wemptronics
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User ID: 95
Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire by Richard Frank. Thorough research from Both Sides helps the reader better understand the decision to drop The Bomb. It builds on scaffolding that allows the reader to judge how justified the decision was in terms of what relevant actors did know, what they didn't, and some of what they should have. It is a darn convincing defense.
I returned to sci-fi while traveling and on vacation recently. First was Rendevous with Rama which was a quick read and enjoyable. The plot is currently in the news. An object flies into into the solar system hurtling towards the Sun. Except in the book this is a massive 50km x 20km not-comet. The reader goes along with the only team available to check it out.
The second was The Mote in God's Eye which could have cut a bunch. Maybe I am a curmudgeon or I take for granted sci-fi was once new and unrefined. The time it spent thinking about aliens was nice. It has the old school sci-fi autistic charm where the authors forget to include a characters arc then suddenly remember to throw something in. It wasn't a slog, but could've been better.
The honorable fistfight is best suited for an environment like school. It includes a level of trust and familiarity. There is some authority figure nearby who can keep things from getting out of hand. Most of this is not replicated in the real world. Most physical altercations occur between strangers in a bar, a traffic dispute, or a misunderstanding in the street. Sometimes in those places, like a bar, there's a mutual understanding, but more often there is not.
Over expansive definitions of self defense that effectively make any form of physical violence a justification for homicide will make this worse, not better.
What part of it do you consider expansive now?
The rare possibility of physical violence is a good thing for social regulation.
Exactly. Like, if you try to kick my ass because you missed a turn, you might wind up dead. When I don't know anything about you except you are incapable of regulating yourself after you've fucked up a traffic signal, there's not even a partial desire to test my strength or your honor. I don't trust you. The people committing 4 million simple batteries a year don't deserve the benefit of the doubt from me.
Let me kick your ass a little, it'll be good for ya might be convincing from a Certified Mottezan. I suspect you're not going to break my ribs if you've managed to knock me out. The real world is not made up of Mottezans. In my experience, people that escalate petty disputes to physical confrontation are exactly the kind of people you cannot trust to regulate themselves or use appropriate judgment.
Instead we've replaced traditional ethics with a feminized world where all physical contact is treated as a deadly threat, where boundaries are set such that all fighting is illegal and both morally and physically dangerous because of that boundary. We're raising our boys to act like scared old women.
We're long past the point where you can or should trust a stranger to know when you're beat-- if such a world ever did really exist. The situations where a fistfight is good for you are rather limited. The situations where encouraging fistfights ends up as a good thing for society even more limited. Are fistfights more justifiable in some cases of lethal self-defense? Sure, you shouldn't whip out a pistol when Jack, your roommate in college, finds out you've been sleeping with his girlfriend. How many of those circumstances actually occur in one's life? What kind of demographics most frequently escalate fistfights to homicide?
I don't think boys should be expelled from school for getting into a fistfight. Zero tolerance policies are dumb. Encouraging physical violence is not going to improve our society, at least not in any way that a well-armed society can't.
I don't feel like reading that substack, because it seems pretty crazy. Square that framing with CNN's framing this morning. Democrats are committed they are in lock-step they are staring Trump down to get what they want. Which is credit for standing up to Trump.
Democrats are maintaining fierce unity publicly and privately, with lawmakers and senior aides telling CNN that they are prepared to stick with the party’s strategy for the near future.
I trust the more official mouthpiece of the party than the anxious doomsaying of a substacker. If this is the dissolution of Congress, then it is an abdication not an outright power grab. But, maybe your writers address that.
The maximum if I recall which is the nastier end of the example making stick. We don't jail politicians for lying to voters, but he did stick to denial and defiance until there there was nothing left. He probably would have gotten a softer touch had he bowed out with any amount of grace or contrition. In the end he serves 4 or 5 months? If he goes away forever and moves on it seems fine. I don't know if he has that in him.
The guy called someone else a RINO! Absolute mad lad.
Sink or swim? If or when legislators spit them back up, then an additional decision can be made whether to cram the nominee down their throat.
He commuted George Santos's sentence, for the stated reason that Santos always voted Republican, which is a pretty strong method, but is he doing anything to prove his reliability to non-criminal members of the party?
Trump was charmed by his saucy, sassy gumption and fashionable friends. Seriously, the guy could be cast as The Gay Friend in any Hollywood romcom ever made. Straight out of Sex in the City.
Santos “was somewhat of a ‘rogue,’ but there are many rogues throughout our Country that aren’t forced to serve seven years in prison,” Trump wrote
He showed initiative, he showed gumption. What's forgiveness for a little fraud? Another theory: Santos was doing very poorly in prison, or presented himself as such, and Trump took pity on him after an advocate got the president's ear. Santos is reprehensible to me and I wouldn't believe a lick of what he says, but mercy can be a demonstration of power.
Determining who the real hypocrites are is an invitation to the Seventh Circle of Hell. Contextual bickering could occur, but the main difference between Jay Jones and Ingrassia I see is:
After the texts came to light, several Republican senators said they would not support his nomination. They included some of the most conservative and stalwart Trump allies in the Senate.
I assume Ingrassia can be sidelined and replaced with ease. He might even have enemies or competitors with reasons to want that. Dems had no such out with Jay Jones. So, yes, I think it's fair to say Democrats are the hypocrites™ here. The respectability standards, as ever, are fluid and contingent. That doesn't mean they aren't real or are permanently unilateral. I do think the Young Republicans got offered as an unnecessary sacrifice to the altar of respectability. Vance was correct about that.
Platner has the support of people who cheered Charlie Kirk's death and faces off against the establishment. They would be happy to see him drop out. At least one of his fellow primary challengers has demanded such. People still go on about how Bernie had the election rigged against him. That may be what Dem operatives are thinking anyway. It does appear less than ideal some reddit communist has garnered a groundswell of support and a real campaign.
What is not believable is that Platner didn't have knowledge of the lineage of his cool skull tattoo. A veteran marine of multiple combat deployments, who then served as a military contractor -- one that, according to his now former campaign aide, "prides himself on his extensive knowledge of military history" -- certainly knows what kind of tattoo he wears on his chest. Weirder things have happened, but if I could bet money against his total ignorance of the design I would bet a good deal. I don't know why he didn't just say he was inspired by any number of killing-is-rad coded skulls as a young marine, and that the Croatian skinhead who gave him the tattoo only had one design to pick from.
questionable reddit posts "suggested people concerned about being raped shouldn’t be inebriated around people they don’t feel comfortable with."
Now that's just good advice.
It looks like that case laid the groundwork here. It was a 5-4 decision. Roberts I am less sure of, but Kavanaugh concurred in part:
the authority to conduct race-based redistricting cannot extend indefinitely into the future. But Alabama did not raise that temporal argument in this Court, and I therefore would not consider it at this time.
"Hint hint", says Kavanaugh, "what a shame." In the same year as Allen v. Milligan, the "temporal argument" gets applied SFFA vs. Harvard. He brings it up in oral arguments for LA vs. Callais. There might be other details in how each state framed their cases that dissuaded Roberts, or other tactical considerations. I briefly looked through the history of this one after netstack asked a question one comment below.
I find the temporal argument agreeable, but am less sure what it is based on. Times up! I guess lots of talk was had in the 60-70s about many of the positive discrimination stuff being limited and we just kind of forgot about those?
Wow. Yeah, the majority said Purcell! The stay preserved the map for the election. Jackson dissented and wrote it's not applicable there's totally enough time for remediation.
"Purcell has no role to play here. There is little risk of voter confusion from a new map being imposed this far out... I would have let the District Court’s remedial process run its course before considering whether our emergency intervention was warranted."
The District Court has not yet selected a remedial map, and, were it not for this Court’s intervention, it may have selected a map that complies with both §2 and the Equal Protection Clause. I would have waited until after the remedial process concluded (when it would have been clearer if the intervenors’ faced irreparable harm) to consider their arguments.
I have no idea if the Purcell time crunch was real or a pretext.
Why did the rest of the court want a stay? Was it going to get mooted if the legislature workshopped an alternative to their 2024 map?
LA draws one the district court accepts, or the district court imposes one. If you consider a narrow "did LA have good reason to use race here" preferable from a turn into 2025 "Whether the State’s intentional creation of a second majority-minority congressional district violates the Fourteenth or Fifteenth Amendments to the U. S. Constitution" then punting it back to district court is a way to avoid being in those oral arguments last week with the VRA coming into view.
Is that reasonable?
My only request is that we build a giant dedicated building for it
An open air amphitheater perhaps? One in which we can host bloodsports that better suit the brutal nature of politics in form and function. Besides aesthetics weather adds a new X factor. The arena would also compliment the return of state-sanctioned duels that keeps the massive lower house orderly. We can call it the Polisseum.
wemptronics
28d ago
The Constitution does prescribe equal protection.
Why doesn't this provide equal protection from the state drawing lines on a map every few years with the intent of limiting the impact of my vote/representation based on my race?
Did The Motte talk about the latest set of oral arguments at SCOTUS for Louisiana vs. Callais? The case is a continuation of the NAACP LDF's efforts to turn this big red blob of a congressional district that Louisiana created into a slightly longer contiguous red blob, but with new lines and a new congressional district. If SCOTUS was to affirm the district court's ruling, then the LDF will have won an additional majority black district in a state that is 33% black. For the sake of context, numbers I find put the state at 30% black in 1990, so this is a relatively stable share.
The decision to upend Louisiana's proposed 2022 map, it was be argued, is what Federal law requires. Section 2 of the VRA has been amended, extended, and litigated on several occasions since the 1965. In 1986, SCOTUS described the Gingles test to determine whether a majority-minority district should be created. I'm sure there are pages of nuance before and betwixt each:
- The racial or language minority group "sufficiently large and geographically compact to constitute a majority in a single-member district";
- The minority group is "politically cohesive" (meaning its members tend to vote similarly); and
- The "majority votes sufficiently as a bloc to enable it ... usually to defeat the minority's preferred candidate.
According to the NAACP, when the LDF received their favorable decision against the state in 2024, a group of "self-described 'non-African American [Louisiana] voters'" challenged this on the basis of 14th and 15th amendment issues. SCOTUS first heard the case in March of this year, but decided to schedule reargument (somewhat uncommon) which occurred last week. (PDF) The nature of the questions now in play led to a flurry of articles concerned that "justices could upend decades of court decisions holding that states may — and sometimes must — use race-conscious redistricting to protect the voting power of minorities." Other outlets like The Federalist take a Buzzfeed-esque dunk list approach to reporting the case.
My understanding is nobody knows just what kind of scope in ruling we should expect, but that the questions to follow suggest something broader than a Yes/No to a district map. There are all kinds of tidbits worth debating. There's my Big Questions which SCOTUS will not answer like: by how much does the fact my US representative is a black man, whose race I do not share, mean he doesn't represent me? It seems every minority whose vote doesn't represent their A) race and B) party can be considered un(der)represented, even if Congress hasn't provided a statute or adopted a different system of representation to resolve this.
At the time the VRA was written the demographics were very different to today's. Kavanaugh asked Nelson, who was arguing for the LDF, whether there should be a time limit on court ordered, law enforced racial voting maps. He receives a frank reply that is basically "lol, never." It's statute it doesn't just go away unless Congress changes it. That makes sense, but seems to force the hand of a potential majority that has questions on how this all works out.
Justice Jackson covers the more popular argument I see in the wild. She says,
"[Louisiana is] not departing. Their map looks fine, but because of all of these race-based [economic] effects, because of the history of Jim Crow, which I appreciate happened a long time ago, but I'm positing and Gingles allows for us to see where those effects are still occurring."
To her credit, she only mentions the word disparity once in arguments. This is the argument that until blacks disperse themselves geographically as other minorities have, or achieve similar outcomes to something, then states are required to continue to grant them majority-minority districts.
If you transported my liberal sensibilities to 1965 you'd probably convince me with ease that this little unconstitutional carve out was justified and workable. Not so much these days. I don't look forward to a total upending of the VRA house of cards. Sounds messy, but this is the consequence of previous pragmatisms of SCOTUS. The pragmatist leverage left, for me, is the fact gerrymandering is cynical by its nature. If you leave it to states without limitation, then they will discriminate by race for the very reason Justice Jackson says: blacks vote Democrat reliably enough to target. Which means we would still have to answer constitutional questions about lines on a map.
The "socially conservative" countries also did the things the reactionaries criticize, so I don't think it soothes anxieties around collapse. These places fell to the same pressures: educate women, push them into the workforce, compete globally, and acquire wealth. Afghanistan has a declining TFR, but not at a rate that will bother the Taliban anytime soon.
I don't think you need to argue societal collapse to see room for improvement. Yes, there is a mean spirited fantasy of the shitpostariat that goes full bore into denigration. Sexless reactionaries are resentful and as a result they don't value women very much, or express as much. The edgy memes were evolved in a period where anything not-feminist -- whatever it meant on a given day -- could be summarily discarded as misogynist. Full stop, end of story. How dare you? Which means some part of the reaction here can be chalked up to unfortunate, if predictable consequences.
At the very least it seems important to investigate radical changes to our society with an appetite for rigor. Improvements may not lie in RETVRN, but they may not lie in our understanding of concepts like "gender role" as wedded to things like second-wave feminism. Judith Butler shouldn't get the last say on how women think of themselves in our world. That's madness! Instead, women should listen to me. Barring that, we should want to look for alternatives or improvements. Why couldn't the next revolution be more traditional without fulfilling a young adult dystopian fiction? What if we can't have whatever makes you happyism without the cost of anxiety disorders, unhappiness, and civilization grinding to a halt?
We probably will avoid that last bit, but "traditional gender roles" shouldn't be off the table for consideration as a Scarlet Letter. That is also not the conclusion of this essay/book review by Ginevra Davis. She is more concerned with biological constraints she feels were imposed on her as a woman, and how that interacts with ideals of traditional feminism. I found her conclusions disagreeable, limited, pessimistic, and a little sad, but this thread made me think of it so I'm plugging it as a different take of being a woman.
One common conservative value, which most people don't outwardly object to though fewer find actionable, is holding motherhood as (if not the "highest and most virtuous") a significant, fulfilling achievement. Most progressives with families value motherhood, but of young women -- who are becoming more progressive with time -- this is a conservative coded value. Society relies on the fact cool, progressive girls ignore their politics, which they consider more important in more key areas than the past, and discover a natural desire for kids. At best, this seems suboptimal and unnecessary.
If we can effect a change in our values we might be able to leverage values into stuff. If it's all structural nothing-we-can-do forces, then the future is looking grim indeed. Baron Trump might put it off, but eventually he'll have to do the annual insemination tour to keep tax dollars flowing. I do hope this is our Malthusianism, and somehow we go back to something more normal and satisfactory in the future. Oh, and personally, I appreciate a woman who can read a book. You can trust her with so much more!
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