Can Anyone Explain How Nudity Laws Make Any Sense?

[Andrew D]

Well, that's a start. Sort of.

Anyone who feels like it can verify the things I say abgout myself. I use my first name -- my real first name -- all the time. I don't use my full last name, but it has been posted here.

Is it true that I hold a JD from Boalt? Don't take my word for it; look it up.

Is it true that I practice law in California? Don't take my word for it; look it up.

Is it true that I have written extensively about Tibet, self-determination, human rights in general, and torture in particular? Don't take my word for it; look it up. (Not everything I've written is on the net, but there's enough to show that I am who I say I am and that I do what I say I do.)

It isn't rocket science. Google it.

But what do we know about you?

Yeah, there's a Maun General Hospital in Botswana. Yeah, it has an infectious disease clinic.

But do you have anything to do with it? Maybe. Maybe not.

[Andrew D]

The question still stands, Scooter. Assuming that you have done what you claim to have done -- and those claims might well be perfectly true -- why haven't you been posting about what's been going on in the Congo?

[Andrew D]

It's amazing that anyone can take Lord Jim seriously.

A nudist believes that he or she has the right to go naked in front of other people, whether they want to see his or nakedness or not. We can debate the merits of that position if it ever actually arises.

What I have proposed is not nudism at all. What I have proposed means that no one will ever be forced to see anyone else naked.

No nudism.

People like Lord Jim will remain perfectly free to keep their children in ignorance. He wants his daughter to be mystified on her wedding night. Fine; he can want whatever he wants.

But what I have proposed does not require any children -- even those children who are chronologically "adults" -- to see anyone else naked. That is just a fact.

But Lord Jim and facts have an adversarial relationship. Surprise to no one.

If he had anything of substance to say on the subject, he would have produced it by now. He has not.

Surprise to no one.

[Scooter]

Well I'm sorry Andrew, but if you think I'm going to post anything resembling my real name here just for the sake of satisfying your curiosity, you're going to be disappointed. Not that it really could satisfy you, since any name I post could be one that I appropriated from someone else, couldn't it? Just like the "Andrew D..." that graduated from Boalt and has written on Tibet may or may not be the person who posts under the name of Andrew D here.

[Sean]

Some people don't feel the need to make everybody aware of their achievements and good works.

I admire that.

[Lord Jim]

It's always amusing to me the way Andrew sputters, flails, and tries to throw others on the defensive whenever he realizes he's made himself look foolish....

He doesn't seem to have a really good grasp of the "when you're in a hole quit digging" concept....

[Andrew D]

It's amazing how Lord Jim, when he has no rational response to what someone says, will try to turn what someone says into something that person is not saying.

No, wait; it's not amazing. It's typical.

[BoSoxGal]

You're out of line, Andrew D. And I say that as someone who admires (and has read much of) your work on Tibet and fully believes it's you who have accomplished it.

Frankly, coupled with your broad brush attacks on prosecutors and police in another active thread, you're really pissing me off with this attack on Scooter.

It's none of your business why Scooter doesn't choose to post here at length about the regrettable situation ongoing in sub-Saharan Africa, of which he apparently has first-hand experience. Maybe he comes here for entertainment, and whilst engaging in meaningful debate at times, doesn't feel the need to proselytize on an issue of such obvious personal import to him.

As to you; I commend your work on Tibet, but the daily legal 'grind' you participate in, by your own admissions here and on the CSB, is one which essentially enriches or protects the assets of corporate insurers and guarantees you and your wife a comfortable suburban existence awash in fine wine. Not necessarily noble stuff, there.

Yet you freely attack me and others like me who have dedicated our entire legal careers to serving the public interest, at a comparatively low salary, by broadly brushing us all with nasty accusations of lying and unethical practice of law. Quite frankly, that stinks. I've been in and around the criminal justice system long enough to know that there are plenty of folks of high ideals involved in this system - not just here in Montana - and to accuse 90% or more of us of being lying scumbags is ridiculous.

The truth is that out of idealism we dedicate the vast majority of our lives to a system that requires us to daily see the very worst the human animal is capable of, and to continue finding the energy and desire to come back at it day after day after day in the face of the terrible realities of violence, drug addiction, alcohol addiction, child abuse and neglect, serious mental illness, etc. with which we have to cope repeatedly.

Do you have the balls to do a job that difficult?

I'm sure you feel awfully self-important for your writings on Tibet; it's such a clear-cut issue, China's wrong, the poor downtrodden Tibetans are right, and 90% of the world likely agrees with your position.

Try taking on an imperfect system with a hell of a lot more moral ambiguity and finding the intellectual energy and emotional reserves to cope with that every day; then maybe you'd have the right to slander me and my fellow public servants the way you do.

Or, keep enriching insurance companies and buying high-priced goat cheese for your omelettes.

Either way, why don't you drop this particular absurd argument and leave Scooter the hell alone.

[Lord Jim]

It's perfectly obvious what happened here....

When Andrew saw that this thread was garnering him nothing but ridicule, rather than simply letting it die and moving on (the "stop digging" option) he got pissed off and decided to morph it in a bizarre direction and try to turn it into some sort "discussion" about whether or not Scooter has provided sufficient evidence to convince Himself that Scooter has been involved with the plight of those suffering in Africa...(I have to say that the relationship between that and the question of the validity of public nudity laws doesn't immediately jump out at me...)

This weird topic shift of his obviously hasn't been a rousing PR success or credibility enhancer, so I wonder if now he will finally stop digging....

I tend to doubt it; I don't believe his ego will permit him to.

[Andrew D]

Well, let's see.

My (paid) work is mostly about enriching insurers? That's odd. So many times, I tell insurers that they should pay the claims, even when they think that they should not have to. That doesn't sound to me like enriching insurers. That sounds to me like giving opinions which -- if the insurers take my advice; the ultimate decisions are theirs, not mine -- mean that the insureds will get what is rightly theirs.

Is there something wrong with that?

And my (paid) work mostly involves very large commercial cases. You rant as if I were trying to snatch insurance payments away from grandma after her house burns down. I don't get involved in such cases. I get involved in cases where there is the insurance company with its battery of attorneys on one side and the chemical fertilizer company (or the real estate development company or whatever) with its battery of attorneys on the other side.

I argue such points as "My client offered the plaintiff the very coverage which it now alleges it has, and the plaintiff declined to buy it. The plaintiff is not entitled to the coverage which it declined to purchase." And "The defendant has already litigated the question whether he did what my clients claim that he did. He is now in prison, because he was convicted of doing what my clients claim that he did. And he was not convicted on the basis of police testimony; he was convicted on the basis of the testimony of seventeen of his co-conspirators and the 46,000 pages of documents tracing, in perfect detail, what he did."

Is there something wrong with that?

As to fine wine, I can't remember the last time I bought a bottle of it. Yes, I have an abundant (although shrinking) store of fine wines that I bought years ago. So what? I busted my ass to earn the money to pay for that wine. And now, in one of life's fine ironies, I can't even drink it. All I can do is sip and spit. Gee, envy me.

As to practicing criminal law, the problem is not between my legs but between my ears. When I was in law school -- and you were in what? high school? grammar school? -- just reading the criminal cases raised my blood pressure to dangerous levels. There were times when I could not sleep, because I could not stop thinking about criminal cases. Sometimes I was enraged by the tactics of prosecutors -- tactics that even right-wing courts found totally beyond the pale. Sometimes I could not sleep, because every time I closed my eyes, images of what the filthy scum who were on trial flooded into my head. So I sat up all night watching bad reruns and struggling not to let those images consume me.

Maybe I should have gone into criminal law. I often consider volunteering for the Innocence Project. Their purpose is a lofty one, and my skills in legal research and analysis and writing could serve them well.

But every time I consider it, I reach the same unhappy conclusion: I cannot take the stress. I just turned forty-eight, and if I start working for the Innocence Project, I probably will not see my fiftieth birthday. I have made no secret of the fact that I already need various medications just to stay alive. If I were to do that kind of work, well, I don't think that even modern medicine has a drug cocktail good enough.

So, yeah, I have chosen survival over that particular kind of charitable work. I have concluded that even though that work needs doing, and even though I would be very good at one portion of it, I am not willing to put my wife through burying me for it. Or my mother. Or my brother. Or my nephews. Or my godchildren.

Maybe I'm just a coward. Maybe I'm just selfish. Maybe I really should take on that sort of work, regardless of the consequences to the people who love me.

Would you? If you were sure that being a prosecutor would kill you within a couple of years, would you have taken the job anyway?

As to "attacking" Scooter, I have said quite explicitly that I have not posted anywhere near as much as I should have about what has been going on in the Congo. I am as guilty as are others of paying more attention to trivia than to the greatest human-rights calamity on the globe. What more do you want?

As to Tibet, it may be that 90% of the world now agrees with the positions that I have asserted. But that sure as hell was not true when I was doing that work.

(By the way, the total number of hours that I put in, pro bono, is easily in the high hundreds and probably in the thousands. How many lawyers do you think can honestly say that? As one person correctly put it back when I was working at a law firm, my pro bono work was enough to fulfill not just the bar's recommendation of what each lawyer ought to do, but enough to fulfill that recommendation for all the lawyers in the office combined.)

When I was doing that work, not many people knew anything about Tibet. On the political scene, internationally and domestically, Tibet was barely a blip.

We, those of us who did the hard work when almost no one else was listening, changed that. Many people did much more than I did; I know people who have devoted their lives to that cause. I did what I could, but what I did was only a tiny fraction of the work that went into it.

And I didn't get a dime for any of it.

How much pro bono work have you done?

Do you really believe that you are serving the public interest? I have no way of knowing; I can't read your mind.

But considering how obvously easy it was for you to throw all of your previous ideals overboard like so much rotten fruit, it looks like you switched sides because it bumped up your salary.

Oh, the nobility.

[Lord Jim]

[Andrew D]

When you don't have an answer, post a picture.

It's clever. It's funny. It's evidently easy for some people.

And most of all, it helps hide the fact that you don't have an answer.

You're much better than I am at this, Lord Jim. You have much more experience than I do in posting what will capture people's attention. I tend to post long-winded, boring, excessively annotated stuff. I have never mastered your gift for the quick, clever response, and I doubt that I ever will.

You win.

I bow to your superiority in witticism.

Someone somewhere may decide to read the threads for the substance of what they have to say.

Maybe.

Or maybe not.

But I cannot compete with funny pictures.

I am at a loss when it comes to turning a clever phrase. I drone on endlessly. I use so many footnotes that they drown out the text that I am writing. I am drearily monotonous.

You are none of those things. Clever phrases fall effortlessly from your lips. You are succinct; you land directly and sharply on the points you are making.

I just stumble in my semi-coherent way through mountains of stuff that very few people are interested in anyway. I don't find anything witty to say. There usually is something witty to say, and you usually find it. I usually don't.

You win.

Equating public defecation with public nudity is a brilliant strategy. It puts me on the defensive. It turns the tables so that instead of your having to defend the requirement that people clothe themselves, I have to defend a prohibition of public defecation, even though I have never asserted that people should be allowed to defecate in public.

It is dazzling.

I cannot begin to compete with it.

I am in awe.

But somehow, I find myself, despite being awestruck, not being envious. Somehow, I find myself not saddened by my incompetence at the cheap trick. It's probably just one of my personality defects.

You win.

[Gob]

A nudist believes that he or she has the right to go naked in front of other people, whether they want to see his or nakedness or not. We can debate the merits of that position if it ever actually arises.

Not true, a nudist is someone who enjoys being nude and being in the company of other naked people. It is not a question of the right to do so.

[BoSoxGal]

I practice law with the strictest adherence to ethics and the obligations required of me by the mandate that I serve not just an individual client, but the Constitution, the pursuit of justice, and protection of the community. These obligations and my adherence to them often result in MY advocating for preservation of the rule of law to the benefit of a defendant, when his/her own defense attorney has not so done.

My perspective of being a prosecutor is based not only on my own (thus far) brief experience, but years of studying the criminal law both in school (at the undergraduate level, and in law school) and as a personal interest, in which capacity I've been an avid scholar of the criminal law since my teens.

I studied the criminal law 'officially', by the way, with folks who had served as both defense attorneys and prosecutors and were renowned for their ethics in practice on both sides of the fence. One who comes to mind immediately is Samuel Dash, who started the defense clinic at Harvard while a student there and later was lead prosecutor in the Watergate case. I studied legal ethics with Father Drinan; again, renowned within the profession for his adherence to ethics.

If your opinion of them differs, Andrew D, I'll take that with a grain of salt when balanced against the hundreds upon hundreds of good attorneys in both corners who consider them both role models.

As to this:

Do you really believe that you are serving the public interest? I have no way of knowing; I can't read your mind.

But considering how obvously easy it was for you to throw all of your previous ideals overboard like so much rotten fruit, it looks like you switched sides because it bumped up your salary.

Oh, the nobility.

That's a truly shitty thing to say and totally uncalled for, Andrew D. Nice of you to dimiss out of hand the kind and encouraging sentiments you previously sent me by PM when we discussed the issue of my change of job, something over which I was agonizing at great length, obviously reluctant to give up on my passion for criminal defense - which I still happen to believe in 100%, and which I also pursued ethically. (eta: The primary basis for my decision to leave there and come here was the fact that I was so under-resourced I was at the brink of malpractice on a daily basis, as the public defender system expected me to play receptionist and secretary in addition to carrying a massive caseload and I was barely able to do the minimum of lawyering on behalf of my clients. As a prosecutor who believes justice is the law tempered with mercy, I do far more to benefit defendants than I was ever able to as a defense attorney. And yes, I got a few measly beans more in the process - but I am still eating mac-n-cheese and one paycheck from financial ruin.)

I'm certainly glad that I never contacted you IRL as you welcomed me to do at that time. You don't deserve to know me IRL.

And for the record, I've also performed HUNDREDS of hours of pro bono - on top of working solely in legal aid organizations, public defender organizations and now as a prosecutor, for the entirety of my legal career. The rest of the legal community recognizes that by definition those positions constitute 'the practice of law in the public interest.'

Additionally I've fed the poor at soup kitchens, visited the elderly at nursing homes, tutored inner city kids, assisted with the building of homes for the low-income, volunteered on crisis hotlines, and at least a dozen other activities in the benefit of the public interest on a regular basis since I was 12 years old.

But since you can't personally verify that, I'm a money-grubbing (ha! at a prosecutor's salary?!?) piece of shit.

And for the record, I'm only a few years younger than you, Andrew D. The law is my second career. You aren't some kind of experienced sage by comparison to me, as you present yourself in your posts.

I've been considering taking a break from internet use beyond what is necessary for work for some time now; you just helped me make the decision. Because while I do a job every day that most people wouldn't want to do (and I say that with regard to my time as a public defender and legal aid attorney, too) - a job that is rife with incredible stress and yes, creates negative health implications for me or anybody else who does it - I don't need to come to a place that I consider a community of friends and have one of those people repeatedly accuse me of being a lying scumbag and of advocating the positions of others who are lying scumbags while violating the oath I took before God, family, friends and colleagues to support a Constitution in which I place my absolute faith and for which I willingly put my life/health in jeopardy, absent ANY actual evidence in support.

And God help you, Andrew D, should you or your wife or anybody else you love become the victim of violent crime and you have to rely on the integrity and skills of a lowly scumbag prosecutor in seeking justice on your behalf.

Enjoy wallowing in the stench of your (supposed) superiority, Andrew D.

[Liberty1]

Good God, do you people ever work or do anything else productive?

Who has time to read these potifications, much less come up with them.

[BoSoxGal]

It's poNtifications.

I wrote mine on my lunch break. Many posts have been posted since and before I had the opportunity to post mine, during a brief break following hours of court and case negotiation with opposing counsel.

It's 5pm here; I've got about two more hours of work before I'll leave my office, where I've been at work since 8am. This is an average day; in trial prep I'd be working closer to 12 or 14 hours and the same for actual trial days.

I make $50k/year and have 3 weeks paid vacation. I owe over $150k in student loans.

Yes, I'm a money-grubber with no sense of ethics, duty or principle and with no consideration for the fates of the members of my community.

And I didn't just cry yesterday when a beautiful drug-addicted mother of 5 was sentenced to a period of incarceration for crimes against people and property which she readily admitted she had committed in furtherance of her addiction.

I just don't give a shit about anybody but me, and my beans.

[Andrew D]

I don't know why you bring up stuff that we said in PMs we exchanged. You may recall that by the time we actually started having a conversation, you had already taken the job.

Nothing that I could have said could possibly have influenced your decision: Your decision was a done deal before I said anything.

I said kind and encouraging things. I meant them. I still do. And I would say them again to someone else in similar circumstances.

But do you really believe that practicing law ethically is what most people in most prosecutors' offices do? Do you really belive that testifying truthfully is what most police officers in most places do?

Maybe that is true in a state with a minuscule population and no big cities. I don't know: There aren't enough data from tiny places to base any rational conclusion on.

But there are plenty of data about what happens in big cities -- in places where most police and most prosecutors do what they do. Check out New Orleans. Check out Los Angeles. Check out New York.

Why do you think that the Innocence Project exists?

It exists because there are innocent people in prison.

Who put them there?

[Andrew D]

... the public defender system expected me to play receptionist and secretary ....

Oh, the pain. I've been my own receptionist and my own secretary and my own file clerk and my own paralegal and my own everything else for a dozen years. Ain't life a bitch.

It's 5pm here; I've got about two more hours of work before I'll leave my office, where I've been at work since 8am. This is an average day; in trial prep I'd be working closer to 12 or 14 hours and the same for actual trial days.

Exactly. You have it easy.

The last time I was in trial, I got less than five hours' sleep a night on the nights I got any sleep at all. I didn't work 12 or 14 hours a day; I'd have loved to work only 12 or 14 ours a day.

I worked 16, 17, 18 hours a day. Many times, I worked 24 hours a day and kept right on working.

And the last jury trial I was in went on for seven weeks. Not counting pre-trial stuff. Not counting deliberations. The actual being in trial went on for seven weeks. It got to where when the clock said 3:30, I had no idea whether it was 3:30 in the afternoon or 3:30 in the morning.

I ... have 3 weeks paid vacation.

Lucky you. That's three more than I have.

You get a regular paycheck. I have no idea from one month to the next how much money I will have. Some months are great; some months suck.

I get hired to work on a huge case; I get assigned a fat, juicy piece of work. A week later, I am informed that the case has settled, and there is no work left for me.

I've never had a soft, cushy government job. So pardon me if I don't get all weepy over your woes. Try working in the private sector instead of suckling at the governmental teat. See if you survive.

[rubato]

"...
What exactly do you want to know? It is the infectious disease clinic at Maun General Hospital in Botswana. My contributions have been in the areas of governance, organizational development and financial management. I have occasionally spoken about it on the CSB.

Is that all? Do I get a cookie?

Great job. I'm impressed. That's the kind of thing that really does change the world. I had not heard you mention it before.


yrs,
rubato

[rubato]

I think Andrew just needs a group *hug*.

yrs,
rubato