We all know the christianist psychopath codewords for the racism that they know that they can’t get away with stating explicitly.
But not as many people recognize the christianist psychopath codewords for advocating for the theocracy that they feel they are being discriminated against by not being allowed to inflict on any and all who don’t believe exactly as they do.
The one to watch out for: ‘christian worldview.’
It is presented as at worst benign and, beyond that, a positive that we will all benefit from.
Its a lie, of course.
Its a signal to christianist voters that, if given the opportunity, the candidate in question will inflict christianity on all – and with force of law.
…all of which brings me to an item currently up at Crooks and Liars which should strike fear in the heart of anyone who does not live in a walled estate or have the means to employ private security as a buffer between themselves and the kriminal kops that us peons have no defense from.
[I]n a series of cases this week about law enforcement searches of cell phones, we caught a glimpse of the Supreme Court’s real technology problem. Here’s what it comes down to: it’s not essential that the Court knows specifics about how technology itself works—and as Timothy Lee argues, that might even tempt them to make technology-based decisions that don’t generalize well. However, it is essential that the Court understands how people use technology, especially in areas where they’re trying to elaborate a standard of what expectations are “reasonable.”
So when Chief Justice Roberts suggests that a person carrying two cell phones might reasonably be suspected of dealing drugs, that raises major red flags. Not because of any special facts about how cell phones work, but because (for example) at least half of the lawyers in the Supreme Court Bar brought two cell phones with them to the courthouse that day. Should those attorneys (along with the many, many other people who carry multiple devices) reasonably expect less privacy because the Chief Justice is out of touch with that fact?
Roberts essentially demanded authoritative proof from an attorney that many people have more than one cell phone. When the attorney notes that it was simply her observation that led her to make that assertion, the Racist Alzheimer’s Pin-Up Boy of 2014, Antonin Scalia, belched out in response: “You’ve observed different people from the people I’ve observed.”
Tony the Scowl hasn’t lived in the same world that real people live in since at least 1986, when the Senate bafflingly gave him his seat on the Supreme Court without any no votes.
Contrast that with Justice Kagan’s point about storage location in the same argument. Justice Kagan suggested, correctly, that people don’t always know what is stored on their device and what is stored “in the cloud.” The actual answer to that question should be immaterial; the point is that it’s absurd for a person’s privacy interest to hinge on which hard drive private data is stored on. Instead, the important fact here, which Justice Kagan recognizes, is that the distinction between local and cloud storage just doesn’t matter to many people, and so it can’t be the basis of a reasonable-expectation-of-privacy test.
If you’re feeling less generous, you might take Justice Kagan’s point as evidence that she herself doesn’t know where her files are stored. And in fact, that’s probably true—but it’s not important. You don’t actually need to know much about file systems and remote storage to know that it’s a bad idea for the law to treat it differently.
…
[A] real feeling for what people expect from their software and devices is something that has to be observed. If the nine justices on the Supreme Court can’t bring that knowledge to the arguments, the public suffers greatly. Again, Justice Kagan seems to recognize this fact when she says of cell phones:
They’re computers. They have as much computing capacity as laptops did five years ago. And everybody under a certain age, let’s say under 40, has everything on them.
Justice Kagan is not under 40, and might not have everything stored on a phone (or on an online service accessible through her phone). But that quote shows me that she at least knows where other people’s expectations are different.
In other words, she has a worldview that is focused on the world in which real people in the United States actually live their lives.
In 2005, Roberts bluffed his way onto the court with rhetorical nothin’ muffins like “My job is to call balls and strikes and not to pitch or bat.”
The problem is: He’s not making calls under the 21st century rules of baseball that real people actually living in the actual United States in 2014 utilize when they play baseball. He’s judging plays made by the real people actually living in the actual United States in 2014 , but he’s using the Knickerbocker Rules of 1857.
He’s as unqualified to sit on the Supreme Court as is Tony the Scowl.
And the less said about Clarence Thomas, the better – until we have a Congress that is ethical enough to impeach him.
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