Author Archives: Michael Froomkin

Who Thinks Selling Condoms is a Sin?

I didn’t think much of it when Daily Kos asked, Is Walgreens committing a sin by selling condoms?

Thomas McKenna: “So a Catholic employer, really getting down to it, he does not, or she does not provide this because that way they would be, in a sense, cooperating with the sin…the sin of contraception or the sin of providing a contraceptive that would abort a child, is this correct?”

Cardinal Burke: “This is correct. It is not only a matter of what we call “material cooperation” in the sense that the employer by giving this insurance benefit is materially providing for the contraception but it is also “formal cooperation” because he is knowingly and deliberately doing this, making this available to people. There is no way to justify it. It is simply wrong.”

Nice bit of agitprop, I thought, the Catholic Church may treat selling condoms as morally equivalent to employer-financed abortions, but this won’t take off.

But wait. Smart Jim DeFede asked GOP starlet Marco Rubio the question on TV:

“Is contraception wrong?” CBS4′s Jim DeFede asked Senator Marco Rubio in a recent exclusive one-on-one interview.

“In terms of?” he responds.

“Birth control,” I said.

“Of course not,” he replied. “Who says it is? You’re going to get into this whole argument about contraception. No one has ever said that contraception should be illegal, that contraception should be discouraged, that people should be looked down upon for using it.

Could this be a wedge issue?

DeFede spotted via SFDB, which appears to be studiously ignoring We Robot.

Posted in Politics: US | 3 Comments

Yes, But Not Enough

Matt Stoller asks, Does the 2012 Presidential Election Matter? and seems to mostly suggest it doesn’t:

The 2012 election, in other words, is at this point a completely empty enterprise, bereft of substance, or integrity. This is new to our era, reminiscent of the late 19th century electoral landscape which was dominated by policy consensus around corruption and plutocracy while electoral contests were organized around “bloody shirt” smear campaigns. Populism intruded briefly, but there’s a reason that time period was known as the time of the robber barons. It’s increasingly analogous to our time.

And yet, I think the robbing would be even worse with the other guys.

It doesn’t help, though, that I got an online poll from “YouGov” today, which among other things asked me the following question:

How much of the time do you think you can trust the government in Washington to do what is right?
Just about always
Most of the time
Some of the time

No, I didn’t cut off the last line. There was no other choice offered.

Posted in 2012 Election | Comments Off on Yes, But Not Enough

The Latest Fad in Citation Counts

Today’s fad in citation counts was set off by The Volokh Conspiracy » 790 Westlaw Documents Citing the Blog, which celebrates what it sounds like (database: TP-ALL). I know it’s a trend because Prawfsblog touts its 237 in TP-All and two is a trend in journalism, so it ought to do for blogs.

I figured what the heck, let’s look at discourse.net. I predicted to myself that I would find three citations to “discourse.net” in TP-ALL. Whoa! 100? How did that happen. But wait, it’s a mirage: 86 of them are to my article Habermas@discourse.net: Toward a Critical Theory of Cyberspace. So those don’t count. Even so, 14 >> 3, so I think I’m happy.

Posted in Discourse.net | Comments Off on The Latest Fad in Citation Counts

We Robot News 4/11/12

Very nice writeup at Hizook, Robotics and the Law: The New ” We Robot ” Conference.

There’s a brief but enticing mention at Techdirt.

Three robopromos since my last update:

I’m going to be the discussant on the Kerr/Millar paper.

And we’ve now got almost all the papers online at the program.

Posted in Robots | Comments Off on We Robot News 4/11/12

Mitt Romney’s Greatest Hits, Vol 1

Straight from the Obama campaign a strong attack video — Romney quotes from the primary campaign.

Those Obama guys might not be good at little things like closing Guantanamo or keeping themselves from arguing for expansive state power, but they seem to be good at campaigning.

Posted in 2012 Election | Comments Off on Mitt Romney’s Greatest Hits, Vol 1

Did You Miss Me?

The site has been down for most of the day, and is still unreachable from some parts of the Internet as I wait for the latest DNS change to propagate.

Suffice it to say that I’ve relearned the value of the old programmer’s adage: never change more than one thing at a time.

I changed two.

Posted in Discourse.net | Comments Off on Did You Miss Me?