zenoli.net » politics

Abandoning Our Legal Heritage

paul — Sat, 24 Feb 2007 04:40:04 +0000

The edifice of Law could perhaps be described as a sort of Winchester House, obsessively extended and larded with unexpected features: stairs that lead nowhere and 47 fireplaces. Every so often, some reformer decides it’s time to root out some particular bit of cruft. The New Jersey state constitution, for example, holds this gem in Article II, Section I, paragraph 6:

No idiot or insane person shall enjoy the right of suffrage.

Leaving aside whether this rule is actually enforced, it is has been suggested that this provision is deeply insensitive to idiots and the insane. Thus, New Jersey Senate Concurrent Resolution 134 has been adopted, proposing a constitutional amendment removing the language.

Somehow, I can’t shake the feeling that there’s an ulterior motive, here. Perhaps certain senators wish to pack the polls with the feeble-minded and the mad to shift the balance of power that brought about certain recent legislation.

(via reddit)

Votergasm.org and Unintended Side-Effects

paul — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 05:36:59 +0000

votergasm.org promotes an interesting strategy to get more people to the polls on Election Day. Taking a page from Lysistrata, site visitors can pledge to (a) withhold sex from non-voters for a week following the elections, (b) have sex with a voter on election night and withhold sex from non-voters for the week following the election, or (c) have sex with a voter on election night and withhold sex from non-voters for the next four years.

Here’s the problem with this plan, though: nothing prevents non-voters from having sex with each other.

This is it: this is how Wells’s vision will be realized. As these pledges are carried to their logical conclusions, the population will divide into completely separate breeding populations, voters segregated from non-voters. I leave it to your prejudices to figure out which become the Eloi and which become the Morlocks.

(via the Bulldada NewsBlog)

Protologistic Vocabulary of the Day: “To Wuck”

paul — Thu, 01 Feb 2007 03:32:43 +0000

My friend Craig mentioned a phrase he’s been using lately: ‘to wuck up’, which he defines as, “to screw up as badly or worse than the current president has managed to over the last six years”. His question to me was this: How does one go about spreading its use into popular language?

While it doesn’t have the intensely scatological memes of ‘santorum‘, ‘wuck’ is still a protologism with some propagation potential. (Incidentally, the ’santorum’ Googlebomb has managed to retain its #1 Google rank as of this writing.)

Here are my suggestions to get things off the ground: start posting comments on liberal blogs, try to get a few people using it. Once there are some independent references out there, add it to Wiktionary’s list of protologisms. Set up a one-page website on wucking and submit it to reddit and digg; if it’s clever enough, it will have a good chance of rising high enough in the rankings that lots of people will see it.

What are you waiting for? Get out there and wuck things up.