these latest supreme court decisions are creepy as fuck. thank god powerful companies/unions can exercise their 'free speech' to mislead everyone during elections, and meanwhile the 'free speech' of the bong hits 4 jesus crowd is curbed.
regarding clarence's opinion on that last case, jonathan zimmerman of the LA times raises an interesting point: since when are schools' primary goal the 'discipline and obedience' of youth? what about, say, learning and shit?
To Thomas, American educational history seems to end at the start. Our first schools aimed to instill discipline, he wrote, so that's what schools should do.
Worse, Thomas assumes that the schools succeeded in this task. "Teachers commanded," he wrote, "and students obeyed." But this command melted away in recent years, Thomas claims, when courts invented specious student rights — and "undermined the traditional authority of teachers to maintain order in the public schools."
Here's the part of Thomas' opinion that would be relevant — if it were true. But it's not. Yes, teachers tried to establish strict order and discipline in early American schools. As often as not, however, they failed.
really though, is clarence a bigger dick than scalia? might be. at least scalia's out there telling it like he sees it. clarence usually says nothing, just looks around all crazy-like thinking shit-knows-what. when he does accidentally write something, we find out he's the proverbial wolf in sheep's clothing.
if, you know, sheep wore robes.
Labels: supreme court
posted by the cold cowboy @ 4:28 PM
6 Comments:
This shit blows my mind. I went to a pretty integregated school (just jews and blacks....and one jew/quaker), and I credit it with making me less of a dickhole then I might otherwise have been.
The Justices have basically killed Brown v. Board of education. The implications are wild. As if economics, the media and geographic segregation weren't doing enough to isolate cultures along ethnic and class lines, now we'll stop making sure they at least see each other in some sort of setting every now and again.
This is sort of like a return to nation states. Now to organize them along corporate fealty lines, say the Dockers v. Nike.
man, fuck the Dockers. i hate them and the khaki they stand for.
let us take up arms and die for great justice beneath the glorious non-khaki flag of Nike.
can you explain how you think that decision kills brown v boe of topeka?
Yes. This decision means that we will stop attempting bus children in to an area to work towards diversity, because taking race in to account for anything along the lines of a bussing plan is now unconstitutional.
It will apply in other ways as well. I don't think it's a death blow, but it ain't helpful.
It means that schools will more accurately reflect the communities around them, which is good where there's money and bad where there's not.
Public housing experiments go better in 'mixed income' models, where they put the housing somewhere people want to be, market some of the housing to upwardly mobile yuppie types and give out the rest as Section 8. The mix of class, economic background, education, etc. actually breeds less crime and more community (though probably some undocumented fistfights).
I submit that schooling is the same way. Diversity (and I mean that not just racially, but economically and socially as well) drives vertical and lateral mobility for folks.
okay i have thought more about this because it freaked me out that i would agree with anything the current supreme court has to say.
i understand the intentions of these school systems and completely agree that diversity is good for everyone, but i'm not sure that the methods they were using to achieve that diversity were so good, mainly because they would have been forced on everyone regardless of how they felt how the problem should be solved.
and especially because it ignores the real problem which is that the communities are already segregated. it's a band aid, and one that everyone would have had to wear. i'm not sure that's the right solution to the problem. i understand what they were after but their means of getting there seem unsettling to me.
a required type of race or income or anything for a public institution of that nature seem to be moving backwards in our thinking rather than moving forward.
now, whether that was the intention of the court or not is completely unknown. frankly i think they passed up a great opportunity to talk about this and instead just quietly said no, which is why it's so unsettling that i agree with them.
i think we have entirely different motives.
An interesting question that I really don't know the answer to is whether, on big issues like class/race, a band-aid solution is preferable to nothing at all. We are kidding ourselves to think that bussing in public schools is going to solve racism and class divides. But it might do something...
On the question of Supreme Court douchebags, my top vote now has to go to either Alito or Thomas. I do resent that Thomas never asks a question: he already knows what he thinks, why even bother with an oral argument?
Scalia at least will occasionally admit to believing in habeas corpus or something else that is halfway surprising. Thomas is not going to surprise you.
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