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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, @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.