The Alabama Supreme Court ruling on frozen embryos is exactly why we have, in this country, a separation of church and state. Mind you, this is the same state that has laws in effect declaring that a pregnant woman can be charged with murder should she miscarry. (Those laws have been used for just that purpose. They originated in precisely the same ignorance as the Supreme Court ruling and produce an unjustness that should infuriate any compassionate individual.) And now,…
Without Freedom of Thought, there can be no such Thing as Wisdom; and no such Thing as publick Liberty, without Freedom of Speech; which is the Right of every Man, as far as by it he does not hurt or countroul the Right of another: And this is the only Check it ought to suffer, and the only Bounds it ought to know. This sacred Privilege is so essential to free Governments, that the Security of Property, and the Freedom…
When people say that capitalism is “the problem,” what they really mean is that they’re opposed to the naturally unequal forces of a free-market (i.e. voluntary participation and product/service selection) based economy. Capitalism is merely the scapegoat. People blame it for all sorts of evils having nothing to do with the way businesses are financed: poverty, inequality, racism, and a host of other societal ills that have more to do with government intrusion in the market, collusion between business and…
The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people. Of my screed from earlier today, many may say that surely the 9th Amendment (in theory, at least) protects unenumerated rights and freedoms of individuals. We have already seen that this is, in practice, untrue. Refer again to the offhand and incomplete list of government intrusions from the past two years, and it’s easy to see that government has…
The problem with viewing the Constitution and Bill of Rights as prohibitions on government activities is that those rights and freedoms not specifically articulated are then interpreted as perfectly allowable intrusions by government, and its agents, on the anomaly of individual freedom. What if, instead, we recognize individual freedom as the default and government intrusion as the anomaly? This is, I believe, the stance the Founding Fathers took when they drafted both documents, knowing full well (again, I believe)…
I have some rules that help me navigate the world without having to spend too much time stressing over silly things like what to wear and whether a particular sentence is appropriate in a particular story. The rule for the latter is much simpler than the rule for the former (which is a series of rules), so that one goes first. The rule is: Story trumps everything. Well, the core of that is that Story is Character, but the rule…
Last week or so, I finished reading After: Nineteen Stories of Apocalypse and Dystopia edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling. Datlow is an award-winning editor. I heard about her last year when I participated in the Books of Horror Christmas exchange. (Books of Horror is one of the reader-oriented Facebook groups I follow.) So when I was looking for new-to-me Horror recently, I decided to give one of her anthologies a go. I’ll have more on my impressions of…
Ravelry, a crochet and knitting social site, has implemented a No Trump Support ban because We cannot provide a space that is inclusive of all and also allow support for open white supremacy. Support of the Trump administration is undeniably support for white supremacy. Let’s leave aside for a moment that it is absolute insanity to seriously equate President Trump with white supremacy; this is in no way factually correct and is, in fact, a delusion of the left. No, wait….