People sometimes try to convince me that Mark Steyn’s drivel is worth taking seriously. As counter, I suggest people read his latest screed for Maclean’s wherein he bravely tackles the demon that is empathy:
Then-senator Obama voted against the confirmation of Chief Justice Roberts because the nominee said he saw the judge’s role as that of “umpire.” The President wants someone less hung up on the rule book. He likes to cite the case of Lilly Ledbetter, who sued Goodyear Tire for discrimination but ran up against the pesky old statute of limitations. An “empathetic” judge would presumably say, “Screw the statute of limitations.”
Now, Steyn is actually pretty smart despite his lack of ethics, so presumably he knows that the issue in Ledbetter v. Goodyear wasn’t whether or not to get rid of “the pesky old statute of limitations” but how the statute of limitations was applied, because the question was whether the statute of limitations should start running from the point that the pay discrimination that Ledbetter suffered began, or whether it should start running from the point where she became aware of it. The conservative wing of the Supreme Court decided against all common sense that it should be the former, and that the clock on Ledbetter’s ability to sue in fact began years before she even knew that she was being discriminated against.
Again, Steyn probably knows this. But I doubt he cares; it’s just one more bullet in his gun filled with the usual cheap potshots about how Palestinians are actually savage animals (which he knows because he was in the West Bank for a week this one time and he totally saw tons of convenience stores with “Martyr of the Week” posters, and just because Steyn was just busy completely mischaracterizing a well-known and entirely public legal decision two paragraphs previously, why would we ever suspect him of being a fabulist in this regard?) and then accusing Barack Obama of sympathizing with terrorists in his Cairo speech (you know, the one where he bluntly told the Arab world that violent extremism wasn’t just unacceptable, but also that Holocaust denialism was ridiculous, and that Palestinians needed to come to grips with the fact that the Israelis aren’t going anywhere, and that Muslim countries need to better ensure women’s rights).
He’s a cheap hack. He always has been, he always will be. Don’t ever forget it.
Top comment: Y’know, I notice that people keep angrily bringing up the fact that you called Steyn a cheap hack, but no-one seems to care that you called him a malicious asshole, too. — Skemono
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“The conservative wing of the Supreme Court decided against all common sense that it should be the former”
I think you meant “latter”.
Nope, the Conservative wing went for the former, but the liberals and centrists went for the latter, and were the majority.
You’re both wrong; it was 5-4 for Goodyear (Scalia, Roberts, Alito, Thomas, Kennedy). The conservatives were the majority and found that the statute of limitations ran from when the incident first occurred.
Steyn is one of the reasons that I stopped subscribing to Macleans. Total a–hole. I had someone at my door the other day trying to get me to subscribe. I asked them if Steyn was still writing for them.
“I think so.”
“Then no thanks.”
Oh yeah, but in the same speech he dared to talk about how Palestinians had suffered and are suffering and how that is a bad thing. I mean, how dare he, right? *eyeroll*
This precedent could have an “up” side if you dislike someone enough to buy the “beat-down-o-matic” from the makers of “ShamWow.” Basically, it’s a device you put in their car’s driver seat and program the timer for the interval of time that the statute of limitations sets for assault. When it goes off, it repeatedly bashes the head of your victim against the roof of the vehicle. By the SCOTUS’ ruling, you’re in the clear since the initial act leading to this (in your eyes) justified delivery of pain and suffering happened outside of the law’s parameters!
Order now, only five easy payments of 19.95, no CODs.
The column’s subheading reads “In a world of imponderables, some old-fashioned detachment might serve us better”.
Just putting that out there.
I wasn’t reading all the words (no kittens or Cap’n America) so I thought you said the guy was a cheap hick, and I really liked the idea of some barefoot overalls-wearing Supreme Court Justice spitting tobaccy juice all over the bottom of Scalia’s robes when he wasn’t looking, possibly also wearing a hat like Minnie Pearl. There would be a lot of homespun wisdom relating the release of Gitmo prisoners to the hog-judging of aught two when Old Man Bergstrom tried to pass off his largest granddaughter in the competition, or something. Then I realized I was wrong about every aspect of my interpretation and I got depressed. Cheap hacks aren’t nearly as much fun to think about.
I know this is an ignorant, stupid question even before I ask it, but does the Statute of Limitations serve a beneficial purpose? I mean, was it originally conceived to protect normal people, or is it really a big bad legal shield for assholes who get off on technicalities and stuff like the TV cop shows make it out to be?
I’d guess the reasons for the statute would be to help keep the legal system from being to clogged up, so the government couldn’t keep an old charge in their back pocket to deal with someone causing problems like how autocratic governments will arrest someone on bogus charges whenever they’re having elections, to put pressue on the legal system to really work on the case before them and also an acknowledgemnet of the fact people can change over time and they’d just be taking up space in a jail.
So you think it’s ok when a 99 year old can go to court for something that happened when he/she was a baby?
The statute is there to protect people from unrelenting legal prosecution. It’s similar to the right to a speedy trial.
Steyn’s style is abrasive and exaggerated for satiric effect, but so is Jon Stewart’s — the same grains of sand should be taken for both of them. And whatever one thinks of his opinions and perspective, his willingness to draw attention to the bureaucratic corruption of the HRCs in Canada deserves some acknowledgement.
As such, I think you might be going too far to accuse Steyn of “completely mischaracterizing” a legal decision: for starters, he isn’t attempting to characterize the specific decision but rather the legal philosophy that disagreed with how it was made, the philosophy that places more weight on contextual circumstance (when did the victim become *aware* of the crime?) than on hard fact and objective definition (when was the crime itself actually committed?). Merciful as the former may seem compared to the latter, there is no doubt that it is problematic at the very least to make the legal existence of a crime dependent on unproveable states of mental awareness (as any lawyer who’s worked on issue-of-consent rape trials can confirm), and in a larger sense, it’s equally problematic to suggest that the administration of justice should be dominated by “empathic considerations,” i.e. unique exceptions that either set contradictory precedents or set no precedent at all. That the conservative flank of the Court decided in favour of objective verifiable fact over contextual, victim-dependent awareness does not surprise me.
As for accusing Steyn of simply flat-out lying about posters he saw in the West Bank, it’s conceivable that may well have been satiric exaggeration; but he did not lie about Mariam Farahat, “Umm Nidal”, the mother of three suicide bombers who boasted of sending them on their missions herself — Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Umm_Nidal) verifies pretty much everything he said in his article exactly.
Steyn’s fundamental point is that “empathy” is a noble human impulse, but it is still capable of being mistaken (“No, you *don’t* know what it is to feel my pain”), insufficient (“And even if you did, why should I care and what good will that do me?”) or used inappropriately (“Can I only count on a fair hearing if you can somehow empathize with me?”), and that the people currently adumbrating it as the be-all end-all criterion of acceptable thought do not give any indication of having realized these inherent limitations. As such, they are in for unpleasant surprises at best and may lead us into destructive situations at worst. Steyn is simply sounding a call for second thoughts, and for remembering why we used to value such things as objectivity, consistency, precedent, logic, and clarity.
Do you actually have a legal education? If so, how did you ever pass contract and tort law, having obviously failed Logic 101 in your undergraduate studies? Do you really believe that either a Canadian or U.S. court is going to adopt the concept that the existence of a legal fact can be based on unproveable states of mental awareness or that objective, verifiable fact can be overridden by victim-dependent awareness?
Let us say that A is involved in an auto accident with B. A is insured and, accordingly has the advice of an Agent, backed by competent legal council, as well as the support of his family. However, A does nothing for six years, before filing a tort action against B. A alleges that he was simply unaware, for six years, of B’s liability as regards the accident. This, of course, will not fly, due to the statue of limitations. The limitation, of course, starts from the date of the accident, which is simply the only possible date that the alleged liability could have been incurred. The law in North America is based on the assumption of free, universal, and mandatory public education, which apparently you, and your phantom client Ledbetter, never received. Too bad!
Given that you’ve just essentially derided all witness testimony that cannot be independently corroborated, yes, somehow I think it will.
I love wildly overblown hyperbole when someone tries to prove their point!
For example, in your test case, A’s allegation of unawareness could be directly challenged in court by B’s evidence.
Also, your hyperbolic theoretical example has no bearing on Ledbetter, where Ledbetter’s lack of awareness of the harm being done to her as well as the harm itself were not challenged in the Supreme Court appeal. But I’m sure you knew that, with your free, universal, mandatory public education.
If your wondering why your blog is getting more traffic it is because the “cheap hack” generously linked to your patch of the woods here. I believe a large box of truffles would be a nice thank you gesture to the “cheap hack”; don’t you?
The blog’s been doing quite well for a long time without “help” (note the qutoes) from the cheap hack (note the absence of quotes), Ian.
Also, feel free to make fun of the tyop in the above post if it’ll add a ray of sunshine to your day.
Ledbetter is a dumb twat that should have just quit if she was unhappy with her job or the amount she was being paid.
“If your wondering why your blog is getting more traffic it is because the “cheap hack” generously linked to your patch of the woods here”
So you think Mark Steyn (who is indeed a cheap hack) is doing his critics a favour by sending his readers to troll blogs on his behalf?
Comics-related tidbit: in the suit between Neil Gaiman and Todd MacFarlane, the court ruled that the Statute of Limitations clock started ticking when the infringement was detected, not when it began. So it’s not as if there was no precedent for Ledbetter’s position.
Source: http://journal.neilgaiman.com/2008/04/few-final-copyright-thoughts-before-we.html
Standard left winger fare i.e. ad hominem attacks “cheap hack” on people with whom they disagree.
The liberal pretense that “I could refute Steyn’s actual argument but it is so beneath me” fools no one except other lazy thinkers.
Firstly, go learn the difference between an ad hominem and an insult.
Except I did refute his argument re: Ledbetter by pointing out that it was, at best, mistaken, and at worst dishonest.
The amusing thing is that there was no particularly noteworthy traffic uptick as a result of the link. Like, not even ten percent more than usual. Steyn’s influence isn’t nearly so big as he thinks it is.
Y’know, I notice that people keep angrily bringing up the fact that you called Steyn a cheap hack, but no-one seems to care that you called him a malicious asshole, too.
From my reading of the opinion it looks like the issue wasn’t “did she know” but “what act of the employer triggers the statute of limitations?”
The relevant law gave Ms. Ledbetter 180 days “after the alleged unlawful employment practice occurred” to file a discrimination claim. Ms. Ledbetter didn’t ask the court to excuse her tardy claim on grounds of ignorance, and the majority pointedly expressed no opinion on the question. Instead, the question for the court was whether the “unlawful employment practice” at issue was (1) the employer’s decision not to increase her salary or (2) the periodic checks afterwards issued to her by the employer which did not reflect a salary increase.
The majority decided that the pay raise decision was the discriminatory practice referenced in the statute and held that the statute of limitations began to run from the date of the employer’s decision. The dissent felt that every new paycheck was a separate discriminatory act and would have allowed Ms. Ledbetter to bring her action at any time, provided that she continued to receive paychecks from the employer (though the dissent suggests that the employer might have some equitable defenses to the action if a court decided that Ms. Ledbetter had waited too long to file, the definition of “too long” being a matter of judicial discretion).
The dissent’s opinion, which replaces a predicable deadline with something fuzzy and indefinite, could fairly be described as “screw the statute of limitations” by someone who was feeling sufficiently snarky. I don’t see that Mark Steyn is a hack for describing it as such.
You’re missing the obvious distinction here, which is that there was no way for Ledbetter to be aware of the pay discrimination until she was made aware of the difference between her pay and a co-worker’s. Choosing the employer’s decision as the alleged discriminatory practice forces the issue of knowledge whether the Supreme Court wanted to discuss it in such terms or not; my reading of Alito’s decision makes me think he was specifically trying to avoid the issue.
I noticed, skemono. And care. Typical left-winger. Insults AND ad-hominem attacks, with absolutely no self-awareness.
For the love of Christ, if you’re going to accuse people of ad hominem, learn what the term actually means. It’s not just being rude.
Steyn is creating a straw man, though, because there’s no consistent and well-known judicial philosophy I’m aware of that works like this. It’s just another potshot at liberalism, grounded in fantasy.
Except that the entire system of criminal justice depends on proving mens rea, criminal intent, which is technically not provable either without having a telepath present. We rely on evidence to prove the likelihood of mens rea; arguing that suddenly this is too problematic for a civil tort is either ignorant or disingenuous.
Cons and Libs always get caught up in these technical debates that can never be won. There are good points and counterpoints on both sides. Why do Libs always think that people are owed more than the opportunity to leave a job if they are not happy with it? Are private businesses supposed to be welfare programs? Any why won’t the Cons quit this idiotic argumentation which is akin to wrestling a pig in the mud and instead stand on free market and property rights principles?
Steyn an asshole? Yah probably. But a hack? Far from it.
Because for the vast majority of people, a job isn’t something you can leave if you’re treated poorly; you need your next paycheque to stay alive and under a roof. The power in any employer/employee relationship is always weighted towards the employer first and foremost; we can’t make it equal, but we can at least create a situation where the employer is dissuaded from abusing that power.
As to why governments should keep business from employing discriminatory business practices, we accept that freedom of belief cannot and should not be regulated, but allowing businesses the opportunity to discriminate is, you know, bad, what with it creating systemic underclasses and all. I know conservatives would have us believe that the market can take care of such things and that maybe people will just patronize non-racist/sexist/whatever businesses, but in the real world people need to maximize their dollar efficiency wherever possible and can’t be vigilant for these things.
If I own a business why should some government official be able to tell me who I can hire/fire or what I can pay them? How is it that this person who has no insight into my company knows better than I how to run it? If I do stupid things like underpay a valuable employee, I will be punished by the free market. The only other solution is to set up a huge litigious system (like the one we have) and waste vast sums of money with dumb court cases like the one above.
Business are not here to create jobs for people. They are here to allocate scarce resources as effectively and efficiently as possible into stuff which consumers want understanding that their results will be graded by the profit and loss system.
“You’re missing the obvious distinction here, which is that there was no way for Ledbetter to be aware of the pay discrimination until she was made aware of the difference between her pay and a co-worker’s. Choosing the employer’s decision as the alleged discriminatory practice forces the issue of knowledge whether the Supreme Court wanted to discuss it in such terms or not; my reading of Alito’s decision makes me think he was specifically trying to avoid the issue.”
No one, not even Ms. Ledbetter, appears to argue that her problem was one of lack of notice.
Footnote 10 of the Majority Opinion:
“We have previously declined to address whether Title VII suits are amenable to a discovery rule …. Because Ledbetter does not argue that such a rule would change the outcome in her case, we have no occasion to address this issue.”
The dissent does not argue otherwise. While it does make policy arguments that some wage disparity claims will be hard to discover and that others might need to “ripen” over time to be discovered, it is talking about hypothetical plaintiffs not before the court.
Possibly the reason that Ms. Ledbetter does not argue a lack of notice is that in her case the employer awarded raises solely on the basis of employee performance reviews. Ms. Ledbetter received poor reviews, perhaps as a result of sex discrimination, and consequently did not receive a raise. If she knew about the reviews, knew that the reviews were unjust, and knew that her employer had not awarded her a raise on the basis of the reviews, that would probably be enough to put her on notice of her claim.
You can argue that Alito failed to take the broader Congressional purpose into account in interpreting the rule; my feeling is that his decision makes better sense in the context of the statutory language, especially in that in his reading the statute of limitations has an actual and sensible purpose while the dissent’s reading results in an inconsistent application where the limitations provision becomes a vestigial curiosity where the employee remains with the employer, but remains a strict deadline where the employee has been let go.
In other words, if Congress has bothered to put a statute of limitations into their act I am inclined to interpret the statute in a way that makes that limitations period effective, even if it leads to unjust results.
Mike T.: We thought about just leaving business decisions such as the setting of salaries to the free market, but gave up on it. Why, the free market declined to punish people in an adequate way. A good example of this is the frequent habit private sector habit of blocking/locking fire exits.
Employers, like everyone else, do “what were we thinking” sorts of things all the time.
So there are laws, to prevent predictable, stupid behavour. If the price is hundreds of lives, we are not going to wait for the free market to “punish” a business for using its fire exit as handy storage space.
One such law prevents employers from paying people less because of their sex, religion, colour of their skin, etc. We do that _because_ employers insist on doing that, evidently ignoring the abstract consequences in favour of short term goods. We, as a society, do not have to, nor should we, sit around waiting for them to clue in.
As if anyone ever went into business thinking that was what they were doing.
By this logic, there’s no reason we should have child labour laws, you realize.
A definition of ad hominem
http://ancienthistory.about.com/od/aterms/g/Adhominem.htm
“Ad hominem is a Latin term meaning “to the man”. It is short for “argumentum ad hominem” which refers to an argument against a man. An argument that is ad hominem is one that has deviated from the claims being made and has instead focused on the person making the claims.”
Calling Steyn an asshole would most certainly qualify, as you gave no examples to back up this claim. Do you know Steyn? Ever interacted with him? Corresponded, even? Give us some evidence as to why he’s an asshole, other than because he possesses the extreme character flaw of disagreeing with your political positions.
Who’s REALLY the hack here?
Jesus H. Christ: it takes a certain kind of persistent stupidity to actually quote the definition of something and still get it wrong.
An argument that is ad hominem deviates from the claims being made and focuses on the person making the claims, this is true, but is still targeted at the claims. The classic generic example of an ad hominem is, to wit:
“[X]’s argument about [whatever] is wrong because he is a worthless asshole.”
That’s why ad hominem differs from insult. Insult is essentially opinion. For example, I think Mark Steyn is a malicious asshole. You don’t have to agree with me on that. That’s opinion, and hence insult.
If I want to justify it and turn it into an argument, I might say it’s because he oversimplifies his arguments to misrepresent the position of his opposition and conflates essentially unrelated political phenomena on the basis of apparent surface similarities to create the appearance of a sustained argument where none in fact exists. (And in fact I did say just that in the original post.)
Even then, though, that’s still not ad hominem, because in that case the claim being made is specifically about the person making the claims. (To wit: X is an asshole because of Y and Z.)
Ad hominem occurs when the major point of argument is A) not about the specific individual referred to and B) one then fallaciously refers to negative characteristics of that individual to “prove” he is wrong. In the context of this post, that would have been something like “Steyn wrote about Lily Ledbetter and got it totally wrong, because he is an asshole.” A sloppy reading of my post, which ignored my point about his oversimplifying Ledbetter v. Goodyear to the point of idiocy, might mistake that for ad hominem – but no dice.
That’s why ad hominem is one of the classic logical fallacies. Got it now?
Right, got it. But if that’s the case, I’d have to say the sloppiness wasn’t in my reading, it was in your posting.
You open your post with a headline claiming Steyn’s a “malicious asshole”, and then cite his “mis-reading” (to you) of Ledbetter, which was backed up by the court. Then, you bring in wholly unrelated claims about his take on Palestinians and Obama’s Cairo speech. What’s your definition of sloppy, if not that?
And no, you didn’t say “Steyn wrote about Lily Ledbetter and got it totally wrong, because he is an asshole.” You basically said “Steyn’s an asshole because he got Ledbetter wrong”. Hence, ad hominem.
Your post would have been solid if you had just given arguments justifying you’re claim that Steyn is most always wrong and/or not a good journalist/commentator. But you stick the term “asshole” in the headline, then provide no justification for it. I have yet to hear anything from you that would prove that his character, behavior, ethics, morality or any other aspect of his person merits that label. That’s not my sloppy reading, my friend, it’s your sloppy thinking, and sloppy writing. Better luck with your blog in the future.
For fuck’s sake, Cosmo. I’m not sure how many times you have to have this explained to you.
Ad hominem is using insult – IE, opinion – as evidence for an argument.
Saying “Steyn is an asshole because he got Ledbetter wrong” isn’t ad hominem because the insult (“he is an asshole”) isn’t being used as evidence. It’s being used as the proposition of the argument, and then evidence (getting Ledbetter wrong) is supplied to justify that argument.
But sure, let’s say it’s my sloppy writing that’s causing confusion, rather than the fact that you can’t figure out what an ad hominem is when it’s explained to you multiple times and when you specifically go look for the definition. Because that makes sense.
“We thought about just leaving business decisions such as the setting of salaries to the free market, but gave up on it”
Really??? – But someone has to set them right? And you believe that a 3rd party with no knowledge of the transaction is better positioned to make the determination than the parties involved? How is that possible?
“So there are laws, to prevent predictable, stupid behavior. ”
The funny thing about people on the left is that they believe that government fiat can prevent bad things from happening in a cost effective manner. If you want a better free market solution take a look at Underwriters Laboratories.
“By this logic, there’s no reason we should have child labour laws, you realize.”
I do, and we shouldn’t. Or at least you could say they don’t mean anything anymore. Do you think if we took them off the books there would suddenly be a rush of children dropping out of 3rd grade to fill our manufacturing sweatshops which no longer exist? Child labor may be cheap, but it is terribly unproductive and has no value in a modern economy.
Guys, I live with a Canadian and I love her –– Canadians seem to be blessed with hearts of gold. But ya’ler so dern illiterate ‘bout economics.
Third-party certification has problems: namely, that there’s no real accountability on the part of the third party. Look at what happened with Moody’s or Standard and Poor’s bond ratings: everything got rated AAA, even when the ratings companies knew perfectly well that the bond issues were shoddy or unsecure, because if they didn’t give high ratings their clients would stop coming to them for certification. That doesn’t really happen with government regulation.
You think where child labour exists – and it’s still very prevalent throughout the global economy – it exists because people want children to work? No, it exists because additional income from child labour can help alleviate poverty on a short-term basis for a family unit.
And incidentally: there’s certainly enough poverty in the United States that child labour exists there right now, despite it being illegal. The Department of Labor investigates thousands of incidents every year. You really think that if it were legalized there wouldn’t be a dramatic increase? That’s just staggeringly naive – there’s always going to be a demand for labour that can be easily intimidated, and nobody can be more easily intimidated than children can.
MGK: You’re talking to what appears to be a libertarian subspecies of the right-wing genus. To them, what you’ve just said translates to : “Does it exist because people want children to work? No. It exists because people want children to work.”
I’ll set aside the question as to whether you adequately understand Mark Steyn. I don’t think you do, but you don’t seem prepared to reconsider your understanding, perhaps not now and–horrifying thought!–perhaps never in your lifetime. But as for malice, what’s wrong with it? It seems the capacity for malice can contribute to wellbeing, much as any other emotion can. I don’t know whether malice is the precise flavor of your own hatred, but this very post shows that you have considerable capacity for hatred. Really, your hatred is amazing, but I’m pleased you’re hateful, and it seems it would just be self-damaging to hide the truth from yourself.
Mike T.
I would be interested in hearing the argument that makes me a “person on the left.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benjamin_Disraeli)
Warning: there are lots of words before you get to the part about which party led the fight for occupational safety and health regulation.)
Notice that anti-discriminatory legislation doesn’t set wages in a vacuum. It does so based on what the employer pays other persons to do the same work. Society has a sovereign interest in preventing employers from intimidating intimidatable people.
For example, there is a long apprenticeship to become a wheelwright. The payoff is that wheelwrights are better paid than mere labourers. But Tinkers soon learn that, because they are despised by society, their employer won’t pay them like other wheelwrights.
So they don’t become wheelwrights. Then, when the dastardly French start a war, and we have to send a seige train off to the Low Countries, there aren’t as many skilled wheelwrights as there could have been.
We could leave the matter, somehow, to an independent body of wealthy, knowledgeable and well-connected insurance underwriters. Sometimes, that is actually useful. I don’t see it in this case, though. This is a case where the full power of the Crown is being brought to bear to limit the freedoms of an individual. Practical people have no problem with this, for this is a freedom is the freedom to be unjust, and it is to limit such freedoms that God gave humanity kings in the first place.
That said, though, there will be objections, as the recent events in the lower thirteen colonies demonstrate. Some Jonathan, filled to the brim with republican propaganda, will invoke “tyranny.” That action is necessary, he will admit. But since the Crown did it, it is wrong.
What then? He will propose that an indepedent underwriter should act, instead of a Minister of the Crown. What difference this should make is hardly clear. But we all know that a child will take exactly the same kind of chastisment, when administered by a mother, as kinder and gentler than when administered by a father.
Which is to say what is obvious anyway, that the Jonathan’s high ideals have more to do with adolescent rebellion than the world as it is.