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Notes -
Resurfacing another old comment from @functor about Conservatism as anti-ideology. I think it's interesting to reflect back on now that we're in Trump 2.0:
Keith woods says it better than me
https://keithwoodspub.substack.com/p/conservatism-as-anti-ideology
Conservatism lacks ideology, vision and a moral compass. At this point it is just angry ranting against cartoon vilians who are satanically evil. There is little systemic analysis instead there is an over emphasis of conspiracies. If the populist conservatives took power, they would be incapable of wielding it since their policies lack depth beyond SJWs bad but trans people with MAGA hats good. Conservatives are too negative, their entire focus is on what they dislike. Rich people bad, welfare queens bad, Klaus Schwab bad but what is good?
My life sucks, boo out group isn't really lyrics that inspire or offer novel insights. It isn't surprising that the anglosphere right has greater problems attracting young people than the right in the rest of the west. AfD, Sweden democrats and national rally do fairly well among young voters. The rather aimless right in the anglosphere fails at attracting young people and successful people. A young highly educated person is simply going to find the aesthetics and the values of mainstream conservatism boring and unappealing. It isn't a uniting message, it is a message with no vision that is anti PMC. I simply struggle to see a well travelled, highly educated person fitting in to the conservative movement at all. The right is making itself culturally toxic defenders of boomer rights.
I'll say from my perspective, this view actually seems validated after what we've seen from Trump so far. With the exception of tariffs, which are already being struck down, there's much more of an emphasis on destroying than actually building anything.
That being said, I'm generally conservative myself and weakly pro-Trump, so I'm not trying to just take cheap potshots. I genuinely think this is a huge problem the right needs to face in order to create a more compelling and useful platform for the future.
Define the terms please. There's a version of this I might agree with, if for example by Conservatism you mean it's Boomer implementation, but that's not a problem of Conservatism qua Conservatism, that's a problem of Liberalism writ-large.
What? There may have been a time that political thinkers would sell you dreams of a shining future, but currently the entire political spectrum is based on "my life sucks, boo out group".
Isn't this completely false? Last I've seen they had trouble attracting young women, with young men flocking to the in droves.
You don’t actually believe that’s true, do you? Like, clearly there are many people — people well within the mainstream Overton window of the two major American political parties, and certainly those within the mainstream of other Anglosphere countries — who do not fit this description at all. One could point to the “Abundance Democrats” and the “Tech Right” as two ascendant factions made up very largely of successful, optimistic, non-resentful individuals.
I haven't observed either to be a coherent concept. Someone recently gave Elon as an example of the "Tech Right", and he's pretty quick to complain about he's outgroup the last time I checked. As for "Abundance Democrats", are they the ones constantly blaming "NIMBY's" for everything? Also, neither one of them is particularly credible in their promises of a brighter future, though I suppose that's another topic.
You claimed that
Even if you can find example of the people I’m pointing to saying their outgroup sucks, you’re still missing the “my life sucks” part. Elon Musk’s life manifestly does not suck, nor does he appear to be under any illusions that it does. To the extent that he criticizes his enemies (political or otherwise) it is because he believes they’re making America worse, or making the world worse; he definitely doesn’t seem to be claiming that they’re making his own life worse. (Except for maybe on the trans issue specifically, given the way it has impacted his family life.)
Similarly, the main figures in the “Abundance Democrats” — assuming such a faction does indeed exist — focus their criticism on “NIMBYs” — again, let’s assume for the sake of argument that such people exist and are reliably identifiable — because they believe that such people are actively preventing American society from addressing a major issue that is negatively impacting the lives of many people. Notably, though, the Abundance Democrats are largely financially successful people who can currently afford housing without too much difficulty. (Or who live in subsidized housing, as students, academic faculty, etc.) The housing crisis isn’t wrecking their lives, and they’re not motivated by personal grievance. They do genuinely appear to want to fix a problem, even if that problem isn’t a problem for them specifically.
What, "my cars are not selling because of vandalism and smears against my company triggered by my political activity" does not count?
Does Trump's, or Vance's?
You're the one that posited their existence!
Yes, that's what "my life sucks" meant in TheDag's reductive summary.
Correct, I was asking you to accept that position as well, at least for the sake of argument.
Correct, that definitely does not count as “my life sucks” in anywhere near the same way as Oliver Anthony style “I’m personally oppressed and downtrodden, and it’s my outgroup’s fault” populism.
I don’t think so. I think there’s an important qualitative difference between populist “rage and vengeance” grievance on the one hand — which is what the OP is attributing to Anglophone conservatism — and the technocratic/futurist “we’ve identified the problems, and it’s time to let smart and successful elites determine how to fix those problems” institutionalism of the factions I identified.
I wish I knew who the hell that was. Anyway, since we agree it's not about Trump, looks like w agree OP's thesis can be dismissed.
How can I determine that this is, in fact, the case, rather than it being a Russell's conjugation?
Literally the guy the OP was mostly about. You know, the guy referenced several times by name in the post you replied to.
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Trump got about 56% of men under 30, while Harris got about 59% of women under 30 (55% Harris to 42% Trump overall for 18-29, because more women vote than men). But the young men were most concerned about the economy, so it's hard to tell how many are going to the right vs how many were just voting against the current party because the economy sucked. Presumably some of those 56% will shift back if the economy sucks again in 2028, but we can at least say that they are willing to vote for Trump/the right, even if some of them weren't specifically flocking to the banner. Trump was up from 36% in 2020 to 42% of 18-29 in 2024, so there was certainly a swing.
However as I pointed out previously Bush got between 45% to 49% of the 18-29 vote when he won in 2000 and 2004, so Trump hasn't got back to where conservatives were a couple of decades ago. How that vote shakes out in 2028 is probably going to determine if we can see a long term swing rather than a single election cycle swing.
That's all fair enough,but given those numbers I think it's also fair to dismiss the claim that they're having trouble attracting young people (men in particular), unless some kind of supporting argument is provided.
I would say it's fair to say they are still having trouble attracting young people overall. Even Bush at his best with the post 2001 bump couldn't break 50%, (I think Reagan was the last conservative to do so in 1984). It's also fair to say they aren't having trouble attracting young men specifically and that Trump appears to have reversed that trend somewhat.
I suppose it depends what you mean as "trouble attracting". Not being able to get a majority of a group for 50 years, maybe qualifies? I'd suggest the claim Democrats are having trouble attracting men is true for similar reasons. They haven't got 50% of men (though Obama in 2008 got close), since Jimmy Carter in 1976.
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"Droves" is an exaggeration - Trump won 18-29 men 49-48 per the 2024 exit poll, which is about the same margin he won the electorate as a whole by. He does better with the middle-aged than the young among white men and women, though not among ethnic minorities. The gender gap is only marginally higher for the young than the middle-aged and only marginally higher in 2024 than 2020 - the massive youth gender gap reported e.g. here didn't show up at the ballot box. What did happen is that Trump lost the youth vote (of both sexes) less badly than the Republicans normally do in a close election.
The place where right populism really is an old man's game is the UK. Reform's vote is younger than the Conservatives, but not by much.
My read is that the MAGA is in the middle of the pack in terms of right-populist movements ability to appeal to young men. Looking at the exit polls for the 1st round of the Polish presidential election, the total right-populist vote (PiS+Confederation+Crown) is flat by age but the young voted for the kekkier right-populist parties whereas the old voted for the more traditionalist PiS. The 2024 French legislative elections showed the Left winning the youth, RN winning the middle-aged, and Macron's party winning the old. The same picture applies to the 2025 German elections.
SSCReader said it was 56%?
That's fine. I just have issues with calling that "greater problems attracting young people".
My source is the CNN exit poll as reported on Wikipedia. I'm happy to defer to someone with a better data source.
The Catalist report has a reputation for being more accurate than exit polls, but the free online version doesn't include the sex/age crosstabs. Matt Yglesias did a Substack post based on what is presumably the paid version of the report and says that the big picture was a mostly-uniform swing apart from the big swing to Trump among Hispanics and (to a lesser extent) Asians.
I don't think we disagree here.
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Depends on the exit poll. You can find 56% (Guardian), 52% or 49% depending on where you look. I took the high end because if that doesn't count as droves then neither does any lesser number. You could split it and say it is roughly 52% plus or minus 3 maybe.
Really we'd have to define the terms of what does greater problems and droves mean before any of the numbers can tell us anything. For me "droves" would have to be over 60% at least and consistently getting under 50% would be greater problems attracting X. But that's really just squinting at it and going off vibes. One could make reasonable arguments for very different numbers I am sure.
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Nobody gives a darn about that musician. He's a one hit wonder and now he's gone. Google trends says his popularity lasted a few months at most.
Conservatism does have an ideology. Clean safe streets lined with trees, single family homes, and white picket fences. Young people working starter jobs around town in stores and businesses knstead of shitskins.
Nah, it's gotten to a point where someone ranting against "suburbs" is as likely to be on the Right as on the Left. You're going to see even more of this after the 2026 midterms.
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Unemployment rate is close to zero, anyone who looks for a job can get one. And it will shock you to learn that white people have higher incomes and higher employment rate than non-whites.
Note also how pathetic the message is. Woke black tells his people "I'll get you jobs as doctors, lawyers, politicians, and CEOs." This guy tells whites "I'll get you the job standing behind the counter at 7/11." THAT'S all you can realistically aspire to.
Nobody can "get" you a job as a doctor or a lawyer or a CEO (well, unless it's a CEO of a scam) without walking a long way there (I omit politicians because it's not a job like any others). You can't just "become" a doctor without studying hard for years, and if you're already capable of that, the wokes would just slow you down. The only thing the wokes can offer you is to pressure the system into devaluing your work by lowering the criteria. They still won't be able to make you a doctor overnight, but they will make people wonder whether your training had been as rigorous as the other folks'.
And I don't really see any way to get into the job market but beginner-level jobs (unless you win the birth lottery and your family is rich, at which cases again you don't need the wokes already). Maybe the message of "if you want to succeed, try working hard" is "pathetic" compared to "scream victimhood hard with me and get all the stuff for free" but the latter - unless you become a con artist and join the grifter class, which is not for everyone - is a lie.
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Nearly every group with light skin has high incomes and low unemployment in America, including nonhajnali groups like Maronites, Russians, Jews, etc.
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And the labor force participation rate is...? Unemployment rate is only part of the picture.
People who aren't looking for jobs won't get them, yes.
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You are allowed to express racist sentiments here, but we do ask for more effort than slurs as punctuation. Your log is a bunch of warnings and a tempban, and this post indicates that those warnings are not penetrating. I'm banning you for three days this time; other mods feel free to lengthen if it seems appropriate.
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Conservatism is not an ideology. It's an orientation. Moreover, it's an orientation against a reference point, (which is why today's conservative is yesterday's liberal etc.)
People confuse this because contrast the term with liberalism, which can mean two things.
Most of the useless polticial showerthoughting is downstream of the confusion caused by the fact that the word liberal can refer to either, which conservative can't.
Both the complaints of liberals not being liberal, or conservatives not being ideological, or of assuming conservatives are ideologically illiberal etc.
At the end of the day, both American Conservativism and Liberalism are big tents each containing both liberals and illiberals.
One thing I love about the 1991 August Coup in the Soviet Union is that it’s about the only time and place in history where you could be a Conservative Communist.
Most of what makes modern politics/political actors difficult to understand these days is not understanding that classical liberalism is [now] a "conservative" position, and taking what groups call themselves at face value rather than thinking about it for 5 seconds and figuring out that yes, actually, progressives are the most conservative movement today (in the "develop nothing ever, be safety-obsessed all the time, impose nonsensical social controls out the ass, sanction sex, hate the young, old women > young men" senses that popularly characterize conservatism).
Not that we haven't tried- "right is the new left" was nearly 10 years ago now (and people still just don't get it)- but ultimately the failure to understand who and what the groups are (and the groups themselves don't help either, to be fair, and this is mostly an advantage to progressives/the media's faction) will destroy anyone's ability to think logically about politics.
Haidt's 6 Foundations apply just as well (or even more) to the average progressive than they do to the average traditionalist, but as soon as you say the C-word, people start thinking they only apply to Boomercons and they shut right down.
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Why the anti-immigration right tends to do better in non-anglosphere than anglosphere countries has a lot to do with the differing electoral systems. The main center-right party in Sweden, the Moderates, isn't much sexier than the UK Conservatives but because Sweden uses proportional representation (as opposed to FPTP) a vote for SD isn't going to risk feeling wasted like a vote for Reform in the UK might.
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Progressivism's promise is that if it is provided with power and control, it will deliver a better life for society generally. It has been provided with increasing amounts of power and control for decades, to a point where it has visibly approached total sociopolitical closure for the forseeable future, and what it has delivered is stagnation at best and more often a steadily-growing avalanche of crises. Given its track record, it becomes extremely important for Progressivism to silence any attempt to establish common knowledge and chain-of-accountability for its monstrous failures. One obvious method is to claim that its critics only destroy, only tear down, only criticize, without offering any constructive alternative of their own.
It seems to me that critics of Progressivism have no shortage of constructive alternatives to Progressive doctrine. When we have spent seven decades concentrating every scrap of social, political and economic power into the hands of Progressivism, though, almost all of those constructive alternatives are either going to involve demolishing things Progressives have built or routing around them entirely. This is the nature of misallocation: you either have to re-allocate, or simply eat the sunk-cost loss. Progressives have built an unworkable system and then condemn us for not offering an explanation of how to make it work, but there is no reason to entertain this chicanery. I cannot tell you how to operate America's current educational system through tinkering at the margins, but that does not mean I do not have a pretty good plan for how to educate my children, or ideas that I think are positive-sum on how to build a new general education system from scratch. "The current system has to come down" is the fault of the system and its designers, not my abilities as a critic. I can explain at some length how serious engagement with Christianity builds community, personal development, support networks, family formation, long-termer preferences, all the necessary building blocks of durable community that more than a half-century of liquid modernity has destroyed in most other contexts, but there is no way to integrate these insights into a sociopolitical system whose designers explicitly see total exclusion and eventual elimination of Christianity as a foundational part of their social program.
Likewise for economics, rule of law, foreign policy and most other questions of governance. The problem is not a lack of constructive alternatives. The problem is that, at a certain point along the seizure-of-power gradient, all constructive alternatives reflect the common nature of the problem, which is that one faction has seized all the power and escaped all accountability for its wielding.
Republicans have managed to get elected roughly half the time, so it seems like it's you who's trying to escape all accountability here. If you say they couldn't do anything because of progressive Republicans, well, maybe you should have won more elections.
And it's not like the Right has no successes. Desegregation busing was heavily limited. Welfare reform in the 1990s. You even managed to overturn Roe v Wade and ban abortion in many states, which did nothing to create the "community, personal development, support networks, family formation, long-termer preferences," etc. that Christian conservatives tell us their ideology brings, but you did do it.
These two sentences contradict one another.
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American conservatives do not excel as defenders of boomer rights, though. Literally, democrats are better at that. Home valuations are consistently much less ridiculous in red states, Trump doesn’t want to cut social security but democrats are the ones wanting to drive down the cost of labor(which retirees consume) and expand Medicare.
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That’s not just a modern American phenomenon. If you screw people over long enough they will eventually think you’re doing it on purpose. In the the few years before the French Revolution there was a persistent conspiracy theory among the poor residents of Paris that the food shortages were an intentional plot to starve the French people. In Russia in 1916 there were endemic rumors that the Tzarina was a German spy who was intentionally sabotaging the war effort.
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You'd like a 25 point plan that outlines a positive vision for a unified nation under conservative principles?
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National Order Through Self-Sufficient Economic Empowerment
1. National Unity
All American citizens unite under a shared commitment to the United States, rooted in the principle of self-determination as enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Strong families form the foundation of national unity, with policies supporting marriage and child-rearing as patriotic duties.
2. International Equality
The United States receives equal treatment in its dealings with other nations, with international agreements that undermine American sovereignty or economic interests renegotiated or abolished. Trade policies prioritize domestic family-supporting industries.
3. Economic Self-Sufficiency
Policies ensure access to resources, infrastructure, and opportunities to sustain the American people and provide for future generations, including investment in domestic industries and infrastructure. Family wage standards ensure single-income households can support multiple children, with minimum wage calculations accounting for family size.
4. Citizenship and Civic Duty
Citizenship is reserved exclusively for individuals born in the United States to parents who are U.S. citizens or legally present on an immigrant-class visa at the time of birth, and individuals naturalized in accordance with U.S. immigration laws. Citizens from larger families receive priority consideration for civic honors and appointments.
5. Exclusive Voting Rights and Public Service
Voting rights for federal, state, and local elections are reserved exclusively for U.S. citizens. All public offices and public employment positions are held exclusively by U.S. citizens. Public service positions offer enhanced family benefits and flexible arrangements for parents.
6. Economic Opportunity for Citizens
The government ensures economic opportunities and a decent standard of living for all U.S. citizens, prioritizing citizens over non-citizens when resources are insufficient. Married couples with children receive preferential hiring and advancement opportunities in government positions.
7. Immigration Reform
Immigration laws are strictly enforced, with a merit-based system prioritizing the economic and cultural interests of U.S. citizens. Illegal immigration is prevented through robust border security and enforcement of existing laws. Immigration preferences given to intact families with children who demonstrate alignment with American family values.
8. Equal Rights and Responsibilities
All citizens have equal rights and obligations under the law, as guaranteed by the Constitution. Tax obligations are adjusted based on family size, with substantial credits for married couples with children:
9. Productive Work
Every citizen contributes to society through productive work, with individual pursuits aligning with the broader interests of the nation. Raising children is recognized as productive work, with Social Security credits awarded for each child raised to adulthood. Flexible work arrangements and career re-entry programs support parents.
10. Economic Justice
Unearned income through monopolistic practices is eliminated, and debt systems that burden citizens are reformed. Excessive financial speculation and profiteering are curbed. Student loan forgiveness programs for married couples based on number of children born within marriage.
11. War Profiteering
Personal enrichment from war or national crises is prohibited, with strict penalties for profiteering during times of conflict or economic hardship. Military families with children receive additional housing allowances and educational benefits.
12. Nationalization of Key Industries
Critical industries are nationalized or strictly regulated to ensure they serve the public interest over corporate profits. Family-supporting industries receive priority status and protection.
13. Profit Sharing
Profits from large-scale commerce are equitably distributed, ensuring fair wages and economic stability for workers. Additional profit-sharing bonuses for employees with dependent children.
14. Social Security Expansion
Social Security is strengthened and expanded to provide robust support for retirees and the elderly. Parents receive additional Social Security credits based on number of children raised to adulthood. Retirement benefits increase by 10% per child for married couples.
15. Support for Small Businesses
Policies bolster the middle class by supporting small businesses, including tax incentives, low-cost leasing of commercial spaces, and preferential treatment in government contracts. Family-owned businesses receive additional tax advantages and preferential lending, with succession benefits for businesses passed to children.
16. Land and Housing Reform
Housing and land reforms ensure affordability, prevent speculative real estate practices, and provide access to property for public benefit. Pro-natal policies include:
17. Justice Against Harmful Actors
Strong measures are taken against individuals or entities whose actions harm the public good, with penalties reflecting the severity of the offense. Enhanced protections for families and children against predatory practices.
18. Legal Reform
The legal system is rooted in American constitutional principles, prioritizing justice and fairness over bureaucratic or elitist frameworks. Family courts reformed to support intact marriages and shared parenting. Marriage incentives include tax benefits increasing with marriage duration.
19. Education Reform
Quality education is accessible to all capable citizens, emphasizing practical skills, civic responsibility, and critical thinking. Funding is provided for gifted students from low-income families to pursue higher education. Pro-natal education benefits include:
20. Public Health and Wellness
Public health is protected by supporting families, ensuring maternal and child welfare, eliminating exploitative labor practices, and promoting physical fitness through community programs and sports initiatives. Enhanced pro-natal health policies include:
21. National Defense
A strong, citizen-based national military protects U.S. sovereignty, replacing privatized military forces. Military families with children receive additional housing allowances, educational benefits, and priority base housing. Service members from larger families receive advancement preferences.
22. Media Integrity
Media outlets prioritize factual reporting and align with American interests. Foreign-owned media outlets require government approval to operate in the U.S., and content harmful to national unity or public welfare faces legal consequences. Media promoting strong family values receives tax incentives.
23. Religious Freedom
Freedom of religion is upheld for all denominations, provided they do not undermine national security or public morals. Materialistic ideologies that erode American values are rejected, emphasizing the common good over individual gain. Religious institutions supporting marriage and family formation receive enhanced tax benefits.
24. Centralized Governance with Accountability
A strong federal government enacts these principles, balanced by accountability to the people through transparent institutions and elected representatives. State and local governments align with federal laws to ensure national unity. Family impact assessments required for all new legislation.
25. Commitment to the Nation
Leaders uphold these principles, prioritizing the interests of the American people above all else, even at personal sacrifice. Political leaders with intact marriages and children receive public recognition. Government support for genealogical research and family history preservation strengthens national identity. Federal funding for local family-oriented festivals and community gatherings reinforces cultural traditions that celebrate family life.
I’ll commend you for cleverness, inasmuch as you added enough new material/adaptation to the modern American context to the 25 points of the NSDAP to prevent them from being immediately recognizable to people who weren’t already in on the joke.
The NOTSEE acronym is kind of obvious, so I suspected it was cribbed even though I've never studied the original.
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The title was a bit of a giveaway.
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It is worth noting that the change to the first post is large, and load-bearing. The 25 points began with the union of all Germans, not all German citizens - it was a specific pledge to incorporate Austria, the Czech Sudetenland, the Polish Corridor etc. into the Reich. @AvocadoPanic could have said "All Americans" instead with the implied dog-whistle that Albertans are included, and it would have been closer to the original and still relevant to MAGA policy.
I suspect were you to ask someone, "What is an American?", you'd get worse answers than the people who don't know what a woman is.
I'd be happier with language nearer the original, a pledge based on attributes more immutable than nationality. I don't have the language to express this sentiment while also keeping with the current year America context.
I'm not clear how 'All Americans' would imply Albertans are included. I'd be happy to include many people, unfortunately more and more nationality is useless as a descriptor. Some sort of Ahnenpass would be necessary to only include Albertans with 7/8 Albertan great-grandparents.
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This reminds me of the National Justice Party "25-point platform" (yeah, I get the reference) that ended with the party imploding. The Trump masses aren't much interested in this stuff, they love Trump even when he said he'd cut rich people's taxes. And that's a good thing since these ideas are mostly bad. "Minimum wage calculations accounting for family size" is just going to mean employers don't want to hire people with large families.
It's a 25 point plan, you can't expect all of them to be winners. You'd have to not allow employers to a ask about family size.
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But enough about their wise and desirable traits.
My main complaint about the other side is their unthinking reflexive trust and support for their favorite elites. Seemingly changing their opinions and values on a dime when "the science" or some cabal of would-be technocrats sends out new positions for right-thinking people to hold.
There's a level of distrustful contrarianism that is maladaptive. The opposite of stupidity is not necessarily wisdom. But conservatives are onto something vaguely distrusting our self-appointed elites. Correctly recognizing that taking orders from the vanguard of the opposition is not a good idea.
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Im sorry, but i dont see how anyone could reasonably engage with the work of current conservative thought leaders like Victor Davis Hansen or Thomas Sowell, past leaders like Limbaugh, Brietbart, and Buckley, or old lions like CS Lewis, GK Chesterton, Rudyard Kipling, Douglas, Burke, Smith, Et Al. and come away with the impression they lack "ideology, vision and a moral compass"
Thier vision may be unreasonable in your eyes, or totally at odds with core liberal beliefs, but that's not the same thing as not having one.
Ditto for current conservative-coded posters like @FCfromSSC and @Dean or past posters from the reddit/SSC/lesswrong days like Hlinka, Diesach, BarnabyCajones, Jason, or LetsStayCivilized.
Say what you will about them, but what they were not lacking in is/was ideology.
Those people do, certainly, but none of those people seem remotely represented by what currently calls itself the conservative movement in the United States. Limbaugh, maybe.
But if I compare MAGA to, well, Lewis, Chesterton, Kipling, Burke, or even old Adam Smith, I doubt you will find much ideological overlap, if any at all.
If I compare any political movement in it's entirety to it's top thought leaders, I get the same result.
I question to what extent those people even are thought leaders in the context of MAGA or the modern Republican base. It's hard to see Burke or Chesterton approving of the kind of reckless destabilisation that you get with Trump, no matter how far you stretch the analogy.
To my mind they're just totally different ideologies. There are always some differences between the way a movement's elite conceives of its mission and the way the masses do, but I think this is far enough that it's fair to say there is no meaningful resemblance.
Show Burke or Chesterton the system being destabilized, and I'm skeptical their conclusion would go the way you claim.
They did see that, though? I'm not sure what world you live in if you think Chesterton wasn't living through the decline and destabilisation of the systems that he thought were essential for civilised society. He explicitly thinks English society is increasingly run by a cabal of vicious, anti-human elites and is therefore sinking back into barbarism.
So I am pretty confident that he wouldn't end up like MAGA.
He did get desperate a few times - I believe he once visited Italy and said nice things about Mussolini - but on the whole, I don't see the resemblance.
Could you elaborate on the specific features of MAGA that that you believe would preclude his approval?
Chesterton was a localist and a distributist - his political views strongly tend towards small government. He criticises both capitalists and socialists for concentrating property in the hands of the few who can then wield arbitrary power over individual citizens. As an ethical matter, I think Chesterton is also conspicuously opposed to bullies. He presents himself as a champion of the ordinary, no-longer-free Englishman who craves a return to ancient liberties.
I would say that MAGA involves a centralisation of power in a single office, or more properly a single man, and that man is grossly intemperate and vengeful. I'd guess that Chesterton would see Trump as akin to one of the more demagogic kings of England, vicious in his lusts, but nonetheless opposed to the suffocating bureaucratic-parliamentary class that the common man sees as a more direct enemy.
In his Short History of England, Chesterton writes that "the case for despotism is democratic". I suspect he would see Trump as a 'democratic despot' along these lines, and Chesterton's observation that "[despotism's] cruelty to the strong is kindness to the weak" might enable him to regard some of Trump's excesses with a measure of sympathy, even if the man himself remains a despot. Thus, still in Short History:
Naturally I do not think Chesterton would be at all sympathetic to the American left, especially as that left has become increasingly institutionalised and regulatory. I am sure he would see that as a thicket of weeds choking the natural liberty of the people. That is simple an instance of The Servile State.
So I can see Chesterton having a kind of, if not affection precisely, at least understanding of Trump, as a kind of poetic expression of the American genius. So perhaps Trump is a Nero figure - someone whose own soul is perhaps contemptible, but whose effect, insofar as it weakens America's de facto 'nobility', is good.
I am not sure how far he'd go with that in practical terms, though, because Chesterton's distributism was very much concerned with the real distribution of property, and as much as Trump has symbolically offended an elite class, he has done very little to remedy the actual concentration of property in America.
I offered via Chesterton a kind of qualified defense of despotism, but I am bound also to mention his description of the same in Heretics:
(This leads him on to a defense of 'hereditary despotism', i.e. monarchy.)
If we interpret MAGA as a type of Caesarism, which I think is about as reasonable a comparison as is available to us, I think this gives us a look at some of Chesterton's attitudes towards that. The worship of great men always appears in times of weakness and cowardice.
If you'll pardon a long quote, one of the next passages of Heretics strikes me as particularly apposite:
I think you can trace from this the Chestertonian criticism of the academic left and the bureaucratic state, and insofar as MAGA is opposed to that, they and Chesterton have a common enemy.
But Chesterton was never good at biting his tongue and making common cause against a common enemy - to H. G. Wells' great frustration - and I can't see him joining or supporting a movement that, by his own lights, is weak and cowardly.
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When you write it out like that you make Chesterton sound positivly Trumpian.
That our institutions have been captured by a cabal of anti-human elites actively working to turn the US into a 3rd World country is arguably one of the core premises of the MAGA-right.
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I note you conspicuous avoid attesting to any of us having 'morality' here.
(Wink / nudge / laughing at self in good humor.)
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True, consider the Tories in the UK and Liberals in Australia. Both are ostensibly conservative parties, both are fully committed to mass migration, the energy transition and so on. If there's one thing the Tories are 'for', it's Universal Boomer Income, the triple-lock on pensions subsidizing senescence. They promised to take control of migration, won an election victory and then raised it significantly. And they let the NGO-deep state blob run the rest of society. Hopefully the Tories dissolve entirely, nothing of value would be lost.
I think the problem with Trump is that he needs to be destructive in order to break the power of the NGO-deep state blob, in this case the judges. I was at lunch with an American law professor some time ago who was wistfully imagining a world where the Democrats decided to run on a platform so popular they'd just dare the judges to block them and if so... expand the court! Break them! He told us that he often asked his students about the consequences of their marvellous plans to use state power to achieve some goal, what if the other side got in power and used the power to their ends? Students used to realise this and come out with a renewed perspective on compromise. About a decade ago they started coming to a different conclusion: 'it'll be tough but we'll fight back and win eventually'. Restraint is for suckers. Even the professor seemed to have changed his mind on this.
The same logic applies for Trump. Deporting illegal immigrants is his big thing, he did win the election, he should probably have devoted his efforts to that rather than schizo tariff wars. Break the will of the courts on the most advantageous battlefield you can find, don't fight on unfavourable battlefields.
But as usual with Trump, his destructive energies are not tightly focused on the right targets in order of priority.
You absolutely can have a positive vision of 'safe streets', 'cheap energy' 'nation-state not economic zone' 'peace through strength' and that would be pretty popular. But without the confidence to pursue it, they're just words.
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The Washington Times claims:
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:
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
CBSNBC 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:
nuttieststrongest 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...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.
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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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.
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.
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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!
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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.
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.
With state capacity and prisons today, you're better off dead.
Tell that to Kyle Rittenhouse.
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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.
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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.
How do you know?
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.
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.
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'.
... 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.
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.
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.
To be very explicit:
Barring a tiny number of exceptions not relevant here and not demonstrated in past attacks of this class, the moral value of a person who is in the process of attempting to kill or cause permanent injury to innocents rounds to zero, from the negative side. Any considerations regarding their lives either need to actually challenge that belief in a deeper way than ispe dixit, or rely on tactical, strategic, or legal grounds.
Near-universally, those tactical matters overwhelmingly favor firearms, and lethal force with firearms, over less-lethal tools. They provide range, they provide greater accuracy, and they can respond to many more attackers, so on. Less-lethal tools can and maybe should supplement firearms; they can not replace them. The only times a less-lethal tool can not be replaced by a firearm, conversely, reflect either legal or moral constraints.
And those tactical matters weight extremely heavily. I am not going to encourage people take a 10% risk to life or limb or concussion in exchange for even completely removed risk of legal or social attack. I'm not I'm willing to demand at a 1% chance. People should be aware of, and responsive to, the legal constraints for their jurisdictions, but they have no moral obligation to commit suicide over them.
And I don't think that offer is seriously on the table, either. The courts and news media are, in fact, willing to make national news and a jail sentence out of someone leaving a tire skidmark on a crosswalk; the theory that prosecutors and activists will say 'all good' after a taser strike under all but the clearest examples is far from clearly-supported, and most of these future attacks will not be clearly documented. Again, that Dolloff is not just a free man, but one that leftists and media are quite willing to describe as innocent, tells us exactly how much sticking solely to pepper spray buys you. That Hayes is on trial in a week tells us how much it matters if your 'victim' survives; I will bet you cash money he does not get a prosecutor giving him the last-minute Dolloff treatment.
Yes, on net, this leaves a number of circumstances where someone defending themselves, legally and morally, may 'cause' greater total deaths, and not just in the sense of shooting someone that might have been possible to just pepper spray. It's imaginable that an alternative-universe Rittenhouse (or Gardner) situation could result in prolonged violent protests aimed at other people who are not able to defend themselves. I'm not willing to demand Gardner shoot himself in the head lest Omaha burn down.
That's because I don't accept that 'cause' as true, honest, or a norm applied across all political valiances. The people burning down a city over a morally correct self-defense shooting are not the fault of someone defending themselves: they are the fault of people burning down the city. In many cases, they are intentionally cultivated, by centralized organizations justifying their violence and providing false information encouraging them.
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Some updates:
sondaughter. Even assuming a duty to report that pierces the family and that shirtless flamethrower guy was spitting a lot of cause for suspicion around his wife and kids (tbf...), it'd be worthwhile to at least specifically say some specific thing they should have done.Two more weeks, or until the order of the Fifth Circuit.
Still stayed.
We didn't get a miracle.
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Snope v. Bonta has dropped like a gravestone:
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.Again, would be a great opinion! It's not one, either. Instead:
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.
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).
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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.
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.
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've replied to a filtered comment.
Why can't I read filtered comments? Not directed at you per se.
Only mods can read filtered comments. That's why they don't notice they are filtered.
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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.
(reposting to alert of major correction)
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!
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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.
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What's the link to the source code? At the very least, I could make the approve link big and red.
Link
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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.
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.
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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.
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I prefer ‘one man, one vote- the president for life is the man, and he has the vote’.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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Okay, let’s lay Rule of Law aside for a minute. There’s a much, much more serious problem here.
First off:
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:
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.
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.
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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"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.
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He did specify:
This is, in fact, written to exclude Dobbs.
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.
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).
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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.
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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:
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.
Sorry to reply so late; my actual life imposed.
Your idea of a “national divorce” is tempting only inasmuch as there are two distinct groups that will have no more internal conflicts once separated. But this is not borne out by reality. Look at the tenuous Musk-Trump alliance, which has already fallen apart. Would they have to share part of America? Why would they not simply fall into factional infighting? Why isn’t it divorces all the way down?
Loving thy neighbor, or at least tolerating him in a modestly political sense, is a difficult thing to do, and when it breaks down there is no limit to the breakdowns. There are no Blues without Reds, no Reds without Blues, and the spirit of the age is one of malice seeking an outlet. What I have argued, am arguing, and will continue to argue, is that opposing this malice in itself, not through some subset of its mortal proxies, is both right and the only hope we have.
I have friends and family who are much, much more politically attached than I am. I oppose them in many ways, and I’m fairly open about that. But I still have good relationships with them because that opposition is braced by the much more real and human love and trust we share. I believe this is what’s at the heart of what one might call a homogeneous nation - this sense of trust that permits differences and arguments. And that trust, when it exists, exists on the smallest scale and percolates upwards as a simple expression of the way we live our lives, day to day. And part of that trust is the trust that we will do what is right and proper even when it is inconvenient or disadvantageous, that we will keep our word. Will you keep your word? That’s what’s really there, in the rule of law. It’s the rule of law over one’s own heart. And if you repudiate that in favor of advantage or passion, who can trust you - on any scale?
No shit the progressives have overstepped. But that’s not what’s at issue here. The real question is, and can only be, the safety of one’s own soul.
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So in this giant Red win meant...that Blues no longer got to unilaterally dominate national policy. This is not comparable to Obergefell (or Roe in the original instance). Blue wins mean they get to override Red preferences everywhere. Red wins mean they get plausible cover to try and eake out a separate existence in some places. These are not the same.
Yes, this is what Blue tribe gets when they "win."
What a coincidentally perfect distillation of major leftist legal doctrine.
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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.
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I think a key crux here is:
Is the current system an imperfect attempt to instantiate Rule of Law, which fails, which falls short, because perfection is beyond the reach of flawed humans?
Or is it a scam? Are its promised rights lies?
I can see, in the abstract, how there's kind of a muddy middle here where different people might draw the line between those categories differently. But I don't know how anyone can look at the facts in the OP and honestly maintain that this is an attempt to be evenhanded. The thumbs on the scale are too regular, too predictable, and too weighty for me to dismiss them as noise.
Whether we have a right to life, liberty, the pursuit of happiness, guns, free speech, or whatever else seems pretty clearly to be an axiomatic moral argument, not a factual one. Ought, not Is.
This comment from two years back lays out what I think is a pretty solid argument for the nature of the problem:
And the answer elaborated in the rest of the comment comes down to explaining why loopholes are in fact not a generally-manageable problem in rules design. The lie and scam comes from the idea that you can write down a legible definition of rights, and then right down a legible set of rules about how to adjudicate disputes over them, and then by following these rules the rights will be secured, and thus the processes and outputs we observe are simply The Way The Rules Are. Our society is built on the idea that rules work this way, but they really don't.
You can make a set of rules that work when people generally want them to work. Making a set of rules that work when people don't want them to work is probably impossible. Incompatible values results in a lot of people not wanting the rules to work any more, so they don't. There's a term that Moldbug came across awhile back: "manipulation of procedural outcomes". It's one of the most perfect political terms I've ever encountered, and the perfect encapsulation for the nature of the problem. Rules, procedures, exist to secure outcomes, but can be manipulated. Once you grok that, everything else follows with the crushing inevitability of a glacier.
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It's been three months, but I'm binging your past comments- you're an extremely lucid and cogent writer, and we disagree on just enough to make that a very interesting exercise for me.
I'd identify as a "Rule of Law" proponent, but the bulk of my comments on the subject are to the effect that it would be awfully nice to have it. I think it possible- although I am not certain- that at some point in the past, we did; or at least, we had a much stronger norm to obey and enforce the written laws than we now have, in ways that could actually constrain behavior.
This has been visibly-cracking-at-best for as long as I've been paying attention (one of my first political memories was of hearing that Clinton had committed perjury and being confused as to why he wasn't being arrested), and at this point it's a complete joke. I am very interested in emphasizing that it's a complete joke! Getting common knowledge that it's a complete joke is, apart from being desirable-in-itself, absolutely necessary if we're ever going to build a version that's not a joke. I'm a proponent of "Rule of Law" in that I'd very much like to do that.
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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.
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".
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!
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:
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And the other SCOTUS Catholics?
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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.
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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.
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What did you think ‘states rights’ meant?
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.
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.
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Why do you think Lawrence was wrong?
Sodomy should be a crime.
Why?
What was wrong with the legal reasoning in the decision?
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Yes, forbidding people from giving food to the poor certainly ought to be a crime. (Chabad, October 2012; Tablet, November 2019)
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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.
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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.
This comparison irritates and mystifies me.
The right to bear arms is quite directly in 2A:
But the right to abortion is...nowhere. It's inferred from the right to privacy, which is inferred from due process (5/14A):
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.
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.:
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.
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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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What if the NFA was challenged, rather than a state law?
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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.
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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.
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.
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."
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
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It's a bit silly, but those (unless we're talking WW1 era) are "antique firearms":
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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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?
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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.
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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.
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With respect to privateers, private cannon ownership was encouraged.
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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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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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.
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The circuit split pseudo-requirement becomes even more frustrating when you realize that important issues are not evenly distributed geographically. Most federal land is located in the 9th circuit, and the 5th and 11th circuits (the ones most favorable to conservatives) have virtually none at all. So a lot of the 9th circuit's crazy environmentalism never gets to SCOTUS because none of the reasonable courts have jurisdiction to hear similar cases and generate a split.
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Viramontes Has Dropped
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.
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Lamont has dropped.
Unanimously, the 2nd Circuit has now redefined "dangerous and unusual" to mean "unusually dangerous". I don't see many ways to resolve this which don't leave the Second Amendment a dead letter, or at best allow a gun in a circumstance. The logic? To repeat myself: (because fuck you, that's why)
Association of N. J. Rifle & Pistol Clubs, Inc. v. Platkin updates
In theory, recent changes to the 3rd Circuit's makeup could result in this case having a pro-gun and perhaps even fast decision. The case had no chance at the appeals level (two judges, Schwartz and Freeman, have already signed onto pretty bad anti-gun rulings), so this could even simplify matters.
In practice, I'm not that optimistic. The whole circuit has only a slight R-D lean, and it has enough squishy Rs on a complex enough topic that it'd be a hard situation to run on, and unlike Range has no easy way to limit to the borders of this case or the limits of the popular.
On the other hand, I guess it could be worse. It could be Koons. Except then there's a question why the en banc Koons, too.
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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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I love this explanation, it's a great way to put it in perspective. I would also say that this -
Rules most people out of the agentic category. And that's why I say please and thanks to deepseek anyway.
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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 think the main point of contention is this. As evidenced by discussions up and down this thread, for most people, the number is closer to 0.05 than 0.95, so there's no political will to do the other things you suggest. A real-world example: Anthropic. When the OpenAI engineers quit the company because it wouldn't slow down for safety, they didn't shoot the remaining employees, instead they created a competitor to sprint faster with the belief that if they reach AGI first, it'll be better aligned for humanity.
To be clear, I'm in favour of co-ordinated meanness on this one - government action. I've exhaustively considered the possibilities of terrorism and with the exception of a certain harebrained scheme which requires nuclear weapons (and good luck getting those as a terrorist), the maths doesn't work out. No single point of failure, awareness raising of the mere idea is unnecessary*, and that leaves you with "terrorism only makes sense if it can be sustained over a period of time" which the Rats can't (and especially can't on a global scale).
I was initially using the metaphor of the USA in a race with other countries; by "shoot them" I meant war. Nuclear war if necessary, but as noted I'm optimistic about the possibility of getting the nuclear powers on board.
Anthropic's actions I model as a combination of lower P(Doom), self-overestimation, greater tolerance for Doom (Silicon Valley tends to attract risk-tolerant types), and most importantly "it's really important to be careful what you get good at".
*Take the climate soup-throwers as an example. They'd be of use if nobody'd heard of global warming. But people have heard of global warming, they (including me) just disagree with the soup-throwers' opinion that it's an X-risk requiring major action RTFN, and throwing soup is not going to convince people of that. Likewise, there have been enough "AI rebellion" films that that kind of terrorism is not really useful (and TBH public opinion is already pretty strongly against AI).
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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.
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.
Yo Claude,
Please look over all these loans and optimize our revenue/risk. Then after you do, come up with an explainable algorithm that, post-hoc, comes to the closest results.
Periodically revisit this and tweak the explainable algorithm.
Why don't you just send your confession directly to the feds instead of their best friends and save a judge some time?
You really think an insurance company can't spin up enough GPUs to do this privately?
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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.
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Ooof, I get experimentation for local issues but 50 States with 50 different AI regimes is just feeding money to the PMC and consultant class.
Do you really not think people would flock to competent governance like corporations once did to Delaware?
Depends if they would be allow consumers to use their AIs under the law of the hosts' State.
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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.
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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.
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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?
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The issue with state regulation of AI is obviously that all relevant AI in the US is produced in California, maybe a little bit in Texas. This would have never flied with a Republican administration, but even that aside it's clearly discriminatory against everyone else who will experience the effects of Californian regulation.
Except such a regulation might actually drive the work out of California. Which leaves me torn -- do I support the ban because I want to prevent California from impeding AI work, or do I oppose the ban because I'd be happy for California to shoot itself in the dick and drive tech companies out?
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