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The Female Party

“Nearly two-thirds of all Democrats are women; here we see the much-discussed gender gap as less than half of the Republicans are female.” (Maisel, American Political Parties and Elections, 2016)

From same source: “In a Gallup poll conducted in June 2015, 31 percent [of Americans] identified themselves as Democrats, 25 percent as Republicans, and 41 percent as independents.”

Assuming the ratios for party membership stand also for people who “identify as” (as a matter of fact I see no reason, no explanatory factor why both ratios should be significantly different), we’ve got the highest proportion of males among “independents.” Independent, therefore, sounds a lot like males who cannot identify with party politics.

According to my calculations, the figures are (source says, in the first quote above, “nearly two third,” and “less than half” [meaning “not significantly less,” I believe, otherwise the source is saying nothing of quantitative value], so these figures are approximations [also because 31+25+41 doesn’t add up to 100 percent]):

20.6 percent of the American population are female Dem;
12.5 female Rep;
13.6 female independents;
10.3 male Dem;
12.5 male Rep;
27.3 male independents.

By order of magnitude: male independent (27.3) > female Dem (20.6) > female independent (13.6) > male & female Rep (12.5 twice) > male Dem (10.3).

There are twice as many Democratic women as Democratic men in the USA. There is an equal number of Republican men and women. And there are twice as many independent men as independent women. These imbalances, except in the case of the Republican party, are in dire need of an explanation. (The “gender gap” explains nothing, especially considering the absence of imbalance in one category.)

You can check my calculations are right in this quick way: 20.6=2(10.3) “there are twice as many Democratic women as Democratic men,” which is the same as “(Nearly) two-thirds of all Democrats are women,” since if you take 9, two thirds of 9 is 6, one third is 3, and 6=2(3).

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There are no manufacturers of corpora delicti

Abstract: The claim that gun manufacturers are treated differently than other manufacturers is unsubstantiated, in contract, consumer protection, and tort law. Arguments for gun control often overlook a general principle of law that may be encapsulated in the words “There are no manufacturers of corpora delicti.”

i

“New York Will Allow People to Sue Gun Manufacturers for Violence.” Cuomo was elected at the wrong election, in fact he wanted to be a judge. Now he is governor and he thinks he can tell courts what their decisions should be?

There already were trials against arms manufacturers, notably after Sandy Hook. But also there is the federal Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act. Adoption of the act was obviously intended as a shield against the bad faith of Second Amendment opponents who want to hold arms manufacturers liable not for failing to deliver as stipulated but on the contrary for complying with business regulations and contract stipulations.

Example: “The Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act shields the gun industry from nearly all civil liability for the dangers their products pose. With nearly every American industry and product, civil liability can be used as an important check on irresponsible manufacturers and sellers—but not the gun industry.” (Giffords Law Center: To prevent gun violence)

A gun manufacturer is liable if he sells a defective, hazardous gun, like any other manufacturer. What the opponents want is to make the manufacturers liable for weapons that function as stipulated in contracts and according to reasonable safety expectations, and under the rule of law there can be no such liability in this world.

Opponents talk of “dangerous products” as if the aim of a weapon were not, precisely, to be dangerous (in order to deter aggression and crime). The dangerous products of contract law are products which use is beneficial besides their dangerousness, so the category cannot as such apply to guns, which benefice lies in their very dangerousness, their purposeful dangerousness. Dangerous guns as to contract law are defective guns which use presents a danger to the user mainly; there is no liability regarding the gun’s normal danger to other people (to whom the gun is dangerous on purpose, in case they need to be deterred).

The trials that courts have examined and will continue to examine no matter what governor Cuomo says about it are cases of normal liability. But opponents want to create a new judicial category that cannot exist.

ii

A gun is a deterrent and as such it is dangerous. It is dangerous as such.

You need explosives to drill tunnels. Explosives are “dangerous products” as to tort law because you need them to drill tunnels and at the same time their use is dangerous. Therefore liability might be involved when the danger turns out to cause injury. That is to say, when you use explosives, normally you don’t cause injury, you only open a tunnel.

On the other hand, when you use a gun, basically you harm or kill someone and–mind you–that’s the expected outcome of the lawful use of the gun (self-defense). Generally speaking you don’t need to use the guns you own because owning them is a sufficient deterrent most of the times.

Everyone (except a few “law centers”) thus sees that guns are not the usual dangerous products of tort law, as the danger guns pose is the very aim of their lawful ownership and use.

Since opponents to the right to bear arms wanted to remain blind to such crystal-clear distinctions, the legislator felt compelled to pass the Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act, in order to prevent complacent courts to call guns “dangerous” and hold manufacturers liable as if we were dealing with explosives needed to open tunnels, which would be a devious way to suppress the Second Amendment, emptying it out, without due constitutional amendment process.

iii

Just let me know if you have ever heard of a manufacturer held liable for damages caused by the unlawful use of his products. This is what opponents to the right to bear arms want for gun manufacturers.

They say: ‘’When products cause damages, manufacturers are liable. Guns kill people, so gun manufacturers must be held liable.’’ This is nonsense. It is when their products are used in a lawful expected way and yet causing damage, due to a defect, that manufacturers may be held liable. If on the other hand someone kills another one with say a screwdriver, the manufacturer cannot be held liable for the loss of one’s life.

With guns the lawful and the unlawful uses both have the same outcome: injury or death of people (leaving aside such uses as hunting and shooting sports). When people kill others with guns unlawfully, the manufacturer is not liable. And when someone kills another lawfully, in self-defense, then his gun worked as expected. There can be no trial unless someone needed to fire a gun and it did not work as expected.

iv

“I’ve heard of pharmaceutical companies being prosecuted for not making it hard enough to open their packages to keep the content from candy-seeking children.“

The suits my interlocutor talks about are normal liability cases, what one may expect, not necessarily what one may reasonably expect, it depends on the claims, but what one may expect within the boundaries of the rule of law. What the opponents to the right to bear arms are up to is quite different, it isn’t possible to give them reason without violating the consistency of legal principles.

Manufacturers, like the pharmaceutical companies in the example, are expected to deliver reasonably safe products–gun manufacturers too and guns have safety locks.

In the same way that you cannot sue (win a suit against) a pharmaceutical company when someone uses their medicines to deliberately poison another person to death, you cannot sue gun manufacturers for the unlawful shooting of innocent people. There’s no exception to the principle that I know or can think of.

A product turned tool of crime, a part of corpus delicti, shifts to quite another sphere. There is no “manufacturer” of that “new” object. There are no manufacturers of corpora delicti because crime is in criminal intention (mens rea) and there is nothing a manufacturer could do to prevent people from having criminal intentions. A manufacturer can improve the technicalities of his products as well as consumer information about the products’ potential hazards so that their use is as safe as possible, but his action cannot reach further than his products, that is, he has no control over people’s lives. (The impact of marketing and advertising is an entirely different issue and here we do not examine the prospects of suing manufacturers for their advertisements, only the prospects of suing them for “violence” as in the New York statute.)

Reminder: “The five elements of a crime. (1) Actus reus–The guilty act (2) Mens rea–The guilty mind (3) Concurrence–The coexistence of (i) an act in violation of the law and (ii) a culpable mental state (4) Causation–The concurrence of mind and act must produce (5) Harm.”

That leaves open tort litigation against gun manufacturers if the shooter is declared insane and criminally irresponsible. Perhaps, because then the shooting is not a crime. But then again, a manufacturer has no influence over people’s state of mind; here insanity cannot be distinguished from criminal intent. What could be argued is that gun manufacturers have an influence over the whole nation’s state of mind, making it violent, but this kind of reasoning cannot be used in judicial proceedings, which bear on individual cases, and may be food for the legislator’s thought qua legislator subject to the Constitution. (If such reasoning could be used in a court of law, that would excuse all violent criminals.)

v

One cannot sue (win a suit against) manufacturers for tort damages when a crime is committed with one of their products. This is what opponents to the right to bear arms push for. They push for their reform not by saying they want all manufacturers to be suable for damages when crimes are committed with their products but by saying they want the general law of torts applied to gun manufacturers as it is to any other manufacturer, but the truth is that gun manufacturers are already within the general law and if we were to give reason to the opponents to the right to bear arms we would make gun manufacturers liable in situations where the other manufacturers are not.

As to someone’s claim that “you can sue anyone for tort damages,” the opponents themselves are not so sure, as shown in the recent news “New York Will Allow People to Sue Gun Manufacturers for Violence.” A bill–or whatever state or local act–is needed in their eyes.

Another bill is the federal Protection of Lawful Commerce in Arms Act (2005) “that protects firearms manufacturers and dealers from being held liable when crimes have been committed with their products.” There was no need of such a bill because the described protection is a necessary consequence of foundational notions of law, is a general unwritten principle which we encapsulate in the words “There are no manufacturers of corpora delicti.”

As gun manufacturers cannot be held responsible in situations where other manufacturers are not without violating the general principle that there are no manufacturers of corpora delicti, no legislative body or court is granted the constitutional power to make such a move. If guns are to be treated in the overriding fashion that opponents want, it has to be through constitutional amendment, probably not only by removal of the Second Amendment but also by allowing expressly tort suits against manufacturers for the unlawful use of their products, or by forbidding individuals to carry guns.

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Ladies and gentlemen, the Bishop of Stockholm. Complete with cassock, mitre and crosier.

“Eva Brunne is the first openly lesbian bishop of a mainstream church in the world and the first bishop of the Church of Sweden to be in a registered same-sex partnership.” (Wikipedia) (2009-2019)

ii

Archbishop Antje Jackelén, primate of the Church of Sweden. “The first female archbishop,” since 2014 strongly dedicated to apparel tradition.

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Taney

They blame Chief Justice Taney (Scott v. Sandford, 1857) for “seeing slavery in the Constitution” but if slavery was not in the Constitution, why did slaveowners and the Southern States ratify it? You had to convince them that slavery was in the Constitution to obtain their ratification, and if you turned out to be convincing then it probably is because it is true that slavery was in the Constitution, even if you did not believe it yourself and thought you were lying to slaveowners.

I disagree with late (conservative failed nominee to the Supreme Court) Robert Bork: A constitutional amendment was indeed necessary to end slavery in the United States, and Taney was a correct interpret of the Constitution.

Picture: Taney statue removed from Maryland state house (Aug 2017).

(For a discussion of Bork’s views, see Law 8.)

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Charged For
(Name a Crime, not a Freedom)

Former highschool student charged for putting Hitler quote in yearbook. (New York Post, July 13, 2021)

New York Post‘s headline is sheer disinformation, of which their own article gives ample evidence. The kid is charged for “computer crimes for accessing a database used by students to alter two classmates’ entries.”

The so-called “Hitler quote” are the words “It is a quite special secret pleasure how the people around us fail to realize what is really happening to them,” which the kid “incorrectly attributed” to George Floyd. To detect that these were actually Hitler’s words requires a level of specialization far beyond the average, and if, to boot, as the paper seems to say, the kid did not know they were Hitler’s words (obviously, if the kid “incorrectly” attributed the words to George Floyd, it means he did not change the author’s name on purpose, knowingly), you may not talk of a Hitler quote at all.

The second quote is thus described by NYP: “Tryon, 18, also reportedly inserted a quote in a second student’s yearbook entry referencing drugs and Boston bomber Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, who was convicted in the April 2013 attack that killed three people and wounded more than 260 others.” There’s not a jot of information in this, it could mean anything, the quote could either be apology of terrorism, or indictment of terrorism, or something entirely different for all we know. Obviously, NYP doesn’t care what the content of this quote is, they had their headline with the “Hitler quote” and that was good enough for these muckrakers.

But, again, the case is not at all about a Hitler quote. The headline should not read “charged for putting Hitler quote in yearbook” because under the rule of law people are charged for crimes and a Hitler quote, even in a yearbook, is not a crime.

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Libel Law and the Political Cartel 2

Trust in US mainstream media hits rock bottom. (Reclaim the Net)

This is why Justices Thomas and Gorsuch’s view that New York Times Co. v. Sullivan should be reversed must not be heeded to. Libel law must remain favorable to the messenger when the message deals with public officials and public figures. Smear campaigns by disreputable media do little harm. On the other hand, giving public officials (read, mainly, politicians) a convenient weapon in libel law woud Canadize U.S.A. (see Law 18: Libel Law and Political Cartel). I go as far as saying that current U.S. libel law is what has made U.S. mainstream media fall into general disrepute, as the media felt unbound and that has been their fall because they lack integrity.

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Taxes and Irresponsible Police

‘’Defund the police’’ is the logical sequel to Town of Castle Rock v. Gonzales (SCOTUS 2005). No one needs (as no one should rely on) irresponsible police. To pay taxes for this is madness plain and simple.

‘’Castle Rock v. Gonzales, 545 U.S. 748 (2005), is a United States Supreme Court case in which the Court ruled, 7–2, that a town and its police department could not be sued under 42 U.S.C. § 1983 for failing to enforce a restraining order, which had led to the murder of a woman’s three children by her estranged husband.’’ (Wikipedia)

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FR

« On n’est pas en Turquie »

Rappelez-vous. Macron réfute toute dérive autoritaire : « On n’est pas en Turquie. » (Huffington Post, 4/12/20)

Or quel pays figure avec la Turquie parmi les États « sous surveillance » (under watch) en matière de censure internet ? La France, seul État occidental dans cette catégorie avec l’Australie (et la Norvège mais seulement pour les métadonnées transnationales : « only the metadata on traffic that crosses Norwegian borders »). (Wikipédia : Internet Censorship)

A noter que parmi les « ennemis d’internet », donc la catégorie encore en-dessous dans cette classification de Reporters sans frontières, à côté des dictatures auxquelles on s’attend (Chine…), on trouve les U.S. et le Royaume-Uni. Depuis Trump, les U.S. ne cherchent même pas à garantir un principe de « neutralité du Net », donc rien d’étonnant puisque les acteurs privés font alors ce qu’ils veulent.

En résumé, 4 États occidentaux censurent internet : U.S. (libre censure privée), Royaume-Uni, Australie et France. Parmi ces quatre, seul un, la France, est membre de l’Union européenne (UE).

Si la Turquie n’a pas le droit d’entrer dans l’UE, je ne vois pas ce que la France y fait.

ii

On n’est pas en Turquie, on est en Franquie.

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Des mots inacceptables

Rappelez-vous. Macron : « On ne peut pas parler de violences policières dans un Etat de droit. » (« Ne parlez pas de “répression” ou de “violences policières”, ces mots sont inacceptables dans un Etat de droit. »)

Non, c’est en dictature qu’on ne peut pas parler de violences policières.