What I’m Reading, May 7, 2014

By California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation [Public domain], via Wikimedia CommonsU.N. Human Rights Chief: Stop Lethal Injection in U.S., Noa Yachot, ACLU Blog of Rights, May 2, 2014

The pain and suffering of Clayton Lockett during his gruesome execution in Oklahoma this week has been met with outrage around the world. Today the United Nations human rights chief said that Lockett’s botched execution may violate international law, and called for an immediate moratorium on the administration of the death penalty across the United States.

Should scientists ‘Jurassic-Park’ extinct species back to life? John D. Sutter, CNN, May 2, 2014 Continue reading

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When the Baby Kicks

Alabama Supreme Court Chief Justice Roy Moore has been in the news for his interesting take on freedom of religion under the First Amendment:

Speaking at the Pastor for Life Luncheon, which was sponsored by Pro-Life Mississippi, Chief Justice Roy Moore of the Alabama Supreme Court declared that the First Amendment only applies to Christians because “Buddha didn’t create us, Mohammed didn’t create us, it was the God of the Holy Scriptures” who created us.

“They didn’t bring the Koran over on the pilgrim ship,” he continued. “Let’s get real, let’s go back and learn our history. Let’s stop playing games.”

Thomas Gainsborough [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons

Yes, 21st-century America should totally take all of its cues from this cat.

He said something else interesting, though, that seems to have been largely overlooked:

Chief Justice Moore later defined “life” via Blackstone’s Law — a book that American lawyers have “sadly forgotten” — as beginning when “the baby kicks.” “Today,” he said, “our courts say it’s not alive ’til the head comes out.”

He is referring to the Commentaries on the Laws of England by William Blackstone, first published in 1766. I figured I’d see what Blackstone actually said about the issue, because that’s how I roll. In Book 1 (The Rights of Persons), Chapter 1 (Of the Absolute Rights of Individuals), Blackstone writes on pages 125-26: Continue reading

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What I’m Reading , May 6, 2014

jodylehigh [Public domain, CC0 1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/deed.en)], via PixabayPrison rape is not a form of poetic justice–it’s an actual crime–so stop cheering it on, Robyn Pennacchia, Death and Taxes, May 2, 2014

[C]heering on something like rape takes away from you as a person. Although yes, sometimes crimes are so horrific that our id takes over and we want nothing but horror and misery to come to the perpetrator. Trust me, I understand that. But we have these rules for a reason, we have the 8th amendment for a reason–and it doesn’t have as much to do with the rights of a prisoner as it does to protect us from becoming the kind of people that cheer on “cruel and unusual punishment.” We need to be better than that. We need to prevent our ids from taking over, or else we’ll end up becoming exactly what we despise.

Where’s The Next Alexander Fleming? Or Why Corporations Don’t Have Incentives to Create New Antibiotics. Echidne, Echidne of the Snakes, May 1, 2014 Continue reading

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What I’m Reading, April 29, 2014

Tom Woodward [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/)], via FlickrBe Exploited By the People You Know! Scott Lemieux, Lawyers , Guns & Money, April 25, 2014

Ahead of today’s vote at Northwestern, the actions of proponents of the NCAA’s indefensible status quo were predictable:

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Coach Pat Fitzgerald, a former football star who is revered on campus, has framed a vote for the union as a personal betrayal.

“Understand that by voting to have a union, you would be transferring your trust from those you know — me, your coaches and the administrators here — to what you don’t know — a third party who may or may not have the team’s best interests in mind,” Fitzgerald wrote to the team in an email.

And don’t kid yourself: the people and organizations reaping huge amounts of money off of your unpaid, physically taxing labor, and yet impose extraordinary rules that prevent you from even being compensated by third parties, totally have only your interests at heart.

“Due process? What due process? We’re rescuing hookers!” Donna Gratehouse, Blog for Arizona, April 17, 2014 Continue reading

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Eight Amendments

Here’s something you might not know about the Bill of Rights, from Gerard Magliocca:

Is the Bill of Rights the first eight amendments or the first ten? No doubt many of you would say 10 because ten were ratified in 1791.

Many cases and commentators, though, define the Bill of Rights as the first 8. Learned Hand took this view. So did Hugo Black and Felix Frankfurter. Why is that? Partly it’s because they did not care for the Tenth Amendment and thus wanted to read it out of the Bill of Rights. (Black also didn’t like the Ninth Amendment). Another thought is that the Bill of Rights must really be about specific individual rights, which leaves the 9th and 10th out in the cold. You can find many authorities that use this formulation, and as far as I know there is no definitive statement from the Supreme Court to the contrary.

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What I’m Reading, April 28, 2014

klsgfx [Public domain, CC0 1.0 (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)], via OpenclipartPlease, Please, Please: Do Not Make Your Kid The Center Of Your Universe, Cassie Murdoch, Jezebel, July 6, 2012

It’s impossible to say for sure that intensive parenting leads to depression and stress and being dissatisfied, but the links don’t really make sense if you flip them around. It’s also not clear whether intensive parenting has any great impact on the children, but Liss concludes that anything that makes moms depressed probably doesn’t benefit children in the long run. Plus, anecdotally some of us have observed that making your child the center of the universe tends to result in rather obnoxious offspring.

Justice Sotomayor accuses colleagues of thinking they can ‘wish away’ racial inequality, Robyn Pennacchia, Death and Taxes, April 23, 2014

Just yesterday, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the people of Michigan had the right, via mob rule, to ban the practice of Affirmative Action at state institutions such as the University of Michigan. It wasn’t a good ruling. Ever since the state voted to ban it, minority enrollment has declined significantly. Which is not surprising, because when you ignore unearned privileged and advantages, it’s hardly shocking when the priviledg and advantaged pull ahead. Obviously the person who starts the race in the middle of a marathon is going to have a better chance at winning.

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Puppycide and Other Problems

Austin police officers shot and killed another dog last week. They described the dog as a pit bull, because of course. They also say that dashboard camera footage supports their version of the story—”that the officers had no choice but to respond that way to this dog that was charging at them,” and that “they didn’t have time to have a plan B to draw their Tasers or draw their pepper spray this is a matter of seconds”—although the family adamantly disputes their account:

[Alicia] Guerrero says when the family member holding on to the dog let go, officers shot the animal in the head. She says the dog was retreating to the house when it was shot a second time, ultimately dying on the front stoop.

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Allocating Police Resources

The state of Missouri forgets to send a guy to prison for 13 years, and he spends that time leading a productive life and staying out of trouble while never trying to hide (h/t Jason). Then the state notices the mistake and sends a SWAT team to his house.

After he was convicted of armed robbery in 2000, Cornealious Anderson was sentenced to 13 years behind bars and told to await instructions on when and where to report to prison. But those instructions never came.

So Anderson didn’t report. He spent the next 13 years turning his life around  getting married, raising three kids, learning a trade. He made no effort to conceal his identity or whereabouts. Anderson paid taxes and traffic tickets, renewed his driver’s license and registered his businesses.

Not until last year did the Missouri Department of Corrections discover the clerical error that kept him free. Now he’s fighting for release, saying authorities missed their chance to incarcerate him.

In a single day last July, Anderson’s life was turned upside-down.

“They sent a SWAT team to his house,” Anderson’s attorney, Patrick Megaro, said Wednesday. “He was getting his 3-year-old daughter breakfast, and these men with automatic weapons bang on his door.”

Meanwhile, the federal government decides not to bother a Nevada rancher who has been breaking the law for twenty years because someone might get hurt.

It’s not like the Missouri SWAT team could’ve been sent to round up cattle instead, and I really do think it would be dumb if people get killed over that moocher rancher—but it is an interesting statement on the allocation of police resources.

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What I’m Reading, April 15, 2014

"Dragons famili" by mapazhe [CC BY 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/)], via deviantARTHow We Won the War on Dungeons & Dragons, Annalee Newitz, io9, March 26, 2014

[U]nlike my fantasy of being a hot half-elf, the Christians actually had some control over our lives. My best friend got kicked out of Catholic school for playing D&D, which we counted as a win because it meant she could come to our shitty public school and play D&D with us. Outside our southern California town, however, D&D players weren’t getting off so easily. They were ostracized by their peers, kicked out of public schools, and sent to glorified reeducation camps by parents who feared their children were about to start sacrificing babies to Lolth the spider demon.

It sounds crazy in our world today, where there are Dungeons & Dragons movies and a rich game industry full of titles inspired by those old paper-and-dice games we played back in the twentieth century. One of the most popular shows on television, Game of Thrones, features plots that my friends and I might have cooked up back on that playground at lunch. Somehow, the popularity of epic fantasy and role playing overcame America’s fear of young people making up stories about monsters and gods.

The Cost Of Permission Culture: Or Why Netflix Streaming Library Sucks Compared To Its DVD Library, Parker Higgins, TechDirt, April 9, 2014

The problem is that, unlike earlier movie-rental options, streaming rights fall fundamentally within a permission culture. Netflix is a great illustration of what’s gone wrong here. It’s gone from having a nearly unrivaled catalog of films available to rent to being the butt of Onion jokes. What happened: It shifted from a system where nobody had a veto power over its operations, to one where it had to get permission and make deals with Hollywood. Sometimes it’s difficult to find the concrete costs of living in a permission culture, but the decline of Netflix’s selection is an important cautionary tale.

Physicist surprised to see himself in ‘documentary’ claiming the sun revolves around the earth, Robyn Pennacchia, Death and Taxes, April 8, 2014

Like any other Christian pseudoscience theory, geocentrism is built upon the premise that humans are special and earth is special and God made them special, so any science conflicting with that must be wrong. Like, probably Satan somehow made it look like the earth is really old and revolves around the sun just to destroy our self-esteem. The film makes this premise clear, with its suggested hashtag, #areyousignificant.

How Hatred of Islam Creates Strange Bedfellows of Christians and Atheists, CJ Werleman, AlterNet, April 11, 2014

Despite claims by David Silverman, president of the 501(c4) political lobby group American Atheists, atheism does not earn an atheist the title of freethinker. With very few exceptions, movement atheists are not. They’re parrots. Don’t believe me? Ask an atheist to opine on the Israeli-Palestinian crisis, and he or she will invariably wax lyrical about religious motivated violence, Islamic extremism and suicide bombers. In other words, expect a recital from atheist luminaries Sam Harris, Richard Dawkins and the late Christopher Hitchens.

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Atheists, myself included, enjoy mocking religious fundamentalists for their inability to question authority or dogma. But very few atheists sound dissimilar to the aforementioned atheist heavyweights when it comes to assessing the roots of Islamic terrorism. In the aftermath of the attack on the U.S. consulate in Benghazi, American Atheists president Silverman tweeted, “Dear Peaceful Muslims: Sorry, but yet, that IS your Islam and your Prophet’s followers.” Silverman included the hashtag #IslamIsBarbaric. If you were told neo-con firebrand Ann Coulter had posted this careless tweet, you would have believed it.

No doubt, Harris (neuroscience) and Dawkins (evolutionary biology) are leaders in their respective fields. What they’re not is experts on terrorism and the Middle East. So movement atheism needs to stop pretending like they are, because the words of Harris, Dawkins and Hitchens serve only to make movement atheists sound like neo-conservatives, Zionists and the Christian Right, which ultimately makes seeking peace even harder to attain.

[Ed. note: The URL slug for the above article is “how-atheists-are-complicit-atrocities-and-oppression-palestinian-people.” Just thought that was worth noting.]

Photo credit: “Dragons famili” by mapazhe [CC BY 3.0], via deviantART.

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What I’m Reading, April 10, 2014

Photo credit: Nemo [CC0 1.0], via PixabayOn Ignoring Sound Methodologies: Empiricism, Scientism, And Other Ways Of Knowing, Academic Atheism, April 5, 2014

Lately, there’s been a move away from either taking empirical methodology at face value, so to speak, or attempts to demonstrate its weaknesses. Instead, there’s been a move toward avoiding it and/or claiming that some other methodology is better. People who did this, however, haven’t offered any good justification for claiming their methodology is better. The issue is that such thinking is beginning to become more widespread.

That leads to any even greater problem. Effectively, what ends up happening is that such people forgo their respect for truth. They’re basically stating that their prized opinion matters more than the truth—that they want to believe despite the evidence at hand. Prior to showing why empirical methodology can’t be avoided, it is useful to deal with some accusations—accusations that have become quite persistent and that rest in a misunderstanding.

The Sham of Conservative Originalism, Ed Brayton, Dispatches from the Culture Wars, April 7, 2014

Conservative originalism has always been a sham, a pretense of objectivity where there is none. Justice Scalia, in particular, loves to lecture everyone on how his textualism and originalism are objective, as opposed to all those liberal justices who only care about the outcome of the case. That’s simply a lie. Scalia himself is absolutely an outcome-based judge; compare his opinion on the scope of the Interstate Commerce Clause in Raich to his opinion in the health care reform case from two years ago, that is all the proof you will need. There are lots and lots of ways to manipulate originalism to get the result you want, including picking and choosing which views of the founding fathers are the ones that matter.

Republican SBOE Member Asks if Non-Mexican Americans Will Be Included in Mexican-American Studies, Katherine Haenschen, Burnt Orange Report, April 9, 2014

Republican SBOE Member Ken Mercer asked during a hearing on Mexican-American Studies if Cuban-Americans Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz would be included in the curriculum.

The debate centered on the potential creation of a Mexican American studies course that could be offered as an elective to the entire state. The SBOE would need to develop and approve the new course’s curriculum.

Hispanic students are the largest ethnic group in Texas public school systems. The overwhelming majority are of Mexican descent. It should be common sense that Texas public school students should be able to learn about leaders who share their heritage. After all, it seems to be working out just fine for the white kids.

The fact that Ken Mercer cannot distinguish between Cuban Americans and Mexican Americans suggests that this coursework is sorely needed.

8 Things America Gets Wrong About Sex, Amanda Duberman, Huffington Post, April 7, 2014

It’s difficult to distill America’s sexphobia into a few list-friendly factors. Rather, a puritanical seed planted around the 1700s, nourished by national identity, has grown into a sinister vine tightly wound around many of our public institutions. While antiquated laws about women and sex are lampooned for comedy and shows like “Masters Of Sex” and “Girls” are all over premium cable, the stigma around sex and sexuality persists where it hurts the most: in the classroom, doctor’s office, at political conventions and sometimes, in the voting booth.

Photo credit: Nemo [CC0 1.0], via Pixabay.

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