gattsuru
1yr ago
For conventional writing, Coraline and Good Omens (collaboration with Terry Pratchett) are some of the easier ones to get into, maybe followed by MirrorMask and American Gods. Much of his influence is elsewhere, though: he's been massive part of the comic sphere. Pretty much every worthwhile Endless (aka Sandman) comic and a majority of the not-awful Constantine ones are his work or related to one of his works, and that's had downstream effects on a lot of writing and tabletop spaces (eg Exalted and especially Nobilis/Chuubo's).
On the flip side, his long presence in the tumblr sphere as one of the few authors that Just Shows Up in fandom mentions was always unusual, as was his pronounced defense of Alan Moore's Lost Girls; the man had been holding a lightning pole up in the rain for a while.
gattsuru
1yr ago
This is a popular take, but I don't think it's the right one. 2009 had Obama's first meeting with GOP leadership summarized as "I won", the Affordable Care Act was 2009 and passed on party lines during infamously flametastic discussion where anything but the Democratic proposal was demanding people die in the streets by the thousands or tens of thousands, and the only reason someone could oppose this was Racism. By May he was joking about IRS audits of organizations that didn't agree with him enough. He instructed the Department of Justice to not defend DOMA in federal court in 2011.
Not all the worst of the 2008 culture wars were downstream of Obama directly -- there was a conspiracy theory that Palin's youngest child was 'really' her grandchild, and she had an involuntary biographer take up residence as a neighbor, and afaik that were genuinely just nuts (Andrew Sullivan, everyone!) that media groups latched onto rather than promoted by the Dem party directly -- but a lot of them were.
Perhaps more critically, many seeds were planted for future culture wars, even fairly early. The ACA threw in expansive mandates for gender-related stuff, and took over a large portion of higher education loans, for example.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Trivially, trans stuff is going to come to a critical head soon one way or the other: social conservatives has been focusing most heavily on minor transition, but Kincaid v. Williams is the other shoe dropping for Bostock, can't be put off another four years, and it's... hard to overstate how broad of an impact it would have. In addition to the direct regulatory impact, it would likely (given the recent EMTALA example) result in the feds overriding every remotely anti-trans state law under a Dem admin. And the next President has non-trivial chances of replacing the two names on the dissent from denial of cert in Kincaid. I don't think Trump particularly cares about trans stuff, but I don't think you can staff a Trump admin without anti-trans activists precipitating out of the woodwork even if he did care.
There's a lot of active encouragement of at-least-gray immigration under Biden. It's possible that most of that escapes scrutiny in a Trump administration, but at least some of it won't survive, for better or worse, and I'd expect it to be a serious target as this decade's version of 'self-deport'.
There's an increasing set of broad policies that the Democratic party is looking to get through over a wide variety of infrastructure goals for their political movement: regulation on charter or private schools, post-Janus encouragement for unions like banning right-to-work states, reparations-likes for (certain) minority groups. Trump obviously would be strike against any of those going anywhere, but progressive seem him as likely to do reversed version. Again, I'm not sure Trump cares, but a Trump administration will near-certainly bring people who do.
((Conversely, I think Paxton talks a much stronger talk than he actually walks.))
gattsuru
1yr ago
I don't think even the copium will survive either if Range (where the lower court found that a complete ban on possession for a 95 conviction for food stamp fraud was found unconstitutional) gets GVR'd with a dissent this week or the next.
Called it, at least on the GVR. We'll see how the copium goes.
gattsuru
1yr ago
The Court, for its entire existence, has steadfastly refused to provide advisory opinions such as this comment.
Eh... kinda. The Court does not give solely advisory opinions -- that's the steelman for the court punting as moot even in the face of voluntary cessation -- and famously refused and continues to refuse to answer when pressed for questions before a law is passed. And it supposedly won't comment about future cases in present ones.
((Modulo the various exceptions.))
But as to whether opinions can advise about future laws, well, Alito's concurrence in Cargill doesn't say that a machine gun ban would be constitutional, but it's not exactly subtle in encouraging Congress to pass a law, and that's just a recent one. When it comes to dicta, the rule against advisory opinions have always been held closer in theory than in the breach.
gattsuru
1yr ago
The conservative take is that McConnell has only returned in kind escalations by past Democratic speakers, with the blocking of Miguel Estrada predating the blocking of Merrick Garland, and the detonation of the filibuster for judges in 2013 predating the death of the filibuster for justices in 2016. Even then, noting that it was limited to official acts (eg, McConnell hasn't given false claims about Biden's tax returns on the House floor).
I don't think that's entirely honest -- McConnell hasn't 'he won, didn't he' in no small part because every Republican knows it wouldn't work rather than some sense of fair play, and there have been some conservative escalations like the attacks on ACORN -- but it's more fair than not.
gattsuru
1yr ago
For the specific examples Skibboleth brings up, and the specific term 'criminal accusations', I would also point to the various DeSantis kidnapping fanfiction, or the "Abbot drowned immigrants to Texas".
"Last night a woman and two children drowned crossing the Rio Grande River near Shelby Park—land recently seized by the Texas National Guard, who blocked Border Patrol from accessing the land," Sawyer Hackett, a Democratic strategist and one-time appointee of former President Barack Obama, wrote in his own post. "Greg Abbott is responsible for these deaths. And he should be tried accordingly."
gattsuru
1yr ago
I'll have to find it later, but SlightlyLessHairyApe complaining that the police were treating the J6 protesters with "far lighter touch", me posting that they were about to get shot in the face, and then one of the protestors getting shot in the throat, all in less than thirty minutes, rather sticks in the mind.
gattsuru
1yr ago
The reason Chevron became a doctrine in the first place was because it involved highly technical questions that courts were reluctant to wade into. The original case involved whether Chevron had to apply for a permit or not. While people are generally concerned about environmental issues, they're concerned about the kind of issues that actually affect the environment, not about the details of EPA permitting requirements.
I think people would care less if it were constrained to that, but Chevron is not some one-case-only matter. Even for the specific matter of EPA permitting requirement, Chevron applied not just the biggest businesses running power plants, but also smaller developers or individual homeowners (both later overturned). Nor does it limit to the EPA: big HHS tax credits, wireless stations, immigration law, vapes, wired internet, countless others. Some courts even tried to expand it to criminal law.
The bigger cases tend to involve corporations, both for obvious financial reasons and because individual plaintiffs seldom can attempt to follow the Sacketts at any price, but that just makes them the bigger cases.
gattsuru
1yr ago
There's some messiness with it -- the state was able to respond to Sotomayor with a specific example of a citation "issued to a person with a home address" (pg 10, committed to a (state) necessity defense, and there's actually a mess of five different regulations only some of which got enjoined, and as progressives are prone to point out in other contexts sometimes a rational law only hits some people because they're the only ones violating it -- and the facial nature makes that even uglier.
But yeah, I think there's something on the edges that would make more sense, and probably be something the courts would be willing to enforce. The Eight Amendment doctrine just doesn't make sense for it.
gattsuru
1yr ago
There's probably some due process or doctrine of impossibility framework where compliance genuinely wasn't possible, or where enforcement is just a 'you must be this unscruffy', that I'd have a lot more sympathy for. But this was a facial challenge, temporary shelter was available (if not in conditions the plaintiffs wanted), and the underlying Martin decision was completely nuts.
((That said, I'd expect a lot of the coastal state judiciary discover a new right to camp if homeless.))
The charitable answer for Idaho is that the moderates saw non-intervention as likely to result in some absolutely abominable precedent in the 9th Circuit under the original constraints (eg, finding that any federal encouragement of a thing prohibited a state restriction, which the Civil Marksmanship Program would absolutely love to hear about), which SCOTUS would have to overturn in the most controversial case possible, and then the concessions from both the federal and state government during trial set that concern off the table.
The less charitable is that the concessions were enough that, even if the moderates could recognize voluntary cessation when it was slapping them in the face, they saw that they could punt. See NYSPRA I, Fulton, so on for previous editions that got further along. It's not a lack of willpower; it's a lack of desire.
He rejects the arguments of the liberals, saying that it requires stabilization of any threat to an unborn child. And that it fails to take into account the spending clause. [Side note: would this make all abortions illegal? No one argues this, so I must be missing something.]
The text of EMTALA covers only stabilizing care in emergency rooms that accept medi* funds. There'd be a hilarious mirror stretch where a conservative administration tried to turn it into a hospital Born Alive Act, but trying to ban abortion at clinics that don't have emergency rooms would be far more of a stretch.
I still need to get to three more Thursday opinions, and by the time I do that, there'll be some Friday ones too. SEC v. Jarkesy seems like it will matter.
Yeah, that's a big one. I think people overestimate how big -- too much of ALJ depends on these civil penalties for them to actually comply with the dicta, and a lot of the targets of these historical civil penalties will roll over for the equivalent of plea bargains when various administrative offices start pointing out that it's not that much harder to prove jail-time-penalties if they have to go to a jury anyway. But it's also not just Big Business that gets hit by civil penalties: while I expect them to Massively Resist it, everything from the EPA to the ATF depends on this sorta thing.
((Technically, even a lot of fire/safety code stuff does, though the weird state of incorporation of the right to a jury trial means that it probably doesn't matter for state regs in the near future.))
EDIT: and Loper-Bright on Friday is a second part of a Mozambique for admin law advocates. It's likewise not going to matter as much as it should, since lower courts are still going to do Chevron-in-all-but-name -- and Robert's bizarre stare decisis argument is just giving permission for it -- but just having to put the work in will slow a lot of expansive reads of federal law.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Trump also has the 'advantage' that for many his skeptics, his brain getting eaten by RFK's worm is not necessarily worse. Trump being moderated by his staff versus Biden moderating his staff sorta thing.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I think the more critical part is the extent that social conservative (and other non-progressive) interests are being cordoned off, even in red states or outside of state interests. I don't yet agree with FCFromSSC's thesis that multiculturalist approaches are fundamentally doomed, but they're very clearly not something anyone with serious power is willing to accept.
It's demonstrably possible make the argument for people's right to make medical decisions or talk up the right to freedom in education, while wanting to ban homeschooling or require medical procedures, because that's become The Accepted Position, but it's little more than multi-culturalism-for-me.
On the silver lining side, the broader movement is in the process of eating itself alive over other contradictions, so the lack of interest in accepting more minimal takes has its costs. Hell, I don't think the transhumanist part will survive, because no small portion of the pro-trans not-actually-trans-themselves world hates transhumanism-as-practiced; cfe the various reactions to VR or weight loss drugs or AI or yada yada.
But that's a pretty shitty silver lining, and the movement can be incoherent longer than you can stay solvent.
gattsuru
1yr ago
While I'm skeptical of the uncutactivists -- and oh boy are they annoying in gay porn land -- my understanding of their thesis is that a lot of the impact comes during prepuberty or early puberty, or from the slow acclimatization over time. I think this has the separate problem of being unfalsifiable and depending on a lot of data that has too many alternative explanations, but it's not as overtly incoherent.
((Conversely, I do think the UTI risk is overstated. A lot of the studies for infants and younger kids are very streetlight-effect prone, in no small part because it's such a known impact; such a wide majority of UTIs clear up without medication that it seems likely to have underreporting among people who think they're immune. I've known more than a couple cut guys who only found out that they've been having repeated UTIs for the better part of a decade when they went to get tested for STIs.))
It's entirely possible that we see more cases on the exact same provision.
Much of the frustration here is that we've had years of better cases on the exact same provision, and Gorsuch didn't even write a dissent from denial of cert. There's some firearms people who are really hoping that SCOTUS just wanted to have a Bad Guys Can't Own Guns case first, but it's very hard to see that as anything but copium, and I don't think even the copium will survive either if Range (where the lower court found that a complete ban on possession for a 95 conviction for food stamp fraud was found unconstitutional) gets GVR'd with a dissent this week or the next.
I think maybe this opinion leaves a "Second Amendment +" case, where someone brings a 'normal' right case that also includes gun ownership, and gets more deference than they would under the traditional guns-are-always-a-compelling-interest bullshit, a la Caniglia, but Roberts' decision is just way too permissive in its writing, and I don't see it allowing any meaningful circuit split to develop for them to review with the text it just handed the coastal circuits, and the court will always have an excuse without a circuit split.
Mai is settled law, today; Roberts just saved himself from having to write the opinion.
((EDIT : And today's social media censorship case dodging any substantiative questions by complaining that the plaintiffs didn't bring a time machine to prove standing, and the leak of a similar punt for the EMTALA case, point the same direction, point similar directions.))
gattsuru
1yr ago
Levine is trans herself, which... well, in theory means first-hand experience, but leaves a lot to be skeptical about professional focus.
Combined with the laughably bad Surgeon General’s Advisory on Firearm Violence, it does seem like a lot of progressive groups are trying to stripmine any remaining institutional trust.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Yeah, I think there's a pretty critical underlying value disagreement. Even were a choir of angels to descend from heaven with a device that could guarantee not only whether a specific person was trans, but even whether they'd be happier to transition or not, I don't think social conservatives and the pro-trans side would be able to agree even in the most convenient world.
And in the world we're in, it's looking increasingly like that magical device might change from 'yes' to 'no' for a single person over time in some cases, which is pretty far from convenient. Social conservatives reject the framework that this change reflects internalization of transphobia or the harsher limits of later transition (usually, I think, in favor of seeing it as 'puberty naturally solving the discomfort'), but even accepting it doesn't actually change the value conflict: social conservatives absolutely will bit the bullet in favor of distress for a couple years to avoid sizable surgical interventions, even well outside of the trans sphere.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Both the standard and Jimenez's counterstandard histories seem... more than a little fuzzy, if you start digging into them.
((The trial court blocked the 'gay panic' defense before it was presented; a lot of the assumptions of anti-gay animus derive from it being presented at all, as well as some pretty pathetic sequences from Aaron McKinney during questioning.))
McKinney claimed years after the trial that he did not know Shepard, and was just looking to rob someone, and that the gay panic defense was partly something he came up with and partly his defense attorney, but at best that's the jailhouse word of a self-admitted meth-raging liar. Most of the claims that Shepard and either attacker had previously had sex come from 'Doc' O'Connor, the operator of a 'limo' service (coughcough: with a lot of sex work ties), but Jimenez's actual quote is that "Matt may have been one of the guys in back with Aaron... I can't say for sure", where the same man previously claimed to have only met Shepard once only days before the attack (and longer after the supposed car hookup), and if you start digging into other media coverage for O'Connor he alternates between knowing nothing and having been deeply involved in the personal lives of not just Shepard but also McKinney and his wife, and many of the stories are contradictory.
There's pretty strong evidence (if second-hand) that Shepard used drugs, including pretty hard drugs like meth, and some evidence that he was at least in a few degrees of contact with people who moved the drug through Colorado, but it's not clear where he fell on the lines for selling or reselling. A lot of people game-of-telephone Jimenez's account into certainty that Shepard was moving ten thousands of dollars in meth (cfe Reason here), but the actual claim in the book is a little different.
"I was therefore surprised when he [Aaron McKinney] confided that his “real plan” on the night of the crime had been something altogether different. He claimed that a roofing co-worker had tipped him off about “another dealer” in town who had six ounces of methamphetamine, worth more than ten thousand dollars on the street. Aaron said he had planned to steal all the meth, believing it would not only solve his money problems but also provide him with an ample personal supply of the drug. It was only when he couldn’t pull that robbery off that he decided to rob Matthew “instead.”"
The implication is that Shepard actually had or could get access to that much meth, but Jimenez never really ties it down further than one of McKinney's methhead friends boasting on the matter, and said friend, while never naming who that "another dealer" was, later points to a married man, ie not Shepard. Instead there's just insinuations about some regularly scheduled run from Denver, where someone would move ten thousand bucks of meth and be paid a few hundred dollars in meth, and it could have been Shepard. The quotes claiming genuine knowledge of Shepard selling anything, rather than mere belief, instead point to stuff that could be courier, small-scale resale, or even (heavy) personal use, not of knowing or long-term control.
On the flip side, investigators didn't test either attacker for recent drug use, so the alternative story of a meth-rage is pretty hard to prove or disprove, either. The official story conveniently places McKinney's last binge just long enough ago to remove even withdrawal as a motivator, and it seems to be based on little more than whatever an investigator could pull out of their ass. And there was little contemporaneous attention paid to how deep shit McKinney seemed to be in with his own suppliers, or even investigation of those suppliers. Jimenez points regularly to the possibility of either intentional ignorance or even outright assistance by police in the drug trade, and there's enough gaps in the official investigation that it doesn't look wrong, either, and that's knowing the extent that vice tends to be compartmentalized. Shepard seems to have gotten set on a bit of a pedestal, post-mortem, and while part of that's trying to avoid blaming-the-victim, part of it does seem focused around presenting a nearly perfect innocent for the story.
My gutcheck points more to something messier in the mix.
A lot named people in Jimenez's book claim McKinney was at least gay4pay, and that's a lot of other quotes that point to him as also self-closeted or genuinely doing it out of addiction. And there's pretty strong evidence that McKinney and co were looking for cash or drugs in anyway or form, not least of all that they did steal Shepard's wallet. McKinney was almost certainly desperate enough to fuck or fight someone for a hit, probably expected people at the particular bars he scoped out to be more likely have cash or drugs, and might (if we're trusting O'Connor) have suspected Shepard to have some cash or drugs, and targeted him specifically because of that, though in turn we have little reason to believe he had good reason to believe Shepard had drug-dealer amounts of cash.
But someone who's gay4pay isn't exactly immune for homophobia, especially if they genuinely were doing it for the cash (or drugs) or self-closeted, including violent homophobia -- especially at the time, there were a lot of hangups over what 'really' makes someone queer, many esoteric even within the gay world. But even were a methhead to turn a plan for a seduction or a 'simple' robbery or into a fatal beating because the methhead didn't bottom, it's hard to separate that from a methhead being a methhead who might have gotten set off for any of a thousand other things.
But that is just me pulling it from my gut.
gattsuru
1yr ago
That's true, and the seriousness of the policy disagreements are definitely part of the pressures making transgender politics so prominent in public discourse; not just that they are permanent, but that they're permanent in ways likely to be undesirable outside of the axioms and assumptions of the movement.
I think my argument is more that FoxDad can happen even (arguably especially) in communities with a lot or even revolving around 'toaster'-fucking, and this kinda puts a fork into the thesis from the greentext.
That said, I do think that people can and do treat benign communities as dangerous and harmful.
I was there, watching usenet and VCL-era wars over a zebra pool toy inflationist. Furries absolutely were a matter of serious controversy, believed to be self-modifying their sexuality in ways that directed them to same-sex attraction (probably wrong direction of causation) or made real-world 'healthy' sexuality difficult or impossible, in ways that can't be changed back, and in ways that made us a threat to innocents or even animals. There's still social conservatives circles doing that sorta thing, today; there actually been a recent mess in about (nonsexual) furry teenagers in schools. And some of the lesser-known stuff can modify you in even weirder ways -- I've got more respect for therians and therian self-modification than most people here would, but I'm not convinced mirror-dwellers are doing their brains any good.
((It might even literally be the specific target for this greentext: there's a long-standing meme in the fandom about protogen, a fantasy cyborg species, as toasters. Though the timeline is tight enough that it probably isn't, at least not that directly.))
There's a fair argument that they're wrong, for furries, and I'd agree with you. I could point to LGBT spaces that consider themselves self-criticizing, or where they keep the more prurient stuff moderately out-of-sight. ((Or rare places where a furry or furry group insufficiently policed the private behavior rules, or where public behaviors are accepted and should be acceptable: there are absolutely out-of-convention-center-doors fursuit parades. And bowling events.))
gattsuru
1yr ago
Yeah, I'd second that read. The Reductress framing is a little obnoxious in the gossip magazine summary of things (that Lady Gaga aside?!), but it's pretty common, and I could name three or four people who've taken variants of it each direction.
gattsuru
1yr ago
There were five commonly proposed mechanisms :
- Normalization of homosexuality could make it possible to discuss abusive homosexual relationships without admitting to illegal or taboo interests as part of the complaint. The extreme case is something like Dahmer, where police literally handed an underage victim to a serial killer (though Dahmer lived in Wisconsin, where adult homosexuality was legal at the time, he'd been booted from bathhouses for drugging people and the police in question had largely been driven to a policy of not asking questions). But a lot of stuff well below that level should have gone through the courts, and was instead handled through whisper networks that were plainly not up to the task, because the victims or witnesses could have faced liability or stigma.
- The separation from Actual Abuser and just homosexual would have made the stigma on the former more significant. Most of the documented stuff from Keynes involved people over the age of consent or who were plain adults and just younger than him, with the more serious allegations looking to be misunderstandings by more recent readers of the common terms of the time. Contrast Gajdusek or Breen's clear and known abuse of young children. But in the lingo of the day and even into the early 1990s, most public discussion (even in gay spheres!) would not distinguish the two fields, leaving far less pressure on the marginal bad actor to behave better.
- There was a common failure mode where an outed (or afraid-of-being-outed) teenager would flee or be kicked out from their normal community, and find that a combination of personal interests and business discrimination and native contacts would lead them to crash with various unrelated gay adults, often for pretty lengthy periods of time. Sometimes these were full-blown group houses, more often they were just rooming with friends-of-friends-of-friends, whatever. Sexual relationships in these conditions would be prone to abuse even without the age disparity, but it also meant they were people who had perfectly healthy (and above-age-of-consent-the-entire-time) relationships that looked really skuzzy from Traditional Perspectives. Cleaning this process out would both reduce temptation for marginal bad actors, and more critically also remove an avenue of normalization.
- Demographics are (and were) a bitch. For a heterosexual person, there's about one het member of the opposite sex in a five-block age range of your age for every thirty people. For a gay person before the Internet, that number was probably closer to 1:600 or 1:2400, depending on who's numbers you trust. And given the covert nature of efforts, gay men were limited in how they could go looking. While some approaches were able to concentrate all possible sexual partners, sometimes even into one room, in practice the real answer required looking very wide in one way or another, and opening that age bracket was often the only available choice. Young adults in particular have particular problems with complying with the standard rule for hets, both because of the more narrow slices and because those present were far less likely to be able to be out, be mobile, and be trying to match publicly. ((And the AIDs crisis blew up a large slice, too.))
- For... mechanical reasons that straight people aren't going to want to hear about, there's a lot of more awkward stuff that can happen between two gay virgins than two heterosexual ones, barring pregnancy. And while that's a very big 'except', it at least involves months before the emergency room visit. Various downstream knowledge and pragmatic matters made 'gay mentor' a thing, and while a majority were genuinely in the 'leave a pamphlet and pretend the question never came up' side, it left a massive space for abuse among people who by definition would not be able to readily recognize abuses. Increased information availability in public spaces, the growth of sex toys as an available industry, and more one-to-many discussions of gay sex mechanics, all did genuinely reduce that.
A lot of this was predicated on most abusers selecting their victims by opportunity or mild preference, rather than strong preference or as obligate parts of their sexuality, and that wasn't always true. And there remain awkward edge cases that neither the gay community (nor society as a whole thinking about the het versions!) really want to handle as rules rather than on a case-by-case basis.
But it wasn't wrong, either, nor clearly wrong at the time.
Biden can pardon Hunter whether he wins or loses; it's not like there's takebacks on November 20th.
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