ControlsFreak
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User ID: 1422
ControlsFreak
6hr ago
there is a difference between "science" and "New Correct Lefty Science"
Can you suggest a simpler and more plain way of indicating this? I thought the caps and everything did the job. Maybe a (TM)?
It is possible to not be an active addict... an addict can be a "monster", then return to being normal for years or decades or the rest of their life, even if the monster risk is always hanging over them.
I hate to say it, but this reeks of epicycles. Like, it's also always possible for someone who has never been an addict before to become an addict at some point in the future. If so, what conceptual content does "addict" have? What is its definition? Is it something like, "An addict is someone who has at any point in the past been addicted to drugs"? If so, it's another one of those amazing definitions like those that just claim, by definition, that it's theoretically impossible for someone to change from being homosexual to being heterosexual (and that anything that appears otherwise must be hidden mystical bisexualism). Ok, sure, you can define your terms that way, in a way that makes it true, by definition, that people who are addicted to drugs cannot become not addicted to drugs, but that's not saying anything about the science of addiction, or anything we've "learned" by science since the Robinson era. It's saying that you've simply adopted a different definition. Then, we'd have to wrestle with how changing definitions affect the legal and philosophical concepts involved. Plus, from a culture war observer position, I'll absolutely enjoy just watching and noting the various changing of definitions, how they may come from political pressures rather than new scientific results, and how such changes interact with the broader public discourse.
I'm speaking a bit tongue in cheek, because as I linked to a couple of my prior comments, and as many people learned during COVID, what the politicians or the media say the science says is ultimately as powerful or more powerful, in terms of the culture war, than what the science actually says. This is ultimately about observing the shift in the culture war, not a shift in the science. That is, there is a difference between "science" and "New Correct Lefty Science", where the latter is specifically things like what the politicians, media, and every party member in good standing must say in order to not end up in the metaphorical gulag.
I'm anticipating that in the next five years or so, simply asking people who want to argue about drug policy, specifically those who are on the left, a version of, "Can a person go from being addicted to drugs to not being addicted to drugs?" is going to be illustrative and possibly necessary in order to even communicate with them reasonably on the topic. We will have to figure out where in the update process they are, kind of like how we've had to do so on trans issues for the last ~5 years.1
I have gotten piled on here (well, at least at the various old places, with a similar community of individuals) for taking the position that "treatment" isn't a magic word that solves drug addiction problems, that legalization will likely increase consumption (including people who consume for the first time or consume enough to become addicts), and that we have approximately zero clue how to convert people from being addicts to not being addicts. (Plenty of people do things like "age out" or take agency and figure it out on their own, etc. It's clearly possible to stop being an addict, except in the colloquial sense that some support groups use the phrase; it's just that we have basically no useful public policy tools to actually accomplish that with any scale.) But similar to what @crushedoranges said, if we take that view, then it really opens up arguments for public policy that are quite different than the arguments we're seeing now.
At least since I was young, this perspective has not been on the table, as the pro-legalization cultural forces have been utterly dominant. I even bought their message when I was growing up, which is how I know what the messaging was like. So, perhaps the New Correct Lefty Science is actually adopting something more like this now. If so, that might be a great improvement, being closer to correct! (I'm a bit doubtful that they'll actually hit the target, though...) However, if so, it's going to generate quite a rift and plenty of cognitive dissonance with all the pro-legalization talking points, and that's a culture war worth paying attention to. Like, what's going to happen? Who's going to win? Who are the X-o-phobes going to be? What sorts of rationalizations will emerge to blend this with various policy desires? Prior to this oral argument, I didn't anticipate needing popcorn for drug policy arguments anytime soon; now, I'm already poppin'.
1 - For another example, you still occasionally see someone on the internet who clings to the extremely weird claim that it is just theoretically impossible for someone to change from being homosexual to heterosexual, the rationale being to the point that even if you have a public example of someone who appears to have done just that, there's some hidden mystical behind-the-scenes explanation that they were actually bisexual the entire time, but were also somehow not wrong about their claim that they were homosexual, and the epicycles that follow. But it's very rare now; it was everywhere ten years ago. Completely pervasive. Because that's what the party demanded. I found it plenty interesting to watch how that culture war shifted, even if I don't think anything about the "real" science shifted.
ControlsFreak
7hr ago
Mostly what @gattsuru said. We could have gotten a string of cases that treated sex as the status in question and then applied standard 14A intermediate scrutiny, but we didn't. Don't forget that it's not just Lawrence and Obergefell. It's Lawrence, Romer, CLS, Windsor, and Obergefell. They made an absolute hash out of the whole mess, and they certainly did not rest simply on distinctions being made based on the status of sex.
Would be the absolute peak of irony, however, in an alternate universe, to hear KBJ interrogate counsel with a frank and straightforward, "Can a person go from being the male sex to being the female sex?"
ControlsFreak
20hr ago
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.
Sure. Evangelis and Corkran seem to agree that people cannot go from being addicted to drugs to not being addicted to drugs. It didn't stick out all that starkly when Ms. Evangelis spoke about it (though I notice it more clearly now; Corkran also said the same thing but not as starkly in her response to Roberts). She seemed to be thinking more about the "struggle" part. It stuck out massively when KBJ spoke to Ms. Corkran.
I couldn’t actually figure out where mutability came into play.
Evangelis and Corkran seem to agree that addiction to drugs is immutable (to some extent; Evangelis is a bit less clear here). Evangelis thinks that this is a distinguishing factor from Robinson, thinking that the Robinson Court, at that time, also viewed it as some sort of immutable, which contributes to an argument of it being a "status". Corkran disagrees, thinking that the Robinson Court simply got the facts about addiction wrong, that they thought it was mutable (but it's really not), so they were thinking that mutable things could still be a "status". Thus, Evangelis thinks that Robinson supports mutable things being not a status and immutable things being a status, while Corkran thinks that Robinson implicitly supports both mutable and immutable things being a status (dependent upon some other features, apparently).
So at what point did this become “lefty science”?
The point where EVERYONE suddenly believes that people who are addicted to drugs cannot, in any way, become not addicted to drugs! This is a huge H-WHAT?!?! moment. I've been constantly bombarded for decades now with messaging that we just need "treatment", and that will solve all our public policy problems with drug addiction. It's a magic panacea that, if applied appropriately and with sufficient outlay of government monetary resources, will be able to convert people who are addicted to drugs into people who are not addicted to drugs. Now, suddenly, out of nowhere, everyone seems to agree that this is just impossible. This is, frankly, incredible New Science. I'd be open to a scientific argument with links to scientific experiments and theorizing that support this incredible New Science; if convincing, I may even agree with it. However, until I see a remotely convincing argument with actual scientific evidence, I'm going to default to it being the new Lefty Science Party Line, akin to the prior consensus on biological determinism of sexuality, that has been adopted primarily due to political reasons and raw social force rather than genuine scientific evidence.
ControlsFreak
23hr ago
I would be interested to see an effort post from you describing what you think "actual justice" is, alongside your meta-ethical views and how they fit together with your determinism. I know that you have in the past positively linked to Mackie's argument for moral nihilism from queerness, but I haven't gotten a sense for how you put it all together. What do you think is "actual justice" to a nihilist? How does it possibly matter to a determinist? Why would it even make sense to have a decision "theory" in this world, and what would it possibly have to do with justice?
ControlsFreak
1d ago
Have you considered that maybe people you don’t like can be right?
Sure they can. Care to defend either of the things I "tilted" at?
Note that I wrote:
Of course, as is probably traditional for me at this point, I hardly even want to talk about the specifics of this case, at least not concerning homelessness. Instead, I'd like to jump off into questions of categories (which, uh, I guess are made for man?), agency, and the games we play with categories like 'status'.
The sections you're complaining about are the parts that aren't actually about the specifics of this case. So, uh, I'm really not sure how your description of things that are specifically about this case are really relevant to the things I wrote that you're complaining about.
STATUS GAMES
When people talk about "status games" 'round these parts, they're normally referring to our obsession with relative social status and the games that we play in order to increase it. However, this morning, I listened to oral arguments in City of Grants Pass v. Johnson, a case about a municipal ordinance, from a town in Oregon, prohibiting people from sleeping in public, at least with some 'aggravating' factor, like having a blanket. Of course, as is probably traditional for me at this point, I hardly even want to talk about the specifics of this case, at least not concerning homelessness. Instead, I'd like to jump off into questions of categories (which, uh, I guess are made for man?), agency, and the games we play with categories like 'status'.
The background is a 1962 case, Robinson v. California, referred to in all blockquotes from the Court as just "Robinson", which considered
A California statute makes it a misdemeanor punishable by imprisonment for any person to "be addicted to the use of narcotics," and, in sustaining petitioner's conviction thereunder, the California courts construed the statute as making the "status" of narcotic addiction a criminal offense for which the offender may be prosecuted "at any time before he reforms," even though he has never used or possessed any narcotics within the State and has not been guilty of any antisocial behavior there.
SCOTUS held:
As so construed and applied, the statute inflicts a cruel and unusual punishment in violation of the Eighth and Fourteenth Amendments.
Details aren't the most important, but a vague sense of that backdrop is. If someone is "addicted to narcotics", that's considered just a "status", not actual behavior or conduct that can be regulated by the state.
This status/conduct categorical divide has a long history of being quite confusing, and this confusion was on full display at the Court. A Ctrl+F of the transcript shows 121 mentions of the word "status", and many of them are trying to figure out what counts. I collected more blockquotes than I could possibly clean up or feel comfortable bombarding TheMotte with, so I'll try to be sparing. First off, Justice Kagan asking questions of Ms. Evangelis, who is arguing on behalf of the city:
JUSTICE KAGAN: So can I talk about that, Ms. Kapur? So taking Robinson as a given, could you criminalize the status of homelessness?
MS. EVANGELIS: Well, I have a couple points to that.
JUSTICE KAGAN: It's just a simple question.
MS. EVANGELIS: So Robinson doesn't address that and I think it's completely distinguishable. So Robinson was a --
JUSTICE KAGAN: Could you criminalize the status of homelessness?
MS. EVANGELIS: Well, I don't think that homelessness is a status like drug addiction, and Robinson only stands for that.
JUSTICE KAGAN: Well, homelessness is a status. It's the status of not having a home.
MS. EVANGELIS: I actually -- I disagree with that, Justice Kagan, because it is so fluid, it's so different. People experiencing homelessness might be one day without shelter, the next day with. The federal definition contemplates various forms.
JUSTICE KAGAN: At the period with which -- in the period where -- where you don't have a home and you are homeless, is that a status?
MS. EVANGELIS: No.
There is a bit of meandering that I'll omit, but it comes back to:
MS. EVANGELIS: The statute does not say anything about homelessness. It's a generally applicable law. One more -- it -- it's very important that it applies to everyone, even --
JUSTICE KAGAN: Yeah, I -- I got that.
MS. EVANGELIS: -- people who are camping.
JUSTICE KAGAN: But it's a single person with a blanket.
MS. EVANGELIS: And --
JUSTICE KAGAN: You don't have to have a tent. You don't have to have a camp. It's a single person with a blanket.
MS. EVANGELIS: And sleeping in conduct is considered -- excuse me, sleeping in public is considered conduct. And this Court -- this Court in Clark discussed that, that that is conduct. Also, the federal regulations --
JUSTICE KAGAN: Well, sleeping is --
MS. EVANGELIS: -- are very --
JUSTICE KAGAN: -- a biological necessity. It's sort of like breathing. I mean, you could say breathing is conduct too, but, presumably, you would not think that it's okay to criminalize breathing in public.
MS. EVANGELIS: I would like to point to the federal regulations which I brought up.
JUSTICE KAGAN: And for a homeless person who has no place to go, sleeping in public is kind of like breathing in public.
and finally:
JUSTICE KAGAN: -- I'll tell you the truth, Ms. Kapur. I think that this is -- this is a super-hard policy problem for all municipalities. And if you were to come in here and you were to say, you know, we need certain protections to keep our streets safe and we can't have, you know, people sleeping anyplace that they want and we can't have, you know, tent cities cropping up, I mean, that would create one set of issues. But your ordinance goes way beyond that. Your ordinance says as to a person -- and I understand that you think it's generally applicable, but we only come up with this problem for a person who is homeless, who has the status of homelessness, who has no other place to sleep, and your statute says that person cannot take himself and himself only and, you know, can't take a blanket and sleep someplace without it being a crime. And -- and -- and that's, you know -- well, it just seems like Robinson. It seems like you're criminalizing a status.
Kagan may be the smartest of the liberal Justices, so it's probably no surprise that I think she got the closest to a conceptualization of status that is friendly to the left in this case. Unsurprisingly, though, "Republicans Pounce". Justice Gorsuch said that, "[T]he distinction between status and conduct is a slippery one and that they're often closely related," and had what was perhaps the most comprehensive exchange on the topic with Mr. Kneedler, who is the Deputy Solicitor General, weighing in on the case on behalf of the federal government, who was technically supporting neither party, but is obviously in practice representing the equities of the Biden administration portion of the left.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Mr. Kneedler, I want to probe this a little bit further because it -- it does seem to me the status/conduct distinction is very tricky. And I had thought that Robinson, after Powell, really was just limited to status. And now you're saying, well, there's some conduct that's effectively equated to status and -- but you're saying involuntary drug use, you can regulate that conduct. That doesn't qualify as status. You're saying compulsive alcohol use, you can regulate that conduct in public. Public drunkenness, even if it's involuntary, that doesn't qualify as status, right?
MR. KNEEDLER: Right.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: You're saying you can regulate somebody who is hungry and has no other choice but to steal. You can regulate that conduct even though it's a basic human necessity, and that doesn't come under the -- under the status side of the line, right?
MR. KNEEDLER: Yes.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Okay. But, when it comes to homelessness, which is a terribly difficult problem, you're saying that's different and -- because there are no beds available for them to go to in Grants Pass. What -- what about someone who has a mental health problem that prohibits them -- they cannot sleep in -- in a shelter. Are they allowed to sleep outside or not? Is that status or conduct that's regulable?
MR. KNEEDLER: I -- I think the -- the question would be whether that shelter is available.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: It's available.
MR. KNEEDLER: Well, no, available to the individual.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: It's available to the individual.
MR. KNEEDLER: But --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: It's just because of their mental health problem, they cannot do it.
MR. KNEEDLER: I -- I think there might be -- I mean, that's -- the mental health problem --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Status or conduct?
MR. KNEEDLER: The mental health situation is itself a status.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Right, I know that.
MR. KNEEDLER: Yes. But -- but if the
JUSTICE GORSUCH: It has this further knock-on effect on conduct. Is that regulable
MR. KNEEDLER: I -- I --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: -- by the state or not?
MR. KNEEDLER: -- I -- I think that -- I think if the --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: All the -- you know, alcohol, drug use --
MR. KNEEDLER: Right, right.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: -- they have problems too and that that -- and -- and -- but you're saying that conduct is regulable. How about with respect to this pervasive problem of -- of persons with mental health problems?
MR. KNEEDLER: I -- I think, in a particular situation, if the -- if the -- if the person would engage in violent conduct as --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: No, no, no, don't mess with my hypothetical, counsel.
(Laughter.)
JUSTICE GORSUCH: I like my hypothetical. I know you don't. It's a hard one, and that's why I'm asking it. I'm just trying to understand --
MR. KNEEDLER: I -- I --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: -- the limits of your line.
MR. KNEEDLER: I think it would depend on how serious the offense was on the -- on the individual.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: It's -- it's -- it's a very serious effect. The mental health problem is serious, but there are beds available.
MR. KNEEDLER: Well, what I was trying to say, it would depend on how serious being required in -- to -- to go into that facility was on the person's mental -- if it would make his mental health situation a lot worse, then that may not be something that's --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: So that's status -- that falls on the status side?
MR. KNEEDLER: Well, I -- I -- I -- I guess you could put it that way, but I -- I guess what I'm saying is that --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: I -- that's what I'm wondering. I don't -- I'm asking you.
MR. KNEEDLER: Well -- JUSTICE GORSUCH: I really am just trying to figure out --
MR. KNEEDLER: No. You could view that as status or --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: You're asking us to extend Robinson, and I'm asking how far?
MR. KNEEDLER: Well, what I was going to say, you could -- you could think of it as status, but I think another way to think about it, and this is our point about an individualized determination, is that place realistically available to that person because --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: It is in the sense that the bed is available --
MR. KNEEDLER: I know that it's --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: -- but not because of their personal circumstances.
MR. KNEEDLER: Right. Right. And that's -- and that's my point. It -- it's available in a physical sense. It may be available to somebody else, but requiring an individualized determination might include whether that person could cope in that setting. That's the only --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: So that -- so that might be an Eighth Amendment violation?
MR. KNEEDLER: Because it may not -- yes, because it's not available.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: So that's an -- it's an Eighth Amendment violation to require people to access available beds in the jurisdiction in which they live because of their mental health problems?
MR. KNEEDLER: If -- if going there would -- would --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: How about if they have a substance abuse problem and they can't use those substances in the shelter? Is that an Eighth Amendment --
MR. KNEEDLER: That is -- that is not a -- that is not a sufficient --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Why? Why? They're addicted to drugs, they cannot use them in the shelter. That's one of the rules.
MR. KNEEDLER: Well, if they -- if they -- if it's the shelter's rule, then they have no -- they -- they -- they can't go there if they're -- if they're addicted. That's not -- that's not --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: So that's an Eighth -- that's an Eighth Amendment violation?
MR. KNEEDLER: Well, no, the -- the -- the Eighth Amendment violation is prohibiting sleeping outside because the only shelter that is available --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Is not really available to that person?
MR. KNEEDLER: -- won't take them -- won't take them, yes. And that's an individualized determination.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Same thing with the alcoholic?
MR. KNEEDLER: Yes.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Okay. So the alcoholic has an Eighth Amendment right to sleep outside even though there's a bed available?
MR. KNEEDLER: If -- if the only shelter in town won't take him, then I think he's in exactly -- he's in the same -- he's in the same condition. And there can be all sorts of reasons, and the City doesn't normally --
...
JUSTICE GORSUCH: How about if there are no public bathroom facilities? Can -- do people have an Eighth Amendment right to defecate and urinate outdoors?
MR. KNEEDLER: No, we -- we --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Is that conduct or is that status?
MR. KNEEDLER: I -- it's, obviously, there -- there is conduct there and we are not suggesting that cities can't enforce their --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Why not, if there are no public facilities available to homeless persons?
MR. KNEEDLER: The -- the -- that situation, you know, candidly, has never arisen. And whether or not there -- I mean, in the litigation as I've seen. But no one is suggesting and we're not suggesting that public urination and defecation laws cannot be enforced because there are very substantial public health reasons for that.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Well, there are substantial public health reasons with drug use, with alcohol, and with all these other things too.
MR. KNEEDLER: And they can all be --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: And you're saying the Eighth Amendment overrides those. Why not in this circumstance right now?
MR. KNEEDLER: No, I'm not -- I'm not saying the Eighth Amendment overrides the laws against drug use.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Oh, I know that.
MR. KNEEDLER: Oh, I'm sorry.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: I know that.
MR. KNEEDLER: No, I misunderstood what you --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: That one -- that one the government wants to keep. I got that.
MR. KNEEDLER: No, I misunderstood your question. Sorry.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Yeah. Last one. How about -- how about fires outdoors? I know you say time, place, and manner, but is there an Eighth Amendment right to cook outdoors?
MR. KNEEDLER: No. I -- I -- I -- I think what -- what --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: That's -- that's an incident -- a human necessity every person has to do.
MR. KNEEDLER: But this -- but this is one -- this is one of those things that, you know, is taken care of on the ground as a practical matter. There are restaurants where someone can go. There are --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Well, no, no, we're talking about homeless people.
MR. KNEEDLER: No.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: They're not going to go spend money at a restaurant necessarily. Let's --
MR. KNEEDLER: Well, there -- there may be inexpensive places. Some people get --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Let's say there isn't, okay?
MR. KNEEDLER: And --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Let's say that there is no reasonable --
MR. KNEEDLER: And -- and the local community --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Do they have a right to cook? They have a right to eat, don't they?
MR. KNEEDLER: They have -- they have a right to eat, a right to cook if it entails having a fire, which I think it -- it -- it probably -- it probably would, but -- but, as I said, the -- the -- the eating, the feeding is taken care of in most communities by nonprofits and churches stepping forward --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: But if there isn't
MR. KNEEDLER: -- as they have for 200 years.
JUSTICE GORSUCH: -- but, if there isn't, there's an Eighth Amendment right to have a fire?
MR. KNEEDLER: No, no, we are not saying there's an Eighth Amendment --
JUSTICE GORSUCH: Well, I thought you just said there was.
MR. KNEEDLER: Well, there -- there's food that you can eat without cooking it. I mean, they -- and they could could get a handout from the -- from a -- from an individual that, you know, people can beg for money. I mean, there are -- there are ways that this works out in practice.
Oof, that was long and covered a lot. Gorsuch would go on to suggest that the Court should just push the case back the State for a "necessity" analysis and not "get into the status/conduct stuff that -- that Robinson seems to invite." Roberts, meanwhile, went after immutability in a colloquy with Ms. Corkran, representing the class of homeless people challenging the law.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: A number of us, I think, are having difficulty with the distinction between status and conduct. You'll acknowledge, won't you, that in those terms, there's a difference between being addicted to drugs and being homeless? In other words, someone who's homeless can immediately become not homeless, right, if they find shelter.
Someone who is addicted to drugs, it's not so -- so easy. It seems to me that in Robinson, it's much easier to understand the drug addiction as an ongoing status, while, here, I think it is different because you can move into and out of and into and out of the status, as you would put it, as being homeless.
MS. CORKRAN: Yeah. So it's interesting, we today understand addiction as an immutable status. In Robinson, the Court suggested that someone might be recovered and no longer have the status of addiction. So the Robinson Court wasn't thinking about addiction as something that couldn't change over time.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Well, that may limit the applicability of Robinson to a different situation, but what is the -- I mean, what is the analytic approach to deciding whether something's a status or a situation of conduct?
MS. CORKRAN: So the question is a status is something that a person is when they're not doing anything. So being addicted, having cancer, being poor, are all statuses that you have apart from any conduct.
CHIEF JUSTICE ROBERTS: Having cancer is not the same as being homeless, right? I mean, maybe I'm just repeating myself because homelessness can -- you -- you can remove the homeless status in an instant if you move to a shelter or situations otherwise change. And, of course, it can be moved the other way as well if you're kicked out of the shelter or whatever. So that is a distinction from all these other things that have been labeled status, isn't it?
MS. CORKRAN: I -- I don't think so because, you know, a cancer patient can go into remission, they no longer have that status. I don't think -- I mean, I don't think there's any question that being poor is a status. It's something you are apart from anything you do. It's a status that can change over time, and at that point, you wouldn't be a part of the class, but I don't think it changes the fact that it is a status. And what Robinson found so offensive about status-based conduct --
But it would take Justice Jackson to blow up our first real bombshell of the argument, following up on the Roberts' discussion of immutability:
JUSTICE JACKSON: Can a person go from being addicted to drugs to not being addicted to drugs?
MS. CORKRAN: So I think under common -- as we think about it in terms of modern medicine, the answer is no. But the Robinson Court certainly thought that was the case, right? Sixty years ago, we didn't have the same understanding of addiction as we do now.
JUSTICE JACKSON: So your view of Robinson is that it doesn't really matter, the permanency of the condition; it's still a status?
MS. CORKRAN: Right. The Robinson Court did not think that the permanency mattered because it thought that addiction was a status that could change.
In summary, the Robinson Court was actually wrong on the facts. They thought that people could go from being addicted to drugs to not being addicted to drugs. So, they clearly didn't care all that much about permanency. But BOOM goes the claim that, apparently the New Correct Lefty Science has determined that people don't ever transition from being addicted to drugs to not being addicted to drugs. I guess I heard it here first. My years of shouting at clouds that Scott pointed out that basically all honest alcoholism rehabilitation studies fail to outperform a placebo and that narcotics rehabilitation studies don't even use measures like "stops taking narcotics" in favor of measures like "causes trouble for other people while using narcotics somewhat less often" is finally being adopted! (Frankly, in far stronger form that I would have even stated. I wouldn't say that people can't stop being addicted to drugs; just that we can't magically impose a "treatment" regime that is going to result in them stopping.) Wow! Was the failure of Oregon's decriminalization experiment so spectacular that we're no longer going to have endless claims that we can make everything completely legal, so long as we pray to the god of providing "treatment" (without any serious consideration of how this is going to happen or whether it will actually do anything)? I can hardly believe it.
As amazing as this concession to Justice Jackson was, Alito somehow at least comes close:
JUSTICE ALITO: Well, see, the problem is that once you move away from the definition that makes the inquiry basically tautological, then you get into the question of assessing the closeness of the connection between the status and the conduct. And you do run into problems with the person who's a kleptomania -- a kleptomaniac or a person who suffers from pedophilia. So how do you distinguish that? How does the Court assess how close the connection has to be?
MS. CORKRAN: So -- so, for both of those categories, the -- the -- the status is defined -- I don't know if status is the right word there -- being a pedophilia or having pedophilia is defined by the urge that you have, not by your conduct, and acting on that urge. So, if someone were to act on that urge, that tight causal nexus on why they didn't have access to shelter, then they would be outside of our claim.
What's this?!?! A distinction between "having an urge" and conduct?!? In the realm of sexuality? Say it isn't so! How many times can The Lefties That Be just boldly admit that the entire slew of homosexual behavior to gay marriage cases were based on a fundamental lie?!
The more cynical among us might observe that status/conduct games seem to be yet another way that folks run away from agency, shielding anything that they like in terms of it "being who you are" or things that just "happen to you". There is no real theory here, and most attempts to justify it are pretty philosophically incoherent. It doesn't seem like the Court is going to buy this particular extension of The Game, but why wouldn't they try? They've had all these other victories, including effectively banning Christian groups from campuses, by substituting "status" in for "conduct/belief". Why are the Status Games so powerful?
ControlsFreak
4d ago
KBJ is still "young", a prospect of sorts. One of those, "She needs some refinement to bring her play up to the level of wily, consistent veterans, but she shows flashes of potential greatness," situations.
Whereas with Sotomayor, I think we pretty much know what she is. I would submit that the Thomas Revolution was less about Thomas changing/growing and more just about how people viewed his work. Lots of folks were so focused on Scalia during his life and just thought Thomas could never live up. It wasn't until Scalia passed that they re-evaluated. I don't think Sotomayor is suffering from that. Perhaps a bit of a Kagan effect, but I would find it quite difficult to imagine someone sitting down now, putting their hypothetical brain to work, removing Kagan from the picture, thinking hard about what Sotomayor's core contribution is, and coming up with a great argument that it is something that can be rallied around to really deliver. KBJ totally could.
ControlsFreak
7d ago
I have always preferred calling them "micro-aggravations". Yes, it's a real thing, but it really says more about the aggravatee's psychology and what they find annoying/unpleasant than it does about anything that can be properly called "aggression". One can still care deeply about reducing their impacts, even on a society-wide basis, but I think this terminology more appropriately captures the concepts that they use to describe the phenomenon and avoids the horrific conflation with literal violence that plagues the rest of the associated political movement.
ControlsFreak
7d ago
statistically speaking, CICO is not likely to result in success.
This is basically useless evidence. Statistically speaking, most people don't get jacked. It doesn't mean that weightlifting doesn't build muscle. It's a pretty "simple" biophysical phenomenon, but it's not particularly "easy" to dedicate time and effort to doing it.
Moreover, we have good evidence for why CICO is not likely to result in success, because we can see a stark difference between studies of in-patients, where the researchers have complete control and ability to strictly account for calories consumed, and self-report studies, where they don't. The conclusion is that it's unquestionable that CICO absolutely completely works; it's that people do all sorts of shit to convince themselves of little lies here and there rather than wholeheartedly embrace truth and reality and take agency for their choices.
Two examples I've talked about here are my wife and a friend of ours. When I convinced my wife to just count the calories and see what the deal is, she still mentally rebelled against it. She would see the line tracking her weight (weekly average) not always dropping immediately, and be all, "MAYBE IT'S NOT WORKING ANYMORE!" I had to say, "Shut up and just keep doing it," more times than I can remember, and sure enough, it always kept going down. I don't know how many times it took for her to mentally "get it". At some point, she was like, "Yeah, I 'knew' that it worked like this, but I didn't 'know know'." Because society has been lying to her for decades.
Our friend literally went to her doctor and basically begged for advice on how to plan diet/exercise, but doctors hate to tell people to diet/exercise, because they know that most people have been lied to for decades and simply won't believe it enough to do it, so what did her doctor say to help her? "Ya know, you're just getting older." Even the fucking doctors contribute to the constant lying that people experience. It's no wonder that the statistics are what the statistics are, even if it works 100% of the time when you do it.
WaPo just had an article a couple weeks ago detailing one of the industries that are literally dedicated to lying to people about how the world works. These are the bootleggers. The baptists are the lying gyms and diet people who say shit on big signs like, "LOSE 30LBS IN 20 DAYS!" Everyone is constantly lying to people, and we shouldn't be surprised that, statistically, people get confused by those lies rather than doing the simple, but not easy, things that are necessary to lose weight.
ControlsFreak
7d ago
The way we solve this is that we just schedule different snacks. My wife and I have the same meals, with calories planned so that they make sense for her, and then I have more significant and more calorie-dense snacks to fill out my requirements. I work from home, and she goes in about half the time, so I may even just have basically a "fourth meal"; e.g., if the plan for lunch is just a 200-300 calorie soup or salad, I'll just eat that at like 10:30 and then make myself another quick meal around 1-2.
She helps in this by making sure that I have plenty of prepared snacks available. She'll make tasty and protein-full snacks like chicken bites with various seasonings that are easy and don't lend themselves to overeating, like potato chips.
ControlsFreak
28d ago
there's more to the story of the rising rates of obesity than "everyone has less willpower than they used to"
This is the strawest of straw men.
ControlsFreak
30d ago
the ones that do often make you jump through hoops to get it (e.g. Texas).
YesChad.jpg
But, ya know, for an entirely different reason. Nothing to do with voting. Identity theft is awful. I absolutely want anyone who is trying to acquire an ID that is in any way related to any component of my personal information to have to jump through hoops to do so. I know full well that this means that I also have to jump through some hoops at times. E.g., when I moved states right after school, but didn't rent with a traditional lease or utilities that were in my name, I had to figure out how to jump through the right hoops to get appropriate documents. For most people, this is a big headache at most once or twice in their life, but it is an eminently solvable headache. For identity theft mills, this is a cost that scales poorly and significantly hinders their ability to wreck massive headaches for large swathes of people.
I would also note that when I had the aforementioned headache, the easiest document for me to acquire that would then help me unlock many other documents was voter registration. The baseline level of hoops that we require of people for voting is wayyyy easier than literally any other thing. I could see someone thinking that we should just bump up the registration to being a full "voting-only ID", still with an obscenely low level of hoops to jump through. I don't think that's particularly unreasonable, but then we really just get down to haggling about price. What specific hoops would you allow for obtaining a "voting-only ID"? If you let there be even one hoop, someone out there will have a story about how, in their highly-specific situation, this one hoop is actually an annoying headache for them. We will never have anything other than tradeoffs, nothing other than both Type I and Type II errors, and nearly everyone is allergic to actually using numbers to analyze these tradeoffs.
ControlsFreak
30d ago
It does not seem to me that you understand how guns work. The government has nukes, which are the biggest "guns" in existence. Why do they persist in buying rifles? They have the biggest guns, why do they need the small ones?
When the last of the human resistance makes their Final Stand against the God AI which only has nuclear weapons, they will primarily base their efforts out of data centers. Strangely for the Yuddites, the humans will not think to pull any plugs while they're there.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Money is no object.
Don't listen to the haters saying to travel the world. Go to the moon, my man.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Game theory seems to be an attempt at predicting what is likely to occur. I'm not interested in what is likely to occur at the moment. I'm interested in what we can say at the meta level. So, when you ask, "Should they?" I can interpret this two ways. First would be whether there is some sort of objective "should", and I think you have utterly rejected this possibility. Second would be, and this is what I think you're speaking to in your latest comment, a hypothetical, "If someone wants to achieve End A, then they should ____." That is simply a description of possible means, and others could obviously disagree with you on an estimation of likelihoods of success and such.
If this is the case, then I think that you have agreed without speaking plainly about your agreement. That it is purely power politics and its extension. While there may be lingering questions about optimal means to achieve the goals of power politics, I think you would say that it just is the situation, that there is just power politics, and that there is nothing more to say about the situation. They may shut up and multiply and then pursue their axioms by means of power politics, and there is nothing more to say, except that you don't personally like it and may engage in your own power politics in return. Is this about right as an exposition of your views, or is there something specific that I've actually gotten wrong about your meta view?
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Your personal preferences are not in question, so it is of no help to describe your personal preferences again.
Instead, we're talking about people in general, from the outside view. Maybe I shouldn't have used the general "you", so I'll try to correct that here. People in society have different axioms, and there is no objective way to reconcile them. Instead, there is only power politics. And if people in society decide to promote their own preferred code and to promulgate it above others, then they might as well feel like they can just cancel, deplatform, shame, struggle session, brainwash, and intimidate people to be inculcated with their view? That if that isn't producing the desired results, power politics may be continued by other means, in the Clausewitzian sense, all the way to total war and genocide? And there would be nothing else to say about this other than that you don't personally like it? Maybe that you (here, may be actually the specific you) might respond, as a last resort, in your own mind, with power politics or its extension, in the form of watering the Tree of Liberty? Is this about right as an exposition of your views?
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
And for those who disagree, well the Tree of Liberty isn't going to water itself.
So again, just power politics, all the way to power politics by other means? This seems to be your conclusion, and you seem perfectly happy to use a euphemism for it. Why not simply speak plainly and affirm it directly?
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
I think Alito is pretty obviously right to make comparisons to print media, though even with that, there's still plenty of tricky. In fact, I think that we really shouldn't even speak the words "social media" or "internet" in this discussion. Instead, from a historical perspective, this really seems like a core freedom of the press issue. That is, for centuries after the printing press was created, governments around the world went to great lengths to control its use. Examples are found in Acemoğlu and Robinson. Private entities or companies would operate a printing press, and regular people could go interact with these operators in sort of a regular way; say, if they wanted to print up a pamphlet to hand out about their views or a newspaper or something, they would go to the printer, submit what they wanted to have printed, pay them however much money, then come back and receive their product after it was printed. Much the same as today, you could say that those private entities had some rights of their own to do business, and they might refuse to print something if they really disagreed with it (they didn't have to bake the cake or make the website; could ban the local Alex Jones, or whatever analogy you want). So what did governments do? They pressured press operators to adopt criteria that the government found favorable. Maybe they'd even issue local monopolies and say that only so-and-so had the right to run a press in a particular area. Of course, the guys they picked always somehow knew what sets of views they needed to have (and which they needed to reject to print) in order to keep their license and continue making bank.
As countries became more liberal democratic, they realized that this was a problem. Some countries kept the monopolies, but passed pretty strict non-discrimination laws, saying that they had to just print whatever the customers wanted; no letting pro-monarchists print their pamphlets and rejecting revolutionary pamphlets. Others, like the US, passed freedom of the press provisions, simply saying that the government needed to stay TF away from press operators; no monopolies, no threats of shutting them down if they don't toe the party like, just leave Britney press operators alone. All of them. Whoever wanted to just buy a press and print.
As such, I think the freedom of speech part is kind of a distraction for what should really be considered freedom of the modern press. It's not an institutional press, like NYT/CBS/whatever. It's literally anybody who waltzes down to their press company and wants to use the press. And I think the underlying motivation, while not putting in words that it's effectively a non-discrimination law, was understood to have a non-discrimination effect. Whether or not there could be enough history here to make a legal determination given our current laws, just from a 'theory of good institutions in the vein of Why Nations Fail', it would be a pretty rough outcome for countries that went down the "freedom of the press" route rather than the non-discrimination route to discover that natural monopolies might arise to make this whole branch of the endeavor ultimately fruitless, if governments could just discreetly threaten the natural monopolists. I just hope we don't have to see a nation or three literally fail from going down this route before we either rekindle the non-discrimination-type theoretical roots of the freedom of the press or we explicitly adopt something that is a standalone non-discrimination provision.
Some additional nice things that this view captures: The third-party business is important and captured here. Old school printing presses were also third parties. It doesn't matter whether the guy who is asking the printer to print the thing is the NYT or Joe from across the street; if the government doesn't have a reason that is compelling enough to overcome 1A speech scrutiny, so that they can go directly to NYT/Joe and directly tell him that he can't say that, then they should be prohibited by 1A press scrutiny from going down the street to the local print shop or the commercial entity that actually does the physical printing for NYT and telling them that they shouldn't print it.
I think this distinction also captures some of the "government need" doctrine, as well. I accept that there are some genuine government needs that can overcome 1A speech scrutiny. For example, they can legitimately tell folks who have security clearances that they're not allowed to just write a book blowing a bunch of classified information. Of course, how is this balanced with things like the Pentagon Papers precedent? Well, in my view, the Pentagon Papers precedent is quite strong - if someone who didn't agree to keep classified information secret gets that classified information, for the most part, the government can't prohibit them from publishing it. There is some obvious danger here, but it's actually not all that far off from the tradeoffs we make in cybersecurity all over the place. If Party A discovers a flaw in Party B's software, even if Party B is a sensitive government function, the sort of accepted solution is that they tell Party B that they'll only have X days to implement a fix, to do what they can to protect some equities, and then they're going public. Yet, at the same time, some flaws are viewed as soooooo potentially damaging, that even Google's vulnerability team has failed to follow through on the threat to go public when the company with the flaw didn't bother repairing it. We basically let that decision be up to the Googles/Party A's.
Similarly, when the Intercept/Guardian got the Snowden files, they met with the NSA. The NSA did try to express the government's perspective on the matter. They asked the journalists to withhold some things from publication, arguing that some of the items were completely noncontroversial, directly within the government's known mission, were of extremely little "news value", and would cause significant damage to national security and/or sources/methods. I'm mostly fine with this, even though there is a lot of conversation here about government discussions being inherently coercive. It is genuinely difficult to draw lines here, and it's hard to come up with a good limit that prevents the Intercept/Guardian from getting the Elon Musk Harassment Treatment.
That said, I think it is infinitely preferable to the option of going to third parties. The Intercept/Guardian definitely have to weigh a lot of things, including the possibility of the Elon Musk Harassment Treatment, but at least they're the ones with skin in the game and the ability to actually weigh them. Whoever it is that prints their physical copies or hosts their website may have some skin in the game, just because it is possible for people to flee to other printers/hosters out of fear of being censored, themselves, but that skin is wayyyyyyy thinner than the actual party who wants to publish the information/opinion that they have.
Of course, this would make it much harder for the government to do what they want to do. There are lots of bozos on twitter spouting bullshit that the government would like to get rid of. If they actually had to go through the bozos rather than twitter, there would be substantial refocusing of efforts towards things that actually matter for national security, not bozos spouting off about their personal beliefs on COVID or whatever.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Ok, great. Wanted to make sure I was understanding you and not strawmanning.
In your elaboration, you observe that you see no reason why anyone couldn't be a moral chauvinist. Do you see any reason why the next conclusion is anything other than that the only thing is power politics? That once one realizes that there is nothing to be done other than power politics to promote their own preferred code and to promulgate it above others, then you might as well just cancel, deplatform, shame, struggle session, brainwash, and intimidate people to be inculcated with your view? That if that isn't producing the desired results, power politics may be continued by other means, in the Clausewitzian sense, all the way to total war and genocide? Simply disposing of those who oppose your chauvinistic views may, indeed, promulgate your views above others.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
a careless intentionality argument can be contorted into almost anything.
Agreed. We definitely need to take care in how we do things. I joked a bit about trolley problems, but there is a lot of genuine work to try to figure out how to be careful with these concepts.
expected outcomes are really important
Also agreed, and again a point of significant professional work. Expectation, foreseeability, etc. are all concepts that can come into play, and we can't just casually choose something willy nilly, not think about it too much, and declare everything done.
You bring up good points in the rest of your comment, as well. I don't have a complete theory in mind. Some sense of constrained optimization seems reasonable, where there just is no currently known way to do anything better. I wouldn't say that it's impossible for someone to take a strong anti-natal, abstinence-only stance on these grounds, but it would definitely be a strong motivating question for future work. Akin to how "why not suicide" motivated substantial philosophical developments, "why not end the human race via abstinence" could have potential as a major work. Maybe it's been done, and I just haven't read it yet. Perhaps there is room for something here other than "the other ends are worth it", but I don't know. And of course, moral value is always lingering. I often say that I think the outcome from the rock climbing scenario is not that we can immediately conclude that abortion is impermissible, but that it shows that if we do intentionality the right way 'round, the strong argument from bodily autonomy doesn't seem nearly as strong, and that it throws the main question back to the moral value of and beginning of human life. For sure, if the thing on the other end of the rope were a worm or something for which we believed there was no moral prohibition on killing, then it would be perfectly permissible to cut the rope. I don't think intentionality single-handedly solves the problem, but it is absolutely a vital component to think about if we're going to do anything other than spin our wheels.
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
Ok, so let me see if I'm understanding you correctly. You reject the possibility of objective morality, but I think you might also be rejecting moral error theory. I think this means that you land somewhere in the land of meta-ethical moral relativism. Of course, I think this also rejects the core underpinning of the project of consequentialism/utilitarianism as being an objective basis for morality. Is this about right?
Then, I think the next move in the relativist frame is to say that individuals simply adopt whatever axioms they choose to adopt. So, like, if someone adopted the axiom that Ponzi schemes are good or the axiom that Llama-7b is the best arbiter of their morality or the axiom that if there were a way to give ALL to two-year olds, it would be good to do so... then, that's just totally and completely fine. That's their axiom, and all that can be done is carrying out that axiom with basic and complicated mathematics. Is that about right?
Then, lets suppose that you and someone else have adopted different axioms. They adopted the axiom that it is good to give ALL to two-year olds (if such a thing were technologically possible), while you adopt the axiom that it is bad. Presumably, you would say that they have no objective grounds on which to claim that your axiomatic system is wrong, and likewise, you would have no objective grounds on which to claim that their axiomatic system is wrong. You would both just go about using basic and complicated mathematics to satisfy your respective axioms, you'd both just shut up and multiply, and no other statements can be made about the situation. Is that about right?
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
See, this is why I sort of don't believe you when you say that we should just shut up and multiply. It doesn't seem like that's really what you think. If it's, "Shut up and multiply, but oh by the way, you definitely can't multiply," then it really means, "Shut up."
What on earth gives you that takeaway? It was never on the menu.
Because you're still saying stuff like:
I clearly stated that morality is fundamentally arbitrary/subjective/observer dependent and as far as I can tell, there is no good reason to think that's not the case barring wishful thinking.
That does not sound like something I can just multiply to get. If so, you could also just multiply, and we'd get the same thing. Because that's the bit about empiricism. You know, the linked article that you linked.
Whereas, again, this:
You can perform utilitarian calculus
is option 2. That's not "fundamentally arbitrary/subjective/observer dependent". It's a different option.
If, somehow you're actually an LLM, then you've achieved a working understanding of gestalt human morality simply by being fed an enormous amount of text and then doing multiplication (of matrices). It is obviously doable. A randomly instantiated neural net will predictably achieve it.
And this is a really weird option 3. So, yeah, I think you've again given me all three options. They're going to give me different answers. Which option is the right one? What does an empiricist as anti-epistemologist do with three different empirical answers to the same question?
ControlsFreak
1mo ago
those failed implantations could not occur but for the intentional action. They interfered with the normal, mechanical progression of ovulation to menstruation, and now it’s an embryo dying instead of a lone egg.
Sorry, please spell this out. What was the intentional action, and how did it result in what outcome versus what other outcome?
Similar reasoning applies to congenital diseases. An intentional action has some chance of creating a being which will die horribly in utero, as an infant, or otherwise early. Those deaths may all be perfectly mechanical with no further action from the parents. How much of that responsibility still rests on the parents?
Where in the process did they have a choice to take an intentional action that is conceptually related to the death, and how is it related?
Maybe the specific chances matter. The expected outcome of sex might be a healthy child. But that’s abandoning the bright line. It also opens up questions about contraception. If the expected mechanical outcome is no longer pregnancy, can the parents justify a return to the status quo?
Most contraceptives are not magic. They have relatively well-known rates of pregnancy occurring. The expected mechanical outcome of such sex is some probability of pregnancy, where that probability is reduced compared to sex without contraception.
A similar line can be used to support rape exceptions, since the victim took no intentional action.
Very plausibly. I could at least see the sketch of an argument along these lines, though I'd have to work at it to see if I think it goes through or not. In any event, to get to this point, people would have to come to some agreement about the general contours of the arguments, and soooo many people aren't there right now. They're at shit-tier arguments like "masturbation must be murder".
Violinist argument
I kind of can't believe it, but I cannot find my previous comments on the Violinist argument, either here or at the old site. Perhaps I should give another full comment here that I can save somewhere for future reference, but the short version is that the Violinist argument is a master class in how to do intentionality exactly the wrong way 'round. Nobody thinks for nanosecond that there is just some purely mechanical, no human intentional action, process that resulted in the person waking up, attached to a machine that is using them to provide life support for a famous violinist. Everybody immediately intuits what's really going on - a cabal of the violinist's fans kidnapped the person in the middle of the night and intentionally chose to hook them up, because they preferred the violinist's health over anything about the person providing said life support.
My preferred analogy is rock climbing. When two people go rock climbing, they intend to have a little fun. They 'hook up', using the best safety equipment possible, intending to make the probability of an issue be as low as possible. But Murphy's law happens, snake eyes come up, and your partner ends up dangling at the end of a rope attached to you. Maybe that rope is causing you a little discomfort; maybe it's threatening minor rope burn; maybe it's threatening one of your limbs; maybe it's threatening your life. Lots of possible variations to handle a variety of scenarios people want for abortion. I don't think people are nearly as likely to say that you can choose to pull out your pocket knife and intentionally cut the rope, knowing that it will surely lead to your partner's death, completely regardless of what the danger is, all the way to the case where there is literally no real danger, just that they are relying on you to not cut the rope. This gets intentionality the right way 'round and also neatly handles the question of contraceptive use to reduce the probability of the undesired outcome, as well as the question of danger to the physical body of the woman.
I believe that both the respondents and the Deputy Solicitor General are trying to represent beliefs that could be described as "lefty", by virtue of their respective positions.
I wrote:
So, it appears that the general zeitgeist is moving toward the idea that addicts can't become not addicted to drugs, and some portion thinks that it didn't used to be that way.
Why wouldn't we short-circuit that to just "has that desire"? What is the AND doing, besides pointing to past conduct? Should "pedophile" be defined as "someone who has any point engaged in pedophilic conduct AND still has that desire" rather than "has pedophilic desires"? Should "homosexual" be defined as "someone who has at any point engaged in homosexual conduct AND still has that desire"? I honestly can't help but point out that this is feeling suuuuper epicycl-y.
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