Note that “horrible” is Bricker’s choice of term: AFAICT none of the polls in question used it, and I don’t think it’s an appropriate or representative synonym for the terms they did use.
:dubious: Wipe the froth from your lips and calm down. The link I provided states very clearly that it’s a press release based on a first analysis on the survey results, not the report in its entirety. I don’t know where to access the full report itself.
That’s debatable. As the editorial I linked to in an earlier post remarked, Snyder has been seeking a new stadium for the team, but has met with some lack of enthusiasm partly due to concerns about the team name. The editorial suggests that what the Post is trying to do is reassure locals that the name isn’t actually a problem, so they’ll be more supportive of the relocation:
In the press release it says that the report “is called ‘Redskins Survey Research Outputs 1 on 4-23-14’ and is available from the Center at Cal State San Bernardino or the Principal Investigator James Fenelon”. And where do you get your estimate of “6-7 years”? The date in the report title seems to indicate it’s actually been about two years (which agrees with the timeline of news stories about the survey such as this one).
You know, DrDeth, for someone who’s complaining that other people aren’t reading things carefully enough… :dubious:
If you were talking to lawyers referencing the name of a case might be an attempt at communication instead of obfuscation. But you aint.
The issue of this thread is whether members of the public at large should be bothered by the use of an overt ethnic slur as the name of a sports team. Is that assessment altered if only a minority of the small and relatively impoverished minority states they experience racial offense from the name? Should tax dollars be used to support the team to build a new stadium, etc. for that team?
The discussion centers around how offensive the term is and what level of offense to what sort of group warrants what sort of public reaction. No, trademark protection was not the center of the discussion. Would “The Ragheads” be okay? Maybe.
The First Amendment is what you might call a key point here but you might be the only one.
Disappointingly, the Simon Tam case has nothing to do with the government’s power to train psychic female assassins.
Instead, it’s about whether some Asian guy can trademark his band name (“The Slants”). The court ruled that the trademark could not be denied for being disparaging, and that particular section of the law was unconstitutional on First Amendment grounds. The court did not consider other sections of the law which prohibit, for example, immoral or scandalous trademarks.
The ruling he cites to is relevant only to the narrow question of whether denying a federal trademark registration under Section 2(a) of the Lanham Trademark Act of 1946 on the basis that the relevant term is disparaging or scandalous violates free speech rights.
That does not make the First Amendment relevant to the broader issue of whether the Redskins should change their name, whether people who.want then to change it are wrong to want it, etc.
One issue in this thread is what to do about the horrible, overt ethnic slur.
And the fact that Snyder can exclusively profit from his team’s name and logo on merchandise has been discussed with disapproval; the attempts to use the PTO and the courts to divest him of legal rights to protect his trademark has been discussed with dewy-eyed admiration.
Therefore, the fact that the First Amendment prevents this approach is relevant.
But of course, I understand it’s not welcome news.
The Patent and Trademark Office seems to think that if the “disparaging” portion of Section 2(a) is unconstitutional, then so is the “immoral” and “scandalous” portions. It has put all such trademark examinations, opposition proceedings, and cancellation proceedings on hold pending the completion of court review.
Again, the PTO’s position is based entirely on the argument that cancellation or denial of a trademark registration does not in fact divest a trademark owner of legal rights to protect its trademark, because registration is not the source of trademark rights.
If the Redskins trademark registrations are cancelled and if the Slants registration is rejected, the victory is almost entirely symbolic, in my view. Similarly, in my view, if the Federal Circuit’s ruling in In re Tam stands, the victory for the trademark owners is also almost entirely symbolic.
This legal proceeding is very narrow and really is a side issue the actual question s surrounding the Redskins’ name. I would argue that that also means that the free speech question is nothing more than a narrow side issue in this conversation.
The law in this case is seventy years old, so my opinion is that it’s constitutional until a court says it isn’t. Are you aware of any pending challenges to the “immoral” and “scandalous” provisions? A quick google indicates they’re considered synonymous and generally applied to sexually-explicit marks.
Yes, one side issue has been what to do about it, and one sub-discussion of that side issue has been the issue of rescinding the trademark registration of the team. Hardly a key point of the discussion.
As far as that sub-discussion of one side issue goes … IANAL (and a day does not go by that I do not express gratitude for that!) but for now the loss of registration holds. Maybe the appeal will win on the basis of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruling you cited … or maybe the appeal to SCOTUS of that ruling by the PTO will reverse the lower court’s ruling. I don’t know and claim no expertise of particular interest. If registering, say, the trademark of “Wetback Rapist Taco Bowl” (a football invitational run exclusively by Trump Enterprises), is ruled as required as part and parcel of the First Amendment, well if SCOTUS so rules, it so rules. As of now both the ruling against the Redskins and that In re Simon Shiao Tam rulings are extant and subject to appeal, yes? So
In any case such is completely tangential to whether “Wetback Rapist Taco Bowl” used as the name for the football invitational is or is not insulting, is or is not something that non-Hispanics should express an opinion about, whether or not non-Hispanics should lobby to exert every legal means of pressure to have the name changed, and under what conditions a majority in a power position should be concerned about potential abuse of that power of a relatively powerless minority member of society.
Uh, “is available from” doesn’t automatically mean “is on the website of”.
[QUOTE=DrDeth]
It’s not. They have never heard of it, have no listing for it.
[/quote]
What do you mean, “never heard of it”? Did you talk to somebody who said so? I dunno if it’s because you’re still upset, but you’re not being very clear here.
[QUOTE=DrDeth]
Simple to prove me wrong- *get a copy. *
[/QUOTE]
Hey, I already said that I don’t know how to access the full report. I was merely pointing out that a full report is not the same thing as a press release, so you can’t get your knickers in a twist about “missing data” just because not all the data is in the press release.
I’m not going to take anything for granted about what the report contains if I haven’t seen it, but I’m also not going to take anything for granted about what you claim the report contains (or doesn’t contain) if you haven’t seen it.
Spifflog’s point was that the WP was a highly reputable outfit, with no apparent incentive to run a bad poll incorrectly downplaying the level of offence. You waved that off. But in retrospect, his point was correct.
Before assuming that the WP had made a poll with “crap data” and declaring that here, you should have verified that the claim was accurate, or else qualified your position. On one side you had the professional reputation of the WP, and on the other you had some anonymous guy posting on the internet, and weighing the two in balance you should have been a lot more circumspect about it.
The same thing applies to the census. There’s nothing to stop anyone from identifying themselves however they want in the census. What the census does - per the linked source provided earlier - is ask people to check a box for every ancestry they identify with. The ones who check only the “American Indian” box are the 2.9M. This is most closely comparable to asking people what ethnicity they are and accepting those who respond only with “American Indian” (or similar). So the WP is solid on this too.
I agree that it’s similar to your 120 MPH analogy too. The general rule in that case is that every potential risk has to be balanced against the potential reward and measured against the risk/reward ratio of an alternative approach.
And the same would go for naming teams. The general principle is that you can’t always avoid offending someone but you need to balance the plus/minus ratio and decide what’s worthwhile and what’s not in a given instance. So the idea that you can single out ethnic based names as being ruled out on that basis based on the simple fact that someone is offended doesn’t hold.
For your satisfaction? If so, well sorry, but who in Hell cares about that?
It suffices for me.
I am glad that for you the fact that a media source has commissioned a poll is adequate enough to accept it unquestioningly. Well not glad really, but your belief that all that accepting data is one study using techniques that other expert pollsters have previously stated are inadequate to address the question requires is that a media source commissioned it is not really something that matters to me.
Believe it or not I read articles in a variety of very reputable scientific and medical journals critically too. NEJM is great, but even articles there can have conclusions that overreach the data and have flaws in study designs. In a community of scientists a single study that gives an unexpected result and one that conflicts with another study is not accepted as truth not to be questioned because it was published in a reputable journal.
For the record - polling the Native American population is well known to be very tricky to do. I respect the challenges and that they seem to have tried hard.
It is interesting that the reports about the poll did not highlight that over 1 in 5 of those self-identified as Native Americans polled feel the word is “disrespectful” of Native Americans and that even though 43% have heard any good amount about the team name issue 20% find the issue to be important to them.
Well that’s fine as a Tough Guy statement, but you’re missing the mark. I meant suffices for the use to which you put it. You came on strong about this poll, declaring it to be “crap”, based on what turned out to be incorrect facts that you had no real knowledge of. To say “well, I didn’t know what I was talking about but I trusted some random poster’s assertion” does not suffice as a justification for that approach, and calls into question the validity of other things that you might say – which might turn out to have a similarly nonexistant basis.
Do you appreciate that there’s a middle ground between “accept[ing] it unquestioningly” and declaring it to be “crap”? I assume you’re capable of that. You can look through my posts here and you won’t find me advocating accepting this poll unquestioningly, and there’s nothing I’ve said to you which suggests that. So your assertion that this is what I’ve been advocating here is just self-serving “crap”.
Again, you’re obfuscating here. Reading articles critically is all fine. But the point here – and I’ve said this before so you shouldn’t pretend otherwise - is that you didn’t read it. You had no idea what the data set was because it was behind a paywall and you relied entirely on another poster who turned out to have been mistaken.
You read NEJM critically, that’s fine. You hear some anonymous guy attributing something idiotic to the NEJM and declare the NEJM to be crap on that basis without having read it, then you’re being arrogant and foolish.
In the press release it says that the report “is called ‘Redskins Survey Research Outputs 1 on 4-23-14’ and is available from the Center at Cal State San Bernardino or the Principal Investigator James Fenelon”. And where do you get your estimate of “6-7 years”? The date in the report title seems to indicate it’s actually been about two years (which agrees with the timeline of news stories about the survey such as