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				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I am in my 50's and that is certainly what we were taught about addiction when I was a kid. "Not even once!"




I don't think that saying is identical with saying that it is impossible for someone who is addicted to drugs to become not addicted to drugs. It's saying that it's easy to become addicted to drugs. It was also the slogan of an anti-meth ad campaign by The Man, the gov't, the squares who are, like, the evil Christian Moral Majority or something. It was quite the meme on the internet. Everybody hip to the drug legalization scene knows that it's much more of a joke phrase than a serious exposition of the science of substance use.


In any event, our own perceptions of the zeitgeist aside, what the prominent counsel for the cause claimed was that people used to believe that people who were addicted to drugs could become not addicted to drugs, but that science knows better now. I've primarily just observed that claim.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
STATUS GAMES


When people talk about "status games" 'round these parts, they're normally referring to our obsession with relative social status and the games that we play in order to increase it. However, this morning, I listened to oral arguments in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, a case about a municipal ordinance, from a town in Oregon, prohibiting people from sleeping in public, at least with some 'aggravating' factor, like having a blanket. Of course, as is probably traditional for me at this point, I hardly even want to talk about the specifics of this case, at least not concerning homelessness. Instead, I'd like to jump off into questions of categories (which, uh, I guess are made for man?), agency, and the games we play with categories like 'status'.


The background is a 1962 case, Robinson v. California, referred to in all blockquotes from the Court as just "Robinson", which considered




A California statute makes it a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment for any person to "be addicted to the use of narcotics," and, in sustaining petitioner's conviction thereunder, the California courts construed the statute as making the "status" of narcotic addiction a criminal offense for which the offender may be prosecuted "at any time before he reforms," even though he has never used or possessed any narcotics within the State and has not been guilty of any antisocial behavior there.




SCOTUS held:




As so construed and applied, the statute inflicts a cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments.




Details aren't the most important, but a vague sense of that backdrop is. If someone is "addicted to narcotics", that's considered just a "status", not actual behavior or conduct that can be regulated by the state.


This status/conduct categorical divide has a long history of being quite confusing, and this confusion was on full display at the Court. A Ctrl+F of the transcript shows 121 mentions of the word "status", and many of them are trying to figure out what counts. I collected more blockquotes than I could possibly clean up or feel comfortable bombarding TheMotte with, so I'll try to be sparing. First off, Justice Kagan asking questions of Ms. Evangelis, who is arguing on behalf of the city:




JUSTICE KAGAN: So can I talk about that, Ms. Kapur? So taking Robinson as a given, could you criminalize the status of homelessness?






MS. EVANGELIS: Well, I have a couple points to that.






JUSTICE KAGAN: It's just a simple question.






MS. EVANGELIS: So Robinson doesn't address that and I think it's completely distinguishable. So Robinson was a --






JUSTICE KAGAN: Could you criminalize the status of homelessness?






MS. EVANGELIS: Well, I don't think that homelessness is a status like drug addiction, and Robinson only stands for that.






JUSTICE KAGAN: Well, homelessness is a status. It's the status of not having a home.






MS. EVANGELIS: I actually -- I disagree with that, Justice Kagan, because it is so fluid, it's so different. People experiencing homelessness might be one day without shelter, the next day with. The federal definition contemplates various forms.






JUSTICE KAGAN: At the period with which -- in the period where -- where you don't have a home and you are homeless, is that a status?






MS. EVANGELIS: No.




There is a bit of meandering that I'll omit, but it comes back to:




MS. EVANGELIS: The statute does not say anything about homelessness. It's a generally applicable law. One more -- it -- it's very important that it applies to everyone, even --






JUSTICE KAGAN: Yeah, I -- I got that.






MS. EVANGELIS: -- people who are camping.






JUSTICE KAGAN: But it's a single person with a blanket.






MS. EVANGELIS: And --






JUSTICE KAGAN: You don't have to have a tent. You don't have to have a camp. It's a single person with a blanket.






MS. EVANGELIS: And sleeping in conduct is considered -- excuse me, sleeping in public is considered conduct. And this Court -- this Court in Clark discussed that, that that is conduct. Also, the federal regulations --






JUSTICE KAGAN: Well, sleeping is --






MS. EVANGELIS: -- are very --






JUSTICE KAGAN: -- a biological necessity. It's sort of like breathing. I mean, you could say breathing is conduct too, but, presumably, you would not think that it's okay to criminalize breathing in public.






MS. EVANGELIS: I would like to point to the federal regulations which I brought up.






JUSTICE KAGAN: And for a homeless person who has no place to go, sleeping in public is kind of like breathing in public.




and finally:




JUSTICE KAGAN: -- I'll tell you the truth, Ms. Kapur. I think that this is -- this is a super-hard policy problem for all municipalities. And if you were to come in here and you were to say, you know, we need certain protections to keep our streets safe and we can't have, you know, people sleeping anyplace that they want and we can't have, you know, tent cities cropping up, I mean, that would create one set of issues. But your ordinance goes way beyond that. Your ordinance says as to a person -- and I understand that you think it's generally applicable, but we only come up with this problem for a person who is homeless, who has the status of homelessness, who has no other place to sleep, and your statute says that person cannot take himself and himself only and, you know, can't take a blanket and sleep someplace without it being a crime. And -- and -- and that's, you know -- well, it just seems like Robinson. It seems like you're criminalizing a status.




Kagan may be the smartest of the liberal Justices, so it's probably no surprise that I think she got the closest to a conceptualization of status that is friendly to the left in this case. Unsurprisingly, though, "Republicans Pounce". Justice Gorsuch said that, "[T]he distinction between status and conduct is a slippery one and that they're often closely related," and had what was perhaps the most comprehensive exchange on the topic with Mr. Kneedler, who is the Deputy Solicitor General, weighing in on the case on behalf of the federal government, who was technically supporting neither party, but is obviously in practice representing the equities of the Biden administration portion of the left.




JUSTICE GORSUCH: Mr. Kneedler, I want to probe this a little bit further because it -- it does seem to me the status/conduct distinction is very tricky. And I had thought that Robinson, after Powell, really was just limited to status. And now you're saying, well, there's some conduct that's effectively equated to status and -- but you're saying involuntary drug use, you can regulate that conduct. That doesn't qualify as status. You're saying compulsive alcohol use, you can regulate that conduct in public. Public drunkenness, even if it's involuntary, that doesn't qualify as status, right?






MR. KNEEDLER: Right.






JUSTICE GORSUCH: You're saying you can regulate somebody who is hungry and has no other choice but to steal. You can regulate that conduct even though it's a basic human necessity, and that doesn't come under the -- under the status side of the line, right?






MR. KNEEDLER: Yes.






JUSTICE GORSUCH: Okay. But, when it comes to homelessness, which is a terribly difficult problem, you're saying that's different and -- because there are no beds available for them to go to in Grants Pass. What -- what about someone who has a mental health problem that prohibits them -- they cannot sleep in -- in a shelter. Are they allowed to sleep outside or not? Is that status or conduct that's regulable?






MR. KNEEDLER: I -- I think the -- the question would be whether that shelter is available.






JUSTICE GORSUCH: It's available.






MR. KNEEDLER: Well, no, available to the individual.






JUSTICE GORSUCH: It's available to the individual.






MR. KNEEDLER: But --






JUSTICE GORSUCH: It's just because of their mental health problem, they cannot do it.






MR. KNEEDLER: I -- I think there might be -- I mean, that's -- the mental health problem --






JUSTICE GORSUCH: Status or conduct?






MR. KNEEDLER: The mental health situation is itself a status.






JUSTICE GORSUCH: Right, I know that.






MR. KNEEDLER: Yes. But -- but if the






JUSTICE GORSUCH: It has this further knock-on effect on conduct. Is that regulable






MR. KNEEDLER: I -- I --






JUSTICE GORSUCH: -- by the state or not?






MR. KNEEDLER: -- I -- I think that -- I think if the --






JUSTICE GORSUCH: All the -- you know, alcohol, drug use --






MR. KNEEDLER: Right, right.






JUSTICE GORSUCH: -- they have  problems too and that that -- and -- and -- but you're saying that conduct is regulable. How about with respect to this pervasive problem of -- of persons with mental health problems?






MR. KNEEDLER: I -- I think, in a particular situation, if the -- if the -- if the person would engage in violent conduct as --






JUSTICE GORSUCH: No, no, no, don't
mess with my hypothetical, counsel.






(Laughter.)






JUSTICE GORSUCH: I like my hypothetical. I know you don't. It's a hard one, and that's why I'm asking it. I'm just trying to understand --






MR. KNEEDLER: I -- I --






JUSTICE GORSUCH: -- the limits of your line.






MR. KNEEDLER: I think it would depend on how serious the offense was on the -- on the individual.






JUSTICE GORSUCH: It's -- it's -- it's a very serious effect. The mental health problem is serious, but there are beds available.






MR. KNEEDLER: Well, what I was trying to say, it would depend on how serious being required in -- to -- to go into that facility was on the person's mental -- if it would make his mental health situation a lot worse, then that may not be something that's --






JUSTICE GORSUCH: So that's status -- that falls on the status side?






MR. KNEEDLER: Well, I -- I -- I -- I guess you could put it that way, but I -- I guess what I'm saying is that --






JUSTICE GORSUCH: I -- that's what I'm wondering. I don't -- I'm asking you.






MR. KNEEDLER: Well -- JUSTICE GORSUCH: I really am just
trying to figure out --






MR. KNEEDLER: No. You could view that as status or --






JUSTICE GORSUCH: You're asking us to extend Robinson, and I'm asking how far?






MR. KNEEDLER: Well, what I was going to say, you could -- you could think of it as status, but I think another way to think about it, and this is our point about an individualized determination, is that place realistically available to that person because --






JUSTICE GORSUCH: It is in the sense that the bed is available --






MR. KNEEDLER: I know that it's --






JUSTICE GORSUCH: -- but not because of their personal circumstances.






MR. KNEEDLER: Right. Right. And that's -- and that's my point. It -- it's available in a physical sense. It may be available to somebody else, but requiring an individualized determination might include whether that person could cope in that setting. That's the only --






JUSTICE GORSUCH: So that -- so that might be an Eighth Amendment violation?






MR. KNEEDLER: Because it may not -- yes, because it's not available.






JUSTICE GORSUCH: So that's an -- it's an Eighth Amendment violation to require people to access available beds in the jurisdiction in which they live because of their mental health problems?






MR. KNEEDLER: If -- if going there would -- would --






JUSTICE GORSUCH: How about if they have a substance abuse problem and they can't use those substances in the shelter? Is that an Eighth Amendment --






MR. KNEEDLER: That is -- that is not a -- that is not a sufficient --






JUSTICE GORSUCH: Why? Why? They're addicted to drugs, they cannot use them in the shelter. That's one of the rules.






MR. KNEEDLER: Well, if they -- if they -- if it's the shelter's rule, then they have no -- they -- they -- they can't go there if they're -- if they're addicted. That's not -- that's not --






JUSTICE GORSUCH: So that's an Eighth -- that's an Eighth Amendment violation?






MR. KNEEDLER: Well, no, the -- the -- the Eighth Amendment violation is prohibiting sleeping outside because the only shelter that is available --






JUSTICE GORSUCH: Is not really available to that person?






MR. KNEEDLER: -- won't take them -- won't take them, yes. And that's an individualized determination.






JUSTICE GORSUCH: Same thing with the alcoholic?






MR. KNEEDLER: Yes.






JUSTICE GORSUCH: Okay. So the alcoholic has an Eighth Amendment right to sleep outside even though there's a bed available?






MR. KNEEDLER: If -- if the only shelter in town won't take him, then I think he's in exactly -- he's in the same -- he's in the same condition. And there can be all sorts of reasons, and the City doesn't normally --






...






JUSTICE GORSUCH: How about if there are no public bathroom facilities? Can -- do people have an Eighth Amendment right to defecate and urinate outdoors?






MR. KNEEDLER: No, we -- we --






JUSTICE GORSUCH: Is that conduct or is that status?






MR. KNEEDLER: I -- it's, obviously, there -- there is conduct there and we are not suggesting that cities can't enforce their --






JUSTICE GORSUCH: Why not, if there are no public facilities available to homeless persons?






MR. KNEEDLER: The -- the -- that situation, you know, candidly, has never arisen. And whether or not there -- I mean, in the litigation as I've seen. But no one is suggesting and we're not suggesting that public urination and defecation laws cannot be enforced because there are very substantial public health reasons for that.






JUSTICE GORSUCH: Well, there are substantial public health reasons with drug use, with alcohol, and with all these other things too.






MR. KNEEDLER: And they can all be --






JUSTICE GORSUCH: And you're saying the Eighth Amendment overrides those. Why not in this circumstance right now?






MR. KNEEDLER: No, I'm not -- I'm not saying the Eighth Amendment overrides the laws against drug use.






JUSTICE GORSUCH: Oh, I know that.






MR. KNEEDLER: Oh, I'm sorry.






JUSTICE GORSUCH: I know that.






MR. KNEEDLER: No, I misunderstood what you --






JUSTICE GORSUCH: That one -- that one the government wants to keep. I got that.






MR. KNEEDLER: No, I misunderstood your question. Sorry.






JUSTICE GORSUCH: Yeah. Last one. How about -- how about fires outdoors? I know you say time, place, and manner, but is there an Eighth Amendment right to cook outdoors?






MR. KNEEDLER: No. I -- I -- I -- I think what -- what --






JUSTICE GORSUCH: That's -- that's an incident -- a human necessity every person has to do.






MR. KNEEDLER: But this -- but this is one -- this is one of those things that, you know, is taken care of on the ground as a practical matter. There are restaurants where
someone can go. There are --






JUSTICE GORSUCH: Well, no, no, we're talking about homeless people.






MR. KNEEDLER: No.






JUSTICE GORSUCH: They're not going to go spend money at a restaurant necessarily. Let's --






MR. KNEEDLER: Well, there -- there may be inexpensive places. Some people get --






JUSTICE GORSUCH: Let's say there isn't, okay?






MR. KNEEDLER: And --






JUSTICE GORSUCH: Let's say that there is no reasonable --






MR. KNEEDLER: And -- and the local community --






JUSTICE GORSUCH: Do they have a right to cook? They have a right to eat, don't they?






MR. KNEEDLER: They have -- they have a right to eat, a right to cook if it entails having a fire, which I think it -- it -- it probably -- it probably would, but -- but, as I said, the -- the -- the eating, the feeding is taken care of in most communities by nonprofits and churches stepping forward --






JUSTICE GORSUCH: But if there isn't






MR. KNEEDLER: -- as they have for 200 years.






JUSTICE GORSUCH: -- but, if there isn't, there's an Eighth Amendment right to have a fire?






MR. KNEEDLER: No, no, we are not saying there's an Eighth Amendment --






JUSTICE GORSUCH: Well, I thought you just said there was.






MR. KNEEDLER: Well, there -- there's food that you can eat without cooking it. I mean, they -- and they could could get a handout from the -- from a -- from an individual that, you know, people can beg for money. I mean, there are -- there are ways that this works out in practice.




Oof, that was long and covered a lot. Gorsuch would go on to suggest that the Court should just push the case back the State for a "necessity" analysis and not "get into the status/conduct stuff that -- that Robinson seems to invite." Roberts, meanwhile, went after immutability in a colloquy with Ms. Corkran, representing the class of homeless people challenging the law.




CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: A number of us, I think, are having difficulty with the distinction between status and conduct. You'll acknowledge, won't you, that in those terms, there's a difference between being addicted to drugs and being homeless? In other words, someone who's homeless can immediately become not homeless, right, if they find shelter.






Someone who is addicted to drugs, it's not so -- so easy. It seems to me that in Robinson, it's much easier to understand the drug addiction as an ongoing status, while, here, I think it is different because you can move into and out of and into and out of the status, as you would put it, as being homeless.






MS. CORKRAN: Yeah. So it's interesting, we today understand addiction as an immutable status. In Robinson, the Court suggested that someone might be recovered and no longer have the status of addiction. So the Robinson Court wasn't thinking about addiction as something that couldn't change over time.






CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Well, that may limit the applicability of Robinson to a different situation, but what is the -- I mean, what is the analytic approach to deciding whether something's a status or a situation of conduct?






MS. CORKRAN: So the question is a status is something that a person is when they're not doing anything. So being addicted, having cancer, being poor, are all statuses that you have apart from any conduct.






CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Having cancer is not the same as being homeless, right? I mean, maybe I'm just repeating myself because homelessness can -- you -- you can remove the homeless status in an instant if you move to a shelter or situations otherwise change. And, of course, it can be moved the other way as well if you're kicked out of the shelter or whatever. So that is a distinction from all these other things that have been labeled status, isn't it?






MS. CORKRAN: I -- I don't think so because, you know, a cancer patient can go into remission, they no longer have that status. I don't think -- I mean, I don't think there's any question that being poor is a status. It's something you are apart from anything you do. It's a status that can change over time, and at that point, you wouldn't be a part of the class, but I don't think it changes the fact that it is a status. And what Robinson found so offensive about status-based conduct --




But it would take Justice Jackson to blow up our first real bombshell of the argument, following up on the Roberts' discussion of immutability:




JUSTICE JACKSON: Can a person go from being addicted to drugs to not being addicted to drugs?






MS. CORKRAN: So I think under common -- as we think about it in terms of modern medicine, the answer is no. But the Robinson Court certainly thought that was the case, right? Sixty years ago, we didn't have the same understanding of addiction as we do now.






JUSTICE JACKSON: So your view of Robinson is that it doesn't really matter, the permanency of the condition; it's still a status?






MS. CORKRAN: Right. The Robinson Court did not think that the permanency mattered because it thought that addiction was a status that could change.




In summary, the Robinson Court was actually wrong on the facts. They thought that people could go from being addicted to drugs to not being addicted to drugs. So, they clearly didn't care all that much about permanency. But BOOM goes the claim that, apparently the New Correct Lefty Science has determined that people don't ever transition from being addicted to drugs to not being addicted to drugs. I guess I heard it here first. My years of shouting at clouds that Scott pointed out that basically all honest alcoholism rehabilitation studies fail to outperform a placebo and that narcotics rehabilitation studies don't even use measures like "stops taking narcotics" in favor of measures like "causes trouble for other people while using narcotics somewhat less often" is finally being adopted! (Frankly, in far stronger form that I would have even stated. I wouldn't say that people can't stop being addicted to drugs; just that we can't magically impose a "treatment" regime that is going to result in them stopping.) Wow! Was the failure of Oregon's decriminalization experiment so spectacular that we're no longer going to have endless claims that we can make everything completely legal, so long as we pray to the god of providing "treatment" (without any serious consideration of how this is going to happen or whether it will actually do anything)? I can hardly believe it.


As amazing as this concession to Justice Jackson was, Alito somehow at least comes close:




JUSTICE ALITO: Well, see, the problem is that once you move away from the definition that makes the inquiry basically tautological, then you get into the question of assessing the closeness of the connection between the status and the conduct. And you do run into problems with the person who's a kleptomania -- a kleptomaniac or a person who suffers from pedophilia. So how do you distinguish that? How does the Court assess how close the connection has to be?






MS. CORKRAN: So -- so, for both of those categories, the -- the -- the status is defined -- I don't know if status is the right word there -- being a pedophilia or having pedophilia is defined by the urge that you have, not by your conduct, and acting on that urge. So, if someone were to act on that urge, that tight causal nexus on why they didn't have access to shelter, then they would be outside of our claim.




What's this?!?! A distinction between "having an urge" and conduct?!? In the realm of sexuality? Say it isn't so! How many times can The Lefties That Be just boldly admit that the entire slew of homosexual behavior to gay marriage cases were based on a fundamental lie?!


The more cynical among us might observe that status/conduct games seem to be yet another way that folks run away from agency, shielding anything that they like in terms of it "being who you are" or things that just "happen to you". There is no real theory here, and most attempts to justify it are pretty philosophically incoherent. It doesn't seem like the Court is going to buy this particular extension of The Game, but why wouldn't they try? They've had all these other victories, including effectively banning Christian groups from campuses, by substituting "status" in for "conduct/belief". Why are the Status Games so powerful?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


there is a difference between "science" and "New Correct Lefty Science"




Can you suggest a simpler and more plain way of indicating this? I thought the caps and everything did the job. Maybe a (TM)?




It is possible to not be an active addict... an addict can be a "monster", then return to being normal for years or decades or the rest of their life, even if the monster risk is always hanging over them.




I hate to say it, but this reeks of epicycles. Like, it's also always possible for someone who has never been an addict before to become an addict at some point in the future. If so, what conceptual content does "addict" have? What is its definition? Is it something like, "An addict is someone who has at any point in the past been addicted to drugs"? If so, it's another one of those amazing definitions like those that just claim, by definition, that it's theoretically impossible for someone to change from being homosexual to being heterosexual (and that anything that appears otherwise must be hidden mystical bisexualism). Ok, sure, you can define your terms that way, in a way that makes it true, by definition, that people who are addicted to drugs cannot become not addicted to drugs, but that's not saying anything about the science of addiction, or anything we've "learned" by science since the Robinson era. It's saying that you've simply adopted a different definition. Then, we'd have to wrestle with how changing definitions affect the legal and philosophical concepts involved. Plus, from a culture war observer position, I'll absolutely enjoy just watching and noting the various changing of definitions, how they may come from political pressures rather than new scientific results, and how such changes interact with the broader public discourse.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


For a start is it really lefty beliefs?




I believe that both the respondents and the Deputy Solicitor General are trying to represent beliefs that could be described as "lefty", by virtue of their respective positions.




If you think that the general zeitgeist is that addicts can be cured and it didn't used to be, you can just say that.




I wrote:




Evangelis and Corkran seem to agree that addiction to drugs is immutable (to some extent; Evangelis is a bit less clear here). Evangelis thinks that this is a distinguishing factor from Robinson, thinking that the Robinson Court, at that time, also viewed it as some sort of immutable, which contributes to an argument of it being a "status". Corkran disagrees, thinking that the Robinson Court simply got the facts about addiction wrong, that they thought it was mutable (but it's really not), so they were thinking that mutable things could still be a "status". Thus, Evangelis thinks that Robinson supports mutable things being not a status and immutable things being a status, while Corkran thinks that Robinson implicitly supports both mutable and immutable things being a status (dependent upon some other features, apparently).




So, it appears that the general zeitgeist is moving toward the idea that addicts can't become not addicted to drugs, and some portion thinks that it didn't used to be that way.




So the definition is "An addict is someone who has at any point in the past been addicted to X AND still has that desire."




Why wouldn't we short-circuit that to just "has that desire"? What is the AND doing, besides pointing to past conduct? Should "pedophile" be defined as "someone who has any point engaged in pedophilic conduct AND still has that desire" rather than "has pedophilic desires"? Should "homosexual" be defined as "someone who has at any point engaged in homosexual conduct AND still has that desire"? I honestly can't help but point out that this is feeling suuuuper epicycl-y.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Mostly what @gattsuru said. We could have gotten a string of cases that treated sex as the status in question and then applied standard 14A intermediate scrutiny, but we didn't. Don't forget that it's not just Lawrence and Obergefell. It's Lawrence, Romer, CLS, Windsor, and Obergefell. They made an absolute hash out of the whole mess, and they certainly did not rest simply on distinctions being made based on the status of sex.


Would be the absolute peak of irony, however, in an alternate universe, to hear KBJ interrogate counsel with a frank and straightforward, "Can a person go from being the male sex to being the female sex?"


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm speaking a bit tongue in cheek, because as I linked to a couple of my prior comments, and as many people learned during COVID, what the politicians or the media say the science says is ultimately as powerful or more powerful, in terms of the culture war, than what the science actually says. This is ultimately about observing the shift in the culture war, not a shift in the science. That is, there is a difference between "science" and "New Correct Lefty Science", where the latter is specifically things like what the politicians, media, and every party member in good standing must say in order to not end up in the metaphorical gulag.


I'm anticipating that in the next five years or so, simply asking people who want to argue about drug policy, specifically those who are on the left, a version of, "Can a person go from being addicted to drugs to not being addicted to drugs?" is going to be illustrative and possibly necessary in order to even communicate with them reasonably on the topic. We will have to figure out where in the update process they are, kind of like how we've had to do so on trans issues for the last ~5 years.1


I have gotten piled on here (well, at least at the various old places, with a similar community of individuals) for taking the position that "treatment" isn't a magic word that solves drug addiction problems, that legalization will likely increase consumption (including people who consume for the first time or consume enough to become addicts), and that we have approximately zero clue how to convert people from being addicts to not being addicts. (Plenty of people do things like "age out" or take agency and figure it out on their own, etc. It's clearly possible to stop being an addict, except in the colloquial sense that some support groups use the phrase; it's just that we have basically no useful public policy tools to actually accomplish that with any scale.) But similar to what @crushedoranges said, if we take that view, then it really opens up arguments for public policy that are quite different than the arguments we're seeing now.


At least since I was young, this perspective has not been on the table, as the pro-legalization cultural forces have been utterly dominant. I even bought their message when I was growing up, which is how I know what the messaging was like. So, perhaps the New Correct Lefty Science is actually adopting something more like this now. If so, that might be a great improvement, being closer to correct! (I'm a bit doubtful that they'll actually hit the target, though...) However, if so, it's going to generate quite a rift and plenty of cognitive dissonance with all the pro-legalization talking points, and that's a culture war worth paying attention to. Like, what's going to happen? Who's going to win? Who are the X-o-phobes going to be? What sorts of rationalizations will emerge to blend this with various policy desires? Prior to this oral argument, I didn't anticipate needing popcorn for drug policy arguments anytime soon; now, I'm already poppin'.


1 - For another example, you still occasionally see someone on the internet who clings to the extremely weird claim that it is just theoretically impossible for someone to change from being homosexual to heterosexual, the rationale being to the point that even if you have a public example of someone who appears to have done just that, there's some hidden mystical behind-the-scenes explanation that they were actually bisexual the entire time, but were also somehow not wrong about their claim that they were homosexual, and the epicycles that follow. But it's very rare now; it was everywhere ten years ago. Completely pervasive. Because that's what the party demanded. I found it plenty interesting to watch how that culture war shifted, even if I don't think anything about the "real" science shifted.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


there’s a relevant passage on page 38. Evangelis argued that homelessness, due to its mutability, does not fit Robinson’s definition of a status. It’s exactly what Corkran was trying to rebut when you quoted her.




Sure. Evangelis and Corkran seem to agree that people cannot go from being addicted to drugs to not being addicted to drugs. It didn't stick out all that starkly when Ms. Evangelis spoke about it (though I notice it more clearly now; Corkran also said the same thing but not as starkly in her response to Roberts). She seemed to be thinking more about the "struggle" part. It stuck out massively when KBJ spoke to Ms. Corkran.




I couldn’t actually figure out where mutability came into play.




Evangelis and Corkran seem to agree that addiction to drugs is immutable (to some extent; Evangelis is a bit less clear here). Evangelis thinks that this is a distinguishing factor from Robinson, thinking that the Robinson Court, at that time, also viewed it as some sort of immutable, which contributes to an argument of it being a "status". Corkran disagrees, thinking that the Robinson Court simply got the facts about addiction wrong, that they thought it was mutable (but it's really not), so they were thinking that mutable things could still be a "status". Thus, Evangelis thinks that Robinson supports mutable things being not a status and immutable things being a status, while Corkran thinks that Robinson implicitly supports both mutable and immutable things being a status (dependent upon some other features, apparently).




So at what point did this become “lefty science”?




The point where EVERYONE suddenly believes that people who are addicted to drugs cannot, in any way, become not addicted to drugs! This is a huge H-WHAT?!?! moment. I've been constantly bombarded for decades now with messaging that we just need "treatment", and that will solve all our public policy problems with drug addiction. It's a magic panacea that, if applied appropriately and with sufficient outlay of government monetary resources, will be able to convert people who are addicted to drugs into people who are not addicted to drugs. Now, suddenly, out of nowhere, everyone seems to agree that this is just impossible. This is, frankly, incredible New Science. I'd be open to a scientific argument with links to scientific experiments and theorizing that support this incredible New Science; if convincing, I may even agree with it. However, until I see a remotely convincing argument with actual scientific evidence, I'm going to default to it being the new Lefty Science Party Line, akin to the prior consensus on biological determinism of sexuality, that has been adopted primarily due to political reasons and raw social force rather than genuine scientific evidence.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I would be interested to see an effort post from you describing what you think "actual justice" is, alongside your meta-ethical views and how they fit together with your determinism. I know that you have in the past positively linked to Mackie's argument for moral nihilism from queerness, but I haven't gotten a sense for how you put it all together. What do you think is "actual justice" to a nihilist? How does it possibly matter to a determinist? Why would it even make sense to have a decision "theory" in this world, and what would it possibly have to do with justice?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Have you considered that maybe people you don’t like can be right?




Sure they can. Care to defend either of the things I "tilted" at?


Note that I wrote:




Of course, as is probably traditional for me at this point, I hardly even want to talk about the specifics of this case, at least not concerning homelessness. Instead, I'd like to jump off into questions of categories (which, uh, I guess are made for man?), agency, and the games we play with categories like 'status'.




The sections you're complaining about are the parts that aren't actually about the specifics of this case. So, uh, I'm really not sure how your description of things that are specifically about this case are really relevant to the things I wrote that you're complaining about.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I have always preferred calling them "micro-aggravations". Yes, it's a real thing, but it really says more about the aggravatee's psychology and what they find annoying/unpleasant than it does about anything that can be properly called "aggression". One can still care deeply about reducing their impacts, even on a society-wide basis, but I think this terminology more appropriately captures the concepts that they use to describe the phenomenon and avoids the horrific conflation with literal violence that plagues the rest of the associated political movement.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
KBJ is still "young", a prospect of sorts. One of those, "She needs some refinement to bring her play up to the level of wily, consistent veterans, but she shows flashes of potential greatness," situations.


Whereas with Sotomayor, I think we pretty much know what she is. I would submit that the Thomas Revolution was less about Thomas changing/growing and more just about how people viewed his work. Lots of folks were so focused on Scalia during his life and just thought Thomas could never live up. It wasn't until Scalia passed that they re-evaluated. I don't think Sotomayor is suffering from that. Perhaps a bit of a Kagan effect, but I would find it quite difficult to imagine someone sitting down now, putting their hypothetical brain to work, removing Kagan from the picture, thinking hard about what Sotomayor's core contribution is, and coming up with a great argument that it is something that can be rallied around to really deliver. KBJ totally could.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for April 17, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


statistically speaking, CICO is not likely to result in success.




This is basically useless evidence. Statistically speaking, most people don't get jacked. It doesn't mean that weightlifting doesn't build muscle. It's a pretty "simple" biophysical phenomenon, but it's not particularly "easy" to dedicate time and effort to doing it.


Moreover, we have good evidence for why CICO is not likely to result in success, because we can see a stark difference between studies of in-patients, where the researchers have complete control and ability to strictly account for calories consumed, and self-report studies, where they don't. The conclusion is that it's unquestionable that CICO absolutely completely works; it's that people do all sorts of shit to convince themselves of little lies here and there rather than wholeheartedly embrace truth and reality and take agency for their choices.


Two examples I've talked about here are my wife and a friend of ours. When I convinced my wife to just count the calories and see what the deal is, she still mentally rebelled against it. She would see the line tracking her weight (weekly average) not always dropping immediately, and be all, "MAYBE IT'S NOT WORKING ANYMORE!" I had to say, "Shut up and just keep doing it," more times than I can remember, and sure enough, it always kept going down. I don't know how many times it took for her to mentally "get it". At some point, she was like, "Yeah, I 'knew' that it worked like this, but I didn't 'know know'." Because society has been lying to her for decades.


Our friend literally went to her doctor and basically begged for advice on how to plan diet/exercise, but doctors hate to tell people to diet/exercise, because they know that most people have been lied to for decades and simply won't believe it enough to do it, so what did her doctor say to help her? "Ya know, you're just getting older." Even the fucking doctors contribute to the constant lying that people experience. It's no wonder that the statistics are what the statistics are, even if it works 100% of the time when you do it.


WaPo just had an article a couple weeks ago detailing one of the industries that are literally dedicated to lying to people about how the world works. These are the bootleggers. The baptists are the lying gyms and diet people who say shit on big signs like, "LOSE 30LBS IN 20 DAYS!" Everyone is constantly lying to people, and we shouldn't be surprised that, statistically, people get confused by those lies rather than doing the simple, but not easy, things that are necessary to lose weight.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
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!


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Wellness Wednesday for April 17, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The way we solve this is that we just schedule different snacks. My wife and I have the same meals, with calories planned so that they make sense for her, and then I have more significant and more calorie-dense snacks to fill out my requirements. I work from home, and she goes in about half the time, so I may even just have basically a "fourth meal"; e.g., if the plan for lunch is just a 200-300 calorie soup or salad, I'll just eat that at like 10:30 and then make myself another quick meal around 1-2.


She helps in this by making sure that I have plenty of prepared snacks available. She'll make tasty and protein-full snacks like chicken bites with various seasonings that are easy and don't lend themselves to overeating, like potato chips.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


A big reason why Medicare spending grows so rapidly is because US healthcare spending in general is growing rapidly and Medicare covers a population (old people) that tend to be much sicker than average.




This one is pretty shocking, and I didn't realize until my mother got cancer right around her retirement age. It pushed her retirement date a little earlier than she had originally planned, which was a little annoying to her, but probably for the best. In any event, she asks me to help her look through some financial stuff, because even though she's normally pretty good with that sorta stuff, "chemo brain" is a bitch, as is just aging in general. When she was able to get on to Medicare was my first real exposure to how the system works, what it costs (I'm not even sure if I really had much of a grasp on which parts were truly free and which parts you had to pay extra for), what all the options are, etc. I shouldn't have been surprised that it had similar terms to normal health insurance, with things like premiums, out-of-pocket maximums, etc. What I was definitely surprised about was just how shockingly cheap it was, with incredibly low maxes. Like, simply insane. Like, better than the best monetary value I've seen out of even the top tier, most expensive insurance I've ever been offered by an employer, with premiums significantly lower than I've see out of even the bottom tier, most cut rate insurance I've ever been offered by an employer. That was when I realized just how massive of a wealth transfer the program is from young to old. It was also when I realized how the incentives worked. Out-of-pocket maxes so low that if you have literally anything happen to you in a year, then you simply do not even have to consider the price of any other medical service that you might think about consuming.


That's when it sort of clicked, why the large conglomerate that is managing her care has bundled in everything imaginable into what seems to be their "cancer package". If you can squint your eyes and think that it might be helpful for the cancer, for managing or recovering from the chemo, whatever, it's part of their package. They'll pay for Ubers to your appointments, every therapy under the sun (physical, occupational, mental, etc.), even your gym membership (at their extra fancy, extra expensive gym that just so happens to be a part of the conglomerate). Feel like you're not sleeping the best? We'll send you to some sleep specialists, do the full workup. Not fully happy with a rapid recovery of mental faculties from chemo? We'll give you some brain scans, a variety of tests, and surely, more weekly therapy of various sorts. The list goes on. It's a good thing that she's retired now, because she has basically a full-time job just managing and going to all of the myriad of possible appointments and offerings they provide in their neatly-packaged conglomerate, and all of the expenses can be justified in some way or another with respect to the cancer or side effects from the treatment, or something.


On the one hand, cool that she can get so much attention to get every month of vitality possible; I really do value the additional time spent with her, especially with her still being able to be as clear-minded and engaging as she is. Moreover, cool that she doesn't have to constantly worry about money. She hadn't really saved as much for retirement as she would have liked, and pre-retirement, I really got the sense that she was kinda constantly worried about it and how things were going to work out. Now that all the paperwork has been done and the numbers are on the table, she can see how it's going to work, that it's going to be okay, and that she no longer has to worry about it. On the other hand, hot damn, that means that she (and we, by extension) literally do not even have to think for a millisecond about a cost-benefit ratio for literally any possible option within their menu. From her perspective, it is all literally completely and totally free. There is not a single moment where she has to think, "How much tangible benefit do I think this is going to provide for me, and how much do I really value that benefit, to the point of being willing to give up some amount of my own resources for it?" If anything, the only thing that she trades off is just the time of going to the thing and doing it, but of course, she's retired now and has a lot of time in the week. So if she assesses that the tangible benefit has any decent probability of being literally any value more than epsilon>0, why not? How much does it 'cost'? Who knows? Who cares? It doesn't come out of my pocket. I personally benefit from this, because 100% guaranteed that if there was any real expense, she'd be leaning on me to help figure out what's worth it and how to make the finances work. A nice burden off my shoulders, too. I can see the 'cost' now, but damn if the incentives don't do their best at making me apathetic, just because then I don't have to think about that stuff.


A couple final scattered thoughts. First, there was a moment where I thought, "Damn, I don't always sleep the best, and I've had some recurring sleep problems before. It would be nice if I could get a full workup and see if we could fix it. But that would be suuuuuper expensive, and I don't know that I can justify it, given the solid probability that they're not actually going to be able to help me in the end even after I wrack up huge bills." And even some jealousy that she can just go do that for free. I also sort of wonder, society-wide, if we'd be serving our population's health and productivity better if we did stuff like figure out people's sleep problems and fix them when they're young and have many years for those benefits to accrue, rather than make it prohibitively expensive for most of your life and then free right near the end.


Second, I almost wanted to make an analogy to the public school system. People often joke that the school system is mostly a daycare, with incidental ability to help educate children, primarily for the purpose of freeing up parents from having to take care of them. It almost is like getting hooked into one of these big health programs while on medicare is like that. "We'll take your elderly parents, give them constant care, keep them busy coming to appointments and such, and make sure they're at least doing alright," and it's not that genuine medical care isn't there (like how genuine education is not absent from public schools), but that it's more minor or incidental. "We make it so that you don't have to worry about your parent most of the time," just like, "We make it so that you don't have to worry about your child most of the time." A useful service, yes, with some amount of real value, for sure. Like I said, I realized that I genuinely benefit from it in that way. But how effective is it? How costly is it? How efficient compared to possible alternatives? Who knows? Who cares? The bureaucrats and the unions and the conglomerates control all that and don't really want you to know the answers even if you did want to know. All the incentives are just about perfect, so long as the whole thing doesn't blow up spectacularly at some point, and so long as the schools aren't so ineffective that China eats our technological lunch and conquers us via warfare.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think Alito is pretty obviously right to make comparisons to print media, though even with that, there's still plenty of tricky. In fact, I think that we really shouldn't even speak the words "social media" or "internet" in this discussion. Instead, from a historical perspective, this really seems like a core freedom of the press issue. That is, for centuries after the printing press was created, governments around the world went to great lengths to control its use. Examples are found in Acemoğlu and Robinson. Private entities or companies would operate a printing press, and regular people could go interact with these operators in sort of a regular way; say, if they wanted to print up a pamphlet to hand out about their views or a newspaper or something, they would go to the printer, submit what they wanted to have printed, pay them however much money, then come back and receive their product after it was printed. Much the same as today, you could say that those private entities had some rights of their own to do business, and they might refuse to print something if they really disagreed with it (they didn't have to bake the cake or make the website; could ban the local Alex Jones, or whatever analogy you want). So what did governments do? They pressured press operators to adopt criteria that the government found favorable. Maybe they'd even issue local monopolies and say that only so-and-so had the right to run a press in a particular area. Of course, the guys they picked always somehow knew what sets of views they needed to have (and which they needed to reject to print) in order to keep their license and continue making bank.


As countries became more liberal democratic, they realized that this was a problem. Some countries kept the monopolies, but passed pretty strict non-discrimination laws, saying that they had to just print whatever the customers wanted; no letting pro-monarchists print their pamphlets and rejecting revolutionary pamphlets. Others, like the US, passed freedom of the press provisions, simply saying that the government needed to stay TF away from press operators; no monopolies, no threats of shutting them down if they don't toe the party like, just leave Britney press operators alone. All of them. Whoever wanted to just buy a press and print.


As such, I think the freedom of speech part is kind of a distraction for what should really be considered freedom of the modern press. It's not an institutional press, like NYT/CBS/whatever. It's literally anybody who waltzes down to their press company and wants to use the press. And I think the underlying motivation, while not putting in words that it's effectively a non-discrimination law, was understood to have a non-discrimination effect. Whether or not there could be enough history here to make a legal determination given our current laws, just from a 'theory of good institutions in the vein of Why Nations Fail', it would be a pretty rough outcome for countries that went down the "freedom of the press" route rather than the non-discrimination route to discover that natural monopolies might arise to make this whole branch of the endeavor ultimately fruitless, if governments could just discreetly threaten the natural monopolists. I just hope we don't have to see a nation or three literally fail from going down this route before we either rekindle the non-discrimination-type theoretical roots of the freedom of the press or we explicitly adopt something that is a standalone non-discrimination provision.


Some additional nice things that this view captures: The third-party business is important and captured here. Old school printing presses were also third parties. It doesn't matter whether the guy who is asking the printer to print the thing is the NYT or Joe from across the street; if the government doesn't have a reason that is compelling enough to overcome 1A speech scrutiny, so that they can go directly to NYT/Joe and directly tell him that he can't say that, then they should be prohibited by 1A press scrutiny from going down the street to the local print shop or the commercial entity that actually does the physical printing for NYT and telling them that they shouldn't print it.


I think this distinction also captures some of the "government need" doctrine, as well. I accept that there are some genuine government needs that can overcome 1A speech scrutiny. For example, they can legitimately tell folks who have security clearances that they're not allowed to just write a book blowing a bunch of classified information. Of course, how is this balanced with things like the Pentagon Papers precedent? Well, in my view, the Pentagon Papers precedent is quite strong - if someone who didn't agree to keep classified information secret gets that classified information, for the most part, the government can't prohibit them from publishing it. There is some obvious danger here, but it's actually not all that far off from the tradeoffs we make in cybersecurity all over the place. If Party A discovers a flaw in Party B's software, even if Party B is a sensitive government function, the sort of accepted solution is that they tell Party B that they'll only have X days to implement a fix, to do what they can to protect some equities, and then they're going public. Yet, at the same time, some flaws are viewed as soooooo potentially damaging, that even Google's vulnerability team has failed to follow through on the threat to go public when the company with the flaw didn't bother repairing it. We basically let that decision be up to the Googles/Party A's.


Similarly, when the Intercept/Guardian got the Snowden files, they met with the NSA. The NSA did try to express the government's perspective on the matter. They asked the journalists to withhold some things from publication, arguing that some of the items were completely noncontroversial, directly within the government's known mission, were of extremely little "news value", and would cause significant damage to national security and/or sources/methods. I'm mostly fine with this, even though there is a lot of conversation here about government discussions being inherently coercive. It is genuinely difficult to draw lines here, and it's hard to come up with a good limit that prevents the Intercept/Guardian from getting the Elon Musk Harassment Treatment.


That said, I think it is infinitely preferable to the option of going to third parties. The Intercept/Guardian definitely have to weigh a lot of things, including the possibility of the Elon Musk Harassment Treatment, but at least they're the ones with skin in the game and the ability to actually weigh them. Whoever it is that prints their physical copies or hosts their website may have some skin in the game, just because it is possible for people to flee to other printers/hosters out of fear of being censored, themselves, but that skin is wayyyyyyy thinner than the actual party who wants to publish the information/opinion that they have.


Of course, this would make it much harder for the government to do what they want to do. There are lots of bozos on twitter spouting bullshit that the government would like to get rid of. If they actually had to go through the bozos rather than twitter, there would be substantial refocusing of efforts towards things that actually matter for national security, not bozos spouting off about their personal beliefs on COVID or whatever.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


the ones that do often make you jump through hoops to get it (e.g. Texas).




YesChad.jpg


But, ya know, for an entirely different reason. Nothing to do with voting. Identity theft is awful. I absolutely want anyone who is trying to acquire an ID that is in any way related to any component of my personal information to have to jump through hoops to do so. I know full well that this means that I also have to jump through some hoops at times. E.g., when I moved states right after school, but didn't rent with a traditional lease or utilities that were in my name, I had to figure out how to jump through the right hoops to get appropriate documents. For most people, this is a big headache at most once or twice in their life, but it is an eminently solvable headache. For identity theft mills, this is a cost that scales poorly and significantly hinders their ability to wreck massive headaches for large swathes of people.


I would also note that when I had the aforementioned headache, the easiest document for me to acquire that would then help me unlock many other documents was voter registration. The baseline level of hoops that we require of people for voting is wayyyy easier than literally any other thing. I could see someone thinking that we should just bump up the registration to being a full "voting-only ID", still with an obscenely low level of hoops to jump through. I don't think that's particularly unreasonable, but then we really just get down to haggling about price. What specific hoops would you allow for obtaining a "voting-only ID"? If you let there be even one hoop, someone out there will have a story about how, in their highly-specific situation, this one hoop is actually an annoying headache for them. We will never have anything other than tradeoffs, nothing other than both Type I and Type II errors, and nearly everyone is allergic to actually using numbers to analyze these tradeoffs.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


there's more to the story of the rising rates of obesity than "everyone has less willpower than they used to"




This is the strawest of straw men.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I've been thinking a lot on the application of the laws. A couple stories come to mind.


First, a literal friend of a friend. We were both at a mutual friend's house for dinner one night. I didn't know him before this evening, and I never saw him again afterward. It was a while ago; I can't precisely age him; I would guess 30s. He was a black man. All I really remember is that nearly the entire evening, he was talking about how unjust he thought marijuana laws were. He expressed that, because of this belief, he thought that it was his duty to continue selling marijuana in violation of the law that he thought unjust. To the point of saying something along the lines of, "I have a child now that I want to take care of, but I will absolutely go back to jail, because I have a duty to keep selling marijuana."


I remember thinking at the time that it was just a terrible pragmatic decision, because regardless of his belief on the justness of the law, it seemed implausible that his persistent violation of it would have any remotely meaningful effect. It's still above my pay grade to have any sort of judgment on the perspective where you're convinced that a law and the means by which it is being prosecuted is unjust at its core, unfairly and unjustly applied, perhaps in a discriminatory way toward unfavorables, and then having to decide what to do about it. But it helped me understand just how much opprobrium many people can have when they see such things that they consider to be abuses of what may be otherwise legitimate political power, especially when they think that a part of the abuse is, "They wouldn't put me in jail for it if I were white."


The second example is Doug Hughes, the mailman who landed his ultralight gyrocopter on Capitol Hill. His political shtick was that he was "delivering letters" to politicians to protest campaign finance laws. But it was all over the news, a major embarrassment to the Obama administration. How could this guy just fly in to DC airspace?! It's one of the most protected airspaces in the world and there are special flight rules that must be observed in order to enter it. (He likely would not have received authorization to enter if he had asked according to procedure.)


However, those rules are just little bitty administrative rules, basically. You talk to pilots who are in the 'pilot community', and they know that you definitely take those rules seriously, because if you even accidentally break them, the minute you land, you're going to be interrogated by someone from the FAA (and possibly law enforcement) to figure out what you were up to, and the likely outcome in any event is that they're going to revoke your pilot's license.


But, uh, Doug Hughes didn't have a pilot's license for them to revoke! You don't need to have a pilot's license to fly an ultralight gyrocopter! The Powers That Be were in a bit of a pickle. They had to make an example of this guy, somehow. Their only normal recourse was to take the license that he didn't even have. Soooo, they scoured the law books, grasping for anything they could come up with. What they found was that, with the added weight of the letters, the total weight of his gyrocopter was just barely above the weight limit for ultralight aircraft, and there's a real big boy statute with real criminal felony penalties requiring a pilot's license to fly heavier aircraft. That's how they got him.


I can't help but think that if Mr. Hughes flew his slightly-overweight gyrocopter literally anywhere else, in a way that didn't bring national embarrassment to The Powers That Be, his criminal conviction would have evaporated at twenty different levels of discretion. First off, probably no one would have even known. Who the hell monitors the weight of these little guys on a regular basis? Nobody. And even if someone did notice, they might have just chuckled. "Can't believe you managed to get that beefy boi up!" Mayyyyyyyybe someone miiiiight have quietly noticed and whispered, "Hey Doug, don't do it again, or at least, don't let other people know, because I just came to the brilliant realization that it's technically illegal, that pretty cool thing I just saw you do and am otherwise giving you social props for." (It is left as an exercise for the reader to estimate the likelihood of criminal sanctions if the flight had gathered attention, but was widely viewed as being politically favorable to The Powers That Be.)


Spoilers: The jurisdiction we were in at the time of the marijuana conversation has now legalized marijuana. Recently, the FAA has basically acknowledged that weight limits have very little to do with safety and may, in fact, be detrimental to safety when it comes to regulation of small aircraft.




I recently read a couple books by William Riker, who to my knowledge, has never stepped foot on any model of the starship Enterprise. Particularly of note here is his Liberalism Against Populism, written in '87. Much of it is mathematical minutia of the the pros/cons of different voting systems and the pathologies which may follow, but in his concluding chapters, he presents a fascinating interpretation of political science/philosophy, public/social choice theory as sort of a general domain that seems to have some sense grown out of economics departments in the late 20th century.


Riker acknowledges the common refrain that economics is 'the dismal science', since it deals with allocation of scarce resources, and sort of no matter what choices you make, someone is not going to have everything they want (especially if what they want is basically everything). Of course, some people lose economically, due to a variety of factors which may or may not be under their control, but he says that social choice is the real dismal science, for at least in economics you can very often find positive sum trades sort of just sitting around all over the place. They can make things genuinely better for pretty much everyone!


In a sort of analogy, in his mind, social choice is also a study of the allocation of a scarce resource, but that scare resource is political and moral values. These are often distributed in a zero-sum fashion (think two-candidate elections). Or, as he flatly says, "Suppose that, ..., it is still the intent of each possible winner to impose some kind of external cost on the losers. Then, no matter who wins, there exists a loser who is the worse off for having participated in the political system." He contrasts economic scarcity, which means that those who cannot pay or convince a Soviet-style planning commission to allocate to them must go without, to political/moral scarcity, which "requires that the nonpossessor suffer additional punishment for nonpossession". He then leverages his long work on voting systems and 'heresthetics' to argue that it will, in fact, often lead to dissatisfaction by a majority of people. This has other implications for his political science, but I think I will stop here.




Regardless of what I think are the personal pros/cons of his strategy, the jurisdiction in which marijuana man lived eventually decided to allocate some scarce political/moral resource to him. Doug Hughes was an incredible loser in the negative sum game of obtaining scarce political/moral resources and punishing one's enemies in the process. He may eventually be vindicated by the FAA on moral grounds, though he had to pay a steep price in the meantime (as I assume marijuana man already had; I recall him saying that he would go 'back to jail' as if he had already been).


Regardless of what I think are the personal pros/cons of Trump's strategy, his case (the case of political and moral allocation, not that of his legal trial) has yet to be decided. The Powers That Be will use every tool at their disposal to deny him any allocation of political/moral value, at least for now, even if that involves scouring the books for anything, even if that means going after him for something that would have disappeared as an issue for anyone else by twenty different offramps.


Riker tells me that the only answer liberalism gives to anyone who is unhappy with this current allocation of political/moral value is to vote people out. He tells me to not worry too much, because a majority of people are usually unhappy with the allocation of political/moral value anyway. He tells me only to worry when people start thinking that they're getting an even shittier deal by participating in the political system and acknowledging it as a suitable means by which to allocate scarce political/moral value. Unfortunately, this is what I hear when I hear Megyn Kelly talk to Tucker Carlson.




Epilogue


I sometimes get angry that so many people violate so many laws in ways that genuinely hurt others. I sometimes get angry that so many of those people are never prosecuted, due to twenty different offramps. I sometimes get angry that other bullshit laws exist and that people get unjustly prosecuted under them. I sometimes get angry that the most common way to play the political game is to punish one's enemies, making the whole thing a negative sum endeavor. I might also even get angry when some political losers start to reject the entire edifice that is built on things that I sometimes hate and get angry at. I used to get more upset at that last one; ya know, the whole 'damaging to our democracy' bit. And sure, I can still see how such degradation can occur, leading to all sorts of political dysentery. But man, I am starting to lean in the direction that when everything is obvious bullshit, "I get mad about every bullshit thing I see," might not be the way. After all, as the video says, I'm just some fuckin' guy, and probabilistically, I'm highly likely to be in the dissatisfied majority most of the time.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
This, plus the fact that we have no idea how to do "treatment" that actually works. Scott posted loooooong ago that honest studies on rehab for alcoholism fail to beat a placebo. The end goal of most rehab studies for harder drugs like potent opioids isn't even "stops using potent opioids"; it's "maybe uses potent opioids slightly less and gets up to criminal mischief slightly less often". The true believers in the idea that we're just going to "apply 'treatment' directly to the forehead", if we just try hard enough politically and decide to spend enough money, and that it will magically convert addicts into non-addicts/non-users, are just banging their heads against reality.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I find that looking at these aggregate numbers to be fascinating, and also difficult to really understand, especially because I really get the feeling that it's tough to understand without really digging in to the data sources, seeing if there are discrepancies between sources and how they choose to do their groupings. For example see the wiki article, which has different tables that are listed from the 2014, 2019, 2021, and 2022 ACS.


Especially the "detailed ancestry" section. Median Indian household income is $152k?! That's wild and dwarfs the top line white/black gap. Makes me wonder if composition effects are significant. That is, are Indian "households" just bigger? Like, more people, plausibly more working people, living in the same house? Conversely, many articles have been written claiming that poor family relations and divorce have plagued black communities more. If Indian households have 2-3 individuals earning incomes on average, while white households have 1.5-2, while black households have 1-1.5, could that be a huge effect? I do recall EconTalk mentioning household composition effects being rather important when talking just about the country-wide median household income statistics, and I wonder how much of a story they tell here.


Additionally, in the detailed ancestry section, they don't have a category for "African Americans (Black Americans)" at all, like they do in the top line chart. So, how are they actually describing these group boundaries? The number from the top chart for this category would be at the absolute bottom of the bottom chart (coming in just below Appalachian), and that's kind of wild to me, too. Even the "Subsaharan African" number is substantially higher. Is the general African American number being pulled down specifically by people who don't identify with any other ancestry, even if they have some sense of where their family came from? It would have to be a pretty strong pull, and I don't have a sense for how relatively big these groups are.


What about self-identification issues? If Cletus decides that Appalachia sucks and that you can't make a living there, so he moves out, finds a job in the fancy city, meets someone there, marries her, makes a family there, etc., how many years will it be until he stops identifying as Appalachian? He thought Appalachia sucked! "Nah; I'm just American." Possible analog to an evaporative cooling mechanism.


I don't think today will be the day that I have time to pour through all the details, but thanks for another reminder that I really need to sometime.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Canada doesn't use the new nitrogen hypoxia method. Canada uses the "old" lethal injection protocol that has been horribly cruel for decades, at least since it has been adopted in the US for capital punishment. Prior to adoption by the US for capital punishment, lethal injection was the "new" humane way of killing someone, and it was only the barbarous Americans who were still killing people via electric chair, which was the "old" protocol. At least, the electric chair was the "old", barbarous method only after the US adopted it for capital punishment. Before that, it was the "new" humane way of killing someone, and it was only the barbarous Americans who were still killing people via firing squad, which was the "old" protocol. Before that, ....


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of February 26, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The current contours, given existing statutory law for material support, were outlined in last year's case Twitter v. Taamneh. Worth a read. Of course, if you listened to oral arguments there, they did try to grapple with whether they could say something about 230 or about Constitutional limits, but the opinion they converged on dodged all of that and focused purely on statutory interpretation, making their job a lot easier and kicking the can down the road a bit. The upshot, at least for folks who want to impose some sort of legal liability on these companies is that, since this was purely about statutory interpretation, it's entirely possible that they could just pass a different statute that can provide a different standard. It will likely only be when more statutes are passed that pull that line closer and closer to Constitutional/230 limits that we'll really see where the boundaries are.


As an aside, in that case last year, these companies were all swearing up and down that their algorithms are totally passive, agnostic to the nature of the content, and that they are indifferent to the customers who use them. Compare to this week's arguments, where many of those same companies were all swearing up and down that they expend significant time, money, and effort to carefully curate a newspaper-like editorial product that reflects the company's desired expression, and that being able to prohibit Tucker Carlson or Rachel Maddow from using GMail just because they don't like their politics is just a regular part of their editorial discretion. This massive hypocrisy was pointed out multiple times, and we'll see if it matters in the final decision. There have been times before that the Court has been pissed off by repeat litigants who appear to make a mockery of the Court's standards and processes by making contradictory claims about the same underlying facts in different cases at different times to achieve the results they want.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Major NYT opinion piece dropped this week. At the time of my clicking on it, it was under the headline "Born This Way? Born Which Way?" It is a tour de force of Current Thinking on all things sex and gender, covering trans issues as well as sexuality. Given that the title is so evocative concering the topic of my recent AAQC, I feel like I can't help but comment on the current state of affairs. Let's start with the history of thinking on sexuality, since that's the closest link.




For gays and lesbians, social acceptance and legal protection came as Americans learned to see sexual orientation as an innate and immutable characteristic. When Gallup first polled on the topic in 1977, just 13 percent of Americans thought gay and lesbian people were born that way. Now roughly half do, and in many ways it hardly seems to matter anymore. The frenzied search for a “gay gene,” a very 1990s preoccupation, has petered out. Believing gay people had no choice but to be gay was a critical way station on the road to accepting homosexuality as just another way of being in the world, and no one talks much about it anymore.




And later:




...like many queer people, I had many different romantic entanglements in my youth, and had I not met my wife in college it is not impossible to imagine that I might have ended up on another path. I certainly did not experience myself as being born any particular way.






Among people of my generation and younger, it isn’t all that uncommon for women who were once married to men to later in life end up in partnerships with women, and I certainly have known men in gay relationships who wound up in straight ones and vice versa. These people seldom describe themselves as having “lived a lie” in their previous relationships. I think most of us know intuitively that sexual orientation is not binary, and is subject to change over the course of our lives.




Finally:




We ended up with the born-this-way model because of the tension between the seeking of rights for an embattled minority and the broader search for liberation. But this tension is ultimately dialectical — it contains the seeds of its own destruction.




She words it differently, but the conclusion is basically the same as what I had said - it was importantcritical to force people to believe in Dogmatic Position so that political victories could be won, but in the Year of Our Lord 2023, basically no one even bothers defending it anymore; they don't have to! The political victories have already been enshrined.


Unfortunately, that's about all that the article really says about the "born this way" narrative and the political history around it. Fortunately, it hits on quite a few other notes that are highly related to things I've thought about and said for a while. The article opens:




When I was in sixth grade, I made a decision that changed the course of my life. I decided not to try out for the middle school swim team. I know that might not sound like a big deal, but it was. As a grade schooler I was a standout swimmer — strong shoulders and back, and well-muscled legs that powered me through the water with ease and speed. I was disciplined, obsessive. My form was excellent. My coach saw potential.






Had I stuck with it, my life might have turned out pretty different. I might have been a popular jock rather than a lonely weirdo. I might have become a varsity athlete who won admission to a top college rather than a barely graduated teenager who had to take remedial math at a community college to scrape my way into a not-very-competitive school.




And soon after hits the high note:




We allow children to make irreversible decisions about their lives all the time, ideally with the guidance and support of the communities that care for them. Sometimes they regret those decisions. The stakes vary, but they are real. So what are we saying, really, when we worry that a child will regret this particular decision, the decision to transition? And how is it different, really, from the decision I made to quit competitive swimming? To many people — I am guessing most — this question is absurd. How could you possibly compare something as fundamental and consequential to one’s life as gender to something that seems comparatively trivial, competitive sport?




Man, I can't even blockquote it without thinking about how many domains this thinking touches on. I'm sure it's been remarked on here, and I feel like there was an SSC/ACT post or some other significant post here where people ruminated on life choices, regret, and the human condition of our walk through a garden of forking paths, where every choice we make closes off an infinity of alternate possible realities. Like, this is so core to the the human condition that it's hard to imagine subjects that it doesn't touch on. Nevertheless, I can't help but think about the hot button ones - abortion, consent, child sex, and economics.


Abortion


Commonly, in discussions of abortion, a divide appears concerning what sex is about, how important it is, whether it's sacred or whatever, etc. I feel like a common perspective that is expressed by pro-choice folks is that it is wayyy less important/sacred than they think their opponents think it is. This opinion piece talks of competitive swimming, but I recall people saying that sex is like a tennis game. It's just a fun recreational activity that a couple of people show up to do together; they both consent to playing tennis; they just have some amount of fun; then nothing particularly interesting happens. In the era of ubiquitous birth control, they think that sex is totally just like this.


This is used to argue that abortion should be totally fine, and the only people who disagree are some crazy folks who still think sex has some meaning or implies some responsibilities/consequences and apparently want to punish women for basically playing a game of tennis.


Consent to sexual relations


We start to see some cracks in the full-on sex-is-tennis position already when it comes to consent to sexual relations. Imagine your boss really loves tennis and decides that he wants to have some team-building out on the court. There's plenty of perceived pressure to play. Maybe you don't particularly like it, but you feel like you should just suck it up and play. It's not that bad. Maybe you could even learn to kinda like it. Besides, you likely have other parts of you job that you like even less (friggin' TPS reports are the worst). Lots of people might think this is kind of a stupid thing to be part of a job, perhaps somewhat unprofessional. Who knows? I hear that some people feel like they have to play golf to make that sale, and they don't seem to think it's terribly unprofessional.


Regardless of how annoying/stupid/unprofessional you think it is, basically no one would argue that it should be criminal. But we absolutely would if it was sex! It seems to be significantly different.


Child sex


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.


Economics


I don't have a better subtitle for this section, but my thoughts here are background shaded by the free market, Marginal Revolution style economics, which emphasizes that it's important to let people make choices, even ones that they end up deeply regretting. "Capitalism is not a profit system; it's a profit and loss system," they say. You have to let people choose to try things that may succeed and make them a boatload of money... but which may also fail and lose them a boadload of money. This is often justified by placing a possible governing agent in a position of ignorance - you just don't know ahead of time which choices are going to be spectacular failures and which are going to be spectacular successes. Pushing in an even more libertarian direction, many folks want to say that we should just let people do the most harmful of drugs, even though we can be 99.99% sure that it is destined to end in pain and hardship. The article wants to have a sense of this for individual gender choices. 'You know what? Even if they regret it, we need to let them choose, because we're in a position of ignorance.' The article begins concluding with:




I understand the impulse to protect children from regret. The fantasy of limitless possibility is alluring — who wouldn’t want that for their child? To forestall, for as long as possible, throwing the switches that will determine your destination in life, is tempting. But a life without choosing is not a human life.




Hits a bit different after a section on child sex, though.


Closing Thoughts


I don't have a nice tidy bow to put on this package. I have my personal beliefs1, but I don't have a nice clean way to just directly put together a story connecting these things in a way that will please any particular reader with their own inclinations on the various questions involved. Mostly, it just really stands out to me that lots of people have completely contradictory opinions, at their conceptual core, when we try to apply them to all of the above problem domains. I don't think it's "just the outgroup", either. I think we need careful work and reflection across problem sets to help people understand where their positions are sounding hypocritical and why there are serious, huge problems here that are fundamental to the human condition. Reductive slogans aren't going to work. "Shut up and mouth these politically-acceptable words or you're an X-ophobe," isn't going to work.


1 - If you must know, I think the transgender ideology is near incoherent philosophically and anti-science biologically; I think abortion is wrong regardless of whether sex is like tennis; I don't subscribe to a consent-only sexual ethic and therefore don't think the question is of all that much import for whether children should be able to have sex; I generally lean pro-profit-and-loss capitalism and less drugs.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 4, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
You haven't gotten banned for it.


...try calling atheists delusional, and see what you get. Try saying that atheists are treated with kid gloves, and see what happens.