One of the most annoying argument tactics involves the smug use of words like “myth” or “urban legend” to describe another person’s opinion or recitation of facts, or stronger words like “facts” to describe one’s own. Typically, such non-arguments take the following format:

Myth: [Insert your opinion here.]
Reality: [Insert my opinion here.]

What’s perhaps the most annoying about this type of non-argument is that it applies one standard to those who assert certain facts, and another to those who choose to question them. The unspoken message is “don’t believe that other guy without first checking out the facts for yourself, believe me without first checking out the facts for yourself.” And thus, hamhanded efforts abound to “debunk” all sorts of “urban legends,” some of which are ULs indeed, others of which are substantially true but get a minor detail wrong (e.g., Al Gore falsely claimed a role in “creating” the Internet, not “inventing” it), and others of which are 100% accurate.

A blogger I normally trust, Dean Esmay (hat tip: Patterico) walked into this very trap today with his post on Ebonics. His arguments for a “compare and contrast” teaching approach to cross-dialectal learning are interesting, and may even be right, although it should be noted that it’s not nearly the slam dunk he makes it out to be. Those theories are what they are. Where Dean completely screws the pooch is on his recital of the alleged history of Oakland Unified Unified School District’s infamous 1996 resolution on Ebonics. On that, he writes:

There is an urban legend that is pervasive in American society. This urban legend goes like this:

In the 1990s a school district in California announced that they would begin teaching “Ebonics” in the classroom. The kids would be taught this non-standard language, given lessons in it, and taught to regard it as equal to English.

Still to this day most people believe that there was such a program to “teach Ebonics to children.” But it never existed. It is an urban legend, one of the most widely sprad [sic ] urban legends in America.

There’s one problem: aside from the technicality of the program never “existing” (Oakland withdrew it before it was implemented) this “urban legend” is true.
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The normally reasonable (if not Reason^TMable) Virginia Postrel defends the politically correct phrase “Happy Holidays” on the grounds that:

I hope to have a happy, though not necessarily merry, December 25. But I wish good-hearted folks like Lileks would consider that Christmas greetings don’t make everyone feel good.

Oh, please. First of all, the word “merry” does not have any religious connotations whatsoever, so anyone who objects to that word is two fries short of a Happy Meal(R). If someone wished me a “merry birthday” or a “merry New Year,” I might look at him a bit odd, as that’s not the usual terminology, but it wouldn’t even occur to me to get offended by it. For another, Christmas is Christmas. If someone wishes you a merry one, and that doesn’t make you feel good, the problem lies with you, not with him. I’ve never had a Jew wish me a happy Hannukah, but you know what? I’d be flattered if one did. I’m not a Jew myself, but I’ve worked with more than a few of them at varying stages of my career. Most of them largely kept their religion to themselves, but one said “Mazel Tov” to my wedding and another said a Jewish blessing when I announced the expected birth of my son. It didn’t occur to me to take offense either time. I took both for what they were: an attempt by a sincere Jew to be nice to me in his own way. I appreciated that. I didn’t go paranoid and interpret it as a backhanded effort to convert me, which it almost certainly was not.

In that vein, I hereby call scroogity on Virginia Postrel. So what if she’s not Christian? As a devout agnostic, neither am I, nor was one of my past Jewish bosses who scratched his head over the fact that a Christian colleague declined to attend the company’s Christmas party on religious grounds. As to that colleague’s reason for not attending, so what if the Bible itself doesn’t say when Jesus’s birthday is? Whether I remain an agnostic for the rest of my life or convert to any other of the world’s major religions, I hereby promise that I do not now, nor will I ever, take offense at being wished a Merry Christmas by anybody. The only conditions of this promise are as follows: (1) it must actually be Christmas, or shortly before it (i.e., wishing me a Merry Christmas on the Fourth of July won’t work) and (2) the wish must be sincere, i.e., you must really mean “Merry Christmas,” and not “get your ass back in church, you heathen.” To everyone else I say, if having someone wish you a “Merry Christmas” does not make you feel good, get help. The problem is with you, not with them.

UPDATE: In a follow-up entry, Postrel acknowledges that most of the email she’s received defending “Merry Christmas” has come from people who “are not in fact Christians but secularists determined to define Christmas as an occasion that has nothing to do with religious faith.” The heading of her post aptly reads “Gee, Maybe I Was Full of Crap Another Reason for ‘Happy Holidays.’” Another reason?! OK, I guess. According to VPostrel, we should now stop wishing each other a Merry Christmas for two reasons: (1) because it is a religious holiday that only Christians can appreciate, and (2) because it is a secular holiday only non-Christians can appreciate.

Given Virginia’s “heads I win, tails you lose” style of argument, it is clear that no one is going to “win” this argument with her between now and this Christmas. That’s OK, we’ve got a whole year to go before next Christmas Holiday. In the meantime, should you ever speak to Virginia Postrel, email her, or correspond with her shortly before any federal or state holiday, be sure to wish her a generic “Happy Holiday” rather than identifying the holiday in question by name. I’m sure she’ll understand.

UPDATE x2: Michelle Malkin, unsurprisingly, agrees.

While the vast majority of the links to Spoons’s entry on U.S. Cellular are sympathetic to his position, the Peoria Pundit takes the position that U.S. Cellular’s $220 bill, while unreasonable, is legal nevertheless. A few of Spoons’s commenters have taken similar positions, most of which boil down to the argument their “customer service representative” offered Spoons: “a contract is a contract.”

Of course, all lawyers and most non-lawyers know that a contract isn’t always a contract. To cite the most obvious example, a hit man who breaches his contract on a prospective victim has plenty to fear from the Mafia don who offered him the contract, but only because the don has his own way of enforcing “contracts” like that one. If the don were stupid enough to sue him for damages in any court of law, the hit man would have a pretty obvious defense: murder is illegal, and he can’t perform on the contract without committing a murder, therefore, the contract itself is illegal and unenforceable.

Looking on the bright side, Spoons’s contract with U.S. Cellular did not require Spoonsy to kill anybody. However, it may be legally objectionable on other grounds. The following is a list of potential defects involving U.S. Cellular’s $150 termination fee, as applied to Spoons. [Note to U.S. Cellular's lawyers^*: I'm not stating as fact that Spoons's allegations are factually correct. I think they probably are, but apart from knowing Spoons reasonably well online and having no reason to question his veracity, I have no personal, independent knowledge of the specific claims here, nor do I claim to.]

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Rule 1: Don’t steal screw up.

Rule 2: If you must steal screw up, don’t steal attempt to collect your erroneous fees from a lawyer with a blog.

UPDATE: Wizbang Paul, Artitumis, ISOU, Murdoc, Jed and Max Power have more.

UPDATE x2: Thanks to Patterico for the link I meant to post originally. Ich bin ein Dummkopf.

UPDATE x3: More from the Dummkopf Department – I originally gave Artitumis the Xlrq treatment, misspelling his name “Artitumus.” It’s fixed now, I think.

UPDATE x4: More on the legalities of the issue here.

UPDATE x5: Powerline, which has rightly been named Blog of the Year by Time Magazine, offers a completely unrelated reason to use Sprint rather than U.S. Cellular.

FINAL UPDATE: Spoons just informed us that U.S. Cellular has acknowledged that their illegal fee was in error, and dropped it from his bill. Comments to this post are now closed, but I will still accept comments to the follow-up post, which discusses legal vs. illegal contracts more generally.

Much to the chagrin of the American Criminal Liberties Union, California’s Megan’s Law database is finally online. Jeff Lewis and the Sacramento Bee have the story.

NON-UPDATE UPDATE: It’s offline at the moment. Presumably it will be up and running (again?) soon.

UPDATE UPDATE: It’s working now.

Via Xrlq Soyer and Uncle, the Frisco City Council is considering banning handguns next year. The Ass. Press further reports that “Sam Paredes, the group’s executive director, said state law bars local governments from usurping the state’s authority to regulate firearms.” What they don’t say is that California courts said the same thing 22 years ago in Doe v. Irvine San Francisco, in which the same friggin’ city did the same friggin’ thing, and that Section 53071 of the California Government Code left them little other choice. That statute provides as follows:

It is the intention of the Legislature to occupy the whole field of regulation of the registration or licensing of commercially manufactured firearms as encompassed by the provisions of the Penal Code, and such provisions shall be exclusive of all local regulations, relating to registration or licensing of commercially manufactured firearms, by any political subdivision as defined in Section 1721 of the Labor Code.

Last time around, Frisco claimed to have found a loophole, arguing with a straight face that this statute “provides only that the state has preempted the areas of registration and licensing and says nothing about a local government’s ability to regulate possession.” The Court of Appeal rightly rejected that idiotic argument 3-0. Query if they’ve thought of some other bogus argument to float this time around.

The Ass. Press article is the claim that Washington, D.C. is the only major U.S. city that currently bans handguns. This will come as news to would be gun owners in New York and Chicago.

UPDATE: Boi From Troy notes in a comment that West Hollywood already bans “junk” guns and “Saturday Night Specials.” I presume he is talking about the 1998 ordinance, which Professor Volokh also briefly refers to in his fine piece on the “No one’s trying to take your guns away” myth. That ordinance, applies only to sales, not possession, and is therefore unaffected by Gov. Code 53071. If West Hollywood wants to inconvenience its own subjects by forcing them to drive all the way to Culver City to pay sales tax there, that’s their prerogative.

Yesterday I picked up two Toshiba/Audiovox 4050 phones for Mrs. X and myself. They’re quite cool, with video capability in addition to taking still shots. If you choose to get one, though, don’t buy it online. They’re $129 after rebate with a two year contract (new line of service) at Sprint, which is not bad, or $10 less if you can get it through Amazon, which you probably can’t. At my local Costco in Irvine (but not online), they’re going for $29 through Christmas, and also come with a free set of accesories (car charger, ear piece and case) that would cost extra anywhere else. You can’t beat that.

Below is a transcript that was just leaked from the courthouse in Redwood City:

Mark Geragos: Scott! Relax! I’ve got some great news for you.

Scott Peterson: Did the bailiff just tip you off that they’re gonna let me go?

Geragos: No, silly. It’s too late for that. But trust me, the news is good.

Peterson: They’re going to recommend 20 to life?

Geragos: Nope, can’t do that, either. But c’mon, let’s celebrate!

Peterson: Life without parole? OK, I can deal with that.

Geragos: No, it’s [inaudible]

Judge, in background: Have you reached a uninimous verdict?

Peterson: What was that?

Foreman, in background: Yes, we have, Your Honor…

Peterson: So what is it?

Geragos: I just saved a bunch of money on my car insurance by switching to Geico.

OK, so maybe I wasn’t voted “worst weblog ever,” but it was close. At least I didn’t fare as badly among Top 100-250 blogs as Kevin Drum, Lawrence Lessig and the female Butt-Head fared overall.

One of the common arguments of gun-grabbers is that they only support “reasonable” gun control. Of course, as long as the word reasonable remains an undefined variable, it’s hard not to agree. Of course, that’s the whole idea behind the rhetoric: by stating generally that you only support “reasonable” gun control, they can then claim a mandate to push through whatever unreasonable controls they actually had in mind.

Nevertheless, I do believe there are a few types of gun control that really do make sense, or at least should be given credit for not being inherently unreasonable. Below is a (potentially) complete list.

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