Wow, a driver that’s been retired for 13 years won for a team that shut down 10 years ago in the first ever season that Nascar has decided to run 2 Daytona 500s in the same month.
GitHub have the gall talking about accessibility while flinging their octotentacles, dragging users screaming down to the firey pits of JavaScript hell.
I would suppose the above user is referring, rather snidely, to GitHub not loading commit information without JavaScript. GitHub's JavaScript use is really quite minimal, and certainly nothing like GitLab.
Github uses web-components which are not supported by
old browsers. All dynamic menus don't work without
polyfill extension(which takes 100% CPU due some bug after awhile), basic functionality like creating/modifying files works right now but there is no guarantee github wouldn't break it.
I don't understand that to be honest, commit information is fairly static, and we've been building semi-dynamic pages server-side for decades now. At their size they could probably - and probably do - have an in-memory cache for commits + basic information for super fast access.
The fact that it used to work perfectly fine without JS is proof enough that it don't need it. But I guess the average web deviloper is more concerned with stuffing one's resume with the latest fads than real accessibility and efficiency.
There's a lot of hostility on HN towards web developers. "Real accessibility" doesn't really have much to do with Javascript or not, it has everything to do with ensuring the site is screen reader accessible, ensuring the site is available for low-vision users, and ensuring that the site is available at slow bandwidths. Given that the site caters to those already (good kb navigation, stated future support for color-blindness, and the site is ~300kb/page) I think that they're in pretty good shape.
Ultimately, choosing not to run JS is your decision—but a vanishingly small percentage of users choose to do that, and as a company your focus is on providing features for the product, and not supporting every single user and their unique configurations. Should Github explicitly support terminal-based browsers like Lynx as well?
Plus, you can avoid 99% of the github website just by using git from the command line (or your favorite client) and using their CLI tool for repo creation/etc.
I really don't understand the glorification of no-js websites on HN. Like, I'd get it if it was Flash or something ('cause that definitely has some real accessibility issues, and required a plugin to be installed), but the web platform is HTML, CSS and JS. Why artificially limit yourself to just two? It seems to have become a matter of pride to say "works without JS", for absolutely no practical reason (it's not like removing JS is some silver bullet for accessibility, no-js sites can and do still absolutely have problems with accessibility)
JS is usually what kills performance on lower end devices. If websites were only html and css, my smartphone from 2015 would still be a functional device. I have yet to have a page crash due to too poorly written html and css.
It depends what you're doing with the JavaScript. This is like saying "C kills performance" because you found one slow C program. JavaScript can actually improve performance in quite a few conditions (even on lower end devices) by preventing full page reloads and such, which adds more overhead in the network, HTML parsing, etc.
If we're talking about saving bandwidth, JS can be useful, although JS bundles are usually heavier than their HTML and CSS counterparts.
I have yet to see an example where rewriting the DOM would end up being lighter on devices with lower-end CPUs and RAM than doing a full page refresh. Browsers already cache static assets, generally a page refresh only takes a second or two (on reasonable connections)
A common example is when you have a page with information and you want to load some additional data or details to display (possibly just a single line). Often times, a a simple AJAX request is faster, and it's also often better UX, IMHO. There are loads of examples of this, but people don't tend to notice when it works well and only remember the examples where it doesn't (like, say, the new Reddit UI).
The application I work on initially used to work completely without JS, but I let that go and now you need JS. It made everything faster, more performant (even on my shitty phone), and the code easier to work with. And it's just 770 lines of JS (+ jQuery, because I think it's just more convenient than dealing with the DOM API).
I have nothing against Javascript when it improves the overall result. However, when I come across a site which consists of text articles interspersed with some static images, and the images do not show with JS disabled, or in extreme cases, the entire page remains empty because it needs JS to even display text, that just screams wrong.
Web has been able to display well-formatted text and images for decades without Javascript just fine. In fact, that has been its original primary purpose, to display text with hyperlinks and some images. Why bastardize it just because you want your images to load with a cool effect or something equally silly (that won't work well for half of the visitors anyway) ?
> There's a lot of hostility on HN towards web developers.
You're conflating different types of web developers here.
There's only hostility towards the sub-set of web developers that focus only on what is expedient while sacrificing user-friendliness. The ones that hop on the latest and greatest buzzword technologies in order to pad their resumes.
There's a lot of hostility on HN towards web developers.
Why shouldn't there be, when they're the ones breaking things that used to work perfectly fine, and then reimplementing them half-bakedly while consuming an order of magnitude more resources than before?
Should Github explicitly support terminal-based browsers like Lynx as well?
Why does it have to be "explicitly support"? Whatever happened to using the simplest technology possible for the task? That way you'll end up with a page that will work to the best possible extent for any given user-agent. That is ture accessibility.
I'm not asking for them to go out of their way to try to show images in Lynx or whatever. I'm asking for a sane approach to making sites that does not require running arbitrary code on the client just to show some static text that should've come along directly in the page, something that literally all browsers would be able to, but is being needlessly restricted.
Plus, you can avoid 99% of the github website just by using git from the command line (or your favorite client) and using their CLI tool for repo creation/etc.
> they're the ones breaking things that used to work perfectly fine
And it still works perfectly fine. You've purposefully modified your browser to not respect web standards. Any error is your responsibility, not theirs.
To some extent I agree with this sentiment. Not so much the Javascript aspect, although I've always viewed JS with the "less is more" mentality myself. I understand that it's become a critical part of the web, so that's not really where I agree with you.
I agree with you more on the "breaking things that used to work perfectly fine." To me this has nothing to do with "accessibility." If I recall correctly, a couple years ago the header was white, then they changed it to grey.
While I feel like giving users more theme options and more control over their UI is the right direction to go in and one that adds value, I can't help but think that this is just the design team keeping themselves busy/valid.
I followed their design team on social media for a brief period until I realized that all they do is hold senseless confs with the same people over and over again to discuss the same things over and over again. None of them have real code in their repos, just markdown and HTML and stylesheets. None of them contribute to 3rd party projects. Then they iterate something nobody was complaining about. I just feel like these are resources that would be better spent elsewhere.
Please take a step back for a moment and imagine that you're one of the blind users of HN running into this comment. Reading that GitHub devs who took the time to actually support some assistive technology on their website (not sure how well, but see the existing aria attributes in the source) and track their support (https://government.github.com/accessibility/) don't care about "real accessibility" by not catering to what technology choices you prefer.
That's not true. The idea that the web should gracefully degrade and continue to display content in browsers of all types has been live for... the entire existence of the web.
There is a new trend to expect all clients to run js, yes, but that is a bad assumption.
I understand that is an ideal, but "browsers of all types" is utterly unrealistic, and hasn't been the case in the wild since the 90's.
Not only does the modern web expect you to be running JS, you're expected to be running a browser that's at most 1 version off the most recently released version. Supporting only evergreen browsers might just be the best thing that's happened in web development.
Graceful degradation was a thing for a very brief period in the lifetime of the web, and hardly anyone actually had the resources or inclination to even pretend to attempt it.
We got conned into this shitty world where HTML shovels ajax and giant JS payloads.
Old web was information and a theme could be written locally and applied to everything.
New web is almost as trashy as the App Store.
edit: my imagination is vivid, and it doesn't end at React and the iPhone. We can do so much better. Semantic information markup without ads and presentation details. Shared p2p, unsiloed. Completely free.
You're arguing semantics. The web development community (and the engineering industry as a whole) uses the term "accessibility" to refer to making things usable by people with disabilities (and has done so for decades).
Pretending that people understand the term to mean a different thing, and then screeching at them for not doing that how you want them to is intellectually dishonest and just makes you look like an asshole.
The quality of being accessible, or of admitting approach; receptiveness
As another link posted elsewhere in here shows, it seems accessibility has turned from striving to make sites more accessible to everyone, to doing the bare minimum legally required by disability laws.
"real accessibility" predominantly involves making it possible for people with disabilities to use a website, it's not about accommodating people who put a blindfold on and complain that it's difficult to see.
Accessibility doesn't really mean catering to people who choose to disable JS in their browser. There's whole set of standards for providing accessibility with dynamic web https://www.w3.org/WAI/standards-guidelines/aria/
And every common description of web accessibility. From WAI to Wikipedia to common courses. I'm not saying it's good design or the right direction for GitHub. Just that accessibility is important and disabling-js is not really it.
Specifically: disabling JS - your choice; having a disability - not your choice.
In my case, yes, it is by choice. But do you think everyone has a choice? JavaScript is a power-hungry, memory-hungry, bloated, security nightmare. Requiring JavaScript for basic functionality (that was available not that long ago!) is simply hostile.
Yes most consumer devices run the same 3 browsers all of which run Javascript just fine. I get you don't like it, but that doesn't mean its an accessibility problem.
> Yes most consumer devices run the same 3 browsers all of which run Javascript just fine. I get you don't like it, but that doesn't mean its an accessibility problem.
Assuming you have a new enough device. My 300€ android from 2017 is essentially unusable as it can't run JS well enough any longer.
That doesn't make sense except for a few heavy applications of JS like a resource-intensive web game which is obviously a niche outside of general statements about the internet.
Your 2017 Android isn't unusable because it can't run AJAX and $(dropdown).toggle() fast enough. Maybe it's not as fast as your laptop.
The issue here is that nowadays "heavy applications of JS" are quite common on blogs, news websites and other "definitely not web applications"-type of websites.
With JS enabled, I sometimes see simple mousewheel scrolling slow down or become choppy, or spiking CPU usage for a second or two. Simple scrolling of content that is already rendered and is not moving. And often, the same site with JS disabled scrolls smoothly (or completely fails to load, it's a crapshoot, really).
No, accessibility is already defined as a legal concept that has been around since before the advent of the Internet, because it also applies to our physical infrastructure.
There's a really big gap between claiming that modern web development goes too far and runs far too much code and is much too bloated and claiming all sites that require javascript are "not accessible." You may as well go into shouty rants about the use of color because you refuse to stop using a monochrome terminal.
It wasn't always like this. Look at WCAG version 1.0 [0] section 6.3. It's very sensible advice. Then through the magic of "Web 2.0" and bigco work on "Accessible Rich Internet Applications" the advice was made to disappear [1].
Nowadays when you mention the issue on the web, instead of trying to understand and imagine low-powered devices, limited browsers, restricted environments, or maybe just security-concious people who are effectively disabled by this "Web 2.0" bullshit, people claim that you're using the term "accessibility" wrong.
I wonder what makes people so eager to push back on such a simple request, to make basic functionality available without JavaScript. In GitHub's case, they only recently screwed it up in a major way, so surely it shouldn't be a big deal to add back the functionality?
Is it "frontend programmers" feeling hurt? Or business types who think it hurts their telemetry channels? Do their salaries depend on it? Or perhaps it's just people who just need to disapprove of someone else's preferences?
It's a simple request. Yes, more than 99% of your users use JavaScript, are not blind or deaf, have reasonably fast links, powerful machines, large enough screens, don't mind updating their browser every week (very important! security matters _so much_ when you regularly run arbitrary code), etc.
So I'm in the 1%... why do so many people feel such a strong need to tell me this issue of mine is a non-issue for everybody else?
> I wonder what makes people so eager to push back on such a simple request, to make basic functionality available without JavaScript.
I think it's as simple as the fact that your simple request isn't important to them, but you demand it as though you are owed a javascript-free web experience. "I am not doing that because I don't want to" is a perfectly good answer to your demands. It really doesn't matter how easy it would be for them to provide it. They're also probably not providing RSS, though you may want them to, and that would be easy too. Sorry your pet thing is not prioritized.
Personally, I think a small amount of client-side scripting can vastly improve a user experience, and way too much client-side scripting can vastly deter from it. It's a balance that each site must strike. And the effort they must go through to test and support all functionality while also supporting completely disabling javascript is definitely nonzero. Some sites won't find that effort worth it. That's the breaks. I can tell you that I never, ever intend to put any effort into supporting a no-javascript user experience on anything I build in the future. I could almost see rendering an alternate page that says "you no-JS kooks aren't gonna be happy here" but even that is more effort than I care to expend on a militant userbase that's likely to also take exception to some silly shit like my html not being semantic enough.
Are you working for GitHub? If not, nobody asked you anything. That you are taking such offense at my simple request that you have to create a "non-JS kook" personality type to satisfy your vindictive feelings is mystifying. Try to improve yourself.
To answer your question, I don't work at GitHub. And I really don't take offense to your simple request, but I do find it interesting how vehemently you are making your "simple request." I also don't think it's unreasonable to turn off JS. What I do think is unreasonable is turning off JS and then getting angry over the fact that few other people care about this scenario.
> In GitHub's case, they only recently screwed it up in a major way, so surely it shouldn't be a big deal to add back the functionality?
Unless you're under the impression that websites are only requiring JavaScript out of spite, it seems like it would be a pretty big deal.
> why do so many people feel such a strong need to tell me this issue of mine is a non-issue for everybody else?
Because it's self-imposed, your justification involved calling JavaScript a "newer technology", and people tend not to react well to the belief that "I don't want to run JavaScript" is comparable to disability.
I don't know how much programming experience you have, but let me tell you that bringing back an HTML dropdown menu is not a big deal. I don't know about "spite", but I would say it's either an oversight, or incompetence, or some grander goal to force JavaScript on their users for what could be termed "business-related reasons".
You picked up on "newer technology" as if it's pertinent to the matter. It is not. This usability checkpoint is still 100% valid today. I gave reference to that document to show that the matter is related to accessibility, and to provide evidential support to userbinator's view that the term has been hijacked by the web giants and munged up to exclude whatever is inconvenient to them.
You, like others in this thread, bring "disability" and "self-imposition" to this discussion. I dare you to imagine a world where not everybody who wishes to make basic use of GitHub is able, even if willing, to run JavaScript in every conceivable context. Can you imagine such a world? In this totally imaginary world this inaccessibility is not self-imposed. Given such a world, would you be willing to accept that my simple request is reasonable?
You are seeing the true nature of corporate greed and control show its ugly face. The end-game is clear: one browser controlled by one company, of great complexity and continuously changed to discourage others from attempting to compete, shaping websites to that one company's desires. Of course everything will be "standard" and "open", but that hardly matters.
One company has clearly invested a lot into the "JS only" propaganda and strongly attempts to silence the opposition. Turning all sites into ridiculously overcomplex "web apps" that only work in their very latest browser is their dream. It's obvious that a simple text-only or even text+images browser is not all that complex, so from that perspective, basic HTML and browsers that can handle it is a threat --- and cutting those off by making sites not work in them is the ultimate underhanded tactic. They can cheer all they want about "moving the web forward" --- and unfortunately a lot of the "young and impressionable" gets caught up in that propaganda --- but what they are really doing is helping this company further its control over the Internet.
Don't forget the endless stream of security updates, bundled up with whatever new UI/tracking/arbitrariness they want to force upon you. After all, the world wide web is a dangerous place, and your data is at risk. Don't you trust us to keep you safe? As if you had a choice.
Agree - This GitHub theme is unfortunately too dark. Which is a shame, because I was genuinely excited to read that GH has released a dark mode.
I use many dark mode themes and have even created them. The important thing to constantly keep in mind whilst authoring a dark them is: resist the urge to go "too dark" and contrasty, and to keep checking against a known "good" reference.
If any GitHub execs are reading this, and would like to see an example of what we're talking about here, then the JetBrains "Darkula" theme in IntelliJ is a well done dark theme.
Same! I use Dark Reader and I much prefer it's take on Github than this - way too much contrast. "Dark" doesn't need to mean BLACK. A nice example is overreacted.io - a navy/blue dark theme.
I've been using a Firefox plugin that let's you style sites with alternative CSS for years to achieve something similar on GitHub (I forget the name, but it is pretty popular) - every now and then something on the site looks a bit weird until the styles are updated to keep in sync with GitHub tho.
I personally think GitHub have got this just right, I love it! (I'm red/green colour blind tho, and do tend towards preferring a bit more contrast).
I use the Dark Reader plugin on Firefox and it is incredible. It works perfectly on almost all sites, which is quite an accomplishment given how many site-specific dark modes are either poorly done or non-existent.
I usually prefer the dark theme but some websites detect that Windows is in dark mode (using `prefers-color-scheme: dark` in CSS) and fail to provide a way to toggle the dark theme off. This makes it difficult to read the text during daytime.
Scheduling dark theme on & off and combining it with Dark Reader's automation, it's nice being able to have all websites switch to dark mode at night.
Well since the Settings has both System Default and Dark Mode, I wish System Default would be matching closer to macOS Dark Mode which is Dark Greyish colour when user is on macOS.
> Anyone who wants to get cocaine, will get cocaine
I never thought this was a good argument against making something illegal, because there are definitely people who only-kinda want cocaine but are deterred by the law. Those people could have ended up as addicts if it was legal (and easier) to get.
Why is murder illegal? Anyone who wants to murder someone will do it. At that point why is anything illegal?
From a public policy standpoint—the point of a ban on hard drugs is to improve public health. If hardly anyone uses hard drugs as a result of the ban, then it’s effective. However, if people are using hard drugs anyway and getting punished for it, the ban is not serving its purpose—it’s failing to prevent these people from using hard drugs, and it’s also then punishing these people (which is wrong).
So you have to weigh the negative impact of the punishments and the cost of enforcement against the positive impact of reducing (not eliminating) drug use.
So then it's a valid question to ask, if other drugs were made legal would they also rise to that level? AFAIK drug enforcement casualties don't come close to that number.
We have history of, for example, opium being legal and having millions addicted. Of course it's a different time period. Maybe today stuff like that wouldn't happen.
> So then it's a valid question to ask, if other drugs were made legal would they also rise to that level
Look at countries where they are legal—the answer is almost certainly NO, for most drugs and most countries.
Alcohol consumption would almost certainly be banned if (1) bans were effective at reducing consumption and (2) bans were made on the basis of public health. People in the US want to consume alcohol so badly that it will happen in great numbers despite a ban, as we see during US prohibition. That’s not to say that prohibition failed, just that it was at best a partial success.
The question is then, why is alcohol not banned if it is widely known that alcohol is more harmful and more addictive than various illegal drugs?
> We have history of, for example, opium being legal and having millions addicted.
Right, for example the very dark period in Britain's history when it supported the opium trade in China, even though it was illegal in both Britain and China at the time. If you want to understand this part of history, I’d say that the horrors of British colonialism are more explicatory than the addictive nature of opium itself.
If you thought of opium as a public health problem in China you would not be wrong, but if you thought of it as weapon used by imperialist Britain against the Chinese people then you would not be wrong either.
There are people who are turned away because they are afraid of the law, of being caught, but there are also lots of people for whom the law is more informative than threatening. If I see the speed limit drop from 80 to 25, maybe I slow down because I am afraid of a ticket but I probably slow down because I trust that there is some good reason for the lower limit. If a substance is made illegal I will be hesitant to use or purchase it because I have a degree in trust in my government. I trust that someone spent time looking at a substance and made a decision. Laws, even if never enforced, can still dissuade people.
On the other hand, if one never trusts government then every law is a problem, every ban an infringement upon liberty.
It's one thing to trust the government about something that is relatively uncontroversial, like speed limits. It's beyond naive to trust the government on a subject about which it has a very long history of questionable decisions and moralizing policy.
The difference is that cocaine use is only really harmful to the user whereas murder obviously involves a third party.
You also have to consider the impact of the policies themselves. Cocaine prohibition may reduce cocaine addiction but it also creates legal issues for cocaine users that are often more harmful than the drug itself in addition to creating the space for a criminal blackmarket to exist and thrive. On the other hand, murder prohibition reduces the number of murders and is generally considered to be worthwhile.
> The difference is that cocaine use is only really harmful to the user
Incorrect, it harms the families of addicts and the victims of crimes perpetrated to buy more cocaine, to name a couple externalities of cocaine use. This goes for alcohol, heroin, etc. I've been an addict and seen the damage that my use caused to others.
That being said, I think cocaine/heroin/meth should be legal and cheap, with drug counseling intake services offered at places that sell them.
Most things that are illegal have a victim. Murder, robbery, assault, etc. all have a responsible party and an injured party. Nobody expects that making murder illegal will stop all murders, that's a silly argument. You have to have some kind of justice, though.
This is why criminalizing drug use is such a unique and unusual case - when a person does drugs, there is no other victim, and yet the state punishes them for it anyway.
> there are definitely people who only-kinda want cocaine
Perhaps, but it's pretty odd that one would accept a significant risk of catastrophic damage, but be deterred by the relatively minor risk of legal consequences. I don't think the segment you're talking about is that significant.
> Why is murder illegal?
Come on, really? Drug consumption is a victimless crime.
That's a hell of a strawman, nobody is arguing DWI should be allowed in any capacity. And to think of the children is $LOCAL_VARIANT_OF_CPS's literal job description.
okay, but what about the drug users who don't have dependents? what about the people who drink, but never drive while intoxicated? who is the victim in these cases?
Someone only "kinda wanting" to do cocaine is indicative of a non-addictive personality, therefore use of cocaine is of minimal risk for these individuals.
From my understanding, this is most people.
Addiction is the problem, not the drug itself. And it will always get channeled into something destructive; ie. gambling, sex, alcohol, sugar.
You can't ban everything, but you can treat addiction.
Removing stigma, shame and punishment encourages people with addictive personalities to seek treatment, which is the only long term solution.
illegality was never really about deterrence. deterrence is just a narrative and there is not a ton of evidence suggesting its efficacy.
ie: see statistics of vehicle crashes directly linked to speeding, texting and driving, or reckless driving which includes DUI. these are top of the chart causations that are illegal, where frequency has increased over the years, not gone down -- not to be conflated with a decrease in fatalities, which appears to be more a result of better structural/impact design of vehicle models, than because people are deterred from breaking the above classes of laws.
WV used to top the charts in vehicular fatalities as a result of DUI, despite illegality during that era of its history.
also, see deterrence and the argument for capital punishment. there's not a ton of evidence here but admittedly it's been a long time since i've studied ethics.
perhaps it is one of those common sense things we understand before we prove.
with that said, regardless, illegality as a concept was designed strictly as a means to enforce accountability in the context of a free society when there exists evidence of an action: you are free to act but may be held accountable (law).
in my opinion that is all illegality should ever be: a framework of accountability.
now, what is determined to be illegal is of course the debate and subject to collective agreement within a free society.
Take punishment. As a deterrent and or motivator to avoid future problems, punishment makes sense.
...except when it doesn't. Take someone who would be doing fine had they got got themselves into a bad place using drugs.
Just being in that bad place and coming to acceptance on it is significant.
Punishing them isn't a corrective action though. It's more like a cost, more harm to avoid doing some other harm at best. And, when it has implications, like being unable to return to that pre-drug life because of the conviction, inability to work, etc...
Corrective actions, in my view, should be the outcome.
Punishment or not, the people in trouble need help. Trouble with this side of things is they won't always accept it, and or are not in any degree of acceptance about the trouble.
In both cases, we can pour a lot of resources, money and time into all this and leave a person worse off, and maybe with fewer options for recovery and a move back into just being an ordinary person living a reasonable life.
To me, avoiding those expensive outcomes is a very solid argument for decriminalization.
There still can be punishment post criminalization too. It's just not going to be spending years in a cage. Maybe it's worth some additional thought.
We could then still punish and potentially eliminate the bad outcomes, maybe break even or even save on costs, and more people have more options more of the time.
Reaching acceptance can take multiple cycles. Use, get in a bad place, use, bad, use... If, along the way, people maintain options, have hope, and or opportunity to accept and have real reasons, their own reasons to change, more would, more of the time without falling further away from that return to normal.
I am saying we would benefit from rethinking what punishment actually is, or what it could be, and how corrective actions could mean more opportunity for people to improve.
As it is now, punishment is often harsh, and it has it's own negative impact, distancing people away from a return to normal, making it harder for them to get past a bad time, out of bad habits.
Doesn't have to be that way.
And corrective actions, once the stigma of criminality is farther off the table, could expand into more and better opportunity for people to get out of a bad place more quickly, or with lower impact to their community, family.
Lastly, judgement.
This is perhaps the biggest gain with decriminalization. I am not saying we should not judge people for bad calls, living poorly. It sucks for them and people around them.
But, consider how it could go, using racism as an example, because it's easier for me to illustrate with:
Path A: "You sir, are a racist!"
Path B: "That comes across as racist to others, is that what you intended?"
Right out of the gate, acceptance means facing, owning, and recognizing the truth of the direct personal judgment; namely, being a racist.
That's a huge friction point! People won't do it and they have a ton of reasons for not doing it. Big problem space, and personally difficult.
We have a barrier between the undesirable behavior and someone making better choices, and it's there before we even get to the better choices part!
On path B, it's different. They aren't being called a racist, not being labeled, judged as a person. It's more about what they did and how it impacts others, or is perceived.
There still is a barrier, but it's a different sort. The door is open for things like:
"yeah, bad call, let's not go there"
At the very least, they can hear that feedback, express their intent isn't to be a racist, and then simply choose to make different choices in the future. Low friction.
Decriminalization is more like Path B. Lower friction, less judgement, people have options to improve, having to accept can be more on their terms, and if they do want to own up to the trouble, they could get help without so many ugly implications.
> Come on, really? Drug consumption is a victimless crime.
It is common practice to penalise the selling of drugs much heavier than the possession or usage. There you have the victim: the buyer and user of the drugs.
It isn't semantics. We give protected classes extra protections because they are attributes of who a person is. To give the same protections to actions that people do would be wildly different.
A salesperson should be able to be fired for shit-talking their own product. A customer service representative should be able to be fired for treating a customer inappropriately. The editor of a magazine should be allowed to edit contributors' articles. Putting speech on the same level as a protected class is ridiculous.
Courts aren’t machines that evaluate a series of IF statement in vacuums; they look at the entirety of the situation. They’re going to be looking for the root cause of the reason that management has landed on their decision.
Someone mentioning they’re gay after being asked if they have a wife would be a very different situation from someone who, for instance, is engaging people in inappropriate and unwanted discussions of sexuality.
The law is quite simple: was the person fired because of their membership in a protected class?
What do you mean “why isn’t speech codified at the same level”? You mean, why haven’t legislators made a law that protects free speech against discrimination by employers and businesses, in the same way the Civil Rights Act does for religion?
I mean, what other answer is there than what’s implied by that very question: it’s because “legislators haven’t made a law”.
Now you can believe all you want that there’s been a centuries-old conspiracy by legislators to not ever draw up and approve this kind of law. But maybe you should consider that the other things mentioned in the 1st amendment, such as freedom of press, lobbying, and assembly, also aren’t “codified at the same level” as religious protections. And maybe you’ll realize that there are obvious differences in how religion is perceived to be different than the 4 other things protected by the 1A.
If I had intended a "pretty extreme bad faith response", I would've done it in a sentence, not several paragraphs.
To use your analogy, it'd be as if u/deadmik3 were asking, "Why must apples be called 'apples', when oranges are called 'oranges'?" It's a question that isn't coherent enough for a single answer, as it seems to be based on flawed foundational assumptions on the part of the asker, e.g. "Who says you 'must' call apples 'apples'" and "Do you actually think English people named oranges after the color, 'orange'?"
Here's deadmik3's original question/assertion [0]:
> Why is speech the only part of 1A that gets this treatment? You wouldn't say the same thing about religion
I would've thought u/kube-system's response was clear enough (e.g. it's the Civil Rights Act, not the 1A, that protects religion), but apparently it hasn't been. So I genuinely don't know what deadmik3's issue is. Do they think laws (and/or the process of making them) are merely a "semantic" concept? Do they think that religion and speech, being in the "First" amendment, confers to them a special overriding priority (i.e. in the way that being in Amendments 2-27 do not)? And if so, have they considered that the 1A explicitly mentions 3 other freedoms – press, assembly, and petition/lobbying – that, like speech, do not have the protection for religion?
Without knowing the presumptions behind their confusing question, it's hard to answer or otherwise debate it. I mean, the natural rebuttal would be to point out that the CRA's protections for religion is far from clear cut and indisputable – has deadmik3 never heard of the gay wedding cake case, which after 6 years ended in a narrowly defined Supreme Court decision? [1] – which means that similar protections for free speech would be even more contentious and logistically complicated, which is likely a key factor why that legislation doesn't exist/has never passed.
But why get into that if someone believes lawmaking is a semantic designation, rather than an actual process that requires considering how a law (and its enforcement) will actually operate in reality?
We can. We just haven't yet, and it is not clear that it would result in a world that most Americans would prefer to the one we live in. And like religion it would be subject to lots of tension and litigation about the speech of the corporation's owner vs. the speech of the corporation's customer.
When discussing the nuance of legislation and constitutional law, there is no such thing as being too pedantic. The difference between something being enshrined in law, something being protected by the constitution, and something being protected by jurisprudence based on the constitution are really big, important differences.
