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
1yr ago
So I am not sure if this is some kind of cultural shift where black entertainment elites are more willing to criticise Jews...
I think most white Americans would be quite surprised to find out how many black musicians and athletes are into what are typically characterized as fringe religious views - Black Hebrew Israelites, Five-Percent Nation, Nation of Islam, and so on. Even among people that are aware of guys like Jay-Z repping these groups, I think most whites don't realize just how deeply weird and racist these religions are. For example, Five-Percenters on race:
As in the Nation of Islam, Five Percenters believe that the original inhabitants of the world were Black (which they refer to as the "Asiatic Blackman" and believe had inhabited the earth for "66 trillion years") who ultimately descended from the Tribe of Shabazz, while the White race are evil "devils" who were created 6,000 years ago on what is today the Greek island of Patmos by a 'rogue bigheaded scientist' named Yakub (the Biblical and Qur'anic Jacob) who was of the Meccan branch of the tribe. After the Whites attempted to rise up against their creators, they were exiled to the caves of "West Asia" - what would later be known as Europe. The Yakub origin story is the basis for all Five Percenter racial understanding.[72]
When you start flipping through the Wikis, you find some pretty aggressive claims. The Black Hebrew Israelites are particularly antisemitic, but they're not all that picky about who they direct racism at. If you ever get a chance to hang around outside the basketball arena in DC, these guys are out there preaching, and they are wild. They insult whites, they insult Asians, they even insult black people that associate with whites. If you ever want to see what "hate" looks like in person, these guys are the perfect embodiment of it.
Anecdotally, I've had a surprising number of black folks mention these sorts of things offhandedly - not that they've fully bought in and not that they're personally hateful or anything, but just stuff like, "hey, did you know that black folks were actually the original Jews?". A black guy at a dive bar that was chatting with my (Asian) wife and I had some odd ideas about the ancestry of Asian people. Occasionally you'll hear an athlete mention something like this.
The only thing unusual about Kyrie is that he's stubborn enough to be blunt, open, and refuse to take it back. There's usually a gentleman's agreement to just not poke at people's weird beliefs too much, but I guess it's just too tempting with Kyrie and Kanye.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
Protest generally entails disruption, and disruption means that at the margins, sometimes, somewhere, something like this will happen
I see sentiments like this pretty consistently, that protestors need to be able to impede others and disrupt them to make them listen. What I don't follow is how this doesn't grant full license for retaliation and escalation - is that simply ruled out as a possibility on the basis that the protestor is righteous, so there is no license to response to impedance with violence? Surely if one of these protestors was doxxed and I went to their house and simply refused to allow them to exit their door, they'd have legitimate license to use force against me, right?
I'm not being sardonic, I genuinely don't understand why refusing to allow someone to pass isn't provocation to violence.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
My wife and I watched this on the local news last night and had the same thought - "man, fuck these parents". Seriously. As far as the kids and the "flamethrower" go, I'm filing both under the Boys Will Be Boys category. The kids were engaged in low-level, mischievous pranks that have been common as long as humanity has existed, got caught and probably properly scared by the adults. This isn't a real problem! Maybe the kids shouldn't TP houses and maybe the adult overreacted, but whatever, no one's hurt and the whole thing is pretty funny.
But the parents? I barely even know what to say. I can't imagine, as a teen, having gone to my parents and informed them of my activities if this happened. I would have been in deep shit! I'm absolutely baffled every time I hear one of these stories with narcissism transferred onto the children reaching to new heights of "my baby didn't do nothing wrong".
“I want Jim Langkamp held accountable for not protecting (the students),” said Anne Burgess, the mother of Zach Burgess. “One of the things that we always teach our kids is guilt by association. We hold our kids and our athletes to the same code, and Jim, by associating with Mr. Kolar, and then not stopping and preventing this from happening, is critical to why he should not be allowed to be around these kids anymore.”
I really don't even know how to respond to Anne other than shaking my head and saying, "you stupid bitch". I was unsurprised that the news segment didn't include any of the boy's fathers.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
6mo ago
While granting that it's probably a small part of the zeitgeist, who the hell wants these women for commanding officers? Worse than the general impression from the photo and worse still than the display of naked racial supremacy is knowing that the top brass above that will simply lie about plain statutes to protect these favored regime pets:
The inquiry concluded that the photo was among several taken in the spur-of-the-moment. It was intended to demonstrate “unity” and “pride,” according to the findings of the inquiry.
In addition to concluding there was no violation of DOD Directive 1344.10, the findings state, “that based upon available evidence none of the participants, through their actions, intended to show support for a political movement.”
This is ridiculous! They're throwing up a classic gesture of racial and leftist politics. One finds it hard to believe that a group of white male cadets performing a Roman salute would be able to get away with claiming that it was mere unity and pride, and therefore a non-political gesture, worthy of no discipline.
Does this sort of thing matter? I genuinely don't know. I'm not hanging around 18-year old kids that are looking at entering enlisted ranks. I have no idea if they're even cognizant of these sorts of things. If they are, I would certainly expect it to be discouraging and demoralizing to know the politics of the officer corps and top brass.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
10mo ago
Education is a public good, which should provide broad social benefits. Universities and the government should maintain the right to press on the scale to ensure democratically available and efficient outcomes.
Old post of mine at the old place, but I want to reiterate my objection to referring to education as a public good:
On student debt forgiveness, I'm seeing the emergence of a new framing that seems almost completely nonsensical to me. In a recent Voxsplainer, this quote is included from a policy person:
“What’s attractive about student debt cancellation in this moment is that in addition to righting a policy wrong — which is the decision to make the cost of college an individual burden when I would say it’s a public good — is that it can help stimulate the economy at a moment when we need economic stimulus. And it has significant racial equity implications as well,” said Suzanne Kahn, director of education, jobs, and power at the Roosevelt Institute and an advocate for complete federal student debt cancellation. It’s also something Biden could try to do independently of Congress, which is attractive since stimulus talks have stalled out.
I want to emphasize the use of "public good" there - this doesn't mean something that's good for the public, this is a specific economic term used deliberately. The meaning is:
In economics, a public good (also referred to as a social good or collective good) is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous.
...
Non-rivalrous: accessible by all whilst one's usage of the product does not affect the availability for subsequent use.[8]
...
Non-excludability: that is, it is impossible to exclude any individuals from consuming the good.
This is not at all what university educations look like. Not only are degrees both rivalrous and excludable, they're also positional goods that convey signaling benefit to their recipients. To make them non-rivalrous and non-excludable would substantially remove their value to the individuals receiving them. We can imagine a world that looks like that, where Harvard offers all of its classes online to anyone that would like to take them and anyone that signs up and passes receives that Harvard degree, but that looks nothing like the world we actually live in.
From my perspective, student loan forgiveness would be one of the worst policies in American history. It would:
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Reward irresponsible people that had no plan to pay debts freely entered into.
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Reward universities that conferred expensive degrees that don't have an actual return on the investment.
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Reify moral hazard and perverse incentives related to the above.
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Continue to inflate college costs due to the expectation that no one actually has to pay for anything.
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Further the class/social war by explicitly choosing to extract from non-university labor to reward the formally educated.
Almost all of the upsides seem to me to be incredibly short term and ignore normal human reactions. To me, the justifications all look like sophistry in service of smash-and-grab politics.
As an addendum to the above, even if I were to take a less formal definition of "public good" as just meaning something that has positive externalities, I would need an explanation for why the value of an education isn't primarily captured by the educated individual and instead accrues more broadly. Sure, there is going to be surplus value from some educations, but it's going to be pretty hard for me to understand how a Harvard-educated attorney or financier isn't actually capturing the majority of the economic value produced by their skills.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
Anecdotally, quite a few people that "work a lot" are actually just nominally present for a large number of hours, available in a fashion that's close to on-call, but not really doing what you'd think of as work. How many of us that post here do so while we're "working"? How many things are purchased on Amazon during standard office hours? The standard work week may not have formally changed, but quite a few white-collar employees have quietly elected to work 20 hours per week and most businesses don't seem to really care as long as the core work gets done.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
I have mixed feelings. I want a border that is fully hardened against incursions and to turn away every single person with a bogus asylum claim from south of the border, which in my view is every single person with an asylum claim from south of the border. Nonetheless, framing it as being about the spread of Covid has always seemed like a dirty trick, a way to get around the preference for open borders that many in the bureaucracy seem to hold. On one hand, this trick is fine because it's in response to the trick of using "asylum" to create de facto open borders, on the other hand, I just don't like lying.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
Is Dylan Mulvaney the Trans Andy Kaufmann?
Watching the Dylan Mulvaney spectacle play out has left me with an odd feeling that I’ve struggled to quite put a finger on, with Mulvaney causing me to have something like an uncanny valley reaction to his transition and demeanor. I don’t mean this to say that Mulvaney looks almost female, but not quite, I mean that Mulvaney gives me the impression of someone that isn’t sincere about transitioning, but has put enough effort into it that I’m not exactly sure what’s going on and what to make of this person. In light of the recent Bud Light debacle I’ve finally settled on an explanation that makes more sense to me - Mulvaney is a modern Andy Kaufman, playing the part of a trans person well enough to convince some people, while others are in on the joke, and all of them contribute to Mulvaney’s accrual of fame and cash.
Who was Andy Kaufman? I think the Wiki summary is better than anything I’ll write up:
During this time, he continued to tour comedy clubs and theaters in a series of unique performance art/comedy shows, sometimes appearing as himself and sometimes as obnoxiously rude lounge singer Tony Clifton. He was also a frequent guest on sketch comedy and late-night talk shows, particularly Late Night with David Letterman.[6] In 1982, Kaufman brought his professional wrestling villain act to Letterman's show by way of a staged encounter with Jerry "The King" Lawler of the Continental Wrestling Association. The fact that the altercation was planned was not publicly disclosed for over a decade.
Kaufman died of lung cancer on May 16, 1984, at the age of 35.[7] As pranks and elaborate ruses were major elements of his career, persistent rumors have circulated that Kaufman faked his own death as a grand hoax.[6][8] He continues to be respected for the variety of his characters, his uniquely counterintuitive approach to comedy, and his willingness to provoke negative and confused reactions from audiences.[6][9]
Comedian Richard Lewis in A Comedy Salute to Andy Kaufman said of him: "No one has ever done what Andy did, and did it as well, and no one will ever. Because he did it first. So did Buster Keaton, so did Andy."[96] Carl Reiner recalled his distinction in the comedy world:
Did Andy influence comedy? No. Because nobody's doing what he did. Jim Carrey was influenced—not to do what Andy did, but to follow his own drummer. I think Andy did that for a lot of people. Follow your own drumbeat. You didn't have to go up there and say 'take my wife, please.'[97] You could do anything that struck you as entertaining. It gave people freedom to be themselves.[98]
Reiner also said of Kaufman: "Nobody can see past the edges, where the character begins and he ends."[99]
Kaufman made people laugh, get angry with him, and even physically attack him by playacting at different roles so successfully than people couldn’t tell where the sincere Kaufman stopped and the characters began. When I watch Dylan Mulvaney advertise native-scented deodorant, I don’t see someone that’s genuinely trying to be a woman. I see someone that’s clowning the concept, mocking women, mocking trans people, and exploiting the clicks for fun and profit.
I wasn’t around for Kaufman, so this comparison is likely imperfect. Nonetheless, watching people react to what sure looks to me like a running joke as though it’s perfectly sincere has been entirely surreal. I see people on the pro-trans side treating Mulvaney as sincere. If I’m right and this is a running joke, Joe Biden sure didn’t get the word. My inclination has been to chalk this up to people becoming sufficiently accustomed to never question claims from trans people that playing along with Dylan Mulvaney is no different than the rest of it, and even if they have doubts, they’re surely not going to look at Dylan and saying, “oh, come the fuck on”. So even though this was weird, it wasn’t until the Bud Light thing that it began to really seem hyperreal to me.
Here, watch this 35 second reaction video from Kid Rock. What’s going on here? Is Kid Rock sincerely pissed off at Bud Light, so pissed off that the only way to express it is with a burst of automatic weapons fire supplemented by some covering fire from a shotgun-wielding buddy? Is he basically sincere in his reaction, but strongly exaggerating the reaction because it’s funny? Is he ambivalent, but doing it for the clicks and lols? Is he part of the Bud Light advertising campaign, just driving the product into people’s mindspace? Does he agree with me that the whole thing is a big joke and he’s just rolling with his own improv? I don’t know and I don’t even know how I would know.
Vox reports that people have reacted in real life:
Don, a liquor store owner in Arkansas who requested to remain anonymous so he “doesn’t get caught up in the wokeness,” told me he’s seen a 20-25 percent dip in Bud Light sales since the controversy hit, with his admittedly small sample size of shoppers seemingly opting for Miller Lite and Coors Light instead. However, he doesn’t expect the backlash to stick. “A lot of people are talking about it, fired up about it, they’re never drinking Bud Light again, yada yada yada, but they’ll be drinking them in a month, as soon as the news cycle quits,” he said.
Well, what are those people thinking? Are they genuinely pissed, but not so pissed as to permanently give up a product that seems completely fungible with other light beers? How about Ben Shapiro:
The post started to pick up steam in conservative circles relatively quickly. Right-wing commentator Ben Shapiro decried the collaboration on his show, saying, “Well, folks, our culture has now decided men are women and women are men and you must be forced to consume products that say so.” Shapiro appears not to be much of a Bud Light fan himself, so he probably doesn’t have much to boycott. “I understand Bud Light is piss water masquerading as beer,” he said, “so I guess that, you know, it’s sort of trans beer.”
Well, I’m glad he at least kept the on-brand smugness. In fact, no one seems to be missing out on their normal branding, which lends itself to the hyperreal experience. In keeping with that, I will smugly note that I don’t drink that shit anyway and I’ll be cracking an IPA from a real industry underdog - Lagunitas(tm), a tiny subsidiary of a little-known international parent company. Thank God that I’m not getting taken in by all this hyperreal marketing.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
Who typically earns more in today’s America: a landlord in a poor neighbourhood or one in a rich neighbourhood?
You might assume the posh landlord, whose tenants bring more money and less risk. But according to Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond, you would be wrong.
I suppose this is a good example of how much of a bubble I live in that everyone that I spend much time talking to about finances would understand this to be an intuitive and obvious result, not a surprise. That the tenants bring more money and less risk immediately implies that the rate of return should be expected to be lower in any environment where the investors are decently informed about the relative expected profits and risk profiles. This is the opposite of surprising, it's an expected, intuitive, and appropriate outcome. One doesn't even need to get into how unpleasant dealing with lower class tenants is, just including the increased scale and decreased risk of higher class tenants makes the result that landlords willing to serve the lower class will have higher margins obvious.
To move onto pieces that aren't as obvious to people who haven't dealt with rental properties at all, we can then add that low-class tenants require much more time investment to deal with damage to properties, evictions, collection of payment, and even crime. Since property management requires actual labor rather than just being an input-free source of profit, it stands to reason that the increase management labor will further increase the required ratio of rent to capital. I suppose on some level this isn't quite fair for a poor tenant actually does their best to make payment, but in the aggregate, I'm not seeing the unfairness.
On a subjective level, I absolutely promise that I would prefer to take lower returns on my investments in exchange for not dealing with the underclass - I cannot exaggerate how terrible the poor are to deal with when it comes to rental properties. The endless array of excuses, the filth that many of these people live in and subject property to, the low-level criminality, the lying about other occupants and pets, the badly behaved children that destroy cupboards, trim, and other pieces of property... it's all more than you can imagine if you're a normal middle-class person. All any normal investor wants is to put up capital, provide a decent service, and receive payment in return for it, but you're going to get much more than you bargained for if you sign up to provide housing to the poor.
I would add Long Covid to this list of illnesses. Of course, post-viral symptoms from a nasty viral infection are a real thing that impact some non-trivial number of people, but the distribution of Long Covid doesn't make much sense if it's that. We have a disease that can't be identified with reliable physical markers; per the CDC:
A positive SARS-CoV-2 viral test (i.e., nucleic acid amplification test (NAAT) or antigen test) or serologic (antibody) test can help assess for current or previous infection; however, these laboratory tests are not required to establish a diagnosis of post-COVID conditions. SARS-CoV-2 RT-PCR and antigen testing are not 100% sensitive. Further, testing capacity was limited early in the pandemic so some infected and recovered persons had no opportunity to obtain laboratory confirmation of SARS-CoV-2 infection. Finally, some patients who develop post-COVID conditions were asymptomatic with their acute infection and would not have had a reason to be tested.
Even more strikingly, Long Covid correlates with belief in having Covid rather than positive tests:
Conclusions and Relevance The findings of this cross-sectional analysis of a large, population-based French cohort suggest that persistent physical symptoms after COVID-19 infection may be associated more with the belief in having been infected with SARS-CoV-2 than with having laboratory-confirmed COVID-19 infection. Further research in this area should consider underlying mechanisms that may not be specific to the SARS-CoV-2 virus. A medical evaluation of these patients may be needed to prevent symptoms due to another disease being erroneously attributed to “long COVID.”
The CDC demographic breakdown of who says they've had Long Covid is fascinating - women report it much more frequently than men, but transgendered people more still, bisexuals report Long Covid much more than straight or gay people, and there doesn't look like any correlation between races and states that makes sense with infection rates or severity of illness. Other work shows much higher rates among people with self-reported histories of anxiety.
As Scott suggests, I'm not saying that these people aren't experiencing something quite unpleasant, but I am saying that it's often not a product of a strictly viral or immunologic cause.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
7mo ago
The question I keep coming back to when I see these pro-Palestinians-murdering-Jews rallies is, "why are these people here?". That's my instinctual response to seeing this in New York, Toronto, Sidney, really any nice, polite, Anglo-founded civilization. Don't get me wrong, I understand why they want to be here, there's all sorts of material goods to be gained by moving to nice, polite, Anglo-founded civilizations. What I mean is how did we wind up with a set of policies that allowed immigration of people that were going to bring their old ethnic hatreds and import them to nice, polite, Anglo civilizations. I can't really begrudge black Americans for holding a grudge over American history and I certainly will grant that Native Americans have a point or two. But why the hell did we add a set of people with Middle Eastern grievances to celebrate the barbaric murder of Jews?
This is, of course, rhetorical and I am familiar with the history of immigration in these countries, but I just can't get past that being my sentiment every time. Whether people have a right to be bigots or not, Sydney didn't need to invite them in to do on the steps of the Opera House. The people that want to engage in desert barbarism should be doing so in said desert, not in Times Square.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
7mo ago
somewhat charming cast
I think it's hard to overstate how heavily the show was driven by Hugh Laurie just being really, really good at delivering the House role. The rest of the cast does a good job too, but Laurie is perfectly cast, well written, and consistently delivers sardonic humor that keeps the whole thing running. Maybe the exact jokes don't get written that way in 2023, but the basic character would work just fine and would simply be taking shots at someone else instead.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
9mo ago
'Why is peepul thinking we wuz talkin' 'bout killin' peepul? Y they not get de IMPORTANT ENVIRONMENTAL CLIMATE CHANGE FIGHTIN' POINT?'
I thought this was going to be a post about the NYT fretting about "backlash" to the Kill the Boer song.
On topic, the climate radicalization I see forming is turning me into a "climate change denier". I am agnostic on the impact of human emissions on the climate and tend to assume that the basic described effect of CO2 upregulating temperature is probably right, but I am increasingly seeing framing of "climate catastrophe" and "existential threat", to which I think just outright saying that this isn't happening is probably closer to the truth than some middle-ground. In the same way that "Covid is just a cold bro" would get closer to my preferred policies than "Covid is a very serious emergency", I think "climate change is not a big deal and has always happened" will be closer to my preferred policies than "climate change is literally going to end humanity" and I probably have to pick a side.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
Sure, this passes the sanity check.
Really though, I want to step back from that for just a moment and focus on just how disingenuous I believe the puberty blocker discourse to be from trans advocates. Without linking to outside drama, there were two threads in my local subreddits yesterday regarding how puberty blockers are "completely reversible", that they're validated by medical science, and have been long-used. Here's one example:
Even if a kid just wanted attention and convinced everyone around them they were trans, the side effects are basically non-existent...stop taking the blockers and continue on with puberty.
This is bullshit, and not in a fashion that implies misunderstanding, but the product of absolutely ridiculous lies that anyone with a thin grasp of developmental biology can spot in a moment. There is almost zero chance that you can just press pause on an important developmental process for years at a time and have it be "completely reversible". Perhaps after rigorous study we can settle on the position that it's the least-bad option available, but passing it off as totally harmless, so harmless that it could be used as on someone that just wanted attention is the product of bold-faced lying by people that are ostensibly medical professionals and scientists. That the default position on this has been flipped to it being requisite that you spend a great deal of time dealing with bone structure or any other singular dimension is privileging the null hypothesis despite the blatant, obvious reality that puberty has massive effects and that delaying it while other growth and aging processes continue will almost certainly have impacts on development. Again, maybe those won't be so bad, maybe on net it turns out to be an improvement for the kids, but I absolutely refuse to treat these as no big deal to pass out like candy.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
11mo ago
All else aside, it is absolutely breathtaking that the mainstream position circa May 2020 was that lab leak was a "racist conspiracy" and that "they have super sketchy meat markets, really dirty people spreading all sorts of diseases" was the thing that decent people believed.
If a singular person (small group of people) is revealed to have been responsible for all the death, of all the suffering, of all the economic disruption and all the curtailment of simple human livelihood that resulted from Covid 19 and the associated panic, what crime can you charge them with?
I still think the worst crimes were the government responses rather than the actual disease. Yes, someone screwing up with a highly contagious virus and then covering it up is a Bad Thing, but I can still figure out why someone acting basically rationally would do that. The insane suite of policies that accomplished absolutely nothing other than economic ruin and political chaos on the other hand... well, it's still not fully legible to me how we wound up there. I would prefer to start with punishment for the policymakers than the scientists.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
Georgia v. McCollum (1992) is all about how a defendant in voir dire acts as an organ of the state when they select their own jury, and therefore are forbidden from considering race when seeking to exclude potential jurors.
Every time that I think I've read the most tortured, dishonest bullshit from a legal expert seeking to arrive at whatever conclusion that they wanted based on their personal feelings, someone calls to attention an even more ridiculous example. This decision really is breathtaking in its utter mendacity and inclination to oppress people that are on trial. I knew that racial discrimination in voir dire had become illegal at some point, but I didn't realize that it was by declaring that the person who is under attack by the state is conscripted into being an arm of the state themselves! The reasoning for granting the state standing is also remarkable:
(d) The State has third-party standing to challenge a defendant's discriminatory use of peremptory challenges, since it suffers a concrete injury when the fairness and the integrity of its own judicial process is undermined; since, as the representative of all its citizens, it has a close relation to potential jurors; and since the barriers to suit by an excluded juror are daunting. See Powers, 499 U. S., at 411, 413, 414. Pp. 55-56.
Frankly, if this constitutes a basis for standing, I have to say that any claims that a litigant ever lacks standing are bullshit, always and forever. If a defendant selecting a jury that is more racially favorable to them constitutes a "concrete injury" to the state on the basis that the state represents all citizens, this is a fully general argument for state standing in every possible example I can think of. I'm sure some brilliant legal mind can explain why that's definitely not the case and my blunt response is that they're simply lying.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
Important distinction:
Forty-three percent of Americans now say they support laws that criminalize the act of providing gender-transition-related medical care to minors
I'd bet you get a very different result if you ask more generally whether it should be legal for people to seek medical assistance in transition. I believe the increase in preference for criminalizing these "treatments" for minors is a product of better information becoming available on what exactly "gender affirming care" means, who is getting it, and how diagnoses are done. The euphemism doesn't exactly call to mind surgical mutilation of mentally ill teens, but many people now understand "gender-affirming care" to include surgical mutilation of mentally ill teens.
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
3mo ago
As ever, there is absolutely no reason to treat objections to specific methods of the death penalty as good-faith disagreements. The overlap between people that insist that another method be used and people that don't want anyone executed is almost complete. For those of us that think there should be at least an order of magnitude more executions, most of us don't actually care about the method; if I thought updating from firing squad to some fake and lame "humane death" would be a compromise that gets people to stop trying to save the lives of vile murderers, I would take the compromise. I do think execution should be done by methods where the executor can't avoid the fact that they're ending a life, but whatever, I'm not that insistent on the point.
While the United States is slow about it and doesn't execute enough people, that it still does it to some of the worst people in the world is a great example of it retaining civilizational superiority over countries that take pride in their weakness.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
4mo ago
The problem with Trump is the same as the problem with Clinton - the other side hates and fears him so much that running him drives up turnout on the other side. Anyone who doesn't do that will likely have a better electoral outcome.
I believe this is now fully baked in for all Republican candidates. Haley gets GoodGuy points at the moment because she's a loser that has zero chance of beating Trump. If she were nominated, she would immediately be a Nazi, dangerous to our sacred trans children and innocent asylum seekers. Normal, completely ordinary policies from a decade ago are now treated as signs of literal fascism. We're going to need a long period of de-escalation before a Republican winning the Presidency isn't treated like a reason for riots.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
10mo ago
It was both of them! One source here.
After she was sworn in, Kagan told Scalia about how she had invited herself to one of his hunting trips.
"He thought it was so funny, he was on the floor laughing," she remembered.
Scalia took Kagan to his gun club and began teaching her gun safety and how to shoot. After he declared her ready, the two began taking hunting trips together, which is when they began to bond. Birds in Virginia, deer in Wyoming, duck in Mississippi — over the years, the justices traveled, hunted and got to know each other better.
"He was as generous and warm and funny as a person could be. I just so appreciate all the time I got to spend with him," she said. "I miss him a lot."
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
I frequently see Somalia trotted out as what a limited state might look like, but surely you can see why people who prefer a limited state don't find that compelling? Setting aside that the reference is outdated and Somalia has a government with explicit power over just about everything, "limited government" and "collapsed government" are not synonyms. Outside of the most fringe libertarians, people that favor limited government are not suggesting that there be no government to enforce contracts and maintain general public order. Rather, the claim is that governments shouldn't have the powers flexed during Covid or shouldn't be reallocating half of the economy.
Regarding blank slates, I'm inclined to note that the demographics of Somalia aren't what some of us would consider conducive to being the sort of place I'd like to live. I might even go so far as to note that I expect any local unit that has a sufficient number of Somalis to become the sort of place I would not like to live in short order.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
First, you're mostly just going to catch the stupidest criminals this way. The smarter criminals will be able to evade capture for much longer. So we're only catching people who would have eventually been caught, anyways.
Why is this bad? Removing the dumbest and most impulsive criminals from society as fast as possible seems like a net boon. Letting them run around doing dumb, malicious things when they're readily observed being dumb and malicious just seems like a terrible plan.
Second, stupid criminals will make stupid choices. They'll make the decision to run/fight more often than not. This means cops could get injured, or some dumb criminal (and many criminals are legitimately mentally retarded) will get hurt/killed.
Doesn't this contradict the first point? If you're going to need to arrest these imbeciles at some point, you might as well get it over with.
If a citizen ever lays hands on these individuals, we send in the real police to do a summary execution. Otherwise cops aren't involved in anything to do with those stops or enforcement of those laws.
Wait, I thought you were just saying that arresting the low-level criminals was a problem because it's not politically tenable...
It's absurd to pay police officers to be stopping people for broken traffic lights, or for littering, or for evading fares. Because then everybody becomes guarded in their interactions with police.
Well, not everybody. Pretty much all decent people just don't litter or jump turnstiles.
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.
Gender Identity and Sports - Once More Around The Track
There has been ample discussion regarding whether trans women should be able to compete in women’s sports, ranging situations as unpopular as Fallon Fox celebrating the bliss of fracturing women’s skulls in cage fights to the silliness of the Boston Marathon extending women’s qualifying times to anyone that says they’re non-binary. For better or worse, some of this is starting to wash out to actual policies at the highest levels of sports, with World Athletics banning trans women from competing as women in the Olympics. Personally, I would regard this as an obvious and easy decision, with no reasonable debate to be had. For the other side, here’s trans sprinter Halba Diouf’s feelings on not being allowed to compete as a woman and here is Science
insistingarguing that the null hypothesis should that be trans women don’t necessarily have an advantage.This is sufficiently well-worn territory that I don’t really expect anything fresh to be said at this point. Instead, I want to focus on something that I’ve always personally thought was quite a lot more difficult to judge correctly, which is athletes that were assigned female at birth, but have conditions that cause them to have abnormally high testosterone, such as XY chromosomes. In recent years, this seems to be coming up more often, possibly because of awareness of it being a thing that happens, possibly because the increased money and visibility of women’s sports has begun to select for increasing levels of biologically unusual people, or possibly because of something that’s not occurring to me. The first one I was aware of was Castor Semenya, who I’ve always had a soft spot for because it seems like a really tough break to have been born labeled as a girl, lived your life as a woman, competed and won at the highest levels, then get told, “nope, sorry, your chromosomes don’t match, so you’re banned in the future”. I hope that regardless of my positions on these issues to always extend that basic level of empathy to someone who truly was not at fault in the creation of a difficult situation.
I recently bumped into an article tying the plight of Diouf to a Senagalese sprinter who turned out to have XY chromosomes and high T, resulting in a ban from the Olympics and this is what gets to the heart of the matter:
First, I’d like to note that this objectively is discrimination and that takes us right to the heart of the point - having a women’s category in sports is inherently discriminatory. That’s the whole point, to discriminate men from women and create a category that is feasible for the best women to win, hence we must determine what a woman is for the purposes of that competition. That a policy is discriminatory simply cannot suffice as an argument against it, particularly when the whole point of the category is to implement a form of discrimination!
Second, I think Coe’s answer is correct and neatly covers all of these scenarios. I used to have a tough time with them, precisely because of the desire to be fair to women like Semenya, but the reality is that Caster Semenya simply isn’t a female and the whole point of women’s sports is to allow women to compete on equal footing against other women. That this will feel unfair and exclusionary to some tiny percentage of the population that has either a gender identity disorder or chromosomal abnormality is barely an argument at all - elite athletics isn’t actually an inclusive activity, it is exclusive and filters for the absolute best in the world for a given ruleset. Within track, use of performance-enhancing drugs is strictly monitored, with spikes in biological passports used to ban athletes even if what they used cannot be identified. With such tight constraints and rules on what physical specifications athletes are allowed to have, I no longer favor something so inclusive as to allow XY or other gender-abnormal athletes to compete - the women have to be actual women competing against other actual women. If nothing else, Lia Thomas has helped provide me some clarity on the absurdity of muscle-bound, testosterone-fueled males in women’s sports.
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