Monday, December 30, 2013
Friday, December 27, 2013
Let's be careful here...
- Kenneth
- Ny
NYT Pick
Let's be careful here, lest we decide that all that it takes to deprive someone of all their rights is to declare them too abnormal to be considered "sane." Psychiatry is not predictive enough to say who is a menace, and given the spat over what's in the new DSM-V, we cannot even seem to universally agree on what's "abnormal."
The power to declare someone mentally incompetent, and therefore take away his rights, has been abused very heavily in the past. If the law is unsettled, it's because our laws assume competence on the part of its participants, and that grey area is a giant moral, scientific, and ethical morass that isn't tackled for not merely for lack of political courage but because there are questions that few people would want to touch.
The power to declare someone mentally incompetent, and therefore take away his rights, has been abused very heavily in the past. If the law is unsettled, it's because our laws assume competence on the part of its participants, and that grey area is a giant moral, scientific, and ethical morass that isn't tackled for not merely for lack of political courage but because there are questions that few people would want to touch.
Monday, December 23, 2013
Saturday, December 21, 2013
Inverted Totalitaranism...
"the democracy of the United States is sanitized of political participation and refers to it as managed democracy. He defines managed democracy as "a political form in which governments are legitimated by elections that they have learned to control". Under managed democracy, the electorate is prevented from having a significant impact on policies adopted by the state through the continuous employment of public relations techniques."
and
"the essential role that propaganda plays in the system. According to Wolin, whereas the production of propaganda was crudely centralized in WWII Germany, in the United States it is left to highly concentrated media corporations, thus maintaining the illusion of a "free press". Dissent is allowed, although the corporate media serves as a filter, allowing most people, with limited time available to keep themselves apprised of current events, only to hear points of view which the corporate media deems to be "serious""
via http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_totalitarianism
Tuesday, December 17, 2013
Thursday, December 12, 2013
NYtimes concerned about GUNS, not about VIOLENCE
AntonioSanto DomingoNYT Pick
If you have followed the series of articles the NYT has recently devoted to "gun violence", and if you have read them with an open mind, it will be clear to you that the main subject of most of them is guns, not violence. The same can be said of the majority of comments that are in favor of these articles.
To put it bluntly: if Mr. Holten had used a knife to threaten his wife, he would not have figured in this article.
The catch is that Americans have had since the Bill of Rights became part of the fundamental law of the Nation the right to keep and bear arms, and that the Supreme Court, in DC v Heller, has ruled as follows:
"Undoubtedly some think that the Second Amendment is outmoded in a society where our standing army is the pride of our Nation, where well-trained police forces provide personal security, and where gun violence is a serious problem. That is perhaps debatable, but what it is not debatable is that it is not the role of this Court to pronounce the Second Amendment extinct".
I am firmly convinced that gun owners are as opposed to criminal violence as any other citizen, but that they are not inclined to let themselves be led by special pleading into giving up their constitutional right to keep and bear arms, nor to let it be turned into a de facto government granted privilege. It is obvious, furthermore, that the US Congress and the Supreme Court are on their side.
Sunday, December 8, 2013
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