toadworrier
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User ID: 1151
toadworrier
9mo ago
Sounds like a great Eighth Amendment test case. With a dash of the First for flavour.
toadworrier
9mo ago
You could forbid meeting with, say, armed organizations for the purpose of conspiring to kill people. This is of course, already illegal, no one seems to have a constitutional problem with that.
toadworrier
9mo ago
Yes, the whole historical point of the Labor and Liberal was to ding-dong the labour laws. It's still true, but less so.
The labour movement used to have a power struggle between the unions themselves and the more PMC-dominated Labor party. The party has definitively one that fight, and the unions are themselves bureaucratic PMC-run organizations (except maybe in construction where thug life requires footsoldiers).
The Liberals are struggling with the fact that their traditional backers (captial) have become woke capital while all the political energy and opportunities are in the fightback against wokism.
toadworrier
9mo ago
Suppose there were bands of brown-shirted (and presumably red hatted) thugs who were reputed to go around murdering enemies of the president. Obviously already illegal, no need for a new law.
Suppose members of the FBI etc occasionally met with the leadership of these gangs and there are transcripts saying how the feds mentioned that so-and-so is not a nice guy (but never actually asking for a hit of course). Then suppose there's a pattern of so-and-so's getting murdered by "unknown assailants".
Do you seriously think it would be unconstitutional for Congress to pass a law banning those meetings?
toadworrier
9mo ago
Elitism over issues like crime is often a way to signal leftist ideals to boost one's social status, e.g. saying that crime is bad because of racism.
Nah, the narrative is more often about guns.
toadworrier
9mo ago
So what if the Euros have socialized healthcare? At least in the UK (not EU, I know), the NHS is absolutely swamped
I agree with your point generally, but the NHS is a really unfair thing to saddle Europe with. It really is socialised healthcare, and it works as well as communism usually works. Britain is a great place to visit, but don't get sick.
The rest of Europe is better. Germany for instance has normal GPs and also compulsory health insurance a bit similar to Obamacare. That produces some overservicing because everyone is finding ways to milk the insurance companies, but overall that better than the communist underservicing you get in Britain.
toadworrier
9mo ago
(imagine a forum with only one ongoing thread)
You mean like one gigantic thread where a bunch of mostly right-wing, onlinefolk post their culture war angst? Hard to imagine.
toadworrier
9mo ago
Do you think that legislation duly by Congress with similar content would meaningfully curtail the free speech and petition rights of the platforms?
Seems to me that such a law would be subject to strict-scrutiny, but would pass it with flying colours.
toadworrier
9mo ago
Thanks, that's really helpful.
It seems my impression of Korea being left-wing was skewed by emphasis on labour -- Unions being powerful and traditionally respected but now a bit too big for their boots. Kind of similar to my own country, Australia where construction workers are the last holdouts able to engage in actual gangsterism and teachers are radically left wing (of course in Korea that takes a special form).
toadworrier
9mo ago
Because artists want to do what is cool among their peers.
toadworrier
9mo ago
I have not read through the injunction carefully, so for the sake of argument I'll just accept your claim that it's over broad in various ways. If true, it should certainly be trimmed down to size.
My concern was whether any ruling made from the bench (whether as a temporary injunction or as final) could be structured in a reasonable way. And it seems to me that a list of prohibitions for various kinds of communication *for the [curtailment in some particular sense] of protected speech" is a good way to do it.
toadworrier
9mo ago
The Korea thing interests me. I always thought that was a pretty left-wing country by rich-world standards. But I guess it's all about the deltas. Maybe Koreans are all for unions, but as a result they've been so powerful that everyone is sick of them now (kind of like Britain under Thatcher).
toadworrier
9mo ago
Unless the university is in the habit of telling students why they’re rejected, there’s no real smoking gun, especially given the reliance on non-objective criteria for admission.
But this is not the way American anti-discrimination law works. For decades lawyers and civil-rights bureaucrats have been successfully going after every more implicit forms of putative discrimination. "Here's my statistical evidence that Foo has a disparate impact on Bar. I was FooBarred, now give me $$$$$$$" is standard practice.
That cat really will be among the pigeons if the Court can make that particular sword cut both ways. My guess is that over time the court system will follow the leader, but the EEOC will not unless the Republicans take over the government and gut the thing.
Government speech is a whole explicit area of US jurisprudence which is probably over both our heads.
But however you categorise, an injunction preventing government agents from merely communicating with persons is a pretty big deal. But IMHO the judge go this right. The injunction is mostly a list of prohibitions like
[Youse fuckers are enjoined from]:
emailing, calling, sending letters, texting, or engaging in any communication of any kind with social-media companies urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing in any manner for removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech;
My emphasis. So he is allowing the Government to communicate, but just not for the constitutionally forbidden purpose. Sounds reasonable.
toadworrier
9mo ago
Can you link to me the document you are referring to?
AFAICT the particular injunction that this article on about is https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.189520/gov.uscourts.lawd.189520.294.0_5.pdf, and is only seven pages. But of course there are many, many other documents.
Any link to the actual injunction? (Here's a link from@ToaKraka: https://www.courtlistener.com/docket/63290154/missouri-v-biden/, I think the injunction is https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.lawd.189520/gov.uscourts.lawd.189520.294.0_5.pdf
I'm interested in what concrete orders are given, and what that says about the final remedies. The article says:
A federal judge on Tuesday blocked key Biden administration agencies and officials from meeting and communicating with social media companies,
Which is pretty spectacular, and raises it's own obvious First Amendment concerns.
The thing is, I could imagine a detailed statue that laid out what what government could and could not do in this regard, and creates offences for trying to censor the public. But I'm finding it harder to imagine what a judge could do about it from the bench, even if he sees a rock-solid case that the government is violating the Constitution.
toadworrier
10mo ago
I think the academia has been preparing for this for years, moving from "objective metrics with AA bias on top" (like SAT scores, but the passing score is different for different races) to "plausible deniable 'holistic' judgements"
This is where the fun starts, but does not end. This is an anti-discrimination ruling. In broad strokes, anti-discrimination is an area where America has been building up jurisprudence for decades cracking down on any behaviours that might indirectly behave like discrimination.
The Ivy's will certainly try that kind of indirect discrimination, but lawyers from around the land will be looking for lucrative test cases, and they'll be doing it in an environment where the top court in the land has just told the world that anti-discrimination law cuts both ways.
toadworrier
10mo ago
Really, because the university will more than likely find ways to get around this law fairly quickly
They will find work arounds, and people will challenge those work-arounds. What I want to know is how much money is on the line. If people can smell 100 megabuck payouts then they will go for it and attack at all angles. That will change the risk calculus among university admins and slowly change the culture.
But if it's just a few court losses with smallish fines, then it's business as usual.
toadworrier
10mo ago
You are correct, mea culpa, I should have quoted the later part of that paragraph instead.
toadworrier
10mo ago
Here's the most concrete plan I've seen along those lines:
toadworrier
10mo ago
People who do listen to their lawyers don't thus get have senior policemen covering up their crimes for them.
Now that article might be wrong about accusing the FBI of covering for Hillary, but then your comment doesn't address that at all.
toadworrier
10mo ago
They lose money, but not necessarily influence, as they can leverage the loss of money for concessions in other areas, such as Chinese access into other infrastructure or concessions to allow Chinese-only installations
This is what I thought the belt-and-road was for. Pretend loans, that are actually payments to buy influence. But no, apparently the Chinese actually ask for their money back, and do so much more insistently than the IMF etc.
I'm particularly familiar with Sri Lanka. That stuff you might have heard of about the place failng organic farming was BS. That nonsense was government copium because they couldn't buy fertilizer, because they ran out of dollars, because the Chinese had lost patience.
The result was that China's friends in power got literally run out of town while protesters jumped into the presidential swimming pool. The new president is nobody's friend, but is now going cap in hand to the IMF.
toadworrier
10mo ago
The word appears twice in the poem:
I don't know if that's what you consider a heavy Australian accent. The speaker is the real deal, though not what I would call ocker. His voice is well matched to the poem.
The FBI Didn’t Persecute Hillary. It Protected Her. (Eli Lake @Tablet).
The gist is in the title, a longer gist is:
If the Durham report shows anything, it is that the FBI leadership bent over backward to protect Clinton’s campaign while launching a full investigation into Trump’s campaign on the thinnest of pretexts. In other words, the FBI was not really the Clinton campaign’s persecutor, as so many insisted over the past few years, as much as its protector.
I urge you to read the article itself, as it's about details and evidence for the claim above. It did also finally clue me in about why the secret services might be supporting the left. Before Trump was elected they were:
—hoping to curry favor with the person they expected would be the next American president.
[EDIT: _I wrongly thought my original referred to the FBI. That confused reading did in fact solve the puzzle that I had been wondering about, but is nonethless confused. I should have quoted: _]
... headquarters demurred. “They were pretty ‘tippy-toeing’ around HRC because there was a chance she would be the next President,” an FBI official told Durham.
This is very plausible. I hail from a longstanding 3rd wold democracy, and this is pretty typical behaviour. None of the elections are fair because the authorities tip them in favour of whichever side looks more likely to win. Usually this is the government of the day, but not always. In Australia, Rupert Murdoch behaved this way too with his media coverage.
Once Trump was elected, you would expect the FBI to quietly switch sides. But they might have accidentally burned their bridges. Or you might blame Trump for being too volatile and sour-minded to be worth sucking up to.
The other angle is topical: is prosecuting Trump and not Clinton a double standard? There's an argument (ping @ymeskhout) that the difference is that Trump has so brazzenly admitted guilt. Well if there's videotape Clinton also bragging about how her sever was illegal but she's above the law, then we are less likely to know about it because she really is above the law.
If the Tablet article is accurate, this casts light on this and every other putative distinction between the Trump and Hillary cases. Whatever distinction there is, it has (at least if the article is accurate) been brought out under circumstances where investigating authorities have bent over backwards to find ways to protect Hillary.
OK so the law against conspiracy to murder is constitutional because murder is not lawful.
Whereas a law against conspiracy to ostracise is not, because it burdens the rights of those who are taking orders about whom to ostracise. How exactly does it do this?
It's one thing to say that ostracism itself is legal (which it is), or even protected by the 1st Amendment (which it isn't), but it's another thing to say that the conspiracy is protected.
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