netstack
Texas is freedom land
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User ID: 647
netstack
Texas is freedom land
11d ago
As I understand it, Virginia v. Loving says yes.
I will admit that I’m not an expert. But I don’t think the dissents rejected the idea that marriage was a right protected by the 14th. They were more concerned with 1) whether the historical use of the term included the opposite-sex qualifier and 2) whether the due process clause protected positive rights in addition to negative ones. Or maybe that was just Thomas?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
11d ago
I would say that marriage is firmly under “equal protection under the law.”
netstack
Texas is freedom land
11d ago
It’s no hair off my chin.
Seriously. On the long list of questionable bits of jurisprudence, intervening in an interfaith beard dispute is incredibly niche. There’s plenty of things more threatening than the government overstepping its prosecution authority.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
17d ago
That might create people.
If you only drive sober, use your headlights, and follow all laws, you can still get in a wreck. When that happens, should you be held to the same standard as a reckless drunk driver?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
10hr ago
There’s nothing wrong with saying that you find a comparison ludicrous, but we ask that you leverage a more substantial complaint than “TDS.”
Goesaert v. Cleary: “Only when the owner of the bar was a sufficiently close relative to the woman bartender, it was argued, could it be guaranteed that such immorality would not be present.” 1948. Overturned in 1976.
Schulz v. Wheaton Glass: it turns out making identical job listings but paying the women’s jobs less actually counts as discrimination. 1970.
US v. Virginia et al.: no, spinning up a second school to allow male/female segregation is not, in fact, separate but equal. 1996.
I find it obvious that second-wave feminism was legitimately fighting oppression. The same is doubly true for racial minorities. There are plenty of reasons why the Civil Rights Act was significant, rather than a formality.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
12d ago
More effort than this, please.
It’s awfully hard to argue with one-liners.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
18d ago
That doesn’t seem right.
Missouri, Arkansas and Texas were colonized by Southerners and embraced slavery with both hands. California was also colonized by plenty of Southerners, at least if you count Missourians, but today is one of our least “culturally Southern” states.
When Kansas’s slavery was deferred to popular vote, political interests in the U.S. encouraged their supporters to go tip the scales. For abolitionists, this meant recruiting New Englanders, not disaffected Southerners. Proslavery interests, as usual, relied on Southerners, even those who didn’t hold their own slaves.
Outside of those states, the bulk of settlement occurred after slavery was abolished.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
26d ago
That’s ridiculous. “They” don’t co-opt random Christian aesthetics more than anyone else. Oh no, global warming activists have stolen the flood myth!
I agree that bright colors enjoyed a window of novelty. Along with synthetic fabrics and the rise of computer graphics, they’re responsible for some extremely dated trends. I would add that the fashion trends oscillate way faster, though. They’re at least as fast as the generational pressure of teenage rebellion.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
Sure they are. Some more than others.
You’re treating “cruelty-free” like it’s “vegan,” which has an obvious single condition to meet. But it’s more like “pescatarian,” an awkward wastebasket taxon that doesn’t quite match the literal name. It’s just that most people don’t bother distinguishing oysters from lobsters from tuna even though they are happy to draw the line at whales. We could add prefixes until we partitioned out the 12 principled pescatarians, but it is not generally considered relevant.
The partition for “Cruelty-free” means not complicit in a subset of acts which are considered cruel. It’s not exhaustive, and you can catch practitioners in weird edge cases. But 99% of the time you can get them to agree, hey, that thing they do to male chickens is in the “cruel” category, right? Then they’re supposed to avoid it.
How is this different from asking pescatarians if whales are fish?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
10d ago
Exactly. Maybe there’s something analogous in the way certain states recognize different corporate structures? There are only a few which allow forming anonymous LLCs.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
12d ago
netstack
Texas is freedom land
12d ago
netstack
Texas is freedom land
13d ago
netstack
Texas is freedom land
19d ago
Just finished Stormlight and really enjoyed it. Yes, people will point out stylistic/prose issues, and they'll be absolutely right. But Wind and Truth succeeded as the plate-spinning, world-expanding, every-new-detail-an-entire-sequel-hook kind of book I was looking for.
For something completely different, I'm alternating back to Annals of the Former World, a set of geology essays. I mentioned the first one last year, but apparently never commented on the next two, so here we go:
In Suspect Terrain was a hit piece on plate tectonics. Great premise, slightly confusing execution, because it was really more like a series of reasonable objections to people in the "new theory" hype cycle. I can't tell if that means the main character was stating the obvious, or if she really was a visionary who was vindicated in the next 40 years of textbooks. The coolest part was that, yes, plate tectonics was new in the 50s and 60s. I always kind of assumed it was settled in the 1800s like so much fossil and timeline stuff.
Rising from the Plains, though, was amazing. It's a history of one family stretching back to the westward expansion into Wyoming. At the same time, it's a narrative of how the Laramie and Medicine Bow mountains got where they are today. Outrageous cowboy anecdotes share pages with the solemn march of Deep Time. Part of the charm was having to keep a map open to cross-reference. I highly recommend this one.
Anyway, the next essay up is Assembling California. So far he seems to be coming at the region from both the western fault lines and the eastern Sierra Nevada. As always, the prose has been delightful. Here's hoping it keeps up.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
19d ago
Man. I feel like you're hitting a giant blindspot here.
Maybe you're right in saying that, with the appropriate definitional games, one can peel materialism like a banana. But isn't there merit to the framework which is hardest to peel?
The Christian framework comes apart at the slightest interaction with evidential standards. This has lead countless mystics and gurus to spin off their own heresies which try and rehabilitate it. Gold tablets, ESP, Arianism, whatever. None of them do any better than "consensus materialism."
Or maybe I'm misreading you entirely and tilting at windmills. Sorry.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
26d ago
Sorry! I really underspecified. I should have asked more about emergent historicity.
Consider a spectrum between abstract and concrete strategy games. Chess is a pretty darn abstract form of dudes fighting. Miniature wargames add all sorts of extra rules to flesh it out. For the most part, they hold on to useful game abstractions, like dice, or alternating turns. Once we get to real-time games, though, even those can be stripped out or hidden in the pursuit of verisimilitude.
Slitherine-type games seem to go really far on this simulationist end, though with some pretty unusual focuses. It's bizarre seeing abstractions like "cards" in Shadow Empire, a game which also models planetary hydrology and the military procurement process. But so, so cool. I'm going to have to check out all three of your realist/authentic mentions just to salivate over things I don't plan on learning.
But these simulations, sometimes ridiculously complex, don't usually converge on historicity. The game conceits, or the epicycles which were added to disguise them, keep most games from getting too realistic (and, presumably, boring). So we get Warhammer games where one side can be effectively "tabled" in one "shooting phase," giving up their precious "victory points." Divinity, where my squad can spend all our "action points" beating the tar out of one guy while his friends wait their turn. Really, action economy has got to be one of the biggest sources of this kind of divergence, but it's not like actual economics are safer. Victoria 2 is kind of infamous for keeping its plates spinning with careful scripting and duct tape.
Sometimes you get more verisimilitude by reducing the level of detail. I'd say old X-COM is a good example. Oh, there's plenty of game-mechanics nonsense, but the fundamental "Time Units" system does an amazing job of implying simultaneity. Move, and you risk enemies reacting. Hold your fire, and you get a chance to spend it outside the confines of your "turn." You get interesting game choices which wouldn't be possible in a real-time combat simulation.
So when I asked the question, I was thinking something more like: "what are the simplest, most abstract games which punch above their weight in encouraging historical strategies?" Games which reward pike blocks not because someone programmed an explicit stat bonus, but because the rules of their game world imply the physics of ours.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
29d ago
Point taken.
But “related to sexuality” isn’t really load-bearing. A big chunk of the politics leans on comparison to paraphilias. If being trans looks statistically different from crossdressing, or BDSM, or whatever else has gotten more popular since 2000, then it makes less sense to assert that it should be treated like those things.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
Normally I like reading your legal dispatches, but I don’t see how these are fun at all!
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
If they’re coming to opposite conclusions, then I don’t see what makes you say they’re using the same calculus.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
I don’t think this is true, but I suppose it’s rather hard to prove.
There’s no particular statement that crossed the line, but if I had to point to the biggest red flag, I’d blame the scare quotes.
Don't paraphrase unflatteringly. Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
Obergefell is correct. The right to marriage does not distinguish between same-sex and opposite-sex couples just as it doesn’t distinguish between same- or mixed-race ones.
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