I recommend you leave the pedantic symbolic arcana out of your future replies. It can only confuse people, including you yourself.
Ignorance might not be a virtue, but it is not a fault either, for a non-specialist. You know full well that this board is kindly and abundantly served by specialists who are happy to impart concise explanations of exactly the kind I have reasonably asked for.
Mr. Bricker is a shining example. I recommend you follow his example and drop all the teasing and hectoring.
Yes. I would not be surprised if an honest poll revealed less than 50% recognition even on a board such as this where there is a high level of knowledge and literacy (which are sometimes a bit too well hidden.)
I have never before encountered !=, and I did at least muddle through two semesters of college freshman math with a B (algebra) and a C (probability). Inequality was always expressed as an = sign with a diagonal stikethrough, which is a hell of a lot easier to figure out than !=.
I thought Mr. Bone was using the ! as a “gotcha” indicator, or something like that.
Thank you for the link. I will definitely peruse it.
You have certainly not done anything report-worthy. However, I hope you will think a bit more about what it is to say “It’s there!” some damn where in several thousand words of legal opinion when you could easily enough have given a concise explanation. Hell, with all the time and effort you have spent on stuff like != you could have given an acre of explanations. A hectare even.
The very fact that you had to describe the ‘not equals’ sign in english rather than just show it is the very reason that ‘!=’ or ‘<>’ are used on boards such as this to express the concept. They’re not stolen from math, exactly, but from computer programming; and they’re not all that obscure.
Putting a ‘!’ in front of a symbol as a means of emphasis, that’s something I’ve never seen.
While I’m not a big supporter of the Second Amendment’s existence, I feel that this was the correct decision. I tend to agree with John Mace; strict scrutiny should be applied to any potential infringement of an explicit constitutional right.
My favorite explanation of how easy it is for a law to meet the rational basis standard was when a legal scholar (John Finn?) said that all it requires is a law not be obviously insane.
OK- I might have gotten through college math, but years later I could not get through computer programming, and by now the number of people worldwide who have learned enough programming to get to != might be a billion. Maybe even enough for >50% recognition, especially among those born since ~1970 (is one wavy line rather than two to express approximation standard now?)
I am not sure I have seen it either. I considered it a minor liberty to take in an informal setting such as a discussion board.
One works fine in informal writing (for pretty much exactly the same reason, I imagine). It’s hard/inconvenient to do proper math notation unless a board is specifically setup for it and so people have made do.
Here’s a (very) partial list of constitutional rights for which limitations on or violations of the right do not receive strict scrutiny:
[ul]
[li]Freedom from discrimination on the basis of sex or gender[/li][li]Freedom from discrimination as to sexual orientation[/li][li]Content-neutral limits on the time, place, or manner of speech[/li][li]Freedom from warrantless invasions of privacy[/li][li]Freedom to terminate a pregnancy[/li][li]Freedom from excessive use of force[/li][/ul]
Do you believe all of these should receive strict scrutiny too? If not, what’s the difference?
It seems quite odd to me to protect the right to own a particular kind of gun more than the right not to be discriminated against on the basis of sexual orientation (to name one). Well, not odd, actually. Entirely predictable. But hard to defend.
The discussion about whether a gun is “dangerous and unusual” and whether the test of common ownership is one of today or at the time of the founding fathers is an interesting one.
In Heller, Scalia held that machine guns could be outlawed because their ownership is not common today. As the dissent in this case notes (in citing another case), the only reason they are not common is because of a federal law enacted in 1934 putting pretty onerous regulations on their transfer and banning new ones entirely in 1986. It seems, as the judge said, that the law is constitutional because of what the law itself caused.
The “in common use” requirement also suffers from a different flaw in acting as a one way rachet on which guns we can own. Presumably all commonly owned guns today must be kept legal. But say I invent a gun with a solar-powered action and sold 100 of them. Say that they were semi-automatic and were no more or less dangerous than conventional guns. It would seem as if a state could ban my new gun (so long as they acted quickly enough before sales increased) because these guns are not in “common use” or not something that a person would be expected to take into militia service.
States could also ban guns if they fall out of favor. Suppose in 20 years pump action shotguns are no longer popular for whatever reason and people are discarding them. It would then seem as if a state could ban them since they are not commonly owned. It wouldn’t matter if people wanted them again 30 years after that because, sorry, not commonly owned, so they can be banned.
I agree with the spirit of Heller and believe in an individual right to bear arms, but this area of the law is confusing, and IMHO, not well thought out.
Well, the rights you list are not explicit, with the possible exception of the one on speech. Freedom to terminate is a constitutional right because a court decided that the existing explicit rights together implied that termination of pregnancy was protected.
So as I read what they were saying, it was that constitutional rights explicitly spelled out warrant strict scrutiny.
The “equal protection of the laws” is no more vague than “the right to bear arms.” An individual right to have a magazine with 12 rounds is no more explicitly set forth in the Constitution than the right not to be discriminated against on the basis of sex.
What makes you think strict scrutiny would help? The government can make an argument that there is a compelling government interest in preventing unborn children from being killed, that making it illegal to kill unborn children is the most narrowly tailored tool available to them to prevent unborn children from being killed, and that and that making it illegal is the least restrictive means of preventing unborn children from being killed. You presumably do not agree with that argument, but only a fool blinded by dogma could not even comprehend its existence.
