Snope v. Bonta has dropped like a gravestone:
The State of Maryland prohibits ownership of AR–15s, the most popular civilian rifle in America. Md. Crim. Law Code Ann. §4–303(a)(2) (2025). This petition presents the question whether this ban is consistent with the Second Amendment. The Fourth Circuit held that it is, reasoning that AR–15s are not “arms” protected by the Second Amendment. Bianchi v. Brown, 111 F. 4th 438, 448 (2024) (en banc). I would grant certiorari to review this surprising conclusion.
That'd be a great opinion. It's not one.
Only Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch have dissented from the denial of certiorari, which means that there is no Snope case now. This was final judgement (specifically, dismissal of the lawsuit), there are no other appeals, and there is no other chances. Maryland has banned a wide array of very common firearms, with vague definitions, the lower courts have held that these guns aren't even guns nevermind protected by the Second Amendment, and SCOTUS has punted. While Maryland's law here includes a grandfather registration clause, the circuit has already held that such clauses are unnecessary, none of the takings clause people cared, and SCOTUS punted. Binding law in the 4th Circuit holds that a firearm is not an arm.
It's also a case that has been rife with bad behavior from the lower courts; Thomas's dissent emphasizes the logical flaws, but I'll point out that under the name Bianchi this is the case that was held for over a year by a single judge on the appeals court who didn't file a dissent. There will be no percolation; 2A-favorable analysis of these laws will not be allowed to reach SCOTUS, and it will be smothered before en banc whenever possible.
Kavanaugh wrote an interesting ... concurrence? Dissental? Pile of bullshit? Statement. The record calls it a statement. This is particularly interesting because it only takes four to give certiorari; he literally could not write a dissent.
Given that millions of Americans own AR–15s and that a significant majority of the States allow possession of those rifles, petitioners have a strong argument that AR–15s are in “common use” by law-abiding citizens and therefore are protected by the Second Amendment under Heller. See Heller v. District of Columbia, 670 F. 3d 1244, 1286–1288 (CADC 2011) (Kavanaugh, J., dissenting). If so, then the Fourth Circuit would have erred by holding that Maryland’s ban on AR–15s complies with the Second Amendment.
Under this Court’s Second Amendment precedents, moreover, it can be analytically difficult to distinguish the AR–15s at issue here from the handguns at issue in Heller.
Again, would be a great opinion! It's not one, either. Instead:
Although the Court today denies certiorari, a denial of certiorari does not mean that the Court agrees with a lower-court decision or that the issue is not worthy of review. The AR–15 issue was recently decided by the First Circuit and is currently being considered by several other Courts of Appeals. [ed: list of cases moved] Opinions from other Courts of Appeals should assist this Court’s ultimate decisionmaking on the AR–15 issue. Additional petitions for certiorari will likely be before this Court shortly and, in my view, this Court should and presumably will address the AR–15 issue soon, in the next Term or two.
Why? Because fuck you, that's why. Roberts and Barrett, as typical for the majority in denials of cert, have no comment.
Kavanaugh gives a list of lower circuit cases that "should assist this Court's decision-making".
- Capen v. Campbell: The last decision was an appeals court holding "Appellants have failed to demonstrate that they are likely to succeed on the merits of either of their assault weapons- or LCM-related challenges." No preliminary injunction, basically zero percent chance of success at trial.
- National Assn. for Gun Rights v. Lamont: On preliminary injunction, "Plaintiffs have failed to show their likelihood of success on the merits, and so the Court need not reach the remaining preliminary injunction factors." Oral arguments were in October 2024; we don't have the final opinion (because fuck you, that's why).
- Association of N. J. Rifle & Pistol Clubs, Inc. v. Platkin: Hey, finally one with a progun trial decision, if only to the most limited extent (specifically only the Colt AR-15, and not an LCM ban that violated the takings clause) - and it's stayed on appeal. There's a separate issue that two terms won't be enough, given that this doesn't have oral args scheduled until the end of this month and the chance of en banc, but by the time we're asking whether New Jersey can ban Very Specifically Colt's Version Of The AR-15, we've already lost the plot.
- Viramontes v. County of Cook: "For the foregoing reasons, the court grants Defendants’ motion for summary judgment and denies Plaintiffs’ "; aka the "AR15s are like M16s, right?" case. Oral arguments on appeal were November of 2024. Most likely to get a progun ruling (if only because Easterbrook apparently forgot to set his alarm that day), barring some weird procedural detour, but it's also in a bizarre procedural position because the Cook County ban in question was augmented, after the suit was filed, by a broader state-level ban... that SCOTUS also already punted on.
- Miller v. Bonta: hahahahaha, it's the Ninth Circuit, it has a snowball's chance in hell. Maybe we'll get another VanDyke youtube video? Haha, funny meme, yes? Except it's also been stayed since 2024, after original oral arguments, pending resolution of a case that dropped in March of this year, we don't have an opinion from it, and it's the fucking Ninth Circuit so there's literally no possibility of it escaping the en banc process with a progun result.
To be blunt: this SCOTUS will not be address the AR-15 issue in "the next Term or two". There will be no grand cases from the lower courts with a serious investigation of the Second Amendment ramifications that split the baby some perfect way. There will always be some excuse why a specific case wasn't the ideal vehicle, or why some new one that's just reached oral args is the better vehicle later, or why some specific law wasn't the best demonstration. Optimistically, Kavanaugh got a promise from John "Article III is <Not> Worth A Dollar" Roberts and will find out how much that promise is worth; pessimistically, Kavanaugh's a politician wearing robes and this is what he says to get readers (especially the sort that might make unscheduled visits to his house) to believe what he wants them to believe. Eventually, Thomas and Alito will retire, and either we're going to get much worse judges from a technical side who can actually make a fucking decision that matters when it shocks the conscience of the Amtrak world, even if that means they'll also bark on command when Trump asks, or a Dem president will get those seats, and either way, the conservative legal movement and anything deeper than a pretext of originalism will go the way of the dinosaur.
Meanwhile, the plaintiffs here get nothing. They will be out years of their lives trying to bring this case, and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and attorney's costs. They will either have moved from Maryland, or gotten rid of any 'assault weapon' that they once owned, or never been allowed to buy one. A decision in a term or two will not protect Ocean State Tactical, another (pre-final-judgment) case SCOTUS denied cert on today, from being just as completely fucked over. Even should SCOTUS find their balls or be delivered new ones and eventually issue a pro-gun ruling, most circuits have standing orders that only recognize the most complete and on-point decision from SCOTUS as overruling circuit precedent, and the one exception is the 9th Circuit (and with a "when we like it" rule). SCOTUS has happily demonstrated, for the better part of a decade, that they will not smack wrists over that. Anti-gun lower courts will take this as an affirmance in the meantime.
It's not even as though guns are the only matter here: SCOTUS has similarly punted on the question of But It's Mean on Free Speech. Hell, guns aren't even the only thing in the guns cases. The court has similarly punted on the question of whether But It's Guns on Due Process, or But It's Guns on Free Speech [see also], or But It's Guns on Court Settlements, or even But It's Guns on the very caselaw that SCOTUS thought so beyond the pale that they'd managed to scrounge up a 9-0 before.
And, of course, there's the blaring siren in the room. As Thomas points out, SCOTUS has punted on this very specific legal question for over a decade post-Heller, while claiming a right delayed is a right denied. SCOTUS has a case covering the type of gun Heller was trying to bring in Heller I, it's listed for conference for Thursday, it's been over a decade, and they're gonna deny it, 99.9999%. And where I'd once point out that it's been longer since Heller than it was from Lawrence v. Texas to Obergefell, and Dick Heller still can't register (lol) the actual gun from his original case, I'm instead going to something a little more specific and recent. SCOTUS defied all its normal rules about procedural posture to protect the rights of an illegal immigrant in six hours on a holiday weekend. That's what SCOTUS cares about, and for every single court case they punt on in my lifetime -- whether challenges to a law like this, or people sitting in prison like Dexter Taylor -- this the standard they've set, and then forgot as soon as a normal citizen who hasn't beaten their wife got involved. Every single second longer than six hours, for cases that have 'percolated' for years.
Some peoples rights need be resolved right away, and others can wait and wait and wait.
gattsuru
10d ago
To be fair, once you've built a colony industry around Human Skin Leather and Human Skin Leather accessories, there's an upper limit to how much of a surprise this could become.
gattsuru
18d ago
On another hand, this can also look like an excellent example of a union leader’s ability to organize and lead not only anti-Trump/anti-ICE disruption efforts, but force Trump to respond/take him seriously, even as Mr. Huerta’s organizational turnout capacity supported larger protests and greater effect. Sure, some of the protestors got out of hand, but there’s no evidence they were linked to Mr. Huerta… right?
I will also highlight the Teamster delivering face shields to rioters. Could just be coincidence, but the timeline I have been able to figure out for the LA riots is really tight, and the LA-area Teamsters and SEIU are both known to work together and for 'energetic' protest. Even if the DoJ does seriously investigate things I dunno if it could be proven, so no way to know whether the early parts of the LA protest were waiting for something to start rather than were outraged and surprised by Heurta's arrest and spontaneously acted.
And, from the other perspective, I'll point to characters like Judge Duggan, or the various Try To Arrest Me, ICE politician protests, or to the Dem nominee for New York City mayor having Luigi fanboys high in the communication and outreach ladder.
But such norms are not laws, particularly when the norms derive from the discretion of often sympathetic enforcers who are no longer in the position to make the call.
Maybe, but I'll point out again that Lujan Grisham wasn't impeached, censured, indicted by a grand jury, called a fascist on national television or a nationally-syndicated paper, yada yada. She did technically receive a preliminary injunction, but it was immediately stayed. Fauci isn't under arrest. No lawsuit Carter Page could file would ever get to trial. Mahmoud Khalil is out on bail.
Maybe that'll change. Duggan could end up being the first swing of a very hard-hitting hammer. But every single attempt to bring these forces forward has a built-in time crunch. And there's a lot of ways to delay and slow and drop every single effort.
gattsuru
15d ago
Trump v. CASA is very specifically about universal injunctions; none of the majority really delves into the likelihood of success in the merits, and I'm extremely skeptical that it could get more than two votes max on the merits of the underlying lawsuit.
I'm skeptical the EO will even avoid pretrial mass relief: the majority openly invites state-wide injunctions or class action lawsuits, and this would be one of the cleanest Rule 23 class actions possible. I'd be willing to bet 100 USD to a charity of your choice that there are at least three circuits where almost all children of illegal immigrants are covered by an injunction before the end of the year, and I'm only going that low because of friction effects.
... depends a lot on your definition of 'national injunction' and 'gain value'.
This at Table A-2 provides the most expansive definition of both, in that they were injunctions applying beyond the bounds of a courts jurisdiction and applied for at least some time, though because it measures them by what President was in place when the injunction was applied, not what President's administration started the policy that was enjoined (eg, several 'Biden-era' cases revolve around preliminary injunctions about military prohibitions on HIV-positive membership or joining, Harrison and Wilkins). (Contrast Harvard's 14 injunctions under Biden). Smashing those two lists together and focusing on the Biden admin, I'd count :
- Texas v. United States, 515 F. Supp. 3d 627, Tipton's temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction against Biden's 100-day pause on immigration deportations. I don't think this ever got reviewed before it self-mooted, but I also don't think it actually stopped the admin from just doing it and saying it was enforcement discretion.
- Faust v. Vilsack, 519 F. Supp. 3d 470, Holman v. Vilsack, No. 21-1085-STA-JAY, and Wynn v. Vilsack, 545 F. Supp. 3d 1271, loan forgiveness for racial minority farmers. I think this one held for at least the original program until it was repealed. Biden did work around it by using other programs or having supposedly race-neutral programs that only racial minorities were informed about, though.
- Louisiana v. Biden, 543 F. Supp. 3d 388, ban on new oil drilling leases in public lands, preliminary injunction. Reversed on appeal to give more tailored restrictions, trial court drew it back to thirteen plaintiff states. Also an APA case. It's not clear if it actually worked; the EO in question didn't stop scheduled oil leases, but the plan for future auctions dropped dramatically.
- Texas v. United States, 549 F. Supp. 3d 572, DACA, preliminary injunction on new admissions to the program. APA case, overturned on appeal.
- Texas v. Biden, 554 F. Supp. 3d 818. Termination of Migration Protection Protocols (aka Remain in Mexico). Kinda an APA case? Overturned by SCOTUS and the Biden admin had just made a new memo terminating it anyway beforehand.
- Texas v. United States, 555 F. Supp. 3d 351. Whether "shall" requires the administration to do anything to criminal illegal aliens, preliminary injunction. This is the one I keep yelling at Ben_Garrison about, you know how it ended.
- Arizona v Biden, 40 F.4th 375, second verse, same as above except it was overturned at the circuit level.
- Georgia v. Biden, 574 F. Supp. 3d 1337, federal workers vaccine mandate on the contracting side, preliminary injunct. 11th Circuit scaled it back to just the plaintiff organizations, their members, and the seven plaintiff states.
- Feds for Med. Freedom v. Biden, 581 F. Supp. 3d 826, federal workers vaccine mandate on the employee side, preliminary injunction. Long procedural history, think the injunction was in place when the policy was repealed, mooting the arg.
- Nebraska v. Biden, 52 F.4th 1044. HEROES Act loan forgivness, preliminary injunction by the appeals court. Upheld by SCOTUS.
- Braidwood Mgmt. Inc. v. Becerra, 666 F. Supp. 3d 613. Contraception, abortion, and PReP mandate for ACA insurance coverage, weird procedural history since it's mostly a process question with RFRA stapled on the side, hence why it came up literally yesterday. The RFRA side got an injunction that looks like still applies but isn't universal? And the universal injunction on Appointments/APA was squashed early on appeal down to just the plaintiffs, overturned by SCOTUS.
- Monticello Banking Co. v. Consumer Fin. Prot. Bureau, No. 6:23-CV-00148-KKC and Tex. Bankers Ass'n v. Consumer Fin. Prot. Bureau, No. 7:23-CV-00144. Something about the CFPB being unconstitutional and injunctions against data collection rules. I'm not even sure if these count as real national injunctions rather than just applying to a large organization with a lot of members.
- Nuziard v. Minority Bus. Dev. Agency, 721 F. Supp. 3d 431. Another racially discriminatory aid program, preliminary injunction. I think they just made the discrimination a little more subtle, but technically the injunction applied to the end of the case and the plaintiffs got a result.
- Career Colls. & Sch. of Texas v. U.S. Dep't of Educ., 98 F.4th 220. Higher Education Act loan forgiveness program. Preliminary injunction on appeal, under the APA. Currently at SCOTUS.
- Alaska v. U.S. Dep't of Educ., No. 24-1057-DDC-ADM, SAVE higher education loan forgiveness program. Preliminary injunction, under the APA. Stayed on appeal, though Nebraska effectively covered the same ground eventually.
- Missouri v. Biden, 738 F. Supp. 3d 1113, FEEL higher education loan income-based repayment program. Preliminary injunction, under the APA. I think upheld in 8th Circuit
- Associated Gen. Contractors of America v. U.S. Dep't of Labor, No. 5:23-CV-0272-C. Something really technical about treating truckers like mechanics for 'locally prevailing wages and benefits' rules? Preliminary injunction under the APA, appeals are currently stayed.
- Tennessee v. Becerra, No. 1:24cv161-LG-BWR. Including gender identity to Title IX (and indirectly, the ACA). Preliminary injunction under the APA. Probably mooted by the election.
- Tex. Top Cop Shop, Inc. v. Garland, No. 4:24-CV-478. Corporate Transparency Act beneficial owner rule. Commerce clause challenge, the poor bastards. Stayed by SCOTUS, with Kavanaugh specifically writing this as an example of universal injunctions bad.
- EDIT: All. for Hippocratic Med., 668 F. Supp. 3d at 560. Abortion pill FDA approval under APA, technically a nation-wide stay, but had the effect of an injunction. Got smacked down by SCOTUS./EDIT
Honorable mentions:
- Price v. Barr, 514 F. Supp. 3d 171, permanent injunction against rule requiring permit to film in national parks, reversed on appeal. Not really a red-tribe-blue-tribe thing, at least directly; one of the few places I'd put myself and Merrick Garland on the same side.
- Arizona by and through Brnovich v. Ctrs. for Disease Control & Prevention, 2022 WL 1276141. If you want to find anything on this, look for "Title 42 Immigration Case", or this clusterfuck. The preliminary injunction itself was against a Trump-era rule about immigration under COVID, but Biden hadn't officially stopped it, but Biden was defending or 'defending' it.
So there's a lot of cases, here. How you analyze them's going to depend on what you're looking for. Literally any case with an injunction broader than the plaintiffs that wasn't immediately stayed? I think you get somewhere around 15-17 cases, on about five major topics. Cases where this actually worked, if only until final review, cuts out at least five. In one sense it's damning that some of these injunctions got overturned by higher courts... but does that mean that the lower court got it wrong, the higher court got it wrong, or just that SCOTUS was trying to push the CASA button then?
Cases that would have changed if CASA was decided first? A lot of these are APA challenges that CASA specifically sets aside for future discussion, another handful were already being drilled down to their plaintiff states.
Cases that mattered? I dunno.
gattsuru
24d ago
The procedural posture here is also weird, even if no one but Kagan wants to rest their opinion on it. This is an appeal of preliminary injunction that was denied, while other preliminary injunctions or final judgements against other trans minor laws were upheld. Including one where SCOTUS pared back a wide preliminary injunction... to just the plaintiffs).
So now there's a SCOTUS-approved preliminary injunction for an equal protection challenge that SCOTUS just said can't win, sitting in the 9th Circuit. Except they didn't really hold that, they just made it really clear what the breakdown of how they hold the balance of law. Except in this case, the only person treating it like it's not final judgement was Kagan, and that in a minority-of-a-minority dissent.
laws that classify in some other way, which only get rational basis review (almost impossible for a law to fail this one).
I'll caveat that there's two forms of rational basis review: the normal form a la FCC v. Beach Communications where the law is upheld even if the government provides no good reason for the statute, so long as the court can imagine a single even incorrect cause; and the Cleburne version where the law is held to be motivated by animus, and then the statute near-always falls even if there is a named good cause. Some of the finangling in the oral args were about that.
There is some wiggling around to deal with Gorsuch's opinion in Bostock (which is what causes Alito to concur in parts of the opinion rather than the full thing since he dissented from Bostock), but Gorsuch joined this opinion in full, so apparently he didn't have a problem with the Court somewhat limiting Bostock here.
Yeah, that's a mess, and I dunno how he's juggling it. Roberts says tries to distinguish by saying the law here distinguished based on a transgender diagnosis rather than sex, using the metaphor of hirsuitism, but since whether someone will be diagnosed with hirsuitism depends on their sex that seems transparently wrong (and he even spells out that this is often called "male-pattern hair growth"). Presumably he's done that because he knows a hard limit on medical exemptions recognizing sex will result in the same law coming right back up with the medical exemption excised, and that's worse from a pragmatic perspective, but as a matter of law it's clear as mud.
Gorsuch signed onto it, so I guess he must agree? Or maybe he didn't want a bunch of circuit court misreadings if this case ended up in a 4/1/1-3 mixed-majority. But the reasoning here's vague enough that red circuits can draw every other transgender case that isn't specifically a CRA thing (and maybe even some that are) as about Skrmmeti-like distinctions, and blue circuits can draw every other transgender case as more like Bostock.
Thomas or Barrett's distinctions are clearer, but in turn they're a lot more strict.
It's easier for straight cis guys (or even people like myself who are bi), but I think you overestimate how easy it is to walk into a relationship, depending on social class and work/life balance. This is an older poll, but you still end up with sizable percentages of unmarried adults having never had a date, and a much bigger group struggling to try to get a relationship; it's only gotten worse since.
Straight men can ask out anyone... kinda, and there's pretty strict social norms against doing so anywhere near work and several different classes of enthusiast hobbies. People try to set up straight men with friends and coworkers... if you're already the sort of person who has. You can hook up with random strangers... if you're in the tiny percentage of straight guys that can get a tindr date. There's a lot of ways for straight guys to set themselves apart to women... in the negative sense as easily as the positive: (het, cis) women are far more likely to get the ick for single 'red flags' that can end up being. Straight guys don't have anywhere near the expectations of attractiveness... but they're also dancing a very narrow line between coming across as too aggressive or not forward enough.
((and... straight guys are picky in a different way. The expectations are lower, but anything under them is far more strict limitation, in extreme cases to the point where even a guy that wanted to muscle through it in the interest of an orgasm or a relationship would find themselves 'pushing rope'.))
If you're able to make the first move, a lot of those problems disappear, but in turn a lot of the ways (straight, cis) men were allowed to make the first move have disappeared too. Of my social environments, there's maybe one in which asking someone out on a date would be accepted (and, uh, coincidentally this is also the gayest one, thanks FFXIV), and maybe three where it's not explicitly ban-worthy. I can't speak on straight guys getting set up by friends or family from personal experience, given the bi bit, but from what I've seen second-hand there's a lot of people where that either doesn't happen, or it only happens in situations that have developed the various taboos.
Some of that's downstream of selection effects as I've aged and been in a relationship for a while, but it's very different from the gay world or from what I can see of most of the trans-friendly dating world. A number of gay writers are pretty strong advocates of that model replacing the classical one for hets, but I'm not sure it's working out great for the gays: I have a hell of a time when quite a lot of my options are split between bars or dances, down2succ-level 'casual', or online stuff that's never going to graduate beyond RP and hard to even keep time synced. Where these options are unpleasant in a gay context, they seem unsolvable in a het one.
((And the dodges are so common that Scott Alexander had a post on how "you can tell why from like a 5 min conversation" explanations radicalize a lot of people who are very far from the central example of what I'm hoping are your actual focus, over a decade ago.))
Again, I'm not saying that het (cis) guys have it worse or even anywhere near as rough as you do, but I think you're running into a version of the lemon market problem in things like comp sci hiring; it's really easy for the absolute worst to get vastly over-represented, while a lot of those who are either slightly under-par or who are not as assertive won't show up much on your radar.
I'm not sure how much of Ellison's writings are his own faults, rather than exaggerated versions of failures he's seen and done, but there's definitely a mix and I agree that it probably doesn't favor him -- the man did end up with a bipolar diagnosis late in his life, and it pretty clearly wasn't some badge-of-accomplishment diagnosis. And he definitely has some of that 'I talked to a taxi driver' rather than 'I did this enough to grok it' going on.
Tbf, my gutcheck has some of the exaggeration in The Essential Ellison feels like self-loathing, even before I knew about the BPD... but it wouldn't, wouldn't it, whether because he actually had those flaws that bad or because he felt his minor failures were the end of the world. On the other hand, it's hard to tell how much of his hating was anti-anti-semitism rather than just being a hater in general -- the man famously loathed Star Wars and Spielberg in general, and had a number of non-Jewish cause celebres like van Vogt.
On the gripping hand, it's hard to tell how many of those cause celebres he really cared about, rather than just hating their enemies: From Alabamy With Hate is the best-known example, and particularly damning because its denouement revolves around a letter from a bigot who was 'bad as mud' but 'better' than racial minorities, without much consideration of what made Ellison good rather than just better than bigots, but it's pretty consistent everywhere from race to sexual behavior to the military to his stories to convention behavior. His enemies being idiots, or nazis, or chuds, or the teeming fandom masses, or normies, or whatever... might be better than racial resentment, but it's still not good.
I don't have a lot of room to criticize a hater for hating. I do have a lot of room to criticize a man that wrote at length about how science fiction and speculative fiction aren't the same thing, who can't do anything more himself.
On one hand, there is a point where you have to kill the buddha. Most heroes have feet of clay, few philosophers can commit to the bit to Diogenes level. Especially in media there's always going to be a temptation to present someone who's better than you can be, and whatever extent the mask molds the face, it's never going to be perfect and it can't change what's already happened. It's never pleasant to recognize the extent a writer's real positions are weaker than what they present, but Litany of Tarski -- but in turn neither does a philosophy of life become wrong merely because its proponents can't live up to it. Pratchett's view had its flaws and its failings, but wanting something that isn't true, or maybe even can't be true, because it's worth the progress toward it, is an acceptable tradeoff in my eyes.
On the other, I'm trying to write up an effortpost about cyberiatrogenic conditions (and, uh, come up with a better name than that), and one of the subleads is "the things we needed to hear, from the people who should have been there to say them", and how that's incredibly dangerous. Few heroes are carved full from in-situ marble, few philosophies can survive being used every day... except in this distant or fiction view, where every consideration comes through the camera lens, at most from wholly-artifical canned challenges built to reinforce the themes of a story. It's easy to forget that, or what it means. This is a way you'll be burned, and the stovetop hurts, and you'll be burned again. That's part and parcel of how heat works. Tech has let us forget that, for short periods and for induction cooktops, but that's an artifact of memory, not of the world.
Real people, whether Ellison or a childhood friend, will not be clones of you or homonculi of what you want or want to become. Real relationships mean friction. Pratchett's view had its flaws and its failings. Carrot Ironfoundersson (mostly) doesn't and can't. Beware what extent the latter has hacked your brain.
gattsuru
15d ago
The specific law here holds that a "commercial entity" (some carveouts for Google) that serves material on the internet "more than one-third of which is sexual material harmful to minors" must use either commercial or government identification of age, or be subject to fines up to 10k USD per day plus 250k if a minor sees it. There's pretty widespread potential to interfere or discourage adult-to-adult speech that is only obscene to minors, or even some speech that isn't obscene at all so long as it comes from one of these companies.
There's also a compelled speech problem in the original bill, 14-point font inclusion of a substance addiction help line level. This is currently blocked, though it had a weird period where that block was under an administrative stay for nearly six months.
gattsuru
4d ago
Fair on Jole; like Ethan of Athos it feels like it's putting too much effort into trying to answer Le Guin's 'taking life versus giving it' problem, but without the big narrative tension from a speeding deadline. Flowers felt stronger if a bit more repetitive and is certainly no Memory or Komarr, but I still enjoyed it about the same lines as Cryoburn.
gattsuru
8d ago
gattsuru
17d ago
Yeah, there's a basically no chance if they (or even a not-joke Republican candidate) split the not-Mamdani vote. The sane option to my eyes would be organizing behind Adams, sad as that sounds, but it's also a massive coordination problem. But I don't get why they tried Cuomo in the primary to start with, so maybe there's something that would overrun the 'already lost this fight once' problem. And my low opinion of Cuomo is part of why I don't think they can coordinate.
Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton - Pornography 6-3 conservative opinion, Thomas. First Amendment does not prohibit Texas from requiring age-verification for pornographic websites. Kagan writes the dissent.
This one's weird.
The law is probably reasonable enough or close to reasonable enough (if not necessarily my idea of well-designed), but the lower court just set it against rational basis review. Previous SCOTUS decisions either put restrictions on adult content either fully in strict scrutiny (Ashcroft I and II, where restrictions were on the basis of the content's adult nature) or rational basis (obscenity to minors, movie theatres). And strict scrutiny, at least in a free speech context, is ruinously hard to achieve, in ways that even Thomas probably doesn't want to water down. The closest obvious parallel in previous law was adult theatres, which was admittedly a pretty jank decision of its own by pretending it was separating the effects of the content from the content to justify rational basis review. But that'd be the same as no review at all.
I guess this case didn't fall close enough to the commercial speech restriction cases for the adult theatre side to be even remotely palatable? But it's Thomas, and his willingness to go to the bat for bizarrely aggressive paternalism (eg, en loco parentis) is one of the bits that's long been a go to, for better or worse. Instead, he reaches (through BSA v. Dale for some reason) to the draft-card burning regulations from US v. O'Brien, saying restrictions on speech here are incidental to restrictions on behavior, so intermediate scrutiny. From that view, it's not unreasonable.
Then Thomas differentiates it from the strict scrutiny CDA cases by saying those "effectively suppresse[d] a large amount of speech that adults have a constitutional right to receive”. But the analysis is just limited to privacy concerns and stigma (aka, more privacy concerns). Yet these restrictions have potentially massive costs to speakers, not just receivers, on adult-content sites or even mixed-content that don't go up to that mark. Likewise, he tries to distinguish the CDA as regulating noncommercial sites that would not readily take up credit card processing, but HB1181 applies to all commercial entities, not just commercial sites. Burden can't drive level of scrutiny up, but this sort of perfunctory analysis gives little idea of what the actual analysis is, especially since intermediate review is a little ad hoc to start with.
Some of that burden review is probably because the Free Speech Coalition advocate comes across as kinda a nutcase during oral args. He mentions costs to site managers once in oral arguments and it's a stunning 40k USD per 100k users, and then spends much more of his time ranting about the motivations of anti-porn people. But then intermediate scrutiny's biggest bite is specifically in the prong of the O'Brien test that asks if the government interest is tied to the suppression of information, which is where the whole anti-porn thing rises anyway.
It rounds out to normal -- Thomas does everything short of wink-and-nod to say that pretextual restrictions on obscenity-to-minors that try to cover restrictions on adults are invalid -- but it's just such a bizarre way of getting there, and it's going to invite a lot of mess from lower courts.
Gutierrez v. Saenz - ... My read: SCOTUS lets a death-row inmate file a doomed, pointless post-conviction motion that doesn't have any hope of success but will probably delay his execution for a few more years
Yeah, probably. I'm really skeptical that a DNA test with no return of Gutierrez's DNA from the few samples available would factually demonstrate that he was outside of the trailer (or for a positive result to have his advocates want him in the chair), and while I could kinda see the arguments for allowing it anyway, it's hard to care. There's a chance Texas will just punt on killing him, but it's Texas, so that's a real far outlier. The process and procedural stuff might matter for other cases, perhaps? The court just didn't like the lower courts ignoring past dicta?
gattsuru
1mo ago
... it's funny seeing the well-funded national org use worse surveys than I, a rando, threw at amadan offhandedly; it's funnier that they can't spend five minutes on tumblr to actually get a good summary of what Luigi fandom looks like.
(tbf, we are talking tumblr or instagram or tiktok or discord or a punk meatspace group)
The cynical answer is that the NCRI, specifically, is not some neutral true-seeking organization anymore than the Princeton Gerrymandering Project was. They were founded in 2018 as part of an effort to fight the alt-right, and came to national attention after a series of reports in that started with Boogaloo panicking ("this, like turning off the transponders on 9/11, enables the extremists to hide in plain sight, disappearing into the clutter of innocent messages, other data points"). The org pulls in increasing amounts per year (1.45m in 2023) and lists its address as an office park that (at ~5k/year rent) is probably little more than a PO box -- I can't say for sure that they're a cutout for another org to whitewash funding the group, because they fall under the threshold that breaks down how their income works, but there's not-subtle hints pointing that direction.
Yes, they're also probably just left-leaners given that they're pulled from the left side (Princeton, Rutgers) of academia to start with, but they're were built from the ground up to find specific enemies. It's certainly possible that they're trying to pander to Trump, or suddenly reveling in their newfound freedom to see the nose in front of their face, but there's a bit of a blander option: they think these specific groups are in their list of enemies to be targeted, too, and they want to shape how that discussion goes so the people they don't consider enemies are well outside of it. Beware outgroup homogenity bias.
That's why they're not doing a retrospective and suddenly finding any of the literally years of punch nazi discourse, that's why there's no comment on a Certain Topic That's Supported In Princeton, that's why their list of incidents is so short and circumscribed, that's why they can only model left-wing violence as authoritarianism, that's why their 'left-wing' authoritarianism is so obviously post-hoc and cumbersome (antihierarchical aggression, anticonventionalism, top-down censorship aren't just awkward mirrors to their 'right-wing' counterparts, they're not even accurate names to their own descriptions).
Compare ProPublica writing a big story on H1-B abuse without using the word 'fraud' a single time.
gattsuru
9d ago
The Shadows of the Empire book does a lot of the heavy lifting, at least in the old Legends continuity, explaining not just Luke (Jedi training and seeing the cost of seeking revenge above all) and Vader's (finding the Dark Side increasingly unable to repair or alleviate his damaged flesh, and that Palpatine is grooming people to kill Vader's whole family... and thinks Vader's so weak that a crime lord that's not even force-sensitive might take him down) change in perspective, along with a lot of other goofy bits like Leia's Booush outfit or where Luke's new lightsaber crystal came from. Kinda with mixed results: it's definitely not a Zahn-level book, and a few parts were pretty cringy even by 90s-standards, but neither was it awful.
Of course, it did so twelve years after Return of the Jedi made it to theatres.
Eco's theory is certainly believable. For other examples, Harry Potter and Redwall fandom regularly points to the many bizarre early storytelling decisions as why they joined as heavily as they did. I will caveat that it's definitely not sufficient, though. Jupiter Ascending is a glorious trainwreck that leaves unanswered questions everywhere, but despite a small fandom of exactly the demographics you'd most expect to be into fanfic, it's largely abandoned.
gattsuru
15d ago
Yeah, they're not even subtle about it.
For the purpose of federal law, unless theres' been intervening changes to the law or caselaw, 302s don't count, because they're not adversarial or judicial hearings and often run ex parte. They do count for state law, though.
The mental defective side of the bar has been used very widely, if not consistently. And some places will ingest someone who comes to them voluntarily as if they weren't willing (or even treat a voluntary admission as involuntary without undergoing the normal procedures), though thankfully that's one of the few places that courts have been willing to push back on.
But otherwise, yes; federal regulations require that it be involuntary.
I will caveat that many states have separate rules that trigger on voluntary commitment, or don't even require commitment at all (hey, Hawaii!). New Jersey is one such state; applications for a purchase permit require applicants to complete a consent to mental health record search form. While the statute only specifically prohibits giving permits to people with a voluntary or involuntary current committment (no, I don't know why), both state courts and police generally treat it as a blanket prohibition, along with many inpatient procedures. T.B. here isn't even getting to that point, so he can't challenge it, either.
gattsuru
16d ago
[disclaimer: IANAL]
The rule is that all administrative remedies must be exhausted before a lawsuit can be filed (successfully).
This has actually historically had some awkward results. For the VA example below, there was a VA-internal administrative appeals system required by the NIAA, but it would routinely sit on appeals for years. NICS itself has an ATF Relief From Disability program authorized by statute that has been defunded since 1993 and wasn't fast before that. Sometimes this precluded judicial review entirely, other times required demonstrating constructive denial.
That said, this court case here is the lawsuit after exhaustion of administrative appeals. You aren't required to (and are actively discouraged from) bring each matter individually. There's actually a bunch of really complex res judicata rules about bringing a lawsuit over the same legal matter without having a different underlying act, though I don't know them well enough to be absolutely confident that they'd preclude a second lawsuit here.
That said, there's basically zero chance of a successful Second Amendment lawsuit on this matter. SCOTUS has already had fairly sympathetic plaintiffs available, such as Mai v. United States; they've punted. Most successful lawsuits have depended entirely on process or statutory definitions regarding who counts as disqualified to start with. The one exception is the Sixth Circuit, notably distant from New Jersey, and that case depended on the government completely disavowing any current finding of dangerousness or similarity to currently-mentally-ill people.
gattsuru
1mo ago
There's three major stories I'm aware of:
The Red Tribe story starts in 1986, where President Reagan promoted and passed a major immigration bill with two central components. On one hand, almost all existing immigrants, regardless of their status, would be given an amnesty and treated as if they had legally immigrated for purposes such as deportation and naturalization. In turn, we were supposed to get a massive enforcement apparatus discouraging further illegal immigration. But like all Wimpyisms, we found that the stuff that took place today happened reliably, and the prong that was supposed to happen in the future faded away; the various rules to cut off the employment of illegal immigrants were left unenforced, and various court cases would make deportation harder even in the rare case anyone was caught.
((Note that there is no honest Blue Tribe analysis of the impact of these policies: compare the wikipedia's "allowing for the legalization of nearly 60,000 undocumented immigrants from 1986 to 1989 alone" with the actual source).
This was, on its own, frustrating. But it did not escalate immediately. What really brought the tension to the forefront was the 2013 Gang of Eight bill. While a lot of broad stroke discussions of the proposal (championed by Rubio) heavily promoted an increased enforcement mandate, the combination of interactions with the then-controversial ACA and widespread loss of trust in claims made about the ACA made it far more critical. And then the language actual came out, and one of the biggest enforcement mechanisms was a entry/exit database that had been required by statute for over a decade-and-a-half already. This time they'd really do it because the amnesty would only be provisional until (some of) these enforcement actions happened... because ten years of provisional status would be a lot more politically costly to act against. And that goal leaked.
So a lot of conservatives absolutely lost their shit, Rubio was a joke for months. A lot of mainstream conservatives swore, at length, that they would not even consider any bill that did not prioritize enforcement first. Meanwhile, the mainstream democratic party saw any bill without a broad amnesty component as actively useless.
... which was itself, in turn, an escalation. After seeing the conservative response, President Obama, and pushed DACA and DAPA, along with a number of other various non-prosecution policies. While not all of these would manage to go into action (albeit some were only blocked officially), the blue tribe calling conservatives the Party of No weren't exactly wrong! And the next ten years would primarily focused around lawfare; because neither side could pass legislation the other would even consider, various executive actions were the only real option, and because this required no negotiation except for what had to pass SCOTUS scrutiny, these policies could be much wider or single-sided than any plausible statute. Conservatives pointed to increasingly fraught possibilities of downstream political consequences (JarJarJedi has listed most of the mainstream examples, but for a particularly fun one most people who can think about don't say outloud: under the INA, people who have immigrated legally are eligible for naturalization after five years. guess how 'immigrated legally' is defined, or the legal consequences of a grant of citizenship that can't be stripped). Eventually this culminated in US v. Texas under Biden, where it turned out to be impossible to compel any enforcement policy at all from a President that didn't want to follow it.
The Blue Tribe story starts a few years later, as the IRCA1986's entry date amnesty thing passed, and it turned out that there were millions (sometimes estimated as ten million!) people who either entered the US too late for its use, did not register in time, or who were not eligible for other reasons. Run all the above with the opposite valiance, and you've got ten or tens of millions of people, a large portion who immigrated as children, are forced into a gray-at-best legal environment over what the Blue Tribe sees as a glorified paperwork offense, and Republicans who demand that we make a lot of additional paperwork offenses and hefty punishments for them before even considering confronting The Real Problem.
((In both the Blue Tribe and Red Tribe tellings, there's also various selection pressures: pro-immigration Republicans and restrictionist-Democrats were either compelled to change their minds or pushed out of the party/national politics.))
The Gray Tribe story starts much later, and thinks the legal and legislative connections are a little besides the point. They explain why things aren't happening, but they don't explain why the rioting is happening. For that, we instead look to a large and increasing group of who have long framed immigration enforcement of any type as fundamentally illegitimate, and any attempts to do so as fundamentally driven by animus and a sign of unadulterated evil. That put the normal paeans to informed compromise off the table.
The exact start date is fuzzy and depends heavily on who you ask and when. The growth of Punch A Nazi discourse in 2016 is an easy example, but you can also see people pointing to G20 protests or the tactics formalized in the gay marriage wars (I use 'animus' specifically). Everyone's least favorite web forum also 'must' have been the source.
gattsuru
9d ago
I'm... hesitant to go with any of the easy answers. The Bulwarkist side of no-longer-Republicans-if-they-ever-were exists, but it's tiny. The Republican minority outreach should expect to see incoming demographics who don't like The Gays, but the difference just isn't that big. Measurement problems are endemic to modern polls, but there's a lot of reasons to suspect that they'd result in these polls going more toward the demographics most gay-friendly (younger, more urban, more online). And while it's possible for some number of people to be rounding 'gay marriage' and 'trans stuff' together, either out of confusion or treating the movement as a whole, there's too big of a difference in poll numbers on gay marriage and trans stuff for that to shake out right either.
I think there's some genuine disagreements on policy that have become a lot more apparent in the last three or four years. MacIntyre likes to Darkly Hint in ways that wouldn't be accepted (or even necessarily understood) by a lot of Red Tribers, but matters like surrogacy, limits of workplace conduct, interactions with media, the bake-the-cake movement, these are things I see from not-especially-online people in the real world.
I'd like to think that there are workable compromise positions, but they depend on actually understanding and respecting the other side, and I thought the same about trans stuff.
gattsuru
15d ago
Basically credit card transactions or services using those transactions. It might allow MindGeek-like auth, but the US doesn’t really have that. Presumably with a good faith effort to validate that the credit card holder’s name is above 18, though it didn’t come up in any args I could see.
One take is that Mamdani's able to massage a lot of traditionally idpol issues as anti-Trumpist or under legalisms, and thus been able to avoid explicit proposals by having the whole thrust of his lunchbucket politics also imply them.
((eg, "affordable housing" doesn't mean housing people can afford; it means a ton of Section 8.))
Another, more cynical one, is Darwin's old "it was never about being gay". Idpol doesn't care, specifically, about gay rights, or African-Americans, or Hispanics, or even about winning their votes. It cares about the cause of the day, with no more honest motivation than it being the cause of the day. And Mamdani's tongue-bathing Hamas anti-Zionism is the cause of the day among the upper-class demographics he needed to win the primary.
Edit: I was tempted to use hating the Joos above, but couldn’t find a good summary to support it. Not a problem anymore! /EDIT
There's some silver lining on that cloud, in the sense that the Idpol cause of the day can swap out on a minute's notice. But it's not gonna.
Two deaths. Other two victims are currently expected to recover.
One noteworthy bit’s that this is a little bit more sophisticated than the normal hradzka garbage person emotional spasm, not just in the police maskerade, but also hitting two separate politicians so quickly. Police are claiming he had a list with a number of other politicians included. This is pretty far from what I (or, presumably FCfromSSC) would think about, but it doesn’t take much more sophistication before it breaks the normal field tilt toward defense.
Another is that Washington’s ED: Minnesota's /ED state Senate is very close. They’re out of session and it will be a while til the next session, but change votes by a bullet is Very Bad to have as common knowledge.
Some reporting is claiming the shooter has been caught and identified as someone with ties to the Dem political sphere (Walz, morbidly). I’d like to see confirmation that a) that’s the guy and b) it’s not some schmuck with too common a name before doing any deeper analysis publicly, though. EDIT: Confirmed “no kings” rally fliers in vehicle, dunno if motivation or target.
gattsuru
25d ago
They have wide discretion because most of the INA is subject to "may" clauses instead of "shall" clauses right now.
And this guy has been told, repeatedly, that the very specific law he claims has "may" clauses had "shall" clauses, already; that there was a massive court case over it, and it didn't do jack or shit.
There's some technical parts to how LLMs specifically work that make it a lot harder to police hallucination than to improve produce a compelling argument, for the same reason that they're bad at multiplication and great at symbolic reference work. A lot of LLMs can already use WestLaw and do a pretty good job of summarizing it... at the cost of it trying to cite a state law I specifically didn't ask about.
It's possible that hallucination will be absolutely impossible to completely solve, but either way I expect these machines to become better at presenting compelling arguments faster than I expect them to be good researchers, with all the good and ill that implies. Do lawyers value honesty more than persuasion?
One would think! And yet.
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