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Recently, oral arguments were heard regarding a case about license plates and the first amendment. The Texas division of the Sons of Confederate Veterans has challenged a rejection of their proposed plate that had images of the Confederate flag.
The Texas solicitor general argued that, "Messages on Texas license plates are government speech ... [because] Texas etches its name onto each license plate and Texas law gives the state sole control and final approval authority over everything that appears on a license plate.”
Please share your ideas/comments on this case or your views on vanity plates in general.
Story: http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-supreme-court-confederate-license-plates-20150323-story.html
Case: http://www.oyez.org/cases/2010-2019/2014/2014_14_144
What a vanity plate is: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vanity_plate
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 06 2015, @06:45AM
Frojack is of the modern conservative mindset which thinks race is not a social construct. If race is pure biology then a "captive breeding program" can't be genocide because the biology is preserved despite the fact that the identity of the people is eliminated.
> New age definition? No, the definition, under international law.
It would help if you actually cited that definition.
"Article II: In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:
(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;
(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;
(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group;
(e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.
http://www.genocidewatch.org/genocide/whatisit.html [genocidewatch.org]
(Score: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 06 2015, @07:03AM
Race isn't a social construct. You're thinking of culture. Killing an entire race of people will typically destroy their culture entirely as well, but one doesn't need a specific skin color or have a certain heritage to share the same culture.
(Score: 2) by aristarchus on Monday April 06 2015, @08:04AM
Poor Tejas, so far from God, and so far from God. I am not a racist because I don't understand what race is? WTF? Well, now I say let them have the "special" plates. Between those, the "truck nuts" and them "rolling coal", we will know who to have to drones target.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 06 2015, @09:31AM
> Race isn't a social construct. You're thinking of culture.
Hhhm. There are thousands of scientists who disagree with you. [nytimes.com]
For example, Craig Venter, [wikipedia.org] the first guy to map the human genome, said ''Race is a social concept, not a scientific one."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 06 2015, @02:56PM
They can disagree all they want, but the definition of the word says otherwise:
If they say that race is a social construct, then they're using a different definition for "race" than the one that exists.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 06 2015, @04:33PM
> They can disagree all they want, but the definition of the word says otherwise:
Typical dictionary pedant doesn't actually check the dictionary:
race: [oxforddictionaries.com]
1.2 A group of people sharing the same culture, history, language, etc.
example: "They sought to weld the country's diverse ethnicities into a Brazilian race defined in historical and cultural terms."
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday April 06 2015, @09:36PM
And that definition a subset of the definition I used:
This is the generally-accepted definition of the word and what most people think of when they hear it - specifically referring to distinct physical characteristics. There's also 1.1 and 1.3 that further clarify it, still agreeing with the premise of definition 1.
Like I said, the definition of the word, what most people think of when they hear it, says otherwise.