CSotD: Justice and whatnot
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If you want to see Musk/Twitter cartoons, check out yesterday’s exciting episode. I’m currently feeling bowed down by the flood of come-latelies and anybody expecting to land here now had better blow the roof off the place.
Which is to say that I very much like Adam Zyglis’s less obvious response.
Conservatives are celebrating the anticipated unleashing of rightwing propaganda under the principle of “Free Speech for me, but not for thee.”
Promoting disinformation about a deadly pandemic is good. Telling kids that slavery was bad must be forbidden.
Crackpots on both sides are wrong: Those on the right demand we teach history as the glorious triumph of manifest destiny, while the left trembles in anticipation of what Elon Musk might possibly do in several months after he’s completed the paperwork.
And has had time to ponder what happens if the EU throttles Twitter for failing to control lies and hate speech. Which they’ve told him they will.
I have no influence among the fascisti, but I’m appalled at the Nervous Nellies who are closing their Twitter accounts before the ink is dry, and even before there’s any ink on the documents at all.
Even cockroaches don’t scatter until the light’s turned on.
Maybe if kids aren’t taught history in school, they can learn it in the funny papers. Ben (MWAM)’s story arc this week (apparently a rerun) is about the Japanese Internment Camps in World War II.
I’ll confess that I’ve heard so much about how horrible our own government was in this injustice that it never occurred to me to look northward. Turns out the Canadians were doing it, too.
I lived in Denver in the 70s when Bill Hosokawa was bringing the history to public attention there, and I gave a copy of George Takei’s “They Called Us Enemy” to a granddaughter for Christmas, so the topic has been on my radar, but I never realized it happened in Canada as well.
Which proves that (A) you’re never too old to learn and also that (B) nobody should assume a story has been told too often or, certainly, too completely.
We can keep educating people, even if our internal enemies control curricula in our schools.
Which brings us to this week’s oral arguments in the Supreme Court, summed up by Ann Telnaes.
The case, Kennedy v. Bremerton School District, is of a high school football coach who promised God that he would make a public display of prayer after each game.
He even admitted in a WSJ op-ed that he insisted his prayer not be a private conversation with God, refusing the school’s suggestion that he stop ostentatiously praying on the 50 yard line:
I thought that would send a message that prayer is something bad that has to be hidden. I couldn’t send that message.
Though, once in court, it became a private matter after all.
(T)he already thorny case is made even more complicated by the fact that, as Justice Stephen Breyer noted, the coach and the school district have very different views not only of the legal issues in the case, but also of the facts.
Not to mention Joshua ben-Joseph’s instruction that
(W)hen thou prayest, thou shalt not be as the hypocrites are: for they love to pray standing in the synagogues and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men. Verily I say unto you, They have their reward.
The case would never have come up if he had not allowed it to become a public display. When it got out of hand and people were charging out of the stands to kneel with him, a sincere man might have realized his prayer had become what Jesus cautioned against.
Note, BTW, that prayer in public schools is legal, as long as it is not official, coercive or unavoidable.
Conservatives love to joke that kids pray before exams, but federal regulations allow them to gather for prayer as long as it’s their own choice on their own time.
And God knows how many basketball players make the Sign of the Cross before a free throw. God also knows how that affects their scoring percentage, but he’s not telling anyone.
Juxtaposition of the Day
I cited this 1949 Radio Patrol story arc the other day for the way in which a suspect’s request for an attorney was ignored, but the story keeps getting more ghastly. Not only are they denying her attorney access, but they’re purposely letting her go into heroin withdrawal to make coercing a confession easier.
Meanwhile, Pros and Cons makes a joke that’s not funny, since one common trick in our current “justice” system is to threaten a suspect with a maximum possible sentence on a maximum possible charge if he goes to trial, in order to get him to plead guilty to a lesser charge, even if he didn’t commit any crime.
That’s not politics: It’s what you learn when you talk to public defenders.
But, as Dana Summers (Creators) tells us, libtard Constitutional rights are what’s wrong with this country.
No problem. We’re fixing it.
Juxtaposition of the Day Day
I’ll confess I never gave my assistants anything for Administrative Professionals Day, because, unlike the all-too-realistic boss in this panel, I didn’t sit at my desk like a big fat incompetent baby. I treated them like junior partners with specific skills, good judgment and a whole lot of autonomy.
I even agonized over which of us refilled the coffee mugs more often, but, beyond that, their incentives were an occasional lunch, raises when I could wrangle them and my encouragement of initiative.
F’rinstance, I assigned one to run some newspapers up to a school, but she then stayed and taught media literacy classes for four hours. Good for her, good for them.
Of course, the ones you ought to hire don’t stay forever. She left to pursue a Phd and is now a professor at Duke.
Anyway, if she were still my assistant, I’d give her a bouquet and today off so she could visit the zoo and feed it to the tapirs.
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