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2d ago
I scored 93% in it. I don’t see the issue with that example. And that is literally only 3 words and a law can be much longer.
I think you are making a mistake saying that the important thing is “we have a constitution and law” and that’s why you have some gun rights that only get violated at the “margins”.
The reason we have gun rights in the US is because gun rights are popular. Quickly AI checking and there is slight favorability to stricter gun laws, but about 50-50 (stricter vs as is/looser), 32% personally own a gun, and abstract favorability to guns is popular. Things that become unpopular tend to lose in court. Race-based discrimination despite being illegal on things like affirmative action were popular for a very long time and usually won in court.
If issue X,Y,Z was very explicitly given in the Bill of Rights but popular opinion only supported that right at 10% then I would trust the polling for how the court would decide. Best example is the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
So I don’t believe we are a nation of laws. If anything we are nation of public opinion polls.
As a not important aside I can’t think of any good reason I would even want to own a gun if I was Japanese and lived in Japan. They are not a violent people. There is limited threat of invasion. No Indians from back in the day to defend your family with a gun. No Central American migrants breaking in. That is outside of hunting and maybe as part of an actual formal militia if China invaded Taiwan and I then started to think they might invade Japan (but not a real risks right now).
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2d ago
Honestly I hate this view. Law shouldn’t be debatable. It’s should be black and white. And this I think will increasingly be an issue. Sure I can nerd out and think the debates are intellectually stimulating, but at the end of the day a Dem will vote one way and a GOP the other way. You might as well just nominating Ketanjis who might write poorly but vote your way versus a Scalia. It’s basically just a super Senate. The opinions are just a game for some nerds.
A big reason we got here is because justices thought it was an interpretive game to twist some words to get the political outcome they wanted instead of calling balls and strikes.
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2d ago
If the Law is not clear then who gets to decide the rule? I don’t think it’s clear that Courts get to. Thinking about the 14th Amendment I don’t think it’s clear the SC gets to make the decision. Jurisdiction has meaning and I don’t see why the SC gets to choose the meaning. Reasonable people can have different meanings.
Ideally the legislature would clarify. I am not sure how this would work with an Amendment. Could a simple bill make the decision or do you need to amend the amendment for clarification? I definitely think the legislature gets first crack at it but I am not sure what process is necessary a bill or amendment to clarify an amendment. If it’s only a bill then you could to limited extent be modify the Constitution whenever the legislature changes.
If the legislature does nothing then who gets to decide the meaning of “Jurisdiction”. I don’t believe the courts should do anything that would be creating policy. The definition of jurisdiction isn’t in the amendment. They have nothing to base a decision.
Absent legislative action then I guess the executive branch gets to define the word and citizenship status is just an executive order. And if your born 2 min before a GOP POTUS leaves you are a non-citizen for life and if your born minutes later your a citizen for life. Legislative or Executive Action each are more Democratic when bills are passed that lack clarity on meaning.
But I do think in most situations you can write legislation that solves 90-95% of cases in footnotes to legislation. A lot of legislation is written very poorly.
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2d ago
Honestly I took it and scored 93% in the majority. So the rule seems clear to me.
I guess my point is we could have a legal system that is more mathy. Pointing out UC which has probably been the most conservative major law school has multiple different legal theory branches is not mathy. Especially when it applies to judicial philosophy and not law design.
I laugh when people mostly on the right complain about the length of bills. I think a clear bill would include a broad “thing” but then spend a lot of words describing all the specific applications.
The current thing is birthright citizenship. The designers of the amendment could have spent the time properly defining why they meant by “jurisdiction”. You could have the amendment that’s what it is now in the list of amendments to keep it short for students to read and then have pages of footnotes defining jurisdiction.
Instead you have basically just boosted the power of judges. Each side on the birthright side in my opinion has correct arguments. So who decides? You basically just made judges into legislators. It’s a policy decision.
From an ethical perspective I believe our law schools have failed us. They shouldn’t have theorists and debates. Words need to mean something and the schools should be emphasizing that. Debating things is of course fun and academics enjoy that process. But they could be teaching future lawyers to interpret words as written and since lawyers write most laws teaching them to write laws that are clear and limit a need to be interpretive.
You can have a legal system that is far more like 2+2. Common law to me seems like hogwash. If you want a common law to be law then write it down on a piece of paper and pass that law.
I understand how Sunstein enjoyed viewpoint diversity in law. I don’t want viewpoint diversity in law. I want something where if I read a law passed by congress I know the rules I need to follow. Viewpoint diversity just means law becomes another form of politics.
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3d ago
On an article on viewpoint diversity in the Law at the University of Chicago. Sunstein Viewpoint Diversity
Growing up I believed according to American mythology that the law is blind. Everyone knows of the Blind Justice Statue of the Roman Goddess Justitia. This always implied to me (perhaps being an engineer) that the law was like math 2+2 =4. Word x+y has meaning Z. The whole idea that adding a bunch of words together lacks a definable meaning to me makes no sense. Law shouldn’t have theory. It should be math especially if it is going to be blind and not swayed by public opinion. There should be no theory involved. I guess this makes me a textualists. But it turns out at places like UC that you have 10-20 smart clusters of people who all have different solutions to 2+2 = 4.
Law being like math I believe should definitely apply to judges. Legal theory can be useful for a lawyer who works for a Senator who is writing legislation. Then legal theory has a purpose of designing the equations to get a law that does what you want.
One thing that came out of UC was applying economics to law. This again I have no problem with adding economics to new legislation you create. But from my understanding of legal history judges began adding economic tests to old law. To me this is like discovering that 2+2 had a different answer than the 4 that was a correct answer.
Once I realized the law as practiced is not mathematics I switched my judicial philosophy from some form of originalism to Ketanji Brown theory. I just want a judge who votes the way I want her to and do not care if she’s worse at arguing her theory than another guy. The best I can tell from history is that when public opinion on an issue changes the legal theorists of the smart guy at UC becomes the theory everyone else begins to quote. I prefer to just pick judges who back the policy I want in the current legal environment.
Pragmatically the law has never been blind. The criminal justice system has always judged poor dumb kids differently than rich smart kids. The same crime committed by an urban youth versus a Kennedy kid has never been punished the same way. A big reason for this is the court had a reasonable expectations that the Kennedy’s had the resources to deal with the behavior internally and society didn’t need to spend resources to make sure the crime didn’t happen again.
I don’t care if some things “simplistic”. I care if it’s an accurate model of the world. The end of the American walkable city perfectly correlates with the timeline of blacks moving into cities. If I made the exact same argument and said - “White flight occurred because white people are racists and moved to the suburbs (or redlined, zoning, etc) when black people moved to the city. Robbing the urban environment of economic resources to make strong comminities” - I would be a Professor at Harvard and you would likely praise my intellect. Instead of blaming white racism I am saying white people fled cities because black people came to cities and littered, trashed public spaces, killed people, couldn’t behave in schools, etc.
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3d ago
Maybe a good first step would be cutting SNAP benefits and forcing people to enter the labor market. A big issue we is a lack of manufacturing jobs anymore mainly due to productivity. People would be forced into restaurant work etc instead of no work but it would become socially acceptable
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3d ago
On this point I would say the Church is theologically correct not executing people for stealing a loaf of bed. Even murderers are tough to get to execution theologically. It was probably more the state that was doing this.
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4d ago
Then how do you build the Kingdom of Heaven on earth if it is filled with pit bulls? You can put me in jail and punish me as deserving as a morally aware individual. But punishing pit bulls for being pit bulls feels mean? Obviously libertarians deal with this question too - it’s why the libertarian to fascists pipeline exists. And probably why Catholics have fascists tendencies. The Puritan city on hill with self-functioning people seems unrealistic in a world of pit bulls.
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4d ago
Certainly within race ability to do morality differs to. Augustine etc I would reason has greater ability than myself. And differing ability to morally reason would defeat the idea expressed below that individuals can morally reason and instead should just be papists and trust their bettors.
But reality increasingly seems to be pointing me in a direction that some races are pit bulls and have very little ability to morally reasoning on their own. So either my perception of the world is wrong or there is an important theological question without an answer. Europeans between 1492 did not live in a world that had to deal with this question.
The hardest thing for me on Catholicism or more broadly Christianity in general is what the great awakening un-earthed. Racial Disparities as proof of structural issues makes a lot more sense in a Catholic worldview than explaining away disparities as a result of genetics. From a theological perspective what’s a good argument that human races have much different rates of grave sin? You can deal with sin at the individual level thru a need for free-will, but to say God created some humans that like to sin more feels very bad.
Of the major reasons I guess that is one of the very appealing things about Judaism. You can feel ok with rationalizing those issues as they are not the chosen people.
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4d ago
Less than 10% of blacks lived in urban environments before 1910 and virtually zero outside the South.
I am quite confused and feel like you are being ridiculous. The civil rights act wasn’t passed until 1964. So you could just arrest blacks for being in the wrong place before then.
So yes when you can take extreme mitigation (by modern standards) then blacks didn’t ruin nearly all urban environments in the US.
Many would also claim the urban environments began to fall apart before the 1980 date you chose. White flight was earlier.
I feel like you’re trying to force me into a ridiculous claim that a black person in Alabama was ruining Chicago. Black people didn’t show up in Chicago until later. And then Chicago lost the Southside in a handful of decades.
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4d ago
White Flight atleast in Chicago is assumed to have occurred between 1950-1970 with the peak in the 1960’s. America building only “non-walkable” cities would be just after white flight had been completed so a 1980 date fits with the timeline. Wikipedia tells me in 1900 only 20% of blacks in the South lived in cities and >90% of blacks live in the South.
I am confused by why you would question my claims by saying blacks have been here since the 17th century? They literally were not in cities or out of the South in large numbers until the 1950’s. Before the 1970’s we had explicit segregation laws. Timeline wise American cities being unwalkable in the 1980’s fits with black migration patterns and the end of segregation.
In the 1970’s 80% of blacks now lived in cities. By your own timeline the very next decade was when America quit making urban walkable cities.
You can disagree with my claim that blacks caused the end of urban America but you can’t disagree with my claim that the timelines agree.
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4d ago
I wouldn’t necessarily trust prediction markets at this point. I feel like most regular betters on them liking lean left and are biased against Trump. Prediction markets are not public opinion polls since you have money in them, but they sort of are. Betting on Trump outperforming has worked in the past and my gut says the true quants “give me the money” types have not entered the market yet until you can see a more systematic edge in the bet.
My instincts tell me the true macro type betters haven’t placed their wages yet. A lot of people seem to like to highlight the prediction markets as a sign Trump is losing, but I think it is wrong for now.
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4d ago
Historically half-black/half-white isn’t even rare in America. You can look at the NBA and realize there are a lot of them. But most firmly plant themselves in the African community. And the mixing likely occurred much early with the modern parents generally being in the black community but both parents are halfies. His difference is one parent was black and one parent fully white. Plus being smart enough for DEI at Caltech would be too smart to fit into US black community.
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5d ago
At this point I don’t think assassinating Trump would have the desired results you would want to achieve with assassinating Trump. I would compare him to Caesar in that they killed him too late at this point. Now we would lose the charismatic leader but it appears that we do have potential Octavians waiting in the wings. Vance, Rubio, maybe even Kushner. MAGA at this point it would seem likely a new leader would emerge but now more radical because of the assasination and many would argue these figures are more capable.
The Tea Party movement occurred and the 2010 wave election. It didn’t involve violence but there was certainly a lot of anger. I don’t believe people hated Biden as he was viewed as senile but at the top of a machine that was disliked.
My main point is that people saying “Trump hate is different” may be mainly due to where they live and who they interact with. I hated Obama but I guess we believed we could enact change thru the political process while the hate for Trump may be from people who thought they had won a mandate that wasn’t true and now are considering options outside of political institutions.
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5d ago
Fair. I was tone matching. And doing a generalized argument. From personal experience my hood in the 2010’s and more post covid in downtown Chicago faced falling property values with one of the reason being that violent crime increased. Just a month ago my old condo building had its convenience store robbed at gun point.
The process of white flight that largely occurred in the ‘60s was once again occurring in Chicago. Ken Griffin being the most prominent participant.
Obama?
I feel like this depends on where you live. I know virtually no one in person that hates Trump. I knew a lot of people who hated Obama.
Maybe Trump hate actually is worse than Obama. Or the left is just far more tolerant of violence now than the right was under Obama. Evidence exists that it’s the latter - UNH assasination/BLM riots in the last 5 years.
To me Obama hate was real people and Trump hate are people on the internet I have zero interaction with in real life. But many here probably have a HR lady they deal with
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6d ago
Blocking people are for people who are weak emotionally especially the people describing why they do it in these comments. The legitimate reason to block someone is if they are essentially spam. Blocking because you can’t emotionally handle their positions is for losers.
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6d ago
The issue with your position is that you are wrong and RandomRanger is correct. Black peoples ruin civilization and the best thing you can do is to create barriers to being around black people. It’s obviously not ALL black people but 20-50%. If a city has 200k black people then 40k of them will ruin everything without doing mitigation.
I like living in dense walkable urban environments. That does not exists in America because black people ruin the commons. I have to live abroad in order to live the lifestyle I want because black people are in my country.
The jury of one’s peers in our system does not decide the rules. The judge gives juries instructions on the rules. And I don’t believe the judge either gets to “make up the rules” or atleast they shouldn’t. The rules come from the legislator. The question is how interpretive do judges get to be on the “rules” and who actually gets to be the rule maker.
The jury makes deterministic decisions on the the evidence in the case and whether the “rules” given to them were broken. When juries make up the “rules” we call that jury nullification which happens but I am not sure we consider that allowed.
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