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VoxelVexillologist

Multidimensional Radical Centrist

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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 July 3, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I always assume that anyone unironically quoting Schenck agrees with its conclusion that distributing anti-draft pamphlets is akin to shouting fire in a crowded theater.  Which seems like a downright fascist perspective, but what do I know?


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 7, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
I watched Idiocracy (2006) recently and had a similar experience.  Sure, it takes hard swipes at Bush-era conservatives, but the fundamental premise is about how intelligence is heritable (this is, in fact, just assumed without discussion) and how educated populations aren't having kids.


Also Team America World Police hit differently in a 2023 in which opinion seems to have swung back towards "actually, some intervention might, hypothetically, be for good" with wars of violent conquest ongoing in Europe and potentially elsewhere.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 24, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
So the school district in question was recently taken over by the state due to the consistently failing scores of some of its schools. This is somewhat politically controversial because it's a red state but a blue district, although most at least seem to agree that the schools themselves are underperforming.  The new superintendent brought in to fix this is trying some pretty aggressive reforms -- honestly I would have expected business-as-usual with maybe a hint of red politics, followed by little actually changing.


My understanding of the details from peripherally following this are as follows:


    

  • New Education System schools are (mostly?) the failing ones: they seem to be leaving the well-ranked ones alone.
    • 

  • Several thousand (IIRC) non-teaching administrators at the district office have been laid off.
    • 

  • Teacher salaries at NES schools have been bumped measurably, but will also be tied to test scores.
    • 

  • There seems to be a focus on the core "Three Rs" (reading, 'riting, and 'rithmetic), and honestly swapping librarians for improved classroom sizes and reducing classroom disruption might be worth it. It sounds like they are keeping the actual books.
    • 



Overall, I'm surprised they are willing to try an experiment with such large changes.  Some of the changes seem a bit partisan, but "reduce classroom sizes and pay teachers more" seems to generally have bipartisan expectations of improving scores.  Classroom discipline is red-coded, as is cutting non-core services.  I'm modestly hopeful it will show results, but the blue teacher constituency would love to see egg on the State' face.  I'm never quite sure how much we can expect the education system to solve issues at home: maybe in aggregate, but not in every case, certainly.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 28, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Only a tiny fraction of people who come in for an initial consultation end up medically transitioning; most are dissuaded after talking to psychologists and doctors about whether it's actually the best path for them.




Do you have a citation to back this up?  I haven't found any direct numbers, but there are some damning quotes from seemingly-reasonable sources.  For example, the Interim Cass Review of the Tavistock clinic includes:




1.14. Primary and secondary care staff
have told us that they feel under pressure
to adopt an unquestioning affirmative
approach and that this is at odds with the
standard process of clinical assessment
and diagnosis that they have been trained
to undertake in all other clinical encounters




Honestly, I can't even find anecdotes of anyone and their doctor deciding that no treatment was the right course of action.  I'm sure it's happened, but I'm having trouble believing "most" here.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


We go back to having white men be 70% of characters in all entertainment media, and another 25% are white women with zero character traits beyond 'sexy and horny for the main character'?




I think it's at least worth noting that the racial demographics of the United States were substantively different in the '50s-'80s (about 85% of the country was considered "white" by the 1960 census, and most of the rest was black) such that, while white characters may still have been overrepresented in those eras (not doing a formal study here), the background expectation should be much different today, where closer to 60% of the country fits that description.  Complaining that the culture of yesteryear looks like the people of yesteryear seems a bit misplaced, in my opinion, although I don't have quite as strong of thoughts on current television demographics.


This, of course, doesn't apply to the gender breakdown of leading roles, so your mileage may vary.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


A first generation, in which people primarily followed real-life friends or acquaintances of those friends (and so on). Those real-life friends shared their thoughts, pictures, ideas, inane ramblings and so on. This was Facebook and its predecessors like MySpace and Friendster.




I am, to be honest, a little sad that the Facebook of 10-15 years ago isn't really around anymore.  To some extent, the friend network is still there and it's interesting to me to follow what my classmates and friends at the time are now up to.  I think there's till a market for a good service like that for mainly keeping in touch and tracking major life events ("births, deaths, and marriages"), but modern Facebook seems to aggressively recommend Instagram-like creators rather than creating an environment where I can see "oh, this friend from college just moved to the same town as me" and stimulate real communities.  But maybe I'm just getting old and reaching the "old man yells at someone else's computer cloud" stage.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


This will definitely end up erasing a lot of Native American culture from our interpretation of history.




You know, I've had the same thought about things like renaming sports teams.  Not that the previous name of the Washington Commanders wasn't offensive, but that we've established a de facto rule that mentions of Native American culture or history are offensive, but also that nobody got fired for just completely ignoring the topic.  It already feels like public awareness of real native traditions and people has dropped tangibly in the culture over the last few decades of my life because attempts to bring it up are soured by (IMO bad-faith, shallow) criticism that it's "problematic" or doesn't cast enough native actors.  Not that there's nothing at all to those claims, but I think they end up being overall counterproductive, and in practice are just erasing it from the culture completely.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of August 14, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
What's funny about this is that my experience is largely the opposite: I recently visited some friends in the north Dallas metroplex, which is about as close to the platonic ideal of detached-house suburbia as you can get sprawling in all directions, and they know their neighbors on all sides by name (and which tools and skills they regularly trade), and live within a few hundred meters of an HOA-managed playscape where they regularly encounter the same few dozen children and parents.  As far as I can tell, the folks I know in the NYC area have much more trouble meeting their neighbors behind closed apartment doors, with front yards replaced with dark interior hallways, and porches replaced with coffee shops and bars.


I'd buy that the experience varies a lot by personality, though: if you are looking for a particular niche interest friend group, the city is probably a better choice, and suburbia can be pretty underwhelming.  But I do think suburbs are often undersold generally.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


Abortion was made a constitutional right by first finding a roght to privacy, and then discovering abortion being made illegal violates this right (but only in the first trimester).




It's worth noting that doctor-patient privacy somehow also only extended to abortion, and not, say, to Kevorkian or medical marijuana.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 18, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
Our current president said to a largely-Black crowd at a campaign rally that Romney would put them "back in chains".


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of December 4, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


but the EU has exhausted its disposable stocks of arms and armor and the US, which has enough disposable firepower to zone rouge a medium-sized country, is a) not a charity and b) kinda getting busy with other stuff.




One point that I think bears mentioning more often is that there is a back-channel game at play here: the US probably could fund or supply this war itself, but has been trying to pressure (Western) Europe into properly funding it's own defense.


There is that video of the Germans at the UN laughing at Trump suggesting their military expenditures were inadequate and that Russia was not to be trusted, but official statements about missing NATO GDP targets on defense spending have been going on for multiple administrations.  Here is an easy chance for the EU to do so, and it's failing in a tragedy of the commons: Germany isn't likely to get invaded soon, so why should they pay for it instead of Poland?


Also worth mentioning is a political zeitgeist in which the EU has often historically protested American foreign policies (most notably the 2003 Iraq adventure, which I will concede probably deserved it, but also the presence of US troops in the EU, support of Israel, and a few other military activities like Libya), but also expected Team America, World Police to show up when war came to their doorstep.  The US seems to be trying to balance its hardware support with a goal of getting the EU to pull it's share.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 31, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


The problem is that a golf cart is a low-security vehicle




For better or worse, I think one of the less-prominent reasons that cars are so popular is that they're just big enough to be hard to walk off with.  Bikes, and to a lesser extent motorcycles, are forced to depend on locks, which for better or worse are pretty universally inadequate if left unattended for hours.  An angle grinder or bolt cutters aren't regulated equipment, but tow trucks are harder to conceal and use illicitly: as far as I can tell, most car theft involves taking the car under its own power.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of May 8, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					


I imagine these kinds of things still happen in the US but aren't federally funded. And US university people know anything about this?




The typical workaround is that you can host a "women in [field]" event, but you can't restrict who actually attends.  To some extent everyone knows what's expected, but I do recall my local Society of Women Engineers chapter was pretty explicit about recruiting all comers, so it's not all a wink and a nudge.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of January 22, 2024
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
If nothing else, the electoral college shields the country from various shenanigans that would happen if you opted for "sum vote totals from fifty different systems": Every state is incentivized to muck with its vote totals, especially with plausible deniability, and it's unclear what enforcement mechanisms the states would have to keep each other honest.  IMO voter ID rules and election hardware security become even more contentious when every vote cast nationwide effects the outcome, and, say, Alabama "accidentally" certifying totals with three extra zeros at the end probably doesn't violate their laws.  At least right now, the EC bounds state voting issues to only their own electoral votes.


Everyone adopting the Maine system is tolerably close, and doesn't have this problem.  I think it's a reasonable choice.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				Culture War Roundup for the week of July 3, 2023
			
		

	

	

	

		
			

			

				

			

		

			


				

					
IMO Top Gun: Maverick did a good job of scriptwriting without throwing its title character under the bus.  But that may be the only modern sequel/remake I can think of that does a passable job.  Disney (really, Lucasfilm in particular) seems to like bringing up old characters and showing that despite when we last saw them victorious at the end of the movie, they've gotten old and have their lives falling apart.


On the other hand, Maverick is probably the only good example I've seen in the last few years.  I've long wondered why filmmakers can't spend, I don't know, twice as much on hiring a good writer up front and making a good story, presumably saving tons of money in re-shoots and major CGI edits-on-edits.  At least from the outside, it seems obvious that many of these movies are going to be trainwrecks long before release.


				

				

						

							

								
							

						


						
					

				
			


			

	


			
			
				

			
		

	






		

			
			
				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 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 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 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.