The September 11th edition of The Economist focuses on this:

“men are becoming ever more marginalized, while women are taking over the commanding heights of wealth and power.”

I’ve heard this argument a few scant times before. It’s just surprising to find it by people who are supposed to be educated, and not in that parentally pre-ordained way that some men seem to have convinced themselves actually counts as a broadening life experience, and not just their parents paying for their grades and friends, most of whom are equally in need to find the tact and class that used to go along with an ivy league jacket. It’s true, some things money can’t buy.

I’d be annoyed that the flagrantly He-Man Woman Hating sentiment was dumbing down the integrity of the whole publication if it weren’t for the incredibly decent article on September 4th on the same subject of feminism in America that said everything that needed to be said with such class and style that we can just briefly contrast the two and know instantly the follow up article on the 11th is the literary equivalent of the token village idiot out to embarrass us once again for not picking him to be on our dodgeball team.

I have a lot of empathy for the crazy ways men are unnecessarily scapegoated in modern American society, and of the struggles boys encounter as they are trying to come to terms with manhood in the face of so many misleading and predatory commercial themes meant to squeeze as much consumer oomph out of their little allowance pockets. The homophobia and polarization that keeps pressuring men to uphold some outdated model of destructive macho attitude has got a long way to go, most of it self imposed, and the brave boys trying to rise above it are still getting the horns drawn on their identities which actually belong to their ancestors. It’s not easy to ask your first date to the school dance, just like it’s hard for your girlfriend to carry a baby for nine months because your parents think who would sleep with you deserves what they get. (Even if it means marginalized, poorly socialized grandchildren.) A society of this nature is bound to arrive with complications and therapy bills, and quite a lot of bitter, angry tirades.

But the lack of fair details on how increasingly educated women don’t advance as fast as their lesser qualified male counterparts turns the article into something of a propaganda flyer.

Suggestions that Hilary Clinton “would whip both the young Barack Obama and the elderly John McCain” sends an image of feminism as more violent and angry and “white centric” then reality would ever prove, not to mention it generates overtly racist sentiment with the selection of the term “whip” in context of how the author expects Clinton to attack the heroic young black man she was supposed to be dead set against.

The quote naming Clinton a “b!tch” to be “beat” is a non sequitur, unless you count the author’s burning desire to have Clinton discussed as crassly and violently as the author can get away with mentioning in a more respectful newspaper. “Beating b!tches” is a sentiment equally mishandled in an earlier fluff article wrongfully included in the magazine some issues before in a weak address of Hip Hop music, which equally embarrassed us all, apparently from the same treehouse of agenda-carpetbagging authors.

Despite assertion that “educational qualifications” are “the most important of all gender wars” – again, why boil a complex problem down to a polarizing sentiment of violence and war? – the author misses that gaping broad spectrum of social graces where just being empathetic to the problem is 90% of the request.

Other damaging propaganda that could only be considering the vote of frustrated prom dates for upper class white females to even make sense:

“One reason why younger women did not coalesce behind Mrs Clinton in the same way as their mothers must surely be that they have simply become accustomed to living in a world of opportunities.”

Once again, the suggestion that Americans should vote based only on gender or race is a page wasted in an otherwise reputable magazine. To suggest someone vote for a race is to suggest they vote against another race, also known as racism. That such sentiment still hangs a haggard grip on an otherwise intelligent and needed political publication is damaging.

Meanwhile articles that have already skillfully addressed the topic of feminist America’s reaction to the election, like September 4th’s “The woman from nowhere,” make at least the moderate claim to full-scope points of view by using the publication as intended to suggest perspectives for review, rather than to be told what to think based on the cherry picking of poll results that are supposedly leading to “unavoidable” results. Rest assured, the use of the term “unavoidable” in an argument bemoaning the need for social sensitivity is very avoidable by refusing to pay the renewal notice sitting on my coffee table.

See The woman from nowhere for an example of the better-written, more informative material that is brave enough to say what needs to be said more in-depth, more fairly, and earlier. Long live decent editorial construction.

As a final perspective on the September 11th article, entitled “The triumph of feminism,” where selecting the feminist-friendly title of triumph unwisely encourages feminists to read said material, it could be said that suggesting feminists are all old and gone (and young women ungrateful and unaware of what complications arise in society from being a woman) is more wish fulfillment from the author that his hated rivals disappear completely, unveiling the uglier side of a bitter personal bias, not a reflection on the greater half of the population the author still doesn’t understand.

As mentioned previously, the type and quality of the cleavage does not “unavoidably” a Lady Justice deliver.

To replace this inherent lack of PR for good deeds, and to offset when someone innocent gets mishandled, justice officials rush like corporate spin doctors to keep the public in suspense as long as possible via media sensationalism – often in a seeming attempt to build the importance of fear in modern Americans against each other with reference to the possible events of an attack.

Once justice officials know the case is a teen star, prank call hoax, or worse, a bitter old lady at the airport desperate for some self-importance who’s under the wish-fulfillment delusion that some quirky counterculture can finally be demonized with their newfangled blinking art individualism, the press seems to swarm at a level unparalleled to really worthy news stories.

Not that reporting on the misuse of our well meaning local law enforcement officers isn’t important, but the spin doctors are very aware that three days of solid media discussion of a supposed bombing attempt will do more to terrify the public into submission than any direct demand that we roll over and give up all our complicated rights as Americans.

The suppression of the basic rights of the unlucky few for much longer than is reasonable while the saga plays out on the news is an unfair burden on the general public who lives in danger whether they know it or not, of being plucked. It would be laughable to come out and say the police can just grab you on the street, lock you up, allow people to run unflattering news stories about you, and then release you a few days later, reputation permanently damaged so that a quota of fear has been met on the news.

This also highlights a more individualized problem with the police being brought past the line of their established duties to act as interactive propaganda posters. Part of acting as an idea rather than an investigation is that they haven’t been allowed to be wrong.

This is a huge burden on the officers who must wade through the sea of people trying to make sense of a hoax bomb threat while weighing the terrible responsibility that will be theirs if a hoax isn’t taken seriously and proves real.

The behavior of the press to glom onto terrorizing news stories for ratings is capitalism working against the overall economic stability of the country, because in selling ad space keeping people glued to their screens, we’ve scared them to the point they won’t actually feel comfortable buying anything.

Demanding our law enforcement officers go beyond the rational bounds of their jurisdiction and become a part of the media fear mongering as token bag check servants is demeaning, puts them at odds with the general public for no legally-defendable reason, and serves no direct or indirect deterrent to higher level crimes. All it’s doing is enforcing a perception that the only thing we have to fear is each other. A lot of smarter Americans have suggested the contrary throughout history.

Personally, I’d roll with FDR before I’d want another officer taken out of their duty-directed activities, or even just a ball game with their kid – just to go stand between me and my train so that I can take comfort that my life is following a controlled existence and big brother is watching to make sure I don’t do anything unsanctioned. Like disagree.

Those poor cops have to put up with so much anyway, why push more of the good ones out with this degradation of their positions? I want more cops learning and thinking on their feet and understanding more about modern forensics for their own career advancement, not being shoved into grocery bag boy status after they’ve gone to the trouble to get trained and making the commitment to really stand for something good.

Due to the interplay of news media and fuzzy interpretation of the law, combined with a fear by marginalized law enforcement that they will be reprimanded for making mistakes when they are called beyond their bounds, the fear spreads upward instead of trickling down like propaganda is usually intended.

Legitimate investigations get abandoned to address phony witch hunts or plain old-fashioned vulturing by Americans who want terrorism to be real so they have something attention-grabbing to hold over the heads at the PTA.

We get more fake threats to waste precinct resources, more innocent Americans held without just cause to ruin their reputations and the reputations of the law enforcement involved, who if given the choice, probably would have had more important things to do anyway, and we get more oppression of any of the innovation we desperately need to pull us out of economic uncertainty.

Instances like the the “Fear of Blinking Lights” that, once propagated by cheesy sci-fi shows everywhere, now has deathly bored Americans everywhere hoping such an event might be enough to convince the local sheriff or rent-a-cop to call the big boys.

To quote an AP post about a misidentified Hawiian girl stopped at an airport for carrying a sculpted clay rose as an arrival present to her arriving friend:

“She’s extremely lucky she followed the instructions or deadly force would have been used,” Pare told The Associated Press. “And she’s lucky to be in a cell as opposed to the morgue.”

According to BoingBoing.net, the supposed “improvised electronic device” attached to the girl’s sweatshirt consisted of a circuit board and a toy battery that caused her sweatshirt, which had painted writing on it, to light up.”

The fact that authorities referred to the paint on the sweatshirt as ‘putty’ and referred to the toy plastic modeled rose in her hand as possible explosive material is an interesting example of how the propaganda spreads – memes being something like contagens when mixed the wrong way – or, more commonly, by people with a lot of power who don’t know what they’re doing with the resources they already have, much less the ones they’re already eagerly trying to expand.

After all, if someone is stopped, they must have been suspicious.

Of course through all the logistical problems of bottlenecked traffic ripe for lost wallets, and after the headache of officers neglected from their real duties in order to force themselves on commuters, the Port Authority Police realized it had launched a PR nightmare making themselves out to be the bullies. After all, the law plainly states that you cannot search someone for no reason in a public place without a warrant.

This is strictly because randomized searches are never random, due to the fact that they inherently reflect the personal bias of an officer, and the only way to offset personal bias reasoning is to require only searches taking place in the context of an actual investigation.

If an officer is forced to arrest you in order to search your things, then a record of the event must be established, and the officer becomes legally responsible for his or her action. An arrest can’t take place unless there is a reasonable amount of suspicion for a crime. A reasonable amount of suspicion for a crime requires that officers act on the public based on relevant, just action, not personal boredom, hysteria fear, lynch-mob ferocity, or any other irrational, non-constitution-based knee-jerk human fallibility, including bored lack of purpose. This is specifically to help prevent inherent abuses of power. It’s a respectful understanding that officers of the law are not inhuman machines, and this is something we should be very glad about.

As I walked through the public transit to get to a meeting the other morning, I was picked, in my crisp business suit, to have my attaché rifled. I was respectful, and the officers weren’t forceful, but they continued the dialogue to convince me to set my bag down and submit to a search.

I asked a single question. “If I walk away and make my train, is that legal?”

The problem with the Patriot Act is readily apparent when you look at how quickly the passing of this law lends the response from the officer: “You can leave this area and find another form of transportation.”

The officer has been trained to infer that our basic constitutional freedoms are no longer legal. He did not admit my ignoring the request and continuing to my train was within my rights.

So in effect, the Patriot Act has officers of the law readily encouraging law abiding citizens to believe they no longer have rights.

“This is public transportation in a publicly owned place, right?” I said.

“You pay money to ride.” The officer said.

This officer believes that systems paid for by tax payers are actually not owned by tax payers if a per-use toll is in place. Apparently the officer is confused by the series of privately owned toll roads now in place. With the new tolls, the government trades off maintaining public systems like main roads and highways in exchange for private companies profiting from additional tolls on passengers.

The disaster that is privatization includes a law suit levied in California by citizens on a red-light camera system that was rigged to falsify extra light runners for profit off the traffic ticket system.

To my knowledge public transit systems are still public domain, and whether or not you pay the toll, searching you without just cause is forbidden under law. You would not let a stranger rifle your bags, why would you let a police officer not acting in accordance with the law?

Before, the answer was clear, and cops knew better then to think random spot searches legal. Today thanks to the Patriot Act, I have no idea if things were taken from my bag, and worse, cops think what they are doing is OK behavior against the public. The misinformation goes both ways, and training cops to be mouth pieces of propaganda is probably one of the most disrespectful acts against them as well as us.

It’s not that they improved confidence or provided any sort of security beyond the physical presence of the police officers who stood and did nothing before but protect people from bums and slick stairwells. Now I have this us against them mentality that has completely blown apart any chance that I would arrive at my meeting feeling safe and unthreatened.

If that’s the reasoning behind stationing bag searches – to supposedly make people feel safe, I think it’s reasonable to call the exercise a total failure and a direct indication that the persons requesting these stationed searches are far out of touch with this crazy new place called reality.

Not that I quote Reagan often, but he once admitted “The scariest thing a person could say is: ‘I’m with the government, we’re here to help.’”

The government take over on Wall Street may have been a necessary evil, but roughing up commuters has got nothing to do with it.

I am happy to say that later on at the same station, the bag searches were gone, and someone got the smart (at least functional) idea to have one of our canine units there to sniff for actual evidence of trouble. Small victories for sanity in a time of chaos.

I do love cops. No sarcasm intended. It’s the bureaucratic nonsense we have to watch.

Just after the London 7/7/05 public transit explosions, a man was seen carrying a black canvas bag. Police became suspicious. The man ran, and camera security operators lost him in the underground. In a panic a man with a coat and a bag was randomly picked out of the blurry sea of faces, and the police were given orders to shoot so that the man could not possibly detonate the bomb once he discovered he had been found.

The man was shot in the head, unaware of what was about to happen to him as he relaxed on the train, and witnesses say he was coldly murdered with no provocation or warning.

He was innocent. We still don’t know what happened to the man running with the bag. We don’t know if the man in a coat with a bag was running because he was late for a train. Or perhaps he was afraid that a nervous rookie cop might shoot accidentally given the stress of new powers the ratcheting terrorism had begun to distribute around to the local authorities.

If you saw the look in the eye of a police officer who was given clearance to shoot to kill, no questions asked, and you were of visibly middle eastern heritage, and police were swarming with heavy guns flailing about, would you have run?

Suggesting torture is permissible is the same as suggesting we as human beings shouldn’t have to hold ourselves accountable to our actions simply because we can’t be sure of the consequences. I don’t blame the cops for shooting, they were doing their job as told to do it. They had no way of knowing the intel given to them by their own team members wasn’t accurate. But taking into account the monster we become by stopping to the level of those who would drag us down, it would have been better to treat the situation as if we were accountable, not reactionary.

I can’t be sure if I shoot at someone in a duel from twenty paces, that they will die. I can however choose to fire high enough in the air that there is no chance of hitting them, which is how the framers of the constitution held their duels. For all the fierce talk of pride and punishment, they considered themselves morally accountable, even when driven by an emotional need to force each other into a confrontation that gave the opposing side the opportunity to destroy them. The ultimate sign of a respectable American in a duel was not his ability to aim, but to make sure that his aim missed any possible injury to his enemy – also usually his friend.

William Pitt famously walked an elderly man he had offended across the street where they were to have held their duel, choosing not to duel the man, but instead to help him cross so that he could choose to shoot if he must. The elderly man decided against, and Pitt lived for some time after, still considering himself both an Englishman, and a revolutionary. Duels were as much about realizing the crap you did to get yourself into a situation, as they were about letting your enemy face you.

The women of course plotted out how their men would duel each other so the more important creatures were continuously thrusting sabers at one another until the better of them eventually realized they almost never had correct insight anyway into the gossip that brought them there, and it was best to just get through the spectacle without finding out two weeks later that the poor bastard you shot in the head was actually gesticulating wildly at you from afar due to a mix up in getaway carriages, not because he fancied your wife.

Islamic Extremists and the American Military are the husband and lover respectively. The real question we should be asking years ahead of the dueling is simply, who’s the wife? Who is the third party making us the hammer and some poor fool the anvil? Is it private business, clanging poverty level Islamic extremists against clueless suburban American gas junkies? Is it corrupt Islamic extremist thugs, who have infiltrated a desperate population, and sacrificed their peace and happiness for a few decades of blood thirsty glory?

We had all the intel before 9/11, leading to a report that was ignored by our administration. If we’re unable to take the information we are already freely able to compile from legal research sources and use it properly, what necessity do we have to impose more and more tyranny with less reasoning behind it?

There is another, longstanding ideology, that if information is gained at the expense of ethical conduct, it should not be used by the party to which it is given. This has to do much with the torture experiments levied on various ethnic groups over the ages, with the idea that the human race is noble and should not profit from the work of evil men. While not a legal precedent, it is a basic moral one, and is something that should be brightly apparent deep down to every Catholic, Muslim, and Ethical Humanist remaining.

If it’s not, we’ve got bigger problems.

There’s something fishy with the video feed right around 4:35 – 4:45 – right at the point where he discusses abortion. I’ve played it three times. It still skips through what he’s actually saying. Sketch.

I hope the next person who plays the video finds this blip repaired. Give the guy a fair shake to complete such an important thought unedited, I say.

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Someone calling themselves protek25 also mentions the blip at 01:00 PM : Sep 15, 2008 on the CBSNews.com article page, so it’s not just me apparently.

“I was never cool,” says Scalia in the part two clip.

Um, yes he was, apparently. What we need now is a human-navigable government website with his views so we can read and link to all of them.

Am I asking for too much?

…As for making the constitution “hard” or “easy” to interpret, it’s not a matter of ranking opinions of a particular panel of sitting judges, it’s a case-by-case review of each case heard, because in successfully navigating to the supreme court, the case has been deemed important enough to exemplify the evolving standard-of-life social conflicts our nation must balance. The job of a Justice is to interpret the law in context to the current real-life conflict, not to interpret the conflict in context to the facts and studies available two hundred years ago.

Proper channels are important, but once a case is in your lap, you must do the job of interpreting the implications of it in the current social and political climate.

Burning an American flag is a sign that even today the flag still has just as much power as it did four hundred years ago. The emotional need to punish the burner only makes the enforcer look fearful of the power in that expression to take away the power of the flag, which in fact it is not.

A real American isn’t any less of an American when the flag behind them is gone. If anything, that’s the whole point of being an American. If we don’t have a flag we make one. If we don’t have nationhood, we come up with that, too. If we don’t have laws, we create them, based upon the best minds we have at hand. We are still Americans. We didn’t stop being Americans after we dumped the powdered wigs.

Personally I don’t think Scalia is suggesting with Originalism that we give up our situationally interpretive rights. I just think it’s a matter of “save me from your followers” syndrome. I worry that perhaps he doesn’t realize how grossly his take on Originalism will be abused, ironically in exactly the way he is rallying against.

I think it’s better to just confront and realize head on that people apply whatever mythic iconology to their higher law as it suits them, and the best we can hope for is to try and make people aware of their tendency to do that rather zealously (ahem) and perhaps instill a strong sense of self-monitoring to be willing to synthesize new ideas for more understanding, instead of using the document as a fossil blueprint that is subconsciously or sneakily bent sideways in the greed for an ostensibly anarchistic, eternal adolescence – disguised as an ear-covering, eye squinting, b@stardized cheap trick of Originalism.

But maybe that’s just me?

I really want to like all our supreme court justices, but it worries me when I see someone who has a lot of power toying with semantics over expensive on-air time – instead of, say, using an opportunity to say something informative to the American people. This isn’t an Oxford debate, it’s an opportunity to do something for the unwashed masses.

During the interview Scalia seemed disinterested in addressing his audience, and focussed instead on the definition of the word “punishment,” scolding the use as not applicable to the mistreatment of innocents at Abu Ghraib military detention center.

On face value, Scalia admitting these people should not be punished for crimes (because they have not been proven criminals) is Scalia lending credit to the idea that these people should have access to a fair trial. But his attempt to justify torture outside the trial system is unfounded. Retaliation and/or personal injury towards bystanders of unproven crimes is still punishment in the context of the original framer’s intent.

Here’s why:

Denouncement of “cruel and unusual punishment” at the hands of law enforcement is specifically meant to ban group mob mentality of irrationally placing blame on a person who symbolically represents an unpunishable danger, otherwise it would not be cruel, it would be just – because the person actually acting out the crime would be the party receiving punishment. If the person is responsible for the act, and is a danger to society, imprisonment makes sense. If he is not (proven as the criminal), then it is cruel to lock him up. So the term “cruel punishment” itself begets the meaning towards pre-trial prisoners in direct opposition to Mr. Scalia suggesting the term “punishment” is not applicable to innocent prisoners being cruelly treated. “May the punishment fit the crime” is still an applicable interpretation, even when there is no crime.

As for being an Originalist, why would the phrasing suggest “unusual” as inappropriate in the context of punishment, except to allow for the evolving norms of the times to dictate whether legal punishment still fits a once socially-perceived danger? Mind you, it can also go in the other direction, meaning unsavory Marshall law. Which is why modern contextualization is every bit as important as historical context based upon original intent. That being said, I appreciate the spirit of Originalist study of actual doctorine, and the brilliance of it. I’ve just met some devastatingly retarded rejects of patriotism with no ability for situational awareness, self-monitoring, or rational adult skepticism.

Ironically those are the people most likely to be convinced drinking koolaid in Guam is somewhere in the framer’s original intent.

I don’t think Scalia is a bad person, I’m just being arrogant and I think he may be convincing a lot of people to believe whatever they want about the constitution, and still believe they can be absolutely accurate in what the framers intended – and still be absolutely accurate that what the framers intended still fits what the people of today face in every day quality of life issues.

But I’m still annoyed about the interview. There’s a billion more worthy things the man could have said during my precious laundry flip time. When lawyers make out with semantics it’s every bit as gratuitous as actors making themselves cry. Great, you can do it. But what’s the meaning behind it?

Grinning on Sixty Minutes about being a shin kicker is not an apology for self-realized slack argumentative tactics that involve emotional attacks rather than the researched legal logic we’re paying for with our taxes.

We the real Americans expect better, and so they should provide. After all, these people are smart enough, and gosh darn it, people like them.

Personally I’m not willing to go oh dear, poor thing, he’s an old guy, we should let him slide gleefully and self satisfied into senility. I think we have a few more good years of intelligence we can eek out of this guy. Plus, I actually respect his intelligence, which is why it’s annoying to see the world letting him get away with that lazy “disrespect anyone who bothers to argue against me” lowly trash talking.

I don’t care of Lady Justice lets her nay nays hang perfectly sculpted and eternally at attention out her toga. She has class. Being the school yard bully doesn’t hold the same standard of professionalism. Maybe if Scalia stood on a pedestal and let his man boobs sway in the wind for twenty years, we could give him equal courtesy for his blindness.

In the mean time: Get out on that corner and bring me my money.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2008/04/24/60minutes/main4040290.shtml