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PaperclipPerfector  4d ago (text post)   1771 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for December 5, 2025

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Following on from last week's discussion about the proportion of American university students claiming to be disabled in order to secure assorted "accommodations", Hanania has an article about the legislative decisions which led to this state of affairs. It's succinct and interesting, particularly in how certain of the laws carry the tacit implication that an outright majority of Americans could be considered disabled.

The reason I'm posting it in the Fun thread rather than Culture War is because of the passage below:

My favorite court decision from this era is PGA Tour, Inc. v. Martin (2001), in which a golfer who had a condition making it difficult to walk between holes demanded to be able to ride around in a cart during the qualification tournament for the professional tour. The Supreme Court ruled on behalf of the plaintiff this time, holding that it would not alter the fundamentals of the game to grant his request.

[Antonin] Scalia responded with one of the best dissents in the history of the Supreme Court.

Before considering the Court’s answer to the first question, it is worth pointing out that the assumption which underlies that question is false. Nowhere is it writ that PGA TOUR golf must be classic “essential” golf. Why cannot the PGA TOUR, if it wishes, promote a new game, with distinctive rules (much as the American League promotes a game of baseball in which the pitcher’s turn at the plate can be taken by a “designated hitter”)? If members of the public do not like the new rules — if they feel that these rules do not truly test the individual’s skill at “real golf” (or the team’s skill at “real baseball”) they can withdraw their patronage. But the rules are the rules. They are (as in all games) entirely arbitrary, and there is no basis on which anyone – not even the Supreme Court of the United States — can pronounce one or another of them to be “nonessential” if the rulemaker (here the PGA TOUR) deems it to be essential.

If one assumes, however, that the PGA TOUR has some legal obligation to play classic, Platonic golf — and if one assumes the correctness of all the other wrong turns the Court has made to get to this point — then we Justices must confront what is indeed an awesome responsibility. It has been rendered the solemn duty of the Supreme Court of the United States, laid upon it by Congress in pursuance of the Federal Government’s power “[t]o regulate Commerce with foreign Nations, and among the several States,” U.S. Const., Art. I, §8, cl. 3, to decide What Is Golf. I am sure that the Framers of the Constitution, aware of the 1457 edict of King James II of Scotland prohibiting golf because it interfered with the practice of archery, fully expected that sooner or later the paths of golf and government, the law and the links, would once again cross, and that the judges of this august Court would some day have to wrestle with that age-old jurisprudential question, for which their years of study in the law have so well prepared them: Is someone riding around a golf course from shot to shot really a golfer? The answer, we learn, is yes. The Court ultimately concludes, and it will henceforth be the Law of the Land, that walking is not a “fundamental” aspect of golf.

Either out of humility or out of self-respect (one or the other) the Court should decline to answer this incredibly difficult and incredibly silly question

This may be the first time I've actually laughed out loud at the contents of a legal opinion. You can practically see Scalia rolling his eyes.

This may be the first time I've actually laughed out loud at the contents of a legal opinion.

Scalia's dissents are full of stuff like this. There's a reason he's super popular with law students--he's a delight to read, especially when compared to the dreck other judges produce. The biggest problem with Scalia's writing is that it inspires too many judges to try to write like him when they have 1/100th of his talent.

Would you have any examples of similarly witty compositions of his?

A law professor helpfully compiled all the times that Scalia was a big meany and rude to people in his dissents. (She looks exactly as you might expect). She only includes excerpts of those dissents, but if any catch your eye, it'd be worth tracking down the full thing to read.

Although specifically witty ones might be harder to pin down versus sarcastic ones. His dissents in culture war cases tend to be the latter.

Reminds me of the time the Independent compiled a list of Prince Philip's "most excruciating gaffes" – by which they meant, of course, a list of occasions on which Prince Philip was fucking hilarious. I dare say even the author probably had a chuckle at a few of them.

"How do you keep the natives off the booze long enough to pass the test?" Asked of a Scottish driving instructor in 1995.

"British women can't cook." Winning the hearts of the Scottish Women's Institute in 1961

"What do you gargle with – pebbles?" To Tom Jones, after the Royal Variety Performance, 1969. He added the following day: "It is very difficult at all to see how it is possible to become immensely valuable by singing what I think are the most hideous songs."

"If it has four legs and it is not a chair, if it has got two wings and it flies but is not an aeroplane and if it swims and it is not a submarine, the Cantonese will eat it."

"People think there's a rigid class system here, but dukes have even been known to marry chorus girls. Some have even married Americans."

Thanks for sharing, a few of those had me laughing out loud, and I couldn't explain them to my young children.

That opinion is a classic. I particularly like the concluding remark:

The year was 2001, and “everybody was finally equal.” (K. Vonnegut, Harrison Bergeron.)

It's quite ironic that Vonnegut intended "Harrison Bergeron" to be satirical; that people worried about a slippery slope of accommodations were being absurd, since that would require all sorts of silly and draconian measures. Well, we still have a few years before 2081 to see.

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