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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Elie Mystal
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July 18 - August 6, 2022
Conservatives are out here acting like the Constitution was etched by divine flame upon stone tablets, when in reality it was scrawled out over a sweaty summer by people making deals with actual monsters
The Constitution was so flawed upon its release in 1787 that it came with immediate updates.
Video gamers would call the Bill of Rights a “day one patch,”
If the Constitution were really the triumph of reason over darkness, as it is often treated, it probably wouldn’t have failed so miserably that a devastating civil war would break out
That stuff about banning cruel and unusual punishment, for instance? Fantastic.
Too bad we actually don’t.
many of the rules, rights, prohibitions, and concepts are actually pretty decent. The problem is they’ve never been applied to all of the people living here.
I’m going to tell you what this motherfucker looks like after it has had its foot on your neck for almost 250 years.
lawyers are trained to be “dispassionate” when analyzing the law, almost robotic, as if the best lawyer would present like Data from Star Trek,
I reject that form of legal analysis.
The law is not science; it’s jazz.
Most of the original Constitution focuses on the powers and structures of the government:
Most of the amendments, by contrast, focus on citizens:
conservatives are almost always entirely full of shit (full of shit being a term of art derived from the Latin: Borkium shittialis).
a meritocracy is almost in direct conflict with the idea of a democracy.
Democracies neither necessarily nor naturally reward merit. Nor do they punish incompetence. Democracies tend to go along with the popular will, and Socrates knew that the popular will could be easily manipulated into believing any odd thing.
our laws and the laws of most modern societies are written to avoid tragedies like the trial of Socrates, not to protect trash people from losing endorsement contracts.
The Constitution cares about people limiting the inquiry of a free press
about armed agents of the state threatening or jailing citizens
In short, the First Amendment cares about the things Republicans do when they control the government.
Eg DeSantis having a data scientist arrested
The real cancel culture is the one practiced by conservatives.
It’s the police committing police brutality against people protesting police brutality.
the First Amendment has been infected by the religious right, who don’t use it as a shield to protect their beliefs but instead use it as a sword to enforce dogmas
The free exercise clause is one of the ideas that made America unique among eighteenth-century governments.
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;
the state has to have a really, really good reason for doing anything that impacts a person’s faith,
A reasonable person might say: “Wait, you can be denied unemployment benefits because you get high? What kind of uptight Victorian-Jesus bullshit is that?” But, instead of changing the law so that unemployment benefits were easier to get
If your test applies to a burning bush and I don’t like it, I can just call the bush a “tree” and be done with you.
Most judges aren’t like Brett Kavanaugh.
most judges are going to dutifully apply those tests instead of getting cute with semantics.
when members of the powerful majoritarian religion get ahold of it, something like the RFRA becomes a cudgel they can use to impose religious dogma upon the secular sphere.
the double-edged danger of the RFRA is what led to Hobby Lobby.
It took only twenty years for the RFRA to go from something that defended people who used drugs as part of religious ceremonies, to something that prevents women from accessing drugs for their own health.
colleges and producers are not constantly getting slapped with discrimination lawsuits, because being stupid or asymmetrical is not a protected class.
Being an asshole is not a protected class, which is lucky because I discriminate against them all the time.
There are actually very few prote...
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The so-called religious objection to same-sex marriage is always taken at face-value, and it shouldn’t be.
Free speech protects people with theocratic views, but it doesn’t give them the right to impose those views on things like the market economy and the health care system.
free speech is relatively useless to theocrats.
conservative lawyers
enlist their private legal concerns for the larger culture war.
We shouldn’t give deference to people who simply claim to be following sacred constitutional principles or claim to have devout beliefs. Because sometimes they’re lying.
We should defend the principles enshrined in our laws, not the random text of the laws themselves.
the right to gun ownership for self-defense is an entirely new constitutional argument, made up whole-cloth by the gun lobby,
Self-defense is a philosophical right, but that right was not grounded in the “original” meaning of the Second Amendment; self-defense is not mentioned once in the text of the Constitution.
The absolutist interpretation of the Second Amendment is new, but using gun rights or gun control, as necessary, to maintain racial dominance is old.
Roosevelt’s entirely rational response to gang violence was to liberalize drug laws and restrict gun access. And it worked!
They asked if the gun law had any impact at all on the necessity of keeping a well regulated militia. Finding the answer to be no, the Court kindly escorted 1930s-era Duke Nukem out of the courtroom.
Preventing the Black Panthers from defending themselves might have been racist, but it didn’t really have anything to do with militia readiness, and so it really didn’t have anything to do with the Second Amendment.
There was an original purpose to the Second Amendment, but it wasn’t to keep people safe. It was to preserve white supremacy and slavery.
