I have lately been using FDA delenda est as a sort of “you must be at least <this> sane about governance for me to think that your votes will add usefully adequate information to elections”. (Possible exception: if you just figure out if your life is better or worse in a high quality way, and always vote against incumbents when things are getting worse, no matter the incumbent’s party or excuses, that might be OK too?)
The problem with “FDA delenda est” is that while I do basically think that people who defend or endorse the FDA are either not yet educated yet about the relevant topics or else they are actively evil...
...this “line in the sand” makes it clear that the vast vast majority of voters and elected officials don’t have any strong grasp on the logic of (1) medicine or (2) doctor’s rights or (3) patient’s rights or (4) political economy or (5) risk management or (6) credentialist hubris or (7) consumer freedom… and so on.
And applying the label “not educated enough (or else actively evil)” to “most people” is not a good move at a dinner party <3
So...
My current best idea for a polite way to talk about a nearly totally safe political thing that works as a “litmus test” and slam dunk demonstration that there are lots of laws worth fixing is:
The 13th amendment, passed in 1865, which legalized penal slavery, should itself be amended to have that loophole removed.
Like seriously: who is still in favor of slavery?!?!?!
The 14th amendment (passed in 1868) made it formally clear that everyone in the US is a citizen by default, even and especially black people, and thus all such people are heirs by birth to the various freedoms that were legally and forcefully secured for “ourselves and our posterity” during the revolutionary war.
So then with the 14th amendment the supreme court could have looked at the bill of rights in general, and looked at who legally gets rights, and then just banned slavery for everyone based on logical consistency.
We don’t need a special amendment that says “no slavery except for the good kinds of slavery” because there are no good kinds of slavery and because the rest of the constitution already inherently forbids slavery in the course of protecting a vast array of other rights that are less obvious.
Here’s the entire text of the 13th, with a trivially simple rewrite:
Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.
Friday, June 18, 2021, Washington, D.C. – As Juneteenth approaches this weekend, Oregon’s U.S. Senator Jeff Merkley and Congresswoman Nikema Williams (GA-05) have introduced the Abolition Amendment, which would strike the ‘Slavery Clause’ of the 13th Amendment that allows slavery to continue in the United States.
[...]
The introduction follows a wave of bills introduced in state legislatures across the country to eliminate the Slavery Clause from state constitutions. Three of those states—Utah, Nebraska, and Colorado—referred the measure to their citizens, and large majorities in each case approved the measure, including 80 percent of voters in Utah.
If we trust this data, the hidden implication is that approximately 20% of those Utah voters are indeed in favor of slavery (at least in principle).
On the matter of removing ‘slavery’ as punishment from the state’s constitution, four Tennessee senate Republicans took exception.
Members Joey Hensley, Janice Bowling, Brian Kelsey, and Frank Nicely on March 15 voted against a bill put forward by Democrat Sen. Raumesh Akbari that would remove a constitutional clause allowing slavery as punishment for a crime.
I have lately been using FDA delenda est as a sort of “you must be at least <this> sane about governance for me to think that your votes will add usefully adequate information to elections”. (Possible exception: if you just figure out if your life is better or worse in a high quality way, and always vote against incumbents when things are getting worse, no matter the incumbent’s party or excuses, that might be OK too?)
The problem with “FDA delenda est” is that while I do basically think that people who defend or endorse the FDA are either not yet educated yet about the relevant topics or else they are actively evil...
...this “line in the sand” makes it clear that the vast vast majority of voters and elected officials don’t have any strong grasp on the logic of (1) medicine or (2) doctor’s rights or (3) patient’s rights or (4) political economy or (5) risk management or (6) credentialist hubris or (7) consumer freedom… and so on.
And applying the label “not educated enough (or else actively evil)” to “most people” is not a good move at a dinner party <3
So...
My current best idea for a polite way to talk about a nearly totally safe political thing that works as a “litmus test” and slam dunk demonstration that there are lots of laws worth fixing is:
The 13th amendment, passed in 1865, which legalized penal slavery, should itself be amended to have that loophole removed.
Like seriously: who is still in favor of slavery?!?!?!
The 14th amendment (passed in 1868) made it formally clear that everyone in the US is a citizen by default, even and especially black people, and thus all such people are heirs by birth to the various freedoms that were legally and forcefully secured for “ourselves and our posterity” during the revolutionary war.
So then with the 14th amendment the supreme court could have looked at the bill of rights in general, and looked at who legally gets rights, and then just banned slavery for everyone based on logical consistency.
We don’t need a special amendment that says “no slavery except for the good kinds of slavery” because there are no good kinds of slavery and because the rest of the constitution already inherently forbids slavery in the course of protecting a vast array of other rights that are less obvious.
Here’s the entire text of the 13th, with a trivially simple rewrite:
See how much cleaner that would be? :-)
To make your point more viscerally, here’s a photo from 2011 of the still operating Angola Plantation in Louisiana:
You’d be surprised.
Doing a quick search, it seems that people are already trying to close the slavery loophole:
If we trust this data, the hidden implication is that approximately 20% of those Utah voters are indeed in favor of slavery (at least in principle).
Also this: