gattsuru
2yr ago
I think Netanyahu's going to retire or be shoved out of the public sphere regardless of what extent he 'knew' an attack was coming. The pre-October doctrine where Gaza was left to Hamas with business relations, a jobs program, and occasional missile exchanges and shooting atrocities was Netanyahu's brainchild, a major bet that no matter Hamas' public doctrine it wouldn't do anything as an organization outside of The Usual. It was a sad and bloody sort of 'deescalation', where a 'win' for Hamas was a gentleman's agreement for the Israeli's to not explode every member of Hamas' senior leadership, but they had eight years of that and it was a lot nicer for Hamas leadership than exploding, and the rule brought everyone to this.
((Separately, the emphasis on the failed judicial reform bill in a lot of these theories is kinda goofy. Netanyahu didn't win, but neither did Biden get a SCOTUS expansion. They gambled some political capital and lost; it's not the end of the world.))
gattsuru
2yr ago
Would you say that Twitter and its ilk are the issue?
I don't think so.
Trivially, I'm not sure how much the 1970s actually restrained 'reach' for a lot of the crazy activists. Hradzka's Days of Rage recaps give a lot of examples of absolutely nutty leftists who were praised and cause celebres across their fields, but it's not like the Birchers were any more restrained. It had a lower velocity, and that mattered a bit when trying to avoid grifters (though there still were a lot of those, too!), but there was absolutely a ton of consensus that established from the behavior of a small handful of absolute nutjobs. And that's, if anything, more present for the people today: Harvardites are pretty much selected to be the sort of people who can coordinate backstage communications well amongst themselves, we have a Washington Post writer who's devolved to saying that the pictures of decapitated babies could have come from /anywhere/, and the National Lawyer's Guild has shown its ass with exactly the same level of coordination as in the 1970s. Somehow.
At a deeper level, I've seen a lot of groups who either operated before social media, or now operate in exclusion from it, or both, and they're as or more prone to disappearing up their own asses; it's just not visible to outsiders until everything explodes. Indeed, even with social-media dependent groups, a lot of the real crazy positions and behaviors are still being coordinated by e-mail or face-to-face discussions.
More broadly, I'm generally pretty skeptical of Overton Window and related concepts: while they probably real in some cases, my objections to deplatforming are more about free speech and what happens when people don't understand each other's positions. And a lot of the 'success' stories are pretty transparently results of the Texas sharpshooter's fallacies (deplatforming took out Milo twelve times, donchaknow).
gattsuru
2yr ago
Robert Dotson would have a bone to pick with you, but for certain reasons his widow would have to do it for him. And it's not like this is new : Ken Ballew managed to be a short-lived cause celebre among a certain type of gun owner, but Andrew Scott's a good intermediate version that you've never heard of.
Duncan Lemp was floating around the same time that George Floyd was, and tbf he was a bit of a paranoid nutcase (though there is a fun question of whether he was paranoid enough), but so were a number of BLM high-profile examples.
gattsuru
2yr ago
I don't think Twitter is the issue, here. If Twitter had exploded as predicted by All The Tech Writers the day after Musk moved a server, we'd still have had portions of the Harvard student community writing that they "hold the Israeli regime entirely responsible for all unfolding violence"; we just wouldn't have known about it.
gattsuru
2yr ago
Ah, sorry, I mixed up names. I was thinking the Vektor, a famously unsafe concealed carry pistol.
The AGM-80 is more just wildly impractical.
gattsuru
2yr ago
... I've had a discussion on The Old Site where a moderator put out the challenge to find a half-dozen posters who "(a) are "regulars" here (b) leftists, and (c) have celebrated or turned a blind eye to violence", and I got either four-and-a-half or five depending on who you ask just by looking at BLM-related ones.
Support for BLM as a movement in general while either carefully ignoring the violence or at least saying it was bad was far broader, even at the Motte.
gattsuru
2yr ago
I'm going to try to be charitable, but this is a discussion space where people will provide amazingly dishonest analysis while claiming a straight face.
Founding-era behaviors included issuing letters of marque to private individuals who then took their cannon-equipped privately-owned and fully-staffed ships off a hunting. Beyond the practical issues with trying to ban such a thing -- the recent campaign for increased enforcement of state and development of federal anti-paramilitary laws in practice has mostly been calls to go after the political speech that gun control advocates don't like -- the pretense that they survive constitutional scrutiny because of a bad read of Article One powers is laughable.
I think there are a few major categories of firearm-related regulation that are pretty well-supported under current text and history analysis:
- Regulations focused on preventing injuries to the user or third parties from the otherwise-lawful use of a firearm, flowing from laws about gunpowder storage or dangerous and unusual weapons. It's perfectly legitimate if the fire code requires you not to store fifty tons of ANFO in the middle of a city, or for fifty pounds of gunpowder to be in a fireproof containers; people doing stupid stuff that could break their own hand or wanting a stock Viper is not part of the Second Amendment. There's a bit of messiness on the edges, since you can have either laws pretending to be about the safety of a firearm but (charitably) about criminal use or (uncharitably) about making gun ownership difficult, such as the Californian Safe Handgun Roster, or laws that are requiring extreme costs to chase tiny or dubious benefits such as some safe inspection statutes, but the common law rule that a private citizen should not be liable for the criminal use of their property really cordons off a lot of that. Other areas, like lead ammo regulations, are I think legitimate areas of public debate, so long as they are not backdoor gun or ammo (or for mercury, primer) bans.
((I think these practically cover nuclear weapons, simply because of the mix of incidental radiation exposure and fallout and large minimum yield make them very much the archetype of "infernal machine" that was often banned in the early United States, but I also think it's kinda irrelevant.))
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I don't like 'sensitive places' as a legal term because it's invited (often hilarious) abuse, but then again I expect Newsom would have abused a comma-separated list had Thomas written one instead, and there's very clearly a historical record of restrictions for some very specific locations. Areas with highly-restricted access, that have restricted access and the government is acting as the property owner, or where lawful use is impossible or dangerous, are more reasonable than everywhere but the sidewalk.
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Specific findings by a court of dangerousness of an individual person. Most of the limits here are due process ones, rather than second amendment-specific matters, but modern law has permitted a ton of due process violations here because guns ick. The process must be appealable both on matters of law and fact, must be an adversarial hearing with criminal-law-typical standard of proof, must have the right to confront their accuser, must be based on concrete allegations and with an actual statutory definition of dangerousness rather than courts treating it like a restraining order++, must respect property rights, so on. I'd argue that the analogue to surety laws requires a Second Amendment-specific way to expunge loss of rights (and federal law means that the ATF is supposed to be doing it right now, it's just not funded), but I don't expect SCOTUS to ever be willing to establish that.
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While I think they're bad policy, age restrictions up to age 18 are probably constitutional.
gattsuru
2yr ago
Other than the BLM supporters? Even ignoring Darwin's absolutely embarrassing showing, there were more than a couple honest advocates.
gattsuru
2yr ago
While it seems to us (and I would say is) more morally abhorrent, indiscriminately firing missiles at towns and cities is no different in terms of ambivalence to civilian casualties as telling drugged up young men to do what they want with a local civilian population.
I don't fully agree with it, but there's an argument that society has physical limits to how moral it 'can' be at maximum: slavery went from common-place world-wide to detestable with automation and wage manpower (and having literally any other option with war slaves), lowering infant mortality and mass-production of household necessities made it possible for women to have a place outside of the home, so on. At the extreme end, sufficient outside stressors can drive people to cannibalism surprisingly quickly. That doesn't mean that these limits make people more moral, just that they can't be better.
One of the commonly-cited examples is that mass bombing campaigns could only fall out of military necessity with the development of computerized guided missiles. And this is pretty applicable for Gazans: their artillery not only can't be more precise, it's often not even precise enough to distinguish its own launcher site from its 'target'. Leaving that weapon aside requires leaving a tremendous tactical and strategic space.
There are equivalents examples for other laws of war, including some relevant for these attacks. There are a lot of indiscriminate Biblical atrocities, after all. But they fell out of favor before the New Testament; the technology that obviated them wasn't microchips, but roads. The closest I've seen to a tactical or strategic argument is this one (cw: advocacy of outright evil, absolutely not condoned), and that's damning with faint praise: it's the logic of a tantrum, not a military plan.
In this framework, indiscriminately firing missiles at towns and cities is ambivalent in the sense that you're accepting the risk to civilian lives as part of a military plan that has not other comparable options; less ambivalent, and more accepting the costs. Maybe there's something that required the baby-murdering rapists, or Hamas was so low on armed adults that they couldn't pick and choose (but it's not like America's dabbling with baby-murdering rapists found them able to turn it off when they went home!), but it looks more like -- at best! -- absolute indifference.
gattsuru
2yr ago
Duncan v. Bonta drops, again:
Here, a stay is appropriate.
First, we conclude that the Attorney General is likely to succeed on the merits. In New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, the Supreme Court reiterated that “[l]ike most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited.” 142 S. Ct. 2111, 2128 (2022) (quoting Dist. of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570, 626 (2008)). The Attorney General makes strong arguments that Section 32310 comports with the Second Amendment under Bruen. Notably, ten other federal district courts have considered a Second Amendment challenge to large-capacity magazine restrictions since Bruen was decided. Yet only one of those courts—the Southern District of Illinois—granted a preliminary injunction, finding that the challenge was likely to succeed on the merits.
It's not surprising to find the 9th Circuit finding in favor of a gun control law at en banc, though some people are surprised that the vote was the exact same as before SCOTUS sent it back down. No firebreathing VanDyke dissent this time, and while it's somewhat funny that I can predict exactly how well Hurwitz's 'it's just a temporary emergency stay!' aged like fine milk, it's still disappointing he couldn't be bothered to either vote differently or provide a deeper analysis of Bruen as a concurrence. There's some fun discussion from Nelson about whether the 9th circuit's newly-created comeback rule is compliant with federal law, and apparently the court claims that it'll even request briefings on the matter... but since five of the judges out of eleven in the en banc panel are those newly-senior judges that the law does not allow on en banc panels, I don't think it'll be any more compelling to them than the violation of process back in 2020 were when they were doing it explicitly.
The fun part is the explicit text of that original order: "Judgment VACATED and case REMANDED for further consideration in light of New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U. S. ___ (2022).". That quote, above? Is all that the 9th Circuit's en banc panel did, in terms of considering Bruen. As Butamay points out :
Despite this clear direction, our court once again swats down another Second Amendment challenge. On what grounds? Well, the majority largely doesn’t think it worthy of explanation. Rather than justify California’s law by looking to our historical tradition as Bruen commands, the majority resorts to simply citing various non-binding district court decisions. There’s no serious engagement with the Second Amendment’s text. No grappling with historical analogues. No putting California to its burden of proving the constitutionality of its law. All we get is a summary order, even after the Supreme Court directly ordered us to apply Bruen to this very case. The Constitution and Californians deserve better.
Does this count as massive resistance to a direct order from the Supreme Court? I'm sure someone (if not huadpe, now?) could argue otherwise: emergency stays with perfunctory logical support are not exactly unusual, and the majority do mention Bruen for almost a whole paragraph. But it's more plausible to read this the opposite direction, especially given the Court's willingness to punt on procedural issues whenever plausible (and sometimes even when not). Getting GVR'd repeatedly and with increasingly strict-yet-ignored direction is nothing to party about, but it isn't a loss, either. You can make a media spotlight out of it, if you're on the 'right' side, but that's not the real motivation.
It's another two or four years to enforce unconstitutional laws, to mark those who don't comply with an unconstitutional law as felons, to build alternative methods to harass and exclude those who comply but don't agree, to cost your opponents tremendous amounts of money (only a fraction of which they may get back), and to wait for the composition of the Supreme Court to change or be changed.
gattsuru
2yr ago
I'm not surprised by the support for Palestine or even Hamas, given how much it's been a cause celebre for a while, but I'm pretty appalled by the number and profile of people cheering the specific tactics, here. The extent that the paraglider has become a specific signal while being pretty strongly tied to what was effectively a group of spree shootings, kidnappings, and rapes is a change of worldview to at least have a new symbol: it's just a change for the worse. Same for people putting "full responsibility" on Israel, or finding hope in a massacre, or what have you.
It'd be one thing if these folk just had their tail between their legs for a few days and then were right back into talking about the newest Israeli overreach -- and there's no small number of people doing that -- but this is the sort of thing that FCFromSSC's Charcoal Briquettes statement was criticizing, except to an even steeper extent.
And it's coming from a lot of people who supposedly should be much more vulnerable to social sanction than rioters or internet randos.
Yes, there were Right Wingers (or actual-fascists) people who did that post-Norway Attacks (or, more often, after the Christchurch), too. But they were both a much more constrained set and hounded out of both mainstream society and of the Right. (And generally not under their own names, because when they were doxxed they'd be rightfully excluded from their jobs). Maybe we're just on the first few days, and that will happen here as well.
But I'm not optimistic.
gattsuru
2yr ago
That's a good thing to remember in the general case, but it's also relevant to look at the necessary number of people involved in this sort of maneuvers, either directly in terms of men on the scene, and indirectly in terms of immediate support. Even with fairly generous assumptions regarding compartmentalization, it's extremely likely that both the majority of Hamas leadership and literally tens of thousands of individual members were involved.
That both changes how leaders make decisions (cfe more formal example), but it also blends the lines between decisions made by individuals and by organizations.
gattsuru
2yr ago
I spelled out that the Fed numbers I was providing did not include inflation at the end of the post above. (I'm also not sure, but I'm 99% confident the SP500 isn't adjusted for inflation either. Yes to be clear, stocks are still going to end up having larger absolute growth.)
The exact look of the chart varies a lot depending on what inflation and housing price index you use, and some of them will show drops around the 2008 and 1979 (sometimes 1989), but even those will be less volatile than the stock market, unsurprisingly, and that's what I'm pointing toward.
Which is simultaneously obvious and kinda weird! Housing prices are not obviously goods like an opera or string quartet that should be this subject to the Baumol effect, and while land values (and regulatory overhead) are part of the difference in value, you can at least imagine some counterfactual world where a flood of cheap housing brought the average house price lower even if some individual local markets still skyrocketed as they have in our world.
gattsuru
2yr ago
That's fair, although it sounds less like One Weird Trick and more that you've got a Very Particular Set Of Skills. Which still says something, but it's something different.
gattsuru
2yr ago
My claim is less that housing prices have been the Single Best Return On Investment, and more that they're just very consistently rising.
Separately, I don't think the St Louis Fed's residential property price index is really an apples-to-apples comparison to stock investments or what I'm motioning around, but their documentation on what data means exactly is pretty painful. This measure is probably closer, but because it's an average of sale values rather than of all values some of the drop in 2008 is probably about decreasing velocity at the top of the market, and it does hide some of the inflation-related 'real' value drops.
gattsuru
2yr ago
I've been jumping between Vintage Story and Space Engineers as different extremes of the voxel sandbox decade-long-development approach. Neither are really complete, yet, but they're an interesting contrast.
Vintage Story is slowly-paced and (often hilariously) small-scale, with clear inspiration from modded Minecraft survival-focused setups like TerraFirmaCraft or early SevTech. You can easily spend the better part of an in-game week working your way so you can break stone at all, and a day past that to unlock the mystery of sawing logs into planks. Getting even small mounts of iron or steel are mass resource investments. In turn, though, there's something incredibly satisfying about finishing a clay pot, or quenching some newly-forged tools, and even 'simple' things like beekeeping or finding salt are very rewarding. The implementation, at a very deep level, of microblock chiseling and varied mechanics gives a ton of opportunities that are seldom available in other block games; food management is surprisingly deep and has a lot of room to be made deeper and broader (and VS has a decent modding community: ExpandedFoods and A Culinary Artillery alone do a good job). And a lot of the weather and worldgen and even crop behaviors give lessons about Germs, Guns, and Steel-style arguments that were hard to grok as completely without.
(On the other hand, the combat suuuuucks and there's some jank the custom engine's still trying to shake out, mostly due to stuff like texture atlases or memory management.)
Space Engineers goes pretty hard the other direction. At the extreme end-game, you can absolutely grind through a (somewhat small) planet, but even the early-game is spent focused more on considerations like power supply or whether you want a wheeled rover or a small mining shuttle. There's some progression, but it's things like building a uranium reactor or a faster-than-light drive, and most of your construction materials are available with very little effort. As a result, while you can do some impressive stuff at small scales, much of my attention gravitates to larger scales
(On the other hand, the build controls and especially block selection options make me want to smack their UI dev over the head.)
gattsuru
2yr ago
I just watch the money I float in my checking accounts go up 70k every couple months and most of it goes into investments that will only be dinged if the government of the USA collapses; recission proof and inflation proof and 98% risk free.
There's a lot of potential risk, and while not all of it's the sort of thing that explodes a large portion of your asset portfolio, there's some of that class along with the "whoops it's all asbestos", "how do you like dem mold spores" and "tenant from hell that you have to take to your state's supreme court to evict", or just the hailstorm- or leaky-shower-scale problem.
And people can definitely fuck it up. People fuck up the value of homes they live in! This guy swears he'll get your basement renovation done at half the cost, no permits required, and he just needs to cut some notches in this one beam. Labor's expensive for roof repairs right now, just throw some more shingles on top and it'll last another ten years no problem. What does it matter how if the washer and dryer^andsomeotherstuff^ are on the same circuit? The housing inspector said no visible knob-and-tube.
I'd also like to argue that housing as an asset has only risen so consistently because of bad broader-scale policy decisions, but a) I've been saying that for a long time and the regulatory environment can stay stupid long enough for you to stay solvent generations, and b) the last time I decided maybe the counterintuitive economic theory had a point after guessing wrong for decades, MMT self-detonated.
There's a steelman that the risks are out-of-whack with the returns, as evidenced the variety of property management businesses and the relatively low rate of FTX-scale detonations there.
But the extent that's a largely floating on the price of housing being high enough that a small cut off is coming off a large pie. There's a sense where this is revolution-complete, since those high housing prices are the result of a combination of increasing population and immense regulatory and economic pressures against building new (or even replacement) housing, especially in high-demand areas but even in stupid ones, and especially at the lower cost end of the market. But there's another sense where if you could get even a portion of the people needed to have a successful blood-in-the-streets revolution (or the Canadian solution) to get off their couch, you could also change the political calculation, or just move a lot of similarly-minded people to take over a state the Libertarian Party way.
gattsuru
2yr ago
To be fair, Heller did get a carry permit in the aftermath of Wrenn v DC, which struck down may-issue permits in DC. He can't carry anywhere meaningful or with the gun he originally wanted back in Heller I, hence why he's now on Heller IV fighting both ridiculous limits on carryable arms/ammo and an overly broad and unclear definition of sensitive places, and the permit process is both very slow and very expensive.
gattsuru
2yr ago
Thank you for the compliment.
Thank you. I would also like to add that if conservatives won't forgive former racists, they're conceding that the only path to salvation is to become a full-on leftist.
I don't think it's that they won't forgive former racists, and to some extent they'll often highlight them in the specific context of repenting, but they're not going to trust again. Whether that makes a difference or not depends pretty heavily on what you're measuring and how important public recognition by mainstream or conservatives are for you.
Also, who are the Bundies?
A family of Nevada ranchers, best known for the 2014 standoff and 2016 Malheur Wildlife occupation. There was about a week where they were controversial but sometimes lauded among the mainstream right, but comments by the elder Bundy lead to them pretty quickly falling out of grace.
gattsuru
2yr ago
I agree with you that blue states and jurisdictions continue to try their hardest to gum up the works, I cited several examples in my last paragraph. Do you think any solution is possible?
I think it depends a bit on what you call a 'solution'. I don't think (and don't think it would even be 'fair') were Heller or Bruen to result in completely unrestricted firearm ownership. Obergefell lead to Bostock, but it wasn't written in stone the day Obergefell was announced. Hell, there are a lot of restrictions that I think are legitimately within the range of political discussion.
On the other hand, I think these cases absolutely, by central holding and by dicta, prohibit arbitrary restrictions on bare possession or carry of firearms in public places, respectively -- there's a reason so much lower court massive resistance depends on and actively cites the dissents. Yes, there might be some quibbling about how much Bruen breaks out 'sensitive places', but we're not just (or even mostly!) seeing examples close to "sensitive places such as schools and government buildings", but rather ones close to New York City's argument of all “places where people typically congregate and where law-enforcement and other public-safety professionals are presumptively available” that Bruen explicitly rejected. Several areas have done so to hilariously aggressive extents, or required ridiculous fees (sometimes while violating state law!), or with longer-than-year delays, or required a permit per gun (sometimes with total limits), or a thousand similar things. There have even been many restrictions that violate other constitutional principles.
Which... I don't expect people to play nice. I'd have more respect if these jurisdictions weren't making these rules, or heavily anti-gun judges were treating Bruen even by its own strict text, but we have seen several decades of people doing (if slightly more measured) futzing around at the edges for matters like free speech zones or abortion restrictions or gerrymandering cases.
But we've also seen a few dozen cases of people doing those matters and getting slapped down near-instantly, and in many cases the more extreme the gamesmanship or the more overt the intent to defy SCOTUS (or just appeals courts!) the more courts have been willing to step in early and given other expansive rulings. There are some exceptions -- the Texas SB8 law was very much made so that it would require a massive break from normal processes to make an early ruling, even compared to typical interventions -- but for the most part they are exceptions.
By contrast, that doesn't seem to have happened almost anywhere, here or in a number of Red Tribe matters. Several laws on matters of age restrictions or permit delays or gun violence restraining orders have been constructed such that they can not possibly be heard to even appeals level, nevermind SCOTUS, which should drive Robert's supposed anti-gamesmanship instincts up the wall, and there are several well-established exceptions (some, like those that apply for GVROs, which are favored)... and they haven't. In some cases, even as SCOTUS was the last resort before final closure of a case. We don't see much progress by the shadow docket, by the limited available interlocutory appeals, or what have you, nor were any nearby case to Bruen summarily reversed.
Some of that's principles. I'm glad, for example, that Thomas has not suddenly developed a strong lust for national preliminary injunctions.
But a lot of it's pretty clearly not. I don't think this points to SCOTUS being hesitant about a clear standard giving convicted felons concealed carry permits, in no small part because this issue is present in extremely constrained cases. My guess is that Roberts, at minimum, is highly aware of what could charitably be called the "dignity of the court", and more realistically be called the New York Times cocktail circuit, and he and at least a couple others are intensely aware that even the most minimal and sanely-uncontroversial decisions they sign on would become A Cause Celebre.
Thomas's "text, history, and tradition test" (and Kavanaugh before his appointment, and VanDyke and Butamay had pushed it as well pre-Bruen) can be seen within that framework. Not that they're surprised (maybe disappointed) that anti-gun states have been willing to lunge to and swallow the most racist and sexist and otherwise bigoted laws, or even that lower courts will condone them doing so, but when the case goes up, there'll at least be a Scylla to the Charybdis.
But I'm not as optimistic as you are on that. I've been wrong before, as Bruen itself evidences; maybe as we get away from the COVID years and as lower courts have some percolating information, they'll come down like a sack of hammers. Yet instead we're seeing fewer cases with cert granted, not more. Nor has this particular sea monster lead to awful publicity and meaningful impact in the past, as evidenced by how long after the yearbook drop that Governor We-Still-Don't-Know-If-It's-Blackface-or-KKK-Hoods lasted without any serious challenges from the left because of it.
gattsuru
2yr ago
But AFAICT, most of the skirmishes are over very limited laws that make it harder for criminals to get guns, or impose inconveniences that annoy gun owners but don't stop them from being gun owners.
I think this is a bad model, dependent on either reframing the 2nd Amendment such that owning a muzzleloader and five rounds, without the ability to carry them anywhere but one specified range and gunsmith, counts. Just of matters currently under consideration before the Supreme Court:
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NRA v. Vullo (prev here, background here) is about a dedicated effort to use regulatory systems against the speech of a private organization.
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Gazolla v. United States has a state that bans carry so broadly that its own politicians said people might be able to carry on some sidewalks, requires a permit that didn't exist for semiautomatic rifles, and does 'background checks' for ammunition that don't work (and probably violates federal law doing so) -- which it is not the only one doing.
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Nichols v Newsom is a complete ban on open carry, at the same time that the state has many jurisdictions ponderously slow or simply nonresponsive for concealed carry permits, as well as a 1000 ft buffer zone for any carry near any school.
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KCL v. Eighth Judicial is a product liability case that threatens any ammunition, firearm accessory, or related material business.
Even for cases that look like they're about convenience or criminals often are concerned about broader impact:
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Garland v. VanDerStock, Garland v. Cargill, Guedes v. ATF, and Garland v. Hardin all involve Scary Guns That Aren't Popular, but they also involve the federal government retroactively banning guns or firearm accessories that have been legal (and authorized by the ATF!) for decades, without compensation, and with no limiting principle.
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Rahimi involves the sort of dangerous criminal that people expect to be a big issue (and is notably brought by public defenders rather than gun orgs), but Garland v. Range is about making it harder for a food stamp criminal to get guns. Previous cases have disqualified a person for a 33-year-old conviction for selling counterfeit cassettes; some state laws have tried to provide increasingly restrict background checks to such a level that New York's current system does not even have a full list of disqualifying traits.
And when you go broader there are far more concerns.
gattsuru
2yr ago
Why do you think the book isn't doing gangbusters?
To some extent, "best-selling" is more about a pretty specific type of sales, rather than who's doing gangbusters, though I expect this isn't the biggest difference here. I don't even pretend to understand what drives mainstream (or conservative) purchasing. Separately, modern distribution policies have made book purchases less directly necessary to understand claims.
Why do you think Hanania's book is being ignored by the big players in conservative media?
For the big players, there's two problems. The first and most prominent is that Mainstream Conservatives don't platform a "former white nationalist", or VDare fans, or former really clear racists, by definition and by practice. This was part of why Spencer getting a platform on CNN appalled so many, but it's also why the Bundies got dropped like rocks. And it's been explicit in at least part of his case. But there's a second, and less obvious problem.
Reagan had a rule "Thou shalt not speak ill of any fellow Republican". This has always been better held to in principle than in the breach -- Reagan himself rather famously -- but the as-applied version of this holds that if you're In The Club or want to be In The Club, you must be polite about those In The Club, and there's an often-dizzying variety of norms for what exactly 'polite' means. And if you're not sure, you're outside of the club.
That's... not actually specific to Republicans or mainstream conservatives; quite a lot of organizations do this, with their own separate rules and expectations. It's obnoxious, because it can quite quickly lead to issues like the Abilene Paradox, for flawed positions inside the organization to go unchallenged, or allow bad actors inside the organization to flourish uncriticized. But it's supposed to stop organizations from turning into (or at least being obvious externally as) giant balls of infighting.
And Hanania has made a name for himself for... charitably, being a pugnacious righty, and more honestly, trolling.
Is there a chance that even if the book remains obscure, its ideas will make their way to the people who matter?
Are there any new big ideas? Seeing the Civil Rights Act as having been expanded far beyond its original grounds and to extents that interfere with constitutional rights dates back to Goldwater, if not before. Originalist interpretations predated Bostock -- though in turn I'll point who wrote Bostock.
TracingWoodgrains highlights Hanania for seeing the logistical and pipeline problems that TracingWoodgrains believes are core to the long-term (non)viability of the GOP (though I'm skeptical). And maybe that's closer? But I don't think he's argued it to the point where it's 'obvious' in hindsight, and that's usually core to really having your perspective take off.
A really persuasive work doesn't just present a plausible position, but gives you reasons that you should have believed beforehand.
gattsuru
2yr ago
I'm not very strong at economics, but my understanding of the problem as a naive outsider :
FTX (bizarrely) didn't have possession of much actual bitcoin, and did have liabilities in bitcoin, during the rush. A lot of what they did have were weird (often self-minted) project tokens, or tokens where a lot of the value was, charitably, FTX employees buying high or making offers to buy high.
Weird self-minted project tokens aren't illegal or necessarily even fraudy, but at best they're ultimately like stock in that they operate as a bet that their majority owner will do well: if FTX's business case didn't work well, the coins would not have transaction volume or value, and if FTX's business case worked fine but their financials failed at a large enough scale it would eventually liquidate enough of each token to plummet their value. Similarly, the more that other tokens were dependent on FTX purchases to weather drops in value, the less dollar value they'd have if FTX folded (or even if it had 'merely' tourniquet them).
On its own, those bluffs aren't necessarily clearly bad decisions. If you have a lot of paper value that's probably worthless and you do nothing with it, you're fine. But both FTX and Alameda were hemorrhaging money, and selling a lot of this probably-worthless paper to other people in exchange for more valuable paper, or using it to justify loans. It's not just that it was in the red, but that FTX was spending like it wasn't in the red. The more and more your business case depends on the chance that many or most of these tokens have, if not as meteoric a rise as bitcoin, at least have a stellar result, that's not (necessarily) illegal, but it's a really dumb idea. The more and more your reserve fund depends on selling things no one's buying, the more it goes from really dumb to hilariously bad.
And that's the best-case scenario -- not that Alameda's bad bets were intentional ways for FTX to pump its sales side, no one explicitly calls anything embezzlement in e-mails, so on. There's some fun philosophical questions about whether this is 'really' criminal intent or just so hopped up on adderall that they don't know the difference between right and wrong, or honestly believed that just the next day every coin he owned was going to take off in a way that would grow them massively. For the purposes of fraud, though, he said he was going to do one thing and did another. For the purposes of business decisions, it doesn't really matter what he thought, or what some random person hearing about Magic Boxes thought.
Rand's view on Native Americans was... not great: like a lot of pre-1970s Americans she largely saw them as primitive and nomadic tribal groups that hadn't really developed a concept of properties rights or technological advancement. The modern Objectivist analysis holds that some of this falls from often-bad scholarship of the time, which obscured a lot of Native American social technologies, but I'd expect she'd still find them to have failed her techno-utopian vision.
That said, Author Bloom's summary of Rand's position during the Donahue interview isn't very accurate. See here for a transcript, where behind the ellipsis we instead see :
I don't think she ever wrote specifically on the exact bounds of "civilized conflict", but a few of her books touched on her conflicts with 'just war' theory. Most interpretations become... idiosyncratic, to say the least, but I don't think Bloom's "no reason to distinguish between innocent civilians from military targets" is an honest read.
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