Language Rape
I like to imagine the world as it would
be seen by a Martian, an outsider, who doesn't have our culture and
experiences. What would the world look like to that person. For
example, laying down and spending a third of our time in some kind of
hallucinogenic state seems odd.
From that perspective, I started to
wonder...what are lawyers? What do they do? Laws are rules, basically
we figure out what shitty things people shouldn't do, then we write
down, don't be an asshole and do these things. And the job of a
lawyer is to then work with these written rules and figure out what
precisely they mean.
But it seems like what they really do
is twist language and manipulate it and figure out how to take
something and make it mean something else.
Basically, lawyers are language
rapists.
A lawyer would say, it's not rape,
we're just massaging the language – well it's a very deep massage
that the language didn't want and afterward it feels violated. To me
that's rape. .
For example: The First Amendment says
“Congress shall make no law abridging the freedom of speech.”
Congress has gone on to make all kinds of laws that abridge the
freedom of speech, and when challenged in the supreme court, several
supreme courts have done a little tap dance and ruled that congress
can make laws abridging the freedom of speech if they have a good
reason. For example, you can't threaten to kill people, that's
illegal, and we all go, yeah I guess that's kind of a good thing. Then they decided to make it illegal to print and sell
pornography, oh and communist literature. And the supreme court said,
yeah, I mean obviously when the founding father said you “shall
make no law abridging the freedom of speech,” they meant you can
make laws abridging freedom of speech when it comes to things you
don't like such as titties and Marx.
According to these “lawyers” on the
supreme court, the phrase “Congress shall make no law abridging the
freedom of speech” somehow means you can make pornography and
political speech you don't like illegal, but you can't limit how much
money corporations spend on politics.
This is clearly language rape.
This brings me to my favorite case in
the history of law.
A Panera opened in a mall. They had a
contract with the mall that stipulated that they could not let in any
other sandwich places. Then the mall allows another
restaurant to open, and the guy who owns the Panera gets pissed and
yells, “hey assholes, you weren't allowed to open another sandwich
place.”
Now, does anyone want to guess what
this second restaurant was? Subway? Planet Sub? Maybe McDonald’s?
No. It was a Qdoba.
Judging by your reactions, I can tell
all of you people are too morally good to be lawyers.
Here's how you know that the job of a
lawyer is to basically be a rapist of language. The judge didn't just
throw the case out as being fucking stupid. Judges can do that. But
this went to trial.
An actual trial, wherein the
prosecution made the case that burritos are in fact sandwiches, and
the defense had to prove that burritos are not sandwiches.
In a sane world, the mall owner could
have showed up to court with burrito, eaten it, and said “wow, that
was a delicious burrito, I rest my case,” and that would have been
that. But we all know this isn't a sane world, and if he didn't get
his own lawyer he wouldn't have known the right things to say and the
judge would have made burritos and sandwiches into the same legal
entity.
And what about this Panera owner?
Here's a guy who runs a sandwich shop who can't tell the
difference between a burrito and a sandwich. I think I know why his
sandwich shop isn't doing so well. Does this guy think Taco Bell is a
bakery? Does he think Waffle Tacos are just open-face breakfast sandwiches?
This is a man who owns a sandwich shop, and yet he can't tell the
difference between a grilled cheese and a quesadilla.
And here's another absurdity, this
trial creates precedent. In essence, the decision in this case
determines once-and-for-all-time whether a burrito is a sandwich.
This judge by random chance is now the one member of the human race
who has the power to decide if a burrito is a sandwich. I think
anyone with that much power should be elected to the job. What if
that judge hated mexican food, and now he is the one person on the planet tasked with
deciding if a burrito is a sandwich.
In the arguments, both sides were
quoting dictionaries as to how burritos and sandwiches are defined,
and at some point this needs to be made into a dramatic courtroom
film. They not only cited dictionaries at each other, but they both
called expert witnesses. But expert witnesses are complete bullshit,
because both sides will produce experts. We have a sandwich-expert
who can't tell the difference between a reuben and an enchilada but
he runs a sandwich shop, so trust him, he's an expert.
The US government actually has a
definition of a sandwich. They need to have a definition because we
have two agencies that inspect food and so they need to decide who
inspects what. The Food and Drug Administration is the ones that make
you label foods with nutrition facts and they inspect processed
foods, soda, and things like that, while the US Department of
Agriculture, or USDA, inspects farms and meat plants and the more
agricultural side of things.
The USDA says a burrito is a “Mexican
style sandwich-like product consisting of a flour tortilla, various
fillings, and at least 15 percent meat or 10 percent cooked poultry
meat.”
So that settles it right? It's a
sandwich-like product. So it's...not a sandwich?
And apparently, according to the USDA
there's no such thing as a vegetarian burrito?
Here's where it goes from weird to
disgusting. If you package a sandwich and sell it, which agency
inspects you, the USDA or the FDA?
If it's closed-face, i.e. it has
two pieces of bread, then you are inspected by the FDA. The FDA does
inspections daily. If however, you package an open-faced sandwich
with just a single piece of bread, then you are inspected by the
USDA. And the USDA inspects open-face sandwiches sold in interstate
commerce an average of once every 5 years.
So don't ever eat a packaged open-faced
sandwich. That's what I've learned out of all of this. Because it's
legally distinct from a closed-face sandwich and it turns out that
legal distinction might actually kill you.
It's not negligent homicide, it's
just an advanced case of inside-out syndrome where the intestines
decide to leave the body.
So it's all settled then. A burrito is
not a sandwich. Fuck you Panera guy's lawyer, because you just got
paid thousands of dollars because you convinced an idiotic sandwich
shop owner that burritos are sandwiches and then put us all through
this ordeal of language rape.
And here's the worst part. If tomorrow
a Qdoba opens up in a mall, and the Qdoba makes a deal that says the
mall can't bring in any other burrito places, and then the mall lets
a Panera move in, the Qdoba owner could sue, because we have only
legally settled that a burrito is not a sandwich. Whether or not a
sandwich is a burrito is legally unsettled ground. And I bet you that
somewhere there's a lawyer who is trying to date-rape the word
burrito so he can make tens of thousands of dollars on a stupid
lawsuit. And if the Panera guy shows up with just a sandwich and
common sense and no language-rapist on his side, then the judge will
rule that sandwiches are burritos.
Then we'll live in a world where a
sandwich is legally a burrito, but a burrito is not legally a
sandwich.
Here's some more language rape for you.
Subway Footlongs. People started measuring them and many weren't a
foot long. Some were right at 11 inches. What Subway should have said
was, bread rises and expands when you cook it, so it's not always
going to come out exactly at precisely 12 inches, but we do our best
and you'll find that many come out longer than 12 inches and we're
not systematically trying to screw you over.
Instead, what they said was: 'SUBWAY
FOOTLONG' is a registered trademark as a descriptive name for the sub
sold in Subway® Restaurants and not intended to be a measurement
of length.
Not intended to be a measurement?
That'd be like if the McDonald's quarter pounder weighed way less
than a quarter pound and McDonald's said, “the name just describes
how heavy it looks.”
Here's another example of language
rape. The 2nd amendment. Hopefully I won't be shot by the time I
finish this.
The 2nd amendment is a single sentence. “A
well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free
state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be
infringed.”
Now, a lot of people like to forget the
first half of the sentence. In fact, in the Lobby of the NRA
headquarters, they have the text of the 2nd amendment on
the wall. Or, they have the second half of it. They conveniently
leave off the first half that talks about militias, because they
couldn't be bothered to put the whole sentence.
I'm no language rape expert, but when
you spend the first half of a sentence saying that a militia is good,
I think that is relevant to the meaning of the second half of the
sentence. That's what punctuation is for. If these are unconnected
thoughts, you would use a period.
The modern interpretation of this, by
the Republican Supreme Court is, and I quote, “The second amendment
protects an individual right to possess a firearm unconnected with
service in a militia.”
What they're saying, these brilliant
language-rapists of the highest caliber, is that the 2nd
amendment means “the right of the people to keep and bear arms
shall not be infringed,” and that the first half of the sentence is
meaningless and is just there because the founders felt like saying
that militias are nice, especially well-regulated ones.
That would be like if I wrote a law
that went like this:
“Farting being one of life's simple
pleasures and also a necessity for comfort, the right of the people
to pass gas shall not be infringed.”
And then the supreme court decided that
this meant that companies could release all the toxic pollutant gases
they felt like because they have an unlimited right to pass gas.
And when somebody says, isn't that
sentence about farting? Antonin Scalia says, “oh no, the founders
were just saying that they liked farting, but unconnected to that,
and in the same sentence for some reason, they also think unlimited
pollution is a fundamental right. They're unconnected thoughts,
that's why they're separated by a whole comma.”
If the founders wanted to give us all
the right to bear arms unconnected to anything to do with militias,
then the second amendment would have said: “the right of the people
to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed.” But they didn't just
say that!
There's an earlier draft that said:
“A well regulated militia, composed
of the body of the people, being the best security of a free state,
the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed;
but no one religiously scrupulous of bearing arms shall be compelled
to render military service in person.”
Let's break that down:
A militia, what is a militia, why
militias are good, therefore militias should be able to exist, and
you can't make Quakers join the militia.
Every bit about this is about militias,
not rednecks with AR-15s. And if it's all about the militia, it also
says “well regulated militia.”
So it seems to me that the amendment is
saying “you have a right to form a militia, as long as it's well
regulated.”
A few years ago, the city of D.C.
Passed a law that banned handguns and it was challenged and went to
the Supreme Court, and the Supreme Court struck it down because the
Republicans on the court ruled that the right of the people to keep
and bear arms shall not be infringed, therefore you can't ban
handguns.
If you interpret the second amendment
this way, then doesn't that mean you can't make laws banning any kind
of arms? Tanks, Napalm? Can I own a tomahawk cruise missile? Can I
own an ICBM and a missile silo? You know, for self-defense.
Well. . . Actually, you can own a
flamethrower if you want. We have no regulations on flamethrowers.
You don't even need to pass a background check. You can buy a
flamethrower online.
According to genius language rapist
Antonin Scalia:
“Obviously the amendment does not
apply to arms that cannot be hand-carried, it's 'to keep and bear,'
so it doesn’t apply to cannons,”
Okay, so I have to be able to hold it.
I've seen Arnold Schwarzanegger hold an 8-barrel Gatling gun. So
according to Scalia, what guns you can own depends on how strong you
are.
He goes on to say:
Scalia: “but I suppose there are hand-held
rocket launchers that can take down airplanes, so that'll have to be
decided.”
Fox News Person: “How do you decide that if you're a
textualist?”
Scalia: “Very carefully. My starting point
and ending point will be what limitations are within the understood
limitations that the society had at the time.”
So Scalia is saying that it might be
unconstitutional to ban heat-seeking shoulder-fired missiles if his
gut feeling is that people in the 1780s would have been cool with it.
Which do you think is more likely: that
the founding fathers wanted to give everyone the right to own any
weapon, no matter how powerful, just as long as they could physically
carry it, OR that they wanted to make it so that we had a right to
form a well regulated militia?
Which of those two options seems like
something that was thought up by complete fucktards?
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