do you hate small children?

I saw this in my Google Reader this morning, and it made me laugh a little.

If you vote no on 1098 - The Washington State Income Tax - you obviously hate small children. You should be ashamed of yourself.

It reminded me of this kinda terrible movie I watched on Netflix not to long ago, "Totally Baked: A Pot-U-Mentary". The movie itself obviously has a strong pro-legalize marijuana agenda and I wasn't very impressed with the message. However, they did have a really clever part where some evil senator guy was trying to push through an initiative that was titled something like "Save the Small Children and Adorable Kittens" that was about banning marijuana or some such.

It also reminded me of a flyer I got in the mail for "how teachers are going to vote", which was basically another "if you don't vote this way you hate small children" ad. They gave all the initiatives ridiculous and misleading headlines, and it made me want to vote the opposite of whatever they endorsed.

Anyway, this made me amused as I looked at more "vote yes on this!" or "vote no on this!" ads for this year. Most of them tell me I hate small children no matter which way I vote. Luckily though, so far I still love kittens.

A judge quoted Spock who quoted Caesar

A few sites have written about a Texas Supreme court case that involved the judge directly quoting Spock and referencing Star Trek 2: The Wrath of Khan in his footnotes. The judge's reference and subsequent footnote is funny and clever, so kudos to that guy!

However, it made me wonder how much our pop culture will eventually take the place of our history lessons. While Spock's words are original, the idea behind them is not. His quote is a modernized paraphrase of a passage out of Meditations by Marcus Aurelius Caesar.

That which does no harm to the state, does no harm to the citizen.

In the case of every appearance of harm apply this rule: if the state

is not harmed by this, neither am I harmed. But if the state is harmed,

thou must not be angry with him who does harm to the state. Show him

where his error is.

Source: Meditations, book 5

Meditations is strongly influenced by Stoicism, which is why he brings anger up as an issue. Don't be angry at someone who tries to put their needs above the state, instead explain to them why they are wrong.

In the end, it doesn't matter how the idea is stated or where you think it's from, so long as you take away the wisdom that's at the heart of the idea. It just amuses me to think that the words of the fictional, however epic, character Spock from the insanely popular science fiction series Star Trek may someday replace the words a real life person who happened to be an emperor.

I leave you with a silly conversation that I had about it:

Me: This is seriously awesome: [link to one of the articles]

Beau: That's just a re-quote from Marcus Aurelius Caesar...or a paraphrase, would be a better way to put it I suppose.

Me: Shhhh...it's from Spock. And it's law now. Do you hate the law? Do you hate the constitution? DO YOU HATE 'MERICA?!

Beau: No, I just hate plagerizing Vulcans.