The Off Topic Topic

[celedhring]

I miss the Barcelona Dragons. 

So do I. I remember that USA Today was a sponsor and we were handed out issues at the games. That was puzzling in retrospect

They tried to resurrect them in the European Football League, but they folded again last year. It was a bit ridiculous, they couldn't event play in Barcelona because the Olympic Stadium had Barça as a tennant while the Camp Nou was remodelled.

Pretty sure I still have some shirts and merch stashed somewhere of the original Dragons at my parents' home.

[Razgovory]

"Are the hushpuppies any good"

"I only get to eat what I drop.  So, to me, everything tastes like... shoe."

[Admiral Yi]

Only college sports I have watched is Ivy League football, which admittedly even in my ignorance didn't seem a great standard.

Granted, the Lions were particularly not great. IIRC they had losing seasons every single year I was over there. But since actual NFL football was simply prohibitive, it was the best thing I had available. Fond memories.

the Ivy League was originally the IV League because it had only four teams.

[Admiral Yi]

I recently learned that Justice Roger Taney of Dred Scott fame voted in favor of the slaves in the Amistad case.

[Josquius]

I just learned Terry Farrel, who played Dax in DS9, was married to Leonard Nimoys son.
Small world.

[celedhring]

Not long ago I learned that beloved "that guy!" Stephen Tobolowsky of Groundhog Day fame, also co-wrote "True Stories" with David Byrne. Who would've thought.

[mongers]

Not long ago I learned that beloved "that guy!" Stephen Tobolowsky of Groundhog Day fame, also co-wrote "True Stories" with David Byrne. Who would've thought.

  

[The Minsky Moment]

I recently learned that Justice Roger Taney of Dred Scott fame voted in favor of the slaves in the Amistad case.

Taney was an accomplished lawyer before becoming a judge.  In 1819, he represented a Pennsylvania minister, who was arrested in Maryland on a charge of disturbing the peace by delivering an anti-slavery sermon. He said the following on closing argument:

A hard necessity, indeed, compels us to endure the evil of slavery for a time. It was imposed upon us by another nation, while we were yet in a state of colonial vassalage. It cannot be easily, or suddenly removed. Yet while it continues, it is a blot on our national character, and every real lover of freedom, confidently hopes that it will be effectually, though it must be gradually, wiped away; and earnestly looks for the means, by which this necessary object may be best attained. And until it shall be accomplished: until the time shall come when we can point without a blush, to the language held in the declaration of independence, every friend of humanity will seek to lighten the galling chain of slavery, and better, to the utmost of his power, the wretched condition of the slave. Such was Mr. Gruber's object in that part of his sermon, of which I am now speaking. Those who have complained of him, D 2 44 and reproached him, will not find it easy to answer him: unless complaints, reproaches and persecution shall be considered an answer."

https://tile.loc.gov/storage-services/service/rbc/rbcmisc/lst/lst0094/lst0094.pdf

I don't know what happened with Taney. His biographers might.  It may be, like many, that in the 1810s he assumed that slavery was on its way out, whereas matters seemed quite different by the 1850s.  Taney was a practical man, a political man, and very ambitious.  He was well connected to the landed Maryland elite, who in 1819 might have viewed anti-slavery opinion with indulgence but in the 1850s as truly seditious.

Taney signed on to Amistad, without a word.  That case is legally distinguishable from those that followed because it implicated the slave trade, which was clearly illegal, both in the USA generally, the State of Connecticut, where the ship was held, and in Spain.  But in Amistad the Court acknowledged the African plaintiffs as proper parties to the case, a recognition which Taney would not extend by 1857 in Dred Scott.

However, Prigg v. Pennsylvania was decided the following year; in that case the Court (Justice Story again) ruled that states could not pass laws impeding the recovery of fugitive slaves fleeing from the South.  That case is fairly regarded as a blot on Story and the Court, but there is a key aspect that cut the other way.  Story's ruling was based on the premise that the Constitution conferred exclusive power to the federal government, and thus the states couldn't pass ANY laws regarding fugitive slaves, even ones to assist recovery.  He held that it would be OK for states to refuse to cooperate with federal authorities passively, applying what we would now call the anti-commandeering doctrine. 

Taney pushed back on that aspect of the decision hard - he said on the contrary that the Constitution contemplated that states would and should pass their own affirmative legislation to assist recovery of fugitive slaves.  And his opinion clearly anticipates arguments he would make in Dred Scott:

Besides, the laws of the different States in all other cases constantly protect the citizens of other States in their rights of property when it is found within their respective territories, and no one doubts their power to do so. And, in the absence of any express prohibition, I perceive no reason for establishing by implication a different rule in this instance where, by the national compact, this right of property is recognized as an existing right in every State of the Union.

Then, immediately after that statement, he directly invoked the question that would be addressed in Dred Scott, passing on it for the time being: "I do not speak of slaves whom their masters voluntarily take into a non-slaveholding State. That case is not before us."

15 years later, the case would be before him.