Saturday, December 24, 2011

Thursday, December 22, 2011

Saturday, December 17, 2011

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Ayn Rand’s “philosophy” is nearly perfect in its immorality,


Ayn Rand’s “philosophy” is nearly perfect in its immorality, which makes the size of her audience all the more ominous and symptomatic as we enter a curious new phase in our society....To justify and extol human greed and egotism is to my mind not only immoral, but evil.— Gore Vidal, 1961

Thanks in part to Rand, the United States is one of the most uncaring nations in the industrialized world.

Friday, December 9, 2011

What is your political ideology?
Your Result: Social Democrat
 

This quiz has defined you as a Social Democrat (you may or may not be a Democratic Socialist as well). In general you are in the Liberal mindset, but wish to take it a step further. You favour the brodening of various social programs and a progressive income tax system to help alleviate social inequality. You wish to change the current social paradigm, but through gradual means.

Communist/Radical Left
 
Libertarian
 
Fascist/Radical Right
 
Conservative
 
Liberal
 
What is your political ideology?
Quiz Created on GoToQuiz
i know who to blame


People should not ask what drew young men to gang-rape a child, and they should not ask what someone was drinking or wearing when she was assaulted. Victims should not be told to “be more careful” after being attacked. I was not assaulted because of what I had been wearing or drinking. The assumption that I should have known better and wasn’t being careful is insulting. The circumstances surrounding my assault shouldn’t matter. What matters is that I was assaulted.

The culture of victim blaming has to stop. But it won’t until members of law enforcement — and society at large — change their attitudes.

Carey Purcell is a New York–based writer and editor. She runs TheTheatreSource.com, where she publishes reviews of Broadway shows. Her freelance writing can be read at

Wednesday, December 7, 2011

Thursday, December 1, 2011

The end of prosecutions
The indictments and trials ended in 1957 as the result of a series of Supreme Court decisions. Yates v. United States ruled unconstitutional the convictions of numerous party leaders in a ruling that distinguished between advocacy of an idea for incitement and the teaching of an idea as a concept. The Court ruled 6-1 in Watkins v. United States that defendants could use the First Amendment as a defense against "abuses of the legislative process."Template:354 U.S. 178 (1957)
On June 5, 1961, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld by 5-4 the conviction of Junius Scales under the "membership clause" of the Smith Act. Scales began serving a six-year sentence on October 2, 1961. He was released after serving fifteen months when President John F. Kennedy commuted his sentence in 1962.

Yates v. United States, 354 U.S. 298 (1957), was a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States involving free speech and congressional powe


During its national conference this July in Abbeville, S.C. — the self-proclaimed “birthplace and deathbed of the Confederacy” — the LOS continued in the same vein of preparing for the day the federal government collapses and the South rises again. “The mantra [that] violence, or the serious threat thereof, never settles anything is patently false,” Hill said in a prepared speech that was later posted on the group’s website. “History shows that it indeed does settle many things. Please don’t forget this — your enemy hasn’t.”

Yates v. United States, 354 U.S. 298 (1957), was a case decided by the Supreme Court of the United States involving free speech and congressional power. It ruled that the First Amendment protected radical and reactionary speech, unless it posed a "clear and present danger."


Opinion

The Supreme Court of the United States first narrowly construed the Smith Act, stating that the term "organize" meant to form a new organization, not any subsequent organizational acts. Then, the Court drew a distinction between actual advocacy to action and mere belief. The Court ruled that the Smith Act did not prohibit “advocacy of forcible overthrow of the government as an abstract doctrine.” This does not mean that actual advocacy to action is permitted - merely expression of the abstract idea. Tellingly, the Court recognized that actual "advocacy to action" circumstances would be "few and far between." In Justice Black's opinion, he wrote of the original Smith Act trials:
"The testimony of witnesses is comparatively insignificant. Guilt or innocence may turn on what Marx or Engels or someone else wrote or advocated as much as a hundred years or more ago.[...] When the propriety of obnoxious or unfamiliar views about government is in reality made the crucial issue, [...] prejudice makes conviction inevitable except in the rarest circumstances."
The convictions of the indicted members were reversed and the case was remanded to District Court for a retrial.