Latest poll shows Massachusetts voters overwhelmingly support trans rights

the nurses are telling her to vote yes and everyone else is telling her to vote no.

To me, that nurses are urging for 'Yes' votes seems at least intriguing if not compelling. Why would you vote 'No' when those who this directly affects (it's seemingly a labor issue) are telling you that they would prefer a 'Yes' vote?

If it were closer to California's bill, which has more flexibility built into it and a more realistic timeline for implementation, I'd vote for it. But it's too rigid, has to be implemented unrealistically quickly, and has smaller ratios than the CA one.

The one where Texas (Texas!) is a patchwork of legally-binding gun-free zones, Massachusetts is a hotbed of activism to run S&W out of business, and leftists across the land look me in the eye with a straight face and tell me that plain and simple language in the nation's founding documents don't mean what they say because "complexity."

Amy Chua wrote up a nice piece for the Atlantic a few weeks ago about us all needing a common set of values in order for us to function as a pluralistic society.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/...

On the face of it, there's nothing to object to here. But if you take it to its logical conclusion, then you have to start admitting things like the 2nd Amendment protects the individual right to keep and bear arms and the 1st Amendment protects all speech, especially the controversial kind. The words on the page are one thing; the cultural value of actively aspiring to live up to the meaning of the words on the page is orthogonal to that (on paper, there's free speech in China too), and the thing that makes America great is that (up to now) most people took that seriously and tried to live by it.

Well, we can't have that. So oh how convenient...a few days later an anonymous accusation gets published claiming Amy Chua and Jed Rubenfeld both groomed women for Judge Kavanaugh. Go try proving a negative.

That's the planet I'm living on Adam. The one where every inch of freedom must be defended against a thousand cuts of derision, slander, and outright power grabs. If this Constitutional Convention the ballot question is asking for actually convenes, what amendment would come out of it?

Would it say that only for-profit businesses have no right to political advocacy? Well if taken at face value, it would shut down the entire lobbying apparatus in DC. You might think that's good. But it won't be.

Here's an example: Congress and the Executive Branch would be able to pass any regulation they want and no one would be able to spend the money necessary to tell them why it would be a bad idea. For example, Congress could pass a 500% tax on prescription drugs, or a cap on salaries paid to employees of hospitals that accept medicare or medicaid. And there would be a whole host of socialist cheerleaders egging them on to do it. But just like in Venezuela...it would lead to disaster because people don't work for free. Except there would be no one to campaign against such a regulation and the echo chamber would prevail.

But! you might say. There'd be nothing that prevents non-profits from lobbying congress. OK, cool. So all that cash that flows from corporate lobbying would start flowing into universities and paid-for think tanks incorporated as non-profits. And with a slight fig-leaf of extra overhead, the lobbying and campaign contributions will continue as is. And this is obvious, so forgive me if I make the assumption that this proposed amendment would bar any and all political spending, period.

Well cool. But what's political spending? Is paying for a lawyer to argue in court that the ramrodded legislation in my example is a violation of the Constitutional rights to property? We all know a good lawyer does PR too, so are there now constraints on how any person on the company payroll may communicate with the public to advocate for the company and its shareholders?

What's a corporation? If U-hub weren't a one-man operation and you had an employee and/or owned your own servers, you might form an LLC to limit your own exposure to risk if your sever farm catches fire or your employee sues you for not giving him a religious holiday in honor of the Feast of Maximum Occupancy. Would you now be limited in what you can publish on your website? If you were pushing a political position (not that you do that, of course), would you not be able to take out ads to gin up a user base?

Where's the built-in limit to safe-guard rights and freedoms?

All of these questions have messy answers. The way we have (to date) addressed them if by acknowledging that centralized decisionmaking is ill-suited to providing these answers and we have left government out of it. That cultural value is enshrined in the Bill of Rights as written. Now people want to take it apart. Why?

Not one from this galaxy. Also combine with alternate universe.

In fact, I ask it frequently in relation to each and every clause in the Constitution.