Category: Updates

An Online Right To Be Forgotten? Ctd

May’s ruling in the EU Court of Justice upholding the “right to be forgotten” online is beginning to have predictably strange effects, such as causing Google to scrub from its European search results a seven-year-old blog post from the BBC:

The post was removed because someone who was discussed in it asked Google to “forget” them. In the original article, [BBC economics editor Robert] Peston only named one particular individual, Stan O’Neal, a former executive at Merrill Lynch. That narrows down who put in the request to Google with great ease.

Peston describes his post as a discussion of “how O’Neal was forced out of Merrill after the investment bank suffered colossal losses on reckless investments it had made.” The post did not outwardly attack O’Neal, nor was it “inadequate, irrelevant or no longer relevant,” which are the requirements set for being “forgotten.” This plays directly into fears that Google would allow illegitimate requests to slip through the cracks, “forgetting” search results that remain relevant, and undermining the freedom of journalism.

But Mario Aguilar thinks it was brilliant of Google to notify the BBC of this removal, effectively ensuring that it became news:

Oopsies Stan!

Looks like your dirty laundry is flapping in the wind all over again. And all because you tried to cover it up. Google’s response is a wonderful reaction to censorship and a triumph for transparency. It’d be better if nothing was getting de-indexed at all, but this is at least a delicious reminder that you can’t run away from your past on the internet. Nothing really goes away, and if you’re an idiot, you’ll pay the price forever.

Sooner or late, Drum figures, someone will come up with a way to effectively nullify the ruling:

I wonder if there’s a way to make this backfire? How hard would it be to create an automated process that figures out which articles Google is being forced to stuff down the memory hole? Probably not too hard, I imagine. And how hard would it then be to repost those articles in enough different places that they all zoomed back toward the top of Google’s search algorithm? Again, probably not too hard for a group of people motivated to do some mischief.

Update from a reader:

Update to the story here. Turns out the request came from a commenter to the article, not O’Neal himself.

Happy Second Fourth!

Today’s our national birthday, but, P.J. O’Rourke grumbles, we really should have been celebrating two days ago:

The Continental Congress declared independence from Britain on July 2nd. The 4th was simply when the Continental Congress approved the final wording of its independence declaration. If the 4th of July were the 2nd of July, it would have been on Wednesday this year. We could have taken a couple of days of family leave (which Washington prevents U.S. corporations from being required to provide) on either side of Wednesday and had a whole damn week go to parades, play backyard softball games, fire guns, ring bells, light bonfires, grill cheeseburgers, drink beer, and blow our fingers off with M-80s.

Update from a reader:

O’Rourke is right that our holiday should be a week – and there’s a historical reason. Only 12 of the 13 original colonies voted for independence on July 2. The final colony, New York, did not ratify the Declaration until July 9, a full week later. (We write about this in our book, Inside the Apple: A Streetwise History of New York City, and on our blog today.)

Why not celebrate from July 2 to July 9? Now that would be a party.

Toxic Butts, Ctd

A reader notes an unintended consequence of smoking bans:

It’s not hard to determine why there are more cigarette butts on the sidewalks than ever before. Thanks to the smoking bans in virtually all work places, restaurants and most bars, there are no more ashtrays available outside one’s home. So where else can that butt land? You certainly don’t want a smoldering cigarette butt in a garbage can. That’s a recipe for fire. And telling smokers, “Well, just don’t smoke until you get home” is simply unrealistic given the nature of nicotine addiction.

Update from a reader:

When I was in the Peace Corps my roommate smoked. One day we were standing outside and I noticed he finished a cigarette and wiggled the end of the filter between his fingers until the last bit of tobacco and rolling paper fell off. He then put the filter in his pocket. He did a lot of hiking and camping and didn’t like littering the place with stuff that would just sit there forever.

So there is one answer to your reader. Is it convenient? Probably not, but you know there are a lot of things that go along with this addiction. Compared to the inconvenience of lung cancer, emphysema, and heart disease, I don’t think storing the butts in your pocket until you can get to a trashcan is that much of a burden.

Another adds, “In the army we called this field stripping a cigarette.”

Good Luck Finding A Lesbian Bar In Portland

Alexis Clements ponders the decline of America’s “lesbian spaces”:

Two of the most stark examples are bars and feminist bookstores.

In the 1990s, there were literally 100 feminist bookstores in the U.S. Today there are 14. So in 20 years, they’ve almost disappeared. Then if you start to do any kind of research about lesbian bars, you see that they are also disappearing. Philly lost two of them. Chicago lost one. Portland doesn’t have one anymore. West Hollywood – one of the places many people consider to be one of the gayest areas in the United States – doesn’t have a lesbian bar anymore, and it had one of the oldest, the Palms. That’s gone now. …

A lot of people say, “Oh, well, there’s gay marriage now, so essentially queer people can assimilate into the larger culture; we don’t need places to go.” But for both political and romantic reasons, we still need to be able to spend time with people who we want to partner with or who we want to engage in political activities with. Those two things are in many ways core to a lot of lesbian and queer communities. Not every lesbian is a political activist, and not every political activist is queer, but the collision of politics and lesbian identity is longstanding and a very rich and important history.

Update from a reader:

I think that there are fewer lesbian bars because lesbians are much less at war, or at least high tension with straight men.

I’ve lived in Berkeley/Oakland since 1963, which has long been the lesbian’s lower profile mirror to San Francisco’s gay male community. In the ’70s through ’90s, the tough-ass-dyke-man-hater was a local fixture. At some point there was a shift, and the poster person for the lesbian community became much younger and less confrontive. Still tough, but not defined by anger towards males. This new model is also happy to show off her beauty, and less likely to buy into butch/femme sterotypes. I think that this generation doesn’t want to be beholden to a way that they are “supposed” to act.

Perhaps lesbian bars represent the “old” angry worldview. How does the saying go? “Living well is the best revenge”? From my bi-male standpoint, it looks like this generation’s largely having a great time of it, and in that sense is exacting their revenge quite well.

But I’d really like to hear from your lesbian readership. It’s a good question.

Why Not Just Provide The Pill Over The Counter? Ctd

A reader writes:

I have no problem with forms of the birth control pill being made an over-the-counter drug. Women are intelligent beings who can figure out how to use these drugs correctly, and the side effects from using birth control pills are less severe than those of other drugs currently sold over-the-counter.

That said, just selling a birth control pill over the counter wouldn’t make up for losing contraceptive coverage from health insurance. An IUD can cost upwards of $1,000 upfront for the exam and insertion. That’s a big chunk of change that many women can’t save up for. It also happens to be one of the most reliable forms of birth control because women don’t have to take a pill at the exact same time every day; once it’s in, you can largely forget about it until you want to take it out.

So pushing birth control as an OTC drug does not eliminate the need for women to have contraceptive methods covered on their health insurance.

Another speaks from personal experience to make the case “why birth control pills should not be sold over–the-counter”:

I took the pill on and off for about ten years when I was in my late teens and 20s. At first, it was prescribed by a general practitioner, and then by an elderly OB/GYN. After I married, I moved to Connecticut and needed to find a new OB. I went with the closest provider listed in my insurance booklet, which turned out to be a Planned Parenthood.

I have a history of migraine with aura.

I don’t get severe migraines as these things go, and I don’t get them frequently. Like 1/3 of migraine sufferers, however, I get weird symptoms that precede the headache – mine are visual and include flashes and zigzags of light, which is typical. According to a quick google search, 5-10% of women of childbearing age have migraine with aura, so this is hardly an exotic diagnosis.

The doctor at Planned Parenthood took the time to review my medical history. She started asking probing questions about having checked the box for “migraines” on my medical history form, which seemed bizarre to me. And then she told me she would not be renewing my prescription for the pill. While the absolute risk is still comparatively low, women who have a history of migraine with aura have a greatly increased risk of stroke if they take the combined pill (meaning the pill with both estrogen and progesterone; the vast majority of women on the pill take the combined pill).

I thought she was crazy until I went home and googled it, and she was absolutely correct. The WHO unequivocally states that women with a history of migraine with aura shouldn’t take the combined pill. Women with a history of migraine with aura can safely take progesterone-only versions of the pill, but those are less effective.

The pill is a drug. Drugs have side effects and risks. These risks are greater for some of us than others. When a drug is sold over the counter, people tend to assume the risks are minimal, and with the pill, this isn’t the case.

Update from a reader, who responds to that last paragraph:

So let’s put it behind the counter and have pharmacists dispense it. Thanks to credential creep, American pharmacists get almost as much training as doctors. Every drugstore has a licensed pharmacist but they have little practical authority to use that training. Their two main jobs are to catch doctor screw-ups and to waste your time waiting for them to check with you that yes, you have been on this medication for ten years.

Why not use the pill as a wedge to introduce the intermediate class of drugs between prescribed and OTC that most Western countries have? It’d eliminate a lot of unnecessary med-maintenance appointments with physicians, increasing capacity and lowering costs.

Toxic Butts

Of the cigarette variety:

By one estimate, around two-thirds of the 6 trillion cigarettes smoked worldwide every year end up being dropped, flicked or dumped into the environment – around 750,000 tonnes in total. … Used cigarette butts are not just pieces of non-biodegradable plastic. They also contain the carcinogens, nicotine and toxins found in all tobacco products. We have found that one cigarette butt soaked in a litre of water for 96 hours leaches out enough toxins to kill half of the fresh or salt water fish exposed to them.

And Thomas Novotny adds this shocking revelation: “We have also found that the tobacco industry has thoroughly distanced itself from any sense of responsibility.” The industry initially created filters for comfort but misled people into thinking they made the cigs less harmful:

Filters were originally designed to keep loose tobacco out of smokers’ mouths, not to protect their health. So they are really a marketing tool. They seem to reassure smokers that they are doing something to limit the health consequences of smoking and thus may discourage them from quitting. They also make smoking more palatable and make it easier for children to start. The ventilation provided by the filter may reduce the tar and nicotine yields of cigarettes as measured by a machine, but smokers compensate by changing their puffing behaviour and inhaling more deeply.

For these reasons, filters may be considered a health hazard. If their purpose is simply to market cigarettes and make it easier to get addicted, they should be banned.

Or maybe just better labeled? Update from a reader:

Discarded butts is such a pet peeve of mine. Many people who are otherwise more than decent enough not to throw any other sort of litter onto the ground will casually toss their cigarette butts anywhere without a second thought.

I’ve got a young daughter who’s just emerging from the “pick up anything you can find and put it in your mouth” phase, so putting her down on the ground to run around is like tossing her in a cigarette butt minefield in so many public places. In front of a restaurant, on almost any sidewalk, even in a public park, butts are laying around everywhere. She doesn’t know any better, but I sure as hell don’t want those filthy things in her hands or her mouth.

Tweets Of The Day

It appears, according to McKay Coppins, that Bobby Jindal is ready to ride the Hobby Lobby horse into the primaries, in Kilgore’s eyes, “becoming the champion of dispossessed theocrats rebranded as victims of persecution”:

Tony Perkins, president of the Family Research Council and a longtime Jindal ally, praised him as one of the few prospective 2016 candidates with an unimpeachable record on social issues, and a personal life that exemplifies conservative religious values. As an example, Perkins noted that Jindal and his wife, Supriya, were the first couple in the country to enter into a “covenant marriage,” a special sort of legal union designed by Perkins in Louisiana when he was a state lawmaker that makes divorce more difficult. “His foundation [is] really centered on his Christian faith,” Perkins said. “Talk is cheap, but the walk is where you find the worth of an individual. And he is walking.”

Sprinting, I’d say.

Update from a reader, who spells out something that casual readers might have missed:

You might want to clarify in your post on the Jindal tweets that he is dead wrong about this being a First Amendment issue.

As you have covered before, the case was explicitly decided under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which was enacted precisely because the Supreme Court held in Smith that the First Amendment does not cover situations like this.  The Hobby Lobby decision is not based on the First Amendment. From the last paragraph of Justice Alito’s opinion:

The contraceptive mandate, as applied to closely held corporations, violates RFRA. Our decision on that statutory question makes it unnecessary to reach the First Amendment claim raised by Conestoga and the Hahns.

Or, as Justice Ginsburg put it in her dissent:

The Court does not pretend that the First Amendment’s Free Exercise Clause demands religion-based accommodations so extreme, for our decisions leave no doubt on that score. See infra, at 6–8. Instead, the Court holds that Congress, in the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993 (RFRA), 42 U. S. C. §2000bb et seq., dictated the extraordinary religion-based exemptions today’s decision endorses.

On That Religious Freedom Question …

Demonstrators Protest Over The Introduction Of A Ban On Women Covering Their Faces In France

It might be worth asking various figures on the evangelical right if they are outraged by the decision today by the European Court of Human Rights to uphold the French ban on the public wearing of the full-face veil:

At the European Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg, France, judges said the ban was a legitimate attempt to preserve the norms of France’s diverse society and did not infringe on Europe’s Convention on Human Rights. The court was ruling on a case brought by an unidentified Frenchwoman who said the law, first passed in 2010 and implemented in 2011, was discriminatory and violated her freedom of conscience.

And here’s a rather strong case that the issue is one of genuine personal conscience and conviction:

In a statement summarizing the ruling on its website, the court said the woman “is a devout Muslim and in her submissions she said that she wore the burqa and niqab in accordance with her religious faith, culture and personal convictions … The applicant also emphasized that neither her husband nor any other member of her family put pressure on her to dress in this manner. She added that she wore the niqab in public and in private, but not systematically. She was thus content not to wear the niqab in certain circumstances but wished to be able to wear it when she chose to do so. Lastly, her aim was not to annoy others but to feel at inner peace with herself,” the statement said.

For the record, I oppose the ban as an infringement on religious freedom of expression – and always have. I can see how other factors could be cited in favor of the ban – notably that the full veil hurts the possibility of “open interpersonal relationships, which, by virtue of an established consensus, formed an indispensable element of community life within the society in question.” But there are broader issues involved in Hobby Lobby as well: the government’s interest in providing affordable health insurance for the population, the health of women, the reduction in abortions, etc. And the niqab question affects directly only around 2,000 women, compared with Hobby Lobby’s theoretical impact on over half of employees in America.

So let’s hear it from America’s religious right: are you consistent about religious liberty and will do all you can to protect Muslim freedom of religious expression – or admit, you’re only about asserting your own Christian identity and no one else’s.

Somehow, I suspect few of them will be put on the spot like that. But they should be, don’t you think?

The Dish has covered this issue before – read the full thread here. Update from a reader:

This book is the best one on the French ban. It allows one to understand culturally why this ban is so French.  I just wonder about all those French feminists who are trying to save their Muslim sisters from the “horror” of the veil realize that now they have just prevented these women from being able to leave their homes.

(Photo: Two women wearing Islamic niqab veils stand outside the French Embassy during a demonstration on April 11, 2011 in London, England. France has become the first country in Europe to ban the wearing of the veil. By Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images)

Hobby Lobby: Your Thoughts

Readers are far less sanguine about the ruling than I was. One writes:

You should be appalled, not reassured, by the Supreme Court’s ruling on Hobby Lobby precisely because it’s such a narrow ruling. The Court has ruled that only the religious views of abortion opponents count. The views of other religions do not count – Jehovah’s Witnesses (no blood transfusions), Orthodox Jews (no vaccinations on the Sabbath), Christian Scientists (no doctors, period). The narrowness of this ruling not only exposes it as the most blatantly political since Bush v. Gore, it is also the most blatantly Catholic – the result of having five Catholic conservatives in the majority.

Another reader thinks the narrowness of the decision is misleading:

I’m surprised that language in the majority opinion is read so credulously. The underlying reasoning in an opinion is more important than bald statements like “this opinion doesn’t mean that our reasoning can be taken to its logical conclusion.” Yes it does. That’s why we keep winning handily every time Lawrence v. Texas and its progeny (Windsor) comes up. Lawrence explicitly said “this case is not about gay marriage.” Scalia’s dissent howled that it in fact does – and he was right. Lawrence led directly to Windsor and every court that has considered the issue has cited Windsor (and its predecessor, Lawrence) for the proposition that marriage equality is a constitutional mandate. Pretending that Alito’s one throwaway sentence in this opinion somehow immunizes the reasoning from being applied to other areas looks to me like a refusal to grapple with the actual reasoning of the opinion.

About those other areas:

All the “reassuring language from Alito” you quoted specifically says that his opinion only addresses the contraceptive mandate because mandatory coverage of blood transfusions and vaccines weren’t a part of the case. He didn’t actually shut the door on another closely held company making a RFRA claim that mandatory coverage of blood transfusions or vaccines abridges religious freedom. If anything, he’s swung the door wide open for these kinds of cases. I could easily see a company make the argument that a person getting HIV is being punished by God for sinful behavior and treatments like Truvada abrogate punishment for that.

And the ramifications could continue:

I’m no lawyer, but I don’t understand why the objection to the compulsion of a small-business owner who is also a Jehovah’s Witness to provide transfusion coverage (or the compulsion of a Scientologist to provide his employees mental health coverage) would be any less legitimate.

Another reader:

What happens to women who take birth control for noncontraceptive reasons? Should Hobby Lobby be required to comply with the law for these women since they are not violating any religious beliefs? If so, would a woman have to promise Hobby Lobby she won’t use birth control for contraception to get covered? How would that work exactly? And by that same logic, is Hobby Lobby then exempt from having to provide other medications that have contraception as a side effect? Like chemo, for example?

But Hobby Lobby never opposed most kinds of contraception, including the pill. As we noted earlier:

The company objects to paying for morning-after pills and inter-uterine devices, but freely provides insurance that covers tubal ligation, birth control pills, condoms, diaphragms and contraception delivered via a patch or ring inserted into the cervix. More than 80% of all contraception users in the U.S. rely on these methods.

Update from a reader, who catches a typo in that excerpt from Kate Pickert:

Vaginated Americans – even the worst spellers among us – would note the inherent comic hopelessness of any such things as “inter-uterine devices” before letting that misprint meet the pixels of day (it should be “intrauterine” of course). Powerful as sisterhood gets, there is no device to link us up at the uteri.

Heh. Another reader:

I see others have already tread this ground, but I fail to see how Alito’s “caution” that

this decision concerns only the contraceptive mandate and should not be understood to hold that all insurance-coverage mandates, e.g., for vaccinations or blood transfusions, must necessarily fall if they conflict with an employer’s religious beliefs.

… is in any way reassuring, because of the underlying principle that this decision, and Citizens United represents. It has granted limited liability corporate entities individual rights. The fact that a company is closely held or publicly traded should be immaterial; a corporation is not an individual, and therefore shouldn’t be granted rights ascribed to individuals by our constitution.

In fact, the only way the Religious Restoration of Freedom act applies to Hobby Lobby or any other corporation is if you explicitly decide that when Congress wrote a law protecting individuals, they implicitly meant corporations, too. But Congress doesn’t write laws that way; they know the difference between these two.

But if that’s the way that so-called conservative jurisprudence wants to go, they also need to consider this: If there’s no separation between the individual religious beliefs of business owners/controllers and their operations, why should there be any separation of liability. I’d like to see the legal logic that says you can have one without forfeiting the other.

Another:

I share your view of the opinion.  Although I haven’t read the whole thing yet, the holding is much narrower than it might have been.  It may also be a Trojan horse for the shareholders of corporations like Hobby Lobby.  As things stood before the opinion, shareholders enjoyed nearly absolute immunity from liability provided by the shield of the corporate entity.  The fundamental exception has been in cases where a corporation, usually as a result of commingling of funds, can be deemed the “alter ego” of its shareholders, or a group of shareholders.

What happens now when a corporation, through its policies and actions, becomes liable as a result of its execution of the religious biases of its shareholders?  Does the corporation become the alter ego for that limited purpose?  The full opinion probably carves out an exception to the exception to provide ongoing confidence in the integrity of the corporate entity theory. However, I think a creative plaintiff might argue that the justification underlying the holding (in certain closely-held corporations religious belief of the owners may be attributed to the corporation for purpose of compliance with certain statutory mandates) opens the door to liability.  In availing itself of a special, statutory immunity by virtue of assuming the religious beliefs of its owners, the corporation AND the owners become liable for torts arising from actions taken in the name of those religious beliefs.

Who knows?  Stranger things have happened in the wake of “narrow” opinions.

No Place To Sleep, By Design, Ctd

grate

A reader notices another way that architects are deterring homeless sleeping:

Glad to see this trend getting some air, and some criticism. When we were living in Astoria, I noted the appearance of some curious structures above the M/R subway lines. I assumed they were combination vents and benches, but it turns out they are effectively cowlings or battens placed above the existing tunnel vents, designed to keep floodwaters from penetrating the tunnels and disabling the trains.

They are undeniably elegant – and I appreciate the MTA’s choice of elegance over mere utility – but the undulating vanes were also deliberately peppered with raised sections that don’t affect sitting but make lying down painful. For the homeless – and Astoria has many, including for a time Cadillac Man, who wrote about his life for Esquire – the typical flush-to-the-sidewalk vents had for decades been a source of warmth in the winter months. These new structures struck me then as bitter symbols of the new New York: increasingly wealthy and stylish – but in equal measure increasingly hostile, by choice, to those who didn’t catch the cresting wave.

Update from a reader:

In that picture, those metal bumps are used to prevent skateboarders from grinding the benches. Maybe they also prevent sleeping, I am not sure, but where I live they were installed as anti-skateboard devices. I bet if there are handrails near those benches they also have metal caps on them to prevent grinding.

(Photo by Sean Hopkins)