ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Also at universities? Thomas sure seems to be fine with HBCUs. Do you think there could be trouble a-brewin' there?
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Yes. In order to criticize something, we need to know what that something is. To be perfectly clear, I'm saying that your (and that article's) presentation of the "literal interpretation" is an absurd strawman that cannot possibly be sustained by even just looking at the text. 'Round these parts, we don't really give much weight to random articles criticizing strawmen. The routine is to ignore them, because of course it's easy to beat up strawmen. I'm not even asking you to go so far as to steelman the literal interpretation; I'm just asking you to even state what you think the literal interpretation is in your own words. I think you're avoiding it, because you can't bring yourself to say the words out of your own mouth that are the absurd strawman; you're better than that and it would hurt your sense of personal standards to do it. So, you're trying to offload the dirty work to some random absurd partisan with a pretty bald appeal to authority.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I'm apparently really dumb. Can you help me out? Can you point me to the specific words in the quote from the law review article where they say how "equal protection of the laws" means "no possible categorization in laws" means "no laws"? Can you point me to the specific words in the quote from the law review article where they describe what "protection" hypothetical not valid laws would be providing?
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Sorry that they struggle to read in the California Law Review. (They try extra hard to read like morons.)
But try. Try in your own words to explain how "equal protection of the laws" means "no possible categorization in laws" means "no laws". It doesn't. It's not there. Clearly, the context, in Barrett's words, is that there are laws. So, given that there are laws, and you're trying to read this sentence about laws literally, please proceed to explain exactly how your literal reading implies that there are no valid laws. What "protection" would these not valid laws be providing?
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
After all, if taken literally, the Equal Protection clause would invalidate all laws, because all laws treat some groups differently than others.
EPC doesn't say that, tho. Like, on its face. Nowhere in the literal words of the clause does it say that the laws cannot make any distinctions for any reason between people.
I think I'm coming around to Barrett's concurrence that sometimes, if you try hard enough to be a moron when reading something, you'll miss the most reasonable interpretation of the literal text. Having a modicum of context informs how you read so that you don't add in things when you're claiming that it's a literal reading.
It's not the Constitution that's being read based on its actual text, it's the rest of the antidiscrimination laws.
Man, I now want to go back and frame Title VI as being a "public accommodations law". Sotomayor spent basically the entire 303 dissent just cheerleading "public accommodations laws" and how they're the best things ever, rather than engaging with the First Amendment arguments. Would be funny to port all those blessings onto the other case. "Yeah, Harvard, just like motels, has to be equally willing to provide accommodations, regardless of race. They can use other features, like whether they have enough money to pay, whether they're wearing shoes or a shirt... but they can't use race." I mean, universities aren't exactly motels, but neither are website designers.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Barrett's concurrence
My reading of Barrett's concurrence is that MQD is not about strict adherence to the Constitution, but about actually coming to the best reading of the text of the statute. She gives examples like
imagine that a grocer instructs a clerk to "go to the orchard and buy apples for the store." Though this grant of apple-purchasing authority sounds unqualified, a reasonable clerk would know that there are limits. For example, if the grocer usually keeps 200 apples on hand, the clerk does not have actual authority to buy 1,000—the grocer would have spoken more directly if she meant to authorize such an out-of-the-ordinary purchase. A clerk who disregards context and stretches the words to their fullest will not have a job for long.
This is consistent with how we communicate conversationally. Consider a parent who hires a babysitter to watch her young children over the weekend. As she walks out the door, the parent hands the babysitter her credit card and says: "Make sure the kids have fun." Emboldened, the babysitter takes the kids on a road trip to an amusement park, where they spend two days on rollercoasters and one night in a hotel. Was the babysitter's trip consistent with the parent's instruction? Maybe in a literal sense, because the instruction was open-ended. But was the trip consistent with a reasonable understanding of the parent's instruction? Highly doubtful. In the normal course, permission to spend money on fun authorizes a babysitter to take children to the local ice cream parlor or movie theater, not on a multiday excursion to an out-of-town amusement park….
The idea is that you just mentally have some sense of the scope of the text in context, and understanding that scope leads you to the best interpretation of the text. I'm not sure I'm convinced, nor precisely how it doesn't lurch folks back into the morass of divining meaning out of legislative history, but that's what I think it is.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
The student loan case hinged on the wording of a statute, not a reading of the Constitution.
This is hilarious, because I just saw the front page of NYT with a Biden quote on the student loan case ruling: "I think the court misinterpreted the Constitution."
Of course, I happen to totally agree with you that this case was statutory interpretation. If anything, I'm just noticing that this is one of those moments where Biden says something that, had Trump made a similar mistake, it would have been front page news... not because they're cheering on what he said, but because they're aghast about how he could be so ignorant and wrong about this obvious thing (that is a technical little detail, really), and how it must mean that he has no idea what is going on and is therefore incapable to hold office under the 25th Amendment.
As for the affirmative action case,
I think you're nitpicking here. @Gaashk's comment that it's a literal reading of the Constitution is probably correct. Your quote from the opinion about
Any exception to the Constitution’s demand for equal protection...
is pretty easily understood as saying, "Whelp, a literal reading of the Constitution is that you can't do this. That said, there might be an exception to the literal reading of the Constitution." And sure, they spent most of their time on figuring out whether or not there was an exception for this case, but the result of finding that there isn't an exception is that you just go back to the default of a literal reading of the Constitution.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
As for outreach only to white men, that is also legal if for some reason white men are underrepresented at your company.
Would it be illegal to continue outreach programs only to certain minority groups if those minority groups happened to be overrepresented at your company?
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
In today's dissent, Sotomayor observed that "the Constitution places no value on discrimination". Maybe she just really believes in stare decisis? "Whelp, as of yesterday, I had thought that discrimination was a compelling interest, but the Court ruled otherwise, so now I guess that discrimination has no value whatsoever."
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
This comment made me realize that we really are moving to a world where, in order to decide whether some action is bad or not, you have to first figure out whether the victim is "good" or "bad". I noticed this a while back in prominent hacking cases. If the victim was sympathetic to the current political fashions, it's a horrible crime. If the victim, for any reason at all, might not be the most shining example of idealism, at best indifference, at worst "fuck 'em". For example, the discussion around the Ashley Madison hack wasn't, "Hacking is bad, end of story." It was, "Ha! Fuckin' cheaters get hacked. Plus, some of them were government employees, so extra fuck 'em!" "...Uh, hello! Some good, brave, possible minorities, might have good reasons to use a site like Ashley Madison. Maybe hacking is not so good." And so on.
There is likely some amount of pre-judging the alleged perpetrator, too, but I first noticed it in hacking crimes with mostly faceless/unknown perpetrators.
I guess, weirdly, I had previously thought, "Hacking/digital stuff is still a new area; we don't have developed norms yet; given that, there's going to be more 'who, whom' than normal, but once we flesh out some norms, we should head toward more consistency." And now, I, uh, probably think that less. Not sure it makes me more conflict theory-y, but at the very least, I feel more inclined to think that many other people are, in a deeply rooted way, more conflict theory-y than I had previously hoped.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
The vast majority of what most people do with computers involves reading and writing text, and watching video.
Thinking about my own habits, this is true for me. I consume a lot of text. That process includes a lot of detailed reading, skimming, and skipping over sections. The pace at which I scroll is highly variable, depending on the source material and the layout of the site/document in question. To me, I think the key question would be the extent to which I can replicate this process (to at least make VisionOS not worse) or somehow improve upon it.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Would you say that Chirlane McCray is a lesbian?
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
What do you think that principled line is?
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
You don't need to publicly tell the world when you're on the same team as all the journalists. You just need to not object too strongly, even though you already know that most of it is all bullshit. Carter Page was forced to resign, even though he did literally nothing wrong (he is a profoundly weird person; I don't agree with much of his perspective of the world). Rumors are swirling about this and that, AlfaBank and more. The political environment is already ripe enough for Hilary to call Trump Putin's puppet in a debate. Fortnights of airtime and furlongs of column space are already dedicated to pushing the exact message you want; you don't have to tell the world. On that score, you just have to do the minimal amount to keep the narrative going, and make sure not to squash it too hard. Note that we may never have a window into any back-channel discussions between FBI officials and members of the media, where they probe about some story or another, and perhaps instead of tipping your hand a little and telling them that it's bullshit, you just no comment your way into letting the public think it's legit. (Do these back-channel interactions go differently if it's a blue in the crosshairs? Andy McCabe leaking on the Clinton Foundation investigation?) In the meantime, keep working on vapor, just in case the unthinkable happens and the bad guy gets elected; you'll have insurance to take down his presidency, maybe even before it actually starts.
But also remember that it was unthinkable! No one thought Trump had a chance of winning. If you come on too strong in telling the world, you risk backlash. Better to just enable the whole frenzy and continue chasing ghosts, just in case.
In hindsight, given the outcome of the election, would they have behaved differently? We don't really know. That clip is great in showing the difficulty of multi-agent reasoning, especially in partial information environments. Motivations can be varied and complex. (Plus bonus reference to a source with the NYT!) It's wicked hard to work backwards and really get a glimpse of their internal calculations at the time.
...so instead of trying to proceed via proof by hypothesized motivation, we can actually just look at the problem, itself. The DOJ/FBI regulations, themselves. We're already in a weird counterfactual world, one where they didn't have any actual tip from a foreign ambassador... in our world, they literally just have, "Well, we think so-and-so benefits from this crime." In that counterfactual world, the actions they took or didn't take in the real world do zero work to explain whether a hypothetical action would be justifiable in the counterfactual world. They were in an entirely different context! We're stuck just looking at the counterfactual world you've set up, looking at the regs, and seeing that it would be wholly inappropriate for them to jump into a full, wide-ranging investigation of anyone close to Trump based on nothing other than, "...well, we think he benefits."
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Here's the hard truth that will be difficult to stomach - Donald Trump was also a victim of the crimes carried about by Russia. He was a victim of their foreign influence attempts. A victim of their attempt to recruit members of his circle. A victim of the fact that their crimes tainted, put an asterisk on, his election in the minds of millions of people. A victim of the resultant investigation that hamstrung his administration for years. While he benefited by having the crimes of Manafort/Cohen discovered and prosecuted before putting them in any real positions of power, he was a victim of the process in that it removed his National Security Advisor for utterly bullshit reasons that ultimately stemmed from the investigation into Russia's crimes.
It's only because of our screwed up partisanship that essentially no one is okay with saying both of these true things. Some folks on the right can't bring themselves to acknowledge that Hilary was genuinely a victim of Russia's crimes. Some folks on the left can't bring themselves to acknowledge that Trump was, too. We could have had a moment of all acknowledging that Russia victimized Hilary, Trump, and America... and maybe, we could have gotten our shit together in order to actually do something real about it, but instead, we get partisan pissing matches.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I think my original point matters as to why the FBI would take such a tip seriously and start an investigation off of it.
Sure. A lot of people think that. The key question is what kind of investigation, what kind of investigative steps. There's a huge transition to:
Trump's campaign is the obvious beneficiary of the Russian govt crimes, and so youd tend to take any indication that the beneficiary is in on it very seriously.
They had basically nothing here. You could easily take such minimal indication seriously by, for example, going and interviewing the source of that indication, seeing what's there. If there was something worthwhile, that could justify some additional steps. Instead, we pretty much just had fever dreams of a Manchurian candidate. Those dreams were crossbred with wet dreams of getting The Donald and preventing him from becoming president. It was irresistible to them politically, and the response to the same set of facts would have been completely different if the ox being gored was tinted blue instead.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I think you missed the context of this entire comment chain.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
For the actual facts at hand, John Durham seems to think that the DOIG only allows a preliminary investigation, not a full investigation. Others disagree. You'll find the respective standards in Sections 6.5 and 7.5.
...but for this discussion, those facts aren't at hand. For this discussion, the only facts at hand are wild-ass speculations about someone benefiting. Do you think it would be acceptable to open investigations (preliminary or full) into Biden, Hilary, and some other set of prominent democrats (selected by bureaucrats who, let's say, were selected by your ideological opponents) when Trump's tax records were released? After all, there might have been a crime that occurred there... and after all, I bet said ideologically-opposed bureaucrats would assess that such release benefited some prominent democrats.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
I couldn't help but think about this comment when reading Tyler Cowen's latest post. A modern academic, normally completely sequestered from the realities of life and death, existential struggle, catches a glimpse of multi-agent games.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
If we're going with moral arguments, I'd unfortunately have to say that the verdict almost certainly rests with a set of currently unknowable facts - the exact content of the various documents in question. Given the problems of overclassification, it's actually quite tricky to determine whether, and to what extent, each of the documents really was a danger to national security. Obviously, no one is going to come out and make a public appeal in the form of, "Oh come on, all the real content of Document A was already long past sensitive, even broadly published in the NYT already," or whatever. But frankly, if we're thinking about the moral standpoint, such considerations would actually be super important, and we just don't have a clue which way that goes.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Manafort and Cohen deserve to go to jail for what they did. That said, their crimes were totally unrelated. That is in absolutely no way justification for the particular way this investigation played out. It's the definition of a fishing expedition, and fishing expeditions certainly catch some guilty fish from time to time. One can justifiably hope that their crimes had been discovered, investigated, and prosecuted, but via other means. I don't think anyone on the right thinks, "Oh, maybe there's something worth investigating concerning China and the Bidens, so that's justification for the FBI to start rooting around in every single prominent democrat's business, and the whole expedition will be justified so long as we catch a couple folks doing random, unrelated, dirty shit. I hope the specific folks who are doing random, unrelated, dirty shit get caught specifically for what they're doing.
ControlsFreak
3yr ago
Bullshit. What you are actually doing is just failing to read and then trying to act tough when it's pointed out that you failed reading comprehension.
Try to do something other than legitimate your own personal opinion. Perhaps reference one of the public reports from one of the special counsels or OIG. Or perhaps reference the DOIG. Or even case law. Show me a single example where, "Whelp, we just randomly praxxxed out who we think would benefit from this crime (bonus points if it's something as diffuse as benefiting electorally), and that's clearly sufficient grounds on which to predicate a wide-ranging investigation into everything about them."
But seriously, dude. You know that it's OBVIOUSLY not PC. Like, not even in the same universe. I'm pointing out that not only is it not that, it's not even grounds for starting an investigation. No serious person thinks it is, and you can't find such a thing in any gov't document. They had something else that they believed was predication for an investigation, and at various points, believed they had PC for various things.
This part is ipse dixit, and one that strains reality.
Ok, "the same what"? Where is the part where it says "the laws must treat everyone
the sameequal"? Where are those words? What "protection" would these not valid laws be providing? You can't just take one single word, "equal", ignore all the rest of the words, and then make up an idea that its literal meaning is that there cannot possibly be any distinctions in any way. That's just not there. You're divining it out of magic (and one word). You're ignoring even the very next word! No remotely rational person would accept your reading as the "literal" one.More options
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