Supah_Schmendrick
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User ID: 618
Supah_Schmendrick
10hr ago
how is a gay male couple supposed to have a biological kid for one of the fathers except throug surrogacy?
They're not. That's what they sacrifice as gay men. It's a helluva dilemma to be put on the horns of, but that's the hand they've been dealt.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
Even at the height of power and pomp and worldliness, the roots of the Magnificat were maintained and preserved.
Well yes, the roman pontiff can hardly justify calling the Holy Roman Emperor to his knees in the snows of Canossa otherwise.
Less cynically, the Pope prostrating himself might be more convincing as a true symbol of humility were it not done on marble floors, silk and velvet fabrics, with gold and fabulous art everywhere - literally a basilica, or a kingly palace.
Which countries showed that 'conquest and craft and cunning'?
Venice and the holy league at Lepanto. The Conquistadors in Mexico and Peru. The English in North America. The French, before Napoleon squandered their nation's lifesblood. The Germans in their orderliness, art, and science. And the heir to all of them - America.
Do we speak of the great achievements of Greece in the modern world as a leader of technology?
I mean, the Hagia Sophia is a mighty-impressive work of architecture; the Byzantine empire was worlds ahead of its contemporaries in governmental organization and finance, and before first the latins and then the muslims sacked and despoiled it, Constantinople was a shining gem; the greatest and richest city in the world. A might ingrateful to the west's greatest shield against the depredations of Arabia and the turkic steppe hordes, I think.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
That was actually a radically open position. Europe - and thus white people - were really the only substantive population which had any access or ability to immigrate to the US in anything more than token numbers. The 1790 act is, in essence, throwing the borders open to everyone who reasonably could make it to America.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
I agree that the requisite will and organization doesn't exist now. I semi-agree that attempts to build it might be crushed. However, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Faint heart never won fair maiden, etc. etc. etc.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
I don't quite get why statutory indian citizenship need implicate the 14A at all; Congress clearly has the power to naturalize under Article I, and "all members of registered indian tribes are automatically born citizens" seems surely within their power. I could see how it could be janky if someone tried to raise a question like eligibilty for the presidency, but again that seems pretty easy to side-step.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
To rule that the 14th does not say what it says because there is some nitpick about subject to the jurisdiction would be just as much judicial activism as the Roe ruling.
From a policy disruption perspective, I completely agree with you.
From a pedantic lawyer perspective, I disagree. Roe didn't even pretend to base its holding on some sort of textual hook in the Constitution. Instead, it was explicitly based on another judge-made doctrine about an alleged "right to personal privacy," which admittedly "The Constitution does not explicitly mention," but judges have found to be implied either by "the First Amendment . . . the Fourth and Fifth Amendments . . . or in the concept of liberty guaranteed by the first section of the Fourteenth Amendment" (or possibly in the Ninth Amendment's general reservation of rights to the people...the Court isn't fussy about which particular justification is taken up; dealer's choice).
Instead, it's purely based on the court's own policy preferences, taking into account the opinions of the Bar, AMA, history of the Hippocratic oath, etc.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
peasants did not react with "I can't tolerate hierarchy, so I'm going to kill my superior."
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
It's 6 months before the mid-terms and polls imply a blue wave.
Not that this makes it better for Trump, but the opposition doing very well in midterm elections (and in state elections) is very normal for US politics. E.g., the Obama administration got smacked so hard over the course of his presidency that when he left office, though still personally quite popular, the Democratic party was in a worse place nationally than it had been since 1920.
With the way things are trending, it would take a great fumble for Dems to lose the house. Trump may also lose sufficient seats in Senate, so that 2028 could shape up to be a trifecta win for a Democrat.
I'm not sure the bolded part follows. Yes, recently there's been a trend against presidents being able to hand off the office to their successor, but as you point out, that's also heavily-dependent upon candidate quality. For example, it's far from clear whether Trump would have been able to beat Joe Biden in 2016, had he decided to run. HRC was a uniquely polarizing candidate who also was personally bad at retail politics and took bad campaign strategy advice, and Trump only just squeaked out a victory over her in the first place. If the Dems nominate Newsome some other cypher, they may dig themselves the same hole this time as well.
Additionally, whatever happens in 2028, there will be major changes to the electoral map in 2030, with major blue states losing significant population share and thus electoral votes to red states, and possibly even changes like striking down of Section 2 of the VRA act, which as currently read compels the gerrymandering of Dem-locked "majority minority" districts across the otherwise solid-red deep south.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
Neither military toys nor social programs have an easily determined ROI.
Consider the Manhattan project.
Not strictly germane to the conversation, but a fun tidbit is that the Manhattan project wasn't close to the most expensive weapons program USG ran in WWII - that was the B29, whose development at $3T cost 50% more than the Bomb.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
Honestly that was me until like a year ago, and I'm a mid-30's lawyer. Not proud of it, but facts are facts.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
I've recently made a bit of a small amount of a fuckton of money based on starting amounts
Congratulations! I am always happy to hear about a fellow Mottizen prospering.
It would be one thing if there was some sort of big social project that the party was ride or die for
There are several major administration priorities, including (1) beefing up immigration enforcement (such as by increasing integration between federal immigration authorities and local law enforcement), (2) going after racial and gendered DEI policies and set asides (e.g., the VRA's "majority minority" districts, which SCOTUS seems likely to strike down and federal contracting laws), and (3) clearing state voter rolls and voting policies of tactics amenable to machine-style vote banks (e.g. the practice of receiving mail-in-ballots after election day)
It's just that a lot of this stuff is being done in quiet backrooms with a lot of very unsexy administrative law wrangling, and so doesn't make headlines.
However, on the broader point about there not being some sort of "plan," I completely agree with you. Trump clearly plays things by the seat of his pants, and there simply isn't the personnel infrastructure around him, either qualitatively or quantitatively, to carry through some sort of grand bizarro-Great Society-level legislative initiative. Plus, Congress is very close to becoming a completely vestigial organ, and so is in no fit state to draft, amend, approve, and push through such legislation anyways.
Supah_Schmendrick
2d ago
Sometimes it feels like TheMotte is stuck in 2020. Woke is over. Trump is president. MAGA won
Respectfully, this is much too short a time-horizon. Yes, Trump is president now. But he won't be in 2 years, and there has been no substantive action taken against the organizations which enabled aggressive progressive lawfare both against conservative ideas generally, and conservative activists in particular. There is precious little stopping a hypothetical Newsome or Ocasio-Cortez administration from simply reversing every single one of the anti-DEI measures Harmeet Dhillon has worked so hard on as DAG for Civil Rights, or dropping all of the ICE detainer agreements that Tom Homan has negotiated with thousands of US local police jurisdictions.
And even now, there are significant entrenched woke gains in life and society that really are quite nauseating, ranging from the symbolic (it's still mainstream journalistic style to capitalize "Black" as an enthnicity but not "white") to the really quite substantive (a continued progressive hammerlock on the education system including continued racial setasides and preferences for the melanated). The citadels of progressivism - my own beloved, beshitted California, Chicago, NYC - remain entirely undisturbed. The battle is very much still live.
Any forum is less interesting when the dominant ideological faction is in power, because it is easier to criticize and muckrake than it is to get into the nitty gritty of governing policy, which almost always underdelivers compared to rosy dreams and expectations. However let's not get carried away and assume that current trends are anything like inevitably going to continue.
Supah_Schmendrick
3d ago
communist LARPers are
Be very careful about who you think the communists are, and about underestimating them. Because out-and-out commies are also the organizational backbone of left protest movements here in the US (RevComs, PSL, etc.), not to mention how thoroughly the "gay-race-communism" social progressive variant has succeeded in pentrating not just politics, but culture as well. The NYT and AP still capitalize "Black" but not "white."
Supah_Schmendrick
3d ago
The wretch who died the slave's death is venerated and remembered in the most gorgeous, opulent setting.
And where did all those riches come from? From the works of Nietzchean virtue - conquest and craft and cunning.
Supah_Schmendrick
3d ago
I think he's snarking that SCOTUS is, in fact, our highest legislative body.
Supah_Schmendrick
3d ago
So it’s not clearly the original intent to allow 8 billion people to hop a jet and give birth on the LAX tarmac.
Except that it clearly was, because there was all that wilderness to settle, and increasingly factories to staff-up. They were literally giving land away to anyone that could prove they could work it productively.
Supah_Schmendrick
3d ago
And if the answer is that it isn't, what then?
The Constitution itself provides an instrumental example - it was completely illegal under the then-extant Article of Confederation, but it turns out you can just do things if there's the political will and organization to do it.
Supah_Schmendrick
3d ago
Bondi has little-to-nothing to do with SCOTUS briefing and oral arguments. That's the province of the Solicitor General.
Supah_Schmendrick
5d ago
I haven't read Infinite Jest, or Gravity's Rainbow, or White Noise. However I adore Catch-22, and find Slaughterhouse 5 perfectly fine. YMMV.
Supah_Schmendrick
6d ago
Obviously I can't speak for the "Polish street," but their government has been unrelentingly hawkish towards Russia for over a decade.
Supah_Schmendrick
6d ago
That remains yet to be seen; this thing is still barely a month old.
Supah_Schmendrick
6d ago
I struggle to see what other kind of war could have been envisioned. Admittedly I'm not military myself, but I certainly hang out with a goodly number of current and former military personnel in various online and IRL spaces from several different branches -- they uniformly say that this is more or less a textbook example of the "American way of war." With focus on as-precise-as-technologically-possible aerial and missile strikes on political and military targets, down to the targeting of specific individuals, supported where possible by Special Forces/CIA paramilitary "dirty tricks" I don't see how this is functionally different from, e.g., the way we went into Afghanistan. The bombardment of Tehran, Isfahan, and IRGC infrastructure looks a lot like 2003 "Shock and Awe" in Iraq.
What, do you think Paul Wolfowitz was jonesing for the 82nd Airborne and 1st Infantry Division to be rolling from Turkey towards Tabriz?
Supah_Schmendrick
7d ago
France had no centuries long tradition of representative democracy and rule of law.
It did, just a much patchier one. The idea to call an Estates-General didn't come from nowhere - there was a known and remembered tradition of such assemblies. And, if anything, the ancien regime French had too much rule of law; the intransigence and excess legalisms of the various provincial parlements (a misleading name for regional judicial courts which also excercised forms of judicial review in the form of registering or declining to register royal edicts) blocked numerous attempted reforms prior to the revolution.
Supah_Schmendrick
7d ago
Masculinity and femininity as general pro-social concepts are only really useful when there is a division of gender roles.
Why would masculinity and femininity be downstream of social roles rather than biological tendencies? Regardless of social expression, there needs to have a framework for disciplining the excess physical energy of rambunctious teen boys, and the excess social power of young-adult women.
Yes, and people had the same "ew low social status!" intuition when Dubya pronounced it "noo-KYOO-lahr" instead of "NOO-clee-uhr," talked in a texas twang, dared to have big funny poke-out ears, and gave people nicknames like "Turd Blossom". You're just finding the most recent instantiation of it, and it will forever be a dysphemism treadmill where the current departure from the zeitgeist is the WORST THING EVER while the previous instances are actually not so bad in retrospect (because no longer the focus of the social eye of sauron), or even maybe garner a "strange new respect." It's all so tiresome.
Ah yes, that's why Lucky Strike cigarettes are just empirically better than Virginia Slims. Don't you know, they choose to project the most modern and sleek aesthetics, and, haven't you heard, They're Toasted!
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