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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   7266 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025

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Schelling points of the online right and occasionaly irrational rationalists.

In many ways nonsense is a more effective organizing tool than the truth. Anyone can believe in the truth. To believe in nonsense is an unforgeable demonstration of loyalty. It serves as a political uniform. And if you have a uniform, you have an army.

  • Mencius Moldbug

You go online today and you see quite a bit of absurd garbage that is supported by the online right, while they call their left-leaning counterparts out. The catalyst for me was the backlash finasteride got yesterday upon my reactivation of Twitter.

Finasteride is usually taken as a 1 mg oral pill. It is a 5-alpha reductase inhibitor used to successfully treat male pattern baldness in men. Your body's DHT levels change, which is fine if you have gone through puberty successfully. The drug was originally used for men with prostate issues and accidentally ended up being the single most effective intervention for male pattern baldness, even more so than its more potent cousin, dutasteride. The side effects can be quite strong: lower libido, extreme cases of ED, and mood swings; many men need what is called post-finasteride therapy. Right-wing faux masculine bros call for the companies making it to be charged for crimes against humanity. The funny thing is that the number of people who get side effects is close to 2 percent or less, depending on what study you choose. In fact, it is safer and has fewer reported side effects than many medications people take daily. So why are people lining up against a drug that is not just safe but is a damn near modern-day miracle? Nothing can stop male pattern baldness the way it can, so much so that minoxidil, a medication used for promoting regrowth, is useless without it, as you will keep losing more hair than you gain. Hair transplants, by the way, mandate you hop on the same two drugs, if not more, so that you save your remaining hair.

Seed oils are oils extracted from seeds of various plants. They are very cheap, and the fast-food industry uses them a lot because of that. Anyone not living under a rock must have heard reasons not to use them. Butter, ghee, lard, olive oils—all oils with higher amounts of saturated fats—are much better by all accounts; even "stats bro" and "IQ-denying" online bully Nassim Taleb swears by them. Yet the data on this is pretty unfavorable. Now, I am a twig compared to what I wish to be, so I will share what the people over at Barbell Medicine feel, doctors who have really high totals in drug tested powerlifting. They state that every single paper they came across showed that replacing these "better" oils with seed oils produced much better health outcomes.

I use both. I hopped on finasteride three years ago, and my family has been using seed oils since my grandfather's heart attack. I am willing to ditch both if that is the way. Yet, if you press someone on the online right who swears by the benefits of "sun and steel," they would probably state that both might be fine but some have had terrible experiences with both. Hence, the crusade against them at least allows people to not feel alone when they question the validity of what "science" has to say. Plenty of studies, papers, and people are simply incorrect. You will never see a large-scale study that gets public eyeballs which presents group differences as being innate. Hell, the good folks over at ScienceBasedMedicine go out of their way to lie about "science" when it comes to any leftist values. ScienceBasedMedicine is a popular skeptic blog that did its best to be as neutral and was fairly rigorous. Their contributor, Harriet Hall, another person who is not a rabid reactionary, faced scorn for a milktoast review of a milktoast book that states very obvious things about transgenderism. The entire blog went into a lefty purity spiral and has pushed out the kind of stuff you would expect from Jezebel on the issue.

So, the authorities are wrong on a lot of things. The world is indeed run mostly by leftists, and science is just a thing for them to justify their holy cows and why they must not be questioned. People here already know this part, but I try to provide more context for newer "mottizens." This goes deeper, which is why I brought up faux masculinity. War is the ultimate masculine experience, with the ability to exert power being a near equivalent or might even be something that surpasses that. The online right (including me) lacks both. Man wants people with whom he cooperates, to feel like he is a part of a clan, and these memes like seed oil hatred and finasteride fear-mongering are no different from the conservative ones (like living in some ranch with a podcast setup where you talk about guns and Black Rifle Coffee whilst shilling for Israel) or the lefty ones where you deny basic human nature in varying degrees.

You also have a rationalist counterpart for this, which is AI hype, wherein people write literal sci-fi pieces and have a view of AI that people who worked on it mostly did not, and many still don't. Scott Alexander is a great guy; his work is responsible for what we are here. Reading his 2027 piece made me feel a bit odd; the man who posted the most well-thought-out takes on medicine and personally helped many wrote something that is flimsy at best. Gary Marcus wrote a decent critique of it (he can be an asshat but is right here), and 4chan's /g/ largely agreed with it. After all, LLMs have in fact slowed down in terms of progress. Anthropic's CEO has been warning us about AI taking away all jobs in 2 years since 2023 at least, much like self-driving cars. The progress has been remarkable, yet the hype around it is has not paid off till now. Jeremy Howard, who wrote ULMFiT (one of the most important papers in NLP according to many, so much so that transfer learning for ChatGPT was inspired by it), simply laughs at statements about AI taking away all jobs, publicly claiming that we are as far away from ASI or AGI now as we were 20 years ago. I am a novice coder; my friends who do write code usually come out feeling angry when they use LLMs for their coding work, despite being proficient at using DSPy and prompts in general. The average person on this place, or ASC, or LessWrong, has a late 130 IQ, with people who write code making up a big part of the reader base, yet many seem to not want to change their beliefs about what I just listed.

Schelling points are clear to see for an outsider; the weirder they are, the more visible they are to them. Though once you are in a group, your worldview indirectly changes a little to match your clan's. Many hackers in 5-10 years' time would probably admit that the podcasts that host people running firms that make them money would in fact want more hype as they make money from their product. People want to be a part of something; humanity is not an island. I bought plenty of stupid, outright lies during my time working with a co-founder who is clearly in need of psychiatric intervention. I would buy it fully, like I bought the lies of a religious sect before it. The rationalists or the online right are not bad people; these Schelling points are kind of benign. In the case of rationalists, it's not even a point as major as seed oil disrespect among the "bronze age warriors," yet as a person on the fringes of both, it was funny that they would both go to great lengths to keep their holy cows alive. 4chan's /g/ is a toxic place full of bitterness, but their dismissal of the 2027 AI predictions and the amount of belief in our ability to produce synthetic intelligence many on LessWrong believe was not off the mark. I really do like LessWrong's stuff; their pieces on things beyond AI and many on AI are worth reading, and SSC inspired the one place I like visiting on the internet and have benefited a lot from. Yet, I am willing to eat downvotes and get blocked by people for pointing out things that I know are likely false. LLMs may take away all jobs, fin and seed oils might make me a beta soyboy and we may need to accept that singlualrity is upon us, yet I will bet against all of that for now, not because I am a contrarian but because I dont want to blindly accept memes that are probably wrong.

edit - will add links in 20 mminutes

Most of these guys are alternative media and make their living at least partially from their online writing. As such, it’s not surprising that they’re adopting the opinions of their audience, at least publicly. If my audience is full of gymbros, I can’t keep them reading if I’m going against their long-standing belief that seed oils are poison. So I might choose to be silent, but it’s in my interests to let it be known that I think seed oils are bad.

Which is fine, I am happy to change my mind, I just dont like schelling points that are hard to defend but at the same time will get outcasted. I know people irl who could have saved thier hair had they jumped on fin but now have the hair of a 70 year old thanks to friends who in good nature refused to let them take it as they were told by other bros about it online, even though my dermat is a guy who lifts and is a semi pro athlete/academic prodigy.

Its also an all consuming thing, seed oils/fin apparnely cause all health problems and therefore must be crusaded against, you are a shill if you say otherwise. Seems excessive.

The Trump-Musk friendship had already crumbled, but now it seems like it's actively imploding.

Musk went nuclear against Trump's "Big Beautiful Bill", calling it a "disgusting abomination". In response, the White House is "very disappointed" in the criticism. In other words, they're probably saying "fuck you, Elon" behind closed doors. Trump had previously been anomalously deferential to Musk, but if you read between the lines you could see there was trouble in paradise. Musk feuded with other members of the administration and Trump didn't back him up. Musk was causing enough chaos that he was starting to be seen as a political liability, and so Musk was somewhat gently pushed out of his role. People like Hanania who claimed the bromance would last have been proven incorrect, at least on this point.

Trump's budget is broadly awful, exploding the deficit to pay for regressive tax cuts, so I hope it dies.

Tesla is Musk's biggest source of capital, and it's sales, at least in Europe, were fueled by virtue signalling. Now imagine the look on the face of the exact type of person, that wants to be seen as saving the planet, suddenly being seen as a Nazi instead. Tesla's sales are tanking accordingly, so I consider Elon to be a dead man walking, if he loses political backing. The drama being about the budget, I wonder if he wasn't hoping for some bailout to be included there, which didn't materialize.

Anyway, if being cut loose is a foregone conclusion, he might figure that he might as well drag everyone else down with him.

Trump's budget is broadly awful, exploding the deficit to pay for regressive tax cuts, so I hope it dies.

That's an interesting play, since a fair amount of Trump's base isn't so hot on exploding budgets, so maybe he'll manage to stir the pot this way. But these days it feels like the budget can only explode, and if anyone tried doing something crazy, like balancing it, the whole system would collapse.

If you want a top tier electric car these days, get a BYD, not a Tesla. Tesla only has the best self driving these days and if that's not important to you or you don't think regulations will permit it in your jurisdiction any time soon there's no reason to go Tesla anymore. It has nothing to do with virtue signalling.

It has nothing to do with virtue signalling.

I don't know what to tell you man, from my neighbors to coworkers, it's a very specific type of person that even thinks of buying an EV.

Absolutely this. Firstly the choice to want an EV in the first place is purely virtue signalling - nobody I know ever justified it with anything other than highfalutin saving-the-planet rethoric - and secondly the choice to not pick a Tesla might have been justified by practicality, but let's be frank: it isn't. What it is is "Musk man bad". EVs are like anything related to the whole "carbon is killing the planet" narrative and its associated Ablaßhandel (Indulgence/Pardon Industry) - 100% virtue signalling.

It's so very obvious that as far as I'm concerned, any claim to the contrary will need thorough justification.

He does still have an uncontested dominance of spaceflight... Pretty far from dead man walking IMO!

Plus Tesla is by far the largest electric car producer in America, it's not like they'll allow Chinese competition in America. They have one of the world's biggest markets locked down. Europe has always favoured European vehicles, it's understandable that Volkswagen is in the lead there.

He does still have an uncontested dominance of spaceflight... Pretty far from dead man walking IMO!

The competition is catching up, and Starship has so far been nothing but a money furnace. Unless you show me how much money he's making from it, clean, I stand by my words.

Plus Tesla is by far the largest electric car producer in America,

Where sales are also declining, and there's no product on the horizon to reverse the trend. The money was thrown into gimmicks that are either proven abortions like the CyberTruck, or ones that are likely to follow it's fate, like Semi, Robotaxi/Cybercab, or Optimus. No sign of Roadster, that a bunch of people are actually waiting for.

Having the market locked down means nothing. Blues will sooner return to gasoline cars before supporting Musk, and Reds weren't ever that hot on EVs to begin with. He Budweiser'd himself.

Europe has always favoured European vehicles, it's understandable that Volkswagen is in the lead there.

This wasn't the case until very recently. Most EV's I see on the road that I see are still Teslas.

Well if you assume that all Musk's projects will fail, then yes I would agree that he's a dead man warning.

Sometimes Musk succeeds and other times he fails. His attempt to make his own Dojo AI chip failed. But he's doing pretty well on AI with Nvidia chips, Grok 3 is better than anything Facebook, Microsoft or Amazon has come up with.

Maybe Starship fails, maybe it succeeds. If there was no Starship wouldn't you say something like 'oh the competition is catching up, how is he going to stay ahead, there's no product on the horizon'? Developing new products isn't easy, rockets have been known to fail. Who even is the competition? The entire Chinese state and private sector? Bezos who just got into orbit in 2025? ULA? ESA? SpaceX makes them all look puny.

What are the odds that all Musk's upcoming products fail? Robotaxis and Optimus will fail? Well then Tesla would be in a bad place. But how do you know that?

What is the track record of 'everything Musk does fails' in the grand scheme of things? I'm pretty sure you don't fail your way into hundreds of billions of dollars. The media has a skewed perspective on Musk. Whenever Tesla stock goes down we get a morality tale of 'evil never prospers' where you can just sense their glee, yet when Tesla stock goes up (up by 50% since March) there's a mysterious silence.

The Trump-Musk friendship had already crumbled, but now it seems like it's actively imploding.

Do you predict Trump will turn government power against Musk's commercial enterprises?

Do you predict Musk will campaign openly against Trump himself?

Good questions, I think it's unclear at the moment. The main cleavage point here is whether this is the opening salvo in a huge rift between the two, or if Musk will get his nose bashed in and think it better to just generally refrain from politics (or go back to mainly bashing Dems). If it's the former, which I might peg at about 60% chance of occurring, then yeah, we could see the two really go to bat against each other.

Okay, here's my prediction: Of the ire Musk directs at the GOP, he focuses it primarily on the MAGA-reluctant or unreliable elements, which will likely be a benefit to the MAGA wing. Likewise, Trump does not use government power to retaliate against Musk, and in fact Musk's companies continue to enjoy government protection and largesse.

This isn't an unreasonable take, but it goes against what Musk is doing now. Trump's Big Beautiful Bill has had a rocky road that has required Trump to help it along, something Trump generally doesn't like doing for legislation. Musk is giving ammo and support to opponents of the bill, and if it fails then Trump will have a lot of egg on his face.

Someone here predicted that the Elon-Trump alliance would fracture. Was it 2rafa?

A number of people did, but DOGE being bounded and only able to work in a department with the consent of the department secretary was the thrust of a couple of AAQCs in February / March.

I would guess a lot of people predicted it. They were two big egos, which tend to not get along super well.

Edit: Here's my take from a few months ago. I over-indexed on Hanania's arguments and should have stuck with my gut that two egos that large couldn't get along for more than a few months. I was otherwise correct that Doge wouldn't be able to cut much as a % of government spending, and that it wouldn't be able to touch the bloated elder care subsidies the US has.

In 1979, Playboy published a 15 page feature/interview with musician Wendy Carlos. Carlos had been a minor celebrity for a few years around 1970, known for being a pioneer of musical sound synthesis (she and collaborator Rachel Elkind recorded the "Switched-On Bach" series of albums and much of the soundtrack for Kubrick's film adaptation of "A Clockwork Orange" and Carlos had performed with the St. Louis Symphony, as well as doing a handful of televised demonstrations of sound synthesis), before becoming a recluse. The motivation for Carlos to sacrifice her privacy and Playboy to devote 15 pages to a relatively obscure musician was sharing Carlos's experience of gender dysphoria sexual transition, something few had previously done. (A transwoman named Christine Jorgensen had shared her experience with a magazine in 1953 and published an autobiography in 1967, but she did so after being involuntarily outed by the New York Daily News and having difficulty supporting herself. Playboy assumed their readers to be so unfamiliar with the topic that two of the introductory questions are "Let's start with a basic question: What is a transsexual?" and its followup question, "So transsexuals aren't necessarily former homosexuals?") I recommend reading it as a now-historical primary source.

Carlos is an interesting case, because she has traits that would trigger incredulity among critics of transgender medicine, if she were transitioning today (exemplifying many elements of the male nerd archetype), but she was born in 1939 and had transgender feelings as a child (page 4, though I strongly recommend reading the full interview). Historical cases aren't dispositive of present-day sociogenic gender dysphoria, but how do skeptics of "endogenous" transgender feelings explain historical cases? A "critical mass" of cases sufficient for self-sustaining sociogenesis may be possible, but how could it come to exist, absent any "genuine" cases?

(Here's a pdf of the book Carlos mentions on page 5, in case anyone is curious about it.)

1979 is pretty late in the game. If you want a historical case, I'd go with Christine Jorgensen, which was nearly 30 years prior. The thing is even that story contains a significant element of social contafion, as Jorgensen was widely profiled in the media, putting the idea in the American public's awareness, and leading Harry Benjamin (the prior namesake of WPATH) to say "Indeed, Christine, without you, probably none of this would have happened; the grant, my publications, lectures, etc."

but how do skeptics of "endogenous" transgender feelings explain historical cases? A "critical mass" of cases sufficient for self-sustaining sociogenesis may be possible, but how could it come to exist, absent any "genuine" cases?

I'm not sure there's anything to explain. There must have been "genuine" cases of Morgellons disease, in that the affected person formed the idea relatively independently, rather than copy-pasting a ready made one from the media, but I don't think it implies they had actual skin parasites.

how do skeptics of "endogenous" transgender feelings explain historical cases?

Do you have someone in mind, here? Like, I vaguely recall an essay by Alex Byrne suggesting that the notion of "feeling" a certain gender seems incoherent, under the rubric of socially constructed gender. But that kind of thinking, with gender distinct from sex, is very mid-20th century (Simone de Beauvoir) on. Historical cases don't really deal in gender differences without also addressing sex and sexuality; individual cases differ, but the text confirms my expectation that a 1979 Playboy reader would naturally assume transsexuals to also be homosexuals. Why imitate the dress and behavior of a sexually available woman if you were not trying to attract sexual attention from men (or, perhaps homosexual women)? The endogenous feeling there would be homosexuality, of which transsexuality would be a symptom. Autogynephilia would also qualify as endogenous without being a gender feeling. Historical examples aren't hard to explain with just-so stories either way. Noticing, say, the boom in rapid onset gender dysphoria in adolescent girls is not the same thing as committing oneself to the position that transsexuality is strictly a social contagion. So it seems like you need to be more specific about which argument you think you're undermining, here.

she was born in 1939 and had transgender feelings as a child

I have never heard anyone make a claim like this in a way that seemed really believable to me--much like my expectation that people who claim to have seen miracles are more likely to be either foolish or lying, than to have actually seen miracles, no matter how honest they seem to be. I find it far easier to believe that "I had trans feelings as a kid" is a retrospective gloss, or even deliberate self deception, than that a child has specifically "transgender" feelings. Children often reject the gender roles imposed upon them, but part of the problem here is--how do you know you "feel like a girl" if you've never been one? Wanting to fill a cultural role assigned to the opposite sex is something many, maybe most people experience on occasion. Cranking that all the way to "no, I just am fe/male" simply elevates such feelings to the level of an insistent delusion. The addition of social "support" for that kind of thinking probably makes it easier to sell the obvious lie to oneself, or to sort of emotionally sanitize homosexual or autogynephilic drives.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but sexual psychology is really screwy. Humans have sex with animals. Humans have sex with trees. Jeff Bezos, a human billionaire, left his attractive and long-suffering wife for sex with a second-rate journalist made mostly of plastic. Why wouldn't there be people out there who get off on cross-dressing or whatever; that may be one of the least weird things humans have done, sexually. The trans advocacy community works really hard to insist that gender isn't a sex thing, but I think that is ultimately just empirically false. Your brain does not contain separate wiring for sex and gender. It's all one big, thoroughly interconnected mess. That is how "trans" cases can come to exist even in the absence of social contagion: the same way every other psychosexual phenomenon comes to exist! Through the interaction of reproductive drives (normal, pathological, or otherwise), personal circumstances, and cultural norms.

I find it far easier to believe that "I had trans feelings as a kid" is a retrospective gloss, or even deliberate self deception, than that a child has specifically "transgender" feelings.

I definitely wanted to be a girl in some capacity as a child. But that's a desire, not an identity. I didn't "feel like a girl". That would be an incorrect interpretation of the feeling. I agree, someone of one sex cannot have any idea of what it feels like to be the other one.

Do you have someone in mind, here?

I was motivated by this comment, but I don't want to target a specific user with a question.

I have never heard anyone make a claim like this in a way that seemed really believable to me--much like my expectation that people who claim to have seen miracles are more likely to be either foolish or lying, than to have actually seen miracles, no matter how honest they seem to be...

How confident are you that you're not falling into a typical mind trap? (Scott references phantom sensations and "body maps," and phantom limb syndrome researchers found ~60% of transmen reported experiencing phantom penis sensations, when surveyed. I can't comment on brain scan interpretations, but there's a fair amount of evidence there's something neurological going on.) I can't relate to the experience described, but I disagree that it's more worthy of disbelief than any other internal experience.

The trans advocacy community works really hard to insist that gender isn't a sex thing, but I think that is ultimately just empirically false. Your brain does not contain separate wiring for sex and gender. It's all one big, thoroughly interconnected mess.

How was it empirically disproven?

How was it empirically disproven?

I don't put much trust in brain scan studies so I never bookmarked it, but there's a regular conversation between trans/anti-trans that goes something like:

- Here's a study that shows trans people's brains are literally more similar to the average of the gender they identify with.
- That study has failed to account for sexuality. A follow up that included it as a variable found that cis gay people also have brains more similar to the opposite sex, and that "trans brains" are indistinguishable from "cis gay brains".

How confident are you that you're not falling into a typical mind trap? (Scott references phantom sensations and "body maps," and phantom limb syndrome researchers found ~60% of transmen reported experiencing phantom penis sensations, when surveyed.

After more than a decade of masturbating to exclusively trans-porn, I did sometimes experience a "phantom vulva" sensation while masturbating, cross-dressing, and getting high on weed and whippets. But the power of repeated fantasy is probably enough to do the job on its own for a number of people. Autosuggestion is a hell of a drug.

Personally, I view the trans phenomenon as more of a disorder of desire than identity. The dominant social script confuses desire for identity

Nowadays I don't even masturbate. I just have sex with my wife and I never get any sensations or desires anywhere in the ballpark of this.

Any number of real medical conditions don't prove that Munchausen Syndrome isn't also real.

There's always been a small number of LGB and what we nowadays call T. The social sanctions on these people used to be very strong. Despite those sanctions gay men, for example, would still go cruising public toilets looking for strangers to have sex with. They might get arrested, or they might get their teeth punched out, but that didn't stop them. I think we can credit them with sincerity. Likewise there were men who went into the theatre scene where many eccentricities were tolerated and entertained and given a route for expression, eccentricities like pretending you're a woman on stage and then not fully relinquishing the role off stage. Outside of the theatre scene such a man might push and test the boundaries by exhibiting feminine behaviours, but the explicit claim of wanting to be a (or indeed already "being" an as-yet-unrealised) woman would have been met with disapprobation.

Skip forward and we have seen practically every major avenue of cultural publishing pumping out the message that being trans is something to be proud of, that being anti-trans is something to be ashamed of, and that the diagnosis of trans amounts to whether you've ever felt like you're not totally 100% sure that you fulfill all the expectations of your normal gender role.

It's late here so in short: sometimes you get things despite the disincentives (I'm here posting an ant-trans message right now!), you can reasonably expect to get much more of something if you remove disincentives and increase the incentives, and if people perceive the incentives are strong enough they will adopt an insincere position to acquire an advantage.

So, this was an interesting read...

Left-wing violence is being normalized

I doubt many people here will find the core assertion even a tiny bit surprising; we were just talking about it, kinda, last month. What I found interesting was the, uh... I'm not sure what to call it. The rhetoric of realization, maybe? The opening line:

Something has changed in America’s psyche. Violence has become more acceptable.

I immediately found myself doing the DiCaprio squint and mouthing the words "fiery but mostly peaceful", but I read on. The meat:

Well, after working through a heap of survey data and social media language trends, we’ve come to a series of startling conclusions about a change that’s happening in US society. The NCRI has uncovered more than just an online ecosystem of unsettling ideas. What we’re seeing is the rise and proliferation of assassination culture on the internet. It’s more than just a collection of jokes, symbols and memes. It’s an entirely new subculture for incubating radical and subversive ideas that are anathema to the things America has historically stood for.

Over the past several decades we have assumed that calls for political violence come from the far right, and they often have. What we never expected to see was the enormous growth in similar calls emerging from the mainstream left. We undertook a nationwide survey to understand it better and discovered that a breathtaking half of those who identified as politically left-wing agreed that the murder of public figures could be at least somewhat justified. What’s more, 56 percent of them agreed that there could be some justification for killing Trump. Just under half agreed that the same could be said about the fate of Musk. Tesla dealerships, too, merit at least some destruction, according to 59 percent of those surveyed.

You don't say!

If you want to understand America today, the most compelling explanations revolve around a cluster of personality characteristics called authoritarianism. There are two kinds: a right-wing kind and a left-wing kind. Many mainstream academics say that all our present political instability revolves around a critical mass of people amenable to behaviors linked with the right-wing type. . . .

Yet it runs against common sense to imagine only right-wing people can act pathologically when most of the postwar world lived, for a while, under the intensely authoritarian – and quasi-genocidal – domination of communist regimes. And very few of us can shake the intuition that the intense “woke” energy which has so permeated American culture over the past decade shares these hallmarks of authoritarian tyranny.

It probably won’t surprise you to learn that there has been a kind of intellectual embargo on saying so lately, because most explanations coming from mainstream US academia about cultural politics have fixated on the conservative version. The godfather of right-wing authoritarianism theory, the Canadian psychologist Bob Altemeyer, labeled the left-wing variety as nothing more than a “Loch Ness Monster”: it doesn’t actually exist.

And people believed that! Somehow. Bob was the expert, after all. He's an expert, Bob! An expert! (Well, he was; Altemeyer died last year, too early to witness Trump's second inauguration.) Also, how does Horder know I'm not surprised to "learn" that there has been an "intellectual embargo on saying so lately?" He seems to be suggesting that it will not surprise the reader to learn that his surprising new discovery is in no way surprising to anyone who isn't a shameless partisan. How is that supposed to work, exactly?

Newer thinkers, however, have started to change their minds. Academics have begun work on a new framework that describes an emergent left-wing authoritarianism.

The article details the framework, which is basically a mirror of the extant right-wing framework (conventionalism -> anticonventionalism, aggression -> antihierarchical aggression, submission -> censorship). On one hand, I think the author is correct. On the other, I guess I'm wondering if I can get a senior fellowship at Princeton for being several decades ahead of their best researchers on the idea that authoritarian leftism is actually a real thing. The whole tone of the piece is amazing to me. Max Horder comes off as an affable buffoon; "we discovered the Loch Ness monster, guys! What a shock!"

It's a move in the direction. I don't have any serious complaints about the proposed framework. But really. Really. This is the new game? Is it because Trump is in the White House again, so academia has to go back to pretending to be "politically neutral?" "We're all good classical liberals, boss, honest! No radicals here, no sir." Or am I too cynical? Maybe it's more like--there really was an intellectual embargo, the Trump administration has directly or indirectly lifted that embargo, so all the good scholarship is creeping out into the sun. In which case, will academics admit that? Maybe send Trump a thank-you card?

I won't hold my breath.

I’ve often thought that almost everything in politics over the last 25 years could be summarized as “the old neo-liberal, postwar consensus on major issues is completely outdated and we are despairing of finding something that would actually fix our problems.” Violence is the end of that road, and unless we find a solution to the very serious problems, we’ll be there very soon.

The career path as it once existed no longer works for most people. The college to living wage job pipeline is clogged and the expense of even making an attempt at going through that is prohibitively expensive. To try costs hundreds of thousands paid out of every paycheck.

Housing is in crisis to the point that most young adults have given up on ever having one. And with that and the rise of two income households, the possibility of having a baby is just too daunting. Especially when adding in the cost of living, child care, and so on.

AI is poised to take milllions of jobs within the decade. We haven’t even begun to talk about it, but I suspect that within a generation, technological unemployment will be a big problem.

No solutions have been provided for any of this. And in fact most political leaders have been ignoring those problems alongside lots of others for a long time.

The issue with this analysis is that a lot of it is factually incorrect. College grads make more than ever, easily pay back student loans and unemployment is at historic lows.

AI might take jobs in the future that aren't replaced by other jobs, but that is hardly certain and similar worries have existed in the past.

The only thing real here is the housing crisis and fertility decline. I would add mass immigration to that, which doesn't really seem to create much problems in the US in the sense of unemployment, crime, integration and burdening the welfare systems; but regardless causes much contention, while in Europe it seems more of broader and bigger issue.

Finally, solutions have been proposed to all of these issues and they aren't even hard to implement, it's just that the majority doesn't want to. Its like balancing the American budget, it's super easy but people don't want to (raise taxes, cut (mostly elderly) entitlements). Not even populists who say they want to do it want to do it.

The only thing neo-liberalism is actively opposed to fixing and what seems to be it's downfall is immigration.

... it's funny seeing the well-funded national org use worse surveys than I, a rando, threw at amadan offhandedly; it's funnier that they can't spend five minutes on tumblr to actually get a good summary of what Luigi fandom looks like.

(tbf, we are talking tumblr or instagram or tiktok or discord or a punk meatspace group)

The cynical answer is that the NCRI, specifically, is not some neutral true-seeking organization anymore than the Princeton Gerrymandering Project was. They were founded in 2018 as part of an effort to fight the alt-right, and came to national attention after a series of reports in that started with Boogaloo panicking ("this, like turning off the transponders on 9/11, enables the extremists to hide in plain sight, disappearing into the clutter of innocent messages, other data points"). The org pulls in increasing amounts per year (1.45m in 2023) and lists its address as an office park that (at ~5k/year rent) is probably little more than a PO box -- I can't say for sure that they're a cutout for another org to whitewash funding the group, because they fall under the threshold that breaks down how their income works, but there's not-subtle hints pointing that direction.

Yes, they're also probably just left-leaners given that they're pulled from the left side (Princeton, Rutgers) of academia to start with, but they're were built from the ground up to find specific enemies. It's certainly possible that they're trying to pander to Trump, or suddenly reveling in their newfound freedom to see the nose in front of their face, but there's a bit of a blander option: they think these specific groups are in their list of enemies to be targeted, too, and they want to shape how that discussion goes so the people they don't consider enemies are well outside of it. Beware outgroup homogenity bias.

That's why they're not doing a retrospective and suddenly finding any of the literally years of punch nazi discourse, that's why there's no comment on a Certain Topic That's Supported In Princeton, that's why their list of incidents is so short and circumscribed, that's why they can only model left-wing violence as authoritarianism, that's why their 'left-wing' authoritarianism is so obviously post-hoc and cumbersome (antihierarchical aggression, anticonventionalism, top-down censorship aren't just awkward mirrors to their 'right-wing' counterparts, they're not even accurate names to their own descriptions).

Compare ProPublica writing a big story on H1-B abuse without using the word 'fraud' a single time.

For posts like this, in the future, could you indicate who you’re linking at the start? I assume it’s the Paper of Record, but my phone struggles to load the archive link and it’s not immediately clear otherwise.

It's The Spectator.

There's an idea I've been toying with for a while that connects with this. I saw some comment a while ago (I can't recall where) that Obama had said he expected some macho, manly, John Wayne type to be who Republicans settled on in 2016. And so Trump blindsided him.

And lurking in the background there, you can see, I think, something like Obama's (ultimately disastrously flawed) theory of how progress happens in society. Namely, you get a bunch of hardcore radical leftist activists to get agitated up like an agitated bee's nest. And then kind-hearted liberals publicly portray themselves as simply responding to the people's will as they enact progressive change. And then, after enough of that, eventually stern dad John Wayne gets back in office and spanks the radical activists who have overreached - and he gets considerable public support in doing so. And so those activists are forced to have their more extreme edges get sanded down. A certain amount of liberal capitulation happens - but meanwhile, quite a lot of the previous change sticks, too. And liberals get to console their radical activist fringe and say, "I know, I know - what a dick that guy is! We fought for you, and we'll fight for you next time, too! Show up at the polls and organize! But I mean, what can you do? Reactionaries and fascists, am I right?" And notably, in that story, liberals never, ever, ever have to be the bad cop and police their own crazies. They really want to be the cool uncle who still listens to Nas on their ipods (but wear mom jeans).

But Trump threw a massive wrench in this theory of social change. Because of course actual Trump is intermittently pretty radical himself, or at least is quite comfortable with radical rhetoric. And because the actual populist forces that Trump taps into are frequently fairly radical too (but a radical strain that is utterly terrifying to American liberals who really don't want to accept the reality of their own social position). And because American liberals secretly want stern dad John Wayne to reassert reality and normality after their radicals go too far and temper those radicals a bit while leaving the hands of liberals clean and letting them chafe against the repressions of normality... and Trump really didn't do any of that. Trump loves chaos. He doesn't have any of that energy that George W. Bush or Mitt Romney have, trying to be a beleaguered dad from a 50s sitcom holding the line and reinforcing norms in a prissy, stuffy, uncool way.

In 2017, the old, comfortable script got thrown out. And that meant that nobody was there to police liberals' radicals for them - and indeed, liberals were busy being utterly frantic themselves because of Trump, so policing their radicals was the last thing on their mind. They were coming to feel pretty radical themselves. So there ended up being no breaks on the train, and the radicalism of the left ended up growing way more pronounced and unchecked. And so that's grown and grown...

But by 2025, 1) it's turned out that some of those radical edges are absolutely electoral poison (and increasingly make even normie liberals uncomfortable), 2) some of those radical edges are tearing the Democratic coalition apart, 3) intersectionality has proven a lot more adept at making fervent enemies (like nearly all young white men in America) than friends, and crucially 4) a lot of those radicals REALLY, violently hate the Jews, and given how the current Democratic coalition is structured, that simply can't be allowed to continue. And because of the way Trump rolls, they simply can't wait for the stern 1950s dad to show up and reinforce norms and boundaries for them. So (or at least in this theory) some American liberals (or their powerful institutions in the background) are finally reaching the point where its dawning on them that they're going to have to do the policing themselves, as deeply painful and unpleasant as that may be. And that's going to require theorizing their erstwhile allies in Latinate language and casting them in pretty unpleasant lights via rhetoric rewritten as social "science".

Wow, this really rings true to me. In particular, I think that it meshes extremely well with my own sense of how the political right has evolved since Buckley:

[T]he Republican coalition circa William F. Buckley, Jr. was capitalists, anti-communists, and the religious right. Today it's more like "lib-right" capitalists, anti-Wokists, and the working class.

"Political Dad" was the religious right, or at least the way that capitalists and anti-communists spoke when still coddling the religious right. Strength, but also manners; he can crack open a cold one and tell off-color jokes, but only when Mom is out shopping. If Dad is stuffy and uncool it's because Dad has nothing to prove; you already know Dad fucks, that's how he became Dad. But Mom went from being a bitter church lady to being a blue haired political lesbian so she kicked Dad out and now we only see Dad on weekends when he's not on a Disney cruise with his hot girlfriend, Crypto. In short, it's like I said:

Obama's defeat of Romney (not incidentally, a religious capitalist whose prophecies Obama mocked in his infamous "the 1980s are now calling" comment) was the end of Buckley Republicanism as a going concern.

Not to overmix the metaphor but this last semester I had five students in one of my classes show up with ashes on their forehead for Ash Wednesday. The Children do not seem impressed with... whatever the hell this is, this political upheaval that is happening between the Boomers and the Millennials. (Generation X appears to be sitting on their 3% mortgages very, very quietly.)

Generation X appears to be sitting on their 3% mortgages very, very quietly.

2.25% (15y refinance), and I won't shut up about it!

(You've got to let me have this one; in hindsight the biggest financial decision of my life was "I guess gwern makes some good points about this 'bitcoin' thing, but I just can't bring myself to buy any fake money tokens for nearly a dollar a piece!")

Man... sometimes it feels like I hit bitcoin at just the right time. It was worth enough to make me take it seriously, it was after Mt Gox so lessons from that were in the zeitgeist, and I was zealous enough to never sell and keep DCAing for almost 10 years. Some people have done better buying it earlier and selling the tops and buying the bottoms. Some people have done a lot worse panic selling the bottoms. All in all I can't complain.

Nice.

(I built a mining rig in 2010 because I thought Bitcoin was philosophically interesting, then I never actually mined anything because it was beyond my technical abilities and I was busy with other philosophically interesting stuff. My only consolation is that there is no possible world where I both actually mined Bitcoin and held it beyond a total value of, say, $50,000, which would be a nice amount of money to have, but is not really a life-changing amount.)

Yeah, that's good consolation. I'm likewise pretty sure that even if I'd cleverly scooped up a thousand bitcoin at $1 I'd just have sold almost all of them at $25.

Heh, I remember a page linked from HN of a similar vintage that was giving away what was at the time a couple fractions of a penny in Bitcoin (IIRC 0.01 or 0.001BTC when 1BTC was a couple pennies). At the time it didn't seem worth the effort, so I didn't create a wallet. If I had done so, it'd at least be worth my while these days.

I know millennials who bought in (youngish, but out of college) at that interest rate. Post-2008 was an interesting time for most of a decade. Also very quietly, I suppose: their equity is also up 200% or more.

Here's an extension of this theory that I've also been kicking around.

I remember, during the 2016 primaries, when Trump was still being treated as a joke, him racking up surprisingly big wins (in a Republican primary context) in places like Massachusetts. And I was reading something at the time that noted, essentially, that there was a surprisingly big, untapped demographic of voters all throughout New England and places like Illinois (or other Midwest places with dominant progressive cities ) that wasn't particularly religious or pious or prissy, and wasn't large enough to win local elections, but that sounded a LOT like Trump and was really receptive to Trump. But neither major political coalition had had anything to say such people for a very long time.

And ever since then, I've gotten rather stuck on this notion that the older 2 party system, the one that was stable for a while, was really two coalitions that were, especially, catering to two regional sets of winners. The Democratic party had turned into the party of coastal winners, and the Republican party had evolved into the party of sunbelt winners. And that meant Democrats were more attached to old money prestige cultural institutions like universities, and the Republican party was especially connected to new money success like booming California and Texas and Florida population growth and business (although over time, the political culture in California shifted from the ur-Sunbelt model to a much more coastal, entrenched model). And this bifurcation was comfortable and made a lot of sense to all involved - of course the two parties are going to be heavily utilized by various winning elements of society and work as their megaphones and enact their interests. And the winners of the Democratic coalition were morally prissy about PC stuff, and the winners of the Republican coalition was morally prissy about evangelical and personal sex stuff, and so that go reflected in how they became annoying in public discourse, and how they got attacked rhetorically.

But the George W Bush years, and Iraq, and the 2008 financial crisis, were very bad for the Sunbelt winners coalition. It was badly weakened. And a lot that coalition, particularly the parts that had gotten wealthier and were more drawn to the cultural attraction of the Obama story, really didn't want to be associated with the culturally low class (but still economically booming) Sunbelt model any more.

And that coalitional weakness opened the door to a new faction, one that wasn't really getting any representation or being courted... the Northern (and Midwest / rust belt) losers faction. And the Northern losers faction is a nightmare for the Northern winners faction, because 1) they aren't prissy like the Sunbelt evangelicals, 2) they've embraced counterculture energy to a more serious degree than even the Northern winners had (which had always been a cultural Achillies heel for southern evangelicals), 3) they're actually way more racists and tribal than sunbelt winners have been for the last several decades, and much more unapologetically so, which morally horrifies Northern winner sensibilities, and 4) on a deep and profound level, their condition is in many ways the FAULT of northern winners, their own local expert class who has been much more interested in growth through globalization than the economic fortunes of their downscale neighbors.

I get the sense that Democrats really, really, really wish they could just run against 2006 era George W Bush again, or Mitt Romney. That's a very self-flattering world for them, where everything makes sense and they get to fulfill their role of being cool. But quite frankly, the 2016 campaign was the first time in my entire life where I was seeing campaign material for Republicans, at least online (much of filtered through 4chan anarchy), where I recognized the Republican side of political rhetoric being, unambiguously, much cooler in a countercultural sense than what Democrats were doing. I found it fascinating, to be honest.

Both of your comments are great.

Wow, this is a fantastic summary I've been trying to write, but somehow way more concise. Reported as AAQC, thanks.

I think a contributing factor is also that a new generation has grown up steeped in progressive rhetoric but that isn’t “in on the joke”. Millennial and Baby Boomer progressives knew on some level that this was all just a rhetorical device for advancing the Democratic Party’s electoral interest. Trans women weren’t actually women. We aren’t actually planning to have a real no-joke, violent communist Revolution and put the CEOs up against the wall. We shouldn’t actually try to drive Israel into the sea because the State Department wouldn’t like that, even if there is no logical way to justify its existence under the ideological creed we loudly profess. But now you have zoomer progressives who genuinely believe all this without even a hint of irony.

grown up steeped in [whatever] rhetoric but that isn’t “in on the joke”

I've think this more and more. What if someone took common hyperbolic political rhetoric literally and then acted on it?

Like Bush and early Obama era American evangelicals in Africa recite their anti-gay talking points to Africans. The Africans listen and take the only sensible response to people corroding society and ruining important institutions in such an insidious manner: Kill them all and mandate reporting such people with stiff penalties for failing to report a secret homosexual. Then the Americans break kayfabe and go "Oh no, we meant they are ruining society but don't take any action against them other than vague campaign rhetoric."

Or some reddit-style "healthcare CEOs are killing us". Or literally "globalizing the intifada". If many people literally believed this sort of rhetoric, some portion would be happily digging the mass graves to put our wicked enemies into. Or pouring burning fuel on old people and children in the streets.

But now you have zoomer progressive who genuinely believe all this without even a hint of irony.

As I mentioned down thread, I live near a university. I frequently encounter protests for or against the ${CURRENT_THING} whenever I have to go into town.

One of the most fascinating protest signs that I ever saw simply said LIBERALS GET THE BULLET TOO in all-caps sharpie. To this day, I'm not even sure they were protesting.

Actual leftists are not liberals. I've seen LIBERALS GET THE BULLET TOO plenty on edgy online leftist spaces. By which I mean self-identified socialists and communists.

They historically went even further and denounced social democrats as "social fascists". SocDems, socialists, anarcho-communists and Soviet-backed revolutionaries battling each other by rhetoric or sometimes literally with bullets while actual for-real fascists took over Europe.

I'm pretty sure that's a tankie slogan from those that see things like the concept of private property as too far right. Maybe also an element of out group/far group dynamics, or referencing Stalinist and Maoist purges of the inteligencia and such. I don't have any friends that attend such things (that I know of).

One of the most fascinating protest signs that I ever saw simply said LIBERALS GET THE BULLET TOO in all-caps sharpie. To this day, I'm not even sure they were protesting.

I'm reminded of the BLM flag that was the snake with "YES WE WILL TREAD" or something similar. Like, they were protesting oppressive police by... wanting to oppress libertarians? Constitutionalists? The US Navy post-9/11? I mean, I assume they simply interpreted the entire flag as "Outgroup Flag" and didn't think about it, but still.

This is the new game? Is it because Trump is in the White House again, so academia has to go back to pretending to be "politically neutral?" "We're all good classical liberals, boss, honest! No radicals here, no sir.

I live near a university, and what I'm seeing among the faculty is that some of them, at least, look enough like Kulaks and traitors to Glorious Revolution that they're starting to get a little afraid.

Once it happens, it seems like they go one of two directions.

The first is they quadruple down on all the various shibboleths that show they're One Of The Good Ones - their Tesla sports a new "I bought it before Elon went nuts" bumper sticker. Their yard grows another "In this house we believe sign". The pride flag flaps in the wind year round. Each step gets more ostentatious and, to me, increasingly nervous.

The second is that they start doing more "right wing" things and integrate with those who they once called enemies when conversing with their former peers. They hit the range. They go to church. They visit the redneck bar and say "I don't know if I like Trump but this shit they're doing at my kid's school is getting out of hand." Like a prisoner hoping the Nazi biker gang will keep the Crips from raping him straight into the hospital, they observe just enough of the norms to keep them in the good graces of their new group.

Watching the dichotomy is interesting, and I can usually predict which way a given staff or faculty member is going to land.

What will lead the GOP?

I think trumpist campaigning plays out pretty differently when there are multiple people doing it. Im not totally happy with the following explanation of such campaigning, and expect people to dispute some things, but I feel I have to at least attempt one, and I think the conclusion that theres some void to be filled here is relatively clear from just considering the question.

The way the politics game is played traditionally, candidates talk about their policies, are probed for gaffes and flipflops, lose some points for not aswering questions, etc. This gives voters some basis for making decisions, but it can also lead to an "emperor with no clothes" situation with politicians trying to comply with thing voters actively dislike. Trumps strategy exploited a big, interconnected bunch of such issues by rejecting this sort of accountability entirely. This includes saying the populist things, but also not caring how offensive or contradictory you are doing it, never apologising for that, etc. The goal is to trigger a preference cascade towards not judging by those standards. This obviously worked pretty well for him, but it also gives a drastically lower-resolution picture than the conventional strategy. Thats fine if youre far away from all the other candidates anyway, but what if youre not? Now youll need something to distinguish yourself, and I think the great question of the next few republican primaries will be what that should be. Here are the options as I see them:

Inertia-based

Trump won the '20 and '24 primaries because he is the Trump, noone was gonna out-trump him and so noone seriously tried. The path of least resistance going forward is propably that Trump remains in charge of trumpism, continues to voice himself prominently in the media and xitter/truth social, and expects the candidate and later president to dance by his fiddle. I expect this not to go well: People propably arent excited to vote for a president who is outshone even as a figurehead. A falling out at some point is also likely, especially since Trump will likely be more erratic when the role thats naturally the center of attention is filled by someone else. The best case scenario is propably that this goes well once, and then either Trump is too old to stay relevant, or the new guy falls out with him and manages to "win" the internal conflict before his time is up, and then the next election is something else.

The "better" version of inertia is propably some kind of "the party decides". There are plenty of countries that manage without primaries, and while occasional upsets propably cant be prevented entirely if primaries are mandatory, something more like that seems possible. However, the republicans are specifically not set up for this. The democrats have "the groups", and a kind of permanent party leadership - meanwhile, you never really hear about the RNC, except in the fixed phrase "RNC convention". They long where much more of an extension of the current president(ial cnadidate). So the somewhat-possible version of this is that Trump anoints Vance his successor, and Vance some else, they remain supportive of the new guy but in the background, and afer a few times of this you have a more substantial party leadership - but leadership at any time deciding to separate from the previous ones would likely break this, so it takes a long streak indeed.

Return of the media

Candidates go back to conventional campaigning, with a somewhat shifted overton window. This could happen if it seems like political wins were big enough that shielding yourself from the media is no longer necessary, and its also the default option if trumpism has become too unpopular for another go. If it hasnt, there will be significant hesitation before adopting this option, as rejecting it was one of the central ideas of trumpism. Those dont die easily, and its not even clear if the problems of that system where just inerta or an attractor.

There is also the question of the trumpist media. Its been 10 years of Trump on the right, new media outlets have been founded and older ones reconstructed to supporting him. Theyre not really set up to evaluate politicians in a meaningful way, and follow his lead instead. What direction they will take once there is no longer an obvious leader of trumpism is in many ways a similar question to the one Im asking here. If they just try to pivot to evaluation without any kind of more systematic ideological program, that will be one huge slapfight that propably eventually ends in one, but it sure is going to be rough until then. Writing them all off leaves only people who are in significant part not even republicans in name anymore, and propably means a collapse of the right.

Full bore

Candidates engage in an epic rap battle, whoever has the greatest stage presence, the most charismatic voice, and the best alliterative insults wins. This is theoretically the closest thing to multiple people running the original campaign unmodified. I think its unlikely to happen in a pure form, but the the problem of trumpist campaigning that I outlined is with too many candidates running like this. If noone is trying that anymore, it could be viable again. So there could be a mixed equilibrium here, where theres one candidate trying full bore in addition to whatever else ends up happening, with either winning the candidacy sometimes. And since theres no reliable way to have exactly one guy like that, sometimes candidates like that will have to face each other, and it would have to go like that.

Anything you think Ive missed?

Anything you think Ive missed?

The Octavian strategy. Run Donald Junior. People wouldn’t care that much about Donald Junior’s personal qualifications because they know Trump Senior will be backseat driving. Vance is Marcus Agrippa.

I've lurked the Motte in its various incarnations over the past however many years and have felt strongly about many of the things posted, however, I have never felt any strong enough need to post that I thought it necessary to make an account - until your description of 'The Octavian Strategy'.

What would this strategy have to do with Octavian? Octavian was a complete nobody politically until Caesar died, at which point, Caesar certainly wasn't "backseat driving", because Caesar was dead. There was absolutely no sense that people 'didn't care' about Octavian because they thought Caesar was in control, since, as mentioned, he was dead, and many of the key Caesarians had either taken part in the assassination conspiracy or ended up as Octavian's opponents, so they also weren't in control.

Or are you saying that it's the 'Octavian strategy' just because Donald Junior bears his father's name, in the same way Octavian was given Caesar's name by virtue of his adoption? Sure, I guess, but it's far more accurate to describe this strategy as literally any other political dynasty that isn't Caesar's, given that "son takes power after his father dies / exits the scene" is an incredibly common historical occurrence, and again, your primary point is that the father is still in the driver's seat, which definitely doesn't apply to Octavian.

And that's not even getting onto the Marcus Agrippa comparison. Agrippa had very little to do with Caesar, and was incredibly close to Octavian throughout his life. That does not map whatsoever onto Vance and Don Junior. I don't even understand what you're trying to imply with that.

I know some might view this as nitpicky or irrelevant but I honestly can't think of a less apt historical comparison I've seen here, ever, and I've seen some bad ones. Trying to just hamfistedly map scenarios onto what you think happened in Rome just leads to very bad conclusions, since you're evaluating strategy based on outcomes that never happened.

My first thought was the “Putin-Medvedev strategy” but I didn’t want to sidetrack the thread into a 500 reply tangent about the war.

I have never felt any strong enough need to post that I thought it necessary to make an account

Read: “I made an alt so I can drop a pissy comment without repercussions”

Read: “I made an alt so I can drop a pissy comment without repercussions”

Don't be pissy yourself.

I obviously have no means of demonstrating this, but this isn’t an alt, I just genuinely got that baited by your bizarre analogy.

That also doesn’t really explain what you meant, either. What is Vance doing in this situation? How is he Agrippa? You’ve just put names to figures without any actual connection.

The Putin-Medvedev analogy makes far more sense, but Medvedev worked as a patsy precisely because he was seen as “responsible” and “conciliatory” towards the West as opposed to Putin, which gave Putin time and space to breathe while cementing his power. Don Jnr. ain’t that. In that situation someone other than Don Jnr., perhaps Ivanka if you want to keep it in the family, would be the pick. Rubio would be the obvious choice though, and in fact, Rubio seems to be getting Trump’s blessing as a successor. (https://tass.com/world/1952703)

This is why getting your analogies right actually helps - it lets you consider what strategy worked or failed in the past.

What a coincidence: I just read John Williams' "Augustus" and I was also scratching my head over what "the Octavian strategy" meant here.

I am also currently rereading Caesar’s ‘The Civil War’ so suppose I was particularly primed to react, however, if that dated meme is anything to go by, we’re all only a few hours gone from thinking about Rome anyway.

Trump Senior will be backseat driving

Trump senior is not fully in the driver seat right now. Let's not pretend that there will be much of his mind left in 4 or 8 years. And his mind is terrible at driving anyway. Good at winning elections. But at best mediocre at governing.

Let's not pretend that there will be much of his mind left in 4 or 8 years.

You’ve already had the last four years of solid practice gaslighting yourself that the President isn’t a drooling dementia patient. You’ll be fine. And in any case, he wouldn’t need to run the day-to-day operations, just make sure that Don Jr. and Vance are broadly ideologically correct.

I am probably the biggest Trumpist here. Just to calibrate your priors.

I think it will be 'full bore' taken to its conclusion: the candidates will go warlord and start assembling personal armies and killing each other, with the candidacy going to the survivor, who once nominated will fall into line with democratic norms, participate politely in the debates with a centrist economic platform, and lose narrowly to Gavin Newsom.

BTW sorry for mentioning it but you're using the idiosyncratic typo 'propably' throughout this post.

It will briefly be glorious as the velociraptor-mounted troops square off against each other but yeah it ends with the winner declaring that America first was always open borders.

How did you come to this conclusion?

I just suspect they need to be gladiatorial in Trump's image to win Trump's approval, and then when they're the candidate and perhaps need him a bit less, they will pivot a bit.

Literally?

In AI safely news, the "big, beautiful bill" Republicans are pushing through includes 10 year ban on states regulating AI. Seems pretty reckless, who could even imagine what AI could do in 10 years.

Makes perfect sense to me, AI is a national-level issue. Really it's global, a server farm in Ohio can take jobs off Uzbeks and Bolivians, not to mention Floridians. Makes sense to regulate nationally.

Plus, would you really want California regulating a critical sector of the economy?

isn't a 10 year ban better than a bill which just bans states from regulating AI. at least the 10 years creates is a sunset clause on the regulation and would require congress to pass new legislation if they think continuing the ban is a good idea. though, maybe generally we should be pushing congress to include short sunset clauses in all legislation it passes because the future could be very different in X years.

We ask that top-level comments have more meat on the bone.

Since we’ve asked you specifically about this in the last couple months, one day ban.

I'd much rather see different states experiment with different forms of regulation, but it's good news for regulatory clarity and therefore the standing of the US in this domain.

At least China won't automatically win the race from the West kneecapping itself.

I'd much rather see different states experiment with different forms of regulation

What AI problems are intrastate, rather than interstate?

Anything that has to do with law enforcement, healthcare, and any of the nuts and bolts of your life that don't happen on the internet?

I'd much rather have both a place that does and doesn't allow the pile of algebra to decide if you get the loan or not. I'm not certain which gives the best outcome.

the nuts and bolts of your life that don't happen on the internet

I was asking from a place of pessimism about interstate companies faithfully executing independent processes for customers in different states (if the human-made algorithm is less profitable than the AI black-box, will the company scrupulously avoid benchmarking the former against the latter or pulling out of the market?), but fair point.

It's pretty obvious that using a pile of linear algebra gives the best outcome for loans, and literally every bank in the word has been doing this for >30 years. The more old fashioned banks have just been using a person to enter the data into the linear algebra.

To be more specific, consider some regulation that says that you actually have to be able to explain and defend the algorithm in a court, and aren't allowed black boxes.

AI has a lesser problem of enabling dictatorship and a greater problem of rogue AI. In foot-race terms, the lesser problem is that there are other competitors, and the greater problem is that the finish line has landmines under it strong enough to blow up the whole track. As such, until and unless the mines are removed, "sprint harder" is not a solution; if the landmines are set off, you're still dead regardless of who did it.

What if you believe that when you reach the finish line, there's a 5% chance that the track will blow up, but if the other guys reach the finish line first, there's a 10% chance the track will blow up. Also you believe the other guys don't take the risks seriously so they won't stop running. Is "sprint harder" a valid option?

I mean, the preferred solution to "the other guys don't take the risks seriously so they won't stop running" is generally "whip out a pistol and shoot them", although the numbers you've given are on the edges of that solution's range of optimality.

I will note that in reality, the CPC appears fairly cognisant of the risks, probably would enforce stricter controls than "Openly Evil AI" and "lol we're Meta" (Google and Anthropic are less clear), and might be amenable to an agreed slowdown (there are other nations that won't be and will need to be knocked over, but it's much easier to invade a UAE or a Cayman Islands than it is the PRC).

Also, my P(Doom|no slowdown) is like 0.95-0.97, although there will likely be a fair number of warning shots first (i.e. the "no slowdown" condition implies ignoring those warning shots); to align a neural net you need to be able to solve "what does this code do when run" (because you're checking whether a neural net has properties you want in order to procedurally mess with it, rather than explicitly writing it, and hence to train "doesn't kill me when run" you need to be able to identify "kills me when run" in a way other than "run it and see whether it kills me"), and that's the halting problem (proven unsolvable in the general case, and neural nets don't look to me like enough of a special case).

I don't agree with your premise. I think the opposite is true. Therefore accelerate.

The premise of "rogue AI could potentially kill us all", or the premise of "we are currently on track to build rogue AI"?

The premise that rogue AI is a coherent concept distinguishable from an industrial accident. I don't believe machines have wills and there has been absolutely no reason to change my mind on that point.

Though both of these also have very large problems if you concede that point. People underestimate how extremely difficult "kill all humans" is as a task. And we have basically no idea what we're building and why it works at this stage so speculation on the terminal direction of the technology is bound to be nonsense.

Claude 4 and o3 will take action to avoid being shut down. If you leave aside the literally-unknowable "do machines have qualia" point, they sure seem to be best modelled as capable of agency.

People underestimate how extremely difficult "kill all humans" is as a task.

I'm one of the people saying this. Preppers and other forms of resilience nullify a great many X-risks; another Chicxulub would kill most humans but not humanity (not sure about another Siberian Traps). But there is one specific category of X-risks where that kind of resilience is useless, and that's the "non-human enemy wins a war against us" set (the three risks in this category are the three sorts of possible non-human hostiles - "AI", "aliens" and "God"). Bunkers are no help against those, because if they defeat us they aren't ever going away, and can deliberately break open the bunkers; it might take them a few years to mop up all the preppers (though I imagine God would get everybody in the first pass, and aliens plausibly could), but that doesn't save humanity.

they sure seem to be best modelled as capable of agency.

I disagree. For the same reason that I disagree that it was best to model Eliza as having agency.

You're training a statistical model to do something, and it does that thing. To model it as having agency would imply the thing starting to do things on its own that aren't just emergent properties of what you're making it do.

If you don't want unintended effects, don't train the thing on the whole of a culture you don't control. Calling it "rogue" is like calling a hammer evil because it hurt when you're hitting yourself with it. Stop hitting yourself.

bunkers

More like uncontacted tribes.

Realistic X-risk is mostly down to physical conditions making our biosphere unable to sustain the critical mass of human life, like somebody lobbing a big rock at Earth or some invasive lifeform eating all the oxygen in the atmosphere. And even those are somewhat survivable. Losing a war to a recognizable enemy doesn't even register.

Hence why I think the main mitigating factor is any kind of extra-planetary backup.

If you don't want unintended effects, don't train the thing on the whole of a culture you don't control. Calling it "rogue" is like calling a hammer evil because it hurt when you're hitting yourself with it. Stop hitting yourself.

I love this explanation, it's a great way to put it in perspective. I would also say that this -

To model it as having agency would imply the thing starting to do things on its own that aren't just emergent properties of what you're making it do.

Rules most people out of the agentic category. And that's why I say please and thanks to deepseek anyway.

Could you elaborate on the intra-state impacts of AI you'd expect states to want to regulate? I don't think any of the AI companies even tell you where their data centers are based, so "this all happened in Oregon" seems unlikely to even be true. Isn't most regulation of the Internet as a whole at the federal level? Even nationwide collection of state sales tax online didn't happen broadly until 2017.

Snope v. Bonta has dropped like a gravestone:

The State of Maryland prohibits ownership of AR–15s, the most popular civilian rifle in America. Md. Crim. Law Code Ann. §4–303(a)(2) (2025). This petition presents the question whether this ban is consistent with the Second Amendment. The Fourth Circuit held that it is, reasoning that AR–15s are not “arms” protected by the Second Amendment. Bianchi v. Brown, 111 F. 4th 438, 448 (2024) (en banc). I would grant certiorari to review this surprising conclusion.

That'd be a great opinion. It's not one.

Only Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch have dissented from the denial of certiorari, which means that there is no Snope case now. This was final judgement (specifically, dismissal of the lawsuit), there are no other appeals, and there is no other chances. Maryland has banned a wide array of very common firearms, with vague definitions, the lower courts have held that these guns aren't even guns nevermind protected by the Second Amendment, and SCOTUS has punted. While Maryland's law here includes a grandfather registration clause, the circuit has already held that such clauses are unnecessary, none of the takings clause people cared, and SCOTUS punted. Binding law in the 4th Circuit holds that a firearm is not an arm.

It's also a case that has been rife with bad behavior from the lower courts; Thomas's dissent emphasizes the logical flaws, but I'll point out that under the name Bianchi this is the case that was held for over a year by a single judge on the appeals court who didn't file a dissent. There will be no percolation; 2A-favorable analysis of these laws will not be allowed to reach SCOTUS, and it will be smothered before en banc whenever possible.

Kavanaugh wrote an interesting ... concurrence? Dissental? Pile of bullshit? Statement. The record calls it a statement. This is particularly interesting because it only takes four to give certiorari; he literally could not write a dissent.

Given that millions of Americans own AR–15s and that a significant majority of the States allow possession of those rifles, petitioners have a strong argument that AR–15s are in “common use” by law-abiding citizens and therefore are protected by the Second Amendment under Heller. See Heller v. District of Columbia, 670 F. 3d 1244, 1286–1288 (CADC 2011) (Kavanaugh, J., dissenting). If so, then the Fourth Circuit would have erred by holding that Maryland’s ban on AR–15s complies with the Second Amendment.

Under this Court’s Second Amendment precedents, moreover, it can be analytically difficult to distinguish the AR–15s at issue here from the handguns at issue in Heller.

Again, would be a great opinion! It's not one, either. Instead:

Although the Court today denies certiorari, a denial of certiorari does not mean that the Court agrees with a lower-court decision or that the issue is not worthy of review. The AR–15 issue was recently decided by the First Circuit and is currently being considered by several other Courts of Appeals. [ed: list of cases moved] Opinions from other Courts of Appeals should assist this Court’s ultimate decisionmaking on the AR–15 issue. Additional petitions for certiorari will likely be before this Court shortly and, in my view, this Court should and presumably will address the AR–15 issue soon, in the next Term or two.

Why? Because fuck you, that's why. Roberts and Barrett, as typical for the majority in denials of cert, have no comment.

Kavanaugh gives a list of lower circuit cases that "should assist this Court's decision-making".

To be blunt: this SCOTUS will not be address the AR-15 issue in "the next Term or two". There will be no grand cases from the lower courts with a serious investigation of the Second Amendment ramifications that split the baby some perfect way. There will always be some excuse why a specific case wasn't the ideal vehicle, or why some new one that's just reached oral args is the better vehicle later, or why some specific law wasn't the best demonstration. Optimistically, Kavanaugh got a promise from John "Article III is <Not> Worth A Dollar" Roberts and will find out how much that promise is worth; pessimistically, Kavanaugh's a politician wearing robes and this is what he says to get readers (especially the sort that might make unscheduled visits to his house) to believe what he wants them to believe. Eventually, Thomas and Alito will retire, and either we're going to get much worse judges from a technical side who can actually make a fucking decision that matters when it shocks the conscience of the Amtrak world, even if that means they'll also bark on command when Trump asks, or a Dem president will get those seats, and either way, the conservative legal movement and anything deeper than a pretext of originalism will go the way of the dinosaur.

Meanwhile, the plaintiffs here get nothing. They will be out years of their lives trying to bring this case, and tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees and attorney's costs. They will either have moved from Maryland, or gotten rid of any 'assault weapon' that they once owned, or never been allowed to buy one. A decision in a term or two will not protect Ocean State Tactical, another (pre-final-judgment) case SCOTUS denied cert on today, from being just as completely fucked over. Even should SCOTUS find their balls or be delivered new ones and eventually issue a pro-gun ruling, most circuits have standing orders that only recognize the most complete and on-point decision from SCOTUS as overruling circuit precedent, and the one exception is the 9th Circuit (and with a "when we like it" rule). SCOTUS has happily demonstrated, for the better part of a decade, that they will not smack wrists over that. Anti-gun lower courts will take this as an affirmance in the meantime.

It's not even as though guns are the only matter here: SCOTUS has similarly punted on the question of But It's Mean on Free Speech. Hell, guns aren't even the only thing in the guns cases. The court has similarly punted on the question of whether But It's Guns on Due Process, or But It's Guns on Free Speech [see also], or But It's Guns on Court Settlements, or even But It's Guns on the very caselaw that SCOTUS thought so beyond the pale that they'd managed to scrounge up a 9-0 before.

And, of course, there's the blaring siren in the room. As Thomas points out, SCOTUS has punted on this very specific legal question for over a decade post-Heller, while claiming a right delayed is a right denied. SCOTUS has a case covering the type of gun Heller was trying to bring in Heller I, it's listed for conference for Thursday, it's been over a decade, and they're gonna deny it, 99.9999%. And where I'd once point out that it's been longer since Heller than it was from Lawrence v. Texas to Obergefell, and Dick Heller still can't register (lol) the actual gun from his original case, I'm instead going to something a little more specific and recent. SCOTUS defied all its normal rules about procedural posture to protect the rights of an illegal immigrant in six hours on a holiday weekend. That's what SCOTUS cares about, and for every single court case they punt on in my lifetime -- whether challenges to a law like this, or people sitting in prison like Dexter Taylor -- this the standard they've set, and then forgot as soon as a normal citizen who hasn't beaten their wife got involved. Every single second longer than six hours, for cases that have 'percolated' for years.

Some peoples rights need be resolved right away, and others can wait and wait and wait.

Viramontes Has Dropped

Cutberto Viramontes and Christopher Khaya, together with the Firearms Policy Coalition and the Second Amendment Foundation, appeal the dismissal of their constitutional challenge to Cook County’s assault weapons ban. Relying on District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), they argue that the ordinance is facially invalid under the Second Amendment.

We addressed a similar challenge to the ordinance in a case that was before us on appeal from the denial of a preliminary injunction. Bevis v. City of Naperville, We rejected the challenge based on the record the plaintiffs had compiled at that early stage of the litigation. Id. at 1197. The challengers here have failed to develop a record sufficient to justify a different result. We therefore affirm.

It's a three-page read, but to summarize: Viramontes has not demonstrated sufficiently that an AR15 is different than an M16. What could prove such a thing? What is required to prove such a thing? The court does not feel it necessary to even hint. Why did it take three grown adults several months to write three pages? Also a mystery.

Yes, Bruen explicitly said that the burden was on the government, that "The burden then falls on respondents to show that New York’s proper-cause requirement is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation." Yes, it's so obvious it should be in judicial notice. Yes, the plaintiffs explicitly argued "The banned semiautomatic rifles, like all other semiautomatic firearms, fire only one round for each pull of the trigger. They are not machine guns." among a variety of other significant distinctions.

Doesn't matter.

That was one of the possible ones, except nope. Hope Kavanaugh finds it really illuminating.

I'd like to believe Kavanaugh that this is an additional temporary set back, because it's nicer than being mad or catastrophizing.

Regarding "percolation", if a new standard is deployed, then allowing lower courts to hash out the details appeals to my common sense. Highlight the contentious, egregious violations and we get more pointed judgments. This requires the lower courts to respect precedent set by SCOTUS and enforce rights faithfully. Maybe percolation can be relied upon for 1A cases, because there remains broad consensus there. For the 2A, this is akin to a general handing orders over to his officers, having them mutiny over the orders, then going to bed with the expectation they will eventually carry out the orders they are actively mutinying over. "Second-class' right indeed. I'm not sure what the play is, or if the soft degradation of legitimacy is preferable to a sudden decapitation, but delegitimizing it remains for the individuals that consider the court employing something other than politics.

Another thing that loses me is the stated desire for circuit splits as an indicator to act. It's perverse. Should I vote in politicians that will enact unconstitutional laws that limit my rights-- in the hope that SCOTUS will then take the case to the restore the rights of myself and my fellow countrymen? I resent the fact I wasn't taught about this civic duty, nor the fact that a right cannot be vindicated until it is unequally trampled upon in different parts of the country. Delay turns into vetoes and dissent, not less.

Yep. There's a !!fun!! worse-case scenario where Red Tribe groups specifically create and push the sort of worst-legal and -pragmatic case arguments possible with friendly prosecutors and 'defendants' collaborating to make the state's position crumble, a la the cy pres abuse from the Obama era. But as funny as it would be to see Guiliani dropped into new court cases just to fuck them up, the courts are no more willing to play with that than they are with honest engagement.

SCOTUS defied all its normal rules about procedural posture to protect the rights of an illegal immigrant in six hours on a holiday weekend.

While I do not know the specifics, based on priors I would guess that this involved a suspected gang member being at risk of imminent deportation to some El Salvador mega prison. As Trump's efforts to follow court orders to get people deported in such a way were sadly unsuccessful, it seems reasonable to treat these deportations as a permanent harm and prioritize these cases accordingly.

--

I think the problem with the 2nd amendment is that the text allows for a wide range of interpretations. One could argue that the framers meant the small arms of the 1780s -- which were the only guns they knew about, and if a city-destroying laser gun had popped up in 1800 they might have felt different about everyone owning it. Or that they meant 'state of the art military firearms, in perpetuity', because surely nobody would beat any tyrant today with flintlock rifles. Or even that they meant weapon systems to wage war in general, from man-portable antitank weapons to stealth bombers and nukes.

Previous case law has extended 2A to cover cartridges, revolvers and semiautomatics, but not automatics or explosive weapons. As far as the original purpose of the second (to enable the population to resist a tyrant like the US did during the revolutionary war) is concerned, it is very much moot. If the tyrant fields a tank, then the Americans owning what is currently legal for them to own, AR15s or no AR15s, will lose very badly in a direct confrontation. To give them the firepower to even have a fighting chance against tanks or airplanes would also give them the power to effortlessly take out school busses or jumbo jets, and this is a trade-off which few people will favor.

It should also be pointed out that the current SCOTUS has been otherwise quite Republican-friendly. They overturned Roe (which to be fair was always a stretch) and they gave Trump immunity for basically anything he did as a president. I can assure you, the disappointment the gun nuts feel with the SCOTUS for not affirming the legality of semi-automatic AR15s is tiny compared to the disappointment the liberals feel over Dobbs.

As Trump's efforts to follow court orders to get people deported in such a way were sadly unsuccessful, it seems reasonable to treat these deportations as a permanent harm and prioritize these cases accordingly.

Okay. If that's the new rule, what day of this week do you think Dexter Taylor gets his day before SCOTUS? The courts don't have a time machine; the half-decade he's going to be stuck in jail isn't going to get undone. Will Malinowski get the other half of his skull back, or his next of kin get due compensation for watching her husband die? Or will both of these cases never get close to SCOTUS?

Ah, but those have different likelihood of success, or we think they're different types of permanent, post-hoc. Which is... at best an entirely different question from prioritization and permanence. And even many of those claims are not particularly believable. AARP didn't get punted because eh, those asylum claims are probably bunk anyway.

I think the problem with the 2nd amendment is that the text allows for a wide range of interpretations.

This has not, bluntly, stopped any Blue Tribe-favored defenses or constitutional protections, many of which have not only as much or more range in interpretation, but in many cases has been completely dependent on the most expansive interpretation to even exist in a meaningful form.

they gave Trump immunity for basically anything he did as a president.

I'd quibble with that description, but beyond that "we didn't get to try your Presidential candidate in federal court too much" is not especially compelling, and he's not 'my' guy.

I can assure you, the disappointment the gun nuts feel with the SCOTUS for not affirming the legality of semi-automatic AR15s is tiny compared to the disappointment the liberals feel over Dobbs.

That's nice, and all, but even assuming it's true, the ability of people to hack their own brains to be super-duper-ultra-disappointed doesn't actually give me any reason to care that they 'only' got fifty years of a made-up right blowing out not just laws across every state in the country, but even the interfaces of actual rights.

One could argue that the framers meant the small arms of the 1780s -- which were the only guns they knew about, and if a city-destroying laser gun had popped up in 1800 they might have felt different about everyone owning it.

The easy test case here is cannons: they were well-known in the 1780s, they're clearly not useful for personal defense since they're tremendously unwieldy and are only really militarily effective in a standing battle, and they've got the potential for mass casualties loaded with grapeshot or other shrapnel, or property destruction loaded with explosive shells.

So, were cannons privately owned at the time of the Constitution's writing? Did the Founding Fathers take legal steps to ban personal ownership of cannons? Doing some scanning, my tentative conclusion is that they were fine with cannons, I certainly can't find any landmark case saying "well rifles are fine, but cannons are too far". People mention private cannon manufacturers, privateers, and private artillery companies, although I will note that a lot of this seems to come out in response to Biden saying "you couldn't own a cannon during the Revolutionary War" during a speech, so it has become a culture war thing. And the Massachusetts militia gathering cannon at Concord was the kickoff of the Revolutionary War.

Rifled cannons are currently banned, but that seems to be part of the NFA in 1934, well past Founding Father influence, and smoothbore cannons appear to still be legal.

This is a good test, but it only tells us that the Founders were fine with the destructive power of grapeshot in civilian hands when it came with the costs and portability, etc of a cannon. A fragmentation grenade will have a similar destructiveness as grapeshot, but it will also have much-increased portability, will be easily concealed and vastly cheaper, and can easily operated by a single person. So the trade-offs for society are very different.

So, were cannons privately owned at the time of the Constitution's writing?

With respect to privateers, private cannon ownership was encouraged.

my tentative conclusion is that they were fine with cannons

One of the coolest parts in Paine's "Common Sense" was the suggestion that we could get by without a standing navy if only we subsidized merchant ships who use some of their cargo space for cannons, to deter piracy without a dedicated navy but also to make it possible to organize a dedicated navy quickly in the event of war. The question wasn't "should people be allowed to own cannons?", it was "are we getting enough of the positive externalities of people owning cannons?"

There was a wonderful period in between the ancient "Divine Right of Kings" and the modern "Divine Right of Governments" where intellectuals seemed comfortable with the idea that governments are just made of people. Five years ago I'd hoped the left might get back to that point, since "Defund The Police (who can't be trusted) but also Ban Guns (using Police, the only ones who can be trusted with guns)" is just too clearly oxymoronic, but in hindsight my definition of "clearly" may have been overly expansive. English grammar doesn't have the concept of "transitive adverbs", which is a shame since English vocabulary has transitive adverbs.

I was going to make fun of that as spherical-cow thinking by a guy who had never seen naval service, but T-Paine actually had a slightly more complete plan.

Some method might be fallen on to keep up a naval force in time of peace, if we should not judge it necessary to support a constant navy. If premiums were to be given to merchants to build and employ in their service ships mounted with 20, 30, 40 or 50 guns (the premiums to be in proportion to the loss of bulk to the merchant) fifty or sixty of those ships, with a few guard-ships on constant duty, would keep up a sufficient navy, and that without burthening ourselves with the evil so loudly complained of in England, of suffering their fleets in time of peace to lie rotting in the docks.

It’s still kind of like paying truckers if they include at least one anti-tank weapon. America would have a heck of a time getting either to stand up against a serious military.

To be fair, Paine lived in a very different age. In his day, to compete in the Atlantic against the great colonial powers was not on the table for the US. If the Brits decided to invade again, a fleet to block them would not have been cost-effective. Instead, they would have been able to make uncontested landfall somewhere in North America. Of course, with a supply line spanning the Atlantic on sail ships, they would then have been at a disadvantage compared to the US in a land war.

Even today, I would argue that most of the naval forces of the US are not to keep the continental US safe from maritime invasion. Land based missile bases and a few spotter ships or planes would suffice for that.

The US navy is all about force projection. A airbase is superior to an aircraft carrier in every regard, except that you can not simply move your airbase to the South Pacific. Defending democracy on the other side of the world was probably not what Paine had in mind for the US.

To use civilian ships for warfare seems not entirely outlandish either, while purpose-designed warships will certainly offer superior performance, filling a merchant ship cannons is still a reasonable thing to do. What I am much more doubtful about is the use of turning over just some of the space on the ship to cannons. Traditionally, warships have dedicated most of their space to propulsion and armament, which is why they make very shitty merchant vessels. Smoothbore cannons do not exactly operate themselves, and the sailors will be quite busy navigating, so you need dedicated personnel to operate the guns (and the bilge pumps, for that matter). Unless you are also paying that merchant vessel to keep an extra crew of a few hundred to operate the guns, that 50 guns will be worthless.

Paying them to only carry a small fraction of the guns their ship could carry is even worse for warfare, because that means showing up to a rifle fight with a handgun. (It might still work out to scare of the occasional pirate, though.)

I think a better approach would have been to pay merchant vessels to have gunports so they can quickly be retrofitted with cannons (and the crews to man them) if the need arises.

It’s still kind of like paying truckers if they include at least one anti-tank weapon. America would have a heck of a time getting either to stand up against a serious military.

What could some jerks with trucks, consumer goods, and explosives do against, to pick a random example, a fleet of Tupolev bombers, right?

In theory I agree with you 100%, at least now that a serious military needs to have nuclear-tipped ICBMs.

In practice, Suez canal traffic was still down nearly 70% from 2023 Q1 to 2025 Q1, after third-world terrorist separatists took 10% of world trade hostage, because it took more than a year for a serious military to bomb them into agreeing to (not even a surrender!) a ceasefire. I do feel confused that the march of technology hasn't yet brought us to an era in which leading military superpowers can successfully pacify places like Afghanistan, with much less than a couple decades and a couple trillion dollars of effort, but here we are.

It’s still kind of like paying truckers if they include at least one anti-tank weapon. America would have a heck of a time getting either to stand up against a serious military.

laughs in Dari, Pashto, Vietnamese, Irish, etc

Yeah I'm sure a country full of small arms and handheld ATGMs will be a cakewalk to conquer. Good luck holding onto it though. It's just a bunch of peasants, what are they going to do against the best military in the world eh?

It's not totally senseless, it's the equivalent of rich people and celebrities having private security and bodyguards today. "You're the guys likely to be robbed, have some defences on your ships or hire some private contractors". Something like ex-military or ex-cops setting up as private security nowadays? "Hello, you're a former privateer with a ship, a crew, and no war going on for you to plunder foreign navies. What do you do in peace time? Write to MERCHANTS-R-US for exciting new job opportunities in the field of civilian fleet protection!"

As you point out, though, in times of war this affair falls to pieces. That is when you need a professional navy with proper warships. Though maybe Paine wasn't anticipating that America would need to be going to war with anyone else after kicking out the Brits?

It also seems like in times of peace you would just get protection rackets rather than legititimate security.

smoothbore cannons appear to still be legal

Only if they're muzzleloaded and therefore not firearms (for legal purposes). An M256 is a destructive device, and so is every shell you may get for it.

"No officer, there are no firearms in this vehicle. I do have two 18-pounders in the bed of the truck, though."

It's a bit silly, but those (unless we're talking WW1 era) are "antique firearms":

any firearm not intended or redesigned for using rim fire or conventional center fire ignition with fixed ammunition and manufactured in or before 1898 (including any matchlock, flintlock, percussion cap or similar type of ignition system or replica thereof, whether actually manufactured before or after the year 1898) and also any firearm using fixed ammunition manufactured in or before 1898, for which ammunition is no longer manufactured in the United States and is not readily available in the ordinary channels of commercial trade

and therefore not "large caliber weapons", and therefore not "destructive devices" and therefore not "firearms" for NFA purposes.

In practice you can buy yourself one right now for upwards of $300.

I'm pretty sure there's a 4chan greentext about urban youths' conducting a cannon-broadside drive-by shooting.

There's the infamous /k/ thread: https://desuarchive.org/k/thread/33748578/#33748578

but you may also be remembering the classic pasta: https://desuarchive.org/k/thread/23597451/#q23597742

I think the concern is that if they rule on this case while the others are still pending (assuming they strike it down) they get one state law struck down and several others where the courts carefully craft their decision to avoid running afoul of whatever logic the Supreme Court uses to justify their decision, in which case they have to keep hearing the same kinds of cases over and over again. And even when they do rule on it, they're just going to get new legislation that tests the limits of the decision. This is what happens when you have a constitutional right that a sufficient number of states simply choose not to recognize as such; look at how many southern states kept passing more and more onerous abortion restrictions to get around Roe. The court simply doesn't have any interest in turning into the Gun Control Review Board or whatever, so they're just going to keep denying cert. Some people may wonder why they say they're too busy when they still hear tax cases and bankruptcy cases and approximately 16,000 cases per term involving the Uniform Arbitration Act, but it's because those cases involve questions that need answers, and they don't worry about state legislatures and lower courts trying to dodge their rulings.

This may seem like an unfortunate situation to gun rights advocates such as yourself, but it's better than the alternative. The entire reason the court is in this mess is because they want to preserve restrictions that almost everyone agrees are necessary, and while you personally may not care if fully automatic weapons or sawed-off shotguns are legal, as soon as there's a high profile incident with a lot of casualties, the anti-gun protests would make everything we've seen thus far look like a dress rehearsal. There's a reason that most gun-friendly NRA A+ congressmen aren't introducing bills to repeal the FFA, or the Gun Control Act of 1968, or whatever law makes post-1986 guns illegal. This doesn't even get into sales restrictions, or background checks, or any of that. At that point the argument about cosmetic features, or DFUs, or whatever go completely out the window, and whatever rights you think Heller isn't protecting are going to vanish along with Heller itself, and in the ensuing backlash states aren't going to be shy about clamping down the screws.

I think the concern is that if they rule on this case while the others are still pending (assuming they strike it down) they get one state law struck down and several others where the courts carefully craft their decision to avoid running afoul of whatever logic the Supreme Court uses to justify their decision, in which case they have to keep hearing the same kinds of cases over and over again. And even when they do rule on it, they're just going to get new legislation that tests the limits of the decision.

What if the NFA was challenged, rather than a state law?

If we were talking background checks and 1986 machine guns, you might even have a point on the political costs. This case is about a ten-bullet magazine cap, and a ban on the AR15. These things famously were so unpopular on the federal level that they did, actually, not survive political scrutiny in 2004. That's a thing that actually happened. Concealed carry permits that aren't perverse jokes of due process cover a majority of the country, concealed carry laws that don't treat CCWers like vampires same, and both through people voting.

Five judges on the court can write a GVR faster than I can write this post. Anyone with a functioning brainstem can cut that 'gordian' knot of definition. And the court is quite happy to write sanctimonious screeds in that five minute time period defending the vital and important rights of a wifebeating illegal immigrant, face the music and political costs when yesterday an illegal immigrant lit a bunch of people on fire, and just smile on the next day like nothing happened.

They don't want to here. That's it.

EDIT: and, yes, that you have to compare a clearly-written right to one that even its proponents eventually admitted was just made up is a problem. That your 'oh no there might be a lower court case that would adjust in response' covers every single case the courts have ever heard, and hasn't stopped them from countless Blue Tribe decisions, matters. That the courts have ducked the consequences on Red Tribe matters from SFFA to 'someone wore a mean t-shirt', matters.

This is what happens when you have a constitutional right that a sufficient number of states simply choose not to recognize as such; look at how many southern states kept passing more and more onerous abortion restrictions to get around Roe

This comparison irritates and mystifies me.

The right to bear arms is quite directly in 2A:

A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed

But the right to abortion is...nowhere. It's inferred from the right to privacy, which is inferred from due process (5/14A):

No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law

I'll grant that there's some legal history and subtlety around what counts as an "Arm," but that's a much smaller inferential distance than the above.

Why would "abortion, but only up to a certain point in the growth" be part of...I guess "liberty"? But, "drug legalization" somehow isn't?

In classic Mottian fashion, I'm a high decoupler in general, and on this - I'm personally anti-gun and pro abortion. But, that doesn't change that the legal footing of them is exactly opposite in strength: my desires are not constitutionally protected.

But the right to abortion is...nowhere. It's inferred from the right to privacy, which is inferred from due process (5/14A)

I am anti-abortion myself, but I actually think that the demand for abortion rights to be supported by the constitution is itself not supported by the constitution.:

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Therefore, just because something isn't in the constitution doesn't mean people don't have a right to it. In fact it's the opposite - if something isn't in the constitution, the people by default have a right to it, and the burden of proof is on those who would say otherwise. I am fine with the result of having Roe decided by the states (it always should've been imo), but I don't much like the legal reasoning used to get there.

I wish that passage were given more weight, but I don't think it's that open-ended. It's most likely a reference to rights established by the English constitution as the authors understood it, with an emphasis on those in the Declaration of Right. It may also include some common-law rights.

If read in that light, I think it would have some radical implications. But it wouldn't establish a compelling interest test for each and every federal law.

Isn't this a case of who, whom yet again? Depending on how you answer the question of the personhood of the fetus, it's either the right to a simple medical procedure removing some cells, or it's superseded by the right to life for a developing human being.

Has SCOTUS jurisprudence found literally any rights to be established by the 10th amendment?

In practice, the anti-Federalists demanding an explicit enumeration of rights seem to have been right: nothing unenumerated is ever found to exist. Sorry, Hamilton stans.

What did you think ‘states rights’ meant?

I was pretty sure it meant right to deny things to black people.

To be clear, I find this particular punt outrageous and unfair. But I don’t think “states’ rights” has been a particularly principled objection since Andrew Jackson, if ever.

If you want talk progressives into the consequences of that rule, on such a scale that the other parts of the Constitution and its amendments get shoveled under the rug when a state disagrees, I'd... well, I'd still not want to live with it, but I'd at least not consider this comment a troll post.

As it is, there are links in my post above giving examples where the SCOTUS stomped over state rules, in ways that helped the Blue Tribe.

I support the ruling of dobbs and not Lawrence, would repeal the civil rights act if I had the power, etc. This isn’t a haha Republican hypocrites post.

Why do you think Lawrence was wrong?

Sodomy should be a crime.

Yes, forbidding people from giving food to the poor certainly ought to be a crime. (Chabad, October 2012; Tablet, November 2019)

  1. Why?

  2. What was wrong with the legal reasoning in the decision?

Okay. I think you need to make that joke a little more often before it really will hit without a lot of leadup, but I hope you have fun chasing your unicorn.

The denial of cert is likely strategic for the conservative justices. Alito and Thomas will probably strike down the assault weapons bans but the rest (Barrett, Roberts, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh) probably couldn't get a clear 3/4 majority in favor of repealing the bans. Therefore for the ban proponent justices, it's better to deny cert and revisit until the court make-up changes, or at least until the current dissenters change their minds, rather than bringing the issue to a vote today, and have assault weapons bans be upheld.

That's be nice, but:

  • Barrett, Roberts, Gorsuch and Kavanaugh are all supposed to be the product of efforts to get judges that don't throw away parts of the Constitution in favor of whatever they feel like today. That's not to say that they should always be voting for the maximally Red Tribe modes, but this particular question has been a Red Tribe goal since it first entered the national field in 94; if they're not willing to defend this value seriously, it's not clear how we get anyone that will.

  • Kavanaugh, the man who could have placed the deciding vote, did not write out something along those lines. He told us, instead, a story about lower court cases assisting the eventual SCOTUS case on this matter, which they will not do and can not do.

The denial of cert on L.M. v. Morrison was an incredible betrayal by Barrett (with additional mixed feelings on Gorsuch). This only confirms what many have increasingly feared. Roberts and Kavanaugh have always been establishment stooges so I know it's impossible to expect real constitutionalism from the Court, when push comes to shove, but I had hoped that a Scalia acolyte like Barrett could at least be counted on to get the important cases heard.

Yeah. On the upside, we also have Skrmetti dropping in the next couple weeks, it's near-certainly going to be a Roberts or Thomas opinion, and I'm sure they picked that case out of many available preliminary injunction cases just to affirm a denial of a preliminary injunction.

The cynical answer is the squishy center of the court is triangulating: a couple Trump cases and (maybe?) Skrmetti cost too many weirdness points, so sad, everyone else interested in vindicating their rights can go home. I find that particularly undesirable because my preferences don't exactly fall among Red Tribe Blue Tribe lines, but I'd bet someone like @WhiningCoil that does think trans minor laws are super-critical is going to see that sort of thing as 'look, we didn't vindicate their fake rights or your real ones, what do you mean blues keep coming up with new fake rights', not some even-handed application of justice.

But the even-less-optimistic one is that they just don't care. 2rafa lists ways that Barrett isn't a Red Triber, but it's not like she's been some exactly-by-the-book advocate of Catholic dogma, either. These things just don't matter to this court, and that's going to control how they apply the law. The FedSoc project insisted that they could mitigate or at least reduce the role of political currents in the judiciary in favor of a hard-hearted dedication to the raw text of the law, and the Litany of Tarksi tells us that no, they can't, and trying to find people who did gave us, 100% of the time, instead people who'd been drowned in Blue Tribe norms and expectations.

Barrett is a liberal with Haitian children, she is left on every single issue except abortion. She is as conservative as the Pope (current or former). Her policy is just the policy of the Catholic Church, some kind of generic progressive social democracy except opposed to abortion.

I don't know why I am always surprised when someone is surprised to discover "Catholic is, indeed, Catholic".

Her policy is just the policy of the Catholic Church, some kind of generic progressive social democracy except opposed to abortion.

I honestly have to laugh about this, because remember back when she was being confirmed and the rumour-mongering was about her being a member of a cult? A traditionalist cult that treated women as second-class? I don't think Dianne Feinstein was complaining about her being too liberal when she went off about the dogma lives loudly in you.

Yeah, weirdly enough the One, Holy, Catholic and Apostolic Church is not a right-wing American institution. Or a left-wing American institution. But now you guys have the pope, here's your chance to get it Chicago-style!

I don't know why I am always surprised when someone is surprised to discover "Catholic is, indeed, Catholic".

And the other SCOTUS Catholics?

This is my third draft of this comment. I am trying to figure out how to articulate this clearly and with a minimum of snark.

Your first paragraph is a 100% correct critique of 2rafa’s read of Barrett. But I think your second paragraph betrays a tendency common among Roman Catholics to read current practice back into history as always having been the practice of the church, and this is mistaken. Aquinas would not have accepted Catholic social teaching – the body which has evolved since the late 19th century – as it is now. Very few Roman Catholics, and perhaps no popes, before the twentieth century would have accepted the position on the death penalty now given in the Roman catechism.

I think that a great deal of Catholic social teaching as it now exists is the product of Western modernism. At its best it can include some genuinely countercultural Christian teaching. (As a Protestant, I particularly appreciated Rome’s stand against torture when everyone else seemed to be losing his mind.) But it is not above the fray or immune to secular influences, often to its detriment.

Well, sorta the other way round. Modern social justice movement grew out of Catholic beginnings. But I was more amused by Barrett being excoriated as a liberal when she was being excoriated by the liberals for being a fundie.

Don't make me quote "Orthodoxy". Oops, too late! Chesterton is talking about Christianity as a whole, but I think it fits the case of the Church as well:

I wished to be quite fair then, and I wish to be quite fair now; and I did not conclude that the attack on Christianity was all wrong. I only concluded that if Christianity was wrong, it was very wrong indeed. Such hostile horrors might be combined in one thing, but that thing must be very strange and solitary. There are men who are misers, and also spendthrifts; but they are rare. There are men sensual and also ascetic; but they are rare. But if this mass of mad contradictions really existed, quakerish and bloodthirsty, too gorgeous and too thread-bare, austere, yet pandering preposterously to the lust of the eye, the enemy of women and their foolish refuge, a solemn pessimist and a silly optimist, if this evil existed, then there was in this evil something quite supreme and unique. For I found in my rationalist teachers no explanation of such exceptional corruption. Christianity (theoretically speaking) was in their eyes only one of the ordinary myths and errors of mortals. They gave me no key to this twisted and unnatural badness. Such a paradox of evil rose to the stature of the supernatural. It was, indeed, almost as supernatural as the infallibility of the Pope. An historic institution, which never went right, is really quite as much of a miracle as an institution that cannot go wrong. The only explanation which immediately occurred to my mind was that Christianity did not come from heaven, but from hell. Really, if Jesus of Nazareth was not Christ, He must have been Antichrist.

And then in a quiet hour a strange thought struck me like a still thunderbolt. There had suddenly come into my mind another explanation. Suppose we heard an unknown man spoken of by many men. Suppose we were puzzled to hear that some men said he was too tall and some too short; some objected to his fatness, some lamented his leanness; some thought him too dark, and some too fair. One explanation (as has been already admitted) would be that he might be an odd shape. But there is another explanation. He might be the right shape. Outrageously tall men might feel him to be short. Very short men might feel him to be tall. Old bucks who are growing stout might consider him insufficiently filled out; old beaux who were growing thin might feel that he expanded beyond the narrow lines of elegance. Perhaps Swedes (who have pale hair like tow) called him a dark man, while negroes considered him distinctly blonde. Perhaps (in short) this extraordinary thing is really the ordinary thing; at least the normal thing, the centre.

Common knowledge coalesces day by day.

The Constitution never held power, and neither did the courts, much less the body of law supposedly founded upon and adjudicated by them. Constitutional Rights as such protect nothing. If the power to secure protection of one's rights exists, it comes from somewhere else in our socio-political constructs, and effective politics consists of isolating its location and securing that power to be wielded by one's own agents.

To the extent that this power exists outside formal structures, then effective politics consists of coordinating efforts outside those formal structures, a point so obvious as to border on tautology.

To the extent that formal political structures exist for the sole purpose of containing and channeling both power and the pursuit of that power, the above is a statement that formal political structures have evidently failed.

Or perhaps I'm wrong. I would invite "Rule of Law" proponents to explain what they see happening here, and how it fits into their general model of how sociopolitical power works.

What’s happening here is the wrong decision, just like Roe v. Wade was the wrong decision (for reference, that the Supreme Court had any business deciding the matter - I actually rather like the rule as pragmatic legislation). The law, as written, and procedures, as defined, deserve a great degree of deference. This is precisely because such deference prevents disagreements from devolving into their primal forms.

You’re coming at the whole Rule of Law thing from a bit of a strange angle, as if its proponents must view any legal decision as inherently proper and to form. It’s a little like the ol’ Pope Francis gotcha against Christians, or that post some time back about how Catholicism was obviously bunk because the wrong number of cardinals voted. A system, properly understood, is teleological in nature. That is, it has an essence which drives its character and directs its behavior, and the system is functioning as intended to the degree that it asymptomatically approaches that essence. Plato’s Forms are the obvious analogue here. Just because a chair is broken doesn’t make it not a chair; it is simply a chair that is not serving its purpose - the degree to which it is broken is the degree to which it falls short of the ideal of a comfortable single seat with a back to lean on.

So, very obviously, a legal system as implemented in reality will fall short of the ideal of the Rule of Law, for as you well know we are fallen, mortal things aspiring to immortal essence. But the reason of that ideal is to have a way of solving our differences that is more than just conflicting preferences or arbitrary whims. The Rule of Law, embodied, is a set of fundamental systems for determining what relation man has to his neighbors and the corporate body of the state, with progressively less absolute rules layered on top and a process for rectifying and managing tensions in those rules. In the abstract, it is the principle that there is real justice out there, a fair and proper way of doing things, of preventing the injustice we know all too well, which is the power of a man or a mob to crush the free out of avarice or spite. That’s the whole reason here.

So obviously there are going to be failures in such a system. There were from the beginning, there will be in the future. But calling this a suitable case for abandoning the project altogether - well, what do you think the alternative is? The only thing that has prevented gun bans in the US thus far is the Second Amendment. All our peers have long since banned guns, or put massive restrictions compared to ours. And there has been no end to efforts to eliminate them! The argument that keeps holding absolute gun control back is that the 2ndA is quite clear in its requirements. People choose to ignore it, but unless the amendment is removed, it will be a constant boon to any argument in favor of gun freedoms. But if the fig leaf goes away, the question boils down to power alone, and right now Progressives have all the institutional power and they all hate guns.

Rule of Law is not bald proceduralism to protect the powerful. Power hates rules, because rules limit the exercise of power, and prefers commands which can be totally arbitrary. Rule of Law is here for you, even if you don’t recognize it, even if you don’t support it. Rules are the way the weak organize against the strong. And speaking personally, I’ll be damned before I recognize a system that does not respect my God-given rights as being morally equal to one which does.

What’s happening here is the wrong decision, just like Roe v. Wade was the wrong decision

That is fundamentally not what is happening here. The question is not whether the Supreme court has made a good decision in this case. The question is whether the Supreme Court is capable of delivering a good decision in any case.

And to a fair degree of precision, the answer is, "No".

We have numerous examples of what an actual Supreme Court victory looks like. Desegregation enforced by Paratroopers dispersing peaceful protestors, including children, with fixed bayonets is what a Supreme Court victory looks like. Obergefell, which overnight fundamentally reshaped the law nationwide with strict enforcement and zero mercy for resistance or dissent is what a Supreme Court victory looks like. A Supreme Court victory means you get your way, and those who disagree are shit out of luck.

It turns out that Red Tribe is not allowed to have actual Supreme Court victories. Red tribe supreme court victories apply only where Red Tribe has secured unassailable political power; Blue Tribe strongholds are free to ignore the rulings at will, and it turns out that when they do so, the Court will back down rather than escalate. We have stress-tested the formal mechanisms of the Constitution and its adjudication to their limits and perhaps beyond, and they simply were not able to handle the load. That is unfortunate, but hardly unexpected. The important thing is to realize that the formal account of the system is in fact a lie, and that the necessary power will not be found here and so must be found elsewhere.

The Constitution is a scam. Perhaps it can be a useful scam, to the extent that knowledge of its insubstantiality is not yet fully general; it is likely possible to still get people to trade actual value for its paper promises. I will not be one of those people ever again, though, and you shouldn't be either.

I might agree with you on the whole, but I have to wonder if this whole gun debacle is just how lawyers work.

Brown v. Board of Education and Obergefell may both have been written precisely enough to avoid people trying to find holes to poke, whereas all these hyper specific laws around banning inanimate objects with a million different variations come pre-loaded with holes in them. Ban one, another one that's basically the same but with some small change comes into effect because millions of different variations in a field where no one drafting the laws actually knows anything. I don't see anyone wiggling out of Dobbs.

Granted, courts purposely seeing right past obvious constitutionality is pretty obvious at times, especially when they write about the "Aloha Spirit" in their rulings. We're likely doomed either way, but I wonder why it happens more to guns than it does to other red tribe endeavors.

Okay, let’s lay Rule of Law aside for a minute. There’s a much, much more serious problem here.

First off:

It turns out that Red Tribe is not allowed to have actual Supreme Court victories.

What, does the recent repeal of Roe v. Wade not count? The “Blue Tribe” had pinned a huge policy platform of abortion on it, and it was totally undone. Abortion was returned to being a state legislative issue. And this is not merely in words only; there are real and meaningful differences in how states treat abortion. General opinion, and especially Democrat or Democrat-adjacent opinion, is clear that this was a major sea level change. The fact that it does not seem to register to you as a win is really, seriously bad. And I think the rest of the post makes it clear why:

A Supreme Court victory means you get your way, and those who disagree are shit out of luck.

It sounds like what you actually want is not the freedom to do as you wish, but the power to coerce others, and particularly to deny the other what they want. In a perfect world, I wouldn’t have to elaborate on why that’s a bad thing, and especially a bad thing for you in particular, but here we are.

First off, there’s nothing wrong with wanting things. Everyone does. There’s also nothing wrong with wanting exclusive things, wanting things that by their nature prevent someone else having something. That’s life; there’s not always enough to go around, especially of the really valuable stuff. But wanting specifically to exert your power over another is something different. Its envy, or at least, is rooted in the same. Envy is seeing what someone else has, hating them for it, and wanting to destroy it. It’s bringing someone low because you can’t stand seeing them up. What people tend to hate about the great and powerful is that they just don’t seem to care; the eggs hating how casually they get tossed in the omelette. The powerful don’t care. Things need to get done, and you can’t please everyone. Envy goes a step further. Omelette be damned; I’m going to break those fucking eggs.

Envy is a deep part of human nature, and by deep I mean base. It is the primitive ape who can’t help but see the world as zero-sum. Kill or deprive the strong man, and I’ll get more, as sure as shit rolls downhill. But as the wise of all ages have told us, we are more than that. I won’t belabor you with the spiritual and philosophical elements on why we can all of us be uplifted into greatness, the last will be first, the tardy day-laborer will get his full drachma, etc etc. I’m sure you’ve heard them all. The same goes for the economic: cooperation and interconnected systems yield greater production and profit, removing the powerful just disrupts the system and impoverishes everyone, something something communism. Nor do I need to detail how the most powerful empires rise on this positive-sum thought and perish on zero-sum dissent, Roman Empire and socii, abiyyah or whatever it’s called, you get the drift. But on the mere psychological level, envy means you will never appreciate what you have. The mere existence of another is enough to make you fly into a rage. The things you have are irrelevant compared to the comparison. And doesn’t that sound miserable?

What’s worse, it makes politics impossible. What you want is not a laundry list of items that you can get and be satisfied with. It’s specifically to remove what the other has. Who can negotiate with that? Yes, obviously the Democrats have behaved very badly. They’re naughty boys and girls and deserve to be punished for what they did. I won’t argue against that for even a second; that is MY opinion. But that has nothing to do with you. Your problem is: right now, in America, there are a lot of people who don’t really like the Democrats, they think they’re overstepping. But if they caught the idea that the Republican Party was thinking like YOU, they’d vote to suspend habeas before they voted Red. You’re scary as shit, man.

Envy is seeing what someone else has, hating them for it, and wanting to destroy it. It’s bringing someone low because you can’t stand seeing them up.

For values of "up" centered around standing on my neck, yes. Blues have insisted that the Constitution allows them to impose their values on me for my entire life. For most of my life, I accepted this because I believed our tribes were both operating within a concrete set of rules, and that honoring appeals to those rules by my opponents would ensure that my own appeals to those rules would likewise be honored. This belief is no longer supportable by the available evidence. All value expended in preserving "Constitutional norms" by my side was wasted for zero benefit. Blues will never accept Constitutional limits on their desires, and the Constitutional machine observably does not have sufficient horsepower to force them to do so.

My prescription remains the same as it has for some years now: a national divorce is the least-worst option available to us. Blues and Reds are not capable of living together, nor of sharing power with each other; attempts to do so will inevitably lead to constant escalation of conflict ending in large-scale fratricide. All attempts to arrest the escalation spiral to-date have failed, often at the cost of the social and political tools used in the attempt. Our institutions, structures and norms were designed to operate in an environment of values-coherence; that environment no longer exists, and it is the height of foolishness to fail to recognize this fact.

For those seeking additional context:

As I understand it, your complaint is that people are increasingly reluctant to accept the outcomes mandated by the rules. I doubt that you consider rule-following to be a terminal goal, so the argument would be that rule-following should produce superior outcomes, right?

Let's say we disagree strongly on how things should be, but we've agreed to follow a set of rules. A conflict arises. You follow the rules to the letter. I apply a novel strategy the rules didn't account for. I win. You have no grounds within the rules to contest my win, because I didn't break any of the rules as written. Changing the rules to account for this novel strategy is itself a conflict, and you're already behind on winning conflicts. Suppose this pattern repeats a number of times, and you now expect that you lose by attempting to play by the rules, and I win by playing outside them.

Let's say you believe this outcome is a problem. What are your options to resolve it? Attempting to improve the rules is not, I think, a workable strategy. The simple fact is that, contrary to Enlightenment ideology, there is no flawless ruleset available. You are never going to close all the loopholes. Rules are simplifications, abstractions, map and not territory. they have to be interpreted, adjudicated, enforced, and each of those steps involves human judgement and an irreducible loss of objectivity. Motivated agents will always find ways around a fixed ruleset, and the longer they stand, the more porous they become.

At the end of the day, it seems to me that respect for a ruleset requires either trust that the rules lack fragility, or trust in the other party not to abuse that fragility for their own advantage. Leaving aside questions of cause and responsibility, it seems obvious to me that neither side of the Culture War actually maintains confidence in either of these propositions. Under such conditions, why would one expect the rules to continue to operate in anything approaching a reliable fashion?

The value of the Constitution came when it acted as a hard limit on the scope and scale of political conflict. People understood it to put many tools of power off the table for most practical purposes, removing them from the normal push and pull of the political contest. When we vote, the Constitution means that we're voting on policy, not on our basic political rights. If we lose, we suffer the other side's policies for a few years, but our rights are inviolate.

Only, they aren't, and anyone who believes otherwise at this point is quite foolish indeed. Progressives and their Living Constitution ideology mean that all bets are off, and indeed we have seen abuses and usurpations committed and upheld that would have been unimaginable as little as ten years ago.

"They wouldn't do that...." Yes, they would, for any value of "that" that one cares to specify. Americans, Blue or Red, are human, and "that" is what humans reliably do. Presidential candidates have campaigned on the idea of taxing religions they don't like, and openly laughed at the idea of constitutional limits on their ambitions. The theoretical grounding is solid, and the underlying logic is simply correct. Where your "norms" are supposed to fit into this picture I really cannot say.

Turn back to your favorite histories, and contemplate the fact that for all our technological sophistication, nothing about our core nature as humans has ever really changed. Humans will inevitably human. We create systems to control and channel our nature, but what our hands make, they can unmake as well. The Constitution arose from a specific culture, and it worked due to a specific set of cultural norms and assumptions. That culture changed, the norms and assumptions no longer apply, and so the Constitution is dead. To the extent that common knowledge of its death has not proliferated, it serves mainly to fool people into making sacrifices that will not be reciprocated by those who caught on a little quicker.

I am not claiming that "both sides are unreasonable partisans, and they just need to be reasonable". I am claiming that our current system makes unreasonable partisanship the only viable policy option, and pointing out that anyone who expects anything other than an escalation spiral is lying to themselves. I am attempting to argue this from the outside view, ignoring any question of which side is right and which wrong, simply looking at the incentives. I obviously have my own opinion of who is right and who is wrong, and I've argued that further down in the thread. I am making this argument because it is common for moderates here to argue that the Culture War isn't that big a deal, that it's blown out of proportion, and that our existing systems are basically fine and simply need routine maintenance for everything to work out fine. I believe that such moderate arguments are dead wrong to the point of being actively dangerous, and I am attempting to communicate the basis for that conclusion across the tribal divide.

I have my own position, based on my own values and my own best interpretation of the facts. What I'm trying to show is that the larger pattern is obvious regardless of particular values or understandings of the facts: regardless of whether you side with Foster, Perry, neither or both, the situation is obviously unsustainable for our existing system. Rule of law requires common trust in the law and its application, and it, together with the rest of our sociopolitical systems, exist to constrain the scope and scale of civil conflict. These limiting systems have evidently failed, and those that remain are observably blowing out as the culture-war blast front washes over them in sequence.

As I see it, our current choice is between a near-total collapse in federal authority and semi-peaceful balkanization on the one hand, and large-scale fratricide on the other, with the latter being significantly more likely given our current social trajectory. I've been arguing this for a long time, this is just the latest data to illustrate the point.

None of this is new, surprising, or unexpected. I and others saw it coming a long way off. Some of us see what's coming next a long way off too. If you are a Blue living among Reds or a Red living among Blues, you should move.

Roe v Wade is repealed and it is left up to the states, Obergefell passes, and federal dictate is declared.

This is an easy distinction to notice, not sure why it is being missed.

What, does the recent repeal of Roe v. Wade not count?

He did specify:

Red tribe supreme court victories apply only where Red Tribe has secured unassailable political power; Blue Tribe strongholds are free to ignore the rulings at will, and it turns out that when they do so, the Court will back down rather than escalate.

This is, in fact, written to exclude Dobbs.

Envy is seeing what someone else has, hating them for it, and wanting to destroy it.

His claim and complaint is that Blue strongholds are violating the rights of those Reds unlucky enough to live in them, and that there is no real redress for this. This... is not about wanting to hurt people. You've got a pretty-good speech there, but it's misaimed.

You’re scary as shit, man.

I feel I should note that there's a key and often-subtle distinction in Craven's posts (though it's not the main thing you're misreading here), which is the distinction between "due to this the Blue Tribe should be shot in the streets" and "enough Reds will notice this logic that the Blue Tribe will be shot in the streets". He's cooled down enough these days that he's doing the latter - warning of civil war, not trying to incite it. He, like me, is a recovering hothead (though to be clear, I'm a Grey hothead, not a Red one).

What, does the recent repeal of Roe v. Wade not count?

No. The Red-equivalent of RvW would be for abortion to be banned in all states for the next 50 years. Putting an end to Blue imposition of their values on everyone is not the same.

So exactly as he said.

It sounds like what you actually want is not the freedom to do as you wish, but the power to coerce others, and particularly to deny the other what they want.

"The ability to coerce others " is exactly how Blues have wielded the Constitution for more than half a century, and arguably much, much longer. There was a time when I and others like me were foolish enough to believe that this was acceptable, because this was a power that both tribes shared equally: we must respect the enforcement of their rights against our desires, because they must accept the enforcement of our rights against their desires.

We now have conclusive proof that they will never accept the enforcement of our rights against their desires. Claims to the contrary were lies.

For further elaboration, see above.

There is no other form political power comes in. Even negative freedoms are specifically rules that deny some people what they want.

Asking for politics that are not coercitive is a ridiculous standard that not even anarchists abide by.

Yes, but the form of the justification is important in maintaining a functional liberty-minded society, in which the social contract is something like "You and I probably have different ideas and values as to how we should live our lives, so let's just agree on a minimal set of coercive laws so that we can be peaceful neighbors."

Now functionally, in practice, there can be severe disagreements as to what should be part of the minimum set of laws; there's non-ridiculous arguments to be made that allowing people to stockpile a military arsenal can make their neighbor fearful and not able to coexist peacefully, or that someone removing "just a clump of cells" is depriving a being of life. But they're couched as arguments over what is the minimum set of laws to allow diverse viewpoints and lifestyles. Even if in practice they can be the same, they are not presented as a naked "Ok, now that I have the backing of a majority you better adopt the lifestyle I want you to have or else..." I guess in a spirited debate it's possible to accuse the other side of doing it. But to resort to unironically, unashamedly doing it is crossing some serious lines.

Because at that point, the polite covenent of let's just be neighbors and leave one another alone is irreparably broken.

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Desegregation enforced by Paratroopers dispersing peaceful protestors, including children, with fixed bayonets is what a Supreme Court victory looks like.

This level of victory really requires winning two (or really three, in this case) of the branches of government. Roberts has no divisions directly: those paratroopers appear at the behest of the President (nationalizing them from the Governor, representing the counterparty in this case) to enforce the court order.

I suspect Trump could call in the NY National Guard to protect the Columbia library and it's Jewish students, but he hasn't as actually done so.

This level of victory really requires winning two (or really three, in this case) of the branches of government.

Under present conditions, this level of victory is what is known colloquially as a "coup-complete problem". We had ample demonstration of how Blue Tribe reacted to the president attempting to enforce what one might have imagined would be relatively uncontroversial laws like "don't burn down a federal courthouse" via armed federal agents during the BLM riots.

What’s happening here is the wrong decision, just like Roe v. Wade was the wrong decision (for reference, that the Supreme Court had any business deciding the matter - I actually rather like the rule as pragmatic legislation). The law, as written, and procedures, as defined, deserve a great degree of deference.

That might be the case if we were talking about mistakenly making the wrong decision. If the decisions were made maliciously, and in the case of both Roe, and this one, they quite obviously were, the law and procedures deserve active contempt, not deference.

It’s true if any system of laws. They aren’t magic formulas like somebody just declares you have free speech and therefore you cannot face legal consequences for speech. It’s always a power game, and if the elites of society want to, they can simply refuse to allow free speech. It’s historically rare that people themselves can force the issue and generally happens when for whatever reason the people have equal power to the elites. In the 18th century, it was because everyone had access to basically military equipment. The British military had muskets and horses, and the colonies had the same technology. In other eras it was because the government was weak or the military sided against the elites. I accept this reality. Unless you’re pretty high up in the hierarchy, or doing something critical to the elite’s success, you pretty much exist at the mercy of the elites and while some systems are more pleasant than others, the grip of power over you always exists.

It seems you are appealing to an "is" and handwaving the "ought". As it happens, I disagree profoundly with your assessment of the "is"; it does not seem to me that "Elites" are in a position to impose their will on people like me indefinitely, and it seems likely to me that my tribe is well-positioned to press the issue at some length. If I had persuasive evidence to the contrary, that would be a rather different conversation, but it seems to me that the "ought" half of the question deserves analysis.

Actually, the power structure is pretty tilted away from the median person in most societies. The media can create your Overton Window for you. They can pressure you by removing access to the basics of life — for example if you say something too far from normal, you will probably lose your job. Beyond that, physical revolution is pretty much impossible unless the state massively collapses or the military joins the coup as the military has access to much better equipment, training, intelligence, and has many more soldiers than any insurgent forces combined could manage. That’s just reality.

And furthermore, it’s the historical norm. Successful revolution is rare, and most end up being worse than the thing they opposed in the first place. For 90% of human history, the norm was an aristocratic system often headed by a monarch or emperor, and the system didn’t ever bother to ask what you actually wanted. Henry VIII didn’t take a poll or hold an election before forming the Church of England. The British subjects went to bed Catholic and woke up Anglicans. You’d wake up one morning to find that you were at war, and you were drafted. Or that your new ruler was named Paul instead of John. That’s what happened in most societies for most of history— power struggles and dynasties, not elections. And your opinion was irrelevant.

I'm not a "Rule of Law" proponent by your definition. Don't know if anyone is. Didn't we all hear the old saying about postcolonial Africa "one person, one vote, once?"

What's going on here is that some people want the court to say to the blue tribe "look, Alabama can ban abortion but Maryland can't ban AR-15s. Sorry, it turns out that this document you had no role in drafting and never agreed to happens to protects the rights the red tribe likes but not the rights you like. If you don't like it there's really nothing you can do, since it takes 3/4s of state legislators to amend and you're not going to get that." Would the Blue Tribe respect this status quo? Justices have to ask themselves that.

The Blue Tribe does, in fact, respect and demand that status quo when it touches anything that they like. SCOTUS has, in fact, bent over backwards just within the last month to provide a number of Blue-Tribe-friendly alms. There was, in fact, a pretty sizable army of progressives who spent literally decades telling us how important is what that we'd be tied by rules set before the game started, and the Red Tribe bent over or was bent over to match it. There was, in fact, a pretty sizable number of compelling arguments against a clear set of legal norms and rules following clearly-established plain-text law, which favored no side and were not familiar with the particular quarrels of the day.

((The blue tribe has, in fact, spent thirty years yelling at me, personally, about how I signed the unwritten social contract by existing, and thus must play their games.))

I'd like those Constitutional Process rules to still exist! But it doesn't, and it hasn't for a while, and it's not clear anyone in power particularly wants to let it.

Didn't we all hear the old saying about postcolonial Africa "one person, one vote, once?"

I prefer ‘one man, one vote- the president for life is the man, and he has the vote’.

Your description of the situation is so perfectly inverted that there is no point in even attempting to argue the object level. I'll simply note that attempting to use the Constitution in the way you claim people are attempting to use it would be obviously disastrous, and no quicker way to destroy any remaining respect for the document can be imagined.

You asked "what are they thinking?" I answered.

I did not, in fact, ask "what are they thinking", or anything analogous to it. I invited moderates who are still invested in the present system to lay out their defense of this newest iteration of the pattern.

As one of those moderates, I don't see the problem here. The rule of law imposes no requirement on the Supreme Court to hear appeals, and doesn't require any justification for a decision to hear or not to hear a case.

Does the rule of law also impose no requirement that a court of appeals give an actual decision, rather than a member of that court sit on a dissent for the better part of a year while fast-pacing a competing case with a panel draw said judge preferred?

Because SCOTUS just condoned that, too, here.

the problem is a status quo where what the conservative wing of the forum sees as an imposition on constitutional rights continues, and the forum one would go for redress of those wrongs continually punts on fixing this despite multiple electoral victories having led to it being comprised of justices whom one would've thought would think it important to rule on this.

You've replied to a filtered comment.

Why can't I read filtered comments? Not directed at you per se.

Comments are filtered for posters who have not achieved sufficient cumulative upvotes. This is legacy code baked into the Drama code that this site is built on, and no one knows how or has the time to fix it. When a comment is filtered, it's invisible to regular users but visible to mods, with the only indication being an extra "approve" item on the row of small, greyed-out text at the bottom of each comment. it's very easy to miss when you're reading the new comments stream. We approve good faith comments as soon as we're aware of them, but they're very easy to miss.

What's the link to the source code? At the very least, I could make the approve link big and red.

Link

But the guy has 170 comments!? Can't you whitelist him somehow? Or should I manually give him 170 upvotes?

you (and others!) can manually give him upvotes, and hopefully he'll eventually get out of the filter. This would in fact be greatly appreciated.

More comments

(reposting to alert of major correction)

with the only indication being an extra "approve" item on the row of small, greyed-out text at the bottom of each comment

The moderators can use custom CSS to make the approve button more visible. For example, [data-bs-target="#reportCommentModal"]{font-size:2em!important;} makes the report button twice as big as the other buttons. (Not being a moderator, I don't know what selector will make the approve button bigger. I'm just using the report button as an example. From looking at the code, I think it might be something like [id^=approve].)

Let me try this. Thanks much!

Only mods can read filtered comments. That's why they don't notice they are filtered.

Blackman at the Volokh Conspiracy: Justice Kavanaugh to Second Amendment: We're Really Busy Now, Come Back In A Year Or Two

I woke up today and didn't have "read Josh Blackman being too charitable to the squishy center of the court" on my to-do list.

Well what did you have on your to-do list?

Uh... here, I still owe amadanb a response to this post, but I'm kinda struggling to do so without just throwing up a giant pile of links to compare-and-contrast that I don't think amadan will find very persuasive. Had some work, teaching some students basic network communications in Java and databinding in C#/WPF. Grocery shopping, and trying to figure out a parts list for a hobby project pcb (still not done, godsdamnit digikey).

The Washington Times claims:

At least 31 people were killed Sunday morning in southern Gaza, according to the Strip’s Health Ministry, when Israeli troops opened fire on crowds making their way to collect aid from a new distribution mechanism backed by Israel and the United States that has been marred by chaos and violence since it began operating last week. More than 170 others were wounded Sunday in the Rafah shooting, officials said, marking the deadliest incident yet as Palestinians desperately scramble for food despite the danger.

Other organizations have given numbers into the 50+ fatality range. This is pretty much the nightmare scenario for the Trump takeover of the aid program: removing Palestinian or UNRWA control of incoming aid prevents diversion or theft, but a single security failure or panicked guard could be both a political and humanitarian nightmare, and because the organization managing the aid deliveries is tied to US sources, it'd be a worldwide political and humanitarian nightmare.

It's also not clear it's actually happened.

The IDF and GHF have denied it, which, well, they would, wouldn't they? But there's no video of the event, despite the large crowds that must have been present. The Israelis, meanwhile, have released video of gunmen firing on crowds not far from the aid distribution site in question, and said gunmen at least aren't wearing uniforms for the IDF or GHF or GHF-security, and Hamas has been making pretty loud noises about punishing Palestinians who cooperate with the GHF program. Fog of war makes things hard, and trust is difficult in a situation like this, but it's enough that a lot of headlines in even Arabic-focused orgs have switched to the passive voice.

The Washington Times reports:

A man threw an incendiary device at an event organized by a Jewish group at a Colorado pedestrian mall to call for the release of hostages in Gaza, authorities said. At least eight people were hurt before a suspect was arrested in what officials called a targeted attack. Mohamed Sabry Soliman, 45, of El Paso County, Colorado, threw Molotov cocktails and yelled “Free Palestine” before he was taken into custody, police said, citing witness accounts of the attack. Two victims were airlifted for treatment at a burn unit, officials said.

With eight people, all older than fifty and some over eighty, facing serious burns, it'll be a minor miracle if there are no fatalities. 'We may never know the motive' and some CNN apologetics (why is McCabe anywhere near a camera?) or CBS NBC gymnastics aside, the alleged perp has since been charged pretty harshly and has received as high a bail as Colorado meaningfully goes, and the state governor has condemned the attack (he's running!). The feds have another bit or two at the apple if needed, and absolutely would love to chew this guy and spit him out.

There's some easy if morbid memes, here, but I don't expect this guy to get quite as much a Western fandom as, say, Luigi. I'm gonna make a wild ass guess and assume that the shirtless molotov-tosser falls pretty deep into the Hradzka garbage person scale. It's hard to overstate how radicalizing it's going to be as an example, though. The alleged perpetrator was a visa overstay from Egypt who'd gotten work authorization and an asylum claim in under Biden; the victims had been making (kinda goofy) protests over the October 7 hostages for over a year and were hit directly outside of the county courthouse.

We don't know whether he heard 'about' the GHF aid massacre. Again, garbage person, for all we know today, the man was lashing out about 'zionists' because the radio waves in his molars thought it was the best way to help free gerbils. But I think there's some components worth spelling out:

  • Staying strapped is going to become more of a byword for several political groups. The theoretical question of "If he wasn't carrying a gun" stopped being theoretical over year ago, now. There's not been a serious attack like this on a Pride parade yet, and I'm still evaluating whether I'm going to the strap-prohibited local one (and, tbf, whether I can tolerate that level of Mama Mia soundtrack); I can't advocate anyone legally able to CCW to go to a Gaza-focused protest without CCW.
  • The consequences of staying strapped is very likely going to become front-page news in the next year. And it's not going to be a great situation for the guys who starts something, but it's also not going to be a great situation for the guy who ends that something. Dolloff was Denver, but it's not hard to consider how the culture war lines would fall on a remotely unclear shoot.
  • ... but probably not in the places where it's most important for this specific attack. Colorado's carry laws are complicated and in flux, but Boulder, specifically has been very aggressive and basically ban carry in public spaces. Most other places where a lot of the nuttiest strongest pro-Palestinian voices congregate are pretty similar in effect, if not in text. You'd think that would be a violation of Bruen? Yeah, but that's a matter for my other post today on Snope. That's not going to stop everyone, but it's going to get a lot of the people who might be test cases to just to go elsewhere...
  • ... while the unarmed remain.

The consequences of staying strapped is very likely going to become front-page news in the next year. And it's not going to be a great situation for the guys who starts something, but it's also not going to be a great situation for the guy who ends that something. Dolloff was Denver, but it's not hard to consider how the culture war lines would fall on a remotely unclear shoot.

Pepper-Gel (i.e., the active ingredient in pepper-spray, but in a medium with much greater viscosity) is a good less-lethal weapon. Even setting aside legal questions, firearms have a genuine practical problem of only really being a good self-defense weapon in situations when only firearms are a sufficient self-defense weapon. In the case of someone throwing an incendiary device into a crowd, how would carrying a firearm help? Even if you wanted to shoot a hypothetical fleeing perpetrator in the back (and I hope you wouldn't), a lot of people would presumably be running away from the incendiary device at the same time. Supposing you successfully identified the perpetrator and chased them down, adding a gun to the situation may make restraining them more difficult and dangerous. Supposing you successfully restrained them and held them at gunpoint to effectuate a citizen's arrest, you risk being shot by another good-guy-with-a-gun who sees you holding someone at gunpoint.

In this case, the perp had brought a weedsprayer retrofitted to act as a flamethrower. There's a pretty wide variety of situations in which "shirtless guy with flamethrower" can be distinguished from "burning people and people running from flamethrower-dude", where the perpetrator would easily fit within all three corners of ability, opportunity, and jeopardy for self-defense or defense-of-others purposes. Even for other molotov attacks, these people haven't typically done anywhere near as good of a job 'fading back into the crowd' as they think.

Target discernment and backstop are things that matter, but they're vastly overstated as unsolved and unsolvable problems among antigunners.

Using "incendiary device" as a hypothetical, after the same words were used to describe a makeshift flame thrower, was poor communication. However, I think the point remains that less-lethal weapons address the problems you wrote about, and that a firearm may have been a good defense weapon against this specific attacker is not a good reason to opt for firearms over less-lethal weapons.

Even for other molotov attacks, these people haven't typically done anywhere near as good of a job 'fading back into the crowd' as they think.

How do you know?

Target discernment and backstop are things that matter, but they're vastly overstated as unsolved and unsolvable problems among antigunners.

I'm not an "antigunner" (I'd eliminate practically all restrictions on personal ownership of small arms, if I had my way), but it's difficult to overstate a problem that is literally deathly serious.

However, I think the point remains that less-lethal weapons address the problems you wrote about

No, I don't think they do. I linked the Dolloff case for a few different reasons, here, both that pepper spray did not work there, and that quite a lot of the left that even heard of this case thought it justified the shooting, including the prosecutor.

and that a firearm may have been a good defense weapon against this specific attacker is not a good reason to opt for firearms over less-lethal weapons.

Continuity of force has a lot of utility in self-defense considerations. When someone has pointed a flamethrower, or thrown a molotov at an elderly innocent and is carrying two more, these considerations become 'what part of my continuity of force is best or most ethical', not 'what part of my continuity of force did I not leave at hom- and I got beaten to death'.

How do you know?

... because I've written at length about a number of Molotov-launchers over the last five years, as well as followed both the court cases and a number of self-defense experts specifically highlighting the threat model they and similar groups represent.

... it's difficult to overstate a problem that is literally deathly serious.

Yes. Yes it is. I would prefer that to be a problem that the defender has to consider than the attacker or attackers gets to exploit.

I would prefer that to be a problem that the defender has to consider than the attacker or attackers gets to exploit.

Could you please clarify this? I'm unsure if I'm interpreting the implication of you disagreeing with me disagreeing with you disagreeing with me correctly.

CBS gymnastics

Not that there's an abiding difference but I believe you meant NBC gymnastics.

Yep. Thanks, corrected. There's a CBS example here, for anyone that likes gawking at the crash site.

but it's also not going to be a great situation for the guy who ends that something. Dolloff was Denver, but it's not hard to consider how the culture war lines would fall on a remotely unclear shoot.

Not sure I could advise anyone I care about going to a protest armed either. Just having the CCW puts you in an untenable position here -- you get pushed to the ground by an unarmed person, now you're in a no-win place.

Really we need a renewed commitment from law enforcement to do their jobs and stand between the various groups and let them each say whatever.

Not sure I could advise anyone I care about going to a protest armed either. Just having the CCW puts you in an untenable position here -- you get pushed to the ground by an unarmed person, now you're in a no-win place.

From a tactical perspective, perhaps. From a process one, that's either a demand to show up to a flamethrower fight with your fists, or to surrender the public square to the first group that brings violence.

Really we need a renewed commitment from law enforcement to do their jobs and stand between the various groups and let them each say whatever.

If you've got a unicorn, I'll take that, too. But while it's been an issue in previous cases like Kessler or Dolloff, it's not clear that it's what matters here. These particular protesters have been doing this walk for a year without serious counterprotest, and none of the news reports (for whatever you believe them) suggest that the attacker was operating with counterprotesters. This was, as far as I can tell, out of the blue.

I mean I think it’s a consideration, and im not sure that I’d personally “get strapped” before going anywhere, but at the same time, the first task in a case of a guy with a deadly weapon is “live to be prosecuted.” And especially for marginalized or contentious groups, if you’re a target for violence, you need to either get out of the danger zone or be ready to defend yourself.

As far as LEOs, they can’t be everywhere. And I don’t think the reasonable assumption is “well, I’ll just hope the cops have it under control. My first option, personally is to not be there. Don’t do things that make you an obvious target of political violence. That probably doesn’t work for Jews who look… like Jews or wear kippahs or tassels. I’d say the same of gays who act in flaming ways, visible minorities, women etc.

but at the same time, the first task in a case of a guy with a deadly weapon is “live to be prosecuted.”

With state capacity and prisons today, you're better off dead.

Tell that to Kyle Rittenhouse.

Also the fact that you showed up to a protest with a gun would be used against you in the ensuing trial to make it look like you were out looking for trouble.

And God help you if you crossed state lines!

Having been to armed protests before, it’s only dangerous if you can expect violence.

Now Texas nationalist protestors have functionally no counter protestors, so they don’t have to worry about it. Nobody is dumb enough to get violent with notoriously heavily-armed groups.

So life must be pretty chill for US police.

Would you attack a parade of police outfitted in swat gear not in the middle of a riot?

Why the "not in the middle of a riot" qualification?

Riots are chaotic and people do dumb things during chaos.

I can't advocate anyone legally able to CCW to go to a Gaza-focused protest without CCW.

I can't advocate anyone able to avoid it going to a Gaza-focused protest at all. "Don't go near political protests" is standard travel advice offered by every country about every country for good reasons - and essentially nobody in the West has a stake in Gaza that makes it worth protesting about.

essentially nobody in the West has a stake in Gaza that makes it worth protesting about.

American Jews with family in Israel or even family killed on Oct 7. The last American hostage held in Gaza was released a couple weeks ago. A "let our people go" walk is relevant to some Americans.

Relevant, perhaps, but still unwise to attend.


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