Coulter's Slander

Michael

One relevant question is the reliability of her facts.
When interviewed for Canadian TV in 2004 she
repeatedly insisted the Canadian army fought alongside
Americans in Viet Nam in the 1960s and could not
be shaken by whatever politely-cited facts (cf. famous
confrontation of PM Pearson by Pres. Johnson, "You
pissed on my rug!")

This sort of problem impeaches any argument invoking
facts that turn out to be mistaken or untrue.

--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)

I thought everything writthen by Coulter was a slander. But if you're
the kind of person who actually believes there is a liberal media bias,
there's little hope for you.

Michael: Roe v. Wade said that the 4th, 9th and 14th ammendments make
provisions for a right to privacy which the government has to show a
compelling interest before it can violate (and most of the "Roe is bad law"
arguments hinge on the notion that you do not, in fact, have a right to
privacy, so if you're ever tempted to hop on that bandwagon, you ought to be
aware that you're arguing that totalitarianism is constitutional in the US).
It said that the compelling interest of protecting the health of the mother
and of the growing potential life had to be balanced against that right to
privacy, so it set up a sliding scale over the course of a pregnancy.
During the first trimester, the decision about abortion is entirely up to a
woman and her consulting physician; states may regulate in the second
trimester as long as those regulations are pursuant to preserving the
woman's health; and states may regulate or ban abortion in the third
trimester provided that it is not banned in cases where it is necessary to
preserve the health and / or life of the mother. Hope this helps.

htd

Sam

htd wrote:
...

I thought the "roe is bad law" arguments hinge on the notion that there
are many things illegal whether you do them privately or not.

In other words, I think "it's a privacy thing" is indeed a lousy
argument. If someone things killing a fetus is the same a killing a
baby, it doesn't matter if you kill it in the privacy of your own belly.

I kinda like the German solution of making abortion in the first
trimester illegal but not persecutable. Bizarre as it sounds, it seems
to me that this gets it right, or about as right as possible.

\

But yes, this works pretty well in for marijuana in California. Up to 1
oz., no prosecution.

Sam

>

The Other wrote:

> Actually, htd got it right here. The main argument against the Roe
> decision per se is the whole constitutional "right to privacy" thing,

yah, I should have said the _good_ arguments hinge on the notion that
even _if_ there were a right to privacy (and I really have no opinion
one way or another -- if there isn't, let's have one) -- so what?

> the penumbra and all that. The sign displayed in Clarence Thomas's
> office says, "Please do not emanate into the penumbra".

> Any constitutional or legal argument is a lousy argument because
> that's not how the thing's going to be decided. That said, if you did
> have a constitutional right to privacy, the "it's a privacy thing"
> would be a good legal argument. It gets you at least as far as
> "conflicting rights".

How so? In what way does "privacy" entitle you to kill? Keep in mind,
the hypothetical premise here is that fetuses are people.

The Other wrote:

> I think you're right. I was confusing two violations of the mother's
> right to privacy: by the state, and by her unborn baby. The latter
> violation might justify killing the baby, even if it's a legal person
> and even if the death of an unborn baby is as bad as that of a born
> baby. (Remember that ghastly dialysis-machine analogy of htd's?) But
> we were talking about a mother's right against state intervention, and
> I guess the state would have a right, privacy or no privacy, to
> intervene if persons are getting killed, just to decide whether it's
> OK or not. Then if the courts decide it's OK, the state would have no
> further right to intervene, because of the mother's right to privacy.
>
> But it seems we agree this is all academic. Public opinion will
> decide the issue (perhaps via the Supreme Court, initially), and you
> don't shape public opinion with legal arguments.

I agree that the legal situation is pretty much irrelevant, but I don't
think it's "public opinion" concerning the status of a fetus as much as
pure expediency. I don't think many people and/or institutions are ready
to face the consequences of a hypothetical ban.

I think it's a scream that there are folks who are simultaneously for a
"strictly limited, minimalist Federal Government" and who don't think
there ought to be an understood guarantee to privacy. As long as you're
going to bring up the Kentucky Resolutions and thereby get
extra-constitutional in the defense of the argument that nothing
explicitly constitutional is guaranteed (be-fuct), may I remind you that
the opposition to adopting a Bill of Rights in the first place was the
fear that the act of enumerating certain protected rights might imply that
those not enumerated were violable?

I have to ask, what is a more essential right than a right to privacy?
What is a more basic element of limiting government than saying that where
the government can not demonstrate a compelling public interest in
interfering in a person's life, it does not have the power to do so? If
you do not subscribe to the idea that the Constitution, albeit
inexplicitly, guarantees a right to privacy, you are essentially asserting
that it is legal and reasonable that there should be more restrictions on
how much the Federal Gov. should interfere in a state's business than
there are for how much they interfere in yours.

Thursday, the 28th of April, 2005

Silke:

Are you just writing woff the cuff, or
have you thought about this Right to Privacy thing?
I'm asking because I have spent some time trying to
understand what a Right to Privacy would be and how
I would try to formulate a constitutional amendment
to assert it. So far, I have concluded that I can
think of no words that would quite convey it.

In the first place, for it to be a constitutional
Right, it must be a restriction on what powers
government may exercise. If it's anything else,
such as a restriction on what
private citizens may do, or corporations, then that
should be done by legislated law.

Now, police *should be able to investigate crimes*. And
that power should include not only crimes that have been
committed, but they should be able to try to prevent crimes
from happening, if they catch a whiff of criminal activity
about to occur. What they may not do is subject you to
search or seizure without probable cause that a crime
has been committed, and that that search or seizure will
enable the legal process. Which is, what I take the
system of search and arrest warrants to mean. In other words,
I'm coming around to the idea that "no warrantless searches
or seizures" + "no warrants except under probable cause"
already *is* the "right to privacy".

Sometimes people mean by "right to privacy" stuff like
choice of sexual partner and positions, etc.. And, I
can certainly see a Pursuit of Happiness Right therein,
but calling that a "privacy" right begs the question
of what is private and what is not. Surely not any
behaviour that any person *intends* to be private should
be covered by a privacy right. The manufacturing of bombs
for purposes of mass murder should not be made uncriminal
by the fact that one does it in one's basement with the curtains
drawn. With respect to abortion, we *exactly that problem*
since as long as the fetus having a human Right to Life
is an open possibility, the case of abortion is either
like the case of the murderer in the basement or it isn't.
There's no problem of "balancing competing Rights" whatsoever.
*If* the fetus has a human Right to Life, then abortion
is murder, regardless of whether there is a Right to Privacy
as well. *If* the fetus does not have a human Right to Life,
then the activity of abortion should not be criminal
in any event, and abortion would simply be the woman's
(perhaps some would argue misguided, perhaps others would say
sensible) Pursuit of Happiness, it's hard to see what "Privacy"
would have to with it.

Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)

Article II Section 3 allows the President to adjourn Congress "to such
time as he shall think proper," if Congress cannot agree on
adjournment. He can, essentially, rule by fiat during the time before
the convening of the next Congress. Yes, the Constitution also
stipulates Congress must convene at least once a year, but a President
bent on total control could engineer an immediate fight over
adjournment, dismiss Congress and continue his rule.

Sure, it's a long shot this would ever happen, but there it is.

J. Del Col

htd:

I don't even know what a Right to Privacy would mean,
and I haven't seen any clear explanation of exactly what it
would be.

Anyway, it seems to me Free Speech is much more fundamental,
and the Right to Keep and Bear Arms, for that matter, or
Free Enterprise seems pretty fundamental.

But, htd, there are two layers to Rights doctrine in
the American experience. One is at the level of the
Declaration---Rights as abstract liberties that
people are entitled to as people ("Creator-endowed").
And those are things like Life, Liberty, and the
Pursuit of Happiness. Then there is another level of
the Bill of Rights, which is a specific legal code
limiting the federal, and after the 14th amendment, state
and local governments in certain ways.

Seems to me if one means by "privacy" that "you oughtta
be able do whatever you want as long as you aren't
bloodying your neighbour's nose in the process", then
that is what is meant by the Right to Pursue Happiness.
That would be a principle which would cover things like
having sex with what partners and in what positions one
would want. Or operating a business in order to make lots
and lots of money. Whatever, as long as you aren't bloodying
noses along the way.

I don't see this Right to Pursue Happiness explicitly encoded
in the Bill of Rights, however. In the Declaration it is
stated as a general principle (and raison d'etre) of government,
but in the Constitution, it seems to be only in, say, the 9th
Amendment as understood. Or it is encoded through specific
legal restrictions on what government may do---they have to
legislate laws, they have to get a warrant for your arrest on
probable cause, they can't take your property without compensation,
you may always be armed against them, and they can't do anything
to you for anything you might say or publish in print, etc., etc..

In the case of abortion, however, "privacy" is simply
a fuzzy-minded application. If a fetus has a Right to Life
as a human being, *then* no amount of "privacy right"
turns abortion into "a private thing", precisely because
there is another human being whose "nose is being
bloodied" without his consent. If a fetus doesn't
have a Right to Life, well, then "privacy" is more
or less irrelevant since the there is no crime
whatsoever. In other words, there is no *conflict*
between a Right to Life and a Right to Privacy,
since whatever the latter would mean, it would
clearly not extend to permission to commit murder
just because that murder were planned and committed
"in private".

Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)

htd:

It's not the geography of an act that makes it private, it's the
compelling public interest. The government has no compelling interest to
tell you that you can't get kinky with the wife, but it might have a
compelling interest in preventing people from creating explosives for the
purposes of carrying out a criminal enterprise (though surely not from
preventing them, whether as individuals or as corporate entities, from
experimenting a la Nobel himself to find new kinds of explosives, or from
using explosives for non-criminal purposes like blowing up a boulder in
the back 40, etc.) It seems to me that the investigation of the uniquely
criminal aspects of said criminal enterprise might be more fruitful and
less intrusive than is the investigation of all large purchases of
mothballs and corn syrup (or of fertilizer and diesel, or of non-dairy
creamer - did you know that that's explosive?) within a month of each
other, since monitoring everyone for those kinds of purchasing behaviors
is Seriously Creepy Big Brother stuff.

Michael S. Morris wrote:

I haven't given it much thought at all -- in some ways, it seems so
bloody obvious, e.g. sex between consenting adults etc., but I imagine
it is, indeed, a tricky concept to articulate.

...

Anytime a chick with a history of husband battery has a beer too many,
for instance?

That actually makes a lot of sense to me. Of course, that wouldn't cover
abortion clinics if abortion were, in fact, illegal, and I don't see how
the privacy thing would apply there. But I gather we're on the same page
with that one?

Yup. I think anti-sexual-discrimination law is a fine way to go here
(where we might be parting ways, eh).

exactly.

yup.

yup.

Hell, agreed again. I'm under the impression, though, that many people,
myself included, have ambivalent feelings about what exactly a fetus is.
"Blob of cells" covers pretty much any of us, and "fully human" doesn't
seem right, either. I don't think it's a matter of competing rights at
all, just a matter of competing desires and desireables, and certainly
not simply those of an aborting woman.

herothatdied wrote:

I agree that this is a good enough way to differentiate between anal sex
and bomb-making, but it certainly doesn't cut it when it comes to abortion.

> Just finished this. Although she could be accused of

Oh, yes, fascist schizos are very humorous, and all the Faux News lipmovers
just love her. So reassuring to the knuckledragger bozos who are
responsible for the Crawford Cretin and his ilk.

If you ever want to come down to earth, however...

http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh042505.shtml
http://www.dailyhowler.com/dh042605.shtml

--
Doubting Timus
ubi dubium ibi libertas
ti...@nerdnosh.com

be shaken by whatever politely-cited facts...

***********
Yes. She was definitely wrong about that. Nevertheless,
I don't think that necessarily voids her case against a
liberal-biased media. Her SLANDER book appears to
be well-documented, with around 20 pages of footnoted
material at the end.

Michael

I hope it's better referenced than her knowledge of recent history:

What about Chile, where they elected Allende and America said, in
effect, "You can't have Allende"?

Coulter is looking blank: "Who was elected by a free and open
democracy in Chile?" Allende, I repeat. "I don't know enough about
that to speak to it. But sometimes there are bigger fish to fry. The
worldwide threat of communism was a bigger one."

Or there's the email dialogue we have after our lunch, in which I
ask more about the war on Iraq. "You know, I was not enthusiastic
about the last Gulf war," she replied. "Of course, it goes without
saying, I rooted for our team once the shooting started. But I
wasn't for that war. I was also against sending Americans to the
Balkans. My point is, I'm genuinely against America deploying troops
without a really, really good reason. I just can't imagine anyone
not seeing 9/11 as a really good reason for wiping out Islamic
totalitarians." So Coulter makes the link that made even Tony Blair
squirm with embarrassment, the fictitious connection between Saddam
and al-Qaida. She goes further, describing the Muslim-persecuting,
fiercely secular Ba'athists - those who made a capital crime of
praying too zealously - as "Islamic totalitarians"

http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,957670,00.html
--
Differenza fra il rivoluzionaro e il cialtrone. Il rivoluzionario
rompe l'orologio e invece di presentarsi alle nove si presenta alle
nove meno cinque. Il cialtrone rompe l'orologio e si alza alle undici.
Home page: http://people.bath.ac.uk/ensmjc/

Wow. Quantity. Wow.

Coulter makes claims like that there were only two articles written about
issue x during this time frame, and uses as documentation a Lexis/Nexis
search that returns, indeed, two articles. Which anybody who's ever done
any research on Lexis/Nexis (or on any other search engine, up to and
including a card catalog) should know is not much proof of anything, as
sometimes you have to fiddle with your search terms to find all the
relevant articles on an issue. Adjust the search terms, and you find
that, in fact, there were more articles written on the issue she's
claiming was ignored than she has found on the issue she's claiming was
overhyped. This is typical of Coulter and her "documentation".

All of which leads one to the choice of whether Coulter is attempting to
deliberately mislead her public, or if she is simply incompetent.

Too bad that appearance doesn't equal reality. Coulter's
endnotes, as critics have easily documented, frequently do
not say what she claims, and often do not even say anything
relevant to her claim.

See:
http://www.fair.org/index.php?page=2496

and follow links.

--
Dan Clore

My collected fiction, _The Unspeakable and Others_:
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1587154838/thedanclorenecro/
Lord We˙rdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:
http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9879/
News & Views for Anarchists & Activists:
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/smygo

Strange pleasures are known to him who flaunts the
immarcescible purple of poetry before the color-blind.
-- Clark Ashton Smith, "Epigrams and Apothegms"

As far as Coulter's fact checker, I try to maintain a healthy dose
of skepticism in any political commentary. Even with the "real"
facts, it's standard operating procedure nowadays to twist and
mold them into a rude and vitriolic rant that bears little resem-
blance to any kind of balanced discussion. If you can't denigrate
the opposition as stupid or vicious, you really haven't made a
significant political statement.

Michael

Start at www.mediamatters.org which contains links to various sites
regarding Coulter and her 'work'.

Many footnotes in her books are just as fanciful and just as fact-free
as her commentary.

Richard Thurston

That strikes me as to give government a carte
blanche to legislate and enforce anything
government wants to. They do precisely that in
Canada, by the way, with the Canadian Supreme Court
voting once to say "Yep, that's a violation of the
Charter of Rights and Freedoms under free speech
or due process or whatever," and then voting a
second time to say "But we're going to let the law stand
anyway since the government has a compelling interest to
stop hate speech or prostiution or whatever."

htd:

I don't agree with you that that is how it will
pan out in court, since the government's lawyers
can point in the case of every law legislated that
at least 50% of the elected legislators thought there
was a compelling public interest to legislate that
law. So, the prima facie evidence would be on
the government's side.

htd:

It strikes me you just gave away the issue on abortion
in particular. Since even though the consultation and
procedure take place behind closed doors and curtained
windows, the legislators may claim a compelling
public interest in protecting the third party
involved (the fetus). Again, the very fact of the
legislation itself outlawing abortion, say, would
be prima facie evidence that there *is* a compelling
public interest. I don't see that your formulation
of a right to privacy amounts to anything.

htd:

(No, but very cool!There must be some use for non-dairy
creamers.)

htd:

I don't know. I think warrantless searches, or secret
warrants are SCBB stuff. But, I don't see that searching
public records is any more creepy than a street cop
keeping his ears open on the beat.

I confess to being a little puzzled here, since I
am a business owner and I tend to think of
my business as "private enterprise". Consequently,
I tend to believe that no police officers may search
into our non-state-filed business records without
a warrant obtained under probable cause to suspect
that such a search would lead to evidence of a crime.
My impression, however, is that a number of persons
hereon do not consider "a corporation" to be private
like that, but rather more like a licensed public creature
of the state. But maybe my impression about that is wrong.

Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)

htd:

If it's within the pale to bring this back around to an actual book,
Freakonomics is apparently the hottest economics texts on your local chain
mart's shelves, and one of its arguments is, according to the blurb, that
the legalization of abortion is a factor, thirty years later, in a
diminished crime rate (not, presumably, including the criminality of
abortions in those statistics). Grisly calculus that, I thought, but
silver linings appearing where they may...

htd

And I have a problem with the very idea that there are such things as
"Creator Endowed" rights. Sure, Jefferson wrote about them in the
Declaration, but I'd like to see anybody try and prove that there's a God
who has given his personal guarantee that you have a right to live free
and tryin' for happy. If there is such a Being who has made such a
pledge, He's sure done a piss poor job of enforcement as far as I can see
- and you'd think that enforcement of His own laws would be within His
brief, too.

And I'm more than a little wary of submitting my judgment on the issue,
proof being so noticably lacking, to a man who, gifted though he certainly
was, could write that men are endowed by their creator with an absolute,
inalienable right to Liberty, and then go boff a slave and hold his own
children as property.

So I am left, Morris, with the concept of the Social Contract. And in
this particular Social Contract, the only case where we are even tempted
to look at any one person and say "you and only you are intransferably and
unrelievably beholden to provide support for another member of the
community" is in the case of a pregnant woman. We don't hold parents
untransferably responsible for the well-being of their children, we allow
them to place those children with other family members or in day care,
etc. Hell, we don't even hold murderers responsible for the financial
support of their victims' survivors. But we require women to put their
bodies at the disposal of a fetus. And just as much as pro-choice folks
like me worm our way around the question of whether a zygote is entitled
to full protection under the Social contract by dehumanizing it,
pro-lifers worm their way around their dehumanization of women (and I'm
sorry, but saying that the rights of something that is technically a
parasite trump the rights of its host is a dehumanization of the host) who
want to preserve the option of abortion by blaming women for the heinous
crime of having had sex.

Sex (to bring this full circle) being one of the clearest cut cases in
favor of there being such a thing as a God-given right, what with it being
a biological imperative and all...

Every time I think that Time magazine has hit a new low I have to step
back and remember that their Man of the Year distinctions have been given
to Hitler once and Stalin twice. How has this rag survived?

htd

Well, they had slightly better moustaches than Coulter. Otherwise, not
much difference, really.

There is nothing resembling "political commentary" emanating from any of
Coulter's orifices.

<sigh/> As /Time/ has explained over and over and over and over and over
again, since long before I was born, the "Man of the Year" is the one
who /affected the news/ the most in the year. Nothing more, nothing less.

--
John W. Kennedy
"The poor have sometimes objected to being governed badly; the rich have
always objected to being governed at all."
-- G. K. Chesterton. "The Man Who Was Thursday"

Amendment V.

herothatdied wrote:

...>

Who's "we"? Abortion is legal, right?

I still don't get this argument. I mean, I do get it insofar as, yes,
pregnancy is different from other states of providing for another human
being, but how do we go from there to "it's okay to kill it" IF we
assume it's a human? Because if it is/were, then nobody "requires" the
woman to feed it. That's just the way things turn out. Unfair? Okay.
So's menstruation.

We could also go into how women get pregnant and all that, but of
course, every once in a while, it's really neither their choice nor
fault, and I sure as hell wouldn't want to argue for
abortions-only-when-the-pill-failed etc etc.

Again, I don't get it. How is saying "a fetus is a human and you can't
kill a human" dehumanizing to a pregnant woman? And what's that
"technically a parasite"? You and I and every one we know are parasites
on something or other, no? How is it dehumanizing to say this human's
right to life trumps your right not to be pregnant for a few months? I'm
happy to see abortion legal, but I find it easy to understand the other
side, provided they don't come along with "unless she was raped" exceptions.

Deep breath? What's going on here? Obviously there are these people you
talk about, but it isn't rather easy to imagine other reasons to be
opposed to abortion?

herothatdied wrote:

...>

Who's "we"? Abortion is legal, right?

We could also go into how women get pregnant and all that, but of

> And just as much as pro-choice folks

Again, I don't get it. How is saying "a fetus is a human and you can't

happy to keep abortion legal, but I don't see the need to claim that any
of us know what a fetus is.

Deep breath? What's going on here? Obviously there are these people you

htd:

And you'd rather that government _didn't_ have to show a compelling public
interest before it could stop this speech or that purchase or the other
relationship???

morris:

htd:

50% of a bunch of doofuses thinking that a thing is so doesn't make it so.
Marbury v Madison, etc...

morris:

htd:

once again, the geography is irrelevant. I can make the decision to
decorate my living room with ceramic ducks while I'm walking down a public
street, but the decision is still a private one, as it does not fall into
the sphere of something that creates a compelling public interest to be
changed. Private does not mean behind curtains; private means that it
ain't nobody's business but your own.

I think your response confuses the notions of "compelling public interest"
and "the public is interested in". The public is interested in Desperate
Housewives, but that doesn't mean that the continued production of that
show is a compelling public interest. In the case of abortion, it's hard
to argue, especially in the wake of thirty years of legal abortions from
which the country does not seem to have suffered much, that it is harmful
to the Nation to continue to allow women to make decisions about their
medical care without government intervention. No disasters are looming
because Mrs. Brown, pregnant at 48, is getting a D&C, or because Freshman
co-ed Caitlin suspects that there was a rufie in her drink last night and
wants a morning after pill, or because Gretchen would rather have the
chemo than the baby, or because Sarah's ultrasound and amnio reveal that
her baby has Tay Sachs or worse, or because Ginny's fertility treatments
were a little too successful and her OB-Gyn says that her chances of not
miscarrying go up if she'll reduce the number of fetuses to two, or even
because the local skank is knocked up and doesn't want to be bothered.
Those individual decisions have impacted the individuals involved, not the
public at large, and that alone means that they fail the test for
compelling public interest.

A Right to Privacy, as the SCOTUS has defined it, means that, barring the
demonstration _not_ that the public is paying attention to the topic, but
that the public has a stake in the private decision, that the government
does not have the power to interfere in the private decision.

Take another tack, one that you'll appreciate. Right now a group called
Pharmacists for Life, which is more like Pharmacists for Doing Our Jobs If
We Feel Like It, is getting laws passed in state courts that ban their
employers from taking any action against them (up to and including
dismissal) if they refuse to fill any prescription because it violates
their conscience. The prescription in question in this case is
Orthotricyclin, ie Birth Control Pills, but the way the law is written, a
militant Christian Scientist could go through pharmacy school, get a job
as a pharmacist, and then refuse to fill any prescription at all because
she believes all disease ought to be healed only through prayer, and be
utterly and completely protected from dismissal for this (and btw, if
there are any militant Christian Scientists interested in putting it to
the test, do get in touch, there are people willing to contribute to your
schoolin').

So here we have the state legislatures thinking that it would be a good
idea to make it illegal for companies to discipline a certain group of
employees for violating their employment agreements by refusing to perform
their jobs, which is almost as egregious as some other states which have
responded to stories of pharmacists refusing to fill prescriptions by
trying to pass laws that _compel_ all pharmacies and all pharmacists to
dispense BCP.

A Right to Privacy means that in order for the second law to be
constitutional, the government would have to show that there is a
measurable public impact to individual pharmacies or individual
pharmacists not filling prescriptions for BCP, and that no other remedy
for providing BCP to the public is practicable. That's a big burden, and
whether the yahoos of state legislature x think that a law like that would
please those of their constituents who happen to be paying attention or
not has no impact on whether or not there is a compelling state interest
to go mucking in private business decisions.

As far as the laws regarding the protection of Pharmacists Who Won't Do
Their Jobs from the consequences of their own choices, it's difficult to
find even the most remote compelling public interest for them, as a matter
of fact, the public interest lies in preventing such laws from going into
place. That's not because we all have an interest in getting our BCP, but
because if we all had equal protection under such a law, it could bring
our economy to a screeching halt. Right now if, hypothetically, my
company were to add client W and I were to say that I didn't want to write
code for them because I think they're evil, it would be up to my employer
to decide whether I'm valuable enough and whether there's other work
enough to indulge me in my peccadillos. Imagine if it weren't, if just by
declaring that my conscience prohibits me from accepting assignment this
or project that, I can evade those assignments and my company has no
remedy. Now multiply that times everybody. The public interest in this
case lies in keeping that aspect of the employee-employer relationship
private.

Our exchanges are always loooooonnnnnggg, aren't they?

morris:

htd:

I had a BF who scorched all of his arm hair off once with an explosive he
made entirely from things he scrounged out of MREs. Ah, the ones who got
away...

morris:

htd:

See, that's not what's going on now, though. Patriot & other acts on the
books allow the Gov to monitor in ways that violate the 4th amendment, but
b/c the monitoring is done secretly, it's difficult to contest. You have
to show that your own personal 4th amendment rights were violated.

On the second one, I do think that there's a difference, philosophically
and legally, between a person and a corporation. (It might interest you
to know that the founders thought that incorporated businesses were
dangerous to public liberty and put time limits on the lives of
corporations, btw - that persisted through most of the 19th century. Not
saying that they were right or wrong, but I think it's fascinating, and
when I found that out, I immediately thought of you.) Anyway,
corporations are obviously, it seems to me, different from people. They
don't breathe the air or eat the food or drink the water, they don't love
(not even Morris Mechanical really _loves_), they can be bought and sold,
but most importantly the corporation itself can be sued but it can't be
indicted or go to jail, and since the corporation itself can't be held
criminally liable for its actions it has no need of criminal protection
for those actions and thus has no fourth amendment rights.

Corporate records can be and are subpeonaed regularly when looking for
wrongdoing by a third party, or even (under current law like Patriot) for
fishing expeditions to find patterns of usage that suggest criminal
wrongdoing. For instance, when I worked for a cellular company there were
a couple of times when law enforcement sent over a phone number and we
sent back a list of calls. Used to be that the standard was that they had
to get pretty specific (we want the record for this name at this hotel on
this day, if it exists), but Patriot relaxed that, made the records of
what subpeonaes are granted secret, compelled judges to approve all
subpeonaes that the Fed says it wants... As the law stands, if Gonzales
went to one of the judges who issues Patriot Act subpeonaes and says we
need a subpeona that requires Amazon to turn over the names of everybody
who has ordered a Rage Against the Machine album anytime over the last
five years and this is necessary to fight terrorism, the judge can't even
say "Come again?" Patriot is clear that as long as Gonzales says "this
fights terrorism", the judge has to say "okie dokie" and issue the
subpeona.

Which, to me, is sliding its way into SCBB territory.

I see that you are determined to demonstrate the accuracy of his
observation.

Richard Harter, c...@tiac.net
http://home.tiac.net/~cri, http://www.varinoma.com
Save the Earth now!!
It's the only planet with chocolate.

So let's go with it, the idea that the fetus is fully human and also
covered under our social contract. That fetus is, until it is viable,
dependent entirely on its mother in a way that a post-birth human is not.
Its supplies of oxygen, food, etc. come from her and her alone. If
abortion is made illegal, we will be compelling her, under any
circumstances not excepted by whatever law gets passed, to continue to
provide life support to that other being. She cannot pass this burden to
anyone else, it is physically connected to her, and its dependence on her
is total. If her participation in this is not a matter of her choice, as
it is now, but is rather something that she is compelled to do by law,
then we are saying as a society that as soon as you are pregnant, you are
legally a vessel for another person. That is dehumanization: woman as
unwilling incubator.

Beyond that, I've yet to see a proposal for illegalizing abortion that
includes exceptions for abortion to pare down a multiple birth and make it
less dangerous for the mother and the surviving siblings, but I have seen
proposals that refuse to grant exceptions in the cases of fetuses that are
already dead but do not miscarry (yes, it happens) or for conceptions
resulting from rape, or even to protect the life of the mother.

On how a woman gets pregnant, I don't think it's ever her "fault." We are
biological beings, we are compelled by biology to want to have sex.
Disinterest in sex gets weeded out of the gene pool fast, when it occurs.
We are bred to breed. Abortion happens on a case by case basis as a
deliberate choice; getting pregnant, viewed from the systemic level, is an
inevitability.

htd

Oh, great; way to go!
Now let's just hope Rove doesn't lurk here.

Sam
>

************
Is that all she complained about? I thought the article worked pretty
hard towards discrediting her. As far as noncomplimentary pictures of
her, she's got one on her own web page that makes her look anorexic-
thin.

Michael

I think you've filed Coulter in the wrong drawer if you think that's a
relevant question.

She's an act. She's doing reverse outrage, for the choir, if you will.
They love it because they know you're going to be blowing a gasket.
Not because it's true, but because it's something you can't combat.

And you can't. There's simply no answer from the left for a phenomenon
like Coulter. Other than: "Don't feed the trolls".

Yeah, like that ever works.

--
AH

herothatdied wrote:

No, I get that. But I think there's also a difference, at least
potentially, between being in favor of illegalizing abortion and still
not wanting to dehumanize women or punish them for having sex.

I'm not crazy about "social contract" -- I'm happier with rule-of-law,
all things considered. What makes you favor the former?

Yup. And hers comes from?

Yup. I'm not certain about US law, but under German law, I know I'm
obliged to help any human I encounter who's in mortal danger. Not doing
so is a funny kind of murder called "billigend in Kauf nehmen," i.e.,
roughly, letting it happen without objection. And if it's me and me
alone who can do it, then I can't get off the hook by saying in
principle, there could have been someone else around.

It's bad luck, and it's certainly something that can't happen to a guy,
but I don't see how but it's dehumanizing. After all, women who are
happily pregnant are also vessels for another person, and it doesn't
detract from their humanity. In other words, you cannot call vesseldom
inherently dehumanizing w/o declaring all mothers somewhat less than human.

The conceptions resulting from rape raise all my red flags -- if it's a
human being and under full protection of the law, then you can't kill it
just because it owes its existence to a rapist. Or you'd declare all
issues of rape free-for-all...

If a woman doesn't get pregnant and willingly has sex w/o contraception,
it's most certainly her own fucking fault, so to speak.

Eh, I don't think you can make pro-abotion arguments from born-to-breed...

Just like every other right guaranteed by the Constitution.

--
Dan Clore

Lord Weÿrdgliffe & Necronomicon Page:

How not? It's saying that one being has the right to invade
another's body and live at the latter's _physical_ expense
and risk without her consent. How can the fetus's right
defeat all of the host's rights? Only if the host is of a
subordinate order, one whose members have lesser rights
that fetuses'.

G*rd*n wrote:

All of them? Once you're pregnant, no more free assembly, or what are
you talking about?

Let me see -- there's you, bleeding on the shoulder of the highway, on
your rapid way to roadkill, and there am I driving by, pursuing me some
happiness. Does the fact that I have to stop mean I've been dehumanized?

I'm under the impression that folks seem less and less able to tolerate
the notion of seriously conflicting rights. Somebody's gotta win this
one? In practice, certainly, in theory -- no way, not ever. I don't see
how. I don't see how anybody gets out of the moral obligation not to
kill a human, even if not-killing means some (or even considerable)
inconvenience.

interesting use of "invade" here, no? you're not actually suggesting that
the little glob of cells was, say, hanging from a tree and dropped onto the
unsuspecting invadee in the manner of a tick, are you?

michael

"michael" <non...@mungo.com>:

It's been specified that the host doesn't want it in her
body. Therefore, regardless of how it got there, it's an
invader. What difference does its provenience make, and
if it does make a difference, how could we determine it?

smw <sm...@ameritech.net>:

Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, let us say. Or,
I spoke hyperbolically. Or, what I said was short for "all
of the rights which apply to this situation." Maybe the
right of assembly, of free association, is one of them; does
it matter? After all, the fetus poses a risk to the host's
life which will be considerably lessened if she aborts it.
So her right to life is defeated by the fetus's right to
life. I think we could make a considerable list.

smw <sm...@ameritech.net>:

Do the liberal rights command you to stop? I don't think
so. Certainly people often don't in practice, or at least
that has been my direct experience and observation.

smw <sm...@ameritech.net>:

Maybe we have to give up rights talk, then -- that is, the
logic of the liberal rights as a way of determining which
actions are permissible in our society. They specify a
variety of situations in which killing is permitted, for
instance in resisting physical attack or robbery. There
are certainly a number of moral teachers who have found
this sort of permissiveness excessive.

On the other hand the rights are useful as landmarks of a
sort; where they're transgressed there's usually something
pretty bad going on, it seems. One might want to hesitate
before throwing them out.

G*rd*n wrote:

No, let's not say "life." "Liberty" is enough of a stretch. I don't
think it means "not having to do anything I don't want to do."

Really? Do you have figures that make pregnancy more life-threatening
than abortion? What if abortion were slightly more life-threatening?
Would that affect the rights question?

Nah. I don't think you have a right not to be in a position you could
possibly, but very very unlikely, die of. I'm fairly certain that
breathing the air in many areas in this country is more dangerous to
your health than being pregnant. Just think of the lovely way in which
your breast cancer risk drops if you carry to term and feed a bit.

Why do you side-step the question? Just stipulate I have to stop -- does
this dehumanize me?

I agree that often they don't. People also kill, rob, betray their
friends, and generally act like shits. So what?

I don't think rights can determine what's permissible, in any case --
the laws do (i.e. anything they don't forbid). The rights only tell you
what laws cannot be passed. In any case, they often conflict with each
other, and if they really _are_ rights in the full sense, one cannot
declare one more absolute than others. They're all equally absolute,
voila, potential of tragedy.

I'm not a moral teacher, but I certainly find the right to kill
trespassers excessive as at times they have been handled by the courts.
And if you want to make a case of self-defense, I think you have to make
a pretty plausible case that the other guy was out to get you. Wouldn't
work with a fetus.

That's a bit oracular for my taste. Who's talking of throwing anything
out? We're arguing on the basis of the assumption that the fetus is a
human with a right to life. Under those circumstances, somebody's right
is going to give. But maybe that's what you meant?

************
No answer? Not even Michael Moore?

When I read Coulter's book, I took it as a somewhat bawdy romp
over the political landscape, but reading the many responses to
her here, I realize that her commentary was a lot more on target
than I ever would have imagined. She has the liberal style of
argument down pat.

Michael

Did you mean Liberal? Or even "Liberal"?

G*rd*n:

G*rd*n:

smw <sm...@ameritech.net>:

I think, essentially, it means something very much like
that.

G*rd*n:

smw <sm...@ameritech.net>:

I don't have the figures at hand and I'm too lazy to look
them up, but I've seen them here and there. If abortion
were slightly more life-threatening then I suppose that one
argument would be weakened. However, it isn't, so it's not.

G*rd*n:

smw <sm...@ameritech.net>:

I am sure one's right to life includes a right not to permit
oneself to be put at (non-trivial) risk by another.

G*rd*n:

G*rd*n:

smw <sm...@ameritech.net>:

It seems to me that in practice it would. To make the
obligation effective, some authority would have to decide to
abrogate your right to do as you saw fit and render service,
regardless of any competing claims you might have -- after
all, you might be bleeding to death yourself, and be on the
way to a hospital to save your own life. To complete the
analogy, we need the authority to stop only vehicles of
a certain class for this purpose -- Japanese cars, let
us say. Their drivers would now be second-class citizens
with a special obligation to assist the traffic accident
authorities.

I didn't think I was side-stepping the question; you
mentioned the "pusuit of happiness" so I thought you
were specifically drawing our attention to them as the
framework in which the question of abortion rights
were being discussed.

G*rd*n:

smw <sm...@ameritech.net>:

They don't have a right to kill and rob; under some
circumstances, they do have a right to betray their friends
and generally act like shits. Again, in the liberal
framework. If you want to propose a different framework,
say what it is.

G*rd*n:

smw <sm...@ameritech.net>:

But the further we depart from a specific set of principles,
a specific framework, the more likely it is that we will
wind up exchanging fragments of mutually incomprehensible
rhetoric, which is what most discussions about issues like
abortion become. After that, if the issue is political, the
only way to solve it is a contest of force and terror.

G*rd*n:

smw <sm...@ameritech.net>:

Well, again, I was pointing out that you can leave the liberal
framework and choose another. You may feel that we have
infinite obligations to one another (including fetuses and
maybe even the not-yet-conceived), for instance. That would
imply very different political and moral systems than the
ones we're used to, perhaps those concocted by fascists and
capital-C Communists, which I think have evidenced some pretty
serious problems of their own.

G*rd*n:

smw <sm...@ameritech.net>:

If we're arguing a contest of rights in the liberal framework,
then it seems to me the host wins -- as far as rights go, the
unwanted fetus is an invading parasite with no claim on the
host's body which overcomes the host's.

Silke:
I haven't given it much thought at all -- in some ways,
it seems so bloody obvious, e.g. sex between consenting
adults etc., but I imagine it is, indeed, a tricky concept
to articulate.

We seem to be in substantial agreement on a number of points.
This is the one that concerns me most: How does one articulate
as a paragraph of constitutional amendment what is meant by this
"Right to Privacy".

I personally don't know how to do it. As a (lower-case "l")
libertarian or a classical Liberal, it seems to me that sex
between consenting adults is a Pursuit of Happiness Right.
Not privacy at all. So, I would be tempted to formulate it
thus: Neither any state nor Congress shall make any law
which infringes upon the right of the people to pursue
happiness, so long as that pursuit shall not be construed
so as to permit the impediment of the pursuit of others.

"People" would then mean "consenting adult human beings" in
the same way it does for other rights.

That would certainly cover consenting acts of sex. Of course,
the problem is it would also seem to cover consenting acts
of employment contract, and consenting acts of housing contract,
so it strikes me the social engineers would not like it one
little bit.

Mike Morris
(msmo...@netdirect.net)

As I said to htd, we're all parasites -- I think this is the language of
cowards (I don't mean you, specifically), just as "blob of cells" is
(another description of fetuses that applies to all of us).

Perhaps I can't go along with you because I've been pregnant, and I
think of pregnancy as a considerable, but limited, inconvenience with
(hereabouts) very very slight risks of harm. I don't see how my right to
be free of that one could trump the right to life of another human.

So I've pretty much taken the other way out by declaring fetuses
non-really-human. Like the vast majority of pro-choicers.

The practical situation is that if abortion is outlawed, the
practice will once again go underground, this time with RU-486,
and a much larger network than we had in the old days. I
think for the time being our Taliban will have to be satisfied
with tormenting poor young women in out-of-the-way places.

"herothatdied" <heroth...@yahoo.com>:
> If it's within the pale to bring this back around to an actual book,
> Freakonomics is apparently the hottest economics texts on your local chain
> mart's shelves, and one of its arguments is, according to the blurb, that
> the legalization of abortion is a factor, thirty years later, in a
> diminished crime rate (not, presumably, including the criminality of
> abortions in those statistics). Grisly calculus that, I thought, but
> silver linings appearing where they may...