While driving home from work today, I learned that 2005′s Stolen Valor Act was being challenged in front of the Supreme Court.
If you aren’t familiar with it and you don’t feel like clicking on the wikipedia link, the general gist of the law is this:
It’s illegal to lie about having received U.S. Military decorations or medals (specifically, saying that you’ve received them when you haven’t). The penalties for lying about the Medal of Honor are pretty much double.
There are two someones who have gotten arrested for this law, as far as I can tell. The first is a guy who started a “Veteran’s Organization” and posed as a Marine Captain who had won various medals in his appeals for funds for his charitable organization (or, perhaps, “charitable organization”).
This isn’t the case that made it to the Supreme Court, though. The case that made it to the Supreme Court is just about a guy who happened to lie about it. He got elected to a water district board and, in one of his speeches where he introduced himself, said ”I’m a retired marine of 25 years. I retired in the year 2001. Back in 1987, I was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. I got wounded many times by the same guy. I’m still around.”
This statement broke that law.
Now the questions that struck me as interesting are the ones that the Supreme Court kicked around, specifically:
Is a knowingly false statement about having won a medal or honor speech that is protected by the First Amendment?
Is making a knowing falsehood speech that is protected by the First Amendment?
Our intrepid commenter A Teacher tells the story of how he published his NaNoWriMo book (and, of course, tells us how we can get a copy of it for ourselves).
Read the story here. Here’s the paragraph that would make clicking through worthwhile, if you’re still undecided:
If the Stockholm County Administrative Board, which supervises foundations in Sweden’s capital, finds that prize founder Alfred Nobel’s will is not being honored, it has the authority to suspend award decisions going back three years — though that would be unlikely and unprecedented, said Mikael Wiman, a legal expert working for the county.
We won’t make you read, though. We’re going to watch the first season of Fringe and talk and argue about it. We’ll hammer out how many episodes we want to watch between posts (which will show up, at this point, about every week) and, with luck, it’ll be as fun and edifying as any community activity. First assignment is to watch the Pilot and be ready to argue about it come next Tuesday! Come one, come all!
On Wednesdays on the Mindless Diversion blog, I’m quite regularly pleased to play one of my favorite songs or one of my previous favorites or something that just gets stuck in my head… and, yeah, odds are that if the song is from between 1988-1997, it’s got a story or three associated with it as well.
There is a problem that I’ve encountered, however… specifically, the fact that a non-zero number of really, really, really excellent songs from this time period happened to use the N-word (as an aside, I can’t think of a single instance of a white rapper using this word…).
Now, my thoughts aren’t on when or whether it’s okay to use the N-word or if it’s okay to sing/rap along to songs that use the N-word. These topics have been tackled by far more thoughtful writers than this one (and it’s kind of moot when it comes to blogging). My question is whether we, as a community, would want to avoid listening to songs that happen to have the N-word used in the song, whether these songs are no big deal, or if posting them would be within acceptable parameters so long as if we have a warning (and if the warning should say “explicit language” or “contains slurs” or what)?
Ta-Nehisi recently wrote:
As an aside, I think there’s an essay to be written about why any accusation of a racial offense is so often reduced to “Are you a racist?” It would be as if my wife said, “You forgot to check Samori’s homework” and I responded, “I’m not a bad father.”But that piece isn’t for me to write. It’s for some white person daring enough to plumb the depths of their soul. I don’t think this is something that can be explained from the outside.
Now, I certainly don’t think that I’m particularly daring and my soul doesn’t go that deep but I’ll try to answer the question. Sadly, we’re in “I need to tell you this story before I can tell you that story” territory. It may feel like these stories are completely and totally unrelated to the question but, seriously, they set up the background for the answer that makes the most sense to me.
Let’s get started…
The latest little tempest in a teapot we’ve had here on the internets involves an essay on Parental Licensure written by Andrew Cohen at the usually significantly different kind of crazy Libertarian website Bleeding Heart Libertarians.
If you don’t feel like reading the whole thing, the argument in a nutshell begins with the insight shared by Keanu, of all people, from the movie Parenthood:
No problem so far, right? Well, the essay then goes from there to say: With a parental licensing program, if you get pregnant, you go to get a license to raise the child or you decide to give up the child. You violate no law by becoming pregnant. Once pregnant, you violate no law until the child is born—and only then if you decide to raise it without getting a license. And perhaps you are allowed to take the licensing test multiple times if you fail at first. Perhaps you do so after taking parenting classes.
This particular argument isn’t exactly one to get incensed about, particularly, as satires go, it’s fairly incisive… until you get to the point in the comments where Andrew points out: In any case, if anyone’s unsure: not meant as satire!
Upon reading that clarification of his, we are given a handful of choices including, but not limited to, the following:
Head exploding and going nutzo and jumping on the inevitable dogpile
… I have no idea what else there really is to do except have my head blow up and then jump on the dogpile
(No, I’m not going to post that scene from Scanners.)
Instead of wasting your time with yet another list of reasons that this is morally reprehensible and not-exactly-libertarian (I’m sure you wrote one in your own head by the time you got to this paragraph), I think it might be worth wondering if he’s not a harbinger of arguments that we need to prepare ourselves for hearing in the future made by serious people as part of a serious policy. That is to say: I’m not worried about arguing against Andrew on this one, particularly. I’m worried about the person who will give this argument again in a few years.
I’ve long argued that The War On Drugs, as it exists today, is an offshoot of Johnson’s War On Poverty. As part of the argument that “We All Have Responsibilities To Each Other”, it seems to me that there is very much an undercurrent of “if my responsibilities involve feeding you and sheltering you, your responsibilities to me involve trying to find a job and not wasting your time and potential by doing dope!” on the part of those who self-identify with tax-payers. In the same way that quite a few people experience outrage at the thought of food stamps being used for cigarettes, alcohol, or pre-packaged food with recognizable brands on them, many people similarly feel that their own good nature is being taken advantage of when folks on government assistance still have enough money to buy drugs and enough free time to enjoy them.
In recent history, the United States has passed a huge Health Care law that, it’s argued, will help provide health care for absolutely everybody. I had thought that the unintended consequences would manifest themselves in much greater social stigma (if not outright legislation) against such bad habits as smoking, fatty foods, and otherwise overindulging in things that are bad for you… but I’m now wondering if we will start seeing the seeds sown for arguments such as Andrew’s here to ultimately manifest themselves in restatements of Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. (ptooey) in Buck vs. Bell:
We have seen more than once that the public welfare may call upon the best citizens for their lives. It would be strange if it could not call upon those who already sap the strength of the State for these lesser sacrifices, often not felt to be such by those concerned, to prevent our being swamped with incompetence. It is better for all the world, if instead of waiting to execute degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind. The principle that sustains compulsory vaccination is broad enough to cover cutting the Fallopian tubes.
Perhaps I’m being paranoid (I *AM* a little feverish), but I think that Andrew’s argument here is one that we will hear more and more often in the coming years… and the base of the argument will be how we *ALL* have responsibilities to each other.
Warning: the following post talks about cats. It talks about other things, kinda, but mostly cats. If the thought of catblogging gives you hives, you probably want to not click through. The point of the post, however, is that good things just sort of happen sometimes and those things tend to be surprisingly better than [...]
(For opposite week, I decided to argue a theist position.) One of the biggest problems when it comes to any discussion of theism vs. atheism is when some wag asks for a definition of “God”. The general trick is to get them to make some overstatement and then to say “well, yeah, I don’t believe [...]
It is the time of year where Maribou tells me that I need to drive her to the post office so we can mail presents to her family. “Holiday” is upon us once again. Whether you come from a background where you deliberately avoid saying “Merry Christmas”, “Happy Channukah”, “Happy Kwanzaa”, “Blessed Eid”, or “Get [...]
As it turns out, there aren’t any good Tim Tebow songs. There, are, however, Tim Tebow songs. A surprising number, actually. Don’t google them. Seriously. Instead, listen to this lovely song from The War On Drugs, “Black Water Falls” off of their absolutely brilliant Slave Ambient: Of course, you should consider this an open thread [...]
This is the time of year when it’s awesome to have a song that takes 10 minutes to give you time to think about all the things you’re thankful for and then list them in the comments or to air your grievances there or, heck, to just treat the comments like an open thread.
Andrew Sullivan has a neat little post that brings up the topic of Intragalactic Ethics. There is a link to a Josh Rothman column that points out: There’s a long pro-terraforming tradition (especially among philosophically inclined science-fiction readers): Turning a lifeless place into an inhabitable one seems like a noble goal. Meanwhile, others argue that [...]
Having read this post by Ioz, a friend asked me a question that I didn’t know the answer to. Let’s say that you took a bottle of wine, removed one of the glasses of wine from it and replaced that liquid with an industrial-strength laxative.
Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines is on sale at Steam. Five Bucks. Five Smackeroos. Five Samoleons. A fin. The sale ends after Halloween. I originally wrote a review here but, as this won’t convince many, let me just say this to you right now: This game has an 80 from Metacritic. Its ratio of critic reviews are 51 [...]
Oliver Wendell Holmes Senior will kick us off: Have you heard of the wonderful one-hoss shay, That was built in such a logical way It ran a hundred years to a day, And then of a sudden it — ah, but stay, I’ll tell you what happened without delay, Scaring the parson into fits, Frightening [...]
There was recently an article in The Atlantic called All the Single Ladies in which the author explains how she broke up with her steady boyfriend when she was 28 (“something was missing; I wasn’t ready to settle down”) and went on to find herself still unmarried at age 38 (and is, apparently, unhappy about this). [...]
This comment was written by our very own Chris in the Troy Davis and the American Justice System thread: Yesterday, two men were murdered by the state, one in Georgia and one in Texas. They were both convicted of murder, but their similarities end there: one was black, the other was a white supremacist; one [...]
I wrote a comment in Fellow Gentleman Christopher Carr’s sidebar post and he asked me to post it to the main page and then I read that comment and then I posted this. My comment reads: For the record, though, I don’t think that lowering the minimum wage would help in this present crisis. There [...]
About five years back, Matt Yglesias came up with a great little analogy called “The Green Lantern Theory of Geopolitics“. It’s a pretty scathing criticism of the (primarily “neocon”) attitude that pretty much any geopolitical goal is achievable, provided we have enough Will. We could have won in Vietnam, if only we had enough will. We could [...]
My recollections of what I was doing on 9/11 are the recollections of someone in Colorado who was working evenings. Not terribly interesting. There were, however, two things that caught my interest at the time and still stick out. These are two things that had one very distinct narrative when they started and 9/11 changed the [...]
Music is like beer. Some people want Coors in the yellow can. Some people want JW Lees Harvest Ale aged in Calvados. Picking a beer somewhere in the middle is fraught with peril. There’s always someone who is an even bigger beer snob who will point out that 1993 called… FROM A LAND LINE and there’s [...]
Sometimes I wonder if the culture warriors didn’t have a point about rock and roll… In any case, Captain America comes out this weekend. Friends with Benefits is sure to be a second place rom-com due to all of the promises made to get girlfriends to go see Transformers. Personally, I’m counting the minutes until [...]
In looking at Captain America: The First Avenger on IMDB, I cannot help noticing the sheer number of folks associated with “Hydra” (Hydra soldier, Hydra pilot, Hydra heavy artillery soldier) and the unsheer number of folks associated with that other political party that was popular during the 30′s in some European locations. I understand that [...]
Now is as good a time as any for us to make our predictions (otherwise known as projecting our hopes and dreams into the future) about what’s going to happen in November of 2012. Who is going to be at the top of the Republican ticket? Who’s going to be VP? Is Biden going to [...]
For the last little while, a number of officials have been asking Obama’s Department of Justice to clarify its stance on Medical Marijuana. Yesterday (Wednesday), Deputy Attorney General James M. Cole released a memo explaining the Federal Government’s stance. You can read the memo here. (Short version: He’s indistinguishable from Bush.)
In a 7-2 vote, the US Supreme Court ruled today that violent video games cannot be prevented from being sold/rented to minors. The two were Breyer and Thomas (together again) arguing that we already know that we cannot sell, ahem, “Gentlemen’s Magazines” to minors and that isn’t a violation of their First Amendment rights, therefore [...]
This is my favorite Saturday song. I prefer songs about Saturday to songs about other days of the week, that Cure song notwithstanding. Consider this an open thread. It’s even got it in the title.
Warning: There are some middlin’ spoilers for the game LA Noire that follow. There is also a question about the societal costs and benefits of putting people in prison for crimes they didn’t commit because they are likely to commit different crimes. So it’s got that going for it.
Last year, about this time, we were talking about Radley Balko’s report of a SWAT raid in Missouri. It was a horrifying video with children being endangered, pets being shot, and a small amount of marijuana being found. That was May 5th, 2010. It is now May 30th, 2011. Here is a post from Radley Balko in [...]
In 1988, Martin Scorsese directed The Last Temptation of Christ. This resulted in much controversy. Thomas Lindlof wrote a book called _Hollywood Under Siege: Martin Scorsese, the Religious Right, and the Culture Wars_ that does a very good job describing the various protests that followed the announcement, production, and release of this movie. In 1989, [...]
It looks like Superman is going to renounce his US citizenship in Action Comics #900. (I wonder if Clark Kent will keep his…) In any case, Superman is tired of having his actions seen as instruments of US Policy. Which is fair enough, I suppose. Personally, I am interested in seeing where the storyline goes or [...]
I prefer “My Morning Song“, myself, but… well. You know. I hope you all have a good weekend (with a Sunday filled with exactly as much excitement as you are inclined to enjoy) followed by a good, if uneventful, week.
I have any number of questions for Christopher Carr, our OG in Japan, about the last month or so and I’m pretty sure that more than just me has a question or seven for him. I mean, not to put him on the spot or anything. Questions after the cut:
In the Mindless Diversions blog, one of the regular features is the Saturday! feature in which I put various classic commercials for various products. Now, the intention is to show commercials that you may have seen on Saturday mornings in the past and invoke emotions thereof. I mean, it’s not like you’re going to sit [...]
The weekend is upon us which means that it is the perfect time for an upbeat job-related song. (As delightful as I find the song/video, I found myself conflicted over the whole “male gaze” thing that it veers into from time to time. Then again, perhaps I’m overthinking it.) This is also an open thread!
Thursday Blognado: Wargaming My Thursday Blognado post is a guest post at Mindless Diversions wherein I explain why I abandoned miniature wargames produced by Games Workshop, and why Warmachine is my favourite wargame. ( 0 comments)
The Lessons of 1984 The primary lesson of George Orwell’s 1984 is that [my political opponents] are truly totalitarian in intent. The entire culture of [my political opponents] revolves around doublethink, such as [insert reference to something that is contradictory, but only if you put it the way I put it]. And don’t get me started on [my political opponents]‘s newspeak, what with [insert reference to or example of Political Correctness or alternately a way that political opponents frame an issue]. I truly fear if [my political opponents] gain and hold on to political power, 1984 will cease to be fiction. ( 15 comments)
Another from Edmond Rostand Rostand’s second poem from Les Musardises, entitled “The Bedroom.” For my English translation I chose rhymed couplets, though I admit with BlaiseP that there’s a procrustean quality to some of them.
Incidentally, the author dedicates a short essay to explaining the title of the book. Musardise is not a word in standard French, and figuring out a good English neolo-translation of the title is an interesting task in itself. ( 4 comments)
~ Around the League
Journeys in Alterity: Remaking Star Wars ~ Feb. 23. 2012. ~ The Star Wars films have their cinematic gems--and lightsabers, w... Read More
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Mindless Diversions: Confessions! ~ Feb. 23. 2012. ~ (This guess post was written by our very own James K!)
My firs... Read More
American Times: Does The Cybersecurity Act Of 2012 Mark The Beginning Of The War On Cyber-terrorism? ~ Feb. 22. 2012. ~ The Cybersecurity Act of 2012 is the latest effort by Congress to do something about the threat of cyber attacks and cyber crime. Fortunately, and perhaps thanks to the efforts to quash SOPA and PIPA, the Act is quite a bit more restrained in scope tha... Read More
American Times: Did Foxconn Hide Underage Workers During Inspections? ~ Feb. 22. 2012. ~ Foxconn has opened its doors to the Fair Labor Association and ABC News – but is it hiding something? After reports of poor working conditions and worker suicides at ‘s Chinese vendors’ manufacturing facilities, a number of groups hav... Read More
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American Times: What A Crowdsourced Bike Looks Like ~ Feb. 22. 2012. ~ Jess Zimmerman explains: This combination bike and scooter is nominally the work of fancypants designer Philippe Starck, but that’s partly because “everyone in Bordeaux, France” doesn’t have as much label cachet. (More than “everyone in Norma... Read More
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Journeys in Alterity: Dust to Dust ~ Feb. 22. 2012. ~ [caption id="attachment_3632" align="alignleft" width="151" capti... Read More
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American Times: David Cross on the contradictory language of the right ~ Feb. 22. 2012. ~ A couple people have directed me to this clip (which I would embed if it were allowed.) David Cross says what I was trying to say about the double-speak on the right much better – or at least much funnier – than I do. This is more evidence that while the right is very good at [...] Read More
and talk and argue about it. We’ll hammer out how many episodes we want to watch between posts (which will show up, at this point, about every week) and, with luck, it’ll be as fun and edifying as any community activity. First assignment is to watch the Pilot and be ready to argue about it come next Tuesday! Come one, come all!
Kimmi 
Ryan Bonneville 
Elias Isquith 
Murali 
James K 
Alan Scott 
Patrick Cahalan 
Will Truman 
Will H.