Highest Rated Comments


superiority36 karma

Pussy was put in a can by a man in a factory downtown? I don't think so. You know who talked about factories a lot? Marx. QED.

superiority26 karma

TIL that there is a political party with members in the Dutch legislature that believes voting should be restricted to male heads of households.

superiority13 karma

Under current Supreme Court precedent, there isn't really a solid argument for why statutes criminalizing revenge porn can pass Constitutional muster.

Sure there is. The problem with the Stevens quote you posted is that it's not actually true, and it doesn't accurately describe how the Supreme Court has ever treated First Amendment cases. It's just something the justices wrote to make themselves sound good.

Defamation laws and child pornography laws are constitutional because defamation and child pornography harm individuals and/or society, and this harm is considered sufficient to justify laws that are obviously prima facie violations of the First Amendment. New York Times v. Sullivan said that the purpose of the First Amendment is to ensure that "debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open"; Gertz v. Robert Welch, Inc. holds that speech must have some positive "constitutional value". First Amendment jurisprudence has evolved somewhat since the 1940s, but Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire is still good law, and it explicitly says:

Allowing the broadest scope to the language and purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment, it is well understood that the right of free speech is not absolute at all times and under all circumstances. There are certain well defined and narrowly limited classes of speech, the prevention and punishment of which have never been thought to raise any Constitutional problem. These include the lewd and obscene, the profane, the libelous, and the insulting or "fighting" words -- those which, by their very utterance, inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace. It has been well observed that such utterances are no essential part of any exposition of ideas, and are of such slight social value as a step to truth that any benefit that may be derived from them is clearly outweighed by the social interest in order and morality.

And, of course, legal solutions with some basis in copyright are permitted because copyright is explicitly authorised by the Constitution.

superiority12 karma

What would you say is the single biggest economic policy mistake made by each of the Clinton, Bush II, and Obama administrations? Have your views on that changed over time? (I.e. if I had asked you in 2006 what the biggest mistakes of Clinton and Bush were, would you give different answers, do you now think that some things you initially thought were bad are actually not so bad, or vice versa?)

superiority10 karma

Brad DeLong actually wrote an interesting paper in the '90s about how firms are command economies internally, and why they succeed whereas central planning by governments seems to fail.