netstack
Texas is freedom land
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User ID: 647
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
That’s not a nullification. I’d say the correct remedy for opposing a law is challenging it in court, and Abbott’s doing that. But since this isn’t a law passed by Congress, it’s hard to fault him for instructing his administration on how to implement their administrative change.
Now, there’s a little problem. The USED already implements other Title IX athletics rules. Seeing as those aren’t being challenged, I assume Congress explicitly delegated the power at some point. Either that, or it was assumed through the ever-popular federal funding mechanism.
So what makes this different? If it were an Executive Order, I’d understand the case for a Constitutional violation. But this is a “Notice of Proposed Rulemaking.” See here. It sure sounds like business as usual. If so, the federal government has its obvious recourse: cut federal funding. No Constitutional wrangling necessary.
That’d probably be a big win for Texas Republicans. The rule is being spun as “destroying women’s sports” already. Actually reducing any federal funds? Free leverage for Abbott. As much as I resent the guy, he’s set up a decent gambit. Hard to blame him, when Biden’s agencies are being such partisan hardliners—
Taking those considerations into account, the Department expects that, under its proposed regulation, elementary school students would generally be able to participate on school sports teams consistent with their gender identity and that it would be particularly difficult for a school to justify excluding students immediately following elementary school from participating consistent with their gender identity. For older students, especially at the high school and college level, the Department expects that sex-related criteria that limit participation of some transgender students may be permitted, in some cases, when they enable the school to achieve an important educational objective, such as fairness in competition, and meet the proposed regulation's other requirements.
Oh.
Well, no one was going to look at the actual rule, anyway. And if they did, they’d surely see that it’s a trap; no restriction could ever survive the captured, liberal media blitz. And if it did, the deep state would bury it. And if they didn’t, those partisan judges would have to legislate from the bench to stop it. And if they didn’t, well, Biden would obviously send the 101st Airborne to escort a minimally-sympathetic trans woman into your daughter’s locker room. Or worse, do it himself. And you don’t want Sleepy Joe near your daughter, do you?
Far better to make political hay now, before all that unpleasantness can get started.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
What the “right side of history” promises is that, if you join our team, historians will write hagiographies about us and forgive all of our worst sins. And if you don’t join our team? We’ll have no choice but to smear your team as depraved monsters with no redeeming features to speak of.
Props to @NelsonRushton for demonstrating why this is, as the kids say, non-unique. If you don’t join the right team, future generations will insist you’re “the new KKK”. But put the right letter in front of your name and they’ll whitewash you.
Yeah, it’s good rhetorical strategy. Pushes the right tribal buttons. A pure expression of ingroup power. That also makes it truth-agnostic, which is why it’s against our rules. I don’t think it’s surprising that actual politics doesn’t care.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3d ago
Ask for help.
Your manager exists to balance the workload in situations like these. Either by handing off one of the secondary clients or by allocating additional help on the big client. You should be able to go to him or her and say “Client A is taking more of my time than expected. Can I get some help?”
This may feel like admitting defeat. It’s not. You’re not in this alone, so use the resources available. Plus, in my experience, leadership likes it when people are communicative about their roadblocks. It makes their job easier.
I don’t know that I can help with anxiety late at night. Other than the usual advice of avoiding caffeine and screens before bed, enforcing a regular sleep schedule, et cetera. I suppose one thing that’s helped me in your situation is resolving on a course of action. I feel better knowing that, in the morning, I have some plan. Doesn’t have to be a perfect one.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
That’s fair. I shouldn’t have gotten worked up with that last chunk, because I understand how the even the narrow rule serves as an attack. Blue locations will adopt it as soon as someone makes a stink about existing policy, a heckler’s veto binding any school or league.
There’s a counterfactual world where this is a reasonable rule. Up until high school, sports are glorified team-building exercises. Who cares when the little monster who hit puberty six months before his team can outrun any of them? Who cares if a kid wants to join the other team and hang out with her friends? If you set up two middle-school leagues, with absolutely zero enforcement of sex segregation, I guarantee they’d sort into boys’ and girls’ teams. The categories were made for man.
I know we don’t live in that world. Some combination of ideologues, tiger parents, and bad actors will push any boundary you set. Why give an inch when they’ll take a mile?
That’s exactly what frustrates me. In case it wasn’t obvious, I don’t give a damn about children’s’ sports. Pretending that they’re a Constitutional crisis, a basic human dignity, or the last gasp of traditional values? That’s absurd. And yes, I apply that judgment to whatever progressive fringe is crowing about this victory. Great job, guys, you’ve ensured that 1% of your school district can get bullied even harder.
Imagine this situation in a vacuum. If your only goal was to give trans people more opportunities for sports, what kind of compromise would you propose? I think it’d look a lot like this one. Expand the options where stakes are low. Acknowledge that they can’t be expanded everywhere without sacrificing other values.
Obviously, this isn’t a vacuum, and the people who wrote this rule care about lots of other issues. They have every reason to rally around this particular opportunity for point-scoring. I’m not going to pretend otherwise. But they’re doing a better job of converging on the vacuum solution.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
Yeah, the more I read into this, the more popular Title IX looks to have been. Passed 88-6 in the senate? 275-125 in the house? Politics were different back then.
I get the impression that the same spirit which would lead to A Rape on Campus made a lot of otherwise-supportive people very uncomfortable.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3d ago
Okay, but how bad is it really?
Looking at the Unherd article, for example. Their thesis: #MeToo caused radical misogyny and conservative backlash. Their evidence: one survey showing young men were unusually hostile to the current president. A second survey, published in 2019, saying they really disliked feminism. And then a smattering of demographic and dating stats which don’t really measure opinion so much as try to justify it.
If that’s the quality of evidence, I’m not sure it can be distinguished from garden-variety fearmongering. Hey, our students don’t really like Biden. Does that mean the Democrats are at a crossroads of anti[femin/egalitarian/Semit]ism?
On the other hand, SK apparently elected their antifeminist. That speaks a little louder. Has he actually acted on his alleged platform? Because this sort of narrative is what I’d expect to see from a smear campaign.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3d ago
Seems well-written to me.
I can’t say I agree with the stages, necessarily? Especially 1 and 2. “Client ID” describes a phase in some movements, where adoption doesn’t pick up until elites grab the idea. But it doesn’t fit others. Look at Christianity, which didn’t gain elite support until it was firmly established among the periphery. It skips stage 2 entirely, too, since most of its institutions don’t develop until after regional hegemony. Or perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it started from stage 2.
Have you considered a comparison with Scott’s barber pole of fashion?
- Class A adopts signals from a (much) lower Class C
- Class B could imitate those signals, but they’d risk looking like Class C
- Class C sticks to imitating Class B since they have no chance of passing as Class A
- Class K is suitable for use on grease fires
Pretty similar to the g/m/s model, except all the levels have a similar level of awareness. There’s no clueless class existing only to get played by the next step up; instead, each group acts according to its own intuition. But you still get segmented behavior if there’s enough space to distinguish A from C.
So, does this apply to political causes?
I’m going to argue “yes.” Maybe that’s because I’m an inveterate mistake theorist and I don’t like the idea that individuals are driven by class interest. Personal incentives, though? Fair game. I think you can explain a lot of political phenomena as (counter) signaling without giving too much credit to the sociopaths.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3d ago
Were you already religious?
Because that strategy begs the question of why people have been falling away for decades. Otherwise you’re betting on a losing horse. Fine for getting a local support network, but I don’t see it scaling like the more ethnonationalist examples in that essay.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
I believe that was zPv’s point. Making a stink about Obama’s latest change was accepting the legitimacy of the past four decades of Title IX.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
Oh. My mistake.
Title IX is one of the pillars of American civil rights law, which had previously only covered employment. The 60s were an extremely liberal time for civil rights and social programs, but they’d emphasized racial and economic lines first. Title IX was part of a broader egalitarian push.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3d ago
Correlation isn’t causation. I’d be willing to bet that their birth rates predate whatever this is.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
Yeah, @hydroacetylene is right. We are so many steps from Texit. That’s precisely why it makes a good fringe position.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
Thanks. I got the impression it was something like that.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3d ago
I was trying really hard to figure out how the “Future Farmers of America” were involved.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3d ago
Okay, I’m feeling a bit foolish for assuming the attendees were mostly Penn students.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
3d ago
To me, this sounds a lot more plausible than “#MeToo did it.” The articles looked political first and theoretical a distant second.
What’re you basing this on? What gives you this impression?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
1d ago
Nelson has the right link.
Is that not an example of smearing the enemy team for their side of history?
netstack
Texas is freedom land
8d 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
2d ago
I’ll take that bet.
Also, this revision has (apparently) been in the works for more than a few months. This mess has been brewing since Bostock at least.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
5d ago
Sam Altman! I know that name!
I suppose I don’t know what you expected. When the government decides to explore a technology, one of the first steps is always some sort of consortium.
Thing is, that’s also perfectly compatible with the doomers. The paperclipper doesn’t care if it was given marching orders by a corporation or by the President, so long as the order involves paperclips. Making it more banal and routine just raises the number of opportunities!
netstack
Texas is freedom land
2d ago
I don’t believe you can draw a line from Jim Crow defenders and lynch mobs to whatever’s popular today. Even your caricature of it.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
9d 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
6d ago
netstack
Texas is freedom land
17d ago
Deus Ex released in May 2000 with memorable writing, interesting choices, and a deliriously complicated setting. Between the cool factor and the memes, it’s remained relevant for decades.
Daikatana also released in May 2000, featuring…none of these things. It’s best known today for its questionable marketing.
I don’t take this as evidence of a trend in game writing or production. Our impressions are formed by outliers rather than the mean or median or even modal game for a year. We still get vivid, cohesive experiences from developers with a vision. Have you played Disco Elysium yet?
Sigh. I suppose I ought to pay it forward.
Please don’t insinuate that people are off their meds. It’s rather antagonistic.
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