gattsuru
6hr ago
The likely worst-case legal scenario is a lawsuit followed by settling out of court for a trivial amount.
Depends on what you consider trivial. TraceWoodgrains pointed to Midler v Ford in California, and it's foundational for Californian law, but the punchline is that Ford got off scot free, and the ad agency in question was hit for 400k USD. But that's because Midler was an issue of first impression at the time, limiting evidence of 'evil motive'; contrast the later Waits v Frito where Frito-Lay and its advertising company got tapped for a combined $2m USD over an ad that "broadcast in September and October 1988 on over 250 radio stations located in 61 markets nationwide" (though the advertising company had verbally offered to indeminfy Frito-Lay before running the ad). Contrast in turn White v. Samsung, where a literal robot acting as but clearly not Vanna White, which rhymes with today's problem, and ended up at 400k USD over a fiery dissent.
It's not business-ending, at least for a business OpenAI's size -- even adjusted for inflation and for how much Californian juries hate tech companies, I'd expect closer to 1m than 100m. But for all the philosophical problems with an expansive right of publicity, it's not toothless.
gattsuru
3hr ago
A good part of the philosophical problem with right of publicity is that it has very little impact outside of the commercial protections, and even the commercial protections are only protective to the point where the broader public knows you. It's very much a cut out to protect celebrities and the famous, not defend the little people. California has an unusually broad combination of statutory and common-law protections, but it's still only something that matters to public figures worried about getting used as an advertising or product campaign.
((Other 'moral rights' have similar problems: see VARA for a particularly ugly one.))
But that specific context impacts here, at least if Altman did what people are thinking he did.
gattsuru
5hr ago
A lot of work goes into these things, cadences, pitch, pronunciation; once you're far enough in you can't change voices without changing a lot of other work.
Eh... I dunno.
Historically, yes, but a lot of the recent tools are amazingly good. This guy (cw: FFXIV spoilers up to 6.0, NSFW audio) is audibly AI-gen, but it's based on a character that has maybe an hour or two of voice lines, total, and while it's ElevenLabs rather than running on a home desktop, I'm pretty sure you could get similar results through RVC. Handling more varied content over longer periods would probably want more input media, but it's the work of days rather than months.
gattsuru
3hr ago
(But I'm a homo, so presumably I'm not the target audience, and maybe I'd be a big fan of some Josh Hartnett soundalike with an analogously please-fuck-me inflection, I dunno.)
I mean, there's definitely some male voice actor contributions that turn a piece much more memorable for me (eg, recent NakedSav+SpicyGayDog piece has a 'good puppy', a lot of LewdDev's work), enough that I avoid ASMR/audiobook/RVC stuff because I worry it'll be addictive.
But I don't really want that from a random app, and even as someone who would use (and has used) AI for adult content, I'm hoping that is has uses other than that.
gattsuru
17hr ago
I'd caution that the NRA and its members are technically the 'victim' in the current New York lawsuit, but that didn't stop James from threatening the entire organization's mandate, digging through and almost-certainly leaking a ton of internal records, and pretty much crippling both the legal and political expenditures for one election already and probably a second. Tots coincidentally, no insurance provider in the state is willing to work with the organization, a ton of competent personnel have fled the ship or started planning competitors with all the inefficiencies and lost time that demands, so on. We won't know the full reckoning for a bit (June?), but the possibility that the org ends up under a hostile state's conservatorship is absolutely still in the cards.
Tides doesn't face that threat, but it's not because the state can't fuck over a badly operated donor funnel; it's because Republicans don't have the infrastructure to make that push.
gattsuru
17hr ago
Paxton's condescension at the opposition probably isn't great for the longer-term stability of the nation, but in terms of direct impact, I'm more worried about everybody else. If the future were dominated by the most authoritarian political movements in the country stomping each other's faces, well, it'd be bad, but I can't say it would be bad because of the poor innocent jerks.
It's the people in the crossfire. There's always some fuzzy edges where maybe the immigration enforcement is rough-handed to discourage illegal immigrants, or maybe the LGBT restrictions are breaking privacy For The Children, or what have you, but there's also times where people are pretty obviously hammering a matter to drum up attention, or even just because they'd be expensive in human and financial and political capital to defend, and Paxton hasn't hesitated.
Paxton's far from unique in this, and I'm not sure he's even in the top ten. If politics were the proverbial game of chicken, we've long since gone from simply throwing the steering wheel out the window, to shooting a hired driver and cutting the brake lines. But Garland's been bad enough, and we don't need two in a row.
It mostly didn't work, but settling with Defense Distributed (and giving a not-trivial amount of cash in the settlement offer) is the sort of lawfare I'd expect from a coldblooded conservative, if small-scale by the standards of that sort of cy pres-like lawfare. And then there's the obvious guesswho stuff that didn't work entirely.
I agree that a Count of Monte Cristo-style planned revenge isn't really Trump's strong point, though.
EDIT: that said, I do think it's the sort of thing Paxton would a) have the temperament and skills for, and b) absolutely do it for both political ends and to make an impulsive boss happy.
gattsuru
18hr ago
In some ways, that difference can make it a better metaphor, especially for conversations in the 1990s and early-00s. Questions like whether you can treat sexual minorities with additional caution because of an infectious disease (or even protect them from themselves, as defenders of the Cuban concentration camps sanatorios argue even today), or ethnicities with suspicion because a co-religionist drove a plane into a building are still relevant, even if they're not the central case. Rogue killing someone with a casual touch, or Cyclops blowing up a city block with a blink, are exaggerations, but there are answers to these questions that also answer all the closer ones.
I'm a fan of bringing up trans stuff and gun stuff... well, partly because it makes both sides very uncomfortable, but also because the question of whether a dick gun makes a rapist murderer drives a lot of disagreement. Not all, especially outside of the TERF border, but a decent amount. And one reasonable response is that ability alone does not make for a deadly act: it takes either decision or negligence.
It's just that this ended up not being where the broader progressive movement actually went. There had always been a fraction insistent that prejudgement was fine for even things far smaller than leveling an skyscraper, it was just being pointed the wrong direction, and they won. Once you've decided that the possibility was enough, you're pretty quickly going to find yourself just haggling over the price. At the risk of pointing to metafictional example:
Huntington's disease was a hereditary degenerative disease with cognitive and psychiatric symptoms, one of which was psychosis. Huntington's was seen in perhaps one in eight thousand people, and psychosis was seen in perhaps one in ten of those. If a randomly selected human of Superman's apparent age were to obtain Superman's pwoers, there would be in a one in eight thousand chance that they would both have Huntington's disease and the symptoms of psychosis, the result of which would probably be casualties that would dwarf the Great War by a large margin...
When these probabilities were multiplied together, the final very rough estimate was that Superman had a one in ten chance of bringing about a global scale human catastrophe of some kind in the next thirty years. Even if the odds had been one in a hundred, Lex would have taken a similarly extreme course of action.
The Brooklyn District Attorney's website reports:
“Ghost guns are a threat to New Yorkers everywhere, and my Office is working tirelessly with our partners in law enforcement to stop their proliferation. Today’s sentence should send a message to anyone who, like this defendant, would try to evade critically important background checks and registration requirements to manufacture and stockpile these dangerous weapons. Every ghost gun we take off the street is a win for public safety.”
The District Attorney identified the defendant as Dexter Taylor, 53, of Bushwick, Brooklyn. He was sentenced today by Brooklyn Supreme Court Justice Abena Darkeh to 10 years in prison. He was convicted of two counts of second-degree criminal possession of a weapon; three counts of third-degree criminal possession of a weapon; five counts of criminal possession of a firearm; unlawful possession of pistol ammunition; and prohibition on unfinished frames or receivers on April 16, 2024, following a jury trial.
Taylor, also known as CarbonMike, was both a CTRL-Pew 3d printing enthusiast and a New Yorker, a combination that Didn't Go Well.
The specific charges and sentencing are complex, but if I'm reading matters correctly, almost all sentences run concurrently, so the headline charge about ghost guns, like the charges about possession of pistol ammunition and so on, are kinda swamped by a ten-year sentence for 'assault weapons' and for 'owning five firearms'. There are a few border issues on the text of the statutes, but there's not a ton to argue on whether Taylor complied with these statutes.
((Not least of all because many are vague or broad enough that it's very much up to the local DA to make the decision anyway.))
There's a lot to be debated about whether the laws are constitutional, but not much chance that it matters. The New York Assault Weapons Ban has been the target of prolonged lawfare since before Bruen, with the FPC currently supporting Lane after the state was getting good enough reception in Vanchoff v James about lacking credible threats of prosecution, and that's the case with the stance furthest along. Other statutes, like possession of ammunition or "ammunition feeding devices" without a matching pistol permit, are difficult to write cases to challenge before enforcement at all. Even if the statutes for each of the longer sentences are overturned, bail pending appeal is extremely unlikely. Taylor will have served most if not all of his sentence first, especially given the glacial pace that courts have set for these matters (cfe Duncan).
Taylor also makes the argument that he did not have a fair day in court, and while almost every defendant does that to some extent, his argument is unusually compelling. No few gunnies finding a pull quote from the judge allegedly claiming that "Do not bring the Second Amendment into this courtroom. It doesn’t exist here. So you can’t argue Second Amendment. This is New York." but the gameplay about objections, if honestly stated, is as bad or worse. (I'm unable to find a direct trial transcript.).
Also doesn't matter. There is a right to an impartial judge, but this mostly covers matters like giant campaign donations or hating an entire nationality or literally copying text from a party's submissions, rather than just figuratively being on the prosecutor's side. Even assuming Taylor's (and his lawyer's) summary is accurate and complete, the appeals courts don't care that lower courts hate people accused of making guns.
In some ways, Taylor might be the ideal test case: nothing in the visible court records or DA chest-beating show nefarious intent like violent personal history or planned mass shooting or intent to resell (and New York law places a presumption on multiple possession as for sale), he (was) traditionally employed, he credibly claims that he's never fired a single one of the guns, and at 52, he's aged out of the various high-criminal-risk age brackets. To beat the HBDers to the punch, he's even visibly a minority.
((To beat the HBDers with a stick, if we're framing absolutely everything as part of the progressive stack, I think there's strong evidence that the real top of the stack is whatever matches the politics today in a far more direct manner than mere race.))
Of course, the Brooklyn DA brought the case, knowing that. The judge acted like this, in this case, knowing that. And no matter how dim you might think they are, they're winning, and this know what it takes to win. Whether that's because the courts punt on serious cases because defendants fail to present long evidence of futile requests, because they credibly believe that Taylor's not Perfect Enough for the courts to actually handle or for various gun rights orgs to fund, or because even if they're wrong they'll never suffer for it, doesn't really matter. It's possible that Brooklyn DA took the case because Taylor's social media made it easier to prove, it might be that we're only gonna hear about this case out of many because of said social media, and it doesn't really matter.
There's a lot of ways to snark, in "What's the penalty for being late?" fashion, about how Taylor's non-violent noncompliance with a law has gotten a much longer sentence than nutjobs who were separately violent, or a comparable sentence to a man who literally burned another man to death on the pyre of an Approved Cause. And that's not entirely fair, because the federal system doesn't have parole and New York does, and anyway there's a million different squiggly little variables about the crimes and sentences, and there's nowhere near enough cases to make a deep statistical analysis even if I wanted to try. Gun control advocates will certainly quibble, at the edges, about whether this is really 'non-violent non-violent', since there's always the possibility of later bad acts or theft or loss or mental break.
And Taylor ain't dead yet, despite an (alleged) no-knock raid. The actuarials put decent odds on him even seeing the light of day as a free man again, parole or no. Unlike Mr. Lee, had Taylor expressed his dislike of current law enforcement with a bit what the ATF calls a destructive device through a bit of what I call a broken window, the odds would not be looking so good. But there's no magic court case, here, and no golden BB. This isn't even the strawman of a scifi writer drawing up villains who just want their laws as threats to hang over innocent men. If you are ruled by people who hate you, giving puppy-dog eyes and saying this is just a paperwork crime and no one was hurt won't buy you a cup of coffee before you get absolutely reamed in all the least fun ways, and contra a once-prolific-now-banned poster here, everyone who cares about this stuff is ruled by men who hate them.
This is what table stakes looks like.
gattsuru
2d ago
gattsuru
14d ago
The Death of Trust in Bipartisan Lawmaking
The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act is a 2023 law, driven by nearly a decade of cross-party and cross-tribe interests, best summarized by the intro to this 2018 Atlantic piece:
Mattes honed in on one particular case from the Times story, in which a salesperson at the healthcare company Novartis, a single mother was told by her boss she should consider an abortion. “She didn’t, and after her maternity leave, she said they advised her not to pursue any more promotions due to her ‘unfortunate circumstances at home,’” Mattes said. Those weren’t unfortunate circumstances at home, Mattes said: “That is her son Anthony. Pregnancy isn’t a disease. Babies are a blessing.”
On this particular issue, the conservative Mattes had an unusual ally. A week earlier, several hundred miles away, New York’s Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo had ordered an investigation into New York companies accused of pregnancy discrimination...
While a 1978 amendment to Title VII established pregnancy as a protected characteristic, the PWFA's congressional support saw it as too limited in scope and in what accommodations it could require businesses to hold.
Another point, however, dropped in mid-April:
This isn't necessarily new, or a surprise: some courts had already held that the 1978 Title VII amendment protected abortion as a pregnancy-related medical condition, albeit with the more restricted scope. There are good pragmatic or philosophical arguments in favor or against, either in regards to abortion specifically or as a law in general, and some !!fun!! questions about a possible that the EEOC's rule-making treats as purely theoretical. There are some, if not exactly strong, arguments that the text of the law requires it.
Several Republican congresscritters who voted for and cosponsored the bill promptly blasted this interpretation, swearing that they were sure and assured it wouldn't happen. Social conservatives, on the other hand, prompted sang I told you so.
Mattes and his organization do still exist, but haven't commented on the new regulation. They're not, it can be fairly readily assumed, in a huge hurry to partner with the ACLU on statute-writing or sponsor-wrangling any time soon.
Okay, well that's not a policy I actually care about, so it's at least kinda funny, and .
FFLs and How To Get Your Dog Shot By The ATF
The 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act had many components, but one of many that gun rights advocates pointed out at length as a matter of concern, even well before the law's language was fully concrete, was the redefinition of gun dealers and engaging in the business of firearms sales, from "principal objective of livelihood and profit" to "predominantly earn a profit". The ATF released its final rule on this new statutory definition in early April, shortly after shooting someone in the head while all their agents forgot their cameras at home, explicitly citing the BSCA's new language as cause.
Three guesses on how that went, and the first two don't count:
The activities described in these presumptions are not an exclusive list of activities that may indicate that someone is ‘‘engaged in the business’’ or intends ‘‘to predominantly earn a profit.’’ These presumptions will provide clarification and guidance to persons who are potentially subject to the license requirement and will apply in administrative and civil proceedings.
The presumptions will be used, for example, to help a fact finder determine in civil asset forfeiture proceedings whether seized firearms should be forfeited to the Government and in administrative licensing proceedings to determine whether to deny or revoke a Federal firearms license. These presumptions do not apply in any criminal proceedings but may be useful to judges in such proceedings when, for example, they decide how to instruct juries regarding permissible inferences.
The only thing that the new rule explicitly does not consider to be "predominantly earn[ing] a profit" is if an individual is liquidating all or part of their owned firearms, without (ever?) purchasing new ones, and I wouldn't bet my pet's life on it. In some ways, it's kinda impressive: the final rule, as opposed to the original proposal, reacted to gunnie concerns about the underspecificity of one resale exception by explicitly removing firearms owned for personal protection from it. In some cases, it breaks from the text of the statute. Halbrook highlights a statutory exception that the ATF refines down to covers repair and customization.
I've written before about the same act smothering archery and hunter training programs at schools, and while this was eventually (and to my surprise) amended, that passed late enough to leave programs screwed over for last school year. We'll see how many schools are willing or able to bring them back.
All around me are familiar faces, Worn out places, worn out FACEs
The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act is a 1994 statute from the old days before backronyms were popularized outside of the military, and consisted of three major prohibitions:
- blocking someone from trying to access or provide abortion services
- blocking someone exercising or seeking to exercise the First Amendment right of religious freedom at a place of religious worship
- destroying or damaging a reproductive health care facility or a place of worship
It was considered the height of bipartisan compromise at a difficult time (and Bill Clinton's statescraft, in contrast to the then-expensive Assault Weapons Ban), and like many laws from that era, it reflects a draconian view of punishment. While a first nonviolent offense can 'only' result in a maximum of six months imprisonment and a 10k USD fine, these numbers scale rapidly for repeat offenses, and can be rapidly stacked, even in marginal cases, with other charges to boost the scope of a trial and the possible punishment.
Uh. Except you might notice a pattern in what direction both the successful and failed cases go, and what prongs of the FACE Act they cover. It's not that the feds never prosecute someone for clear violations of this law; they just do it by using an entirely different law that predated and does not scale, and accept plea bargains for the most minimal punishments. That disparity has been around for a while, even if it's only become more obvious with Jane's Revenge floating around.
It does not, as a matter of law, matter whether the FACEs is ever enforced against a specific political viewpoint. And from the view of the 'don't break the laws, fucko' or 'don't block access to public spaces' caucus, I've got little sympathy for protestors getting burned when they signed up for the frying pan. But if you sent a message back in time to the 1994 GOP and told them they were just repeating the 1988 18 USC 247, I doubt they'd have trumpeted it.
Joe Wilson and the Affordable Care Act
There's a number of famous controversies during the run-up to the passage of the Affordable Care Act, along with some lesser-known ones. The extent trans-related healthcare would be covered and what expectations that invoked was a sleeper, while the question of "encouraged end-of-life" care rather famously got above the fold at length.
Joe Wilson is best-remembered, to the extent he's remembered at all, for one of the better-known ones. He shouted out "You lie" during the middle of a joint session of congress where then-President Obama disavowed that "our reform efforts would insure illegal immigrants", a matter Republicans feared would be thrown.
Thanks to the Biden-Harris Administration’s actions, today’s final rule will remove the prohibition on DACA recipients’ eligibility for Affordable Care Act coverage for the first time, and is projected to help more than 100,000 young people gain health insurance. Starting in November, DACA recipients can apply for coverage through HealthCare.gov and state-based marketplaces, where they may qualify for financial assistance to help them purchase quality health insurance.
To be fair to President Obama, he's (officially) been out of office for the better part of a decade. To be less fair to Biden, there's no statute changed about any of this in that whole timeframe, and Obama was using the future tense. Whatever Obama thought he was proposing, this is what his proposal got, and it's not like he's complaining.
Wilson received a reprimand for his outburst. There'd be some irony in him living long enough to crow about it, though he hasn't done so yet. And even if he did, being right is cold comfort for anyone other than the politicians.
One of These Things Is Not Like The Others
The Affordable Care Act, unlike the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act or Pregnant Workers Fairness Act or Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, was more the result of long negotiation rather than long negotiation and compromise between the parties. There are no Republican cosponsors or even congressional votes for the law to be betrayed, because there were no Republican congressional votes for the ACA at all; at most, there were some (long-booted) Blue Dogs.
Quite a large number of moderates, of one stripe or another, drew that as a particular failure. They could, we were told, have gotten more serious concessions; they could, we were told, have achieved their own separate goals. How much they were moderates or 'moderates' often said how much 'they' in the previous passages stood for the GOP or for that particular person's particular goals. During the second half of the Obama years, many of the particular goals side painted the Republicans as the Party of No; after, this obstinate unwillingness to give up a slice of the cake was drawn as both cause and effect of various Republican maladies, from poll numbers among young professionals to failure to integrate into the administrative class to the price of tea in China.
The PWFA and BSCA rulemakings and FACEs prosecutions come as the punchlines to those particularly jokes. No one's come away from any statute feeling the GOP has a better finger on the interests of the public, or was able to represent its people's interests better than the What's The Matter With Kansas asshole. Perhaps these laws are all cherry-picked, and every other major bipartisan statute had everyone walk away smiling, or the GOP betrayed the Democratic Party. Nor, given the speed that even matters as simple as dictionaries have turned to political ends, is there any way to promise that the next time would be different, or that even laws and statutes that conservatives badly want would be resistant. Indeed, the longest delay was the case where they compromised in no amount at all!
You still don't get that many tries to break trust, and it's expensive to rebuild.
To add to The_Nybbler's point, oral arguments in Rahimi were November 2023, a case where an incredibly unsympathetic defendant (alleged multiple shooter, drug dealer, and girlfriend beater) was indicted for possessing a firearm while subject to a domestic restraining order. We won't know for certain how the court rules until the opinion drops, and that probably won't happen for a month (or up to three).
But it's extremely unlikely that this will result in a significantly broadened understanding of the Second Amendment. The most optimistic takes in the gunnie world hope that the Court will allow Rahimi's conviction and just require a finding of 'dangerousness'. Most expect that they'll overturn the lower court, or leave only the most narrow process grounds to protect Rahimi.
And there are reasons beyond oral argument tea-leaf reading for that. It's already happened before in Gary/Greer, where unsympathetic plaintiffs made it easy for the court to decide that for process reasons a prohibited person didn't need to be proven to know they were prohibited.
But even more broadly, there's just not that much of the court touching this right to protect all but the most aggressive infringements in the cleanest-cut cases across the wide scope of all people in a jurisdiction, and sometimes not even that, even as case after case was teed up.
If the Court wanted to protect the rights of people who hadn't been violent, they had a case where a man was banned from possessing guns because he was convicted of counterfeiting cassette tapes in 1987. And they punted. If the Court wanted to protect the rights of people who had suffered mental illness long ago and recovered, they had a case where a man was banned from possessing guns because he had a depressive episode in 1999. And they punted. States requiring guns to have technologies that don't exist? Taking private property without warrant or compensation or grandfathering? License denials for driving while black a police encounter that did not result in an arrest or any evidence of wrongdoing? Punt punt punt.
The best result the gunnie sphere other than Bruen was Caetano v. Massachusetts (2016! and see the massive resistance in O'Neil v Neronha, only finished in 2022). After that, there's maybe the GVR on Duncan v Bonta... except they GVR'd it to the Ninth Circuit, which even at the time had literally never allowed the Second Amendment to do anything, and since broke rules to slow Duncan down further. It's not like Bruen is even the only example: Caniglia v. Strom, was more a Fourth Amendment case, but see the later punts on the massive resistance it has faced by lower courts.
Maybe I get surprised here, or VanDerStok is where (... in 2026? assuming it doesn't get punted then?). But despite an environment with a massive variety of low-hanging fruit, these are the only things the Court cared about, and that's not random.
gattsuru
7d ago
Along with the the impeachment process -- in New York, technically just 'removal', requires recommendation from the governor followed by two-thirds of the State Senate, gfl -- trial-level criminal court judges are appointed by the Mayor of New York City for a lengthy period, mandatory retirement at age 70. Judge Abena Darkeh's current term is set to expire in 2030, so you could just hold the New York City mayoral office for six years time, along with taking over the recommendation system. Again, gfl.
((There's also a rule about residence, but I have no clue if/how it's enforced.))
gattsuru
4d ago
gattsuru
7d ago
To be fair, the Aloha Spirit stuff was downstream of using a state statute to evaluate the state constitution.
To be less fair, that's not how that works for anything else. And the state constitutional provision had the exact same text as the federal Second Amendment. Which the Hawaii Supreme Court decided just didn't apply, with or without any aloha spirit.
gattsuru
12d ago
It was all boiled down to that 5000 number that you’ll see repeated over and over again in Republican criticisms of the bill. What’s worse is that this number is presented as a capitulation to Democrats rather than a ceiling on the use of a draconian new power granted in a heavily conservative bill. It’s presented as if the bill mandates open borders for the first 5000 illegal immigrants every day, and only then begins to enforce some border policies. This is so laughably, bafflingly wrong that it defies belief.
In addition to the obvious no-trust problems -- there was already wide suspicion that official numbers on undocumented crossings (aka gotaways) were underestimates before the feds had additional cause to massage them down, and there's no judicial authority to require the Border Patrol to actually do something even should they report the real numbers, there's some fun questions about how mandatory 'shall' language gets -- the proposed bill had a number of other wide ceilings to its use that your summary glosses over:
- The count only includes "encounters" "between the southwest land border ports", "between the ports of entry along the southern coastal borders", and "between the southwest land border ports of entry of the United States", where "encounter" means physical apprehension and/or seeking admission at a port of entry. Gotaways don't count.
- "Aliens described in subsection (a)(2)(C) [unaccompanied minors] from noncontiguous countries shall not be included in calculating the sum of aliens encountered."
- "If the President finds that it is in the national interest to temporarily suspend the border emergency authority, the President may direct the Secretary to suspend use of the border emergency authority on an emergency basis." [for 45 days out of a year]
- The Secretary of Homeland Security only shall activate the border emergency without review on crossing the numeric thresholds for 90 days for the first year, 75 days for the second year, and 60 days for the third year; the SHS has unreviewable authority to not activate the 'mandatory' emergency for 180/150/120 days, and may not activate it at all the remainder of those years.
- The Border Emergency's exception lists includes "An alien who an immigration officer determines, with the approval of a supervisory immigration officer, should be excepted from the border emergency authority based on the totality of the circumstances, including consideration of significant law enforcement, officer and public safety, humanitarian, and public health interests, or an alien who an immigration officer determines, in consultation with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, should be excepted from the border emergency authority due to operational considerations." [eg, just because there's a border emergency active and mandatory doesn't mean any alien must actually be handled.
- ‘‘(A) SUMMARY REMOVAL .—Notwithstanding any other provision of this Act, subject to subparagraph (B), the Secretary shall issue a summary removal order and summarily remove an alien to the country of which the alien is a subject, national, or citizen (or, in the case of an alien having no nationality, the country of the alien’s last habitual residence), or in accordance with the processes established under section 241, unless the summary removal of the alien to such country would be prejudicial to the interests of the United States. [emphasis added.]
gattsuru
6d ago
Paul Prediger, nee Gauge Grosskruetz, aka bye-ceps, has also filed a civil suit. But yes, I genuinely expected feds to go after him, and it hasn't happened, and that surprised me and does show some limits.
gattsuru
6d ago
Was literally pointing a gun at Rittenhouse, whose friend claimed he said "His only regret was not killing the kid and hesitating to pull the gun before emptying the entire mag into him" (later retracted, tots honest), and who was illegally carrying a concealed weapon after his carry permit had either expired or been revoked.
Yep.
gattsuru
6d ago
I'm not convinced that they were tools that are broken rather than blunted, but even if they are splintered beyond repair, how and when and what happened is worth knowing. Regardless of what matters in the long run, these tools are almost certainly not the only tools vulnerable to the same things.
Namely I thought it was a little weird how focused Hanania was on making sure workplaces be more conducive to finding sexual partners...
While I expect the answer for Hanania specifically is that he's reaching for whatever weapons are available, there are some very serious problems, here:
-
Full-time workers are spending about a third of their waking lives at their workplaces, a sizable portion of their Dunbar-sphere will be made of coworkers, and under current law employers can be liable even for after-hours and off-campus behavior by employees. In many career fields, it's common to spend months with little chance for a social life outside of the office at all. Maybe the 20% of couples just meet up right outside of work, but I'd expect that we're not so lucky, and at least some aren't getting BATNAs.
-
Worse, the modern rule isn't just 'don't fuck your employees/coworkers', but against wide breadths of discussion and behavior adjacent to sex or gender stuff. Enforcement is hilariously inconsistent even in places where employers care (and the number of bullshit lawsuits are Known enough that normal people are often hesitant to bring genuine ones), so people can act as though a lot of this stuff is still allowed, but once you get above a certain size of company you start getting insurers/lawyers/politicians peering in and insisting that your workplace complies so that enforcement Won't Be Necessary. As a result, a lot of spaces for vertical transmission of knowledge about matters of sex and romance no longer exist, or have been thoroughly commandeered into a state-favored presentation.
-
Avoiding the appearance -- or possibility -- of impropriety has serious and significant costs. I'm not sure how much I trust the specific numbers for 'MeToo made men afraid to mentor women', but the end result of that policy ends up meaning I've got a Fun Ethics Question when my workplace has me share a hotel room with a (afaik straight, not my type) guy. This isn't taking all the fun out of workplace socialization, but it's a big and vast set of constraints, often ones heavily dependent on local social norms.
The end result of a sexless public space for men... well, we have examples from other spheres that had to move sex to fully private spaces, and the alternatives that they've developed kinda work, but they come at tremendous cost. Online dating started out rough, and it's since vanished up its own backside in a mix of borderline fraud and unrealistic standards. Bars and mixers have come coincidentally along with a hefty incidence of alcoholism and other abuses.
For Scott:
When I think of wokeness, I think of the great cultural turn around 2010 - 2015... Hanania has no explanation for this. He talks about civil rights laws that have been in place since 1964 (he does say that maybe the new civil rights bill signed in 1991 inspired that decade’s interest in “political correctness”, but The Closing Of The American Mind, generally considered the opening shot in that debate, was published in 1987). Why would 1964 and 1991 laws turn wokeness into a huge deal in 2015? Hanania has no answer.
Again, Hanania might not have an answer because he doesn't care enough to think one necessary, but there's a pretty easy and obvious one.
The Civil Rights Act was intended as written under a hilariously narrow scope for all of its wide claims. That lead to hard cases, and even as late at the 1980s the courts were struggling with matters like whether it was discriminatory if an employer (allegedly) raped an employee, and into the late-90s if it would be discriminatory even if the victim was male. There weren't just hard cases in that they involved sympathetic victims and extremely bad behavior, or even whether they could be arguably within the intent or text of the Civil Rights Act, but because they were also near-universally around things that were separately violations of common state laws that had existed for quite some time, at a time where and when the public was unwilling to allow businesses to wash hands of bad acts by their employees. Government advocates and private lawyers had a pick of both clear violations of the text of this law, or arguable cases for this law that shocked the conscience.
((Scalia delivered Oncale, for example.))
But to do so, the CRA1964 had to establish an industry around fighting racism. The EEOC isn't not five commissioners at a table; it had around 350 employees in the 1960s, which grew into the thousands by the late 1990s. Nor was it alone; other offices downstream of or expanded by the CRA include the Commission on Civil Rights, the (various) Office for Civil Rights, the Office for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, DOE Civil Rights Division, so on. And then around that, built up an industry around selecting and prosecuting private lawsuits, and training people to do this, and training people to train. Now, when the law and interpretation was constrained, and overt discrimination (or bad-for-other-reasons-argued-as-discrimination) cases had the pick of both plaintiff and employer, most cases kept close to the core.
That changed. Some legislation made it easier (eg, the 1991 revision allowed some vaguely-defined set of suits with a theory of discrimination that could not identify specifically discriminatory policies or actions, or to get attorney's fees and thus cases on contingency without proving damages), but the grander problem is that you now had thousands of people who's job was to find discriminatory actors, who were trained to notice the most subtle hints of it, and in no small part who believed in the mission. An increasing number, by the close of the 1990s, had literally never known a world without an EEOC and the norms it wanted to apply across the country; many had been trained by those who worked up through the EEOC's wishcasting of policies it wanted.
That's how you get a lawsuit with an appeal's court opinion released in 2010, about a complaint first pushed in 2006, revolving around the sort of "general civility code" that Oncale specifically disavowed. It's how you get related cases that similarly emphasis a general theory of Bad Person. And it matches the timeline far closer than the standard motions around college campuses or SomethingAwful refuges.
That doesn't make Hanania right -- there's a lot of other stuff in the history, if you poke at it, and that's not to mention that just for this there's a pile of executive orders and regulatory notices and all the social junk around the 2008/2006 elections -- but there's a lot more to this stuff than just looking at the dates laws were implemented.
You, uh, missed a spot. Or, for one without a header, whether one can stop to piss in Albany without risking a felony. And it's not like these things are the only examples -- if I hadn't hit trans stuff separately, I'd be pointing out the entire circuit where the ADA now covers gender identity disorders, despite the explicit text of the ADA excluding that by name!
Pregnant Worker's Fairness Act It should also be noted that the EEOC still has to follow the APA when it comes to procedural matters in promulgation (like notice and comment), so this lack of authority doesn't exactly make it easy for them to run wild.
By which you mean they issued a NPR, and then changed basically zip in response to significant public comment.
Saying outright that the law didn't apply to abortion would have created a situation where the EEOC guidance was directly at-odds with any reasonable canon of legislative interpretation; I don't think any textualist could argue with a straight face that abortions aren't pregnancy-related.
The statute, for whatever it matters, does not cover all pregnancy-related matters: it covers "pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions." It's... actually not that hard to notice the difference between a medical procedure and a medical condition.
Maybe that difference shouldn’t on net matter, or the doctrine of constitutional avoidance should rule. There's perfectly good fairness or policy reasons that it should, and perhaps in a world where the text was about pregnancy-related anythings and conservatives had eaten the administrative agencies, I'd be making arguments that they're betrayed trust in an important compromise.
And yet we're here.
But that's all irrelevant because it's unlikely that this rule (or lack thereof) would ever result in litigation... I've personally never had an employer ask about the nature of any medical procedure I've taken time off to get, or had them ask me which doctor I was going to, and if a doctor's excuse is required, I doubt many employers are going to do internet research to determine if this is a doctor who exclusively performs abortions.
Yet rather than the answer to "It's no big deal" being "fine, then let me win" instead, we find that everyone insists it is both necessary and obvious, no matter how much they have to play with statute's language to get the job done.
Indeed, even were there some central case that were vital or some symbolic victory that should be a big deal to the progressive movement and a trivial one to conservatives, the religious freedom concerns that the EEOC itself claims never happen still can't get a "fine, then let me win". While "The Commission also received tens of thousands of comments asserting that giving certain accommodations for pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions, such as providing leave for abortion, infertility treatments, or contraception, would infringe upon the employer's religious freedom", the final rule gloss over any serious management or standard of those concerns, leaving such questions open to "defenses using a case-by-case analysis" and motioning to a statutory defense that only protects religious organization's ability to hire people of that religion.
((Spoiler: there's few cases only because everyone paying attention knows defending against a suit is high-risk and staggeringly expensive, and there's absolutely no guarantee that the vague religious freedom exceptions might apply until very late in appeals, so the EEOC can get 99.9% of the impact just by noisily threatening enforcement and then shrugging that their political opponents leave the entire topic like a landmine.))
FFLs When the entire point of specific statutory language is to expand a definition, you can't complain too loudly when that definition gets expanded. If you had sole rulemaking authority with regards to this, how would you expand the definition to conform with the new law without simply restating the old definition? I'm sure you can think of a dozen ways that this could be done, but that's beside the point.
Not only could I, eighteen thousand people did, as Halbrook points out in his link, but you're right to say that, too, is besides the point. The ATF and APA do not care about the little people. But it does make this rhetorical question more than a little obnoxious.
But there's a third category of people we've talked about before who the government really doesn't like — people who want to sell guns part-time or as a hobby. You mentioned in a previous post how the ATF no longer will issue FFLs for hobbyists. You can disagree with that stance all you want, but it seems to me that Congress agrees with that and that was the specific intent behind the change in language.
But Congress did not write a law saying that you can not sell firearms as a hobbyist; it wrote that you needed an FFL to sell firearms to "predominantly earn a profit", and the ATF decided that included firearms sales that included a profit at all, or even if they didn't have a profit but might be motivated by the money. Congress has not even modified the statutory requirements for provisioning an FFL in decades! And I'll point again to the ATF happily ignoring the strict text of the statute whenever it decides that it knows best.
When you write that the government really doesn't like them, that's true in the sense that 'the government' means progressives, operating under a presumption that compromise means progressive interests get a large portion of what they demand, and conservative interests get fucked, and not in the fun way.
The problem as I see it doesn't stem so much from the law itself or ATF's interpretation of it but that there is a group of people for whom any further restrictions on gun sales is bad and needs to be stopped.
I can separately argue that the law was badly intended, but I don't think there's anything insightful to point out that people want to ban guns entirely and make being an FFL as difficult as possible and impossible for many. Yes, duh, I predicted that literally before Biden was sworn in as President, I can't pretend to be surprised today. Props to you for at least admitting that the whole point is make onerous rules that drive hobbyists and part-timers from the field, but it isn't exactly some deep cover.
No, the problem as I'm trying to highlight is that there is a group of people who claimed at length that this was -- as held in the name -- a Bipartisan compromise that would include both further restrictions and clarifications protecting gunnies, and this didn't happen at all. The statute still explicitly recognizes private sales, but the ATF doesn't actually recognize any way to clearly comply with it in this rule-making.
In many ways, they would have been better served by flipping anyone who offered claimed concessions the bird. It matters, that for many, that is increasingly clear.
FACE Act It's telling that this law has only become controversial in recent years, after the Biden Administration used it aggressively in the wake of Dobbs. For the first 30 or so years of its existence, the fact that it was never used in cases of church vandalism was never an issue.
It... actually was a pretty big controversy back in the 2008-2012 timeframe, as activists had begun disrupting church services, while both feds and state officials left the matter to civil litigation. The ADF actually brought suit with some limited success in that case, though both the org and the individuals were basically judgement proof.
At least not enough of an issue for 2 Republican presidents to invoke it in 12 years, one of whom was devoutly religious and the other of whom was devoutly into culture warring.
At the same 2008-2012 timeframe, the DoJ was highlighting increased use from the pre-Obama framework where it was largely perceived as targeting bad actors on the scale of arson or bombings. If you want to rest your argument on the masterful control of the DoJ Trump demonstrated, I hope you have fun, but I'm gonna have a hard time taking it seriously.
But it doesn't compare to the Houck case, at least if you actually look at the procedural posture. The information in the Nota case was filed the day before the plea was entered. This itself was several months after the incident. What this suggests was that this was already a done deal by the time it was even on the court's docket; for all we know, the prosecutor could have threatened to throw the book at Nota before offering a misdemeanor charge and a sentencing recommendation as a lifeline.
The information that we can't see or find or read, even presuming it actually exists, does not actually do a good job of protecting trust, especially given the extent this glosses over a wide variety of other stuff in the reporting (Nota spraypainting an employee's face and threw a rock at them, and also spray-painted a police car). The lack of SWAT, I am sure, has a similarly plausible and similarly unprovable charitable explanation.
Indeed, yes, the guy who didn't destroy property or spraypaint anyone in the face could have gotten a plea bargain. Of course, Houck was found not-guilty, while Nota was caught spraypaint-handed. Interestingly, we do happen to have another example I linked where the people were actually guilty of a FACE Act violation against abortion clinics, and one of the protestors plead guilty, turned government witness, and got 10 months in prison for her plea deal.
Yes, I'm sure there's some post-hoc way that This One Is Different. There might even be ways to argue it that doesn't look hilariously biased (Davis conspired to block a hallway! something something sentencing guidelines! two counts, because Nota didn't do two illegal things at once!), though I'm not optimistic. But the readiness that people defending these disparities can discover that it is impossible to evaluate the merits or compare in any statistically meaningful way are starting to echo.
gattsuru
9d ago
I legitimately do not understand why judge's eyes gloss over or even they get angry when it's suggested these people shouldn't be assumed to be the most credible people to ever exist. It's almost comical how much defense counsel has to tip-toe around it until they find essentially a smoking gun.
What's particularly funny is how even defense lawyers get into it. Cfe when themotte's own notice that an FBI agent perjured herself at length during a criminal trial; he was genuinely curious how the FBI agent would weasel out of it (spoiler: easily!), and even entertained the possibility "whether the prosecutors will bother" to bring perjury charges (spoiler: no).
gattsuru
21d ago
That letter and five bucks won't buy you a cup of coffee, these days.
I'm very far from sure what Abbott intends for the Texas Education Agency to do/not do, but one important thing to remember is that, for states and federales, the law saying "shall" means absolutely squat without a directly connected enforcement mechanism and someone who can actually press the button on it. This letter might trigger ESEA compliance review stuff, since ESEA state plans have to comply with federal law in general (though it might not trigger until the next review?), but that ends up with a bunch of meetings before the feds can refuse to provide state funding. Title IX proper is supposed to depend on complaints filed regarding specific acts of discrimination (within 180 days of the act, not adjudicated by other bodies, yada), after which the DoE meets with, which (excluding criminal cases not relevant here) if refused can result in "initiate proceedings to suspend, terminate, or refuse to grant or continue Federal financial assistance to the recipient".
I expect Abbott's more relying on unrelated stays slowing any enforcement -- which seems a mediocre bet, since on one hand you've got the Fifth Circuit, but on the other it's this has been the writing on the wall since Bostock -- but barring that he's playing chicken.
(no, blue states have not denied federal forces the ability to operate, their examples of arguable nullification are more noncooperation than open defiance and resistance)
The line gets murky: refusing to honor an ICE detainer is probably noncooperation from a non-commandeering sense, but literally sneaking an illegal immigrant out the back door to help evade an ICE officer... well, there's a lot of metaphors where the Little People doing unfavored things would be sitting in jail.
gattsuru
4d ago
A California Superior Court judge ruled Wednesday that there is enough evidence for Moorpark College professor/pro-Hamas agitator Loay Alnaji to go to trial on charges of manslaughter in the death of Paul Kessler, a Jewish man who was involved in a counterprotest on November 5, 2023. Alnaji was involved in a confrontation with Kessler on that Sunday afternoon when he allegedly hit Kessler in the face with a bullhorn, causing Kessler to fall and fracture his skull. Kessler died approximately seven hours after the altercation...
Dr. Othon Mena, Assistant Chief Medical Examiner for Ventura County, conducted Kessler's autopsy and testified as to his findings. Mena found four exterior injuries to the left side of Kessler's face, along with a tear inside Kessler's mouth and damage to Kessler's tongue where he'd clenched his teeth, likely after being hit with the bullhorn. After examining the bullhorn and the grooved pattern of the rubber lip on the bottom of it, Mena concluded that the scrapes/lacerations to Kessler's left chin, left upper lip, and the outer corner of his left eye were caused by the bullhorn striking Kessler, and that the black eye noticeable on autopsy was either caused by the bullhorn strike or Kessler's subsequent fall.
Mena also testified that a 2-inch curvilinear tear on the back of Kessler's head and a skull fracture were caused by the assault or fall.
A crime lab technician testified that Kessler's DNA was found on three portions of the bullhorn: near the bottom, where a red/brown bloodstain was found, and in two sections of the bottom lip of the bullhorn.
I'll caveat that this is a little more complicated than the quick summary -- you can find some Catholics being very skeptical and treating the accusers as heretics into the height of the early modern witch trials, and there's a controversial claim of an English witch-execution as early as the 900s. It's not clear how much the earlier Church was free of witch-hunting among the laity because they didn't believe in it (or were told to not believe in it), and how much because the records weren't made to start with.
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