Monday OT: June 24 is Bannockburn Day and Midsummer Day
June 24 is the 175th day of the Gregorian Calendar year,
Setting Orange, Confusion 29, 3185 YOLD (discordian),
And let us not forget 13.0.6.10.16 by the Mayan Long Count
This was a day of significant Battles. Hannibal pulled off the first recorded "turning movement" and the largest recorded ambush by the largest recorded ambushing force at Lake Trasimene. He wiped out over half of the opposing Roman army and sent the rest packing in disarray with minimal losses of his own.
The Scots, under their king, Robert the Bruce, decisively whupped the English (under Edward II) at Bannockburn.. Though the war continued for 14 more years, this glorious victory is celebrated in song, verse, art, sculpture and multifarious toasts. Do not bring it up in the vicinity of any gathering of Scots unless you have a tonne of free time on your hands.
Edward III, however, took command of the English fleet in a fleet engagement against the French at the Battle of Sluys, and defeated it in detail, capturing the vast majority of the French ships and killing between 16 and 20 thousand French sailors. The English thereby took command of the English Channel and enabled a troop landing that enabled them to besiege Tournais, but still didn't prevent French raids on English shipping. This was, for perspective, more or less the opening salvo in the 100 years war, so the complete and total destruction of the French fleet can hardly be deemed to have sped things up to any material extent.
Simon Bolivar sewed up Venezuelan Independence, and thereby the creation of the Republic of Gran Colombia. with a decisive defeat of España at The Battle of Carabobo.
* Not mentioned below, among others: 1622 – The Battle of Macau, 1779 – The Great Siege of Gibraltar, 1813 – The Battle of Beaver Dams, 1859 – The Battle of Solferino, 1866 – Battle of Custoza, and so on; I'm sure that you get the picture.
There are in the US, forever and a day, a sufficiency of censorious blue-nosed intellectual refugees from the Victorian era, save for their being assiduous disciples of Thomas Bowdler, that the Supremes were yet again forced to dip their toe into the murky cesspool that is US obscenity law. (I call it that because it is about the only thing that I can think of that is truly obscene.) In today's case, Roth v. United States, the court, much to the displeasure of Justice Earl Warren, held that the First Amendment doesn't protect obscenespeech. The court then went on, as always, to utterly and completely fail to come up with an objective standard as to what the hell obscenity was or meant.
Though not as bad as Justice Potter Stewart's infamous threshhold criteria of "I know it when I see it." (Jocoballis v Ohio, 1964), the "definition" that came out of Roth, were it statute law, would be unconstitutionally vague. (Generally, broadly, a normal person must be able to know with certainty in advance of an act or action whether or not it would violate a particular statute, or else said statute is unconstitutionally vague.) Justice Brennan's holding in Roth gave us the appalingly uninformative "average person, applying contemporary community standards" test. WTF? How average? Height, Weight? IQ? Education? Religion? How the hell is somebody sitting in a dive bar in Vegas writing a pulp paperback on a laptop supposed to know what will fly in Winnemuca on any given day, let alone Macon, Georgia, Peoria, St. Petersburg, or Maine? I live in Alameda County, state of California, USofA. A jury of my "peers" at the county level could, statistically, be selected from a panel composed entirely of Lit. majors from UC Berkeley. It equally well could come from a panel consisting entirely of stereotypic blue-rinsed right wing extreme fundie Christian Reaganites from Livermore who still actively work to get such things as Tarzan and Catcher in The Rye banned at the local high school. I don't need to worry abut Orange County or San Diego, 20 miles east is a whole different cultural universe. But Con. Law need not be internally consistent or coherent, so, censorship based on community standards it is. Like, gag me with a fuckin' spoon, Suzy Creamcheese.
Twenty years of schooling and they put you on the day shift, look out kid, ...
On this day in history:
217 BCE - Hannibal beat the Romans at Lake Trasimene, one of the "Great Battles" of history.
1314 – The Battle of Bannockburn, a decisive victory for Robert the Bruce and the Scots.
1340 – The English destroyed the entire French fleet at the Battle of Sluys, ne of the great naval battles of history
1374 – There was a sudden major outbreak of St. John's Dance, a mass psychogenic illness, in the streets of Aachen
1497 – John Cabot landed in Newfoundland, the first Europeans since the Vikings to do so.
1717 – Sensing a global deficiency in quasi-religious ceremony, some dudes founded The Premier Grand Lodge of England, the first Masonic Grand Lodge in the world, presumably enabling Poe to write A Cask of Amontillado.
1812 – Napoleon's Grande Armée crossed the Neman, starting his invasion of Russia and becoming cannon fodder for Tchaikovsky
1821 – Bolivar's decisive victory at the Battle of Carabobo guaranteed Venezuela's independence from Spain.
1950 – The South African Group Areas Act formally segregated the races, creating Apartheid.
1957 – The Supremes decided Roth v. United States, one of a series of essentially inane rulings on "obscenity"
2004 – The New York Court of Appeals decided People v Lavalle, holding that the death penalty violated the state constitution.
Born this day in:
1386 – John of Capistrano, hater, Inquisitor, and Saint. A classic combo, hence the missions in CA & TX.
1842 – Ambrose Bierce, author, journalist and lexicographer
1867 – Ruth Randall Edström, educator, peace activist and women's rights activist
1880 – Oswald Veblen, mathematician
1901 – Marcel Mule, classical saxophonist
1901 – Harry Partch, composer, music theorist and musical instrument inventor
1911 – Juan Manuel Fangio, legend
1911 – Ernesto Sabato, physicist
1912 – Mary Wesley, author
1917 – Ramblin' Tommy Scott, singer and guitarist
1917 – Joan Clarke, cryptanalyst
1929 – Carolyn S. Shoemaker, astronomer and comet hunter
1942 – Arthur Brown, singer, songwriter, pyro
1942 – Mick Fleetwood, drummer
1944 – Jeff Beck, guitarist and songwriter
1944 – Chris Wood, saxophonist
1945 – Colin Blunstone, singer and songwriter
1947 – Buckaroo Banzai, cavalier
1949 – John Illsley, singer, songwriter, bass player, and producer
That's a serious load of british talent born this day, in case you didn't notice.
Died this day in:
994 – Abu Isa al-Warraq, skeptic, scholar, critic of Islam and all revealed religions as B.S.
1519 – Lucrezia Borgia, archetypal Lucretia Borgia.
1969 – Willy Ley, historian and author
2010 – Fred Anderson, tenor saxophonist
2013 – Alan Myers, drummer
2014 – Eli Wallach, Tuco
Holidays, Holy Days, Festivals, Feast Days, Days of Recognition, and such:
Bannockburn Day
Midsummer Day
Battle of Carabobo Day
Tuco Day (unofficial)
Music goes here, iirc, well,
Juan Manuel Fangio
Ramblin' Tommy Scott
Arthur Brown
Mick Fleetwood
Jeff Beck
Chris Wood
Colin Blunstone
John Illsley
Fred Anderson
Alan Myers
Another side of Jeff Beck
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Image is a statue of Robert The Bruce in Bannockburn
It's an open thread, so do your thing
Comments
Good morning, el.
Much as I enjoy your posts, including this one, today, we are not the same page of the same law book. Not exactly, anyway.
A bottom line reality is that the SCOTUS, a single court to which funnel all final appeals from all federal court and all final appeals from state courts that turned on a question of federal law, esp. the Constitution, thought it had more important things to do than watch "suggestive" films, read "suggestive" books, scripts, and other writings, listen to "suggestive: recordings, etc.
Some thing I've heard one federal judge describe as among the more important things in his caseload was hearing death row appeals. He even considered that more important than the case he was hearing at the time, which was to determine whether management of a corporation was crooked. In that context, it perhaps pales whether a nude scene in the play Hair, which many people paid a fair amount of money to see without being forced to so to do, was obscene or not. So, I guess that the SCOTUS tried to come up with some standard that would reduce its caseload.
As far a jury of anyone's peers, that goes back to at lest the Magna Carta of 1215 C.E. I guess some English barons saw the institution of a jury as an improvement over a single judge, in the service of the Crown--as were the people who arrested the accused, together with the people prosecuting the accused--deciding the case. The defense of course is opposing the Crown and on the side of the accused. The jury is supposed be on the side of neither, searching for the truth.
And, of course, the English colonies here were under the British system, which, I believe, each colony adopted once it became a state or after the Declaration of Independence--I'm not sure which. Of course, King John signed the Magna Carta, then ignored it, a practice that also seems to have been carried over after the colonies became states. But, that's a different issue. (Maybe.)
Brennan, a Democrat nominated by Eisenhower, was, IMO, a decent Justice in other contexts. He did not express only his own opinion, of course, but wrote for a majority of a Court that thought perhaps the residents of different places might have a right to object to publication and/or display of different things. For example, my nephews and niece were born and raised, and walked to school, daily in Manhattan's Greenwich Village and might therefore have a different tolerance than kids born and raised and bused to school in the River City portrayed in the Music Man. Right or wrong, that was the thought behind the community standard. Well, that and probably reducing the Court's caseload. I'm not defending the standard. But, could the Court honestly have held that the Framers intended the First Amendment to invalidate all state obscenity laws and disempower the states from enacting any new ones? At what point do we say the Supreme Court which, as a whole, has been conservative for most of its entire history, may or may not have a legal right to interpret the Constitution unilaterally, but it has no legal or other right to amend it unilaterally?
As far as legal standards, England long ago came up with the "reasonable man" standard, which we took on when we adopted English statutory and common law. (No women on juries then, of course.) The "reasonable man" standard is not very different from "normal person" or "average person" standard. A jury of your peers applying a "reasonable man" stand may work perfectly well and consistently when all jurors are living in a village of 100 serfs and the case is yet another one about poaching a stag from a baronial woods. It works less well and less consistently if you're living anywhere in the US hearing a porn case--or maybe any kind of case.
All legal standards for deciding a case are an attempt to apply law uniformly in each case. They fail in that attempt, and not only because we have different systems of justice for "the normal person" and those with money and/or power. You are not going to find groups that apply the same standard exactly the same way time after time. But what wouldn't fail in that attempt? At least the standard remains the same in every case. And perhaps that is the best we can do. Legal standards are like aging--lousy, but either there's no alternative or all alternatives are worse. The same, perhaps, can be said of our entire legal system.
More specifically: If any jury of an accused pornographer's peers were ever comprised solely of religious fundamentalists, some lawyer obviously didn't have the first notion how to conduct voir dire and should have been sued for malpractice and the case appealed for lack of effective counsel.
I rest my case. (-; (j/k; I don't even play a lawyer on TV.)
Hola HAW! All of what you say is true, but the deviation from
the "reasonable man/reasonable person" standard bugs me because it definitionally excludes outright whackdoodles (whatever they may be, I know). Taken in conjunction with "community standards" (whatever they may be), in a country like ours with assorted socio-cultural pockets and enclaves, that was founded, in part, by extremist fundie, dare I say, whackdoodles, and with a long history of horrible blue laws (many of which found their way up to the Supremes), guarantees not only that somebody somewhere will challenge damn near anything but that they could well win, so need we all live in fear of them?
As to Voir Dire, I tired to implicitly address that here: A jury of my "peers" at the county level could, statistically, be selected from a panel composed entirely of Lit. majors from UC Berkeley.
The courts issue summonses to jury duty to enrolled voters and round up a panel of potential jurors who are subjected to voir dire. Those panels may run from 30 to 60 or even 100 for sensitive/notorious cases. In the 60s, Cal had about 27,000 students, gawd only knows how many it has now. So that entire panel, before voir dire could all be relatively intelligent, semi-educated and moderately liberal Cal students. They are representatives of one "community standard".
Contrariwise, much of this county was agrarian, and specifically cow-town, rodeos and all, until very recently. The area where I live has a church at nearly every other intersection, including 3 very sizeable extremely fundagelical ones, and this isn't one of the more conservative areas. Before some redistricting, one chunk of it elected notorious RW GOP dickhead Richard Pombo to Congress. It is ergo also possible that an entire panel, before voir dire could be fanatical culture warriors of the puritan ilk, who still abound out there and still try to get Tarzan, Catcher in the Rye and many other similar works banned. They are representative of a "community standard" completely antithetical to that expected of Berkeley.
I recently got a jury summons, but eventually no jurors required, to appear at a court out on the Dublin-Livermore border area, probably technically still unincorporated (as is the town I live in). In writing my rant about Roth, I considered what "community standard" might be applied by a jury out there, and envisioned the two separate Pre-voir dire jury pools described above. One is only allowed so many challenges and dismissals, even for cause,and one cannot apply for a change of venue in advance on the theory that you might get a jury pool composed entirely of whackdoodles, none of whom are even arguably "reasonable persons", but all of whom are, in some sense "average persons" (after all, who isn't).
We have an interconnected society in which all writing and speech is rapidly spread and disseminated across the country into innumerable cultural enclaves. The Roth standard essentially says "The lowest common denominator shall prevail", because you could wind up selecting a jury from a jury pool composed entirely of such persons. There are, in fact, extremist federal prosecutors known to seek out such venues for the purpose of trying authors and performers on pron charges, and now and then winning. That very possibility is why so many cases, over the years, have reached the Supremes, because there is always some locale where almost the entire populace will be scandalized by something that "normal" persons hardly notice.
While I sympathise with the workload issue, there should be a baseline created regardless of local state, county, city, town, or rural valley "standards". Howl, Lady Chatterly's Lover, Finnegan's Wake and innumerable other works, previously declared not-obscene should somehow be used to establish a uniform baseline of acceptability and the hell with whatever censorious community may say otherwise. They need not read what they dislike, but should not be empowered to exert control over speech nationwide.
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
There is a base line: Community standards.
And "community standards" are whatever the jury in the particular case says they are. As far as an entire jury panel being homogeneous, that is highly unlikely, given how people are called in for jury duty. Even if someone aimed at a homogeneous group, a juror's ability to get duty postponed would foil the plan. Moreover, characteristics like blue hair and fundamentalist do not even appear anywhere that a person calling in people for jury (that we know of anyway.)
As far as the SCOTUS workload, that was my comment, not the Court's. But I do think that, as a matter of reality, the "nine old men" had to draw a line somewhere after the Sixties, when profanity, frankness about sex, drugs and other stuff began proliferating, as did arrests for those things. Especially because in porn cases, they had to become familiar with the work of "art" being challenged, even if it were a four-hour film, as well as the usual times devoted to reading briefs and hearing oral arguments.
As a I said, I'm not defending the standard. On the other hand, I can't say I can think of a more workable one, either. I do however, defend the jury of one's peers as a vast improvement over having the arresting officer, prosecutor and sole decider all on the government's payroll. And I do defend Brennan as, in general, one of the more left Justices ever to have sat on the Supreme Court. Not as left as Stevens or as willing to be "out there" as Douglas, but none of them are.
Humans are not perfect, nor are their institutions nor legal systems. Maybe that is the bottom line reality.
I agree as to the jury system, even though the idea of a
"jury of ones peer's" is, in practice, usually a pipe dream. OTOH, I think that "community standards" are no standards whatsoever, anything and everything goes, and the viewpoint of the most repressed and repressive will prevail. The California State Superior Court, declared HOWL to be ok (the likely line of appeals winds up in the infamously "liberal" 9th Circuit). Had some prosecutor in Arkansas or Alabama beat the S.F. DA to the punch, it would probably still be outlawed. That kind of shit is unacceptable.
As I said, it Congress passed a law that said "obscenity (or burglary or mayhem) is what any twelve people anywhere in the country say it is" the court would soon find itself compelled to strike it down on the grounds of vagueness.
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
“We are part of the problem"
link
Thanks, gj. Good to see, though I seriously doubt that
anything will come of it.
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
battle of Bannockburn
[video:https://youtu.be/Oi7xBe5-M8k]
Now DMW doesn't need to post it!
And apologies for the embedded ads. At least with this one, the ads are bonus minutes more Sabaton!
"US govt/military = bad. Russian govt/military = bad. Any politician wanting power = bad. Anyone wielding power = bad." --Shahryar
"All power corrupts absolutely!" -- thanatokephaloides
Thanks thanato. I'm sure that DMW thanks you as well.
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --
good afternoon lo
et al
I know this is a pipe dream but if wishes were a carbon free planet...
In a sane world, in a sane country all the candidates would be talking about the climate crisis and be proposing plans to deal with it. How is it that this is still such an end case ???
Hope your preping is going smoothly. Have a good evening...
Stop Climate Change Silence - Start the Conversation
Hot Air Website, Twitter, Facebook
Hola magi. Thanks and thanks for the Inslee info &/or
pipe dream. Prep is going along ok so far, thanks,
Have a great one.
That, in its essence, is fascism--ownership of government by an individual, by a group, or by any other controlling private power. -- Franklin D. Roosevelt --