Freedom of high school speech

In a way, there goes the neighborhood. "Katherine Evans, now 19 and attending college, was suspended in 2007 from Pembroke Pines Charter High School after she used her home computer to create a Facebook page titled, 'Ms. Sarah Phelps is the worst teacher I've ever met.' In his order, Garber found that the student had a constitutional right to express her views on the social networking site. More...

The new Jim Crow

The racial aspects of the criminal justice system are not new to us, but the numbers in this article are quite depressing.

Crime rates have fluctuated over the past few decades -- and currently are at historical lows -- but imprisonment rates have soared. Quintupled. And the vast majority of that increase is due to the War on Drugs, a war waged almost exclusively in poor communities of color, even though studies consistently show that people of all colors use and sell illegal drugs at remarkably similar rates. In fact, some studies indicate that white youth are significantly more likely to engage in illegal drug dealing than black youth.

That is not what you would guess, though, when entering our nation's prisons and jails, which are overflowing with black and brown drug offenders. More...

The sweet smell of doing the right thing

A team of researchers found that when people were in a room recently spritzed with a citrus-scented cleanser, they behaved more fairly when playing a classic trust game. In another experiment, the smell of cleanser made subjects more likely to volunteer for a charity.

The findings suggest that simply smelling something clean makes people clean up their behavior - that a smell can provoke a mental leap between cleanliness and morality, making people think differently about the world around them. More...

Physiological aspects of morality are intriguing to the consilient set.

Pink ouija boards

"Phelan, who has never played the game, said the Bible explicitly states "not to mess with spirits" and that using a Ouija board will leave a person's soul vulnerable to attack." More...

May the lord have mercy on our heathen souls. Especially girls' heathen souls. (What's the boys' version like, anyhow?)

Genetic testing before procreation

"Counsyl, a genetic testing startup company is now offering prospective parents what it calls a 'universal genetic test' that aims to let them know how their genes might combine to produce genetic disease in their offspring." Wow. I can see all sorts of ramifications to this, but maybe I've just been debating too long. And Steven Pinker and his wife are the poster children for it! Link.

Corporate speech again

Many of us were taken aback by the recent court ruling, including apparently th President, but you might want to read this before coming to any conclusions.

"This line of attack demonstrates a fundamental misunderstanding of both the nature of corporations and the freedoms protected by the Constitution, which is exemplified by the facile charge that “corporations aren’t human beings.”

Well of course they aren’t — but that’s constitutionally irrelevant: Corporations aren’t “real people” in the sense that the Constitution’s protection of sexual privacy or prohibition on slavery make no sense in this context, but that doesn’t mean that corporate entities also lack, say, Fourth Amendment rights. Or would the “no rights for corporations” crowd be okay with the police storming their employers’ offices and carting off their (employer-owned) computers for no particular reason? — or to chill criticism of some government policy."

More...

Freedom of association

Long ago, we had a topic about this, the right, or lack thereof, of private organizations to discriminate. The article at hand talks about England and religions, but its point is universal. "As part of this freedom of association, this freedom to give shared beliefs or interests an organisational form, others, who do not share those beliefs or interests, will be excluded... Discrimination goes hand-in-hand with freedom of association. You can’t defend one without defending the other." More...

Human rights video

This is probably best for novices, early on. I found it a little dizzying, myself, but the intro was especially strong. Actually looked like a novice meeting, in a way. Link.

No link to autism

"The prestigious British medical journal The Lancet is fully and formally retracting the 1998 study that sparked the autism/vaccine scare." I realize this is old news, both rez-wise and news-wise, but in case you missed it, here's the details.

Quoting Howard Zinn

Revolutionary change does not come as one cataclysmic moment (beware of such moments!) but as an endless succession of surprises, moving zigzag toward a more decent society. We don't have to engage in grand, heroic actions to participate in the process of change. Small acts, when multiplied by millions of people, can quietly become a power no government can suppress, a power that can transform the world. More...

I'm not a great fan of Zinn's revisionist history, but this article sums up some wonderful thinking. Check out the whole thing on the Huffington Post.

Freedom for dictators

Are dictators more free than their subjects? Probably not. The quote below, absent that issue, is an awfully interesting explanation of freedom, in any case.

Freedom is not only – or even primarily – the ability to do what you choose, but also the availability of significant choices. And a choice is significant when you have the ability to expand the options you can choose from and the ability to make an educated choice between expanded and examined options. More...