[ExI] new covid case rates

[Dan TheBookMan]

On Apr 7, 2021, at 4:24 PM, William Flynn Wallace via extropy-chat <extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org> wrote:
> 
> Dan, you make it sound like the Supreme Court is a useless institution.  Bill W

I’m not sure where you’re going to go with that. Spike seems to think the Constitution prevents tyranny among many other things. Are you arguing that it does this via the Supreme Court? That’s a problem in the two cases I mentioned. With regard to the Sedition Act, the Supreme did nothing because judicial review hadn’t been established. (Interesting that the Constitution was ratified in 1788, but judicial review wasn’t established until 1803. In fact, judicial review isn’t explicitly in the Constitution. It’s an interpretation of Article VI based on an 1803 ruling.)

The Supreme Court also had some strange rulings with regard to indigenous peoples. One merely has to look at the sad history Indian removal and treaty violations. Per the Constitutions treaties are not supposed to be set aside, but the history Indian treaties is one of exactly that. It merely shows that the powerful do what they want when the weak have only a constitution or a treaty to guard them. To pretend otherwise overlooks the entire history of the US in its treatment of indigenous peoples. (This isn’t to say every last thing the Court has done has been bad, but ignoring the bad — and there are more bad cases than the two very serious ones I mentioned — here is no more cherry-picking.)

Also, none of this is really new here. I’ve argued these points here and elsewhere before. The usual outcome is my comments are ignored and then at a later date similar points (ones of praising the Constitution) are made as if my comments had never been made before. (I only repeat my criticisms in hopes that some here understand them, but I don’t expect much. Also, none of my criticisms are all that original. Other libertarians — George H. Smith, Roderick Long, Sheldon Richman, Michael Huemer — made much the same criticisms decades ago. I’d expect people who claim to be libertarians and especially who are older than me to know something of this — that it wouldn’t come as a shock whether they agreed with my criticisms or not.) 

Regards,

Dan 
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