How Rights Become Privileges: MO Amendment 2

The 2012 Missouri primary had several important lessons to impart. The first, which I may have discussed in previous election years, is that the way to bring the "correct" voters to the polls is to have an apparently innocuous but important candidate or issue and a loud, contentious issue or candidate that only seems to matter to one side. In this primary cycle, there was a preponderance of hotly contested Republican seats, and a very dangerous, never advertised Tea Party constitutional amendment. Republicans came out to vote overwhelmingly, and the Amendment passed resoundingly. The full body of the amendment is at the bottom of this article. Basically on the ballot it read as if it was just reinforcing the first clause of the first amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

  • In reality, it says that people have the right to worship the (singular, Christian) Almighty God (but not all those others) including to pray whenever their conscience dictates (such as during science classes).
  • Public meetings can now be started with exclusionary prayers as long as the officiant is invited by someone.
  • I have not yet figured out how the mandatory publishing of the Bill of Rights in schools will be twisted, but I expect as a precedent to posting the Ten Commandments adjacent (as an alleged inspirational source)
  • Students cannot be punished for refusing to do assignments that might conflict with their faith (evolution, geology, astronomy, etc).
So I expect Missouri to soon be incurring legal fees on the order of replacing several major bridges, or (more likely) in lieu of funding science education for a decade. [More (Including the language of the Amendment)]

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Hypothetical Olympian dilemma

People all over the country are parking in front of their TV's for many hours every night to watch sports that they couldn't care less about most of the year. The Olympics are extremely compelling for many of us. People are talking about the Olympics all across America, mostly sharing observations about the sports where Americans are competitive. It all seems very important, and you can tell this by the way earnest look on the faces of people who discuss the Olympics. But what if a magic being appeared before you tonight and offered you the following option: [More . . . ]

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Using the Internet to warn about home construction fraud

I used to work as an Assistant Attorney General in the area of consumer fraud. Back in the 1980's there weren't many ways to get the word out that you had been ripped off by a contractor. You would likely complain to your friends and family, and that is about it. That has certainly changed. Here is a website created recently by Ray Gregory, a friend of mine who was ripped off by a contractor--this work isn't even close to acceptable. Thanks to the Internet, anyone considering using this contractor will find the name Timothy W. Watson of Norfolk, Virginia prominently listed next to vivid photos and descriptions of his extremely crappy work. Perhaps this website will prevent other innocent people from getting ripped off. We are ALL leaving indelible trails on the Internet these days, both innocent people, but also the scoundrels.

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Self-dimming of awareness to protect oneself against anxiety

I'm mostly finished reading Daniel Goleman's 1985 book, Vital Lies, Simple Truths: the Psychology of Self Deception (I found a copy of the book online here). He's preaching to my choir, based on a paper I wrote in 1996 ("Decision Making, the Failure of Principles, and the Seduction of Attention), where I pointed out the critical and often unconscious role of attention in embellishing and distorting our moral decision-making. My targets were the many people who believe that morality is mostly founded on the conscious application of rules. I concluded that humans define and frame moral situations as a result of the way they attend (or don't attend) to the situations. I warned that it is important that we become aware that we have great (often subconscious) power to define the situation as moral (or not). My thesis was as follows:

Attention is constantly steering us in directions which dramatically affect the application of principles [including moral principles]. For starters, if we completely fail to attend to a subject, we will likely be ill-informed about that subject, and likely less competent to make decisions regarding such matters. At the other extreme, excessive attention can bloom into an obsession, causing one to see the entire world through glasses colored by that obsession. Attention also works in subtler ways, however, rigging the machinations of legal and moral reasoning. Attention rigs decision-making in two ways:

1) by the manner in which we attend to our perceptions of the world, and 2) in the way by which we perceive and attend to the principles themselves.

I concluded that high-level decision making is based far more on attentional strategies than on traditional problem solving skills.

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Bill Moyers is highly critical of the NRA

Bill Moyers is highly critical of the NRA:

Every year there are 30,000 gun deaths and 300,000 gun-related assaults in the U.S.," he said. "Firearm violence may cost our country as much as $100 billion a year. Toys are regulated with greater care and safety concerns than guns ... we have become so gun loving, so blasé about home-grown violence that in my lifetime alone, far more Americans have been casualties of domestic gunfire than have died in all our wars combined.

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