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Culture War Roundup for the week of June 2, 2025

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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.

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.

Okay. You can't upvote from the home user page, you have to click the link to the individual comments, and then do it. So I tried to rope in some helpers.

(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.