Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
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User ID: 551
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
17d ago
I agree with so much of this, but want to offer one piece of gentle pushback - there's an old sports axiom that you shouldn't do the thing that your opponents want you to do. Don't punt on 4th and 1, don't pitch to Barry Bonds, don't take a race out slow against Mo Farah, don't swang and bang with Derrick Lewis. I'm someone that absolutely despises Sotomayor and the view that the Constitution should be highly malleable to current-year preferences, and what I want is absolutely for her to keep her seat for the moment. This is my preference for purely strategic reasons - if she stays, she may well die and be replaced by someone that views the law much more like I do. If she retires now, it'll be an incredibly stupid spectacle with people insisting that we need another Wise Latinatm and it'll probably be some crank for the Ninth Circuit or something. Regardless of whether you take a Moneyball approach or a trad gut-feel approach, you should generally not give your opponents what they want.
For me, the best argument for her not retiring cynically would be that the goal should not be to game the institutions and that you should stand on the business of insisting that this type of institutionalism should be taken seriously. The problem there is that the left already views the right as having defected from that equilibrium by refusing to confirm Garland and then replacing Ginsberg almost immediately on death.
Your argument for the growth and influence of justices over time makes sense, but the problem really does come down to the object-level justice in question - it doesn't seem like anyone, left or right, sincerely believes that Sotomayor is an intellectual giant that's going to change hearts and minds. I'm sure there's a spin on this from her fans, that it's just that her detractors are a bunch of stupid racists, but it doesn't seem like there's any real disagreement that she's never going to be treated like an important intellectual figure in shaping future courts. This argument would work much better for Kagan, who generally is treated as a serious and influential colleague with incisive perspective by both friends and foes.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
13d ago
I remain surprised that there aren't more people that want Israel to win, but don't want to give them $26 billion.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
13d ago
Probably a similar amount to what we'd expect if American glazers were responsible for replacing all of the windows broken in Israel. But yes, I grant that these are largely wealth transfers within the United States as much as they are funding for Israel.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
17d ago
And it just struck me as so distasteful for black twitter users who are probably fat and out of shape to mock a guy for being merely a top 3000 basketball player in the world instead of a top 200 player who belongs in the NBA.
This is one of those things that actually playing any sport at all really shifts your perspective on. Guys that are D1 scrubs are still really, really good at their sport. Guys that are capable of having one shining moment on the biggest stage of their sport in college are a whole other level.
As it fits with the Supreme Court, I've had this argument with a few conservative friends that think KBJ is "stupid" because she's an affirmative action appointment and couldn't answer the "what is a woman?" question cogently. They're wrong, just plain wrong. I could give a lengthy rant on how much I dislike her, how utterly dishonest I think her jurisprudence is, and what a mistake I think it is to explicitly promise a SCOTUS seat to a demographic group, but it remains true that if you listen to an oral argument that she's participating in, she's obviously a smart person. Listening to the recent Missouri v Murthy case made me genuinely angry, but it wasn't like Jackson was struggling to keep up with the conversation or doesn't understand the relevant law - she's just wrong. As off-brand as it is for me, I am inclined to think that insistence that she's actually stupid has quite a bit of racism built into.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
Health, Fitness, Obesity, and Politics
Something that’s been bouncing around in my head for quite some time is how people relate their politics to their personal health. This story from The Daily Beast on Wisconsin Senate candidate Eric Hovde has resurfaced this for me by providing a clear illustration of what I perceive as a current difference between the American left and right on this issue:
“Look, we have an explosion of Type 2 diabetes right now. Explosion. Obesity is off the charts. You know, we’re removing people from being responsible for their own health,” Hovde said.
“If they all of a sudden started to realize that they’re going to pay more for their health care by consuming, you know, by consuming massive amounts of soda every day or fatty foods and not exercising, maybe they would change their behavioral patterns.”
Hovde then claimed obesity was a “personal choice.”
“It’s a personal choice,” he said, “but there should be consequences to those personal choices. Fine, you want to do that, you become obese, your health care is going to cost more. Or, the quality—or not the quality, but the amount of health care may go down, because you may not have the money to afford it.
“You have to force personal responsibility back to people, and also make them smart consumers.”
The Daily Beast helpfully loops in a putative expert on the matter, a professor at NYU:
Jay said that Hovde’s comments singling out obesity as something that should raise people’s insurance rates reveals that “either you’re not understanding or you’re really discriminating against people who have a chronic disease.”
“It’s assuming that obesity is some sort of moral failing that people need to be punished for,” she said. “That’s not true.
She added: “It’s a pretty awful and dangerous thing to say.”
This is the latest spat about these sorts of things and probably lays the dichotomous beliefs out about as clearly as possible. There is a policy angle (some people think insurance should be risk-based, some don’t), but that is comparatively dry relative to the beliefs in personal responsibility and how those views extend into political beliefs. There was an old throwaway post from the dissident right blog Dividuals that stuck with me a decade later because of how clearly it captured something that I felt when I read the left-leaning positions:
One realistic way to parodize liberals / lefties / Progressives / feminists / SJWs etc. would be to present them as narcissistic, solipsistic, self-absorbed people with huge and fragile egos who demand that everything should revolve around themselves.
…
The simple fact that feminists tend to be fat would only make, in itself, a weak joke. But when you find they run around parading their fatness, and make it a political goal to make men somehow adore it – imagine it, human beings making it a political goal that other should have a positive opinion of their own personal fsckups! “I have crap for character, now praise me for it, oppressor!” Imagine programmers making it a political goal to convince people that bugs are actually good!
At the time, I wasn’t particularly right-aligned, so this wasn’t really an ingroup-outgroup thing, but an articulation of a growing frustration I had with people on the left, this absolute refusal to ever tell people to own up to their situations, take responsibility for where they are in life, and fix it. Everything, always, forever is just contingent on circumstances, completely outside of their control. While I could understand the arguments about this sort of thing when it comes to wealth accumulation or crime, to be so extreme as to not grant that people have agency over what they eat was the kind of thing that was just steadily pushing me away from having any inclination to share goals with the economic left.
Since then, there has been a steady (if not particularly large) genre of articles characterizing fitness as a right-wing phenomenon. Some of these are really silly things about how gyms are gateways to far-right extremism, but let’s look at one example that’s a little more self-serious and not obviously ridiculous:
The study found a significant correlation between those men who were heavier and stronger and the belief that some social groups should dominate others. These men were also less likely to support the redistribution of wealth, a typically left wing principle.
Specifically, the researchers found a specific correlation between the number of hours spent in the gym and having less egalitarian socioeconomic beliefs.
Dr Michael Price, a senior lecturer in psychology at the university and the lead author of the study, suggested the findings could come down to three things: The result of the men “calibrating their egalitarianism to their own formidability”, that less egalitarian men strive to become more muscular or there could be a third variable at play.
“Our results suggest that wealthier men who are more formidable physically are more likely to oppose redistribution of wealth,” he said. “Essentially, they seem more motivated to defend their resources. But less wealthy men who are still physically formidable don’t seem more inclined to support redistribution either. They’re not demanding a share of the wealth.
Vice covers the same thing, but with an oddly smug glee:
To all you gym-bro haters amongst us, come, be seated. This one's for you. Science—objective, empirically tested science, the science that tells us that the ice caps are melting—has confirmed what many of us have long suspected: Gym bros are right-wing jerks.
…
Price's findings? That rich muscle dudes are the worst! Under those rock-hard abs lie the rock-hard souls of men who doesn't believe in spreading their riches around. "It's basically your tolerance to the idea that wealth shouldn't be redistributed," Dr. Price explains. "Some people thought it was horrible; some people thought it was fine."
If there was ever a line that called for a YesChad.jpg response, it’s that one. While I am not a particularly big guy, I will self-report that I do believe my work as an endurance athlete has substantially shifted my views against egalitarian perspectives and more towards personal responsibility. Rather than modeling that as being about domination and aggression, I would propose that the mechanism is the personal sense of accomplishment and mastery coupled with knowing how much of it is a direct product of your internal locus of control. I’m not decently fast because of some random freak accident of nature - I wasn’t fast when I started running, I’m much faster now, and I keep getting faster in almost perfect concert with how much work I put into the sport. Others will fare better with less work, such is life, but we all have a great deal of control over our outcomes. So, yeah, I am inclined to believe that pursuing fitness as a hobby will tend to lead one to the right of their current positions.
The belief that fitness is a right-wing thing doesn’t stop with this sort of relatively modest claim about egalitarian tendencies though. The Society for Cultural Anthropology has a weird writeup on Gym Fascism. To go nutpicking a bit, the Manitoba University newspaper has Fitness culture and fatphobia are fascistic - Our obsession with looking the same is culling joy and body diversity:
Prof. Brian Pronger points out that almost everything that we stress about physical education centres around maximizing the body’s performance. It’s the way that we are all expected to structure our lives around our fitness regimens, and those five days a week when we’re supposed to work out must be in service to making ourselves as strong as possible.
Fitness fanaticism constipates our personal growth. Think about what it means to “work on yourself.” It often means to work out, as if your character is tied to your physical strength and muscle tone.
OK, too much nutpicking. Back to a serious journalistic outlet, Time magazine. Just before the New Year, Time published a story that might dissuade people from making an ill-advised resolutions for 2023 titled The White Supremacist Origins of Exercise, and 6 Other Surprising Facts About the History of U.S. Physical Fitness:
It was super interesting reading the reflections of fitness enthusiasts in the early 20th century. They said we should get rid of corsets, corsets are an assault on women’s form, and that women should be lifting weights and gaining strength. At first, you feel like this is so progressive.
Then you keep reading, and they’re saying white women should start building up their strength because we need more white babies. They’re writing during an incredible amount of immigration, soon after enslaved people have been emancipated. This is totally part of a white supremacy project. So that was a real “holy crap” moment as a historian, where deep archival research really reveals the contradictions of this moment.
Oh dear.
Anyway, to return to that Hovde story that kicked things off, I find it pretty interesting to think about how these things play with different crowds. Something that’s kind of obvious is that Red Tribe America is not actually very fit at all, while Blue Tribe power centers consistently have quite a few fitness-minded individuals. Nonetheless, when Hovde says that fat people are responsible for their own bodies, it seems to me that most Red Tribers basically agree and accept that they’re fat because they like burgers and beer a little too much, while the Blue Tribers recoil at the suggestion that people are responsible for eating themselves into Type 2 diabetes. This reminds me of how discussions of marriage and morality play out as well - educated elites, regardless of political persuasion, stay married at very high rates and seem to be well aware that this is the correct way to live, but are hesitant to say this about the underclass. They hold standards for themselves that they believe don’t apply to others. As far as electoral politics goes, I doubt this little newscycle item means much of anything, but it does provide a fun case study and litmus test for perspectives on the topic.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
12d ago
Who made this argument?
Potter Stewart, writing the controlling opinion in Robinson v California. I find it amusing that @netstack linked it to approve of the argument - when I read that portion of the case earlier, I couldn't believe the levels of idiocy or dishonesty that Stewart was engaging in by analogizing a common cold to "catching" narcotic addiction.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
18d ago
"False imprisonment by rioters" has been a talking point on the right for years now, but it took urban liberal Jewish/* lawyers to deploy it in practice?
These sorts of actions only happen in left-wing places, so it pretty much requires urban, liberal lawyers to deploy it. The "protesters" wouldn't really get anything out of blocking a road in rural Kentucky and the extent to which it would go poorly for them would be fairly immediate, hence no red-tribe prosecutors needing to deal with them.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
From the statement:
But extremists are proposing hundreds of hateful laws that target and terrify transgender kids and their families...
That highlighted phrase has become not just normalized, but sacralized on the left with the rise of "protect trans kids". Almost no one had heard of this term until a decade or so ago, then it suddenly started picking up around the time Trump took office, and now searches for it have increased sharply (see Google trends here. This is just absolutely wild to me how quickly this term has taken hold and how quickly people seem to have come to believe that this is something they pretty much always thought, that it's a good and normal thing, that this is medical care, and only a bunch of hateful extremists could think otherwise.
But pause. What exactly are "trans kids"? On one hand, I am assured that no one is doing irreversible damage to children, but on the other hand, I am to understand that there is a distinct category of people that it would be hateful to not put on courses of hormone therapy to alter the development of their physiologic gender. I don't understand how people are capable of holding these ideas in their heads simultaneously and that they've adopted these ideas that are so new, so utterly untested consequentially as not just right, but obviously morally right and opposed only by a bunch of bigots. My impression is that for quite a few of these people, they would be unwilling to clearly answer the question, "what are trans kids?" without getting evasive and yet protecting that category is a moral imperative.
I am disturbed.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
18d ago
Quick story of long-distance relationship success - I started dating my wife about three months before she was scheduled to move to another city. Within a month of us getting together, I had her just move in with me since she was at my apartment nearly every day anyway and could save on a couple month's rent by leaving early. She moved, then we flew back and forth for two years before I finally got a job in her new city. We still live in the new city a decade later and have happily ever after.
I'm going to be corny and say that while your math might be wrong on the specifics of the 22, if you're actually infatuated with her, it's entirely possible that you'll never meet another one like her, or that it'll take years to do so. Unless you have a history of demonstrating unusually poor judgment in relationships, I say fuck it, do everything you can to be with her. I did and it made my life immeasurably better.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
24d ago
Such acts are heinous, I simply really liked his course simply because it teaches you that life is not just unfair but everyone is out to get you, not actively, but they would likely fuck you over if they could so you should learn to embrace life that way and develop models that make you less susceptible to getting fucked over (being a lothario vs being a monogamous guy).
I cannot overstate how much this doesn't match my experience even the slightest bit. Living life like this sounds absolutely miserable. Even if I thought that it would somehow lead to a great deal of success to believe this, I would reject it anyway because I don't want to walk around with a chip on my shoulder, believing that people are likely to screw me over. The vast majority of colleagues, supervisors, subordinates, friends, and casual acquaintances that I've been around have been collaborative, pro-social people that are happy to put in a little extra effort to help me out and I'm happy to return the favor to them. The number that have screwed me over is miniscule, and they were people that I plainly disliked from the start, not backstabbers that I never suspected.
Anyway, the fights look great. I'm also looking forward to plunking down and flipping between those and a couple NBA games.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
To put it bluntly, most of my White neighbors and coworkers basically resembled hobbits. They had no ambition to them, nor any aspirations of greatness. Nor did they think about the world in a dynamic way—the more educated among them certainly stayed informed about the wider world, but they largely took it for granted that their immediate universe was a static place where nothing would ever happen.
And the horrifying thing is that’s how they liked it.
I quickly discovered that Midwesterners had no sense of imperial destiny and “right to rule” like you see in New Yorkers, Texans, or Californians. They had nothing like the feisty Faustian individualism of Floridians or “fuck you” pride of Appalachians. They didn’t even have the air of faded glory and gothic tragedy you see in the Deep South. It was nothing but aggressively bland conformity everywhere you looked.
As someone that has adopted the Midwest as home, I'm glad that it's so bad for this guy that it twisted his political views and forced him to leave. Yes, we are basically hobbits, content to live in nice towns with little in the way of crime and no real desire to seek power over others. Yes, the "elites" in the small-city Midwest are less Machiavellian lunatics seeking power at all costs and more boring bureaucrats that just want the buses to run on time. No, this sort of community building doesn't manifest any sort of whites-only ethnic unity; Hmong, Indian, and other populations that would have been exotic here a century ago show up, adopt the culture, and basically wind up seeming about the same as other Midwesterners in a couple generations. That this part of the country remains relatively naturally egalitarian, welcoming, and so godawful boring for a status-seeking, power-hungry lunatic is exactly why I am much happier here than in a genuine power center of the empire.
There's also something that's just genuinely funny to see this guy finding out that Whiteopia isn't actually what he dreamed of and having that curdle into animosity towards the Whiteopian residents that don't even engage in serious racial introspection like residents of Diversitopias.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
22d ago
Yes. Seatbelts are an excellent idea and I wear mine. Demanding that everyone do so is stupid and intrusive.
Opposing safetyism doesn’t mean ignoring risk-benefit, it means that you’re against treating safety as an overriding priority in all cases.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
19d ago
On the one hand, one should love their spouse without regard to physical appearance.
I have trouble with this sentiment, not because I disagree with it across all parameters, but because someone's physical appearance reflects real elements of someone's personality and character, it's not just something completely exogenous to who you love. The woman I love is fit, she was fit when I met her, she got more fit during our time together, and we like doing physical things together. Her fitness is reflected in her appearance - she's toned, slender, tanned deeply in the summers, carries herself with the posture of an athletic woman, and so on. You can see this at a glance, the same way that you can see that someone is sedentary from their chubbiness, lack of musculature, slumping posture, and uncoordinated gait.
Contrary to the saying, there's a lot you can tell about a book from its cover.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
17d ago
Scalia's death seemed out of left field
He was a 79-year-old portly guy - actuarial tables are what they are and you're basically rolling a d20 to save against death every year at that point, even if there's nothing in particular wrong with you.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
You're missing at least one thing that's going on - some rapes (or at least rape-adjacent behavior) are genuinely dissimilar to other crimes in the lack of mens rea from the perpetrator. The canonical example is a guy that takes a girl that's obviously blitzed out of her mind upstairs at a party. Sure, you can provide the admonishment that she shouldn't have gotten so drunk in the first place and you're going to be correct, but it's also plausible that it's feasible to shift the culture around hooking up with very drunk girls from it being funny to it being socially unacceptable. You're not going to convince Ted Bundy to not rape with a social awareness campaign, but you might convince some men that it would be a bad thing to take advantage of a girl that doesn't have her wits about her.
There are many objections to the above that can be offered, but my impression is that this is the type of thing that "teach men not to rape" is referring to.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
18d ago
I'm in the middle - I think megacities (e.g. New York, Tokyo, even Chicago) are terrible places to live, but nice places to visit. Likewise, I enjoy visiting isolated, rural areas, but have zero desire to actually live in one. The sweet spot is a decent-sized city that has all of the amenities that I want, but also has plenty of space for parks, not too much traffic, and that is easy to get outside of either by car or bike ride. In Australia, I'd be thinking of a place like Cairns.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
The US has a long history of backing coups in Latin America, funding militias and creating banana republics. This has made the region less stable and created more incentives for people to leave.
American involvement also helped produce the two most stable, productive South American countries in Chile and Uruguay. I have plenty of negative things to say about the CIA, but backing the guys that throw communists out of helicopters is actually a good solution to communist rule. Not good for the communists, of course, but it's in everyone's long-run interest to remove communists from governance.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
The thing I find most interesting about that is the desire to generate this framing of a villainous white-vengeance seeker on the subways. It seems to me that this is a way of both coping with the observed reality being inconsistent with the underlying beliefs of the vagrant-friendly as well as propagandizing to generate the impression that the only thing dangerous on the subways are white people just shooting innocent black bodies. Taking a look at the Wiki for the episode that @The_Nybbler references, it's just comical:
A white woman shoots two black men in a crowded subway. The shooting at first appears to be self-defense.
...
Benjamin Stone: I miss the good ol' days - when you didn't need a lengthy trial just to give a white person the non-guilty verdict. We would have just covered it up and moved on.
Ah yes, surely we all remember the good ol' days when white women were just shooting up subways, killing innocent black men for no reason at all, then things were being covered up by the police. Well, I guess I don't remember it, but that's probably because the police were covering it up!
In the modern version, just telling the truth about the case might make quite a few people sympathetic to the "murderer". If the full story is basically that some belligerent vagrant was acting like a lunatic, ranting about how he wasn't afraid to die today, and continued escalating to the point where people felt genuinely threatened, there are probably quite a few people that would be glad to have someone step in and choke that guy out, and if it turns out that the belligerent lunatic got hurt in the process, oh well. Others would feel differently and could certainly articulate an opposing case. But no, that wouldn't suffice, it's important to eliminate any ambiguity about who's the bad guy and who's the victim - Penny didn't just overreact according to some standards, he must have been a racist that wanted to hurt a black guy for no real reason. Importantly, this also conveys the message that if you're ever thinking about reacting against the latest screaming hobo on your train, it's probably because you're a Nazi or something.
I find the whole thing all so tiresome.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
You think Hailey Van Lith wears her hair like this because it helps her get buckets?
Something to note here is the intersection between the preferred attire and aesthetic that women adopt and the financial incentives involved. Sure, Van Lith and Cameron Brink look cute in braids, but women in sports just wear braids pretty often without any incentive to do so. If they're going to have long hair (and they should, if they want to be attractive), braiding is one of the easier ways to get it out of your face, and it looks cute, and women like looking cute. You'll see tons of softball and cross-country girls in braids too and it's not like they're getting paid for it.
On the earned media side, Caitlin Clark is getting a lot of airtime on the sports networks. She is in fact putting up some impressive numbers, but I doubt she would be getting this much attention if she wasn't a cuteish white girl who isn't attractive enough to feel threatening to the middle-aged PMC women who complain about stuff.
Agree, but I think you're underselling how entertaining of a player she is. She's literally the first women's basketball player I've ever intentionally turned games on to watch. I've gotten texts from basketball fan friends saying pretty much the same. It's like if you took Steph Curry and dropped him into a 2005 NBA game. Her opponents are just completely unprepared for the combination of range and creative passing. Her skillset is completely unlike any other women that I've watched.
The final thing that you touched on a bit but didn't quite get into is the race war aspect of it. There is absolutely a significant driving element of the wholesome Iowa girls beating a pretty villainous LSU team that also ties into racial stereotypes.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
21d ago
FWIW, I thought it was fine. Your point was lucid, I appreciated you pushing Walt on the matter, and while you did sound a bit charged, it didn't come off as pointless belligerence to me.
During my run yesterday, I gave a listen to the oral arguments from Murthy v. Missouri that had happened earlier in the day. Before getting into what they covered in the argument, let's have a quick rundown of the basics of the case from Wikipedia:
Murthy v. Missouri (originally filed as Missouri v. Biden) is a case pending in the Supreme Court of the United States involving the First Amendment, the federal government, and social media. The states of Missouri and Louisiana, led by Missouri's then Attorney General Eric Schmitt, filed suit against the U.S. government in the Western District of Louisiana. They claimed that the federal government pressured social media companies to censor conservative views and criticism of the Biden administration in violation of the right to freedom of expression. The government said it had only made requests, not demands, that social media operators remove misinformation.
On July 4, 2023, Judge Terry A. Doughty issued a preliminary injunction against several agencies and members of the Biden administration from contacting social media services to request the blocking of material, with exceptions for material involving illegal activity. On appeal, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found that there had been some coercion in the government's contact with social media companies in violation of the First Amendment, but narrowed the extent of Doughty's injunction to block any attempts by the government to threaten or coerce moderation on social media. The United States Supreme Court initially stayed the Fifth Circuit's order, then granted review of the case by writ of certiorari.
Hearings for the case were held in May 2023. Judge Doughty issued his ruling on July 4, 2023, issuing a preliminary injunction against several Biden administration officials from contacting social media services for "the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech."[14] In his 155-page ruling, Doughty wrote: "The Plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that the Government has used its power to silence the opposition. Opposition to COVID-19 vaccines; opposition to COVID-19 masking and lockdowns; opposition to the lab-leak theory of COVID-19; opposition to the validity of the 2020 election; opposition to President Biden’s policies; statements that the Hunter Biden laptop story was true; and opposition to policies of the government officials in power. All were suppressed. It is quite telling that each example or category of suppressed speech was conservative in nature. This targeted suppression of conservative ideas is a perfect example of viewpoint discrimination of political speech. American citizens have the right to engage in free debate about the significant issues affecting the country."[15] He continued: "If the allegations made by plaintiffs are true, the present case arguably involves the most massive attack against free speech in United States' history. The plaintiffs are likely to succeed on the merits in establishing that the government has used its power to silence the opposition."[14]
To no one's surprise, federal agencies have been continually reaching out to social media companies, "encouraging" them to implement moderation policies that are in keeping with the federal government's preferences. On some of these, I can certainly see honest motivations for federal actors to prefer that things be moderated, on others it seems entirely self-serving, but the question before the court on whether the speech rights of posters are being infringed doesn't seem to hinge upon what the government's motivation is (although there is an argument that restrictions that would meet a strict scrutiny standard could be legitimate). The oral arguments were moderately interesting and I thought the first half, argued by Brian Fletcher on behalf of the government, raised some points that I hadn't fully considered. As ever, I am not a lawyer. If you want to peruse the transcript, you can find it here. The most salient piece for me is when Sam Alito is exchanging with Fletcher:
JUSTICE ALITO: Mr. Fletcher, when I read all of the emails exchanged between the White House and other federal officials on Facebook in particular but also some of the other platforms, and I see that the White House and federal officials are repeatedly saying that Facebook and the federal government should be partners, we're on the same team, officials are demanding answers, I want an answer, I want it right away, when they're unhappy, they -- they curse them out. There are regular meetings. There is constant pestering of -- of Facebook and some of the other platforms and they want to have regular meetings, and they suggest why don't you -- they suggest rules that should be applied and why don't you tell us everything that you're going to do so we can help you and we can look it over. And I thought: Wow, I cannot imagine federal officials taking that approach to the --the -- the print media, our representatives over there. If you -- if you did that to -- to them, what do you think the reaction would be? And so I thought: You know, the only reason why this is taking place is because the federal government has got Section 230 and antitrust in its pocket and it's -- to mix my metaphors, and it's got these big clubs available -- available to it, and so it's treating Facebook and these other platforms like they're subordinates. Would you do that to The -- to The New York Times or The Wall Street Journal or the Associated Press or any other big newspaper or wire service?
MR. FLETCHER: So there's a lot packed in there. I want to give you one very specific answer first and then step back out to the proper context. So specifically you mentioned demanding an answer right away and cursing them out. The only time that happens is in an email that's about the President's own Instagram account. It's not about moderating other people's content.
JUSTICE ALITO: Okay. We'll put that aside. There's all the rest.
MR. FLETCHER: So --
JUSTICE ALITO: Constant meetings, constant emails, we want answers.
MR. FLETCHER: Right.
JUSTICE ALITO: We're partners, we're on the same team. Do you think that the print media regards themselves as being on the same team as the federal government, partners with the federal government?
MR. FLETCHER: So potentially in the context of an effort to get Americans vaccinated during a once-in-a-lifetime pandemic. And I really think that piece of context, it doesn't change the First Amendment principles, but it's relevant to how they apply here. And I think it's important to understand that at this time, this was a time when thousands of Americans were still dying every week and there was a hope that getting everyone vaccinated could stop the pandemic. And there was a concern that Americans were getting their news about the vaccine from these platforms, and the platforms were promoting, not just posting --
JUSTICE ALITO: Well, I -- I --
MR. FLETCHER: -- but promoting, bad information.
JUSTICE ALITO: I understand all that. And I know the objectives were good, but -- but, once again, they were also getting their news from the print media and the broadcast media and cable media, and I just can't imagine the federal government doing that to them. But maybe I'm naive. Maybe that goes on behind the scenes. I don't know. But I -- I -- it struck me as wow, this is not what I understand the relationship to be. That's all.
While there is quite a bit more substance, I think Fletcher's argument relies heavily on the bolded above. While he doesn't admit that there is coercion on the part of the federal government (it would be pretty damning if he did), he seems to be suggesting that if there was coercion, it was for a very good reason, so it's OK. In contrast, when the oral argument shifts to the individual arguing against the government, his core position doesn't really rely on whether the speech being restricted is good or bad, whether the government had a strong motivation to encourage restriction of speech, he simply claims that it is illegal for the government to use a third-party to restrict speech:
MR. AGUINAGA: Good morning, Mr. Chief Justice, and may it please the Court: Government censorship has no place in our democracy. That is why this 20,000-page record is stunning. As the Fifth Circuit put it, the record reveals unrelenting pressure by the government to coerce social media platforms to suppress the speech of millions of Americans. The district court, which analyzed this record for a year, described it as arguably the most massive attack against free speech in American history, including the censorship of renowned scientists opining in their areas of expertise. And the government's levers of pressure are anathema to the First Amendment. Behind closed doors, the government badgers the platforms 24/7, it abuses them with profanity, it warns that the highest levels of the White House are concerned, it ominously says that the White House is considering its options, and it accuses platforms both of playing total Calvinball and of hiding the ball, all to get the platforms to sensor more speech. Under this onslaught, the platforms routinely cave. Now, last month, in the NetChoice cases, the platforms told you that it's incredibly important that they create their own content moderation policies. But this record shows that they continually depart from those policies because of unrelenting government pressure. Indeed, as Facebook recently disclosed in an internal email to former UK deputy prime minister Nick Clegg, the reason Facebook did that was "because we were under pressure by the administration. We shouldn't have done it." Now my friend says all this is constitutional because the government has the right to persuade using the bully pulpit. But the government has no right to persuade platforms to violate Americans' constitutional rights, and pressuring platforms in back rooms shielded from public view is not using the bully pulpit at all. That's just being a bully.
JUSTICE THOMAS: Counsel, the -- I know your argument is basically a Bantam Books argument, but do you need coercion in order to -- do you think that's the only way you could make your case, or could coordination accomplish the same thing; that is, the government is censoring by joint actions with the platforms as opposed to coercing the platforms?
MR. AGUINAGA: Your Honor, we don't need coercion as a theory. That's why we led with encouragement in our red brief. And I would point the Court to what it said in Norwood, which is the Court -- or the government cannot induce, encourage, and promote private actors to do directly what the government can't itself do directly. And that's, I think, the principle that's guiding here, which is regardless of the means that the government tries to use to pressure -- to pressure the platforms to commit censorship against third parties, the Constitution really doesn't care about that. It's the fact that what the government is trying to accomplish is the suppression of speech. Aguinaga's argument is that the principle and the literal text of the First Amendment are quite clear, that there isn't some exemption for the government just really, really not liking what someone is saying. The Court doesn't seem to be buying this at all, for three reasons:
[1] Issues of traceability and redressability. The standard is that for the Court to intervene, one must be able to demonstrate that the origin of the restriction speech comes from the government and that relief can be provided by the court. The reason that some of the justices seem to think this isn't traceable is because of how dispersed the government's actions - you can't prove that you were targeted when the government reaches out to Twitter and says, "someone remove this troublesome speech from your platform". Why, Twitter might have decided to do it without the government. Not only that, they didn't say to take down your speech, they just suggested that it would be good if the company took it down. Apparently, the legal theory here is that banning a whole class of speech wouldn't be traceable because the effects are dispersed. One example of this back and forth:
JUSTICE KAGAN: Yeah, but even on that one, I guess I just didn't understand, in what you were saying, how you drew the link to the government. I mean, we know that there's a lot of government encouragement around here. We also know that there's -- the platforms are actively content moderating, and they're doing that, irrespective of what the government wants. So how do you decide that it's government action as opposed to platform action?
MR. AGUINAGA: Your Honor, I think the clearest way -- and if I understand -- so let me answer your question directly, Your Honor. The way -- the link that I was drawing there was a temporal one. If you look at JA 715 to 717, that's a May 2021 e-mail. Two months later after that e-mail, calls were targeting health groups just like Jill Hines's group. She experiences the first example of that kind of group being -
JUSTICE KAGAN: Yeah, so in two months, I mean, a lot of things can happen in two months. So that decision two months later could have been caused by the government's e-mail, or that government e-mail might have been long since forgotten, because, you know, there are a thousand other communications that platform employees have had with each other, that -- a thousand other things that platform employees have read in the newspaper. I mean, why would we point to one e-mail two months earlier and say it was that e-mail that made all the difference?
MR. AGUINAGA: Your Honor -- and I would say a thousand other e-mails between the White House and Facebook in those two months. I mean, that's the volume of this interaction, this back and forth, between the platform and the government. And it's all -
JUSTICE KAGAN: But if it's encouragement -- I mean, let's even take that this was something that the -- that the government was continually pressing the --encouraging the platforms to do. I mean, until you can show that there's something about --overbearing the platform's will, which, you know, seems sort of hard to overbear Facebook's work -- will from what I can gather from the world, but, you know, how do you say it's the government rather than Facebook? This doubles as a great example of what I mean when I say that many legal arguments are fundamentally dishonest.
Come on - does anyone really believe that federal agencies sending thousands of emails to Facebook doesn't impact their moderation policies? If those thousands of emails didn't have an impact, one might wonder why the White House staffers wasted so much time sending them.
[2] A strong emphasis on coercion. There are tons of laps done around this, attempting to distinguish between coercion, strong encouragement, and weak encouragement. Arguinaga takes a very libertarian view that even weak encouragement to remove someone's posts would be an illegitimate government action, but emphasizes that this isn't necessary to rule in their favor. These exchanges get more frustrating to listen to later, but here's one that clarifies the point:
JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: And one thing that I think I want to square up with you is if someone calls and -- or contacts the social media company and says what you have there, this post, has factually erroneous information, so not a viewpoint that we disagree with, factually erroneous information, and the social media company says, we'll take a look at that and --and you still think that's significant encouragement that qualifies as coercion, if they take it down in response to concluding that it, in fact, is factually erroneous?
MR. AGUINAGA: No, Your Honor. If there's no ask from the government, if the government's just saying here's our view of the statement -- JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: Okay. And we think it should be -- it should be taken down, it's up to you, but we think it should be taken down.
MR. AGUINAGA: I think that's a harder case for me. I guess, you know, if you think it is a close case decide it under the First Amendment.
JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: I don't know if --that's the question here. You can't -- you can't just claim the mantle. Yeah. What -- what do you think the -- when you say it's a "harder case," why do you think it's a harder case?
MR. AGUINAGA: Because I understand the instinct, Your Honor, that just asking very, very politely or saying very, very politely we think you should take it down, that that shouldn't be a First Amendment problem but the reality is that when somebody like the FBI or somebody lying a deputy assistant to the president makes a statement like that, that statement carries force. That's just the reality. My dear mother is a saint and if she makes a statement -- same statement to Twitter their -- they don't know anything about her, they don't care, but they do care if it is the government.
JUSTICE KAVANAUGH: Why is that? Is it your assumption that anyone in those circumstances is always implicitly threatening adverse consequences?
Aguinaga is actually more conciliant in response than what I believe - yes, when the FBI reaches out to you and says, "we think it would be good if you did X", it is always coercive. The nature of the FBI is that it does not have the ability to merely encourage - every single thing that comes as a "suggestion" from the FBI is inherently coercive to a private party. Thinking otherwise seems like an example of someone that is so lawbrained that they're unable to relate to the experience of a private individual interacting with a powerful federal agency.
[3] Sometimes the government just really, really wants to take down your posts. This theory was pushed most heavily by my least favorite Justice, Kentanji Brown-Jackson:
JUSTICE JACKSON: So my biggest concern is that your view has the First Amendment hamstringing the government in significant ways in the most important time periods. I mean, what would -- what would you have the government do? I've heard you say a couple times that the government can post its own speech, but in my hypothetical, you know, kids, this is not safe, don't do it, is not going to get it done. And so I guess some might say that the government actually has a duty to take steps to protect the citizens of this country, and you seem to be suggesting that that duty cannot manifest itself in the government encouraging or even pressuring platforms to take down harmful information. So can you help me? Because I'm really -- I'm really worried about that because you've got the First Amendment operating in an environment of threatening circumstances from the government's perspective, and you're saying that the government can't interact with the source of those problems.
Quite the counter. Sure, you may believe that you're guaranteed speech rights, but the government actually has a duty to silence you if your speech is, like, bad. It takes a very sophisticated legal mind to contextualize Brown-Jackson's perspective on the First Amendment, that's for sure.
Anyway, the tenor of the argument made me pretty confident that the Court is going to rule in favor of the government. What grounds they'll have for doing so will be at least mildly interesting. I'm hoping that it will be a narrow ruling, with Roberts spearheading a tailoring doctrine that focuses on the putative lack of traceability and distinguishes between coercion as unacceptable, but strong encouragement being fine. In the worst of all worlds, something like KBJ's principle that the government should censor you if it just thinks you're really bad will be the law of the land. Alito and Thomas will likely offer a short, blunt dissent, probably penned by Alito, emphasizing that the First Amendment actually does say what it says and that implementing censorship via a third-party is fundamentally the same as just doing it yourself.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, one of these isn't like the others.
To be fair, it's now the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
In any case, my position remains that the only reason to have a Bureau of Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms is to distribute those goods to Americans in need and to ensure the quality of said goods.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
21d ago
Not only that, I'd really like to encourage people that have a quick point to just go ahead and post it. You don't need a thesis, just a topic of interest and an opinion with at least some degree of reasoning or fact to back it. If you think it's good or bad that SCOTUS has declined to hear the Deray Mckesson case, you can say so without needing to spend all that long on the matter, for example. People will fill in the details and do their own homework if it's an interesting topic.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1mo ago
I want to talk about how we talk about elections and what’s acceptable for whom to say. Over the weekend, when I was discussing Trump and the reaction to him from the broadly construed left, I told someone that I just genuinely don’t understand the perspective that he’s a “threat to democracy”. Since my interlocutor is on the same page as me with regard to January 6, they didn’t go down that easy and well-trod road, but instead brought up something from before the 2016 election that really rubbed them the wrong way, that they thought from an otherwise neutral perspective was unacceptable behavior, and that’s the way Trump speaks about his acceptance of electoral results. We have a shared recollection of him saying that he would only accept the results if they were fair, but now that I’m sitting down, I want to make sure I know exactly he said:
WALLACE: Mr. Trump, I want to ask you about one last question in this topic. You have been warning at rallies recently that this election is rigged and that Hillary Clinton is in the process of trying to steal it from you.
Your running mate, Governor Pence, pledged on Sunday that he and you—his words—”will absolutely accept the result of this election.” Today your daughter, Ivanka, said the same thing. I want to ask you here on the stage tonight: Do you make the same commitment that you will absolutely—sir, that you will absolutely accept the result of this election?
TRUMP: I will look at it at the time. I’m not looking at anything now. I’ll look at it at the time.
What I’ve seen—what I’ve seen is so bad. First of all, the media is so dishonest and so corrupt, and the pile-on is so amazing. The New York Times actually wrote an article about it, but they don’t even care. It’s so dishonest. And they’ve poisoned the mind of the voters. But unfortunately for them, I think the voters are seeing through it. I think they’re going to see through it. We’ll find out on November 8th. But I think they’re going to see through it.
WALLACE: But, sir, there’s… TRUMP: If you look—excuse me, Chris—if you look at your voter rolls, you will see millions of people that are registered to vote—millions, this isn’t coming from me—this is coming from Pew Report and other places—millions of people that are registered to vote that shouldn’t be registered to vote.
So let me just give you one other thing. So I talk about the corrupt media. I talk about the millions of people—tell you one other thing. She shouldn’t be allowed to run. It’s crooked—she’s—she’s guilty of a very, very serious crime. She should not be allowed to run.
And just in that respect, I say it’s rigged, because she should never…
TRUMP: Chris, she should never have been allowed to run for the presidency based on what she did with e-mails and so many other things.
WALLACE: But, sir, there is a tradition in this country—in fact, one of the prides of this country—is the peaceful transition of power and that no matter how hard-fought a campaign is, that at the end of the campaign that the loser concedes to the winner. Not saying that you’re necessarily going to be the loser or the winner, but that the loser concedes to the winner and that the country comes together in part for the good of the country. Are you saying you’re not prepared now to commit to that principle?
TRUMP: What I’m saying is that I will tell you at the time. I’ll keep you in suspense. OK?
I don’t think this is a cherrypicked example either, instead being a clear articulation of a position that I think Trump has consistently espoused with regard to both the 2016 and 2020 elections, that he will only accept the results of the election if he thinks they were legitimately free and fair (which may well require his victory for him to agree things were on the up and up). The person I was discussing this with thinks this is a terrible way to speak about elections because of the damage caused to trust in institutions by having your highest political officers saying that they really don’t know whether it’s a fair election or not.
I have previously articulated at some length why I think the 2020 election was an absolute mess and why I think the de facto elimination of secret ballots calls all American elections into question. Nonetheless, I have to admit that having a Presidential candidate express the same sentiment is destabilizing. The question I bump into is whether it’s incumbent on the speaker to be the one trying to stabilize things if they truly believe that the election is going to have highly questionable results. As a general matter, I think it would be best for candidates to not deliberately increase the level of uncertainty about a result; if you basically agreed to the rules and security procedures and thought they were fine, you should assure the public that their votes will determine who wins and you’ll win or lose on the merits. But what if you don’t think the election is even close to fair? What should you say? Let’s try a few examples to think about:
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As I describe in the link above, the 2020 election was a mess, with large numbers of ballots cast illegally and laws changed at the last minute. If I were running and believed that, what should I say about it? I don't actually know if it materially impacted the results, but I would be pretty pissed off if my opponents pulled these kinds of stunts in my election.
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If I were running in an Illinois state-wide election in 1982 and there turned out to be over 100,000 fraudulent votes just in Chicago, do I still have to just play along with the crooked machine?
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Should all Russians agree that Putin was fairly elected this Spring? While his margin might be implausible, he probably is popular, so why stir up pointless turbulence?
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Paul Kagame is making Rwanda great again and won 99% of the vote in 2017. His opponent offered him the high praise of saying, “but so far in this election no one in our party has been killed or imprisoned or harassed and that means at least some progress” which was presumably both stabilizing and good for his personal health. Can’t beat that!
Aside from the specific considerations, where at some point an election moves from sincere disagreement about the quality to obviously crooked, there seems to me to be a game theoretical problem with unqualified agreement that there are no concerns about the election. If I repeatedly state that the election is free and fair, am I not limiting my ability to challenge the results if it turns out I was wrong and it’s crooked? Is the game theoretically optimal choice not saying that you’ll see how it goes and assess accordingly? Setting aside problems with Trump’s honesty and bombast, I have trouble with the idea that one should offer such a concession to an opponent that they don’t think is actually a good-faith actor.
But really, I do get the point. Most American politicians don’t talk about issues with the electoral process, favoring stability over personal gain, with the added element of it being likely that they’ll be punished electorally if they attempt to defect from that equilibrium. How should politicians talk about their confidence in elections that haven’t happened yet?
The CDC remains batshit insane on the matter:
Personally, I'll be continuing to run without a shirt all summer. Since 2020, my position has become that the safetyists are wrong about basically everything.
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