ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
So, what is the appearance of quid pro quo involved when Donald Trump pays his porn star? Your blockquote says:
Spending large sums of money in connection with elections, but not in connection with an effort to control the exercise of an officeholder's official duties, does not give rise to such quid pro quo corruption.
When Donald Trump spends large sums of money in connection with an election, in what way is it an effort on the part of Donald Trump to control the exercise of an officeholder's (presumably, Donald Trump's) official duties?
You're missing the point I think. This is an is claim not an ought claim.
No no. I understand that point entirely. In fact, I responded to that point, specifically. I think you are the one missing the point. I would suggest that you reread my comment. Simply observing that you live in the current apex society, so that things have historically happened to break in favor of your current society, isn't very interesting. There is clearly no law of the universe that it must be this way, and we can see the seeds of its destruction right specifically in the exact concept that you are claiming - that there is no such thing as truth worth arguing for; that the reality only is what is, that is, power politics.
I completely understand that you are embracing at least a weak version of moral error theory, claiming that all one can be is descriptive about different folks' vibes-based opinions. Simply repeating such is not terribly responsive.
ControlsFreak
9mo ago
I didn't say that I don't think you hate nazis enough, make strong judgments, say that your position is despicable or offensive. I just tried to understand and describe your position accurately.
I believe subjective things are truly real.
In what sense? Probably not in the traditional sense of the word.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Concerning the @Esperanza post:
Pope Francis said that a man’s gayness was less important than whether “he searches for the Lord and has good will.”
No, he asked who was he to judge, forgetting his position. He could decide to make homosexual actions not a sin. It is within his power.
I've been seeing the question lately in a few places, most recently when Bryan Caplan did a podcast with Richard Hanania: how much "power" do people "in power" actually have? In the podcast, they talked about university presidents, but I've heard it discussed for all sorts of positions. The idea is that, to become a university president, you have to do so many things to please certain people, who have certain interests. To what extent do you need to continue pleasing them to remain university president? Even if you can't be formally kicked out of your role for a particular action, to what extent does your role require cooperation/acquiescence from a variety of stakeholders? If you spend all of your political capital accomplishing one thing that is incredibly controversial among your stakeholders, they may proceed to do everything they can to neuter every last shred of remaining power that you have until they can actually kick you out.
I imagine these constraints vary significantly across different positions of power, but as a non-Catholic, I would argue that the pope does not have the power to "decide to make homosexual actions not a sin", even within the Catholic church. The bulk of the power centers within the Catholic church are committed enough to the position that the bible means something, that one of the somethings that they can easily interpret the bible as meaning is that homosexual actions are sinful, and that this is supported by so great a weight of history and tradition that it would be near inconceivable for a mere pope to, on his own, without a long careful process of arguing for and convincing many stakeholders of his position, suddenly reverse course. They would feel as though a "foreigner" has somehow invaded their group, a spy, a saboteur, an enemy operative. They would view it as illegitimate, do all that they can to remove the invader or at least neutralize his further power until he can be removed. Then, they would go about reversing the decision to whatever extent their history and tradition allows them to. They will declare that it was not "conformable with Sacred Scripture and Apostolic Traditions" (to just copy the words from wikipedia).
In a different time, maybe the pope will gain such power. If the cultural memeplex continues propagating among enough of the rest of the leadership of the Catholic church, perhaps enough will get on board with whatever new argument arises to shift around their traditional position. Different levels of support (or even just apathy) across the leadership will require different expenditures of political capital by a hypothetical future pope, but I think that right now, it's not reasonably "within his power".
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
No, I'm a stupid economic denialist so you'll have to explain to me your viewpoint in detail.
For example, they could pay less in cryptocurrency. There are other items on the list.
And if the price hasn't gone down in 10, 20, or 30 years still?
I'm not sure what your question is. We're not 10, 20, or 30 years after the hypothetical change in the price of fake child porn. Can you rephrase the question?
ControlsFreak
11d ago
Your original post expresses considerable contempt for "tech folks" and demonstrates absolute joy for us having regulation "dropped" on us "in a much stronger way that you really won't like." This really doesn't fit with an idea that you think the regulations will be anything like easy or simple to follow
This does not follow. It's just a non sequitur. It can be easy and simple to follow, but incredibly grating to the personality of "artists". They don't like coloring inside the lines, even if it's easy and simple to follow.
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
They can't consent to sex. Whatever consent to sex is (not an easy concept to analyse, to put it mildly) ... The problem is that children and animals can't engage in consensual sex, whether they want to or not, any more than they can make a mature decision about whether to become addicted to heroin.
This is more than just not an easy concept to analyse. From my comment here a while ago:
When it comes to the question of whether children can consent to sexual relations, the dominant position is that it is just trivial that they cannot. I mean, sure, they can consent to playing tennis just fine, but sex is completely and totally different. Why? I've steeped myself in the academic philosophy literature on this topic, and while it's a thousand times better than the responses you'll get from regular Joe, it still comes in seriously lacking in my mind.
Westen doesn't take a super strong position on the topic, but likely grounds it in what he calls the 'knowledge prong' of what counts as valid consent. A person needs to have sufficient knowledge of... something... related to what sex is, what it means, what the consequences could be, the cultural context... I'm not exactly sure what. I don't think he did the best job of really digging in to details here. This is perhaps the most fruitful line of inquiry for future academic work for those who want to salvage a consent-only sexual ethic, but right now it's seriously lacking. Any work will definitely need to distinguish from tennis, because I see kids out learning tennis at our local courts somewhat regularly, and they can hardly be said to understand the risks/cultural context/etc. of tennis any more than could be said for sex.
Wertheimer, on the other hand, doesn't even attempt a theoretical explanation for why children cannot consent. Instead, he views it as simply an empirical question of whether, in a particular society, children tend to be, on net, harmed by sex. The opinion piece writes:
[A]s categories, we experience [race and gender identity] in large part through the perceptions that others have of us, based largely on our outward appearances.
A disciple of Wertheimer might say that a large part of how children perceive sex, and whether they perceive it as harmful or not, may depend on the perceptions others have of it.
Of course, either of these approaches opens up all sorts of cultural engineering possibilities. If we team up the "sex is like tennis" folks with the "comprehensive sex education as early as possible" folks, it's easy to imagine how society could change to one where children learn the requisite knowledge and are not, on net, harmed by the sex that they do consent to. Some folks might cheer on this result, saying that society would be immeasurably improved to the point that it unlocks this new world of possible good things... but the "it is trivially true that children cannot possibly consent to sex" crowd would certainly disagree.
Your comparison to "mak[ing] a mature decision about whether to become addicted to heroin" is definitely somewhat relevant here, if you read the full linked comment. People think that there's something "more" and "different" about sex and heroin and things like that compared to "normal" things that children can definitely, totally consent to. But the theory here is just completely whack and not at all up to the challenge of explaining why. You can simply ask yourself, "Why can't children consent to sex?" When you do so, you might go down the same road I went down; you might read the same major works by professional philosophers that I read. But I really don't think you'll get a good theoretical answer. It's just sort of an axiom that is held by some. To others, it's just the dogmatic mantra that they were forced to repeat in order to help justify fighting the X-ophobes. But when the same people who convinced you to subscribe to a consent-only sexual ethic and who swear that the thing we need most is early comprehensive sex education to help children understand the sexual choices that they're allowed to make come calling, they're going to ask, "Why can't children consent?" If you don't have a better answer than the professional philosophers who are making the best case possible for a consent-only sexual ethic, you're going to find out that you're an X-ophobe. You're going to get stared at like you're an alien for making outdated assumptions about people. For Sagan's sake, everyone knows that kids are capable enough to choose their gender, have parts of their body hacked off, and keep it all secret from their parents! Of course they're capable of deciding to have a little fun with some friction on the bits.
ControlsFreak
4mo ago
What is administrative burden in research for?
I think about this in a variety of domains, but it came up again when one of my tech news aggregators pointed to this paper. The idea is using LLMs to generate and evaluate protocols for biology experiments. I think the obvious key concern is related to well-known tradeoffs that people have been brought up in other contexts. Sometimes, it gets reduced to, "Well, people were concerned that with automated spell-checkers, then people will forget how to spell, but that's a silly problem, because even if they forget how to spell, their output that is augmented by the spell-checker will be plenty productive."
I wonder if there are limits to this reasoning. I'm thinking of two topics that I recall Matt Levine writing about (I can't find links at the moment; since Money Stuff always has multiple topics in each letter and he's written about similar topics that use similar words a bunch of times, I can't quickly find them).
One topic I recall is him talking about 'defensive' board meetings. The way I recall it is to suppose that a company puts in their public disclosures that they "consider cybersecurity risks". This doesn't necessarily mean that they do anything about cybersecurity risks, but they have to consider them. The way this plays out is that the board has to put an agenda item for one of their meetings to talk about cybersecurity risks. For an hour or whatever, the board has to talk about the general topic of cybersecurity. This talking can be at a high level of generality, and they don't have to really decide to do anything specific, so long as they have the official minutes that say, in writing, that they "considered" it. Without this, they might be liable for securities fraud. With it, they still might be extremely vulnerable and eventually lose a bunch of money when they're exploited (since they just talked and didn't do anything), but at least when that happens, they won't also get hit with a shareholder suit for securities fraud. (Really, Matt Levine would say, they'll absolutely get hit with a shareholder suit for securities fraud, but they'll be able to point to the minutes to defend themselves.)
The second topic I recall is him talking about where the value lies in corporate contract negotiation. He said that most times, you just start from the "typical" contract. Maybe something you've used in the past. You just pull that old contract off the shelf, change some particulars, then put it forward as a starting point. Then, the negotiations are often about just little modifications, and the phrase, "That's standard," is a pretty solid weapon against any modifications. He then talked about how a firm that does these negotiations in bulk as a service can start to sneak new provisions in around the edges in some contracts, so that they can later point to those prior contracts and say, "That's standard." Having the ability to set the "default" can have value.
So, biology. Science. Writing protocols is complicated, annoying, and time-intensive. Scott has written before about how infuriating the IRB process can be. Even with just that, there were questions about what the IRB process is for, and whether the current level of scrutiny is too lax, too strict, or about right.
Applying LLMs will potentially greatly decrease the barrier for newer researchers (say, grad students) to be able to generate piles of administrative style paperwork, saying all the proper words about what is "supposed" to be done, checking off every box that the IRB or whatever would ask for. But I do have to wonder... will it lead to short-cutting? "Sure, the LLM told us that we needed to have these thirty pages of boilerplate text, so we submitted these thirty pages of boilerplate text, but I mean, who actually does all of that stuff?!" Do they even take the time to read the entirety of the document? I can't imagine they're going to pay as close attention as they might have if they had to painstakingly go through the process of figuring out what the requirements were and why they were necessary (or coming to the personal conclusion that it was a dumb requirement that was necessary for the sake of being necessary). At least if they went through the process, they have to think about it and consider what it was that they were planning to do. This could lead to even worse situations than a board "considering" cybersecurity; they don't even need meeting notes to demonstrate that they "considered" the details of the protocol appropriately; the protocol itself is the written document that they theoretically took things into consideration in an assumed-to-be serious way.
This could also entrench silly requirements. You need to provide the subjects with pencils instead of pens? "That's standard." Who is going to be able to do the yeoman's job of subtly shifting the default to something that's, I don't know, not stupid?
I imagine all sorts of dispositions by particular researchers. There are obviously current researchers who just don't give a damn about doing things the right way, even to the point of outright fraud. There are obviously current researchers who really do care about doing things the "right way", to the point of being so frustrated with how convoluted the "right way" can be that they just give up on the whole she-bang (a la Scott). Which factors become more common? What becomes the prevalent way of doing things, and what are the likely widespread failure modes? Mostly, I worry that it could make things worse in both directions: needing large piles of paper to check off every box will lead to both short-cutting by inferior researchers, possibly producing even more shit-tier research (if that problem wasn't bad enough already; also, since they have the official documents, maybe it'll be in a form that is even harder to discover and criticize) and warding off honest, intelligent would-be researchers like Scott.
I don't know. Lowering the barrier can obviously also have positive effects of helping new researchers just 'magically' get a protocol that actually does make sense, and they can get on with producing units of science when they otherwise would have been stuck with a shit-tier protocol... but will we have enough of that to overcome these other effects?
ControlsFreak
11mo ago
I mean, Re: Hillary, destruction of evidence is a pretty automatic charge. Can you imagine Trump not being charged with it? Not to mention the 1001 charges (also apparently seen here, according to reporting), and the OIG report quoted FBI agents who were dumbstruck as to why such charges weren't brought against folks, because they were dead-to-rights. But nope; that stuff is reserved for the likes of Flynn and Trump... the folks who need to be removed.
Possibly more interesting for actual culture war analysis is just observing the public narrative shift. Back in the days before it was fashionable to prosecute Trump and anyone related to Trump, when the possible charges were against Hillary, it was a grave and serious thing to prosecute politicians, especially when they had possible elections in front of them. "That's the stuff of banana republics!" they said. "That's, like, what Putin does!" they said. It was "deeply dangerous for democracy". Whether or not our democracy was legitimate was supposedly hanging in the balance, depending upon whether their preferred candidate was charged with a crime. You don't hear that anymore. For good or for bad, fair and just or unfair and unjust, it's a change in the narrative. Whether this change can be easily flip-flopped on in another 5-10 years... or whether it will be persistent, possibly leading to endless tit-for-tat, I don't know.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Sure, so that kicks the question to, "What counts as a campaign contribution?"
Remember back a whole five years? We seriously had to discuss whether talking to a foreigner was a campaign contribution. At least this time, money exchanged hands. Why does it count as "a campaign contribution"? Whelp, mostly because there is sufficient vagueness, and when it comes to Trump, any vague stick will do. Maybe... someone gave money to the Trump campaign? That's what a "campaign contribution" is, right? ...no, that's not what happened. Someone exchanged money in a way that helped the Trump campaign? Sure, that happens all the time; no crime. Well, maybe that helping of the Trump campaign provided the people involved some influence or access! Wait no, we just saw the Supreme Court call bullshit on that one.
So, how, exactly, does this count as a "campaign contribution", and how can that be disassociated from there being some appearance of quid pro quo? If we're going to start roping in all sorts of stuff like just talking to foreigners, we're talking about things that look very different than the traditional "campaign contributions", you know, the "giving money to a campaign" that the Supreme Court okay'd on the grounds that Congress [was] target[ing] only a specific type of corruption—"quid pro quo" corruption. Like, real talk, if people brought a case that getting opposition research by talking to a foreigner was a campaign contribution (and managed to win in the lower courts), do you think the Court would have accepted that rationale and said that it merely follows directly from the parts of CU we've been quoting?
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
A Modest Kickstarter Proposal
In multiple domains, there is a reasonably strong consensus within the zeitgeist that negative mood affiliated media does not correlate to negative behavior. In fact, the opposite is often claimed, that proliferation of such media provides a substitute for the negative behavior, actually reducing it. Casual Ducking pulls up hundreds of articles, many in academic works, arguing that pornography (even aggressive/violent pornography) substitutes for real-world sexual assault, that generally violent video games substitute for real-world violent behavior, that fake child porn (or just sufficiently cheap, legal, and easy to access child porn) substitutes for real-world sexual abuse of children. Many people make these arguments and attach their real names and institutional affiliations to them.
On the other hand, casual Ducking for games where one is a school shooter doesn't elicit any similar list of names/affiliations calling for such a substitute. Instead, it appears to have been kinda-sorta tried and mostly just shut down. What accounts for the difference? Is there a theoretical argument for why it should have a different effect? Is there some sort of data which could be marshaled against the thesis? I don't have solid numbers for the actual cost of school shootings, but I have to imagine that if someone could set up a kickstarter (or whatever platform you'd need to use to not have the effort immediately banned by the platform) to create a school shooter video game, and if said game could provide even a weak substitute, it would be an incredibly efficient use of EA contributions.
This thought arose from watching the bodycam video of the heroic police officers that was posted below. It reminded me of actual first person shooters that I played back when I was young. In addition, the discussion of whether the shooter had a poor strategy for a loadout was interesting. Some blamed (or, um, I guess praised) FPSs for having a typical mechanic where you can carry multiple weapons essentially "for free". Would it make a difference if the video game was tailored to give players the wrong idea about what would be effective in such a situation? Or should it (and FPSs in general) move to being a more realistic simulation?
Finally, what was actually my first thought on the matter was a response to people praising the officers (especially in comparison to Uvalde). Pointing out that their behavior is something that society has strong and important reasons to encourage. I actually thought first, "What if you made a game that let you take on that persona, rushing into danger to save children at great risk to yourself?" But then, I ran into a conundrum. Would this version of the game actually encourage such behavior? Or would it substitute away from such behavior? "Yeah, I get the rush of going headlong into danger to save innocents plenty at home; no need to actually go out and do that in the real world"?
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
You asked me why my point of view would not lead to genocide etc. And I told you. I also explained why it appears those who would resort to genocide would generally not out-compete others who would.
...and I responded to that? I explained why your current view from the position of the apex society does not imply some law of the universe. You seem to weirdly trust in the pure coercive power of "everyone else" turning on them. That would weirdly be an argument for why no genocide has ever happened. Or at least, some weird claim that those cultures were then, in turn, eliminated, rather than continuing to exist after whatever the political outcome of their actually-existing genocide was. It would be wholly unconvincing to anyone who thinks that, e.g., modern Americans (at the apex of current society) got to their position by essentially genociding Native Americans. A more proper descriptive account would be that genocide simply becomes morally tenable whenever political forces drive a society to believe that genocide is morally tenable in order to achieve their goals, as has happened countless times in the past. They are only limited to the extent that "everyone else" can amass sufficient political and military power to counter them.
Regardless, the focus on the extreme case of genocide is less central to what I said; it was clearly an add-on. I had said:
If there's no truth of the matter to bother arguing for, why argue? Just cancel, deplatform, shame, struggle session, brainwash, and intimidate people to be inculcated with your view.
Genocide is the extreme case, and as stated as a descriptive matter, only occurs when enough power has been amassed by a large enough group that they think they can settle a matter by such extreme means. That certainly is not going to be the SOP of societies everywhere at all times; that just wouldn't make sense. Instead, there would be all these things that I pointed out, specifically for the purpose of inculcating their own vibes-based opinions... specifically abandoning the pretense that what we're doing here is searching for truth. Such a process, as a descriptive matter, may only explode into genocide occasionally, once sufficient uniformity has been enforced across a large enough group with sufficient political and military power, yes. But the important part of my point is that we are abandoning the alternate process of a search for truth in favor of this general route.
ControlsFreak
6mo ago
Regardless of what happens in the legal case, that BBC article is a prime example of how the propaganda machine rolls. "A man has been arrested..." Literally no other references to this man. You can't make this stuff up.
ControlsFreak
9mo ago
Instead, how about I say that subjective things can be overwhelmingly profound and important. They are in no way of less importance than physical material facts. They are not secondary.
I mean, your subjective things are pretty secondary to me. The same reason why the nazi's subjective things are secondary to you.
What is your honest moral judgement of my moral judgement of bad/evil people?
I think it's incorrect/incomplete.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
I mean not really since there's a reasonable price minimum here based on production costs/expected value based on legal risk
Is this to say that you think that the supply of child porn is nearly perfectly elastic?
Modern lolicon was introduced around the 80s
We are discussing a hypothetical change in policy toward lolicon that has not happened yet. We're not talking about the past price history, which would be an empirical question.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Ok, I think you're actually out on a limb on this one. Suppose a person is literally just selling goods. In exchange for money, they give up their legal right to that good. This is a quid pro quo, but not one that is of any real concern. Neither the quid nor the quo is "in connection with an effort to control the exercise of an officeholder's official duties". So, where does something like that come in to play? Is it in the actual thing that Trump did? Or is it somehow justifying a vague and possibly overbroad definition of "campaign contribution"? If the latter, what, exactly, does that justification look like?
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
What do you think arguing is? It is generally an attempt to persuade people. Brainwashing, arguing, shaming, preaching are all part of the same set of things.
I apologize. I meant to have a more specific sense of "rational argumentation", rather than mere sophist rhetoric. Rational argumentation is premised on the notion that there is a truth of the matter that can be discovered via such a method. Without such, there is little point to grasping on to rational argumentation and every reason to simply move to brainwashing, shaming, canceling, deplatforming, intimidating, and maybe even having struggle sessions or genocides... at least, when it becomes more convenient than the alternatives.
People who claim to have access to an objective morality behave in contradictory ways from each other.
This tells me little, besides that there is room for progress via rational argumentation. You could say the same thing about nearly any other belief, even ones claiming access to objective things. That there are lots of irrational people out there tells me nothing about underlying reality.
I have seen nothing in more than 50 years on this planet that suggests that there is an objective moral standard that we can know.
Fair enough. We know your position. I think ZRslashRIFLE was just more honest about what it is. You simply think that it is all vibes-based reasoning and pure cultural power. That is, to me at least, an intellectually defensible version of moral error theory. But I think it means that you should simply say so when you're asked about the morality of something. You should just say that there's nothing moral/immoral to it, because you think that's not a thing; you just personally like/don't like it.
Telling me there is an objective morality is of no use if you cannot tell what it is and show that it is indeed objective. People have been trying to do that for thousands of years and have failed
Phil papers survey of professional philosophers has 56.4% accepting or leaning toward moral realism. This is certainly not a knock-down argument that it is true; by no means would I argue that. But it casts significant doubt on such bold proclamations that the entire project has simply failed. I would definitely be curious to know why you think you have such a simple, knock-down argument for why it has so clearly failed that seems to have eluded them.
ControlsFreak
9mo ago
That two people happen to share some set of subjective things does not somehow elevate them to being any more primary. You and a buddy may both happen to share the taste axiom that you like cilantro. You may happen to share that with twenty buddies. Your experience is still secondary to them, even though they can find some familiarity with it. And it is utterly secondary to the twenty-second guy who dislikes cilantro. Looking at those twenty-two people, can I say that cilantro is "good" or "bad"? I think that even trying would be an error in language.
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
I'm not sure price elasticity is the most appropriate lens through which to the view the issue (as you don't have nearly enough of a sample size in points of fluctuation in the price imposed by policy here).
Can you name any other good that lacks sufficient sample size?
The most direct thing to say is that its highly illegal nature creates a de facto high price/cost floor for producers and consumers.
Why should I interpret a de facto high cost floor for producers as anything other than a nearly perfectly elastic supply curve?
how they should behave (and haven't behaved) as substitute goods?
You have empirical data showing that they haven't behaved as substitute goods?
ControlsFreak
11d ago
The difference is that it's easy to people who don't have a particular psychology or culture. You're concluding that it's not easy to certain folks, which is perfectly compatible with it being objectively easy to most people. Maybe it's even tedious, or as the dictionary would recast that word, boring, to you. But hey, I think we're making progress. The reason why IoT devices have been an absolute security shitshow for years is just because a small culture of powerful technokings think that it's too boring for them to fix the obvious problems that everyone knows are obvious problems and which are objectively easy and simple to fix. We may have reached agreement!
The transcript of the oral argument in Citizens United gets a little lengthy for a full blockquote of the relevant section here, but this summary really does get at the essense of how it went down:
In one of the more memorable exchanges, Justice Alito asked if the "government's position . . . [would] allow[] the banning of a book if it's published by a corporation?" Stewart candidly replied, "the electioneering communication restrictions . . . could have been applied to additional media as well." Even a book. Justice Alito was taken aback by the answer: "That's pretty incredible. You think that if a book was published, a campaign biography that was the functional equivalent of express advocacy, that could be banned?" The answer was yes.
[In the full transcript, other justices piled on to really pin him down that he really was actually claiming the ability to ban such books.]
The government changed its position six months later when the case was re-argued. Justice Ginsburg asked Elena Kagan, the Solicitor General and future-Justice, "if Congress could say 'no TV and radio ads,' could it also say 'no newspaper ads, no campaign biographies'? Last time the answer was, yes, 'Congress could, but it didn't.' Is that still the government's answer?" Kagan answered, "The government's answer has changed." There was audible laughter.
There's a saying that you usually can't win a case in the Supreme Court based on oral arguments, but you can lose one. There are many details (e.g., the procedural posture was inherently weird in that they asked for a reargument) that I will gloss over, but this sure seemed like one of those moments where the government may have gone a long way to losing a case based on their capacious response in oral arguments. I just finished listening to the social media cases this morning, and this colloquy from the Florida argument really stuck out and reminded me of the days of old, also from Alito:
JUSTICE ALITO: [...] does Gmail have a First Amendment right to delete, let's say, Tucker Carlson's or Rachel Maddow's Gmail accounts if they don't agree with her -- his or her viewpoints?
MR. CLEMENT: They -- they might be able to do that, Your Honor.
Quite capacious, indeed! Again, Justices Roberts and Gorsuch piled on a bit to get him to really spell out how they could discriminate, even for direct messages.
These cases have allllll sorts of details and issues (e.g., it's a preliminary injunction on a facial challenge, which took up the lion's share of the argument time), but however the Court deals with it, I cannot imagine that it will be an across-the-board victory for the challengers. I cannot imagine five members of the Court will sign off on saying that the Constitution guarantees GMail the right to refuse private communications service based solely on their dislike of an individual's politics. The best I think the challengers could hope for is some vague kicking of the can back down, maybe giving in on a temporary injunction in order to develop a better record, but maybe having a classic Kavanaugh concurrence where he says some form of, "...and if you come back here saying that the result you came up with would Constitutionalize allowing GMail to refuse service solely on their dislike of an individual's politics, we will absolutely rule against you on the merits."
Sure enough, when Solicitor General Prelogar for the federal gov't entered the chat and Alito asked her if she agreed with the challengers' position on email services, she flatly disagreed with them. No one may ever know if she had actually game-planned this conversation or expected to have to explicitly disagree with them... or if she just was smart enough to have read the room and knew that whatever she came up with, she couldn't agree with them.
I can't imagine trying to predict exactly what the Court will come up with... there were a lot of indications that went the other way, too, and this one factor certainly isn't going to necessarily lead to a broad ruling in the other direction, but I also can't shake the feeling that we're really starting to see the 90s internet consensus finally cracking and crumbling. By that, I mean the consensus that was always bought and paid for by powerful internet companies who have held the line that they can do absolutely anything they want and cannot be held accountable for anything they do. They're the important part of the internet, and without them, they imagine that the entire 21st century economy will come to a halt. But it is only them, because they never really believed the propaganda around Net Neutrality; they never actually thought that it was a serious concern that maybe ISPs would start kicking folks off the net because of politics (at the time when there were precisely zero examples of this); that was just a play to try to reduce their costs at the expense of infrastructure companies. They're the ones who should be allowed to kick you off the net because of politics. As they dig their hooks deeper into every aspect of your internet experience, where you use your Google device to connect to your Google internet service, and only interact with the Google AI who tailors your entire experience, it will all be shaped at their whim, to their political preferences. Maybe, just maybe, we'll avoid that dystopia.
But what you really came here for is the memes, and the Texas Solicitor General at least tried to bring them for you. First, a shout out to all the lurkers out there! We love you guys!
That's when I say you look at the text of the statute, their theory would mean that even if you just want to lurk and just listen and see what other people are saying, they can kick you off for any reason at all. So if you have somebody who had never posted anything or their speech is identical to the speech of somebody else, their theory is: Well, we can kick you off.
Has anyone ever acknowledged the existence of lurkers in front of the Supreme Court before? Second, he tried describing the need for internet companies that allow individuals to control their own private communications, and that if the line is that if private companies provide the service, they can do literally anything they want, inject/reject whatever politics they want, versus if gov't provides it, then all that stuff ("censorship") is forbidden, then he basically said that we'd need to spin up a gigantic government internet 'company' to do that stuff if we want it without censorship. It was a little hard to follow, and his line certainly didn't land perfectly, but at least he tried:
So, for me, the answer is, for these kind of things like telephones or telegraphs or voluntary communications on the next big telephone/telegraph machine, those kind of private communications have to be able to exist somewhere. You know, the expression like, you know, sir, this is a Wendy's.
As much as I have a strong desire to be able to respond to stuff like the latest Gemini hamfisted diversity-in-image-generation with, "Sir, this is a Wendy's," and that they just need to fuck right off with their politics in products that could provide the world incredible mundane technological benefits, we're probably going to have to muddle on with pretty powerful politicized internet companies even after these cases. The only current alternative of giving all that power to government may be the only thing that's worse. So, I guess, here's to rooting for it not being too much of a hash!
ControlsFreak
1yr ago
Ok, so Trump pays money for X. X could be a waiver of a right to sue for breach of contract; could be bumper stickers; could be diet coke. This is a "campaign contribution", because diet coke is a "thing of value" provided to the campaign (in exchange for money)? And perhaps, that diet coke vendor is charging just a bit too low.
Do you think that Trump buying diet coke counts as a "campaign contribution"? Do you think it should? Do you think that if he buys a diet coke, he should be required to report it? ....do you think it should be a felony if he doesn't? Do you think we've mayyyyyyybe stretched federal election law a biiiit too much, and a biiiit outside the lane of what the Supreme Court said was a legitimate interest?
ControlsFreak
9d ago
Fair enough. If there is literally no way to change the culture to something that doesn't have trivially-hackable default passwords on billions of devices with anything other than unreasonable regulations, if this is honestly the dichotomy that you think exists in the world, then I guess I have to throw my lot in with the unreasonable regulations folks. But if you can come up with any plausible way to change the culture enough so that we don't have a spigot of trivially-hackable devices with default passwords on them, and your method is anything other than 'unreasonable regulation', I will jump to your side immediately. Nybbler has already committed to the claim that this is a complete impossibility, that the only options are "a culture that churns out trivially-hackable devices with default passwords" and "unreasonable regulations". Do you embrace this position, that those are the only two options?
ControlsFreak
2mo ago
Morality may be constructed, and subjective, but that is not the same thing as not being real, or not being morality. When I say something is wrong, I mean just that. By my moral code (which I acknowledge is not rational), I judge it as wrong. So saying I don't believe in moral judgements would be incorrect.
I don't see how you're saying anything other than that you have subjective opinions, vibes-based feelings, and you would like to call those things "moral judgments". You can use that language, but we should be clear about what it means. To that end, I would pose two questions to you about your position:
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Do you think that it is possible, in principle, for moral disagreements to be rationally resolved?
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Do you think that moral judgments contain truth-value, and if so, in what sense?
I don't follow your line of reasoning. Can you speak plainly, please?
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