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VoxelVexillologist

Multidimensional Radical Centrist

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joined 2022 September 04 18:24:54 UTC 

				
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VoxelVexillologist


								

								

								
								
								

								
							
					
 
				


				
Multidimensional Radical Centrist

				
				
				

				

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					joined 2022 September 04 18:24:54 UTC
				


				
					

					
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				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 5, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The issue around classification is effectively whether Trump could have by his power as President deemed any of the documents he took to not be information relating to the national defense, and also whether or not his claims to have done so are in fact true, or just something he made up after the fact of him leaving office.




Part of the problem with this is legal case is that with a few (largely nuclear-related) exceptions, all classification guidance exists in the form of Executive Orders.  The current guidance is EO 13526 from 2010, but that revoked and replaced a whole list of orders from previous administrations dating back to Harry Truman.  So if the question is "could Trump have declassified this?", he could have declassified (almost) everything by mere a executive order revoking 13526 without replacement.  In addition, the EO 13526 explicitly designates the President (and Vice President) as a "classification authority" able to determine classification.


But what constitutes an executive order?  In general, the separate powers of the US federal government are given broad leeway to determine their own rules and procedures (see Noel Canning, which found that the Senate is in recess only when it declares itself as such).  I can't see any reasonable court deciding that failing to write on official White House stationary invalidates an executive order.  There might be an argument that the President wasn't faithfully executing the laws as passed by Congress, but the Legislature has its own means (impeachment) for enforcing that.


If the contention is that the illegal acts happened after he was president, that's a potential case, but I think it still faces a fairly high bar to show that keeping the documents wasn't justified by actions taken as president: that would require a court to take significant leeway in interpreting how the executive ran its operations.  A precedent of "just because a President [claims to have] issued verbal instructions to do things that are lawful except for violating prior executive orders doesn't prevent your prosecution for violating those prior orders" would be terrible.


Does an elected President (in particular, one with no prior service) even have to sign SF 312?  That NDA is the vehicle through which most criminal charges for mishandling classified information flow, and without it it's unclear that any charges could stick to a non-signatory.  That's why the powers that be can't charge the journalists at The Washington Post who published the Snowden leaks.


Now, the fact that classification is almost entirely due to Executive fiat is, I would agree, a terrible arrangement, and it would make quite a bit of sense to codify (much of) the existing ruleset through an act of Congress.  But, in its great wisdom, Congress hasn't decided that doing so is worth its effort.  Ultimately, I'm not a fan of Trump, but this really seems like a politicized effort to bring historically unprecedented charges.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


There's got to be a social aspect to the instinct




The most plausible explanation I've seen for Uvalde is that the bystander effect took hold as soon as the first few officers didn't charge in.  When there are already half a dozen guys with guns standing by the door, there's no rush for the next responders to do something different, then you start calling leadership asking for explicit direction to go in, and the next thing you know it's dozens of minutes later.


I'm not saying it exonerates their behavior, but I can see how it could have happened -- or indeed, gone quite differently with a few minor changes.  If so, it's probably reducible with explicit training points about initial response.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The Biden administration is taking measurable steps to halt the flow of illegal immigrants (up to you if it's a genuine change of heart or just cynical ratings management)




As a voter, this seems to be an ongoing vibe from the Biden administration, and I'm not sure I like it.  It feels like they're focus grouping every decision and trying to sweep tough-but-necessary decisions under the rug without actually having to make a stand on the issues.  When it works, it feels pretty competent, but on several issues it's recently felt like very limp-wristed leadership when they try to claim "we're working on it" while they point generally to actions they've been intentionally hiding under the table.


Look at the shipping issues in Yemen: the administration gave out lots of "final warnings", and it seems that even when they finally decided to strike back -- after what, at least to me, comes off as an unreasonable number of shots fired at American ships to tolerate -- they did so weakly enough that they've had to repeat their attacks several times and still haven't resolved the conflict.  I get that there's a suite of left-wing activists (many now protesting the administration's handling of the Gaza war) that were pushing for peace in the Houthi-Saudi war, frequently accusing the Saudi coalition of genocide, and that it broadly looks like the US is having to pick up that battle where they left off.  There are people in their coalition in favor of unrestricted immigration, too.  But their actions in both cases seem chosen first to limit outrage from the extreme corners of their voting bloc, and actual effectiveness is a much lower priority.  If it was actually working, that'd be one thing, but I think the average concerned voter was looking for something more decisive (see Operation Praying Mantis), rather than a slowly-escalating quagmire.  Similar to the Obama administration's "red lines" in Syria, it looks weak to me as an observer.


But on immigration specifically, the Biden administration came into office and specifically and publicly undid many of the policy decisions of its predecessor ("remain in Mexico", "build a wall"), claiming those were unnecessary and cruel.  But here we are a few years later, and they've had to walk some of those back: they're building a wall and at least moving toward involving Mexico in the process.  But they can't acknowledge that, maybe, their opponents might have been partly right on the issue (because, in a large part, of their coalition with "Orange Man Bad").  And while they claim to be working on solutions, I haven't seen anyone propose either reforming the asylum process in question.  Could we surge resources to handle the backlog of cases and hear every case in, say, 24 hours?  Could we increase the standards to promptly toss out a large fraction of the cases that will eventually be denied anyway?  AFAIK the asylum system is entirely defined by Congress and Executive fiat and surely gives some legal leeway here.  I honestly don't have any good suggestions for preventing physical crossings or handling deportations of the unwilling, but surely someone has some.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Colorado Supreme Court Thread
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Yeah, none of those things count.




The text of the Fourteenth Amendment specifies "insurrection or rebellion against" the Constitution of the United States.  Conspiring (within the Executive Branch) to issue orders that violate its plain textual explicit separation of powers (which SCOTUS ruled those orders did) sounds at least as plausibly in violation as Trump "raising an army."


(Although this would probably effectively rule out any incumbent president running for re-election, to which I probably say yeschad.jpg)


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 19, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Renewables were always a joke for Germany as well, they don’t get enough wind or sunlight for them to work and battery tech is still not close enough to compensate




While this sentiment is probably unpopular in the green space these days, over the past year or two I've realized that actually fielding scaled renewable systems anywhere roughly north of the Mason-Dixon line requires something like two orders of magnitude more battery capacity than even "battery-backed renewable" systems design for these days.  Expected grid usage needs to go up.  Way up.


To fully switch from fossil fuels, we presumably need to switch heating over from largely combustion furnaces to heat pumps: heating a home in northern Europe in winter takes far more energy than cooling one in a warmer climate.  Electric transportation adds to grid usage.  Including these, total demand is almost certainly highest when solar is least useful.  A few net-zero days in summer is cute, but doesn't really provide a viable path to storing summer sunlight for winter, and without that investments in solar would be better placed in nuclear.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Every single information and/or discussion channel/forum is getting shittier and shittier. I posit that in addition to algorithms maximizing engagement or minimizing whatever, it's also the userbase.




The true old timers will tell you that they wish September '93 would end.


Not that I disagree, but the observation is hardly new, and yet we're nominally still here.  I sometimes wonder if it's bias in the observation, but maybe there are objective measurements somewhere.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


It definitely annoys me that "access to the financial system writ large" has become so utterly critical to doing anything useful that it immediately has a totalizing effect on what anybody can do, anywhere in the world, even on the internet.




You're not wrong: despite general libertarian sympathies, I do think there is a role for utility-type regulation in a number of new critical roles that didn't exist a few decades ago.  Credit cards and cashless payments are certainly one.


I'd toss out email and online identity infrastructure as another that doesn't get much press: I've come to realize that my dependence on my Gmail account (which I've had since it was an invite-only beta) would be almost impossible to replace.  Maybe with a lot of work I could replace it with one provided through Microsoft, but that wouldn't really fix the problem.  Practically hosting your own email is basically impossible, from what I can tell, due to spam blocking mechanisms.  Given Google's propensity to sunset things (or really, the level of risk of corporate spontaneous failure), I think it'd be a pretty serious crisis if their email and identity servers went down for a day.  Or worse, permanently.


I'd point to the common carrier rules for other utilities as a reasonable example of what could be done.  I think expanding those to include things like credit card payments and email would be possible.  However, those have their own concerns with fraud and such that might prevent applying the existing rules as-is.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Guarantee citizenship for half a decade of service, or something similar.




As far as I know, a year of service already guarantees citizenship qualifies for naturalization.  Although starting to depend on foreign fighters is generally pointed to as one of the points of decline in the Roman Empire.


Of the bunch, I suspect the US can, for now, afford your Midas option, or at least ways of making enlistment a more competitive time investment for young folks.  It seems the current vibe is more "joined because I can't afford college" in a time when student loans and increasing incomes are providing alternatives.  Plus there could be more investment in making veterans high-status, although that's probably too right-coded for the current administration to target -- and social status isn't easily enforced in a top-down fashion.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Israel-Gaza Megathread #1
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Arab states taking in Palestinians has also resulted in a number of civil conflicts, including the civil war in Lebanon and Black September in Jordan.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Yet these American blue cities are not "lurching" (a mild slur by the way) to the right, far from it. In the past decades they have become woker and woker.




I recognize that this is purely anecdotal, but my overall sense of "blue spaces" (and I live in one) is that in the last 12-18 months there's been an increase in the number of, as the kids say, "based" takes.  Especially since the moderator revolt a few months back, a number of previously-radical local subreddits seem to have pivoted towards the center a bit, even if it's IMO quite-modest statements like "local property crime is bad for the community, and actually I want the police to do something" or "letting homeless folks shoot up drugs and openly defecate in the street across from the local elementary school is hardly 'compassionate' to anyone involved" get upvotes and positive engagement.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of June 19, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I'm hardly an expert on Russian internal politics, but this seems a case like several in history: Prigozhin likely believes he cannot escape defenestration (on account of previous comments and a lack of clear battlefield utility to the Kremlin) if he yields, so why not take a likely-unsuccessful stand? A Chinese uprising in 209BC occurred when two officers realized that the penalty for arriving late was the same as for rebelling:  They were ultimately killed by their own men when their uprising proved a lost cause.


Alternatively, this could be compared to Caesar crossing the Rubicon: a charismatic military commander holding troops' personal loyalty faces a choice between yielding civil government demands to give up his army and riches and taking up arms against it.  Caesar was successful despite mixed results in battle, but was ultimately unable to escape assassination at the literal hands of his political opponents.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Imagine if a democrat arrested 20 republicans for possessing an illegal firearm because they misunderstood an ATF statute and the ATF webpage said that particular modification / accessory was legal.




You don't even need to misunderstand the ATF: they're sometimes quite clear, like the since-rescinded 2004 letter in which they ruled that a "a 14 inch long shoestring with a loop at each end" was, by itself, a machine gun.  In 2007 they were gracious enough to rule that the shoestring in isolation is not a machine gun, only when combined with a semiautomatic rifle.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 26, 2022
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


As far as I can tell... That didn't happen? Nothing happened? Did it even matter?




From a technical perspective, absolute net neutrality was probably never a tenable prospect: there are all sorts of reasons why ISPs want to optimize traffic flows.  Interactive applications (Zoom calls, video games) prefer minimal latency, while streaming services focus on bandwidth and can happily buffer enough to handle less continuous data.  Legal streaming being a huge bandwidth user, many services were interested in distinctly less-than-neutral contracts where ISPs would host either hardware or data close to customers to reduce bandwidth costs (these are largely mutually beneficial).  Some internet plans are cellular, and IRL bandwidth is a very finite resource: do we really want to enforce that wireless providers can't throttle video streaming (not necessarily completely, but perhaps forcing a lower resolution) to make sure your neighbors in any sufficiently crowded space don't prevent you from checking your email.  Honestly, some sort of traffic prioritization is probably inescapable, and it's very unclear to me that "neutral" is either well-defined or desirable.


There's also a decent argument that it was only really an argument because the people pushing for it thought they might lose.  Millennials and Zoomers with Netflix accounts were scared their ISPs were going to rope them into costly plans to replace falling cable TV package revenue.  Sometimes this takes the form of a generic data cap, which exist but aren't universal even on cellular plans.  I don't know that those fears were misplaced, but in the past 5 years I think it's clear that between the political will of streaming companies and their (voting!) customers, legislators can't outright ignore their concerns.


I'm sure there are some principled cyperpunk libertarians out there that support Net Neutrality on a purely dogmatic basis, but I am pretty confident that most of the folks involved circa 2017 were probably more concerned about who was going to bear the financial burden of growing bandwidth costs.  Personally, I was loosely in favor, since ISPs are often monopolies.  Since then, though, high-bandwidth internet usage has gone mainstream (even outside of the pandemic) such that (even self-interested) neutrality advocates aren't a minority.


There's probably also a darker view that the mainstream left that supported net neutrality as anti-censorship when they were plucky upstarts are now in positions of power and their interests against censorship were never principled, just self-interested.  I'm not sure I would endorse that view, but I see how someone could argue it, and it's not a great look.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 15, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


which is why they unfroze billions of Iranian funds and reduced sanctions (in what now looks to be a serious blunder).




It continues to surprise me how many of these blunders date back to the first weeks of the administration.  I'm not a huge fan of the previous president, but many of Biden's first actions included repealing the "remain in Mexico" policy (which seems linked to ongoing trouble with immigration), making nice with Iran (which didn't prevent October 7th, and seems hotter now than before), and passing the final round of pandemic stimulus (which we were told wouldn't cause inflation).


It doesn't exactly inspire the most confidence in me.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Realistically there is a small but hopefully-growing set of folks advocating to strike the PACER paywall completely.  Perhaps the pricing made sense when it involved paper copies, but no other federal branch of government demands fees for seeing the law these days.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 6, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
The 1949 Nobel Prize in medicine was given to the doctor who developed the lobotomy, and has never been rescinded.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Israel-Gaza Megathread #2
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Suppose you were a moderate leader of the Palestinians. What on Earth could you possibly do to end the suffering and negotiate a lasting peace?




Honestly, I think if the Palestinians had been led by a charismatic Western-PMC-friendly MLK or Nelson Mandela, rather than by self-enriching despots like Arafat, they could have gotten almost all of what they (claimed to) ask for.    They probably could have, given a demonstrable period of peace, made a compelling case for equal rights for non-Jews in Israel!  The 2000 and 2008 peace proposals seemed, at least to my eyes, pretty accommodating given the circumstances, but were still declined.  At least some of this is, I think, because the Palestinian authorities don't seem to really to run a functioning government: even if Abbas agreed to a given proposal, there are at least a half-dozen Palestinian factions that he can't keep under control that would probably keep fighting.  It's quite possible the leaders have to keep declining peace offers because it would expose how little authority they actually hold with their people.


On the other hand, given the events of recent weeks, I can also see how such a the events of earlier this month would be worse if they had successfully played for peace and open(er) borders and waited for a better time to strike.  I've heard anecdotes that Gazans with work permits in Israel were involved (exact circumstances unclear) in planning the operation.  Given an enemy so dead-set on your destruction at any cost to themselves (martyrdom!), how can you defeat them and win peace in hearts and minds?  Or trust that any current peace isn't a quiet prelude to a larger surprise?  Also, while there have been moments of hope post-Apartheid South Africa after Mandela, the promised utopian future for all of the late 90s seems to have fractured at the seams, with widespread civil infrastructure failures and emigration of those with better options.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The suburban demographic is naturally materialistic, rootless, individualist and globalist.




This really doesn't match my experience in the US: the average suburban dweller I know has a mortgage "rooting" them to their dwelling and presenting nontrivial costs -- real estate sales, movers, etc -- to up and move elsewhere.  There may be some individualism, but the average suburban school has an active parent organization donating time and funds to local education.  And there's no shortage of other groups meshing the community together: churches, youth/adult sports leagues, and so forth.


I wouldn't expect support for the alt-right to take off in suburbs -- whose inhabitants seem generally happy and content to just grill in their backyards -- but I think "solidly neoliberal" reflects what is actually a general conservatism in the sense of being change-averse: suburbanites don't want major political changes (locally or nationally: these might, gasp, impact property values), and garden-variety neoliberalism seems to be one of the least change-seeking platforms currently.  In general, I think they want to keep things as they are, with an eye toward modest, gradual improvements and at least a stated preference for "be nice" policies with modest price tags.  These folks aren't pushing to (re-)overhaul American health-care because they're largely employed and prefer the devil they know in their existing insurance plan.  They aren't pushing to defund their police departments.  But they might agree on increasing Medicaid spending or buying body cameras for police.


But perhaps Sweden's idea of a "suburb" is very different from what I experience day-to-day.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 27, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think any question of video game realism merits a mention of America's Army: a game published by the US government for primarily recruitment purposes.  It's somewhat contemporary with Counter Strike, but I remember it for its emphasis on realism -- memorably: reloading only swapped magazines, and didn't reload them.  It also forced players to sit through military-style training to get the ability to use some of the weapons and abilities.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Executive branch officials seem to have much more ability to craft their own systems, which seem to be less secure.




Not only is the regulation for classified documents defined (almost) exclusively by Executive Order [1], but I suspect high-level executive branch officials are, by nature of their jobs, unable to fully "leave work at the office."  Some bedtime background reading on foreign leaders to meet tomorrow or late-night national emergencies could easily see documents outside of normal locations.  And that's not even considering the acknowledged epidemic of over-classification: it's possible to have a file marked "secret" that has nothing you couldn't learn from a cursory read of the New York Times -- though there are reasons this can legitimately be the case as well.


This isn't to say that I don't want them to do better, but I can at least see how it'd be difficult for the White House to keep all the files locked up every night.


[1] This is one of the defenses Trump has attempted to raise -- although I'm not completely certain I think it should prevail, it is an interesting argument and complicates the whole matter.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of March 25, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


to ban free speech at universities




You know, the folks that take umbrage with this (outside of a few truly principled libertarian types) were probably completely fine with the speech banning here, they just disagree on the targets.  Free speech absolutism on campus sailed probably a century or so ago.  The Obama Administration helpfully defined "sexual harassment" banned for the purposes of Title IX to include "unwelcome conduct of a sexual nature" including "verbal conduct".  Democrats were completely on board with these rulings at the time, and similar ones about racial slurs.  But now that Republicans are passing rules that students can't cheer "gas the Jews" (or, admittedly, several more modest phrases that still advocate for ethnic cleansing) and remain in good standing, that is clearly a bridge too far.


I'm not sure anyone is really being principled here, which as someone with centrist-to-principled-libertarian views is rather frustrating.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I do find the "it's a Korean peninsula proxy war" commentary to be amusing precisely because it's not completely wrong.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of November 27, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I don't think you're completely wrong here, but in my experience in engineering, there is a fundamental, but useful distinction between the guys with the degrees running simulations and making designs and the technicians (frequently with at most a two-year degree) that actually build things and put them together.


This isn't to discount your plant scientists, but they probably won't even think about out-of-specialty things like booking crop dusters and beekeepers six months in advance, or maintaining good relations with the migrant farmworkers that actually pick your apples (agriculture isn't my wheelhouse, so maybe these aren't the best examples.)


Really, I've come to believe that our systems work better when both types work together, and while we probably overvalue the ivory tower types overall (and I say that as one), lots of 20th century attempts to "put the working class (alone) in charge" turned out pretty poorly.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of September 4, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I have always found the "ultra-processed" definition lacking. I don't doubt the conclusions generally, but "processed" is a very broad definition, and I think deserves a closer set of guidelines: hydrogenated oils, breaded-and-fried foods, and such are far worse than, say, hummus, which is "processed" by pureeing a few fairly-healthy ingredients.  I think it'd be a lot clearer to grade processes rather than count them.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I think I in general agree, but it seems quite likely to me that Gore in 2000 uttered words that were, at least, quite similar.  Hypothetically, "Please friendly county leadership recount only the jurisdictions most friendly to me to make sure you didn't miss any votes" sounds enough like "find me some votes" that it's at least concerning.  And SCOTUS found in that instance that different recount standards by county violated the Equal Protection Clause -- I'm not sure I agree with all the details of the ruling, but that one sounds quite reasonable to me generally -- so you could even claim anti-constitutionality there.


More charitably, Gore at least did a better job acting as if his actions were above board, and the lack of clear precedent against such partial recounts at least provides a veneer of falling within the Overton window.  On the other hand, were the fact patterns reversed, I think the left would be shouting from the rooftops about inaccessible ballots and inconsistent chad divination being tantamount to literacy tests.