Blog Comments

Manus: I just looked up that section.

Originally Posted by Public Order Act section 5

(1)A person is guilty of an offence if he—
(a)uses threatening, abusive or insulting words or behaviour, or disorderly behaviour, or
(b)displays any writing, sign or other visible representation which is threatening, abusive or insulting,
within the hearing or sight of a person likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress thereby.

What. the. smurf. That is jaw-droppingly stupid.

Luckily for us, we have the Public Order Act Section 5 to handily make all insults, written or spoken, illegal.

Sometimes common law worries me. Precedents like this are concerning. We can only hope it doesn't actually get implemented in the future.

I'm not sure exactly about the things you're referring to but I think that as a woman, I should be offended. After all, we're not living in Sodom and Gomorrah. Everyone knows that unmarried women don't sleep around and if they do, they deserve to be called unchaste and whorish names.

Out of curiosity, I did a quick Westlaw search for any cases applying the unchastity prong of slander per se in the past 20 years. It was referred to in over a dozen cases where courts just went over the categories, but it was actually applied in New York as recently as 2005. A New York trial court found that a woman had stated a valid claim for slander per se based on allegations of unchastity in a woman after Gene Simmons seemed to assert that a woman was there to satisfy him. Yes, that Gene Simmons. I don't see any future history for the lawsuit, so I assume it was settled.

Jiro: it's actually not like that, because there is no legislative statute like for laws passed in the 1800s that are just still on the books. This is part of the common law, which means it's court-developed doctrine that started forming in England hundreds of years ago. There's a lot of stupid things still in the common law in most states (see: my rant about real property law), but not very much in modern times that is so flagrantly sexist. Legislatures have nothing to do with it (although they can change or overturn the common law by statute), which just makes it more inexcusable.

If lawmakers spent ten minutes in one of today's high schools, they would rewrite a lot of things.

Is this another one of those stupid little backwards laws that hasn't been removed yet? I hope to hell there hasn't been a successful case based on that in recent history.

That seems really backwards and ridiculous and, above all else, unequal treatment. What if I call you a whore? You can't fight me on that? That's not fair.

Thanks for linking me to this.

I'm much too half-asleep to have absorbed most of the discussion properly right now but I've always felt something roughly along the lines of France's system would work well here - largely market-based but subsidised by the government. Of course that would be too common-sense for our politicians to implement, so of course it wouldn't happen.

I think it's amusing how much this decision has pissed some people off. Those popehat links are hilarious.

That amused me way more than it should have.

The US is also the only (or one of the only) developed countries in the world to prohibit "hate speech" legislation; to have a mandatory exclusionary rule which automatically keeps out illegally obtained evidence from criminal trials; and to have entrapment as an absolute defense to any crime. Sometimes the majority is smurfing stupid. You can also apply your last point to yourself.

Also, I am not saying health care companies would sell policies that exclude cancer or contagious disease coverage. My point is that mandatory coverage provisions (including the individual mandate here) tends to help insurance companies more than patients, and that's something we need to carefully consider in each instance. There are also other government barriers to cheaper insurance in the US, including limits to interstate competition between health care companies.

And I'm not categorically opposed to helping lower-income people. But if we're going to be subsidizing insurance, I would much rather subsidize individuals to buy their own insurance through tax credits (on top of the aforementioned policies to keeping prices down) than indirectly subsidizing the companies through mandates or expanding Medicaid.

The drawback is the lack of flexibility, but that's another debate altogether, I guess. If there were zero drawbacks to a system the entire world would have adopted it by now.

I disagree with the system you suggested in that thread - it's all very easy to say "Oh, I don't want to be insured for cancer right now" but when you get cancer, suddenly you look very stupid and you want to change your life and you're told you're hard out of luck. I'm of the general opinion that people, particularly the young, are very stupid in this way but people should be allowed to be kept alive for better reasons than their level of knowledge when it comes to when insurance is a good idea and when it is not.

And then there is contagious disease - if you catch it and you are not covered, should you be given healthcare? You can only look to the disease in the third world as a point that when people don't have good healthcare, the entire nation can suffer.

But yeah... tax everyone, give everyone free healthcare. It makes sense, at least to me. It says a lot that America is one of the only (if not the only) western world country to not have adopted publically funded healthcare. To me, it's similar to how all major nations have slowly seen the light of democracy over the years. Some things just make sense. Perhaps it's tricky to get your head around big changes sometimes when you have grown up never knowing the alternative, though?

There are a variety of legitimate policy reasons to favor private markets over government-provided insurance. Most forms of government-provided universal care have their own draw backs, such as excessive wait times and minimal treatment of non-life-threatening conditions. I've previously discussed ways the US government could make it much easier and cheaper for individuals to afford private insurance much more easily and cheaply than by nationally-subsidized healthcare.

I'll keep my written Constitution, thank you. Our protections for free speech and the rights of criminal suspects are far better ensured that way. The "drawback" is that it interferes with the legislature further smurfing things up, which is not much of a drawback to me. An inefficient government is a less dangerous government.

Also gotta admit it kinda makes me glad on some level that there isn't a written constitution over here. >_> Sounds like a lot of hassle. I know it has benefits, but it certainly has drawbacks, too.

As an outsider, I find it all a little strange. Why would a country not want it to be constitutional for everyone to be able to get healthcare supported by taxes? I've always been of the opinion that when it comes to health, so long as you aren't damaging yourself knowingly, you should have the right to free healthcare. When someone gets cancer, it should not matter how much money they have - they should be allowed to be saved. I find it disgusting that even in today's first world countries, children (let alone adults) die unless enough money can be raised to save them. Taxes should cover everything. If that's not part of a constitution, it should be. The right to health. The NHS over here does get slammed pretty hard by a lot of people, but if I was to get hit by disaster tomorrow, I'd be able to get healthcare without being a burden on my own finances and that of my family for years to come. The only cost is taxes, and I'd rather pay taxes for healthcare than excessive military might.

Apparently our gone but not forgotten azn PG posted a .jpg version of this entry on an obscure Facebook page called "Common Sense 2.0: the New American Revolution," which, as far as I can tell, consists mostly of image macros about how cool it is to be anti-establishment. Am I famous now?

In a more light-hearted vein, Popehat is collecting the best of the internet's collective heart attacks as a result of the decision, in reference to this brilliant post. Get your popcorn.

That blog was pretty darn funny. I love the entry about his dick working xD