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It doesn't matter if Niven was "only joking." Not one eensy little bit.

--Really. Even if he was just saying it to be outrageous because he's a twenty-something hipster-slacker-stoner glibertarian South Park fan for whom all sincerity and empathy are anathema and only cruelty is funny, it's still a vile and bigoted thing to say.And that's all ( Read more... )

via whumpdotcom, from Nevada, the mayor of Las Vegas advocates cutting off people's thumbs for the crime of...graffiti.

No, this isn't a joke.

Next, we have Eugene Volokh explaining why this isn't cruel and shouldn't be unusual. [Joke.]

But of course, it's only Those People with their Shariah Law, cutting off of hands and public floggings, who are

...The small aristocratic societies that are formed by some manufacturers in the midst of the immense democracy of our age contain, like the great aristocratic societies of former ages, some men who are very opulent and a multitude who are wretchedly poor. The poor have few means of escaping from their condition and becoming rich, but the rich are ( Read more... )

...It might be that their lives were hard and that not all of their hopes had been fulfilled; but they were conscious that they were not as other animals. If they went hungry, it was not from feeding tyrannical human beings; if they worked hard, at least they worked for themselves. No creature among them went upon two legs. No creature called any ( Read more... )