 Okay, yeah, let's jump in, talk about discrimination. So let's start with, what is discrimination? What does discrimination even mean as a concept, as an idea? Yeah, so actually, let me say one thing I should have said before, which is I'm here for myself, not for PLF. I just wanna make that clear to people. I work at PLF, I have my own views. Everybody at PLF doesn't necessarily share my views. So with that disclaimer anyway, we can jump in. So yeah, it's good that you raised the question, what is discrimination? Because it has, I mean, it's got a legal meaning, and it's the meaning that I think a lot of people think about in terms of anti-discrimination law. And we can talk a bit about that, but it's got a normal sort of just objective meaning, quite a prop apart from that. Most people think of discrimination as bad thing. It's not a bad thing. It's a neutral concept, and it's a necessary thing. We have to discriminate, we have to make decisions. We have to exercise our values, we have to think constantly. We should discriminate often. Discrimination is a good thing in many, many contexts. The question is what are the grounds or the reasons that we are discriminating or making decisions about whom we should associate with, about all kinds of things. What kind of food we should eat, what should a job should I take, et cetera. So there's a lot packed into that. But one of the really important things for people to get is that discrimination is not a dirty word. And it is really unfortunate that modern views of discrimination just hold that any form of discrimination is necessarily bad or it's tainted in some way. And even the forms of discrimination that are outlawed are often entirely rational, proper behaviors. And we can talk a bit about that because anti-discrimination law is gigantic. And I mean, I could go into, I don't wanna blabber on too long, you're on, but I could talk a bit about how it's thought about in the legal realm and kind of what it means to even think about or talk about anti-discrimination law. Sure, we should definitely, I mean, that's the next point we should make. I'll just say yes, I mean discrimination. I mean, we discriminate every day. We discriminate between restaurants, we discriminate between the values that we have. You can't do everything and you shouldn't do everything because you should have a hierarchy of what's important to you or what's not. And if you're rational, you discriminate rationally. And if you're irrational, you discriminate irrationally based on the wrong hierarchy of values based on irrelevant aspects, irrelevant criteria. And we'll get back to kind of irrational discrimination, I guess once we talk about the context for discrimination law. So tell us a little bit about discrimination law. And also I'm curious, is this, is it just something that started in the 1960s? Was there any kind of discrimination law before that or is it really a feature of the Civil Rights Act? It's no, not really, although there's a number of points. So I mean, the statutes, the 64 Civil Rights Act is the sort of seminal, big anti-discrimination statute passed in 1964, obviously. And that comes at the tail end of the whole civil rights period and the battles against Jim Crow, which I would sum it up as efforts to end legitimate efforts, good efforts to end state-sponsored, state-sanctioned, state-enforced racism. I mean, it's probably better just to use the term racism because that's where this whole idea of discrimination law or where it really evolves from. So its origins are entirely proper in the sense that it is proper to excise or purge from government any distinctions on the basis of race and many other kinds of distinctions. And think about it in a positive way. The positive principle is equality before the law and which is a necessary component of the rule of law. You can't have a rule of law that applies to people based on non-essential characteristics or based on non-essential things, things that the law shouldn't take into consideration. So if the goal of law is to protect rights, you can't say, and the law can't just protect the rights of white people and not black people, which is in fact what we had in this country for a long, long time and not just in slavery, but in the gym, like so many of the policies and so much else that happened in the South, you had de jure slavery and then segregation. And then after that, it was de facto in a certain way that they managed to keep it going for many, many years. And that kind of culminates in the 1960s, 1950s, 1960s and all of the battles over civil rights. But the 64 Act, the statute that you referred to, and there are also analogous state laws. It's not really the first thing. The first thing to think about, I think, or the first legal measure taken to ban, let's call it state-sponsored racism or just the improper, irrational discrimination by government is the 14th Amendment. So that's the Civil War Amendments, the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments right after the Civil War, you get the 13th Amendment abolishes slavery, the 14th Amendment, or the 15th Amendment, it says essentially equality in voting rights. The 14th Amendment is integral and really, really important because what that does is it essentially says that everybody in the nation in America is an American citizen and has the rights of an American, not the rights of a citizen of Mississippi or Georgia or Alabama or even Maine or anywhere else. It's as an American, you are entitled to all the rights that any American has, in particular the rights that are protected by the Bill of Rights. And I would argue that this concept goes back to, and I think the framers of the 14th Amendment were aware of this, this goes all the way back to the Declaration of Independence so that you can think about the Bill of Rights as well it protects certain rights. And then you have the 9th Amendment that's supposed to make sure that it protects a whole panoply of rights. But I think the better the intellectual statement is really contained in the Declaration of Independence which is, government is instituted among men to protect rights among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. And that covers like the whole ball of wax. That covers all of the rights that individual human beings are entitled to as human beings. And the equal protection component of the 14th Amendment, really so the 14th Amendment does really three things. It says states can't deprive you of life, liberty or property without due process of law, without equal protection of the laws and violate what are known as the privileges and immunities of citizenship which is another way of thinking about what rights are. We can get into why it says privilege and immunities but it's basically right. So really three absolutely crucial components to the rule of law and to what it means to be an American or just a rule of law system but I think certainly integral to the American system. So that's really the first. Jim Crow, why wasn't Jim Crow, why wasn't the 14th Amendment used against Jim Crow laws if that's the case, earlier than the 1960s? It was, but it was a spotty, I mean, there's a couple of reasons for this. First of all, what the 14th Amendment talks about is state action, right? So basically the states can't cause states discriminate against individuals or in any way deny people the equal protection of laws, right? So the states as governments can't pass racist laws, let's say. So the states, the southern states were creative in a horribly evil way, right? So they knew, okay, so we're gonna, we'll abolish all of the laws that are on the books that openly discriminate or openly violate the rights of black people. And then what you have is a period of efforts by the states to sidestep the 14th Amendment by essentially allowing state actors, the local sheriff or maybe I should just put it this way. What you have is a period of time in which state government officials are engaging in racism and really, I mean, they're lynching people, let's just like flat out, these guys are members of the clan, right? And so they're using their state office in a way that is still, it's a difficult issue because they're in the kind of this gray area. It's not strictly speaking the state operating or a government acting. It's individual government officials engaging in all sorts of racist behavior and the violation of the rights of freed slaves and black people, but they're not really doing it in a quote official capacity. So it's a difficult issue that has to be sorted out and litigated for a long time. What counts as state action and what do you get? What do you do when the local sheriff comes to your door and knocks on the door and he says, you have to come outside. Oops, and then he runs away and a bunch of clansmen grab you and hang you from a tree. Now, is that really the state acting? It's not really the state acting, but it's somebody acting in sort of the capacity of a state actor. And so what you get is this idea of or in, I forget exactly what it was passed. And it's like late 19th century Civil Rights Act that seeks to deal with this by essentially saying, this is a law called now 42 USC section 1983. What that basically says is individuals have a cause of action against officials that are acting under color of state law. That is they're not acting with the explicit sanction of the government, but it's kind of a wink and a nod. And now you can sue them. So this talk many, many decades to get sorted out. Now there's a whole lot we can talk about, but the bottom line is they found ways around it and there was reluctance on the part of the courts and the federal government to sort of trample. It's not necessary, it's partly states rights, but it's partly really just, I think exhaustion with we had a civil war, we don't wanna go back there, we don't wanna start another civil war. So there's a period of time from like the end of the civil war up through the 1960s in which these issues are being fought and battled and sense in court, in riots, in all kinds of things. Years, hundreds of years. I'll just stop talking with this one last point. We can develop it more. Slavery and race issues is one of the hardest issues, if not the hardest issue that this country has ever dealt with. I mean, really in the post-revolution period, it ranks up there with the hardest things that America has ever dealt with. And it's not an easy thing to solve. How do you deal with that as, you know, how does the federal government, how does any government deal with that? How does a society deal with it? It's hard. And that's why it took a long time because it was really, really hard. What we need today, what I call the new intellectual would be any man or woman who is willing to think. Meaning, any man or woman who knows that man's life must be guided by reason, by the intellect, not by feelings, wishes, wins or mystic revelations. Any man or woman who values his life and who does not want to give in to today's cult of the stare, cynicism and impotence and does not intend to give up the world to the dark ages and to the role of the collectivist roads. 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