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This just in, freedom of the press is bad for America!
Also, the polarization of politics isn't magical thing that started in colleges. If you want to look at the source, look at our government and how decisions are made and voters are won over. Kids emulate adults. Students are doing exactly what they were taught.
Or literally any other person or organization which produces a serial or periodical publication (be it print, broadcast, internet-based, delivered in the form of stone tablets by an organized and centrally-dispatched group of courtiers leading a mule train on horseback in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, or similar) devoted to factual journalism, news-gathering, or political opinion / commentary.
Example:
Should We Be Able to Reclaim a Racist Insult
- as a Registered Trademark?
By SARAH JEONGJAN. 17, 2017
The New York Times
The Slants, as depicted in the artwork for their 2016 album, “Something Slanted This Way Comes.”
Credit Ibrahim Moustafa
In late 2009, Simon Tam’s Portland-based dance-rock band was doing well — going on tours, getting press. It was time, they decided, to start taking things more seriously and file a trademark application for their name: the Slants.
Tam’s lawyer, Spencer Trowbridge, agreed to handle the paperwork for them. This was a fairly routine affair: They expected to pay a few hundred dollars in fees and have their trademark registered within six months. The paperwork was filed in March 2010, and the response came through just three months later: The application had been rejected. This is when Tam first learned about Section 2(a) of the Lanham Act, the law that would consume him for the next six years, eventually taking him all the way to the Supreme Court, where arguments in Lee v. Tam will be heard on Jan. 18.
The night before he left for Washington, I called Tam to discuss how the case began. He laughed when remembering the first rejection. “My initial reaction was, ‘Man, I probably filled something out wrong,’” he said. That wasn’t the problem, his lawyer had explained. The trademark application had been rejected because the band’s name was “disparaging to persons of Asian ethnicity.”
“I took a moment,” Tam said. “I was like, O.K. Let me refresh my brain, make sure I remember what the word disparaging means. Then I said, ‘Well, do they know we’re of Asian descent?’”
The Slants case belongs to a body of law that has made strange bedfellows out of lesbian motorcyclists, a Lebanese wine distributor and an 85-year-old N.F.L. franchise. Section 2(a) of the Lanham Act of 1946 defines a number of trademarks that may not receive federal registration, including those that contain “immoral, deceptive, or scandalous matter; or matter which may disparage or falsely suggest a connection with persons, living or dead, institutions, beliefs, or national symbols, or bring them into contempt, or disrepute.” It’s the word “disparage” that’s key here. At times, the United States Patent and Trademark Office has claimed that the trademark “Dykes on Bikes” disparages lesbians, that “Khoran” wine disparages Muslims and that the football team name “Redskins” disparages Native Americans. And it is the official opinion of the office that the name of Tam’s band, “the Slants,” disparages a group of people that includes Tam and all his bandmates.
There’s a two-part test to determine whether a mark is disparaging. The first task is to figure out the “likely meaning” of the element at issue. If that meaning refers to “identifiable persons, institutions, beliefs or national symbols,” then the second task is to determine whether it is “disparaging to a substantial composite of the referenced group.” It was the “substantial composite” that stumped Tam as he tried to puzzle out his first refusal letter. “We just came off this national tour working with Asian-American communities and organizations across America for the past 18 months,” he remembers telling his lawyer during a telephone call. “So who did they find that said it was disparaging?”
Nobody, Trowbridge told him — but they had included a quote from Urbandictionary.com and a photo of Miley Cyrus pulling her eyes back into a slanting shape. “This has got to be a joke,” Tam said to him. No, Trowbridge replied: He was looking at Miley Cyrus on the response. And Toby Keith. And a screenshot from Urban Dictionary.
In order to make sense of Lee v. Tam, you have to remember that the Slants’ case originates not with a court but with a federal administrative agency. As of 2015, the patent office employed 456 trademark examining attorneys, whose job it is to make sure each trademark is up to snuff — by comparing it with existing trademarks in the database, by reviewing the application materials, by looking at dictionary definitions of any words used. This trademark side of the office has sometimes been accused of being a rubber stamp, and situations like Tam’s, where a trademark application is rejected outright at an early stage of the process, are relatively uncommon.
It also helps to remember that trademark rights exist before and beyond this whole system of federal registration. You don’t need to register to use a name, or to hold rights to it: There are various common-law and state-law trademark rights that exist outside the federal registration system. You don’t need to register a trademark to print it on labels, license it out to other companies or even go to court to enforce it. That last part, though, is what the federal registration system tries to prevent, with a centralized database that shows which marks have been claimed for which goods and services and by whom. The more people use the database, the less likely it is that disputes arise — so the Lanham Act rewards registrants by giving them the legal high ground should they ever end up in court. There’s always the chance that a court might declare a trademark invalid, but having the registration means that’s less likely.
All of this creates some ambiguity around what federal registration actually is, in a much larger sense. A trademark is a kind of intellectual property that can be owned or licensed — but a trademark registration isn’t the same thing as a trademark. If it were, things would be simpler: Lee v. Tam would be a case about whether the government can take away all intellectual property rights over the content of speech, and the answer would likely be no. But simply registering trademarks in a federal system actually seems closer to “government speech,” which is a general exception to free speech: The government might be prevented from censoring the public, but it is allowed to censor itself. By banning the registration of slurs as trademarks, it can prevent itself from being forced to place its imprimatur on those slurs. Of course, given the accompanying legal benefits of registration, it winds up denying applicants far more than just an imprimatur.
Federal registration is the T.S.A. PreCheck of intellectual-property law: Not everyone has to get it, but if you do a lot of business, you probably should. The problem is that in the Slants’ case, the trademark office has come to look a bit like the popular image of the T.S.A.: a bureaucracy of bored enforcers just trying to churn through the queue and get through the day. Except that every now and then, something complicated comes down the screening belt, or someone gets a little overzealous about the job, and everyone winds up looking bad.
The patent office’s first refusal to register the Slants runs 49 pages, including attachments. Attachment 1 is a screenshot of user-submitted content from Urban Dictionary, whose top definition for “slant” reads, “A derogatory term used to refer to those of Asian descent. More accurately, it tends to refer to anybody with slanted eyes.” Attachments 14 through 31 contain the full Wikipedia article for “List of ethnic slurs,” with “Slant-eye/Slant” helpfully highlighted by the examining attorney. Attachment 34 is a post from a gossip blog featuring a photo of Miley Cyrus pulling her eyes back with her hands to make them slant, while sitting next to a young Asian man.
It’s not as though Tam didn’t know what “slant” could mean. When he was first putting together the band, he knew that he wanted his music to celebrate Asian-Americans as a group, to bridge multiple ethnicities by capturing a common experience. So he asked his friends, “Hey, what’s something you think all Asians have in common?” The first person to respond said, “Slanted eyes.”
“I thought that was interesting,” Tam told me, “because No 1., it’s not true. But No. 2, we can talk about our slant on life on what it’s like to be people of color.” The Slants, he said, are hardly the first rock band to reclaim “stigmatizing labels” in order to “throw them back” in others’ faces: “I grew up with bands like the Queers, Pansy Division — groups who take it and flip these assumptions on their heads.” In his experience, “Asian-Americans generally get it,” he said. “They think it’s funny. Sly.” It was white people who sometimes choked on it — but that, for Tam, was what made it such a great conversation starter.
Shortly after receiving their initial refusal from the patent office, the Slants sent a response explaining that “Applicant’s Mark, as used ... is a positive term of self-reference that promotes cultural pride and recognition.” The response included several exhibits, including declarations from longtime Asian-American community organizers. The office replied with yet another refusal, just as lengthy and full of screenshots as the last one. This strange back-and-forth went on for over a year. In June 2011, the Slants submitted a 250-page request for reconsideration that included the results of a survey designed by two university professors, who concluded that few members of the Asian and Pacific Islander community viewed “the Slants” as disparaging. The office responded with a 157-page denial that included more dictionary definitions, arguments in internet forums and, strangest of all, the comments thread under a blog post about the trademark dispute itself. In the comments, the blogger opines that the Slants’ name “would be like a black performer calling himself the N-word.” The writer continued, “It would be ridiculous and people would see that performer as ridiculous.” Then, Tam himself barges into the thread the office cites, with a long, detailed response that begins by pointing out that the “N” in the name of the rap group N.W.A. stands for the N-word.
This isn’t the first time the office has stumbled into an evidentiary quagmire of dictionaries and social-justice discourse. For decades, contingents of lesbian motorcyclists calling themselves Dykes on Bikes have led the San Francisco Pride Parade, along with Pride parades in many other cities. With this long history behind them, Dykes on Bikes are a recognizable icon of L.G.B.T.Q. culture. In 2003, they sought to register the name as a trademark, only to be refused on the grounds that it was disparaging to lesbians. The subsequent back-and-forth was as unbalanced as it was with the Slants, with Dykes on Bikes submitting interviews, declarations from L.G.B.T.Q. community organizers, photos of Pride parades and pages upon pages of emails from lesbians voicing their support. The examining attorney responded with screencapped dictionary definitions and issued another refusal. Dykes on Bikes eventually got the registration they wanted. But when they tried to register their logo in 2016, they were once again rejected on grounds of disparagement.
The stories of the Slants’ and Dykes on Bikes’ struggles with the trademark office are cringe-worthy because they’re stories in which a stolid bureaucratic agency must grapple with one of the more complex questions of our modern age: whether a marginalized group can take a slur back. And this agency must do so by applying a provision of the law that has long outlived its context. The Lanham Act was passed in 1946, and its very language — “immoral,” “scandalous,” “disparage” — flags Section 2(a) as a product of another time. Since its passage, American law and society itself have undergone a revolution, from the 1971 case that declared a jacket reading “[Expletive] the Draft” was protected speech to 1992’s R.A.V. v. City of St. Paul, in which Justice Antonin Scalia articulated the idea that prohibitions against racist hate speech were constitutionally impermissible “viewpoint discrimination.” You might be tempted to think that if the Lanham Act had been passed in 1996 rather than 1946, Section 2(a) would have long been toast.
That’s what the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit seems to think, anyway. In 2015, an en banc panel ruled that the disparagement clause of Section 2(a) is unconstitutional under the First Amendment and tossed out the trademark office’s determination that “the Slants” was unregistrable. It didn’t matter that the Slants could still go by the name “Slants” with or without federal registration. By denying the benefits of registration, the court determined, Section 2(a) was creating a chilling effect for marks “which the government may deem offensive or disparaging.”
From this perspective, the government is impermissibly punishing Dykes on Bikes with an unending hell of paperwork and legal fees and putting them at a disadvantage in any potential dispute, all because they want to call themselves dykes. Framed this way, it does sound like a violation of free speech, and Section 2(a) sounds like a bad idea. But Dykes on Bikes and the Slants aren’t the only people caught in the cross hairs of Section 2(a) — they’re just the more sympathetic ones. Even as Tam’s case was trickling through the legal system, another Section 2(a) case was making very loud and ugly headlines.
Long before Tam had even dreamed up the name “the Slants,” Native American activists were gunning for the Washington Redskins’ trademarks. In 1992, they petitioned the patent office’s Trademark Trial and Appeal Board to cancel the Redskins’ marks under Section 2(a) of the Lanham Act. Ever since then, they’ve been mired in an endless slog of litigation both inside and outside the agency. The board has canceled the Redskins’ trademarks twice now: once in 1999 and once more in 2014. This time, it seems it might stick: When the Redskins appealed out to a federal district court in 2014, they lost.
Meanwhile, the Slants case was picking up steam and looked as though it was headed to the Supreme Court. Tam had connected with a litigator, Ronald Coleman, with a background in trademark issues, who agreed to take on the case pro bono, provided Tam paid associated costs like court fees and appellate printing. But even those costs ran up — Tam says that over the years he took second, third and fourth jobs to keep fighting the case. When his determination pushed the case to the highest court in the land, the Redskins took notice. Although the football franchise wasn’t yet finished with an intermediary level of appeals, it sent a petition to the Supreme Court as well, hoping to be heard there alongside a more sympathetic parallel case.
Tam, who sees antiracism as a big part of what the Slants do, does not care for the Redskins or the team’s owner, Dan Snyder. “‘Redskin’ has a long history of oppression, the football team treats the people as mascots,” Tam wrote on his website in 2016. He concedes that there is “overlap” between his case and the Redskins’, but insists that they are not equivalent. For many people, there’s a fundamental difference between an Asian-American dance-rock band called “the Slants” and a football team owned by a white man, featuring no Native American players, called “the Redskins.”
The problem, from this point of view, is that the Federal Circuit decision that handed the Slants its first victory completely threw out the “disparaging” prohibition of Section 2(a). If the Supreme Court ends up affirming that decision, the Redskins will presumably get their trademark registration back. There are ways to save the Slants that don’t also save the Redskins, the most obvious of which would be for the Supreme Court to redefine “disparaging” in a way that makes room for reappropriation. But whether that’s even possible to implement on a practical basis is another question. Anyone who looks at the piles of dictionary screencaps in the Slants case might very well be concerned that the patent office is not currently designed to produce subtle, socially aware judgments.
And in practice, the “substantial composite” test for disparagement turns cases like the Redskins’ and the Slants’ into a frenzy of expensive surveys and experts. When the stakes are high enough, each side can find people to vouch for it. Asian-American advocacy groups have filed amicus briefs supporting the trademark office in Lee v. Tam, and the Redskins have provided courts with 1990s letters from various tribal leaders, including one that said, “Many of us are proud that sport teams use us and our symbols to represent them” and “We are not offended by the Washington football team being called the Redskins.” Even with public input, committing messy, fine-grained cultural questions about appropriation and reappropriation into the care of an administrative agency might very well be asking too much.
Whatever the Supreme Court might think of this question, it doesn’t want to deal with the Redskins right now. The Supreme Court granted certiorari to the Slants, but has declined to hear the Redskins’ case. What that means for the Slants is anyone’s guess. But for all intents and purposes, it looks as if the Supreme Court, just like Tam, would rather have the two cases detached from each other.
The caption of the case they’re considering, “Lee v. Tam,” feels strangely apt for a case about reappropriating a slur against Asians. The naming conventions of the legal system mean that Simon Shiao Tam is being pitted against Michelle Lee, the first Asian-American director of the United States Patent and Trademark Office. This is, of course, a bit of a legal fiction: Lee will not be arguing the case at the Supreme Court, and she was, presumably, not in the room when the office’s examining attorney first rejected Tam’s application on the basis that it disparaged Asians. On Jan. 18, Tam’s lawyers will be facing down Lee’s lawyers before eight justices, none of whom are Asian, to decide the fate of the Slants and whether trademark law can accommodate “taking a word back.”
Meanwhile, the Slants are releasing a new EP just before their date with the Supreme Court. It’s titled “The Band Who Must Not Be Named.”
Sarah Jeong is a journalist and a lawyer and the author of “The Internet of Garbage.”
I lived there for a couple of years and don't agree that they are all hot. But hotness is subjective.
I was only there a few months, but I don't recall meeting any natives who didn't score in the upper 2/3 of the hotness scale. (Poles don't count. Sorry, not being racist, just objective.)
Originally Posted by sixshooter
Enjoy your warm Merkel:
(Angela Merkel)
Power is sexy. This is a universal truth, regardless of age or BMI. (Obviously, I maintain exceptions here for Gorbachev, Roosevelt, etc.)
Originally Posted by sixshooter
And this sexy member of her parliament:
(Ulle Schauws)
Being totally honest here, Ulle Schauws is in fact pretty hot. I mean, she's not an 11 (the whole teeth thing...) but she's an easy 8. There is absolutely no question as to whether I'd bang her.
Seriously, would any sane person not embrace this, even without foreknowledge of her political stature?
I read in today's paper that yesterday was "a day without immigrants".
I didn't notice.
On the plus side, a few job-creators are seizing this opportunity to separate the wheat from the chaff.
Company fires 18 employees after they participated in 'A Day Without Immigrants' By WTVF Web Staff
Posted 7:19 PM, Feb 17, 2017
Updated 8:45 PM, Feb 17, 2017
A total of 18 people were fired from one business after joining the nation-wide protest "A Day Without Immigrants."
NASHVILLE, Tenn. - A total of 18 people were fired from a Tennessee business after joining the nation-wide protest "A Day Without Immigrants."
The 18 employees at Bradley Coatings, Incorporated in Nolensville, Tennessee told their supervisors on Wednesday they'd be taking part in the nationwide movement. Then, on Thursday, they were told they no longer had jobs.
"We are the team leaders directly under the supervisors and they informed us last night that we could not go back to work and the boss said we were fired," one employee said.
The former employee asked to remain anonymous but had this message to his former boss.
"I would tell him he was unfair, after working for them for so many years, giving him our best. They could not understand that it was just one day. We were going to make up that day on a Sunday, but they didn't understand that, and it was not the best way. They didn't give us an opportunity and just told us we were fired," he said.
"Tennessee is an employment-at-will state which basically means an employer can end your employment at any time without reason or cause. Of course there are a lot of different stipulations, civil rights issues that could stop them from doing that," Department of Labor and Workforce Development spokesman, Chris Cannon said.
Bradley Coatings, Inc.'s attorney released the following statement:
"Bradley Coatings, Incorporated (BCI) is a family-owned, Nashville-based business that provides commercial painting services to its clients on a very demanding schedule. Established in 1986, BCI has always celebrated diversity and supported the immigrant community. This past Wednesday night, certain employees of BCI informed their leadership that they would not be at work the following day. Because of the time-sensitive nature of the jobs these employees were assigned to, all employees were told that they would need to show up for work or they would be terminated. On Thursday, the majority of BCI’s employees fulfilled their obligations to our clients, but eighteen employees did not. Regretfully, and consistent with its prior communication to all its employees, BCI had no choice but to terminate these individuals. The reason these employees missed work—to engage in peaceful demonstrations—had nothing to do with BCI’s decision to terminate them. BCI regrets this situation, but it has contracted with its clients to complete work on a schedule set by the client’s general contractor. BCI will review its procedures in an effort to avoid similar issues in the future, and will continue to provide timely service to its clients and support to the Nashville immigrant community." - Robert Peal, Company Attorney
As a sidebar: Seriously, WTVF, at least make some effort to get the lip-sync correct in your packages. When you publish **** like this, you make us all look bad. Signed, a fellow broadcaster.
You took an article out of the NYT magazine section...
An interesting one at that, but what exactly does posting that article prove? That they write about things that people find interesting in their magazine?
Seriously, would any sane person not embrace this, even without foreknowledge of her political stature?
Sorry, not seeing it Joe. Maybe in an earlier time.
Originally Posted by ridethecliche
You took an article out of the NYT magazine section...
An interesting one at that, but what exactly does posting that article prove? That they write about things that people find interesting in their magazine?
I believe it was part of a larger point to be made.
You took an article out of the NYT magazine section...
Yes, for which I also provided proper citation and accreditation, both to the author and to the journal of publication.
Is it your assertion that The New York Times Magazine is not "a serial or periodical publication devoted to factual journalism, news-gathering, or political opinion / commentary."?
Originally Posted by ridethecliche
An interesting one at that, but what exactly does posting that article prove?
I wasn't trying to prove anything. I was providing an example of what "The Press" is, in response to Brainey's prior request to "define press."
Can we please get back to discussing the physical & romantic attractiveness of Ulle Schauws?
Haha, I was just confused as to why that article, of all articles, was chosen as an example to define the press...
It was a an interesting example of objective reporting on a controversial subject, which I happened to be reading at the time. I realize that Brainey just dumps clickbait articles in here for gigigles, but I take this thread seriously.
Off topic but about German women. My mothers side of the family has a lot of German heritage and I have family over there. One of the things my cousins told me years ago is that yes German women can be extremely good lucking. But when looking to find one to marry you always have to look at the girls mother to see what they will look like when they get older. The younger girls look great, but as they age the looks go down.
Off topic but about German women. My mothers side of the family has a lot of German heritage and I have family over there. One of the things my cousins told me years ago is that yes German women can be extremely good lucking. But when looking to find one to marry you always have to look at the girls mother to see what they will look like when they get older. The younger girls look great, but as they age the looks go down.
In all honestly, I've found this to be true not just for Caucasians, but for Hispanics, Indians (dot, not feather), and, well, pretty much everyone in general.
Assuming that good looks are your primary motivation in a relationship, of course.
I'm at that wonderful stage in life at which I'm still young enough to act like an idiot, and yet the potential dating pool are all "over the hump", so to speak, so I get to see what they're going to look like when we're both in our 70s sitting in rocking chairs on the lido deck. As an added bonus, the "If you don't have kids yet. it ain't gonna happen" clause is also now in effect, and that's a huge plus.
02-17-2017, 06:05 PM
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