Rov_Scam
7d ago
This only applies to involuntary commitments. If you're feeling suicidal and check yourself into a mental hospital for treatment, it's not going to affect your ability to buy a gun. On the other hand, if you attempt suicide and get 302'd (in PA), it will. The way the law is set up now actually encourages people to seek voluntary treatment before it becomes enough of a problem that the state has to intervene.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
This is an object lesson in why people who think they don't need lawyers for stuff like this generally do need lawyers (unless, of course, this guy was so bad that he had a lawyer and the lawyer couldn't do anything about it). His big mistakes were:
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He tried to downplay the 1983 commitment with testimony that was contrary to the medical records. My bitch ex wife gave me some pills that made me crazy but not too crazy because the doctors quickly realized I shouldn't have been there is pretty much textbook self-serving bullshit that judges hear regularly. A lawyer would have examined him so as to frame the matter as a guy who turned to drugs to deal with the stress of a bad marriage, which caused him to do regrettable things that he doesn't entirely remember.
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He lied to the psychiatrist who examined him about why he was there because he thought he needed to to get an appointment, and then admitted his dishonesty to the court. A lawyer would have made him an appointment with a doctor who would provide the exact kind of evaluation the court looks for in cases like this.
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There were statements in the file suggesting the guy was taking psych medications that he couldn't provide an explanation for other than that he wasn't taking any psych meds. He also seemed to have a more intimate knowledge of Lifestream and the doctors that practiced there than someone whose contact with the mental health system ended 40 years prior.
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Most people who were involuntarily committed will have had continued psychiatric treatment for some time afterward and a history of how their condition progressed. When I was at the disability bureau, if I saw an involuntary commitment on someone's record and no other psych history, I'd assume they were homeless or in some other kind of situation where they were prevented from getting treatment.
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We have no idea, from reading the opinion, what this guy was actually like or how he came off in court.
In other words, the judge could tell that the guy was full of shit, and since he has the burden of proof, she wasn't going to grant the expungement. Keep in mind that the court isn't going to subpoena this guy's entire medical history, so they're only relying on what he brought with him. Given that the guy doesn't come off as trustworthy and there's reason to believe he's more familiar with certain things than he's letting on, the court might have suspected that the guy wasn't providing a complete mental health record.
Rov_Scam
8d ago
This was the same argument that Virginia made in Loving and the court rejected it then. Black people are free to marry other black people and white people are free to marry other white people so what's the problem?
But marriage, at least from a legal perspective, is a privilege the state recognizes for people to incentivize the formation of healthy and stable families, which gay people do not do.
Well, at least that's the conservative fantasy. If you look at the way the laws surrounding marriage actually operate, and have historically operated, it's pretty clear that the legal purpose is to regulate property transfers among family members. The only historical precedent which has to do with natural children is the legal presumption that a woman's husband is the father of her children, absent other evidence. While this may be a useful feature these days, it's no longer a necessary one, as states have been keeping records of these things for over a century, and technology has allowed paternity disputes to be resolve fairly easily. Beyond that, historical laws relating to marriage were based on the presumption that women couldn't own property in their own name, that wealth was basically synonymous with real property, and that widows were likely to be an undue burden on society. Today, of course, we live in a property where women are more economically equal than men, where the family farm isn't the primary source of income (or, realisitically, doesn't exist), cash is more important than real property, birth control exists, Social Security exists, etc. As a consequence, the laws surrounding marriage have changed since the turn of the last century to keep up with the times.
An along the way, we've created a whole host of new rights relating to marriage, notably ones concerning medical matters like the right to make certain decisions and the right of visitation. In other words, as the circumstances surrounding marriage have changed historically, the laws have changed along with it, and if you want to figure out the legal purpose of marriage, you have to look at those laws. If you want to believe in an idealized version where the laws that matter are the ones that have "stable families" or whatever as their obvious goal, you're going to be left with very little.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
Because disparate impact suits don't have the magic powers people on this board think they do.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
The skyrocketing price may infuriate China, but the Chinese won't do anything about it. More importantly, it will cause the price to skyrocket in the US, which give the Iranians leverage. Not much leverage, but the narrative could become that Trump made an unnecessary strike on Iran that he acted like was a one-off but that caused gas prices to soar and necessitated US naval intervention, escalating the war.
Rov_Scam
12d ago
The unemployment rate for blacks with a bachelor's degree is a few points higher than the overall rate for similarly situated people. This cohort also only makes about 80% of the income. These numbers hold at every education level. So yes.
Rov_Scam
13d ago
Why don't you link to an article where the New York Times editorial board defends violent rioting. Just one.
Rov_Scam
13d ago
I guess that explains why straight white males have such low incomes and high unemployment compared to minority populations.
Rov_Scam
14d ago
You're assuming that if there was only one victim, or one act, he would have been convicted of the same crime. It's possible that, had that been the case, he would have plead to a lesser offense.
Rov_Scam
14d ago
The sentence imposed was pursuant to a plea deal, so one can't make any judgments about whether it's the same as if there were only two rapes.
Rov_Scam
15d ago
Iran isn't just going to sit there and take being bombed. They may not have air defenses, but they have missiles, and you can bet your bottom dollar that they're going to use those missiles to take out Saudi oil infrastructure. Or they might just block off the Straits of Hormuz, which we could clear, but it would require more than just bombing stationary targets. Or they could decide to protect their own oil assets, which are close to the border, by invading Iraq, starting another war that Iran might actually win, taking more oil offline. The bottom line is that you'd better be prepared for a sharp spike in gas prices, and one that won't subside until the war ends. If, as you say, you're going to go after every possible military installation in a country that covers over 600,000 square miles and has 90 million people, you'd better be prepared to pony up at the pump for a long time.
Rov_Scam
15d ago
If you read Tribe's comments in context it's clear that he's referring to her having a certain arrogance where she thinks she'll be able to persuade conservatives where she's more likely to put them off. It was more a comment about her personality than her intelligence, and why Kagan would be better in the role of Kennedy-influencer. In any event, Tribe later said that he was proven wrong. As for Jackson, she didn't ask that question, she gave a non-answer to a gotcha posed by Marsha Blackburn, who appeared less interested in determining Jackson's qualifications or judicial philosophy than in going on a rant about Lia Thomas and talking about how progressive education led to mind rot. Seriously, how was she supposed to answer? What could she have possibly said that would have satisfied Ms. Blackburn and earned her vote? From Lindsey Graham's questions about her faith to the softballs Democrats were lobbing, the whole thing was a dog and pony show, everyone knew this going in, and she was given specific preparation to not answer any questions if she could help it. Yeah, she gave an idiotic answer, but it was an idiotic question.
Anyway, the reason for my comment wasn't to specifically say that you were engaging in boo-outgroup, just that it comes across as below the standards of this board to imply that someone who has risen to the rank of Supreme Court Justice acts the way they do because of low intellectual capacity. I've been here since 2017 and I have yet to be modded once. I rarely report comments, though I also get pissed off when troublemakers decide to argue with the mods. Whenever I see someone people tying themselves in knots trying to explain and/or justify Trump's latest Outrage of the Week, I'm tempted to respond by simply saying that Trump is obviously too stupid to engage in anything approaching coherence and that his supporters, almost without exception, are too stupid to notice that he's incoherent, and that if you want to bemoan the decline of conservatives in academia then maybe it's time to consider that it isn't so much persecution as it is proof that conservative ideas are simply unappealing to anyone with half a brain.
Of course, I don't do this, and if I did I'd probably be reported on a bunch, and I'd probably be given some leeway at first because of my history here, but eventually patience would run thin and I'd have to start eating bans. And whoever reported me and the mods would be correct to smack me for it, because, despite the fact that I can point to all kinds of evidence supporting the idea that Trump and Trump supporters are generally all morons, that isn't really productive and isn't the kind of discourse I expect here. So when I see it coming from a mod it's disappointing, and when I see it trying to be justified on the grounds that Larry Tribe once said this and "Did you hear what she said to the Senate Judiciary Committee?" it makes me wonder if I should just say "Fuck It" and see what I can get away with. Unless, of course, you're telling me that I'm perfectly within the rules to do that, in which case I won't do it all the time, but you can count on me referring to Alito and Thomas as the "low IW wing" in the future.
Rov_Scam
15d ago
It's a 2-step analysis. First, you have to determine whether or not the law itself makes a distinction based on sex. This is a legal question, not a biological one. If you determine that it does, only then do you get to consider biology, since step two then asks if the distinction is "substantially related to an important government interest". The Tennessee law doesn't even pretend that this isn't a sex-based distinction. Hell, the law finds it necessary to define "sex" to eliminate all ambiguity. Yet the majority puzzlingly finds that it doesn't to avoid having to get to step 2.
Rov_Scam
15d ago
You obviously have no personal experience with the average white male county judge.
Rov_Scam
15d ago
Did you read the dissent? Heightened scrutiny applies when the state makes legal distinctions based on sex. Any reasonable reading of the Tennessee law does this. If a 13-year-old girl starts developing unwanted facial hair, a doctor can prescribe certain medications that he would be prohibited from prescribing if a 13-year-old boy had the same complaint. You can argue semantics and say that this technically wouldn't be a prescription to treat gender dysphoria, but I don't think the legislature's goal was to make sure doctors coded such prescriptions differently. You don't have to agree with this interpretation, but saying that it's so completely devoid of reasoning so as to question the intelligence of the person who expressed it doesn't make sense.
Rov_Scam
16d ago
There are no legal tricks to protect your assets, unless you put everything in a trust that you have absolutely no control over several years ahead of the conduct that led to the lawsuit. And there better not be any evidence that you actually control the money. Aside from that, there is no reason to default on a lawsuit. Even in credit card collection cases where you'd think there would be zero case I tell people to file the necessary paperwork and show up for the court date to avoid a default. Why? Because there's a 50/50 chance the creditor's attorney doesn't show up. When I was doing bankruptcy a few years ago I'd get calls from people who were getting sued but had no other debts, and I'd represent them for fun. One credit card company was using a small law firm in Harrisburg to essentially collect default judgments. I knew they weren't going to pay for someone to come to Pittsburgh for a $4,000 debt. Even if the firm is local, the attorney is often unprepared. I've gotten out of a few cases because the Plaintiff couldn't produce the original signed credit agreement. This can be a serious problem when the plaintiff is a collection agency that doesn't actually have the original agreement and would have to jump through a lot of hoops to get it. And then there's the fact that a bank representative needs to appear as a witness, again a serious problem if the plaintiff is a collection agency who can't testify to any relevant facts about the agreement or about the bank's recordkeeping procedures. And then there was the case where the lady from the credit union had everything and showed up without a lawyer, not realizing that companies can't appear pro se. The point is that even in hopeless cases, there are defenses that can be made and can be successful.
In this case, he filed an answer shortly after the default judgment was entered, and courts will usually give you a little leeway.
Rov_Scam
16d ago
It's worth noting that Kagan, though she agreed on heightened scrutiny, declined to join the Court's low-IQ wing to assert that also the law failed under heightened scrutiny. Once again she shows herself to be, by a wide margin, the most competent jurist on the Court's left wing.
Is this really necessary? Presumably the reason they're low-IQ is because you disagree with their reasoning, and not because you have access to information that hasn't been made public. As much as I'd like to, there's a reason I don't refer to Trump as the moron-in-chief or whatever.
Rov_Scam
16d ago
Forbidding one thing necessarily means requiring something else. One can just say that parents should have the ability to forbid their children from having their own children.
Rov_Scam
16d ago
That's a pretty misleading description of what's going on. Most of the outrage seems focused on the attempt to prosecute the doctor, which requires that New York extradite her to Louisiana. The rest of it centers around the hypocrisy that Louisiana had a pre-Dobbs parental consent law, which would suggest that parents have the authority to determine whether their children carry a child to term. If a parent can veto the decision to abort, they would presumable also be able to veto the decision to have the baby. I haven't seen any commentary suggesting that the mother was right to surrepetitiously abort the fetus.
Rov_Scam
16d ago
This is the kind of thing that AI should theoretically be good at, since members of congress and their dates of birth aren't too hard to find. Actual AI, however, seems to have a hard time with this. Gemini is evidently only capable of repeating what was already published as an article, so if there isn't some website that specifically says what the average was in, say, 1995, then it can't figure it out. Deepseek is slightly better in that it actually gives the answer, though it gives contradictory results within the same prompt. Based on the crappy results I did get, it seems like the Democratic average age has consistently been a couple years higher than the Republican average age for some time.
Rov_Scam
16d ago
Amusingly, black people saved NYC by electing Adams who arrested the Floyd crime wave by allowing the NYPD to do their jobs.
I wouldn't give Adams too much credit here. Pittsburgh crime statistics are as follows:
2018: 58 homicides, 103 non-fatal shootings 2019: 38 homicides, 113 non-fatal shootings 2020: 50 homicides, 147 non-fatal shootings 2021: 56 homicides, 170 non-fatal shootings 2022: 71 homicides, 137 non-fatal shootings 2023: 52 homicides, 118 non-fatal shootings 2024: 42 homicides, 83 non-fatal shootings
So far in 2025, as of May 31 there were 11 homicides and 33 non-fatal shootings. I don't want to project that out since crime usually goes up during the summer, but so far it looks like the downward trend is continuing. Of note is that Ed Gainey became mayor in 2022, and was elected largely as a response to perceived heavy-handed police tactics by Bill Peduto during the 2020 protests. He was supported by all the lefties, though his record from his time in the state house suggests he's more of a mainstream Democrat.
In the meantime, the police department has been in complete disarray. One of Gainey's first moves in office was to replace the retiring police chief with a veteran of the Pittsburgh force who had since moved to Florida, chasing a promotion. This lasted exactly 18 months, at which point the chief retired because he wanted to ref NCAA basketball. Compounding the problem was that it came to light that he had made a deal with Gainey upon being hired that he'd be allowed to ref basketball 18 months on the job. As critics pointed out, it would be ridiculous for a full-time police chief to be on the road 100 days a year, and the mayor should have known that. Worse, the 18 months was calculated because that was the point at which he could retire with a chief's pension. Basically, Gainey got played. A new chief from out of town was soon named, but he withdrew his name from consideration shortly thereafter, presumably because he found out how dysfunctional the administration was. There's zero chance a permanent chief will be named before the new administration takes over next year.
Even before the chief left, things weren't exactly going swimmingly. Officer shortages have led to dramatic reductions in service. Police stopped responding to alarms, and reduced their response time to "within 24 hours" for anything that wasn't an active emergency. Precincts are no longer manned overnight. Foot patrols have been increased Downtown and on the South Side, but this is due more to political pressure than any initiative on Gainey's part (crime aside, Gainey's entire modus operandi was to not do anything until a bad news story or complaints from the politically connected forced his hand). His response to criticism has been to publicly call out local journalists he doesn't like for only focusing on the bad things, citing overall crime reductions, and ham-fisted cheerleading. "Who here doesn't think our police are doing a good job? Don't we have a beautiful city! Why don't you guys ever report on how much Downtown has come back since the pandemic?" In other words, stuff that takes about three minutes and zero effort, all of it in the same MLK tone of voice that he uses ad nauseam, wherein he acts like the new road paving schedule is a monumental achievement in civic governance.
I'm not going to blame Gainey for all of the police department's woes, since most of them are downstream of a nationwide officer shortage over which he has no control. But I'm also not going to give him credit for reducing the crime rate, which seem to have also gone down as part of a nationwide trend over which he has no control. To my knowledge, no one has ever done an analysis on whether "tough on crime" mayors have any statistical advantage over "defund the police" mayors when it comes to lowering the crime rate, and it seems like the biggest argument against the defund mayors is that the crime rate didn't go down as much as in other places. So I'm not giving Adams any credit here, and I wouldn't expect a sharp rise in the crime rate if some lefty gets elected.
Rov_Scam
16d ago
That's pretty much how I feel about all of Adobe's so-called Neural Filters. The only one that really adds anything is the one that colorizes black and white photos, but even that's kind of pointless, because other than as a cool gimmick there's really no need to colorize old photos. People still shoot black and white! This is why some of the AI seriously fails to impress me; it has no imagination. For instance, if I see a low-resolution image of a person's face, I can't make out a lot of details, but I have enough experience with faces to imagine what those details might look like. It might not be accurate to life, but at least I can do it. All AI "upscaling" does is smooth out defects. It doesn't have the imagination to add plausible detail. I'm not going to be able to zoom in enough to get a realistic image that shows the texture of hair or skin, just smoothed-out AI slop that isn't much better, if any than simply resizing the image. It also doesn't do dust and scratch removal any better than the existing tools, which are mostly useless and nowhere near manual removal.
Rov_Scam
16d ago
Where are the 30-something conservatives? If you look at the US House members in their 30s, there are 21 Democrats and 14 Republicans. There are only two people under 40 in the Senate, one Democrat and one Republican. Considering that of the 435 members of the House, 400 of them are 40 or older, I think the correct answer is that there just aren't that many people in their 30s involved in politics.
See my comment above, but voluntarily interacting with the mental health system isn't what gets you barred from owning a gun; it's avoiding the mental health system until things get so bad you're forced into it.
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