It might have something to do with the wine I try to drink before bed (which isn't to say I have to try very hard). Alcohol, as I understand it, is a diuretic and as such I suppose it's possible to suggest I may theoretically in some way sort of be dehydrating myself on a fairly regular basis.
Or maybe it's because I'm drunk.
I'm a little bummed out tonight.
When I'm feeling better I think I'd like to write about (or ask questions in relation to) people who oppose hate crime legislation on the grounds that people ought not be tried twice for a single crime and that making what's in a person's mind (when they commit a crime) illegal is tantamount to prosecuting for thought crime.
I'd like to think I understand the objection, but I wonder (as I often do) whether proponents of this objection would thus be forced to object to legislation concerned with prosecuting for acts of terrorism.
Or maybe it would just be easier to agree that terrorism is bad (and prosecutable because in addition to the acts of murder we can condemn the act of using murder to frighten in hopes of altering the social or political landscape) and then agree that hate crimes are very much terrorism.
Could be there's no case to be made though.
It's entirely possible my understanding of terrorism isn't based on the legal definition and that my understanding of hate crime legislation has been colored by my want to have a clever thing to say about hate crime legislation opponents being hypocritical.
But it seems to me there is a case to be made that hate crimes (while maybe not conspiratorial in nature) stem from the want to punish people for not fitting into a myopic, perverted view of what society should be... which is to say, an effort to affect social change by use of violence and to instill fear (by means of letting other potential victims know they are vulnerable to random acts of violence by upstanding elementary-school drop outs).
It's just a thought I've been having.
Also, I read recently that less than three percent of Oklahoma high-school students can pass a United States Citizenship test, and that just about a quarter of them were able to correctly name the first president of our nation as George Washington (though I've read a man named John Hanson was technically named president of Congress... or president of the Colonies... before the revolutionary war ended... so maybe all those kids just got confused and thought the test was asking about that).
I remember reading (when I was in high-school) that an overwhelming amount of high-school students felt that the press in this country has "too much freedom" and that the president ought to have more control over what the press is allowed to write.
I'd like to think the number was less than 97 percent of high-school students, but it has been a few years, so maybe stupidity is in fact a sexually transmitted infection (which would explain why I'm still so damned clever wouldn't it? Wait... fuck).
To be fair, that poll was conducted after 2002, and I believe the author suggested an influencing factor to be the push to patriotism in the wake of September eleventh (they also expressed fear for how children coming to grasp the world during the frenzy of political ambiguity in the years following 2001 might understand the role of government).
I've also heard that the No Child Left Behind Act does not require teachers to teach civics and as a result many students don't learn anything at all about their government.
But I think this proves (or at least offers a dramatic show of support) for my time-tested theory that children are fucking stupid.
