#essayideas — Public Fediverse posts
Live and recent posts from across the Fediverse tagged #essayideas, aggregated by home.social.
-
I wish all law students understood that it is impossible to understand what the law is and simply apply it without implicating what you think. If you have identified a new situation (new facts) and suspect a preexisting law may apply to it, the law does not actually apply to it unless and until someone says it does. When you say that it does, you are changing the law to encompass those new facts. And you are being an annoying little shit when you try to deny that this is happening and plead objectivity. #EssayIdeas
-
Considering that the process is a big part of the punishment in the American system, the prosecutor is an evolution of the executioner. And of the thumbscrew-turning professional torturer. Like, it used to be someone's job to hang, draw, and quarter others or to cut off their heads. Exactly the same energy now that that person's job is to present arguments to courts that cops are allowed to violate people's rights or that criminal defendants simply must be subject to indignities as release restrictions. #EssayIdeas
-
"I can't work because my software cannot reach the licensing server because AWS is down" is literally deadweight loss to The Economy (TM) attributable solely to copyright. #EssayIdeas
-
The literal first case the Supreme Court ever heard oral argument and issued an opinion for (West v. Barnes) was a case where they threw the case out on procedural fuckery grounds that made it more difficult for people to access courts.
The first one. #EssayIdeas
-
Legal education literally created for itself the same problem that economics education did. Namely, they allowed their 101-style classes to be coopted for baseless, right-wing propaganda through unstated simplifying assumptions. Now they're both all Surprised Pikachu when professional lawyers and economists have no fucking idea how to evaluate problems without absurd conservative bias and also champing at the bit to praise basic knowledge of their field (taught by those classes) as necessary cultural knowledge for everyone.
In this way, they poison not only lawyers and economists (some of the worst people alive), they poison the broader interpersonal culture itself. #EssayIdeas
-
This is why harm reduction politics frequently doesn't even reduce harm. By fixating on absolute levels of harm like "sentencing alternatives mean fewer people in prison," they miss the fact that their harm reduction policy is not designed to reduce fucking harm going forward. In that example, it just means more people are subject to the criminal punishment system and private companies can profit from the draconian monitoring/torture devices that courts require people on probation to use. #EssayIdeas
-
Accessibility needs that are not accessibility aids.
A device that creates structural inequality for other people (and perhaps yourself) is not an accessibility aid. It may be true that someone needs to use it for material reasons, and that need may be tied to a disability, but structural inequality is not aid.
Prime example is the car. An accessibility need prompted by living in car-first infrastructure does not retroactively make the car an accessibility aid. Indeed, most people who discuss the car that way have disabilities that cause the majority of people like them to be unable to drive at all.
The problem with identifying the building blocks of fundamental inequality into our concept of aid is that people who have accessibility needs begin to identify with the dominating group (which does not care about accessibility) through the lens of their own oppression. When this happens, it becomes impossible to discuss accessibility as a positive force for change in that context because these people with accessibility needs will prioritize their present comforts over long-term liberation that they are not in a position to imagine.
A world built to accommodate accessibility needs is not one in which people weaponize their accessibility needs against each other. It is one in which we have designed the world to accommodate everyone. Structural inequality is not accommodation.
-
I'll never stop being lowkey mad at people of color who advocate for copyright in the name of equity with whites, tbh.
Copyright suppresses access to works by people of color. When the public domain moves to 1929 in the in two weeks, we will STILL be at just the beginning of the Harlem Renaissance. In the meantime, incalculable numbers of works by people of color have been destroyed through lack of reprinting, and they have become less culturally relevant because they cannot be shared.
And the presentist lens they want to use to ignore that problem doesn't even help them "compete" within the monolithically white publishing industries. The system does not work for you because IT IS DESIGNED TO WORK AGAINST YOU. #EssayIdeas
-
Everyone says Article 28 of the UDHR fails to articulate an enforceable right, but the USSR delegate articulated a pretty clear one: people have a right to a government that is making changes to be in line with the UDHR. This can be critiqued because the UDHR pretty clearly reflects the ideals of a post-WW2 liberal democracy's elite class. However, taken for what it is, it seems to entitle people to progress on missions like abolishing slavery and ensuring a standard of living. A state's failure to pursue the UDHR does violate an articulable right, and its condemnation should be more severe if it is not even looking into the problem. But it really ought to be used only in favor of the few real universal principles within the document, not to impose liberal democracy on the world any more than it already does. (This one would probably be a little lib-brained, but it could be a little funny.) #EssayIdeas
-
LMAO, the Commission on Human Rights initially included a Thirteenth Amendment exception in its abolition of slavery. They took it out for the final version. So... What's that mean? #3L #EssayIdeas
-
The reason that legal scholarship arguing that rights against the government don't exist isn't interesting has little to do with the interpretation of the Constitution/text. It's not interesting because it's not funny. It's not funny because it is, by definition, punching down by arguing for state supremacy against people. Good legal scholarship is stand-up comedy and the joke is civil rights, not state supremacy. #EssayIdeas
-
A survey of what "A Theory of Law" by Orin Kerr means based entirely upon citations to it, not its text.
"Symposium: A Theory of Law" #EssayIdeas
-
The response to Exclusion from cleanliness (creativity) (whiteness) is not to join the conspiracy. The fact that no human can generate cleanliness means that other traits must exist as proxies signalling cleanliness. The most obvious is, of course, whiteness. The next most obvious is the generation of genres of expression that appeal to white people.
But, ultimately, the pursuit of cleanliness by those who do not come to it earnestly (some people just do like to make "white art" and that is OK) is doomed because their existence within the creative community is and will forever remain contingent on remaining "clean." Refraining from the parts of themselves that will give away that they are human just like the rest of us. And the further away from the ideal they are, the fewer mistakes they will be allowed to make before they are OUT.
In short, creativity is not about valuing the products of people's minds or the artistic spirit. It is about the concentration of resources both cultural and material among a class of people who believe that they generate the best art.
People outside of that group—anyone who recognizes at any level that human beings are not clean—must abandon the concept of copyright because it is a compromise with a conspiracy to destroy them.
-
The concept of creativity as a form of cleanliness. When put that way, it is obvious that that which people do and call creativity is never creativity. The products of human minds are messy and divergent and deeply intertwined with everything people (the author and the audience) have previously experienced. Expression is messy.
Creativity is an ideal that the human could never possibly achieve and the only reason we cling to it is the same reason that white people cling to whiteness. Those who value their expression over others must conspire together to create a justification for their heirarchy. #EssayIdeas
-
The world is not ready for my take that white supremacy is a species of copyright buttressed by the history of disqualifying Black people from authorship because Black people did not possess "true imagination" and the present of demonizing plagiarists for the same reason.
If a work does not fit within the regime of creative regulation, it is an infringement and must be destroyed.
If a being does not fit within the regime of cultural regulation, they are an unperson and must be destroyed.
-
The history of preventing copyright restriction for works from foreign countries definitely has the specter of race and discrimination associated with it.
HOWEVER, the loudest voices in favor of international copyright were always world-famous white authors who felt that they were losing out on money they had "earned" via *checks notes* other people's labor, producing the copies abroad. Meanwhile, these authors were never in any danger of not having enough money and, in fact, tended to tour countries like the United States, where they had fans willing to pay to see them in part because of access to cheap copies.
I think international copyright is one of those times when fixating on perceptions of jingoism rather than labor tends to hide important questions. Most importantly, there is absolutely no reason to presume that intellectual "property" must be treated analogously with physical goods in discussions of trade. If a society wants writing to be a viable career choice, then the fact that a writing career is unsustainable without that writer becoming a force in GLOBAL INTER-STATE TRADE just reveals the fact the state has failed to provide a sustainable livelihood for writers.
In other words, we need to stop asking "why shouldn't someone in China pay for the book I wrote?" and start asking "why doesn't the state's plan for paying workers (including writers) actually provide enough for us to live?" The person in China never promised you a livelihood and, in fact, has no duty to provide you with money. Your state's economy (rich people's feelings) has failed you because it was never designed to sustain you. #2L #EssayIdeas
-
To care about attribution is a function of believing that you have the capacity to meaningfully track attribution. There's a reason the earliest known use of the word goes back to a Roman aristocrat—the field was smaller and he believed his power ought to compel respect. It was the same for teachers who controlled students access to books; they had the capacity to know most of what their students had read and the power to punish.
But there are centuries between then and the "perfect" record-keeping of today. Now everyone has the capacity to track attribution and we're supposed to pretend that everyone has the power to compel respect.
Which they don't. Nor should they.
The world is not a spreadsheet where the more like a spreadsheet it is the more efficiently respectful it has become. #EssayIdeas
-
Whiteness is a title of nobility forbidden under the Constitution. I see it and refuse to recognize its privileges.
Slavery is an attainder. See 1855 Convention of Radical Political Abolitionists.
-
The logic of Mutually Assured Destruction hits different when you do not believe any particular organization ought to continue existing.
If Russia were to destroy the United States, it would be the end of the United States, but it would not be the end of the world. The presence of nuclear weapons in the United States will not save a single life if another country fires at us.
So why does the United States have nuclear weapons?
Their only other function is to complicate the politics of revolution and dissolution. They are an explicit threat to all free people within and without the borders—you must not break off because these can be used against a revolution and any political enemies left behind will control the weapons that lie the areas you no longer claim.
So why would a society of free people ever possess nuclear weapons, even as a "defense" measure? Nuclear weapons are a defense in the same sense that cancer is a defense.
-
How can the goal/purpose of a society change if the founding documents which set out its goals must remain the same?
Thesis: It is not meaningful to say a society has changed unless it has started fresh, taking the big-picture lessons of the previous society and dedicating itself to specific new goals.
For example, the Zapatistas were the first revolutionary insurgency that declared that women have fundamental rights as part of its founding documents. The EZLN was and remains imperfect, but they have made significant strides towards eliminating the patriarchy in the last 30 years because eliminating the patriarchy is EXPLICITLY ONE OF THEIR FOUNDING GOALS. The society which succeeds the Zapatistas (as all societies must one day fall) will ideally take women's fundamental equality as a given and focus instead on a new issue laid out as its goal. A society which does not have women's equality as a founding goal will not be designed to solve that problem.
A society cannot be created to progress on all fronts at the same time. That said, a new one should expand social progress beyond people are comfortable with at the time of its founding. If that is not pursued, there will be no growth either.
Uultimately, we should promote this frequent iteration as a part of an anarchistic praxis. Just like people mature through stages, it is counterproductive/counterrevolutionary to arrest that development. To arrest that development in the name of "progress" is nothing but stagnation for the sake of benefiting people unfairly prejudiced by the current social organization.
Moreover, if a successor society forgets the lessons of its predecessors, then the cycle can occur again to revive that progressive atavism.
(But, to be clear, believing there MUST be a constitution—let alone the assertion that a constitution requires the existence of a state—is cringe.)
-
The intersection of "Property is an enclosed good that the owner understands" and "Art is a consumption good that consumers don't understand." #EssayIdeas
-
Compare #copyright not to landlordism, but to housing covenants. #EssayIdeas
-
Anyway, the third-party doctrine's incompatibility with decentralized social media is yet another reason that it is cringe and should be abolished. The new standard should be that officers should be limited to investigative tools at their disposal in 1789.* The compromise standard should be a reasonable expectation that a person or entity possesses that data. #EssayIdeas
* (i.e., abolish cops)
-
The next stage of fiction writing after post-modern (or whatever was after that, idc) is the "Last Jedi"-fication of franchise fiction. Corporations and their privileged authors control basically every series that exists for wide-appeal and their One Trick at this point is deliberately putting out a divisive lore update that splits the fan base. People who are less "dedicated" fall off, but people who stick around are roped in even tighter because enjoying the divisive change becomes a point of pride.
Meanwhile, these stories shouldn't be monopolized by corporations and their privileged authors at all. Media corporations stand at the nexus of copyright maximalism, fandom identity, and capitalism. Those are the ingredients of the current age. #EssayIdeas
(The latest victim of this is Doctor Who, obv.)
-
Resisting conceptions of plagiarism as one act. Plagiarism is a craft. It is a category of acts describable as "unattributed copying" in the same sense that joining fabric with thread is "sewing" or caring for plants is "gardening." Within sewing there are many constituent acts like pressing and interfacing and pattern drafting. Within plagiarism, there is all the forms of copying which refer directly to the work (wholesale, patch writing, potluck), but there is also a whole other subcategory of acts which take place outside the work which a full understanding of plagiarism as a phenomenon must encompass. And within that subcategory of extrinsic acts, there are acts which are exhibited in partnership with living others (conferring, sharing, discussing, brainstorming), and there are acts which are are primarily solitary (admiration, emulation). But everything one could say about the partnerships with others could properly be said about the solitary ones, too, because what is plagiarism of (e.g. ancient) works but partnership with someone who is not with us? To commune, often, with the dead? #EssayIdeas
-
The complaint that "stories are brands now" is only bad because those stories are ALSO restricted by copyright, which means people can't compete in that (let's say) product category or genre.
Sure, Star Wars can be a genre to itself and Disney can have a Star Wars franchise. Who fucking cares?
The problem is that nobody else can support themselves by writing in that genre without a monopolist's permission. #EssayIdeas
-
Is licensing a work to someone else under the Copyright Act commercial speech protected by the First Amendment? In the sense that money is speech under Buckley v. Valeo? In the sense that 303 Creative could discriminate against who she would license to based on sexual orientation? (In 303, they stipulated to the idea that the websites were "expressive" and "tailored," but perhaps it would be different if it was purely a licensed copy that the customer customized themself?)
-
If you believe a proper government ought to include an administrative state, I think you also need to confront your implicitly colonial beliefs in sovereignty and the legitimacy of state-defined borders. That is, the idea that areas and the people who live there may be claimed, or that the fact that you don't remember the act of those people being claimed implies that the claim remains valid for all time.
