... come on in, there's CAKE for everybody.
Talk about whatever you like. Consider — if you must shop — using The Althouse Amazon Portal. And click there anyway, because Amazon went retro for April Fool's.
The photograph was taken at Paul's Books in Madison, where there are many delightful little things taped to the bookcases. What "Indiana/Intellectually She Rolls Her Own" means, you'll have to speculate.
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According to Wikipedia:
"Irvin Shrewsbury Cobb (June 23, 1876 – March 11, 1944) was an American author, humorist, editor and columnist from Paducah, Kentucky who relocated to New York during 1904, living there for the remainder of his life. He wrote for the New York World, Joseph Pulitzer's newspaper, as the highest paid staff reporter in the United States....
"Cobb is remembered best for his humorous stories of Kentucky and is part of the American literary regionalism school. These stories were collected first in the book Old Judge Priest (1915), whose title character was based on a prominent West Kentucky judge named William Pitman Bishop. Writer Joel Harris wrote of these tales, "Cobb created a South peopled with honorable citizens, charming eccentrics, and loyal, subservient blacks, but at their best the Judge Priest stories are dramatic and compelling, using a wealth of precisely rendered detail to evoke a powerful mood."[3] Among his other books are the humorous Speaking of Operations (1916), and anti-prohibition ode to bourbon, Red Likker (1929)."
According to the Urban Dictionary, "guyed" is "A south african expression. 2 meanings:
1) When you get ''guyed'', it means somebody has done something to you with the intention of making you look stupid, inferior, unpopular or make you look like a general ass. You can be guyed in several ways, including being insulted, bad mouthed or being made a joke of. Meaning 2) An expression made by the hands to show dislike to somebod. This hand signal is made by curling in the ring and pinky fingers into the palm whilst your middle and index finger are pointing toward the person. The thumb then moves in a hammer like action between the ''thumbs up''position and the knuckle of the index finger. i.e. making a gun shape with the hand."
Is CAKE an acronym? Chase, Attack, Kill, Eat?
Repeating the Epstein podcast on Indiana and religious freedom yesterday, in a more appropriate thread.
Althouse commentary welcome, on where he's misguided.
I think it's a sexual-difference thing, the abstracting male mind and the complexifying female mind.
Best discussion yet of the Indiana RFRA is the debate between John McCormack of the Weekly Standard and Garrett Epps of The Atlantic.
http://www.weeklystandard.com/blogs/why-atlantics-garrett-epps-wrong-about-indianas-religious-freedom-law_904745.html
McCormack pretty clearly wins.
And in related Indiana RFRA news, here's video of Ed Whatshisname from MSNBC asking his producers to turn off the mic of the brilliant Ryan Anderson when Anderson started schooling Ed on Ed's shameless taunting of Indiana governor Mike Pence as a "homophobe."
http://newsbusters.org/blogs/curtis-houck/2015/03/31/heritages-ryan-anderson-spars-ed-schultz-indianas-rfra-gets-mic-cut
Do yourself a favor and search YouTube for Ryan Anderson's speech at the Stanford University Anscombe Society.
Noose at Duke.
I love these scandals.
The perp didn't figure on Apr 1, though. The symbolism takes a day off.
I've asked this question before, but don't believe I've gotten an answer. Is there an Amazon portal for your foreign and expatriate readers?
Back in the 1980s when I was in grade school and high school, Indiana was the most prominent basketball program in the country. Sometime in the late 1980s and early 1990s, Duke became the most prominent program.
People would have protested holding the Final Four in Indianapolis back then because of the probability that it would give the Hoosiers a home court advantage.
Had a dusting of Global Warming this AM for an April Fools Joke.
Normal Indiana RFRA news:
I watched a "debate" on CNN yesterday wherein no one defended the law or explained what was really involved.
Weird Indiana RFRA news:
I watched a "debate" on Fox News (The Five) yesterday wherein no one defended the law or explained what was really involved.
I recall calling apple a few times over the years and they always made sure to push their AppleCare protection plan for their products.
Funny how I see #RFRA as basically a kind of insurance, should something unforeseen come up involving a business owner and his/her religion
I tweeted a short version of that, but it went over like a Trevor Noah tweet.
"Intellectually, she rolls her own"
It means the State of Indiana has a program to hire those would be professors who don't get tenure and deploys them as agents tasked with the responsibility to clean out the wallets of Indianan's who have passed out drunk.
Hillary Clinton accidentally replied to email concerning a drone lost in Pakistan with question about decorating
I'm pretty unimpressed with the cowardly, sniveling way that Indiana's governor has comported himself in recent days; it contrasts poorly with the backbone he showed in signing the statute. (His protests to have not understood its purpose and text are desultory.) I have never understood how truly stupid our politicians are; what is the point in retreating under pressure? When you do something controversial, the people who hated you for doing it are not going to hate you any less if you walk it back, and the people who supported what they did will hate them as turncoats or condemn them for trying. You dance with the one who brought you. If you try to do otherwise, what happens? Everyone hates you. Pence should keep that in mind. He has made inveterate enemies of the left; nothing he can say or do now will ever undo that. They aren't coming back. But frak the left! You think that vile hypocrite Tim Cook was going to support Mike Pence before? Still less that he'll love Pence if Pence now recants his heresy? Please. The question Pence now faces is whether he'd like to alienate his remaining supporters.
I am also deeply, thoroughly gratified to see that the administration and board that stuck the knife in Sweet Briar's back is now subject to a lawsuit, and not even the inevitable alumnae lawsuit, but one by the state. What I think that I'd like to say to James F. Jones is this: "I'll take some fries and a coffee." Because he might as well start getting used to hearing that, because he'll never work in higher ed again. There isn't much of a niche in the "wanted" classifieds for "College President to come in, shut the place down, get no-confidenced by the faculty, and get sued by the alumnae." As some SBC students put it on a banner they attached to the President's house: "Sic semper tyrannis." The Sweet Briar students are a long, long, long way from the idiot "Occupy" students who probably couldn't even spell "tyrannis," let alone know its derivation or current use as the motto of Virginia. Women-only higher ed is a precious, precious resource, and when it's gone, we won't get it back; the possibility of resuscitating Sweet Briar and sending those who tried to kill it back to promising careers in the fast food industry is, well, pretty sweet.
The debate should really be about free speech, not freedom of religion. In each of the cases that has come up so far, it is an artistic expression that is being required, asking of the baker, the florist or the photographer to make art to celebrate an event that these individuals do not agree with. What if an artist were required to paint a painting promoting something which they did not agree with? Then it would clearly be an offense against their right to free speech. Freedom of speech must certainly include the right not to be compelled to say something that one believes to be wrong.
I sent out a new tweet... this one should do better.
Obama gives #Iran permission to blame #Republicans for shutting down their #nuclear reactors....
#AprilFools
The RTFM law is a good one, but who follows it.
Just an analogy.
Simon needs to study the courageous Bobby Lee and the outcome of his inane, stubborn Pickett's charge before condemning conservatives as horrible for refusing to proudly die in a charge of Gay bashing within their rights to stand for a legalistic versions of Christ's message.
Simon, I don't understand how Pence did not foresee this coming. It's like he lives in a bubble of supporters who tell him no wrong. Here's a letter from late February. And he sails blissfully along, doing nothing to buttress his arguments.
Getting the Legislature now to "clarify" the meaning of the bill serves only (IMO) to validate the arguments of people against the bill. There must've been something that had to be clarified if they're pushing for a clarification.
Ruben Bolling offers his typically sharp take on the Indiana foofaraw. (It echoes my own comments on the matter from a few days ago.) By the way, I'm Hoosier-born.
Indiana, eh? Scary.
Imagine you go for an exam by a doctor who advertises "Same price for everyone."
Only you find out later that your $100 cash paid for the service is the same as that for a person who pays with a credit card, which comes with a typical 3% kick-back to Visa or Mastercard.
Whether or not you can recover your overpayment by suing the doctor is almost beside the point.
The point is: why the hell would you submit to treatment by a doc who shows no interest in your ability to pay and, in addition, withholds the relevant information concerning his fee?
That's exactly the way it is with the hidden Althouse Amazon kickback. How can we justify trusting in politicians, docs, lawyers, real-estate agents or bloggers who work this way?
Unknown said...
"The debate should really be about free speech, not freedom of religion."
And freedom of association. Suppose Althouse is a professional photographer, she runs "Ann Althouse Photography." She brands each of her photographs with a little vanity in the corner--you know the style, a kind of brushed-script "Ann Althouse Photography." May the government say to her, you, Althouse, must photograph a gay wed-ing, associating your name (and implicitly your approval) with gay marriage, or you must stop photographing any wedding? That seems an awful lot like a forced association, no?
MadisonMan said...
"Getting the Legislature now to 'clarify'" the meaning of the bill serves only (IMO) to validate the arguments of people against the bill."
It's a climbdown--it's a retreat under pressure. Nothing more. The bill was very clear. He just didn't expect the firestorm of criticism, and why would he? This is an uncontroversial provision. There is nothing controversial to it; it's not even a bad idea. But, you know, anger is easy. Any idiot can get up in the morning and be angry about the thing that Jon Stewart says they should be angry about. By contrast, reading the statute, and understanding the gestation and development of the notion now embedded in RFRA statutes down from Sherbert through Smith, through the enactment of the federal RFRA, its subsequent limitation in City of Boerne and the enactment of state analogs to compensate for City of Boerne, and understanding how RFRA cases operate, who's the typical RFRA defendant and who's suing them for what---that's hard. If you don't know that stuff already, you have to read. You have to think. It's much easier to just get angry, especially when you have perfect-storm conditions as anger over gay rights collides with anger over another lefty hobby-horse, corporate personhood. Anger is easy and it feels good; small wonder that's the response. I don't think you can blame Pence for not expecting blowback. I certainly don't think you can fault him for not expecting the brazen hypocrisy of a craven shithead like Tim Cook who is perfectly happy to take money from people who kill gays while attacking Indiana as the worst place ever because we don't thing it's right to force people to sell a frakking cake.
"And freedom of association. Suppose Althouse is a professional photographer, she runs "Ann Althouse Photography." She brands each of her photographs with a little vanity in the corner--you know the style, a kind of brushed-script "Ann Althouse Photography." May the government say to her, you, Althouse, must photograph a gay wed-ing, associating your name (and implicitly your approval) with gay marriage, or you must stop photographing any wedding? That seems an awful lot like a forced association, no?"
Then make your First Amendment defense. Why do you need RFRA?
And RFRA would only protect photographers who can argue they have a sincere religious belief that's being substantially burdened.
The protection isn't properly aligned to what ought to be protective. It's expansive in one way and completely restrictive in another.
@Simon: "I certainly don't think you can fault him for not expecting the brazen hypocrisy of a craven shithead like Tim Cook who is perfectly happy to take money from people who kill gays while attacking Indiana as the worst place ever because we don't thing it's right to force people to sell a frakking cake"
I generally agree with your take on the issue, but given the way the Left effectively mobilizes around any issue that serves its purpose, any GOP politician should expect such hypocrisy, and worse. They should be prepared, intellectually and psychologically. Few are. Being unprepared is political negligence.
This is one reason the GOP base will listen to Cruz. With all his liabilities, he fights back.
That's exactly the way it is with the hidden Althouse Amazon kickback. How can we justify trusting in politicians, docs, lawyers, real-estate agents or bloggers who work this way? - jimbino
So that's how you roll? You trust somebody and believe everything they say or don't trust them and believe nothing?
I listen and evaluate arguments and evidence. But that's just me.
Tim in vermont:
In order for the market to function, there needs to be transparency, which means posting of prices and acknowledgment of bribes and kickbacks.
Docs who self-deal by recommending tests using their own CAT and MRI machines should be avoided if not condemned and incarcerated.
To the extent that Ann Althouse is not charging me for her blog, I can't complain of her skimming, though I can't trust a blogger who pretends there's no kickback involved in recommending that I buy from Amazon through her portal.
Blogs are almost always self-correcting, since the commenters can even the score: that's exactly the justification for my series of posts regarding Althouse kick-backs.
Ann Althouse said...
"And RFRA would only protect photographers who can argue they have a sincere religious belief that's being substantially burdened. The protection isn't properly aligned to what ought to be protective."
Oh, I completely agree--I've said here before, my only problem with what Indiana did is that it's too narrow. I don't care why you don't want to serve a customer; I don't care whether it's a religious basis or any other basis. And that's not because I want to refuse service to anyone, or because I want my neighbor to be able to refuse service to anyone, it's because I don't think that I or anyone else has the slightest right to demand that my neighbor enter into a commercial transaction. We have no right to tell him to buy insurance from company X, and we have no right to tell him to sell a widget to customer Y. I should much rather Indiana had forthrightly addressed that problem instead of trying to fit it into a RFRA garb. But on the other hand, legislators are stupid, and public opinion is flighty, and both tend to react to the immediate problem before them, and we all know the immediate problem before us: The attempts to bully and conscript small businesses into providing goods and services for gay wed-ings, to demand that they engage in commerce to which they object on religious grounds. Here in Indiana, we don't much like bullies, and if this law abridges anyone’s rights, it's the rights of bullies who demand not tolerance but acceptance, compliance, and submission. They have no right to make such a demand, and the government has no right to impose such a demand. I would prefer that Indiana protect the rights of the shopkeeps on a broader principle than narrowly religious freedom, but given what the fire under the kettle is, I understand why they're focusing on that.
There's that "trust" word again. I don't get what "trust" has to do with it.
Trust is for toadies looking for authoritarian sources of information.
Your sniping is just sort of dumb in that it is irrelevant to a grownup. But whatever. I will just laugh at your comments from now on, same as I laugh every time I see you wishing that there were no children in the world.
How about just some common sense?
I am retired now, but suppose I still was a practicing Professional Engineer. You come to me and ask me to design a project for you, but I tell you I am not interested.
Do you really want to go to court to make me design this project for you?
Can a for-profit hospital refuse to treat Governor Pence in an emergency?
There's a "hidden Althouse Amazon kickback"? Why wasn't I told? And here I thought all these appeals to access Amazon by clicking through her blog were motivated by an altruistic desire to see me make an extra fast shopping connection through her portal.
My eyes are opened, thanks to jimbino. I no longer trust any content from "Ann Althouse" (indeed, the name itself has a concocted, avatarish flavor, no?) A nice looking blonde law professor? Preposterous. And "Meade"? Has anyone ever met a real person named Meade?
Tim in Vermont says,
So that's how you roll? You trust somebody and believe everything they say [sic] or don't trust them [sic] and believe nothing?
This is a perfectly ungrammatical example of a "false dichotomy" if ever I saw one.
So let's apply Strunk and White to blog comments now.
Your criticism is nonsense. Your pathetic grammar gambit is just one more example of your authority fetish.
The protection isn't properly aligned to what ought to be protective. It's expansive in one way and completely restrictive in another.
Right, religion ought to have nothing to do with it, nor free speech. It's freedom of association.
The reasoning in the 60s civil rights legislation was wrong and everything is screwed up because of it, provoking perpetual fights over what there needn't be any disagreement over.
Competitive markets = freedom of association.
Noncompetitive markets = civil right to service.
Maximize voluntary transactions because they work out supply and demand so that everybody gets what they want.
There's the market and there's democracy. Sometimes the democratic process nails something down, as in the case of a nondiscrimination rule. Then the question is whether a constitutional right, such as freedom of association, trumps that. Not every preference for freedom shuts out majoritarian preference.
Not every default market freedom is a constitutional right.
Not every default market freedom is a constitutional right.
That's where you don't get the principle.
The idea is that you want government action to leave everybody no worse off, hence just compensation for takings and so forth, subtracting out the compensation that you get from the action considered as positive to you.
Nondiscrimination's compensation is that you're forced to do what you want to do anyway, in the case of a market ruled by private violence or law to the contrary. You wind up ahead.
This is not true in the case of a competitive market, if you're forced to nondiscrimate. You're forced to do what you do not want to do. So you wind up behind, with no compensation.
From those two, you get that the civil rights justification was good (private violence overcome) but that gay rights nondiscrimination is not (the competitive market works just fine).
So you wind up with the extension of nondiscrimination over freedom of association is not going to work. So don't decide cases that way.
There, you're ahead of the game now. You know what's wrong and what to do.
Democracy didn't decide this, perhaps no having heard the argument.
The market is right, the democracy is wrong. That's free speech.
Fix it.
There's an idea from John Gall (_Systemantics_) that complex systems don't work and cannot be made to work.
You can only get a system to work if it runs downhill, in line with human wants, he says.
There's the market, and here's the law with a few key badly decided cases to be fixed to get to it.
Maybe the law is taught these days as how to appeal to feminized judges.
Hey guys, here's what works.
I argue like a guy.
Here's what's wrong, here's why it's wrong, here's what to do.
Oh but there are so many people and so many complicated relationships and so much water under the bridge, let's just stay in this abusive relationship with father, is the other side.
You could say that democracy was told, in extending nondiscrimination from blacks to gays, women, and so forth, that what they essentially had in common was that they were discrimination.
Whereas what mattered with blacks was private violence and laws producing a noncompetitive market, which does not apply at all to the other groups, where there is a competitive market.
That's not really complicated, and it could have been explained to democracy if anybody had wanted to.
It wasn't in the activists' interest, and soap opera is profitable to the MSM, so there you go.
More speech is the solution, not to mention ridicule.
The public accommodation rulings (McClung is the name I recall from law school) have always seemed, even in the racial setting, an example of the Warren Court making bad law in the name of a good cause. Whether it's defining all commerce as interstate commerce, or ignoring any 1st Amendment Constitutional rights (free association, religion) in operating a business or nonprofit, the Warren Court saw eliminating racial discrimination as a progressive goal that swept away all traditional or common sense interpretations of Constitutional limits on government power. The Left is appealing to that racial paradigm in its quest to eliminate all conservative institutions (family, religion, private property and business) from public life (or even gainful employment).
Ann Althouse said...
"There's the market and there's democracy. Sometimes the democratic process nails something down, as in the case of a nondiscrimination rule. Then the question is whether a constitutional right, such as freedom of association, trumps that. Not every preference for freedom shuts out majoritarian preference."
Right. So, for example, there being no constitutional right to cake, there is nothing to trump a law enacted through the democratic process that says you can't make someone give you cake.
The Left says voter ID laws are bad because there aren't many proven cases of voter fraud. The potential to do good (by preventing fraud) isn't enough--you have to show actual examples.
The Left says RFRA laws are bad because they might allow discrimination, even though there aren't many cases of such laws being used to discriminate in that way. The potential for harm is enough--they don't have to show actual examples.
This is logically consistent, though, because of some reasons you won't understand if you're not on the Left
iowahawkblog said... ·
"Wouldn't it be great if we treated both gay marriage and bakery purchases as voluntary transactions between people? LOL j/k #AprilFools"
"One side wants the state to conscript the religious businesswomen and men into participating in ceremonies that violate their beliefs. The other side wants to make it possible for religious people to live their own lives according to their consciences. Yet somehow, the Left and most of the mainstream press paint the current skirmishes over religious liberty as conservative offensives." - Tim Carney
I am reading a couple of books about life in present-day China - The Party and Age of Ambition - and I am struck by the similarity between the tactics of the loony left here and the Chinese government.
The situations are entirely different and the issues are different, but there are attitudes and tactics that are very similar.
You think that vile hypocrite Tim Cook was going to support Mike Pence before?
I think that after, he and a few other CEOs were going to shut down much bigger businesses in the state of Indianus.
Again, you can't complain about not respecting a goofy little pizzeria's "right" to exclude if you can't respect an actually significant company's right to exclude them back.
The Guvnah is just being the bent-over backward bitch that he is to the bigger business, which is just the way Republicans are anyway. And isn't that a conservative tendency regardless? Their understanding of capitalism seems to mean loving whomever has the most capital, and letting them use it politically to throw around whomever they please.
I hardly see what the fuss is about.
"that complex systems don't work and cannot be made to work."
I take it robots are not around the corner.
Not every preference for freedom shuts out majoritarian preference.
There are so many pithy proverbs in "The Little Red Book." I'd forgotten that one.
There's the market and there's democracy. Sometimes the democratic process nails something down, as in the case of a nondiscrimination rule. Then the question is whether a constitutional right, such as freedom of association, trumps that. Not every preference for freedom shuts out majoritarian preference.
This seems to be a very important point in the discussion.
Isn't it the case that the rationale for civil rights legislation was Jim Crow? IOW, the legislation created a trump card of civil rights not just because people were not freely associating with blacks but because the governments had been systematically denying the rights of blacks.
I don't see a similar situation with LGBT people unless one wants to claim that antisodomy laws and the traditional laws on marriage were like Jim Crow, and I haven't seen anyone making that argument. Maybe the activists really do see it that way but they don't seem to feel that they need to make the case on that principle.
"Jim Crow" was not just about official laws and ordinances. There also was more intensive pressure from a vigilante crowd that threatened that if you ever sell or rent your house to a black person, our wives will not speak to your wife and your kids can't play with our kids, besides we will make sure that you are blackballed so that no one else will hire you or do business with you - ever.
This general conspiracy had to be broken up somehow. If you, or your parents, or grandparents, had a better idea for how to do it, please let us know.
However, the homosexuals among us have never had to face anything like that.
One very obvious thing, there is no way for anyone to tell who are homosexual except by some very public behavior on their part, so their situation is in no way comparable to that faced by "black" people.
One very obvious thing, there is no way for anyone to tell who are homosexual except by some very public behavior on their part, so their situation is in no way comparable to that faced by "black" people.
This is the crux of it because it is both true and untrue (depends on the definition of "very public".) The nature of homosexuality is that if it is practiced (rather than just having attractions that are not acted upon) then there will either be some public behaviors or gays would have to be secretive. These would include things like holding hands in public, bringing a same sex partner to the company picnic, or requesting visitation rights for a partner in the hospital. None of that should be denied to gays, but neither should anyone else have to be forced to affirm their practice of homosexuality. Further, the people who feel that their right to abstain from that affirmation should have considerable leeway to define what it means to affirm (though not complete leeway.) the recent cases have involved business owners defining it as participation in a SSM ceremony (not a more general refusal to serve gay people) which seems reasonable to me but YMMV.
Maybe I should revise that to "obnoxious public behavior." There always have been homosexual couples that no one minded.
It is the "in your face" stuff and insistence on being "accepted" whether you like it or not that is so objectionable.
Oh, my!!
The gate crasher at the NSA is both black, and transgender. I'm guessing that will never be reported.
"There always have been homosexual couples that no one minded."
Sure, the ones who kept their real selves and lives hidden, living in fear of discovery, of being shunned by their friends or families.
"It is the 'in your face' stuff and insistence on being 'accepted' whether you like it or not that is so objectionable."
Yeah, how dare they expect--or want--to walk down the street hand in hand or arm in arm with their loved ones (as heterosexual couples do freely and with no disturbance to others), or to be able to talk openly about their real lives? What nerve! Don't they care that others will object?
Yes, Cookie, life is terribly unfair, but you cannot make me love you, or even like you, nor can you have judge order me to do so.
Life is jus so terribly unfair!
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