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US supreme court says yanks have a right to publicly carry guns

Started by Martin Van Buren Stan, June 23, 2022, 08:27:41 PM

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touchingcloth

Quote from: touchingcloth on June 25, 2022, 08:58:03 PMReading about Plessy on Wikipedia it sounds like it provided protections for segregation and is widely seen as the worst decision in the Supreme Court's history. So repealing would be...good?

Although the Brown v Board of Education decision repealed Plessy and outlawed segregation. So he's saying repeal Brown and make segregation legal because of Plessy, and then repeal Plessy and make segregation an unanswered question again?

How about we just try doing segregation in the r-months for a few years, and see how it goes. A/B test it.

Ferris

Quote from: touchingcloth on June 25, 2022, 08:58:03 PMReading about Plessy on Wikipedia it sounds like it provided protections for segregation and is widely seen as the worst decision in the Supreme Court's history. So repealing would be...good?

I think he's saying that because Brown overruled Plessy, then it's fine that some decisions overrule others.

It's still a racial dog whistle, and it signals that basically all established constitutional rights are now up for debate.

Clarence Thomas went out of his way to argue that the 14th amendment is not a good place to base constitutional rights unless they were already established in 1868 (you know, 50+ years before women could vote) conveniently ignoring that his own marriage is legal only because of that very interpretation (in Loving v Virginia).

It's mad.

Crenners

Quote from: Dr Rock on June 25, 2022, 09:06:04 PMThey certainly don't tend to care about us. I care as much about North Americans as I do Middle and South Americans, but our racist news media doesn't see fit to keep us informed as to what's going on there.

Yeah I don't care about them either, they can all carry on eating each other and chopping each other fucking heads off as far as I'm concern

touchingcloth

Quote from: Crenners on June 25, 2022, 08:59:03 PMWhy does anyone care about Americ

make no different to your life

It does feel ever more like this is the correct approach to take. They're an absolutely figure up country and shouldn't be seen as any sort of an ideal for others to look up to.

Racism. Poverty. Misogyny. Theocracy. Inequality.

What have they ever done that's decent? The preamble to the Declaration of Independence is great, but just about everything they've done since goes actively against the spirit of it.

Get em in the bin.

bgmnts

I think it's the fact that the US is basically the epicentre of western culture and has it's reach economically and culturally in almost every country in the world.


Crenners

I like jazz, Animal Collective and Terrence Malick but the rest of it can shoot each other imo

Ferris

I started thinking about what other generally-understood rights could be "sent back to the states" (*nudge nudge wink wink*) and de facto abolished in shitty GOP states, but it got too fucking depressing.

Some things are fairly stringently spelled out in the constitution so things like actual chattel slavery and universal suffrage probably can't be revoked (although... fuck knows at this point), but there are a lot of rights established in case law after eighteen-fucking-sixty-eight that could now be struck down under the same logic.

Your right to fly on airplane, eat a pierogi, not get bummed by a federal worker if you go to renew your drivers license... unless it's explicitly written in the constitution or added by amendment (functionally impossible for boring operational reasons) then it's not nailed-on as a right any more. I'd be genuinely scared and I understand the fear and anger. If you live within 100 miles of the border, you de facto don't have 4th amendment rights any more (that one was announced last week). Sorry, literally everyone in Florida, New England, and Southern California.

I've mentioned it before but 2013/14 we were considering moving down there for a year or two just for the life experience. These days you couldn't pay me to visit, and my wife is declining work trips to the states. Whole place feels increasingly dangerous and deranged, like a grizzly bear on acid that is inside its cage for now but not for any logical reason and the doors are all open.

touchingcloth

Reading more about Plessy, it was passed 7-1. The 1 dissenter strongly against segregation of whites and blacks, but it seems even he was a big old bigot in his own way, and his minority decision can be paraphrased as "everyone with a brain and sense of justice can see that there's no good reason to keep whites separate from blacks. Chinamen, however..."

Ferris

Quote from: Crenners on June 25, 2022, 08:59:03 PMWhy does anyone care about Americ

make no different to your life

Their culture wars are imported wholesale into Canada, for one. They make their way to the UK too.

I also generally care about other people, so if 175m humans get a right taken off them then I'll go to the effort of composing a CaB post or two in disagreement.

Cuellar

Guy I know is moving to the US very soon, and TEXAS of all places, to be with his wife. I sort of want to accost him in the group chat and say 'are you REALLY still going to go?? honestly?? Are you insane?'


Ferris

Quote from: touchingcloth on June 25, 2022, 09:27:43 PMhis minority decision can be paraphrased as "everyone with a brain and sense of justice can see that there's no good reason to keep whites separate from blacks. Chinamen, however..."

That's the kind of bigotry that's so astonishing to see in an educated person, you almost have to respect it. Like - fair play, you've worked fucking hard to remain this incredibly ignorant.

In those days, when you issue a dissent like that you at least checked to make sure the legislation would survive and you'd be basically show-boating. On overturning Roe, Roberts said "we're going too far here lads" and fucking voted for it anyway the absolute lunatic.

Sorry, I'll stop gumming up this thread now. The right to abortion has personal significance to me and I'm still shocked and angry about the whole thing.

In my dealings with Americans, I find most are funny and smart and self-deprecating and basically mean well - I don't believe they really want this, but their terrible national decisions have a direct impact on human beings (and possibly Canadians and the rest of the western world).

It's frustrating and astonishing that their legal system can be so utterly and transparently bankrupt, but also entirely untouchable.

Edit: I'm not even in the right "americas gone to shit lads" thread lol. What a muppet.

touchingcloth

Quote from: Ferris on June 25, 2022, 09:27:35 PMSome things are fairly stringently spelled out in the constitution so things like actual chattel slavery and universal suffrage probably can't be revoked (although... fuck knows at this point), but there are a lot of rights established in case law after eighteen-fucking-sixty-eight that could now be struck down under the same logic.

Maybe chattel laws couldn't be revoked, but even as a non-lawyer it seems like if things got taken back to the original and unamended form of the constitution it would be easy to form an argument along the lines:

1. The constitution outlaws slavery.

2. However, numerous drafters and signatories to the document personally kept slaves well beyond its enactment.

3. Therefore, VOID HAHAHAHA

Crenners

I give the same fuck about Americ as I do about Franc or any of the other mfs

touchingcloth

In terms of decisions which almost no citizens actually agree wholeheartedly with, benefit only a tiny elite but yet are still nigh on impossible to reverse, the adoption of the US Constitution has to be up there with the vote for Brexit.

In both cases the only real solution would seem to be going back completely to the drawing board rather than applying hasty bolt-ons, but how do you go about that short of an wars?

Ferris

(Whatever expertise I have is limited to the Canadian constitution, for the record.)

Amending any national constitution is really, really hard to the point it's de facto impossible. Even really basic shit gets held up for stupid reasons like petty nationalism, the time and effort it takes to do the admin, and just plain disinterest. You need a really broad mandate to make that kind of change - you can't convince more than 80% of the population to take a life-saving vaccine which might save their actual life during a pandemic, good luck getting them to engage in a new model of federalism.

Example: Québec is still not a signatory to the Canadian constitution. As a jurisdiction, it doesn't formally recognize the federal government's role in certain sectors as legitimate, which is bonkers when you think about it - the way the federal government deals with it (since the early '90s anyway) is to basically not talk about it and hope no one notices.

And Canada has a pretty collaborative governmental model between national and sub-national branches. The US is full of furious governors angrily decrying their own national government (because they all want to be president) so there's fuck all chance of them agreeing to any new amendment ever, even if it was to establish a national day of wanking and eating biscuits.

Dr Rock

The Yanks have a similar problem to us here in the UK - a mass delusion that democracy has been installed and needs no further work. The fact that the democracies we have allow the mega-rich, the corporations and big media to keep the system running in the interests of the aforementioned, rather than the general public is one reason the system doesn't progress and improve.

There is always hope for change though, history tells us that.

Dex Sawash


Reckon that Cornyn tweet is the "dems are the real racists" meme, where the libs think black people will fail if given the freedom to bootstrap themselves and while simultaneously needing to deny them boostrap power and keeping them down with gummint handouts so they will vote correctly.

Dex Sawash


Ferris

Quote from: Dex Sawash on June 25, 2022, 10:43:25 PMReckon that Cornyn tweet is the "dems are the real racists" meme, where the libs think black people will fail if given the freedom to bootstrap themselves and while simultaneously needing to deny them boostrap power and keeping them down with gummint handouts so they will vote correctly.

That's the frustrating part of it all - laws don't get imposed in a vacuum. Juneteenth is a thing because it took a few years for something as basic as the abolishment of slavery in the continental US to actually get out into practice.

So for Cornyn to be all "laws are laws and that's how it goes" is one of the many reasons why his line of thinking (intentionally) misses the point.

Ugh! It's all very frustrating.

Mister Six


jamiefairlie

It's a sharp reminder that the veneer of civilisation we take for granted is always hanging by a thread. we talk of rights as if they're baked into the universe but in reality we have no rights, they're just agreements that can be broken at any moment. The people that won those concessions, fought long and hard for them but they were then taken for granted by successor generations.