netstack
Texas is freedom land
No bio...
User ID: 647
netstack
Texas is freedom land
9hr ago
Still a professional word-wrangler. Still funny to hear him tongue-tied.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
9hr ago
Why do you think it’s misplaced sympathy and not, I dunno, doing their jobs?
Surely it’s not just because they’ve disagreed with your intuition.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
10hr ago
I was commenting on the Kagan/Evangelis exchange which you quoted. It was specifically about distinguishing status from conduct. Was that not what you wanted to talk about? I can move on to the rest, I suppose.
New Correct Lefty Science
To be clear, I read this epithet as referring to Corkran’s claim that a person can’t go from addiction to non-addiction. My phone won’t let me quote from PDF, but there’s a relevant passage on page 38. Evangelis argued that homelessness, due to its mutability, does not fit Robinson’s definition of a status. It’s exactly what Corkran was trying to rebut when you quoted her. Clearly, the whole court and both parties are interested in the bounds of this category.
I couldn’t actually figure out where mutability came into play. The Robinson opinion doesn’t mention anything like it, but it could be in oral arguments. As best as I can figure, it has something to do with short-term or automatic changes. But I digress.
So at what point did this become “lefty science”? When Evangelis conceded it before arguing homelessness was different? When Corkran asserted it before insisting homelessness was the same? When Jackson, whom I assume you think is a partisan hack, asked for clarification?
I think all of those options are stupid. They’re clearly arguing about something with a little more nuance than “can things change at all.” Ignoring that to dunk on unspecified lefties is playing an entirely different status game.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
10hr ago
In the abstract sense of complicity that you’re using? Quite a few. So long as they keep doing it, I’m willing to be an enabler.
Yes, I do think conscription pushes the balance in favor of surrender. No, I don’t think it’s obvious that the modal Ukrainian soldier no longer wishes to risk death.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
10hr ago
That’s from Robinson v. CA, so…Justice Potter Stewart, d.1985.
I don’t think quarantines fit the bill. In theory, they criminalize the conduct of going somewhere while (potentially) having such a disease, which is distinct from criminalizing the disease itself. Note that in Robinson the man arrested was expressly not taking any unusual actions.
In practice, did any of the lockdown ordinances actually threaten prison? I know there were enforced business shutdowns, presumably enforced via fines. I didn’t live somewhere which actually kept you in your house.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
12hr ago
In this Court counsel for the State recognized that narcotic addiction is an illness. Indeed, it is apparently an illness which may be contracted innocently or involuntarily. We hold that a state law which imprisons a person thus afflicted as a criminal, even though he has never touched any narcotic drug within the State or been guilty of any irregular behavior there, inflicts a cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment. To be sure, imprisonment for ninety days is not, in the abstract, a punishment which is either cruel or unusual. But the question cannot be considered in the abstract. Even one day in prison would be a cruel and unusual punishment for the "crime" of having a common cold.
I think the proportionality argument is pretty solid, even though it doesn’t give us a hard limit.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
12hr ago
Man, I really enjoyed the summary, especially Gorsuch reducing a professional to a stammering mess. Warms the soul.
Then you had to go and ruin it by tilting at this weird caricature of “New Lefty Science” and “the Lefties That Be.” Have you considered that maybe people you don’t like can be right?
- Sotomayor asks: if this ordinance is not applied to people who are incidentally sleeping outside, but only if the police think they have no home address, is it really legalizing conduct?
- Kagan adds that enforcement rests on having a home, which is a status, not a conduct.
- Evangelis counters that Robinson featured no actus reus, but this situation does: camping. Or really sleeping outside, due to the specifics of the injunction.
- Jackson reasons that if you’re relying on the act of sleeping, then you are touching on a “basic function”. And that’s what gets proportionality protections from the 8th.
- Evangelis avoids a follow-up about eating in public by arguing that a “necessity defense” would come up before the 8th.
- After some going around in circles, Roberts shelves the subject.
Which part of this do you have a problem with? Because it looks, to me, like a legitimate debate over the limits of the 8th. The hypotheticals are relevant. The questions are clear. No digressions about historical richness or other sources of vibes. Just “why is this different from Robinson?”
I will try to review more of the summary later. So far, I don’t see what you’re so sarcastic about.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
14hr ago
No, it doesn’t.
I’ve laid out the case for deterrence before. That only requires Russia to think they can succeed quickly and easily. Correcting their estimate is valuable.
In the world where we refused to supply any of them, Russia could exert power over its NATO neighbors.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
15hr ago
Texans like to complain about the influx of Californians. But the driver is the traffic.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
15hr ago
Texas HB 1181 was passed near-unanimously. It contained two requirements for porn sites: age verification, and a surgeon-general style warning. Nothing about payments.
There’s clearly some interest in suppressing pornography. While I can’t say whether they provided MasterCard or Visa with the impetus, I expect they would endorse payment processors’ restrictions.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
16hr ago
Banning obscenity and vice are two very popular pastimes.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
16hr ago
Less antagonistic, please.
You can make this observation—it sure does look like that was already implied by MartianNight—without turning up the heat.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
16hr ago
I was using it in response to the OP. That tweet just says “fracturing,” so I’m not 100% sure what distinguishes it from Balkanization, siloing, or walled gardens.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
16hr ago
Sorry, I was using it as a generic Eastern Bloc stand-in. Really, any of the smaller countries. I don’t know the legal mechanism, but torrent or vice sites are stereotypically hosted on these more permissive domains. Kind of like how sci-hub.se currently has .ru and .st mirrors.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
Wait, aren’t those both things that happened to Raskolnikov?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
…there is one?
About 4 million Americans are on parole or probation, compared to something like 1 million in prison and another million in jail. They’re being monitored specifically to reduce the chance of recidivism. In the meantime, sure, they still get to ride your subway.
What’s your threshold for “manifestly incapable,” anyway? How should we decide when someone has crossed the line and gets (permanent?) exile instead of prison? I think it looks a lot like sentencing guidelines, probation, counseling, all these other interventions we already do—except at the last resort we boot them to the Montana Gulag instead of the chair.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
I was sure the “lacking value” argument was specifically addressed in a U.S. Supreme Court case. Is this taken from the pixiv announcement?
Edit: it is, but in exactly the opposite way that I thought. Miller v CA.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
Texas recently started enforcing HB 1181, a viewer-age-verification law. The sort which intends to make it very annoying to distribute pornography if and only if one intends to run a business in the U.S.. Hosting a server out of Czechoslovakia is, as I understand it, still untouchable.
Pornhub’s parent company responded by cutting all services to Texas. Should a Texan IP address make a request to their site, he will receive instead an angry letter about his lawmakers’ shortsightedness, questionable legal footing, and so on. Other sites have followed suit. The argument goes that 1) the law only hurts the most compliant companies, and 2) it fails a variety of Constitutional protections.
Naturally, it was wildly popular, passing 141-2. It has also survived legal challenges up to the 5th Circuit Court. Even though one of the provisions was struck down as improper government speech, proponents insist that the rest is perfectly above-board.
So far, it’s looking like another step towards pillarization.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
"access to the financial system writ large" has become so utterly critical to doing anything useful that it immediately has a totalizing effect on what anybody can do
Well, when you put it like that…what’s the alternative?
I met someone, once, who’d been working in Saudi Arabia when her employer switched from paying cash to paying checks. She explained that they used to bring in a giant sack of cash on paydays. Now they could turn it into a bookkeeping problem rather than a logistical one.
These enormous institutions developed by providing a valuable service. People wanted to store their savings. They wanted to distribute promises instead of cash. Eventually they wanted all the records generated automatically, without any humans needing to slow the process down. At what point did they move from a private to a public good?
Because the alternative to private banking, with its private right of refusal and freedom of association, is treating it like we do the roads. A central actor has to step in and say “we know this policy is irrational for any of you as individuals, but we’ve judged the total benefit to be greater.” And that’s not going to happen so long as the central “irrationality” is something unpopular as pornography.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
wokestupid
Come on, that’s just lazy.
Anyway, I’d argue that colleges still pursue the latter goal. Even for pie-in-the-sky pure science. But I suppose I’m rather biased, seeing as my sister and I both did our Master’s degrees in these kind of labs. There are two media narratives about university research. And neither “breathless futurism” nor “absurd political sinecures” captures the quiet tide of NSF and corporate money.
I don’t fully understand the incentives. Grad students remain cheaper than full-time employees; employing them on tangential research is a popular way to scout talent. It also interfaces into the reputation games of publishing, trendsetting, and attracting new students. Combine all these, and you get institutions which compete to be known for their pure science.
I have no idea what percentage of university research falls under this umbrella. My school probably had fuel for both media narratives somewhere on campus. But it is a lot closer to the ideal of a Research University than you might expect from a random state school.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
The first two get recommended on /r/rational periodically, but iI’m sad to say I never got around to them yet.
Is Expeditionary Force Craig Alanson? That one’s on the list. Eyes are open for a hard copy.
Never heard of Starship’s Mage. It does sound rad.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
Hmm. I’ll have to keep eclipse in mind.
My day job is mostly MATLAB, so on the rare occasion I need to do Python, I use Spyder or one of those similar wrappers. The read/execute/print window is the important bit.
Man, I dunno what happened here, but chill out.
One day ban.
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