Back when I was on the MT version of this page, I had put up a link to the McCain-Feingold Insurrection. Since it appeared that the threat to count links as “contributions” had died away, when I switched to WordPress, I didn’t really think about moving that link and banner over here to the WordPress template.

As far as I know, no new threats have appeared. Bad publicity has, possibly, defused the situation, making it impractical (though, from the point-of-view from these bipartisan free-speech attackers, not undesirable) to go after blogs at this point. However, I wanted to make it clear that, should any attack on the political free speech of blogs occur, I will not continue blogging in my usual way, mentioning politics whenever something happens to catch my eye. Instead, I will make it a point to post more political posts, with as many links to politicians’ websites as I can work into the posts.

Why?

Geek With a .45 said it well here:

The First Amendment says this:
—————
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
—————

And that’s precisely what it means.

Accordingly, I believe we can all get behind these following points:

1. Freedom of speech and the press is of critical importance to the preservation of both individual freedom, and the free character of our nation.
2. It is a traditional American Liberty that we guard jealously.
3. This Freedom is directly and unambiguously protected by the Bill of Rights.
4. Our Blogs are the way we choose to directly manifest that freedom. They are our sacred 21st century soapboxes, and we view them as being completely protected.
5. The Infrastructure that enables blogs is the instrumentality of that freedom, and is therefore also protected.
6. The universal criticality of this transcends partisan consideration.
7. Therefore, We, the proud members of the McCain-Feingold Insurrection, will continue to excercise our right of free speech through our online venues as we see fit, without limitation.
8. We shall vigorously defend our right and ability to do so going to such lengths and using such means as the situation and our individual consciences dictate.

I’m putting the banner (and its link) back. It may change slightly in the next few days (it’s a pixel or two wide for my sidebar, unfortunately), but I don’t expect it to disappear again.

Several months back, while I was still on Movable Type, I talked to a friend of mine who was just setting up her own blog. She eventually decided on WordPress (as did I, when I switched my hosting to Hosting Matters) and set up her blog.

It was a week or two before she actually posted, and as is my unfortunate habit, I forgot about it. When I went back, she’d posted quite a bit, but I didn’t really go through and read most of it. Today, I did. And, I found this.

The streets of Florida are turning into the streets of old Dodge City, folks. Yessir, ol’ Dictator Jeb has signed a law (that I guess he wrote himself, what with being a dictator and all) that lets people who, to use her words, “feel threatened” shoot at the people who made them feel that way.

Except, that’s not what the law says, is it? Here is the link she provides. Let’s look at an excerpt (all emphesis mine):

The measure, which passed the Legislature overwhelmingly earlier this year, says that people who are under attack do not have to retreat before responding. They have the right to “meet force with force, including deadly force if they reasonably believe it is necessary to do so.”

Florida residents already have that right in their homes. The bill, which takes effect Oct. 1, extends the right to public spaces, such as the street or a place of business.

The word ‘threatened’ does appear in the article, by the way, in the context of being threatened, which is somewhat different than feeling threatened.

I’m just as outraged about this law as she is, but for entirely different reasons. I’m outraged because it shouldn’t be necessary. Someone attacks me or my family, and I need a law to tell me that I can fight back? I call bullshit. Ninety percent of the time, I’m not going to fight back, but if I decide not to fight back, I expect that to be because I’ve decided that fighting back is more dangerous to me than not fighting back, not because the state tells me that I can’t. If the state thinks it can tell me I have no right to fight back, the state has lost any moral right it ever had to tell me anything.

Florida doesn’t need this law. While I would’ve been happier if they’d tracked down and eliminated every law that was infringing on a right to self-defense (and those laws must exist, or they wouldn’t have passed this one), I can appreciate that the Florida legislature and governor are trying to protect the people’s ability to protect themselves.

If anyone really wants to see what happens in a place where you don’t have the right to respond to an attacker, look at England. (Smallest Minority has a ton of stories to give you a good look at what happens when we require people to roll over anytime they’re attacked, as well as lovely examples of why it isn’t the responsibility of the government to keep you safe… and if it’s not their responsibility, and the government also refuses you your right to defend yourself, then you’re not safe. Period.

At least in Customer Service jobs…

In response to this post over at Clublife, a commenter named Brian writes:

It seems like the first thing you ever learn in a service job is “the customer is always right” and I wonder how much support you get from the guys in charge when you tell a customer that he/she is wrong (which apparently happens quite often).

Brian is, of course, talking about Clublife’s author’s experiences in the bouncing profession, but he brings up the single point that annoyed me most about my year or so working at a Super K-mart in Morgantown. The average worker is given some pretty specific rules on what we can and can’t do; we had some leeway in trying to satisfy customers, but not a lot. It would get to the point where we’d offer to do what we could, and if that didn’t work, we’d simply have to tell the customer that there was nothing else we could do.

Invariably, they’d demand to see a manager, who would immediately order the low level employee (or, peon) to give in to whatever the customer had asked for. Then, as the customer walked away, they’d make some snide remark about the customer or make some other gesture intended to let us know that they didn’t think the peon was in the wrong at all.

While knowing that we weren’t in trouble was better than being reprimanded for following the rules we’d been given, it was still annoying to see the managers give in to customers. It makes the average worker look like a jerk, but worse, it’s fundamentally dishonest. Of course, as a customer, I’m not the type of person who expects that a “buy one, get one free” sale means I should pay half price for a single pair of shoes (in effect, getting the second shoe free), so maybe it’s just me, but I would rather a manager stick to his guns and tell me that what I was asking for was inappropriate than have him give in to me and then cuss about me behind my back.

Since my stint at K-mart, I’ve often said that everyone should do about a year of retail. Either it would teach everyone the value of being polite, or we’d all learn to hate other people so much that we’d end up tearing each other to pieces. One or the other.

Respect for life is not fundamentally a Christian value, but it is a Christian Value. While the latter part of that sentence is the basis for arguments that President Bush is flirting with theocracy with his threatened veto of the lifting of the ban on government funding for embryonic stem cell research, it is the former part of the sentence that reveals the “theocracy” argument to be little more than a distraction.

Many proponents of government funded stem-cell research will readily point out that they are not proposing that more embryos should be created for this research. This is akin to someone sitting down to eat a hamburger and defending himself against a Vegan by pointing out that he didn’t kill the cow. The fact is, government funding of embryonic stem-cell research would provide an incentive to find additional sources of stem-cell research, and it is not a huge leap to believe that this will lead to an increase in societal pressure for more abortions or the continued practice of “overproducing” embryos in fertility clinics. Therefore, a link between government funding of embryonic stem cell research and the destruction of embryos isn’t completely unreasonable.

(This is similar to the reasoning behind a ban on allowing death row inmates to be organ donors because it could theoretically introduce ulterior motives to seeking the death penalty.)

With that in mind, and the assumption that no one is seriously going to advocate that it is acceptable to kill an innocent human life in order to save the life of another person, the stem-cell debate essentially boils down to the exact same question as the debate on abortion: Should an embryo be considered a human life? When we ask that question, the “theocracy” issue again rears its ugly head, as only relgious fanatics would consider an embryo to be a human being… right?

Unfortunately for those who cling so tightly to the “theocracy” straw man, no. Many rational people reach the conclusion that embryos are alive without consulting religious figures or texts. Many others concede that we don’t have a precise definition of “life”, much less “human life”, and because of this, we can’t be certain whether an embryo is truly a separate living entity or not. In the absence of any consensus on whether the embryo is alive, the desire to err on the side of caution isn’t necessarily the result of religious values.

Philosophical discussions about when life begins are inherently interesting, even though there is little-to-no chance that they will change anyone’s opinion. To taint these debates with false accusations of theocracy doesn’t provide any benefit in the long term (though, in politics, it does provide short-term benefits, which is why it’s beng done).

When politicians decree that working on Sunday is illegal, when they pass laws requiring that everyone attend Church services thrice weekly, or even when they simply pass a law forbidding sex toys, I will happily stand up and protest, arguing against the mixing of religious values and law. As long as the debate hinges on finding a dividing line between life and non-life, and balancing the rights of the unborn vs. the rights of the born, we should stop clouding the issue with accusations of theocracy and simply accept that rational people can disagree on this issue. If one wants to sway more people to their side, they should provide solid arguments relating to the issue at hand, not toss accusations at their opponents.

You decide

I still want to write about Kevin’s post, “A Struggle“, over at The Right Spin, but my original attempt at addressing his questions was, well, even worse than the tripe I normally write here. I’ll try to clean it up and post it soon.

In the meantime, I’m adding Kevin to the blogroll, despite a post fawning over the PS3 and dismissing the obviously better X-box 360 just because it’s made by Microsoft. (Note that this is completely different from my fawning over the X-box 360 and dismissing the Playstation 3 just because it’s made by Sony… and I’ll explain how as soon as I figure out what the difference is.)