site banner
PaperclipPerfector  19d ago (text post)   30868 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 23, 2025

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

7
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

I felt kind of annoyed by the claim that "most" Supreme Court cases go 6-3 along ideological lines, although I guess the more defensible version would be that the controversial cases all go 6-3 along ideological lines. Be that as it may, I created a website this morning to help understand data from the most recent term. Spent more time than I intended on this so I'm hoping someone else finds it interesting: https://wbruntra.github.io/scotus/?tab=dashboard

Legalytics/Empirical SCOTUS also does a lot of really awesome work: here although they actually post often enough that some of the stuff like you describe sometimes gets buried

In my opinion the true blackpill for the anti-immigration hardliners is the bipartisan refusal by the government to actually enforce E-Verify, which quite literally is already on the books (relatedly the floated exception for illegal immigrants employed in agriculture and hospitality). A crackdown on illegal immigration which refuses to penalize employers for hiring illegal immigrants is a completely unserious attempt at a crackdown. The administration seems to be optimizing for flashy headline-grabbing deportation raids while avoiding anything that might actually disrupt the status quo.

The CEO of Glenn Valley Foods was shocked to find ICE carting away a dozen of his workers even though he participated fully in E-Verify.

From the point of view of an employer, I dunno what to tell him. If we want employers to be part of an enforcement system, we need to have some assurance that if they do the work, it will actually result in not hiring ineligible workers. This is a guy that provides significant training and value to employees -- the exact kind of person we want to incentivize to hire legals. Instead he's going back and using the same E-Verify system that sucks in the first place.

It seems like "e-verify" is just filing a simplified form I-9 (which has a field for social security number/A-number/passport number) online, and then getting a result saying that "records match" from the SSA or DHS. On Form I-9, the employee attests under penalty of perjury that they have the right to work until some date, and provides IDs to back up that claim. The employer attests under penalty of perjury that they have verified the worker's official documents which establish identity and employment authorization. This is already required for all employers. I imagine a ton of employers are not actually verifying documents and perjuring themselves, but nobody cares, because it is employers who sponsor political candidates.

According to USCIS, E-verify is different from Form I-9 in that it requires a social security number and photo identity documents, and tells the employer whether the employee is eligible to work within three to five seconds. Watching one of their tutorials for employers, the employer fills out "Name", "Date of Birth", "Social Security Number", "Employee's email address", "Citizenship status", and which documents the employee provided. (With the exception of the email address, this all duplicates information on the I-9). The employer is then prompted to upload scans of the documents provided.

So how does the program not work? How does an employer who uses it end up hiring ineligible workers? News outlets are saying that the Glenn Valley Foods CEO "explained that federal officials said his company was a victim of unauthorized workers using stolen identities or fake IDs to get around the E-Verify system."

We have a couple options here. None of them leave the employer, the immigrant, or DHS/SSA/USCIS looking very good:

  1. Employees were signing up to work with scans of other people's documents. Literal identity theft, and the employer didn't catch it because they aren't actually comparing the photo on the ID to the physical person at the worksite (as they are testifying they did under penalty of perjury). This probably shows up as tax fraud later, too.

  2. It's all a performative show. There is no photo recognition on the back end, or USCIS is failing to actually assess eligibility to work. Perhaps people on refugee status with scheduled court dates are automatically waived through. This one is on the US government.

  3. "Photo ID" is not what you think. Form I-9 instructions and E-verify instructions both link a list of "Documents that establish identity," List B from Form I-9. These include a "school ID card with photograph" or, for minors, a "school record or report card". I can't imagine that a "school ID" is a challenging document to fake, given the number and variety of schools of higher education (includes tech schools!) around the country and how there are no standards for what constitutes a school ID. (Not to mention the number of minors who are able to buy alcohol in the US.) I also can't imagine a "report card" incorporating a photo ID, and again, they are printed by every school in the nation, and nowadays report cards are probably html files which can be modified by anyone with technical savvy before being printed off at home. So potentially all that an immigrant has to do is claim to be an under-18 refugee or college student, provide a fake ID or report card, and they can pass document inspections at a lower level of scrutiny. Again, literal identity theft, with the US government complicit. The employer must be wondering how 30% of their balding day laborers are children and students.

I think it is likely that the answer is (2). The reason this business was raided was because DHS already knew there were a bunch of people working there who didn't have the right to work. Perhaps they were previously permitted to work, and perhaps the Biden admin was letting anyone work.

In summary, I am appalled by the low standards of quality the US holds itself to for ID verification (one can also use a student ID to vote!), and I think it's possible anyone involved - immigrant, employer, or government - could be telling "motivated truths".

Fully agree with all this, except I'd kinda put more (relative) on 1/3. In particular, there's studies that untrained individuals are not great at matching photos to people, especially grainy ones and many of them were using stolen identities of people vaguely co-ethnic to them.

Another take on the conclusion is that there is no actual system in place for verifying someone's identity in a way that works when applied by clueless or look-the-other-way very-mildly-complicit employers.

One of my coworkers suggested the simplest way would be that when you start work and do the I9 process, the government goes back and verifies with you via an independent means.

As someone out of US trying to understand why is it that difficult to implement a work right verification system when every other developed country have one:

  1. Assuming there is a quick way to verify US citizens by birth certificate so that we can first filter out all US citizens
  2. Setup a system so that employees can enter passport number and visa number, to verify someone's right to work, the system should also return the name and photo of the passport holder (Legal immigrant in US must have a passport and visa, right?)
  3. Setup an alternative system so that asylum seekers will aquire a temporary visa with photo, so that effectively act as both a passport and visa at the same time when they are in the US
  4. Require employees to save a copy of employers ID documents, to avoid liability in-case of forged documentations

Isn't this the standard for everyother first world countries?

The US has long been a little weird about ID.

The right was always worried about a communist takeover of the federal government and wanted to make sure they could disappear and live under fake names without too much skill needed. I'm using communist loosely, there are a lot of possible left authoritarian governments that people on the right would feel the need to hide from.

The left really did have a bunch of radicals living under fake names. Some for longer than you'd think -- Sara Jane Olson of the Symbionese Liberation Army wasn't caught until 1999.

After 2001 there was a lot of interest in tightening things up, but by that point there were a lot of illegal immigrants, and neither party really wanted to shake things up too much.

So the US government is a lot worse at identifying individuals than you'd expect. Systems are designed not to work with each other or report obvious problems. The IRS goes as far as setting up their computer systems to allow for people filing taxes with stolen SSNs.

I don't know specifics about e-verify, but I've heard it was mostly designed around making congress look like it's doing something.

I think the problem, as usual, is diversity; the US has a large ethnic underclass that thinks it's fucking normal to go around without an ID, and has no idea where their birth certificate is, if it even still exists. You can't enforce "papers, please!" on illegal Hispanic without enforcing it on urban blacks, and they would fail just as often despite having every legal right to live and work here, leading to much wailing and gnashing of teeth; see the kerfuffle about needing an ID to vote.

Immigration via refugee resettlement and other humanitarian programs are a small proportion of the increase in the immigrant population since 1965.

One faction (my faction, I suppose to acknowledge my obvious bias) of the anti-immigration camp is that while the {parole-in-place, resettlement, credible-fear and temporary protected status, etc...} are a small proportion of numbers but a huge proportion of problematic and highly net-negative immigrants as compared to the Sergeys and Elons of the world. You could call them selectivists but really it's absurd to thing that we even need to characterized "we don't need 100K Haitians" as selectivity.

I expect that when the anti-immigration camp was totally out of the zeitgeist in the preceding decade they didn't have to reconcile what they really meant because there was a strong external enemy and they were out of power anyway. Now the farmworker thing has crystalized the division and someone is going to have to mediate it.

It was easy to be against the Obama/Biden policies, it's harder to find one that satisfies the entire coalition.

This is fairly impressive. Did you make this with assistance of generative AI?

Personally, I'd like a greater breakdown into those controversial and high-impact (landmark) cases, but it's still interesting to know that almost half of all SCOTUS opinions are 9-0.

I'd like a greater breakdown into those controversial and high-impact (landmark) cases

I know what you mean. Any suggestions on how to break down the data this way? I mean, at some point, if you just define important cases as cases that go 6-3 along ideological lines, then by the way that you've defined it, 100% of important cases are going to be decided along ideological lines. I'm trying to think about what would be a good middle ground that's still data analysis-based while giving insight into these potentially controversial cases.

On the Agreement Matrix tab, I've added a checkbox that excludes unanimous cases from the analysis. Which I think is an interesting way to look at it, because you're seeing that if there's any disagreement at all in a case, then, for example, Thomas and Jackson are most likely to find themselves on opposite sides, while Thomas and Alito are most likely to be on the same side. You didn't really need data analysis to come up with this insight, but I guess it's good to confirm at least that data analysis confirms what everybody knows.

https://wbruntra.github.io/scotus/?tab=matrix

For identifying landmark cases: Number of times that the data has been looked up? Number of contributions on relevant Wikipedia page?

I believe 9 0 is the most common result from all the cases no one hears about.

This is fairly impressive. Did you make this with assistance of generative AI?

Oh, very much so. Github Copilot + Claude Sonnet 4, if you care to know. Technically I am a web developer but at this point I am basically all-in on using AI wherever possible. Nice to get done in a couple hours what would have taken me much, much longer, and much more frustration, using the old method of typing code by hand.

In same way I hate using AI (vibe coding), but this seems to be the exact case where AI coding is suitable: one off project and not business critical

Although I think using AI for a prolonged period will lower your overall ability to code as a developer, or maybe I am just too old school with basically little to no IDE in my frequently used tools

using AI for a prolonged period will lower your overall ability to code as a developer

This strongly depends on what your ability to code was before you started using AI. The reality is a lot of people can make websites now despite not having a professional approach to coding. If you're a classically trained developer, computer scientist, and you only use Vim, then yeah, you're probably right. That set of developers is going to be a smaller and smaller proportion of the total as time goes by.

I really wish I could see in AI what other people do; I recently tried to use Cursor at the recommendation of a senior developer, and I found that it was actively trying to force me down the wrong path when I was coding (I had to write a one-off web page that was compatible with some very ancient technology, and it kept trying to suggest CSS rules and autofilling text that made no sense for the use case). This has been a very consistent experience for me whenever I try to use AI for literally anything.

It's possible that I'm just not very good at prompting it, but I find that every time I start relying on it for anything, it is subtly wrong in ways that are frustrating to track down and repair.

On the one hand, I'm sure you're right that it's not as good as a human developer. On the other hand, it's kind of like the web in general. Websites all kind of suck now because React gives developers the ability to be lazy and not worry about resource usage or anything else because everything's kind of "good enough." But the cost and speed advantage of using AI is so overwhelming that I don't think your concerns are going to hold up. Developers are just going to have to add more bad code on top of bad code until it works.

Full disclosure: I really think that a lot of concerns from sophisticated developers about how AI makes mistakes are just snobbery/posing. But that's what I, an unsophisticated developer, would think, right?

Like, I'm not saying I've never had an experience where AI is going down a path that I think is bad and needs to change course. But in those cases, I usually hit the stop button and say, "Hey, I think you need to do this in a totally different way," or I can just say, "Hey, your last change was terrible. Can you just revert it?" There are a few instances where I feel kind of dumb because I'm using three prompts to say like hey I need you to change the font size, when I probably could've done it more easily myself in that specific case. But overall, I'd rather be talking to my agent than looking at code.

I'd rather be talking to my agent than looking at code.

What type of developer are you if you'd rather be talking than coding? /s

More seriously, the situations I find AI is really useful is when I need some information, but have enough knowledge to fine tune it after the fact. I've tried to use it to write code, and it always produces code that is kind of messy and bad. I asked it to produce some builder interfaces from a set of DTO interfaces, and it would do weird things like put in defaults that I didn't intend, or return the wrong field occasionally*. What worried me about it is that the junior developer I was working with at the time was copy-pasting them into the codebase as is, and didn't have any comprehension about why they wouldn't work.

*For reference, the type of implementation I was talking about would be something like:

interface IAddress { function line1() : string; function line2() : ?string; function city() : string; function province() : ?IProvince; function country() : ICountry; function zipCode() : IZipCode; }

interface IAddressBuilder { function setLine1( string $line1 ) : static; function setLine2( ?string $line2 ) : static; // you get the picture }

It would give me something like:

interface IAddressBuilder { function setLine1( string $line1 ) : static; function setLine2( string $line2 = '' ) : static; function setLCountry( ICountry $country ) : static; function setProvince( string $province ) : static; }

Which was just not very useful.

the controversial cases all go 6-3 along ideological lines.

I would think that as a matter of law, most SC cases are at least somewhat controversial.

Per WP:

Each year, the Supreme Court receives thousands of petitions for certiorari; in 2001 the number stood at approximately 7,500,[2] and had risen to 8,241 by October Term 2007.[3] The court will ultimately grant approximately 80 to 100 of these petitions,[a] in accordance with the rule of four.

They are obviously not going to pick a lot of the clear-cut cases where the circuit courts are all in agreement about what the law is and the SCOTUS would concur. They will likely prefer cases which allow them to steer things more than saying "every court is doing fine, keep doing what you are doing".

From your neat dashboard, it seems like only 16 out of 62 cases are affirmations (which I understand to mean "there was nothing substantial wrong with the lower courts judgement"). This would be a scandalously high rate of reversal, except in the context that for 99% of cases, the lower courts judgement stands because the SC does not grant the petition for cert.

Of course, while e.g. the major questions doctrine may be controversial legally, it is not one of the big battlegrounds of the culture war, which tends to be focused more on the object level. I can totally buy that the 6-3 split is common for CW cases.

It would be interesting to establish a metric how CW a case is. Perhaps the amount of discussion it generates on social media within 48h of publication might be a decent proxy. Or one could arbitrary define and case related to gun rights, abortion, minority/LGBT rights, immigration as CW and everything else as non-CW.

You might be interested in SCOTUSBlog's stat pack for the current term. They also have ones for some historical terms.

Thanks! My inability to find such a summary was what caused me to embark upon this folly.

I read the new ACX Review post about Alpha School (by an anonymous writer, not Scott). It was well written, but a bit of a slog, because it's quite long for an essay, but not as polished as a book. Some thoughts:

  • The school in question costs $40,000/year, and the writer sent three children there last year. There were apparently only 10 children in their cohort.
  • The big headline for the Alpha School model is that it has only two hours of core academics. I looked at the schedule for my local elementary school, and they have 2.75 hours of core academics. I don't think most people know this. I get the impression the writer, who spent hundreds of thousands of dollars sending three children to this elite private school and wrote a very long essay about it also doesn't know this. Forty-five minutes a day is not nothing, but is not a huge deal or the main thing the school has going for it.
  • The other headline is that they progress 2.6 times faster on the state mandated curriculum, so they'll probably finish it all by junior high or so. Sure. Great. It's nice for kids to learn more things sooner.
  • They have an incentive structure that appears to cost about $400 per child per year, which they earn mostly for completing their lessons well and on time, and can buy real things that they like, not extremely cheap things that individual teachers can afford to buy themselves, like at many schools. It's not impossible that public schools can adopt this, if they're convinced enough. Medicaid gives mothers points for taking their babies to checkups, which they can use in an online shop to buy books, toys, kitchen items, etc.
  • The teachers are well paid ($60,000 - $150,000), not called teachers ("guides"), and have a slightly different schedule structure from public school teachers. In public schools, the art, music, PE, library, and sometimes other teachers are the only specialists, and their schedule is determined entirely by the need to provide a break to the main teachers. There's some office politics around when this "prep" happens, and how the schedules are set up. Apparently at Alpha, all the students work on the digital platform for the first half of the day, and it's not entirely clear what the "guides" are doing during that time -- students ask for individualized help from call center teachers in Brazil -- but given the pay rates, presumably they're doing something. Then they lead clubs and whatnot in the afternoon. That sounds nice, but they're paying them more than the public schools, so I wonder if there's a catch. That's a big part of the question of whether it could scale or not. Could educational assistants do what the Brazilian on call tutors are doing? Could public school teachers do whatever the guides are doing? It's unclear.
  • Every public school teacher I've talked to likes the idea of morning academics, afternoon specials. This doesn't work due to the schedules of the specials teachers, and also staggered lunches. Large elementary schools have six lunches a row, and are very inflexible about that. Apparently it works at Alpha both because all the teachers are, to some extent, specials teachers, and they have less than 100 kids, so lunches are not a huge concern.
  • I can see why the SSC-sphere is apparently full of well off people with gifted children, but do not personally relate all that strongly. If I were going to send my kids to a school like that, it would be for the better/longer electives and more interesting peer group, more than for the accelerated learning.

Thanks to the cringy association with supplements and PUA bootcamps, I've been conditioned to automatically suspect anything whose name begins with—or is just—"Alpha" is a scam or will otherwise underwhelm. It's petty but this is why I'm putting off watching 28 Years Later, despite originally being hopeful about its release and having enjoyed 28 Days Later and parts of 28 Weeks Later.

While the author might be a bit extreme than most, in general it's amazing how much handwringing people do over the details of children's school curriculum design and teaching methodology (teaching content might be more understandable) when the heavy-lifting is done by your partner being smart, you being smart yourself, and keeping your children away from the riffraff. The rest is window dressing.

Doesn't the author know how much Nutritional Security and Socioeconomic Factor he's leaving on the table by not supplementing his children's diets with Alpha BrainTM?

Whilst I agree with the general sentiment of your post I think there are is a very valid reason for why a child should be placed in this sort of program over public education, at the very least.

Considering the child will largely grow up to be similar to mom and dad, barring bad friends and unlucky accidents, why not put them in a program that maximally conforms to whatever ruleset upper class academia emphasizes? It's a good use of time if we assume the kid will inherit the brainpower to meet the demands of higher learning. Instead of being potentially stifled by public education, which is poor, it can potentially be motivated to pursue education and have the resume to enable that pursuit.

whatever ruleset upper class academia emphasizes?

Quis paget entrat, is the joke about that. Though upper-class academia does have its share of clever, as well as well-connected, students.

St Cake's School is an imaginary public school, run by Mr R. J. Kipling (BA, Leicester). The headmaster's name is part of the joke regarding the name "St Cake's", in reference to Mr Kipling cakes. Articles featuring the school parody the "Court and Social" columns of The Times and The Daily Telegraph, and the traditions and customs of the public school system. The school's motto is Quis paget entrat (He who pays gets in), although variations on this arise from time to time, such as when the school decided to admit only the daughters of very rich Asian businessmen, and the motto became "All praise to the prophet, and death to the infidel". While the school's newsletters feature extraordinary and unlikely results and prizes, events such as speech days, founders' days, term dates and feast days are announced with topical themes, such as under-age drinking, drug abuse, obesity, celebrity culture, anti-social behaviour and cheating in exams. The school is sometimes referred to as "the Eton of the West Midlands", in reference to that area's relative lack of such schools and the magazine's founders' attendance at Shrewsbury School in that region.

It is worth noting that the top British public (i.e. private) schools do not run on a quis paget entrat basis, and have not done since roughly the 1980's. There is a standard examination (Common Entrance) meaning that the system is transparent enough that people would know if it ran like Harvard admissions. At the time Prince Harry got into Eton in 1997, they apparently still had slightly lower academic standards for children of hereditary peers (and significantly lower standards for royalty - he wouldn't have met the reduced standards for the aristocracy), but they had no need to let a dim kid in for cash, and didn't. The other top schools had published pass marks with no exceptions.

Part of the joke about St Cake's is that there used to be a lot of mildly shit public schools that were selling social exclusivity and nothing else (and the resulting stereotypes survive because the upper classes are one of the designated acceptable targets for outgroup-bashing humour) but most of them went out of business after WW2.

28 Years Later may be in my top ten favorite films … just need a rewatch so solidify my opinion on that.

Top 5 are:

Event Horizon Suspiria (2018) Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Stop Making Sense

5th is always floating - just completely variable at anytime but it’s probably another Tarantino

Shit, based on your list I had better go see it.

The other headline is that they progress 2.6 times faster on the state mandated curriculum, so they'll probably finish it all by junior high or so.

This bar is not quite as low as the Dead Sea, but it's at least as low as Amsterdam. The state mandated curriculum is supposed to be set up so that every kid gets through it in 12 years. It doesn't do that well, but the numbers are consistent with it working for kids down to more than 1SD below the mean. If you have a program that's almost certainly only going to attract kids 1SD ABOVE the mean and higher, going much faster should be easy.

This is pretty interesting.

All of the GT Workshops are focused on a measurable, legible output. They don’t learn “public speaking”, they learn how to craft and deliver a speech and then submit the performance to the Moth to be judged by external parties. The school’s “100% Money Back guarantee” is that every student who attends will be in the top 1% academically and win at least one national academic competition (for kids who start in kindergarten they guarantee 1350+ SAT and 5s on APs by 8th grade). This past year four kids placed in the top-8 in a global debate with more than 1000 entries, and two kids are competing at national championships in chess and an academic bee respectively, but not national champions yet.

Winning national academic competitions is a bold claim, but maybe there is that much alpha (ha!) to find versus conventional schooling.

Additionally

Airbnb: Maybe the most impressive one. The 5th graders learned about the economics of property management - from property sourcing, mortgages, interior design, taxes, marketing, photo shoots, etc. And then they actually bought and managed a small property as a class (yes, the 5th grade class manages an actual property with a P&L)

I find this fucking awesome. You're clearly not only paying for kids to practice Duolingo. Also, an Alpha School guy replied in the comments and said "We agree that Duolingo doesn’t work. The students wanted to try it last year at GT School for various reasons, but it’s not part of the platform."

Mostly, I just enjoy how willing they are to experiment and iterate even in the face of unpopular ideas. And apparently paying kids to read books is insanely unpopular?

Roland Fryer, who has done extensive work on what works in incentivizing students, quotes a 2010 Gallup poll that found that only 23% of American parents support the “idea of school districts paying small amount of money to students to, for example, read books, attend school or to get good grades” (76% opposed the idea with only 1% undecided).

There are not many things that 76% of Americans agree on. Only 69% of Americans believe another Civil War would be a bad thing. Only 78% agree that American independence from Britain was the right choice. People REALLY don’t like paying kids to read books.

So what do these parents think we should do instead? Mostly they believe that kids should just be “intrinsically motivated” and school should be about inspiring that internal motivation. Their concern is that if we provide external motivation for learning it will crowd out internal motivation. They worry that when the external motivation goes away (no one is going to pay a 30-year-old to read books), there is no internal motivation to keep learning happening. In this model “education” is not about educating per se, or even about teaching habits, it is about inspiring character.

The other option is that rather than use the carrot, you could use the stick. Fryer shares another poll from 2008 where 26% of parents think grade-school teachers should be allowed to spank kids (35% in the Southern US states!). As Fryer summarizes: “The concept of paying students in school is less palatable than the concept of spanking students in school”.

We homeschool our kid and while he is crushing it academically, we do notice his motivation sagging a bit in some areas. Our headline update from reading this entire post was not to move to Austin and send him to Alpha schools, but to try greasing him a bit.

We've been paying for online piano lessons because his mind was blown by Elton John videos and he seemed genuinely interested in learning how to play and we were like sure why not.

And he's been practicing pretty consistently with very little prodding from us for almost 18 months and plays really well. He's decent enough that the last Christmas party we went to he just played and kept it bumping while everyone else sang along. I find this impressive enough because I can't play piano for shit.

But! He hit this one module that has one song that he just doesn't like and his motivation to finish it fell through the floor. It's pretty surprising since it's not even a hard song, it just doesn't seem to satisfy him the way the other ones do. He's been stuck on it for months, just does not care at all to practice it. So... having just read this post we decided to offer him $1 to finish the song by Monday and he bunkered down and has been practicing it hard since.

Are we worried about ruining his intrinsic motivation entirely? Not really. There's some rationalization later about how bribing kids does not render them incapable of doing things without external motivation as adults, and indeed it might be a solid way to push them more towards having intrinsic motivation later.

There's some rationalization later about how bribing kids does not render them incapable of doing things without external motivation as adults, and indeed it might be a solid way to push them more towards having intrinsic motivation later.

I am doing my job mostly because I am being paid. Without this external motivation I would be doing something else.

There's a fairly lucid section in the article about how genius level masters didn't appear born with intrinsic motivation and the simple explanations like "they just love practicing more" don't hold.

They don’t learn “public speaking”, they learn how to craft and deliver a speech and then submit the performance to the Moth to be judged by external parties.

Maybe I'm just dumb, but trying to navigate The Moth's website makes me think this is just a Gen Z version of Toastmasters. I mean, yay for "public storytelling" but I doubt they're going to be very hard on a bunch of elementary schoolers and since they seem to be aiming for podcasters, well okay maybe yeah they are training the new generation of social media influencers who will be hosting podcasts as a career given that AI will take every other job by the time these kids have speedrun the national curriculum and are ready to join the world of work aged sixteen.

It's been around longer than gen z has. It's probably more well-known than the Toastmasters, as that Moth Radio Hour has been on various NPR stations for over 15 years, and while I'd never make a point of listening to it, late on a Sunday afternoon it's often the only thing on the radio worth listening to.

I guess I can see the appeal.

Our family skills are art and nature photography, and the daughter has become excited by the prospect of displaying her creations. She walked into a gallery and announced that she wants to have her work in a gallery. She made a figurine, and got all excited about the idea of selling it. It occurs to me that I don't have any sales and finding display space skills at all, I always gave things away, as did my mom. I think she tried selling her art once, and took my brother and I with, but even though she was next to her friend, it wasn't good enough for her to want to continue. It would be nice if I knew more about competitions or something.I always put stuff in the country fair, so maybe we'll do that in a few years.

I'm not sure what you're responding to exactly. Are you saying this seems inane and that school shouldn't focus on this, or that this doesn't seem like a hard academic competition to win. Is this even an academic competition?

I tried to read the book review before making a top level response, I really did. But I couldn't make it past this part without going on a rant:

In practice “deep” just meant “un‑measured.”

It should certainly raise our hackles when an organization claims its strengths are unmeasurable. Like maybe these people are lying.

But more to the point, there seems to be this mentality of the educational institution being what matters. Not results, not the kids. The system. Spending more money on public schools is automatically better, even if it's spent on buying cigarettes to pass out to the kids it's better than spending the money on some not-public-school-related thing. Iron law I suppose.

None of this is casting shade on individual teachers, who mostly care about how the kids are doing, would like to be paid more but wouldn't everybody, and are simply very conformist women who've been taught that people pulling ideas out of their assholes are 'experts' who should be listened to. Union heads and admins, on the other hand...

I think we see this mentality on wild display with the principle in this first section- she is, by virtue of her position, entitled to deference and respect and obviously knows best, correspondence to reality be damned.

None of this is casting shade on individual teachers, who mostly care about how the kids are doing, would like to be paid more but wouldn't everybody, and are simply very conformist women who've been taught that people pulling ideas out of their assholes are 'experts' who should be listened to. Union heads and admins, on the other hand

I think the lack of concern foe whether the methods actually work, and thus you go through fads that are dumped for other fads rather than trying to actually figure out what methods actually get kids to improve in a given subject. This would absolutely never fly anywhere else. If I try a new method at work, and I don’t see any improvement, im not going to be allowed to keep going. If I’m just doing a new process and don’t even bother to see if it works at all, it’s going to probably get me canned rather quickly, especially if when the results are measured, it doesn’t work. Teachers and administrators can flit from idea to idea, have kids do worse, and nobody cares.

A couple of thoughts:

  • Almost nobody is good at getting preferred behaviors from people who don't want to cooperate. Even good managers are not all that good at it, they refuse to hire almost everyone, and sometimes fire people when things aren't working out. Paying more sometimes helps, but there are a decent number of unemployable people out there. All of them were once children who's teachers couldn't remove them from class for more than about 10 minutes at a time unless they physically assaulted someone.
  • Almost nobody is good at social science research, including actual social science and educational researchers.
  • Elementary teachers are not selected for their educational research and testing abilities, they are selected for patience with small children, helping them learn to get along with each other, and the ability to work within a system that isn't all that well designed, where nobody can ever be expelled and almost nobody can be fired or demoted.
  • Individual teachers can't decide anything about curriculum, schedules, or class compositions. Which are almost everything. They can conduct classroom management, and do actually iterate a lot on who sits next to whom, sticker charts, fidgets, and so on.
  • "If I’m just doing a new process and don’t even bother to see if it works at all, it’s going to probably get me canned rather quickly, especially if when the results are measured, it doesn’t work." It depends on what you mean by work. If you have an unstable client who keeps freaking out and throwing things around the room and pulling random people's hair, and your method works to decrease that but not to improve other metrics, did it work?

Although I'm biased as someone with a statistics degree, we'd get much better research if we either outright banned people who are bad or inexperienced in math and statistics from doing research, or significantly raised the standards for anyone wanting to do research (or as a compromise simply bit the bullet and mandated collaboration with a more math/stats-aware consultant). The number of statistically-illiterate or inexperienced questions that show up on reddit's askstatistics subreddit that mention offhand that it's for a paper they intend to publish is, frankly, frightening.

The big open question as I understand it in educational circles is how would we even implement something successful if the traditional mechanisms are non-functional? Any implementation requires some trust, and that trust is very diminished by administrators mandating often terrible programs or ones with onerous and impractical requirements to be implemented, which teachers understandably sabotage after paying lip service to. These programs or pushes always seem to cycle every 5 years so there's little consistency or follow-through. A lot of it is milked by educational consultants who have never taught in their lives and who have suspect financial incentives to sell things. And it poisons the well for actually-good initiatives, because they also can't get good compliance. It's almost a similar model to how dysfunction occurred in Soviet planned economies.

So in that light your point about cooperation is key.

Indeed. I'm not quite anonymous enough here to talk about this in detail, but it's very much an issue. Trainings can become incredibly hollow if the administrators aren't fully on board, so that teachers don't even understand or have access to the full ideas behind what they're supposed to be implementing, even if they want to do it.

The author (seemingly not scott) seems absolutely deranged. He outlined how he was being abused and exploited by some shitty yet expensive sjw private school yet still groveled to their admin when they vaguely threatened to kick him out for complaining too hard.

it was an invitation to grovel so our kindergartener could remain enrolled – “This meeting is not about your proposal or changing anything. This meeting is to decide if you are still a good fit for our school”

If you don't leave after hearing this, you're the school's bitch and paypig. You should never expect them to listen to or do a single thing for you ever again.

He directly says that the main benefit of his abusive provate school is that it lacks undesirables in the student body. Dude bussing is over just move to a better district using the savings from not paying insane tuition.

Then when his shitty private school was going through some changes, he wanted out, and could only say there were no good options and was thinking of staying anyways. Dude your kids are less than 10 just go to normal school.

Our oldest was going to be entering fourth grade; her incoming roster read like a rebuilding year for a professional sports team. It was possible we could get her into a middle school that would feed into a top tier high school, but those did not start until 5th grade. Our best option looked like “suck it up and accept whatever we had for at least a year”.

What the fuck, your kid is in fourth grade!!! She should be playing in the woods with other kids not training to get into a feeder school like it's the olympics!

One option was to do something radical. We considered taking a GAP year and traveling

Going to a "normal" school with "mid" teachers is sooooooo bad. Instead I'm gonna take my kids to travel the world.

Worst case, it would be a one‑year sabbatical from stagnation.

Apparently having his kids growing up in a school where a few of the best teachers quit is "stagnation". Just going to a normal school must be absolutely ruinous to all of the victims who don't have insane parents like the author.

CPS should be going after people like this for child abuse if anyone.

Your comment inspired me to skim the article.

it was an invitation to grovel so our kindergartener could remain enrolled – “This meeting is not about your proposal or changing anything. This meeting is to decide if you are still a good fit for our school”

giga_chadette.jpg

Virgin “but but my academic data breakdowns” father vs. Chadette head of school.

It also reminds me of the "Dick Flattening / Yes Honey" meme: "It's 4PM! Time for your groveling session."

One might be tempted to call the author weak, pathetic, spineless, a bitch. However, in some ways he has more mental fortitude than I do. I'm not sure how I could live with myself after getting bent over so hard by a school administrator of all people.

The author (seemingly not scott) seems absolutely deranged.

The article too gave me some "Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People" vibes. The author mentioned that:

In practice my oldest daughter got four years of learning about the basic ideas of Martin Luther King Junior and Rosa Parks, a rough understanding that some people are non-binary, and a great deal of anxiety every time I left the water running while I was brushing my teeth.

I wonder how or from where else the daughter's anxious personality might had been acquired?

Seeing the hoops that the first private school made them jump through just to get their kids in, the headmistress could well afford to have the attitude "we fire you, you don't quit" towards the parents. Let them take their kid out and leave, that just opens up a gap for the next affluent, anxious, and aspirational parents on the waiting list to get their little budding genius in. Demand definitely outstripped supply, even at that level of fees.

Honestly, aside from the non binary thing, this basically reads what I vaguely learned at that age in the 90’s.

It took me into my 20’s to think about that the water I use here has no effect on the Chinese (why not African??) kids with no water.

It took me into my 20’s to think about that the water I use here has no effect on the Chinese (why not African??) kids with no water.

I assumed he was in California or something, which is adjacent to a desert. My mother let me play with a hose and sandpile as a kid, and the canals are very robust, but driving through, say, San Diego to Phoenix is weird, and the water system is highly engineered.

What the fuck, your kid is in fourth grade!!! She should be playing in the woods with other kids not training to get into a feeder school like it's the olympics!

That's the Elite Human Capital route to success, and why the likes of us are too normie to ever be worth the time of day from Richard Hanania 😁 Reading articles by Freddie deBoer from his time in NY, it gets even more insane: you have to get your kid into the right kindergarten so you and your spouse train the kid like you're stuffing a Strasbourg goose prepping them to pass the entrance exams while both of you cultivate the right connections and present yourselves as the 'right kind of parents'.

You need to get into the right kindergarten to get into the right school to get into the right high school to get into the right college so they will network with the right connections and get into the right careers. Or else their entire lives will be failures.

At least in England, they were upfront about the model of getting into Eton or other public school -> Oxbridge -> civil service career, the professions, or inherit Papa's estate.

"We're smart and successful, our kids are gonna be smart and successful, that means making sure they get into the right schools which will advance their learning on the time-table we think most efficient, you don't get to be the 1% just by lollygagging". The parents would die rather than acknowledge the snobbery, because they've been brainwashed in their turn that this is all about merit: they were smart and bored in school, why didn't the mean ole teachers let them learn what they wanted to learn how they wanted to learn at the pace they wanted to learn, they're going to do better by their own kids.

The fact that achieving this meritorious path means you have to have the spare resources to throw around 40k per kid and be able to quit your job(s), move across the country, and be pretty certain of walking into a similar well-paying job just for a school is swept under the carpet. No, it's all about pure intelligence and enabling kids to learn without clutter of traditional education system.

I've noticed this blue tribe insane striver culture, like white orientals. I feel bad for their children and strongly believe the striving doesn't actually do anything. But at the end of the day, it is the default response to a hyper-credentialist culture with overproduced elites(see also, oriental countries). I... don't actually know what we can do about it, other than to let the blue tribe shrivel up and die from the low fertility this produces.

strongly believe the striving doesn't actually do anything.

I'm reminded of Scott's old homeschooling post where, iirc, he proposes that in early childhood there's just an underlying brain maturity process that can't be meaningfully accelerated toward basic educational attainments, such that you could either spend every day from, say, age 5 to 7 strenuously trying to teach a kid how to read and do arithmetic before their brain is ready for it, or you could spend those years doing basically anything else and by the time they're 7 they'll pick up reading and arithmetic easily in a couple of weeks. (Some version of this has to be true -- you can't teach a baby to read).

I was "unschooled" through elementary age myself and I don't think I learned to read til I was 8, but when I did it barely required any instruction and I was reading at a college level by 12, possibly because I hadn't learned to resent the attempt.

So much of this striving for early acceleration is probably pushing rope, physiologically, putting in 10x the effort to get to (at best) the same result marginally faster.

I was about four and a half when I went to school (no such thing as kindergarten in my day) and I was able to read. Learned at home, can't even remember learning so I can't brag about "I was two (or three) when I learned to read". That wasn't a sign of me being particularly smart, it was (a) the result of freaky genes on the paternal family side where everyone is an early reader, for some unknown reason (possibly bound up with the strongly suspected but not formally diagnosed autism spectrum/Aspergers we got going on as well through the generations) and (b) my maternal grandmother lived with us and she did a lot of the childminding of infant me, and what is a bedbound old woman going to do with a two year old but start them on the alphabet etc.?

All that means that I have no idea what the optimum age for learning to read is, or what is the best method for teaching reading, but there's definitely a range between "will pick up reading anyhow be it late or early" and "need to be taught or will fall behind" where school is useful.

From the public school's perspective, the problem is that there are all these families where the parents don't read, and would like their kids to read better than they do, but don't necessarily do things like reading in front of their kids, making the whole thing much more difficult and tedious. And there are also kids with various processing differences, who have to be taught very concretely, but English is a bit odd phonetically, it takes up a lot of memory space, so they have to drill a lot.

My daughter just turned six, and has started spontaneously spelling things out loud. She'll say "that's good" and try to spell out the "g-o-o-d" part. I'll tell her the right spelling if necessary. This is not something I suggested, she seems to just want to do it, as a developmental thing. I remember being a teenager and was reading more than I was talking, so my internal monologue contained spelling and punctuation. But that's because my parents had a bunch of curated books in there house, and had designated quiet reading time because they actually wanted to read themselves, which a lot of kids don't have and the schools (not Alpha school, of course) are always trying and struggling to replicate that.

From the public school's perspective, the problem is that there are all these families where the parents don't read, and would like their kids to read better than they do, but don't necessarily do things like reading in front of their kids, making the whole thing much more difficult and tedious. And there are also kids with various processing differences, who have to be taught very concretely, but English is a bit odd phonetically, it takes up a lot of memory space, so they have to drill a lot

Oh gosh yes. Reading aloud fluently and easily, you need to practice that, and the best way in school still is "have everyone read out loud in class and take turns reading several paragraphs". If there's no reading at home, and no practice with books, that's hard to pick up (having said that, my parents never read bedtime stories to us, but my father used to tell us stories every night). You can only do so much in school, and if it's not happening at home, then what you get at school is even more vital.

Oh gosh yes. Reading aloud fluently and easily, you need to practice that, and the best way in school still is "have everyone read out loud in class and take turns reading several paragraphs". If there's no reading at home, and no practice with books, that's hard to pick up (having said that, my parents never read bedtime stories to us, but my father used to tell us stories every night). You can only do so much in school, and if it's not happening at home, then what you get at school is even more vital.

I think people fret far too much about reading happening at home. Maybe there are some edge cases where mom reading bedtime story helps out, but the biggest issue still seems to me happening when that sperm hits that egg, and sometimes what happened during the 9 months of pregnancy. My son just like, looks at books himself. He can't read (to my knowledge there is no such thing as a kid as young as him doing so), but he recites them on his own. I can hear him in the other room "reading" books to himself. I suppose in a world totally devoid of reading at home he couldn't do THAT, but he'd be doing some other thing that smart kids do. He'd be inventing his own stories (he also does this), he be practicing whatever new thing he discovered (like skipping about a month ago). The difference in self-play amongst kids is pretty vast. The kids that cant read at 12 never wanted to read, and reading to them for a lot of their lives is akin to torture.

The kids that cant read at 12 never wanted to read, and reading to them for a lot of their lives is akin to torture

What should the system formerly devoted to education, but definitely committed to keeping kids off the street do with them? A brief look at https://nces.ed.gov suggests it's something like 30% of people are below literacy level 2 (of 5).

Lots of running.

If you read The Idea Factory with a somewhat critical eye you can easily see why Bell labs isn't happening now, and can't happen in the near future. Sure, some of their best guys went to MIT, but that was when you got into MIT by like taking a train there then passing an entrance exam. None of this extra-curricular and AP maxxing nonsense. But many of the main figures also just were like paperboys who were the small town genius and went to a random engineering school nearby. At some point, however, determining actual merit, talent, and skill became unfashionable for academics and hiring managers so they outsourced to boring metrics and racial adjustments.

Asian tiger parent culture is different due to bugman conformalism. They send their kids to extra lessons to get ahead in public school, the same one normal kids go to. Not this abomination that this parent is getting into.

Asian tiger parent culture is different due to bugman conformalism

I can’t parse this sentence. Asian culture is more conforming, so their children go to public instead of private schools? Weird tech-nerds are more non-conforming? I don’t know what bugmen are.

"Bugman" in this sense is meant to evoke eusocial insects, like ants and bees; the implication is that Asians, though hard-working, are highly conformist. The nail that sticks out gets hammered down and all that.

Probably genetic; East Asian cultures have a history of collective punishment that is largely absent from the West, so if you fucked up, you didn't just get yourself killed, but your whole family; that strongly selects for conformist genes.

Bryan Caplan would not have lasted five minutes in ancient China or feudal Japan.

I'm not sure I have this right as I'm only going by impressions picked up online at third-hand, but there seems to be the reverse idea about Asian universities: what we would call the state ones are considered the high-value, high-class colleges you want your kids to get into (the equivalent of MIT and the Ivies), going to a private university is considered a step down (think "small liberal arts college in the middle of nowhere versus an Ivy League college").

So you grind grind grind to get into the right university to get the degree that will get you into the handful of 'acceptable' large business combines where you grind grind grind to get on the executive path or else you're just an 'office worker' which is a failure.

There is this notion of being an elite/belonging to the elite, and elite seems to mean "from a wealthy family, went to the right university, got into Big Corp and am on the executive promotion track".

Let the more informed correct me, please!

This is the case in germany as well for the most part, though it's as always more complicated. For the state universities, there are very few shortcuts, top degrees are kept highly selected & small, and it's free to boot - you just have to be good enough. The private universities, meanwhile, have the reputation that anyone can just buy their way in. It's gotten even harder for them since there's lots of new, easy-to-get degrees even in state universities nowadays. But most people know which are which, so they're only worth it if you can't get anything else.

All bugman references aside, I think the point is that Asian societies are more conformist, so everyone sends their children to the same (public) schools and then quietly to cram school out of sight.

Weird tech nerds are more likely to brag about sending their children to an experimental school, whereas in Japan this is kind of like saying ‘I’m an enemy of society and I don’t want my children to be brought up in the normal way’. There are special schools for diplomats’ children etc. but not enough to matter at scale.

You are not wildly off, but this is an exaggeration. There are many private schools at the secondary level in Japan. They cost more and in general may have a higher academic standard. Their accreditation is only relevant in terms of what they may prepare students to expect in the college entrance exam. In some cases these private high schools have International Baccalaureate programs, etc. As for university, the highest ranked schools are public (Tokyo, Kyoto, Kobe, etc.) But any kid from any high school, public or private, who can pass the entrance exam can get in. This, as you say, is the purpose of cram schools at the high school level.

Re: private schools, would I be right in saying that most of them are grandfathered in? Particularly thinking of the Catholic schools.

For any school in Japan, if a kid can pass the entrance exam (these can begin as early as junior high) he or she can get in. There is a 推薦 / suisen or recommendation-based or so-called "escalator" system as well for kids who begin school in, say, Takagi Goodschool elementary--they will probably then go to Takagi Goodschool JHS, HS, and even university if there is a TG University (sometimes the Takagi Goodschool is associated with a different university and is a feeder school for that one.)

If I am understanding your question correctly, yes, some children who are legacy entrants (whose parents or whatever went to Takagi Goodschool) will go there as well. But as I say, any kid can go there if they pass the entrance test. Still, you will find that some suisen students are exempted from what are sometimes considerably difficult tests (because they are athletes or demonstrate some other skill, or have a very good recommendation from someone at their high school who is a known and respected quantity.) This results in a lot of students who got in via social standing/parental influence/hereditary reasons and then some who are just really smart and/or know how to study for tests.

Not to get too much into it, but Japan has a system where low level students are filtered very early in a way that doesn't seem to happen in the US, at least not how I understood it as a kid. Here, a kid who has no real academic skill will be counseled, channeled into a JH school or then HS where none of the kids are really so academic, and they will focus on sports or trades or whatever, or be pushed to universities or junior colleges or 専門学校 senmon gakko (vocational schools). Of course some do fall through the cracks and become delinquents or just move into something else. Students can opt out as young as 15 (and some do, if they have no parent pushing them to continue.)

I don't know much about specifically Catholic schools, though, so there very well may be something going on there that I am not aware of.

I... don't actually know what we can do about it, other than to let the blue tribe shrivel up and die from the low fertility this produces.

Considering this guy has three kids, this plan isn't panning out in this case.

I'm immediately skeptical of this whole thing because they are using DUOLINGO of all things for language learning. You're much better off doing something like dreaming Spanish + Anki and/or paying a talented SL teacher to do comprehensible input for younger kids then add in YouTube/Graded readers. Duolingo is okay I guess for the really basic stages of language learning, but it quickly veers off into territory that is IMO not useful (way too many reps of vocabulary that undermines the spaced repetition, forced translation, early output). I've learned far more Spanish (and even Italian) through reading+Anki then I ever learned doing Dutch Duolingo.

To be fair, I wouldn't expect to learn that much Spanish from Dutch Duolingo.

It's tragic the entire article is derailed by people hyperfixating on this one bit.

DUOLINGO

An Alpha School guy replied in the comments and said "We agree that Duolingo doesn’t work. The students wanted to try it last year at GT School for various reasons, but it’s not part of the platform."

Forget the Duolingo. It looks like most of the "teaching" this school does is plopping the kids in front of computer education modules that give them feedback on the problems. One wonders why they need "guides" who make 100k a year to not teach them. Presumably the effect of a good teacher is proportional to the amount of teaching they actually do.

Teaching involves a lot of grunt work that teachers don’t necessarily enjoy doing - testing vocabulary etc. It also means being able to identify when a concept in the child’s head is subtly twisted and swooping in to correct it. I imagine flashcard software does the former and the ‘guides’ the latter.

You're much better taking a conventional Spanish class with grammar and homework and taking field trips to the taqueria.

Wtf my spanish class never had field trips to the taqueria

I took years of public school Spanish class. In one class we left school and walked to a local taqueria.

The best part about being a grown-up is that any time you want can be a field trip to the taqueria!

Thats why you dont speak spanish.

The only thing I remember about elementary (homeschool co-op) Spanish class is making hot chocolate with the hand carved mixer and singing a chocolate song in Spanish.

So inauthentic; if you're doing that you should be singing in Nahuatl.

Above the pale stale Dodgers’ objections, a Stunning and Brave latinx #ChicaJefa recently sang the National Anthem in support of undocumented citizens, sticking it to gringos and their Eurocentric linguistic imperialism by singing in Spanish instead of English.

Call me a dirt poor europrole, but I would rather get $480K (plus interest/stock increases) when turning 18 years old, instead of my parents paying half a million for Duolingo.

It tickles the mind though how education could be disrupted/advanced by modern tech.

Or maybe it is not so important after all? One comment on the blog claimed that Finland and Japan have similar PISA scores, despite Japan/Asia being famous for forcing children to grind obscene hours for school.

"Education" can't be disrupted by modern tech because learning is only kind of adjacent to it. The thing called education is mostly signaling + childcare. The ACX OP even basically admits he is paying for segregation.

How much of the Asian academic system is spent on teaching/necessary repetition of core subjects, as opposed to ridiculous grinding scoremaxx training on standardized tests? Asian countries are rather famous for this.

PISA is itself a standardized test though. Admittedly it's low-stakes for individual students since it isn't part of your grade, so you could hypothetically have a model where South Koreans are "studying for the test" which helps them on that individual standardized test but if they were spending that time on more holistic learning it would be dramatically more effective on standardized tests they haven't bothered to study for, but I'm dubious. It's not like students know what is going to be on the test that exactly. Or at least I assume not, I've never actually looked into the practice tests that "cram schools"/hagwons have.

Looking at actual PISA scores I assume he's talking about 2018, in 2022 there's more of a gap since Finland's score dropped by 74 and South Korea's rose by 11.

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scores-by-country

I haven't looked into how much of this can be explained by changing racial demographics. A quick search finds this page saying it can't be explained by that because only 7% of Finnish students are immigrants, but that only includes 1st and 2nd generation immigrants. Actual racial data would make things easier, I know the U.S. collects racial data for PISA tests, allowing this interesting chart, but Finland might not. In any case that last chart also shows U.S. whites matching South Koreans, which seems to support the point that either all those extra hours don't make much of a difference to PISA scores or they're doing something very wrong to render them ineffective. Come to think of it I wonder if anyone in those east-asian countries has done randomized control studies on the effects of cram-school enrollment.

Finland collects fairly granular data on languages spoken in Finland, which are often used as a proxy for "foreignness". Here's a table with the numbers of approximately school age children by language family, showing that a large majority continues to be Finno-Ugric speakers and the next largest groups are Germanic speakers (including Finland-Swedes) and Slavic speakers (including recent Ukrainian refugees).

this interesting chart,

Huh, it's kind of funny seeing "US two or more races" way up there. I wouldn't rule out there being some difference in IQ-mediating genes between races because it would be extremely weird if there was net zero selection effects on intelligence everywhere, but I don't believe any current measure of estimating racial IQ differences is even close to accurate because nutrition + education + early childhood stability are known, massive confounds. That being said, overperformance of multiracial students would be consistent with heterozygote advantage. Someone on the motte once suggested breeding brahmins and Ashkenazi's to see what would happen and I have to admit that it would be the funniest possible twist if actually mass immigration was because some secret society of benevolent galaxy-brained racists decided to take the idea of eugenicizing their way to peak human performance seriously, instead of constraining themselves to nazi dog show fanatic inbreeding retardation.

That being said, overperformance of multiracial students would be consistent with heterozygote advantage.

If there was an effect like that it should be apparent in admixture studies on IQ, like this one on european/african admixture. Instead performance just scaled with percentage european ancestry.

I think the PISA results would mostly just reflect the specific racial composition, where the majority of multiracial-identifying people in the U.S. are "White and Hispanic" and often have little or no genetic difference from the people identifying as just "White". Looking at this Wikipedia page 13.8% of multiracial people identify as black and something else. If we assume they have 40% black ancestry (since regular African-Americans average 80% black ancestry), then by comparison the U.S. is 14.4% black so people who identify as multiracial have half as much black ancestry as the average American. There's also 7.2% of multiracial people who identify as "White and Native American", but most people who identify that way have much less than 50% Native ancestry. 6.1% identify with 3+ races, but that shouldn't shift aggregate ancestry that much. Since biracial self-identification is unreliable, there could also be a bias where more intelligent families are more aware of their family history or more likely to belong to communities where biracial identification is high-status.

tbh that's part of why I don't believe in that current data adequately demonstrates the HBD thesis. If the HBD people are right about selective pressures leading to genetic differences we should expect heterozygote advantage to show up, but it doesn't. A -> means !B -> !A and all that. That's why I gave that whole list of disclaimers before I actually got into discussing the interesting-but-likely-false bit. But it would be fascinating, wouldn't it? My dad recently did a massive study of [telling you the crop might tell you my identity] genetics and it involved hybridizing modern elite genomes with a massive quantity of heirloom varieties from a seed bank to try and find useful alleles that were previously outbred while trying to look for local minima. If anyone wants to actually take HBD seriously they should be thinking of what an equivalent project looks like for humans, not trying to create a single inbred variety on the basis of... ???skin color???

Barring the AI apocalypse Americans will eventually evolve to be darker over large timespans anyways-- people living at our latitude always do. Sunscreen and indoor time will slow the selection effect but not eliminate it entirely.

That being said, overperformance of multiracial students would be consistent with heterozygote advantage.

I suspect that it's some amount of selection bias as well. Specifically, being multi-racial is higher class than being single-race, so people with X% of their genes from one race and Y% from another would answer differently on the survey based on their class.

I don't believe any current measure of estimating racial IQ differences is even close to accurate because nutrition + education + early childhood stability are known, massive confounds.

Ah yes, those socioeconomic factors that everyone "know[s]" are "massive." Despite the hate facts that racist neo-Nazis like to spread (such as the PISA score graph with US broken out by race), everyone knows childhood deprivation can explain those outcomes. That's why anyone who's walked around the US and Vietnam can tell you how thin US black kids are and how fat Vietnamese kids are, and why US blacks and whites of the same SES background perform similarly on standardized tests.

Except the data inconveniently shows that "high socioeconomic status (SES) blacks do no better (and often worse) than low SES whites, whether measured by their parents’ income or their parents’ educational credentials," and the pattern is even more drastic between blacks and Asians. This is peskily consistent with the HBD hypothesis, and peskily inconsistent with the blank slatist hypothesis. Bonus: A similar phenomenon holds for homicide rates.

I would also not get too excited about interpreting "two or more races" underperforming whites (and moreso Asians) as evidence in favor of hybrid vigor and a desire to pwn the racists—since, for example, "two or more races" contains Asian-white mixes. It doesn't take much outbreeding to guard against inbreeding, as mutational load decreases sublinearly with effective population size, something along the order of square root off the top of my head.

Ah yes, those socioeconomic factors that everyone "know[s]" are "massive."

We do, in fact, know empirically that SES affects IQ. You can't refute that just by using scare quotes.

thin US black kids are and how fat Vietnamese kids are

Childhood nutrition is a lot more complex than "calories in, IQ out." Culturally variable diets also impact development, and the western diet--particularly concentrated in poor westerners, including blacks-- is particularly bad. Plus, diet has epigenetic effects. It's not enough for your parents to be well-fed; relative to your genetics, you will grow up stunted if your grandparents weren't well fed.

Except the data inconveniently shows that "high socioeconomic status (SES) blacks do no better (and often worse) than low SES whites, whether measured by their parents’ income or their parents’ educational credentials,"

That exact blogpost proves that SES is a confound-- you can see the line going up for higher SES in blacks. Given the explicit and abundant evidence of existing confounds, the null hypothesis shouldn't be "assume blank-slatism by default, and everything we can't explicitly point to as coming from confounds must be because of genetics."

I would also not get too excited about interpreting "two or more races" underperforming whites (and moreso Asians) as evidence in favor of hybrid vigor and a desire to pwn the racists—since, for example, "two or more races" contains Asian-white mixes. It doesn't take much outbreeding to guard against inbreeding, as mutational load decreases sublinearly with effective population size, something along the order of square root off the top of my head.

To be clear, the fact that evidence for hybrid vigor is shaky is evidence against genetic differences in racial IQ. If you'll let me use symbolic logic...

A: There exist race-based differences in genes that code for IQ B: When genetically distinct populations hybridize, hybrid vigor results. C: We observe hybrid vigor

A + B ⇒ C

So ¬C ⇒ ¬(A + B)

Therefore if C is false and B is true, that implies ¬A.

I'm aware that the following could be used as an argument against B:

It doesn't take much outbreeding to guard against inbreeding, as mutational load decreases sublinearly with effective population size,

But also, I'm having hard time squaring that with the standard HBD viewpoint where racial differences in IQ are due to differential selection effects-- which presumably lead to roughly equal levels of mutational load overall (barring particularly inbred populations). If racial differences in IQ do exist, it would be as the result of selection for alleles (and novel mutations) that optimize for intelligence at the cost of some other trait, like the Ashkenazi Gaucher disease thing, but still bounded by other adaptions to local climate and food variations that sacrifice IQ for survivability in other ways. That's exactly the sort of thing that should cause intra-race susceptibility to heterosis as a function of masking deleterious alleles.

We do, in fact, know empirically that SES affects IQ. You can't refute that just by using scare quotes.

The established correlation between SES and IQ is not proven to be causal. You can't make it up by emphasizing word "empirically". SES is not a confounder because there are genetic differences in SES. Higher IQ allows for person to have upwards mobility and trasmit their higher IQ genotypes to their children. This process has been run many times.

"IQ" of 2 year children in these plots is ludicrous. Certainly it does not measure same thing at 2 yo as it does for 16 yos. People may have different IQ trajectories in childhood and only final thing is what matters.

that optimize for intelligence at the cost of some other trait, like the Ashkenazi Gaucher disease thing

Blacks mature faster than whites, run faster, have better color vision and immune systems. Maybe smell either.

The established correlation between SES and IQ is not proven to be causal.

And the correlation between genetics and IQ has? Nobody's running randomized control trails with polygenically screened embryos. We're at least as confident that SES affects intelligence as we are that any particular gene marker of intelligence does. Sure, SES effects genetics too, but it's not like causality is required to be unidirectional.

Blacks mature faster than whites, run faster, have better color vision and immune systems

Even if these claims are true, and true because of specifically genetic factors, It's not clear to me at all that these things should result in tradeoffs. Faster maturation seems like it would select for greater learning speed; color vision for visual pattern analysis; faster running for spatial intelligence. Maybe I'm wrong-- but either way, it's an empirical question that the current data can't resolve. That's ultimately my big problem with modern race-based intelligence research: that the data is too fuzzy, and that there are too many empirical questions left unanswered. At this point I simply can't reject the null hypothesis and accept that the HBD racial intelligence rankings accurately reflect reality.

More comments

Huh, it's kind of funny seeing "US two or more races" way up there

I'd assume it's a selection effect. Think Amy Chua the Tiger Mother marrying a Jewish law school professor. Assortive mating is being driven by higher education and people moving to cities. Cities and colleges are both more racially diverse than towns/neighbourhoods.

Exactly. Korean tests are, by their very nature, actually not good at assessing intelligence. It's all multiple choice. You can't do writing as multiple choice, you need an essay response to assess real comprehension. But if there's an essay then it becomes subjective and open to endless appeals and lawyering, whereas multiple choice is consistent, uniform and totally fair. Just get the right answer loser!

I remember having to study the 'theme' of 'belonging' in some awful book English teachers probably think is profound. That did not help me understand or wield English any better. The only way to get better is to read and write widely, not obsessively study a single text at 10x the intensity of what I was doing just because it's on the test.

The preliminary rounds of the British Mathematical Olympiad are multiple choice. The later rounds move to written solutions because some of the questions require you to come up with a formal proof.

The multiple choice sections of the science O-levels (the more demanding age-16 qualification that was dumbed down and replaced by GCSE) were the first part to go because they were notoriously the hardest part of the paper.

The LSAT reading comprehension questions, which are notoriously effective at actually testing understanding, are multiple choice.

You absolutely can assess intelligence, real comprehension, ability to apply knowledge etc. with a well-designed multiple choice test. What you can't assess is the ability to make arguments or tell stories. A subject like history has to be tested by essay writing because the skill history teaches is about is making arguments. It would be an interesting exercise to replace one-third to one-half of a history exam with a multiple choice test asking LSAT-style questions about a set of primary documents and a (real or cod) extract from a piece of modern historiography drawing conclusions from them. I think it could be even harder than "write 3 essays in 3 hours with a single page of printed notes and no electronic devices".

To add to these examples, in later rounds of the US physician licensing examination (USMLE Step 3) they will sometimes ask questions which are designed to be novel - no way you know this specific fact or have seen it in a board prep resource. You are then asked to determine what would be the most likely answer based off of your understanding of the underlying biology and so on.

These are hard to do so you don't see too many of them, but it is possible.

Not much of a comment on the rest of your post- I broadly pretty much agree and appreciate the exponentiation on my point- but I think a huge supermajority of Finnish immigrants are very recent, so all of them are first or second gen.

I suppose it's possible that there was some large Sami-Finn fertility differential that opened up exactly the right time ago, but my guess is that the Sami don't have scores that much lower than the Finnish majority anyways. My guess would be changing teaching practices with bad results, but I don't think we have the data to really tell.

this interesting chart

I don't think this really means anything. It certainly doesn't imply that 'actually the US education system is a good as X's'. If you let all the other countries filter out their historic underclass then they'd probably go up as well. Whatever reason you ascribe that underclass status to, it has to be at least partly self-reinforcing a la Ogbu.

I have a genuine question- most of continental Europe uses a three tier education system with kids destined for college, trade school, and unskilled labour literally in different schools. Do European countries administer the PISA test to all levels of school or only the gymnasia? If the latter, it would have much the same effect as only testing middle class white kids in the US.

The school in question costs $40,000/year, and the writer sent three children there last year.

Yeah, I'm hoping that is the total for all three and not 40K each because holy crap. Mind you, the description of the private school they were attending before the parents decided to up sticks and move lock, stock and barrel to Austin also had me going holy crap, this should be the school anthem. (Knowing the original makes the Horrible Histories version even more enjoyable, though I digress).

The fact that this guy is able to up sticks, move across the country, and enrol three kids in a private fee-paying school means that once again, this is something that probably works very well for smart (see the description of the hoops his kids had to jump through to get into the first private school) kids of well-off families who will have support from interested and involved parents, and the genetic and environmental advantages of the same. That's why I went "holy crap" about the private school, because creaming off the best of the best and ensuring you don't have the dummies, the average, and the troublemakers - yeah, you could just stick the kids in the library and leave them to their own devices and they'll come out okay.

Small classroom numbers and highly motivated teachers? Yeah, once again: skim off the good young teachers as soon as they finish teacher training, promise them (reasonably) good salaries and conditions plus they will not be running the risk of getting stabbed in the face for telling a kid to get off their iPhone in class, plus they get freebies like going on ski trips in order to supervise the kids and of course you get them before they're burned out and they're still full of enthusiasm and optimism about education.

How well this Alpha scales up (or down) is something I'm fascinated to know - there's mention of trying it on kids from deprived backgrounds:

I also heard that around this time Alpha began testing the 2-hour learning platform at a facility for juvenile delinquents in Florida. I heard that from one individual who was not directly involved and I have not found any written documentation on it, so unclear if it worked, it was a one off, or if it even happened.

That is where the rubber will meet the road about "is this a genuinely innovative approach to education that will enable kids to learn more, learn faster, and learn more deeply?" versus "is this something that is about a bunch of very smart kids from well-off families who, let's face it, would do equally well if left in a field supervised by wolves?" and the fact that the author seems to have heard nothing more about it would lead me to believe "the success comes because we cherry-pick really smart kids and put them into a specialised environment of nearly 1:1 tutoring".

In the end, I had to laugh that even the Alpha programme ended up re-inventing school. They have teachers, even if renamed "guides". The selling-point of "only 2 hours per day to learn all they need!" turns out to be "and then we fill up the afternoon with the socialisation, practical subjects, etc." part of education.

I hope it works out for his kids, but this sounds more like "yet another Bright Idea that doesn't scale up" in the field of educational reform. The problem is not "does this work for smart kids from motivated families", the problem is "so now does it work for less able kids from families that don't give a damn so long as the brats are taken off their hands for six hours a day".

EDIT: I'm also curious about this bit:

Could educational assistants do what the Brazilian on call tutors are doing?

So maybe they have a handful of very well-paid "guides" but the real teaching is being done on the cheap by call centre tutors in Brazil? Because why would you have the kids ringing someone in Brazil if they have problems with the material, rather than the guides on site? This, on the face of it, seems to be the way they can afford to pay the "guides" much more than if they were public school teachers - less of them, the real work being done by cheaper outsourced labour.

I'm hoping that is the total for all three and not 40K each because holy crap.

Without looking this up, how much do you think the state spends per kid in a public school in a major but not very high cost of living city?

California I would say is probably into the 28-35k range right now. How insanely expensive public school is is a major blind spot for most people I encounter.

Another interesting comment from the Substack:

Jessica Lopez

As a parent of 3 kids from the Brownsville Campus I can tell you this model does not work for EVERYONE. There are some commonalities among their success stories and that is income and background. 85% of the Low SES students from the Brownsville Campus that started at the school in 2022 are no longer there and its not due to lack of "motivation" or ability. This is a good option for those whom its model is targeting but not a silver bullet as replacement for our current failing educational system.

There are a lot of reasons families struggled with this model. Reasons the school never addressed, likely because they were too busy with their marketing machine. After reading this article, it’s hard not to conclude that income and background played a major role in how families experienced ALPHA. They’re used to serving families who can relocate across the country and afford $40,000 per child to “try out” a revolutionary school. But that’s not who we are. We’re families living paycheck to paycheck, with different life experiences and different starting points. That doesn’t mean our kids weren’t capable of success, far from it! It just means they had to work twice as hard to adapt to ALPHA’s rigid model.

This article brings up a lot of valid concerns, but I saw firsthand how much more deeply these issues impacted kids from our background, especially around the concept of "motivation." and their buggy tech.

N=3 and all, but that isn't promising for their method scaling any time soon.

Yeah, I think so. At the very least, if the school is bringing the kids on ski trips, that presupposes the parents can pay for the ski trips. If they can't, and the ski trips are treated as part of the curriculum about learning something, then the low-income kids are going to lose out on that 'learning experience'. The ordinary school day is structured to mesh at least some way with the parental work days, if the Alpha school means parents can't drop them off early/pick them up late, or other reasons, that's not going to work out in the long term.

Schools are expected to do a ton more than simply teaching, and the home environments of the kids also has a heavy influence on how well they do. Alpha and the other suggested fixes work best for those who are "I hated school, I was too smart and was held back" and who now have smart kids and plenty of money to burn on "send them to a programme that will accelerate their learning".

What happens after that, though? So now you have a fourteen year old who has completed the school requirements up to age eighteen and can graduate four years early. Maybe they get into college four years early. But now they're fourteen on a campus with eighteen year olds who are theoretically their peers, and unless there is someone there to act in loco parentis they may not cope well.

What do you do with the extra four years? Go into a job? Start your own business? Maybe some of the genius fourteen year olds will do that. Do your college learning at home? The example of "paying the kids to learn" with the tokens as per the review doesn't reassure me about that, because it seems the kids didn't want to explore their own learning during summer holidays and free time, they wanted to do it in school time to earn the tokens.

Smart kids from well-off families is where the 'fixes' work and if the parents demand them, then there will always be an educational entrepreneur revolutionary with the latest fix, but it's never going to scale for the average kids from low income backgrounds.

Frankly I've never understood the argument for early graduation as "success". Or even skipping so many early-level college courses. To some extent I understand this, as time in college = money spent, but if you spend less than 3 years doing your undergrad, part of me wonders if that's a partial waste, because as the pop psych things says, your brain isn't fully developed until 21 (I know to the extent this is accurate it's more like important growth tapers off nearer to 25 but still)... If you're already graduated by 21, maybe you missed out on something? Plus, as we all know, the skills/knowhow is only half the benefit. While we definitely don't want schools to become purely a social/life experience, the networks and friendships you gain are surely important. Too much acceleration only weakens these.

On the other hand yes we know that even a 15 year old historically is plenty capable of working on something important, even if it's more of an apprenticeship, so sure you can accelerate. Part of me wonders if we should really be experimenting with some other part-time supplement in those years for youth besides pure traditional educational attainment. I'm not sure exactly what that would be.

I think this is just your brain on the system. The system says you should graduate high school at approximately 18 years of age, then spend 4 years getting drunk and sometimes doing coursework, then go out into the workplace.

This system "works" because it is highly subsidized, and pleased the clients. Those being the 18-22 year olds who get to party, the professors who get to be paid to be lecherous, and the companies who get to externalize some of the costs of on the job training.

The rest of society loses.

But also the losers are the talented who should be done with all this silly fake education at age 16, but instead are subjected to an environment of drugs and booze when they get to campus.

What happens after that, though? So now you have a fourteen year old who has completed the school requirements up to age eighteen and can graduate four years early. Maybe they get into college four years early. But now they're fourteen on a campus with eighteen year olds who are theoretically their peers, and unless there is someone there to act in loco parentis they may not cope well.

If I were managing a school like this, I’d send the kid to the local community college with night school classes and have them start farming up two years worth of college credits and do something like productive wage labor on the side to drag things out. Possibly I’d see how challenging it would be to get my own school thus accredited.

At 18, apply to a four-year with two years of credit and plan to graduate at 20, which is not that far off from the larger cohort and is a fine time to go for the first rung of a white-collar job. Most American four-years permit this. It’s something I did myself, with the ages shifted around somewhat (I got my two years of credit while working starting at 18, and went to an ordinary high school).

Maybe they get into college four years early. But now they're fourteen on a campus with eighteen year olds who are theoretically their peers, and unless there is someone there to act in loco parentis they may not cope well.

Maybe someone can start a college that only accepts 14-year-olds (but otherwise has the same admission standards as regular colleges).

Some specifics would be nice. At the moment it sounds like every other complaint made by parents when their children don’t have much ability.

Agreed. Alpha et. al. need to come out and own their model as not being suitable for the average kid. Lead with the fact that it is designed to turn the top 5% of children into Überkinder and damn the consequences...

Lead with the fact that it is designed to turn the top 5% of children into Überkinder

It's American, so they can't. Some of the wealthy striving Blue Tribe parents that these programmes are intended for may, indeed, be one or two generations away from the horny-handed sons of toil, so if they're trying to attract the newly wealthy through tech jobs sector, they can't be overtly snobby. The old money upper class already have their own snobby schools, as the review notes:

How do Alpha’s MAP score improvements compare to other selective private schools across the country?
This is an important question for some parents. It is great if you can expect your 5th grader to advance 2.6x faster than they would at the local public school, but if you are planning to spend $40,000/year to send him to Alpha, your alternative is likely not the local public school. And if you are considering moving your family to Austin for the school, your alternative options are places like Horace Mann, Harvard-Westlake, and Lakeside.

So the market for Alpha (and others like it) are the new money, self-made, middle to upper-middle class:

2013 – 2017 | Garage‑School to “Alpha”
MacKenzie Price, then a mortgage broker in Austin, wasn’t impressed by the city’s gifted programs. She invited a small number of neighbourhood kids (including her two) into a makeshift microschool that ran two intense, teacher‑led academic “sprints” each morning, then “life‑skills” projects after lunch. Joe Liemandt — Founder of Trinity Technology,  ESW Capital billionaire and family friend (MacKenzie’s husband worked for him) — kept his own children in conventional private school until he saw the qualitative improvement in the life skills of MacKenzie’s kids. He decided he wanted his kids to join MacKenzie’s but he wanted to take the project to the next level. Sometime around 2014-2017 he joined MacKenzie as a co-founder and started writing checks. Alpha recruited more students and guides and the operation jumped from location-to-location looking for a larger permanent home.

And these people can't be appealed to on snobbery grounds, since as part of the Blue Tribe values they are all about the DEI, fairness, fight racism, and all the rest of the shiny liberal values. Hence why Alpha has been trying to expand out past the "you're smart and well-off, your kids are smart, let us provide a boutique concierge alternative to public education for you" market so the parents who fork out the 40k per kid can soothe their consciences about their privilege:

The success of the 2-hour learning platform was giving the Alpha founders confidence. Liemandt in particular wanted to see if the program had legs beyond the elite group of students being educated in Austin. Alpha’s first external test in August 2022 in Brownsville, TX – a small community on the Mexico border with less than half the per capita income of Austin. SpaceX had recently launched Starbase in Brownsville in 2014 and the employees there were not happy with the existing school options. Someone at SpaceX approached Alpha and asked if they could launch a new campus for their employees. It is unclear if any money changed hands, but when Alpha launched their Brownsville campus (available to SpaceX employees and any other locals who are interested) tuition was only $10,000 (vs $40,000 at the main Austin campus); incoming students trailed national academic standards by over a year. But after nine months on the Alpha program the first cohort of students had caught up and surpassed the national average, and they kept accelerating, achieving an average learning velocity of ~2× the national average (see section four for what that means). Brownsville was Alpha’s attempt to show that their model wasn’t just rich‑kid selection effects.

...I also heard that around this time Alpha began testing the 2-hour learning platform at a facility for juvenile delinquents in Florida. I heard that from one individual who was not directly involved and I have not found any written documentation on it, so unclear if it worked, it was a one off, or if it even happened. But it fits into the pattern of Alpha at this stage: “We know this program works for a specific type of kid. Let’s find out how broadly it is applicable. Can it work for everyone? Is it the solution for learning and education for the world?”

Personally I don't think "kids of employees at SpaceX" is the move out from 'well-off smart parents' that they think, but also the comment from a Brownsville parent seems to show it really does work on "rich-kid selection effects", as does the lack of information about the Florida effort.

So in short: they can't sell it overtly as "this is for the 5% to help you hoist your kid into the 1%", as the 1% already have their established track for their kids and don't need Alpha, even for their dumber scions (see the joke about being the cream of society - rich and thick) and the middle-class strivers don't want to think that they're using their privilege to get an unfair leg up.

Private schools in my area typically cost in the 30s to 40k per year.

So maybe they have a handful of very well-paid "guides" but the real teaching is being done on the cheap by call centre tutors in Brazil? Because why would you have the kids ringing someone in Brazil if they have problems with the material, rather than the guides on site? This, on the face of it, seems to be the way they can afford to pay the "guides" much more than if they were public school teachers - less of them, the real work being done by cheaper outsourced labour.

I found an interesting comment on that by someone involved in the program:

Matt Bateman

The “brazilian teachers” are software developers and academic specialists who work on the curriculum and platform. They run the coaching calls because they are the ones who need to know what’s not working and fix it on the app side. Not sure about Brazil but some of them are indeed remote.

So that's interesting. I guess the hope is to eventually need even less human interaction, it's one of those "training your AI replacement" positions. Which brings me back to: what are the Guides doing in the morning? They've selected for kids who won't disrupt everyone to get actual human interaction, so they presumably aren't conducting classroom management. Are they spending half the day preparing the extracurricular programs?

They must be doing something necessary because if I understand the review correctly, Alpha is burning through money. So they're not going to pay "guides" higher than market salaries for no reason. I think there must be a lot more 'under the hood' traditional teaching going on than the marketing materials make out. Maybe they discovered that hey, you actually do need physical bodies on the premises when you have a bunch of kids running around, no matter how smart and well-behaved the kids are.

eah, you could just stick the kids in the library and leave them to their own devices and they'll come out okay.

Uh, no you couldn't. The kids would spend all their time in one, maybe two, sections and not get a balanced education. That's at best; worst case is they never progress because they get distracted by, say, Terry Pratchett books.

Uh, no you couldn't. The kids would spend all their time in one, maybe two, sections and not get a balanced education. That's at best; worst case is they never progress because they get distracted by, say, Terry Pratchett books.

Absurd statement.

Young enough and the problem is the kids ruin the books and end up soiling themselves.

Older they do fine.

Even older they just have sex in the library.

You could do far worse than Terry Pratchett, IMO.

Yes, you could, but you also won't learn much from reading them, which is the entire point of school.

I'd say I learned quite a lot from my readings of Pratchett. Perhaps not things that would improve my test scores, but in terms of real life relevance almost certainly more important than anything "Distilled Science Schoolbook vol 4" ever taught me.

I liked his books too, but let's face it, it's slop. The most valuable skills you learn in school is grinding and discipline, and reading slop is inherently not suited for that.

I would say Pratchett did so well because his books are almost unique in his genre for clearly not being slop. Agree with him or disagree, but he has a very particular perspective that he’s coming from and you’re going to end up grappling with his philosophy one way or another.

The entire point of school is to trick people into perceiving that you have learned something.

I did unschooling for middle school. I did in fact run out of Terry Pratchett novels before I ran out of time. Then I read ancient Roman and Greek epics. It wasn't balanced, but it was about as good as public middle school.

I went to a Montessori school from first through sixth grade, this wasn’t a completely unschooling experience (in first through third grade they made us learn how to read, learn basic arithmetic, etc. but 3rd - 6th grade is basically as you described, except that in addition to the library we had works (such as a board that used beads for doing long division etc.), which we could choose from). I learned a lot of roman history, played a lot of RuneScape and developed a love of gardening which I have retained to the present day. I had no trouble catching up when I entered a regular middle school for 7th grade (I actually tested a year ahead in my science and math courses). This experience has left me with a very strong belief that kids should be taught how to read, preform basic arithmetic and learn to socialize with others in elementary school and otherwise be left alone.

Reminds me of the old Moldbug quip about socialism working in Iceland because anything would work in Iceland.

For comparison, the average Catholic(best ranked school system in the US) high school tuition nationwide is around $10k, public high schools in the US average around $19k in per student spending, no correlation between spending and outcomes.

For common denominator education, I'd guess $10k a kid is pretty close to the minimum.

In the area I grew up in the Catholic schools at still at 8k per head, and this is a state with heavy regulation of even those. If you had a good regulatory environment I suspect you could get very competent schooling at around the 2-3k per head number.

Only if the schools were subsidized by the parish. If a school had to stand on its own two feet, $3,000 per head wouldn’t be sufficient to cover the costs of teachers’ salaries, staff salaries (janitor, cook, librarian, secretary, etc.), benefits, utilities, maintenance, insurance, books, supplies, equipment, furniture, and so on. You could probably get by with $3,000 a head if you were running some sort of homeschool co-op with no facility costs.

But you don't actually need most of that. 3k would be pretty bare bones. But you really just need 1 paid adult per 30 kids or so. A warehouse style aluminum building would work. Some open fields around it would be fine. One guy should be able to do all the janitorial & maintenance and grounds work. Support staff could be largely outsourced to one of the cheap HR companies. There will be significant upfront costs for supplies, but those can be stretched over 30+ year lifespans for the buildings, desks, etc. And the books can either be bought 2nd hand for cheap or be disposed of entirely based on your choices. Constantly cycling through new textbooks is a choice, and a wasteful one.

Homeschool coops with no facility costs are much cheaper than that.

Or, alternately, they are much more expensive, unless you consider the mother's labor to be completely worthless. If her labor is actually worthless, and the alternative is that she just sits at home watching TV all day, then she probably won't be very good as a homeschool teacher, either.

Apparently Arizona offers about $4,000/child.

Homeschooling moms are already housewives, though. Probably some would be in the corporate world if they sent the kids to public school instead but most of them are otherwise homemakers.

More comments

I suppose a "good regulatory environment" is one where the nuns can teach for cheap, the children can bring their own lunches, and any children who don't do well under those circumstances can go to public school instead at much higher cost to the state. If there are still enough nuns.

If there are still enough nuns.

Therein lies the rub. Also, I’d argue that having a free teaching staff counts as a subsidy from the parish.

public high schools in the US average around $19k in per student spending, no correlation between spending and outcomes.

Is that true across public schools? I've often wondered if the extra funding thrown at Title 1 schools that typically underperform actually makes the correlation negative, but I've never found an actual dataset.

Abbott districts in New Jersey are one of the best sources of data for this. They're funded at (or higher than) the wealthiest districts in the state but still have dismal outcomes:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abbott_district

I think high spending high performance blue states throw the correlation into something too crazy to be a correlation.

June is coming to an end, which means all the most controversial SCOTUS opinions are coming out in the traditional big lump. These opinions are sharply divided, often along ideological lines, with lively dissents and concurrences--pretty enjoyable for a law nerd like me. Relevant to this thread, these cases tend to focus on big culture-war topics like abortion and gender stuff. This week saw the following:

Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic - Abortion. Congress requires States who receive Medicaid funds to, among other things, permit patients to obtain medical assistance from "any qualified provider." South Carolina receives federal Medicaid funding, but excludes Planned Parenthood from its Medicaid program because state law prohibits using public funds for abortion. Planned Parenthood files a section 1983 claim (this is important, IMO) arguing that it is a "qualified provider" and that Congress's Medicaid statute created a federal right for any qualified provider to receive Medicaid funds. The court, with a 6-3 conservative-liberal split, says "no." Gorsuch writes the majority opinion: the "any-qualified-provider" provision of the federal Medicaid statute does not create a right for medical providers to receive Medicaid funding. All it does is specify a condition with which participating States must "substantially comply" in order to receive federal funding. If South Carolina doesn't want to comply, the feds can kick South Carolina out of the Medicaid program, but that's not the same as creating a "right" to Medicaid funds. Section 1983 is only for vindication of a person's federal rights; there is no right for a provider to receive Medicaid funding from a State, so Planned Parenthood doesn't have a valid 1983 claim. Jackson writes the dissent; I didn't really read it carefully, because the majority seems clearly to have the better argument here. Everyone agrees that South Carolina could, if it wanted to, simply reject federal funding altogether. Then nobody in South Carolina would get Medicaid funding, and South Carolina wouldn't have to abide by any of the provisions of the Medicaid statute. It's hard to say that people have an enforceable federal "right" to receive Medicaid funding from a state, when everyone acknowledges that the state has no obligation to participate in the Medicaid system at all.

Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton - Pornography 6-3 conservative opinion, Thomas. First Amendment does not prohibit Texas from requiring age-verification for pornographic websites. Kagan writes the dissent.

Mahmoud v. Taylor - LGBTQ+ Books and Lessons in Schools 6-3 conservative opinion, Alito. Religious students and parents have a constitutional right, under the free exercise clause, to opt-out of pro-LGBTQ+ curricula in public schools. Thomas writes a concurrence. Sotomayor wrote the dissent.

In my opinion, the biggest case today was:

Trump v. CASA, Inc. - Immigration BUT ACTUALLY Federal Court Procedure (sounds boring but is, IMO, super important) 6-3 conservative opinion, Barrett. 3 concurrences! 2 dissents! This is the "birthright citizenship" case: does the Court agree with the Trump administration that some people born on U.S. soil are nevertheless not American citizens? IDK! Because the Court doesn't answer that question. Instead, it addresses whether the lower federal court had the authority to issue a nationwide injunction against the Trump administration's immigration enforcement proceedings. The Court held it did not have that authority. Federal courts can only determine cases and issue binding decisions as to the parties before them, not the country as a whole. The lower court's national injunction is stayed as to any people not among the parties to the suit.

Some are saying the Court "punted" on the birthright citizenship thing, but I think the Court actually addressed a far more important culture-war issue. "Nationwide" or "universal" injunctions have been part of the playbook for activists' (especially progressive activists) lawfare for a long time. The idea is to find some sympathetic plaintiff who would be affected by a statute or executive action you don't like, shop around the whole country until you find a judge who agrees with you, and then get that judge--before the case has even been tried--to indefinitely prevent the government from applying the challenged law/regulation/action to anyone, anywhere in the country. This opinion represents a potentially huge obstacle to progressive activist's attempts to stymie Trump's immigration agenda.

Less interesting cases, IMO:

Gutierrez v. Saenz - Criminal Procedure. A lurid murder case gives rise to a pretty boring dispute about death-row inmates' standing to request post-conviction testing of DNA evidence. I can't really figure out the nuances of the Texas law at issue or the procedural history, but it looks like the Sotomayor-led majority thinks Gutierrez has standing; he has a Fourteenth Amendment liberty interest in the ability to request post-conviction DNA testing, even though the prosecutor apparently has both the right and the express intention to refuse that request in this case. Barrett concurs but chides the majority for "muddying the waters of standing doctrine." Alito, joined by Thomas and Gorsuch, dissents. Thomas, typically, offers a solo dissent on the quixotic ground that the Fourteenth Amendment has been misinterpreted by the Supreme Court since the early twentieth century; in his view, the "liberty" interests protected by the 14A do not include state-created entitlements like Texas' post-conviction DNA testing procedure. My read: SCOTUS lets a death-row inmate file a doomed, pointless post-conviction motion that doesn't have any hope of success but will probably delay his execution for a few more years (Gutierrez was convicted in 1998).

Riley v. Bondi - Immigration/Deportation. Deportation is a hot-button topic right now, but this opinion about filing deadlines and the distinction between claims-processing rules and jurisdictional requirements is too dry for me to get worked up about. Perhaps notable for the fact that Gorsuch broke from the conservative majority to join, in part, Sotomayor's dissent. Pretty boring overall!

There were others, but they don't have as much culture war salience as the above, IMO. I meant to do a longer write-up, a little paragraph for each case, but I'm too tired ... sorry

Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton - Pornography 6-3 conservative opinion, Thomas. First Amendment does not prohibit Texas from requiring age-verification for pornographic websites. Kagan writes the dissent.

Telling a business to do age verification is equivalent to a ban if that will sufficiently impede their business model. Most of the subscription-based porn sites will likely be fine, but I imagine that the legal sites offering free porn will pull out of Texas, which was probably the intent all along.

I wonder how much this would generalize to other unpopular stuff some people say is corrupting the minds of the youth.

  • Reading the motte could certainly be damaging to some minors. I wonder how many people would participate if they had to send a picture of their driving license to the mods first.

  • Pictures of guns will turn our kids into school shooters (I could claim). Tell all the gun manufacturers, gun nuts influencers and gun safety people that they need to put in age verification or pixelate any weapons.

  • Rainbows and LGBT propaganda brainwash kids into being trans (I could claim). Just let any websites which discuss these topics implement age verification.

I would be more sympathetic to the attempt to make the internet kid-friendly if it was not so obviously doomed from the start. The thing is, the internet has been a cesspit of pornography since even before the web was a thing. Pornhub is only the tip of the iceberg, outlawing them will not change a thing. At the very least you would need a Texas-wide firewall which bans 20% of the international websites (and good luck with keeping the filter list up to date).

Either keep kids on a whitelisted tiny sliver of the web (and pray that they do not outsmart your filter) or teach them why it is a bad idea to search for beheading videos or bestiality porn.

Reading the motte could certainly be damaging to some minors. I wonder how many people would participate if they had to send a picture of their driving license to the mods first.

I wouldn't mind, I'd just be looking at my own driving license.

Hmm.. I wonder if there's room for "creative" thinking here. Every new member is automatically promoted to mod status temporarily, verifies their own ID, and then resigns with dignity before becoming a normal participant.

Mindgeek has already pulled out of Texas, supposedly. A coworker told me that pornhub comes up as a form asking him to contact his state rep and a link to a VPN. I'm unwilling to check this myself but I remember reading news articles about it.

This factsheet from <del>Mindgeek</del><ins>Aylo</ins> confirms it.

Medina v. Planned Parenthood South Atlantic - Abortion.

It sounds to me like Congress put a condition on federal Medicaid funding, South Carolina is ignoring it, and the Supreme Court is saying "the federal government can enforce the condition by taking away South Carolina's Medicaid funding" knowing it will not actually do so, effectively nullifying the condition Congress put in place. Maybe the court decision was right, you don't want to create a situation where the government is buried in endless lawsuits, but it certainly looks like the executive branch is just blatantly ignoring the law. If that's acceptable, I don't want to hear any complaints about Democrats refusing to enforce immigration laws.

  • -11

effectively nullifying the condition Congress put in place

This is not true. Congress when creating conditions gets to create both the rule and define the process by which it is enforced. That is their prerogative. They can chose whether it can be enforced by {individual plaintiffs bringing suit in Federal court} and/or {the HHS secretary decides and can withhold the money} and/or {any other enforcement scheme}.

Now if the statement is that Congress passed a law with no reasonable enforcement mechanism, I don't think that's terribly controversial. Indeed they do that all the time, which is comparable (after a fashion) to not passing the law at all. But they are entitled by Art I to do so, at least in the sense that there isn't a judicial remedy if they don't provide for one.

Congress has put many conditions on Medicaid, and only through controversial interpretations of various statutes is PP eligible in any state, let alone South Carolina.

What interpretations, and what controversy?

The interpretation that you can provide money to an abortion provider without that being considered funding abortions. This is controversial because every intelligent person knows money is fungible, and if medicaid gives PP $10000 for providing strep throat screenings, that money helps keep the abortion mill facility open.

If the strep throat screening cost $10K to provide, then not. The question seems to be whether it's a cross-subsidy.

There's no question its a cross subsidy. The medicaid stuff pays for the salaries of the same staff and the rent of the same building.

That’s very different than a cross subsidy. A cross subsidy would mean the Medicaid stuff pays more than its prorated share of the staff and building usage. Given bottom barrel Medicaid rates I doubt that.

Maybe there’s a different take that their non Medicaid services aren’t enough volume to pay fixed costs and so the medicaid stuff fills out volume. But that’s a weak argument because literally every purchase from any entity whatsoever pays a share of fixed costs. It proves way too much.

Money is, in principle, fungible... but is there clear evidence that Medicaid reimbursements "keep the abortion mill facility open?" (E.G., Analyses of natural experiments?) Pro-choice donors may say they're passionate about all low-cost health services, but are they opening their wallets to donate to non-profit sexual health/OBGYN clinics that don't provide abortions?

Given the number of closures of PP in states that banned abortion, they do not.

So... the abortions are subsidizing the Medicaid patients, rather than Medicaid subsidizing abortion?

The donations are subsidizing both, and they are motivated by abortion. Abortions are pretty profitable from what I understand though.

More comments

Especially in abortion ban states, PP operates simply as any other OB clinic. They have doctors, give fda approved treatments, and accept insurance. There is no procedure you can get at PP that you can't get at any hospital. Granted, their doctors are probably more likely to push birth control, but in my ime many doctors at hospitals and ordinarly clinics will do it too.

Show me the statute that would make Planned Parenthood ineligible.

Pub. L. No. 94-439 § 209, 90 Stat. 1418, 1434 and all similar joinders attached to funding resolutions.

Planned Parenthood does more than just provide abortions. If you can't see the difference between "Medicaid doesn't cover abortion" and "Medicaid can't cover non-abortion care if the provider also provides abortions" I don't know what to tell you.

Money is fungible. Things like rent, electricity, staffing, etc are all shared. They cannot be separated. You can't provide money to PP without funding abortion. If you wanted to, you could spin off the abortion wing, call it Banned Parenthood, make sure there is no staffing overlap, and charge them market rates for rent and facilities, maybe you'd have a decent argument.

The whole point of PP is to provide abortions, everything else is a smoke screen.

Last I checked a majority of what PP does is not-social-conservative-approved-but-uncontroversially-healthcare stuff like STD treatments. That being said, this is still the equivalent of the state of New York not sending federal gun safety program money to the NRA, despite being the nationwide leader in elementary school gun safety training and range safety training. They kinda made their bed and now must lie in it.

majority

In the sense that its basically impossible to do more abortions than write prescriptions for birth control and penicillin, I guess this is true. But PP's own behavior in which clinics it has closed over time indicates that they don't particularly care about providing those services, or that the clinics cannot justify their own existence without providing the profitable abortions for which those services are merely a smokescreen.

PP seems to show up in lots of anecdotes about cross-sex hormone prescriptions, especially for trans minors with relatively few questions asked. As far as I can tell (see SCOTUS thread) those are rather controversial. But I can't say what fraction of their business that is.

Democrats defected first with immigration laws. Maybe deliberately bringing in millions and millions of people through a legal loophole wasn't the best idea to encourage a spirit of cooperation. Endlessly cooperating with them is a sure way to get trampled on.

Democrats defected first with immigration laws

More accurate to say that it was a bipartisan phenomenon engaged in by Republicans like George W. Bush.

What laws did bush blatantly refuse to enforce?

(Not OP)

As stated, I think the claim is hyperbolic and TTBOMK wrong.

Having said that, the Bush-era GOP-controlled White House and Congress could have prodded states to mandate that all employers use E-Verify, by threatening to withhold various federal moneys from noncompliant states, but they didn’t.

I grant you that this would have required Congress to pass new legislation, so the blame doesn’t lie solely with Bush, but Bush had a trifecta for a decent chunk of his 2 terms and easily could have made such legislation a priority. That he didn’t speaks volumes about the values of the GOP establishment of that era.

Anecdatally, it feels like the backlash against (what was perceived as) the Bush-era GOP establishment cucking on illegal immigration was one of two initial rifts within the party that first emerged in the late 2000s/early 2010s, then metastasized and eventually led to Trump’s 2016 takeover (the other rift being the Ron Paul libertarian/Tea Party movement)

The ones against illegal immigration.

In that case bush never defected against the dems. The dems started the defection.

No, that's less accurate.

I understand that 'more abortions for black women(and this is South Carolina)' is your #1 priority. But no one said you can't complain about South Carolina not funding planned parenthood.

I understand that 'more abortions for black women(and this is South Carolina)' is your #1 priority

Don't attribute motives to people they have not stated.

He openly admits he's a eugenicist, prioritizes abortion access, and c'mon, do you really believe the population of South Carolinans he doesn't want reproducing isn't extremely black-heavy?

Being fair to Alexander, he's not a racist. He's a classist. He doesn't want white trailer trash having litters of kids, either. That's why he always bangs on about religiosity: you Bible-thumpers and Catholics, you pro-lifers, don't you realise what you are doing by encouraging teenagers and low-economic status women to have babies at a young age that they can't possibly support themselves?

He openly admits he's a eugenicist

No s***. It always circles back to DemsRRealRacist, Bible thumping, and not being very bright.

  • -12

DemsRRealRacist

It is true that there is a set of people in the United States who believe in inate differences between races and want to see those differences reflected in policy. It is also true that the overlap between that set and the set of people who regularly vote Republican is minimal at best.

Okay, that's enough 4chan-level shitty comments out of you, dipping into personal antagonism.

A lot of users are eagerly anticipating your banning. I try to factor in your unpopularity for just running against popular sentiment when you get reported constantly, but the fact is, your reports are increasingly for low-effort shitty comments and you seem to be trying to do a speed run on how many digs you can get in before you're banned. You actually occasionally have some interesting things to say, but it's mostly buried beneath snark and disdain.

You've gotten a lot of warnings and no bans yet. Here's your first one-day ban. I am disappointed that once again a left-leaning poster cannot control himself enough to avoid getting banned, but that seems to be the path you are on. Change my mind.

a left-leaning poster

Since Turok can't respond, I'll give out an eyeroll on this one -- I'm ambivalent to his banning, but you sure aren't reading very closely if you think he's left-leaning.

His whole schtick is sneering at right-wingers for being low-class. Maybe he's really an honest person on the right concerned with the right's failure to uphold elite standards, but that ain't the way to bet.

I've read his disclaimers.

In @hydroacetylene's defense the OP has been pretty open (both on the motte and elsewhere) about their belief in the significant "eugenic benefits" of maximizing access to abortion in states with large populations of negroes and/or Trump voters even if they have never clearly stated what those benefits are supposed to be.

Hey, you hit me back! I don't want to hear any complaining about me hitting you first!

Every political movement always thinks the outgroup hit them first, and that they're just perfect little victims who are only trying to defend themselves, and therefore allegations of hypocrisy shouldn't apply to them.

hypocrisy

It's not hypocrisy. I can both advocate that we shouldn't be punching, and that ill gotten gains from punching should be rolled back, while at the same time acknowledging that we are in fact in a punching game, and god damnit, I'm gonna punch harder than anyone if that's the game we're playing.

The alternative is just being a loser, getting punched relentlessly by an opponent that believes in punching, while they mock you for not fighting back because it's not what you believe. Or mock you for fighting back because they claim according to your own beliefs (which they don't even share) you are supposed to allow them to punch you relentlessly.

The fact that the claims are symmetric does not mean the situation on the ground is.

Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton

How did this case come about to begin with? Is Texas just requiring the same sort of "age verification" that's existed since the 90s (the website says are you 18 and you click yes)? If so, how was it possibly worthwhile for FSC to sue over that?

Is Texas just requiring the same sort of "age verification" that's existed since the 90s (the website says are you 18 and you click yes)?

Texas is requiring that pornhub make potential viewers upload a photo of their driver's license. Presumably if a parent uploads a photo of their driver's license to let their kid watch porn and Texas attempts to enforce the law against pornhub then that would be a different lawsuit but let's be real, the tiny number of people who actually do this won't get caught.

The specific law here holds that a "commercial entity" (some carveouts for Google) that serves material on the internet "more than one-third of which is sexual material harmful to minors" must use either commercial or government identification of age, or be subject to fines up to 10k USD per day plus 250k if a minor sees it. There's pretty widespread potential to interfere or discourage adult-to-adult speech that is only obscene to minors, or even some speech that isn't obscene at all so long as it comes from one of these companies.

There's also a compelled speech problem in the original bill, 14-point font inclusion of a substance addiction help line level. This is currently blocked, though it had a weird period where that block was under an administrative stay for nearly six months.

Presumably, all sexual material intended to arouse is deemed "harmful to minors"?

I would argue that while presenting unsolicited sexual material to either adults or minors can indeed be harmful (to some degree -- I remember seeing porn ads when I was downloading cracks for games at age 12 or 14, and mostly went eeeewww and got on with my life, but it did not traumatize me. Getting DMed a dick pick would certainly be worse, though), things are often different when users actively search for such content.

Sure, there are things which are likely harmful to the person searching for it, a 10-yo searching for rape or beheading videos is probably better off not finding any. But I do not think that any person of any age or gender who is searching for "naked woman" is likely to be harmed by pictures or videos of naked women, even if they are sexually suggestive.

Quite frankly, I believe that sexual content consumed by minors is too influential to leave it to chance and adult entertainment companies targeting an adult audience. The sooner we accept that the effect of age verification laws is not that horny teenagers will not view sinful material, but at best that they will learn how to connect to a VPN service, the sooner we can start producing more age-appropriate porn for minors.

I do not think that viewing PIV sex on video after searching for it is intrinsically harmful. The stuff which is harmful is all the stuff where porn differs from what one would recommend as sex acts for beginners. A median porn video teaches a teenage male that of course a woman will be enflamed with desire as soon as you touch her, enthusiastically give you oral sex for a while, then be ready to get fucked however hard you want to fuck her, then happily switch to anal and finally let you cum on her face. Communication about consent, boundaries, or birth control? Nada (except for BDSM porn, which typically discusses boundaries explicitly on camera). She implicitly consents to everything, has no boundaries and is solely responsible for contraception. Getting her off? She just gets off being used by you, man, no need to learn anything about female anatomy or psychology. Pillow talk? Just call her a dirty whore.

Then you have all the kinks which are mainstream in porn. Incest? Super hot. Unhealthy power dynamics? "I would do anything to get a passing grade in your class ..." Spying on women? When caught, they are flattered and will have sex with you. Respecting your partner? Nah, they like to be degraded. Now, there are plenty of kinks which are fine between consenting adults who are into them. But the context "this is a thing which most women are not into" is generally missing in porn.

Just hire some 20yo porn actors and make them act out healthy sex scenes (where the actors play a couple (or actually are a couple), discuss boundaries, contraception and all that), put them on the web in 4k (or even better, find popular but healthy sex tapes produced (semi-)commercially and just buy the rights) and tell the minors in sex ed "it is actually normal and healthy to be interested in how sex works, if you are interested here are some videos which are more realistic than what you find on pornhub.

Sure, some will still prefer to watch gangbangs in 480x320, and for a few unlucky ones the good porn might actually be a gateway to the mainstream stuff, but by and large this will do much more to prevent minors from getting wrong ideas about sex (or see seriously disturbing stuff because they were curious how sex looks) than Texas just making the big US porn vendors do age verification and pretend that this will prevent any horny teen from watching porn.

But my suspicion is that the Texas move was never about protecting minors in the first place, it was about getting the filth off the Texan internet by pretending to care about minors seeing boobs and dicks.

Just hire some 20yo porn actors and make them act out healthy sex scenes (where the actors play a couple (or actually are a couple), discuss boundaries, contraception and all that), put them on the web in 4k (or even better, find popular but healthy sex tapes produced (semi-)commercially and just buy the rights) and tell the minors in sex ed "it is actually normal and healthy to be interested in how sex works, if you are interested here are some videos which are more realistic than what you find on pornhub.

I’m going to assert a couple points.

First, although I think there is a right and wrong way to have sex, I really, really do not want the government getting involved in it past the absolute brightest of lines (rape).

Second, the locus of the erotic is, for whatever reason, in the forbidden itself. Everyone knows that sex is dirty. If it’s clean, normal, and well-ordered, it’s not tempting in the first place. At minimum it must be private; the private side of someone which they would never show anyone else, but for you…

A practical middle ground would be to define a clear boundary between softcore (basically nudity and intense looks, no partners or penetration) and hardcore (intercourse, violence, unrelated obscenities), and put a lower legal age target for the former. There’s frankly not nearly so much that’s damaging to either boys or girls with just seeing naked people. Sure, unrealistic standards this or body image that, but it’s nothing compared to the implication of hardcore porn that women are supposed to experience sex in the manner of seedy porn scripts.

Respecting your partner? Nah, they like to be degraded.

I was wondering where the hell all the "women like/want/demand to be choked during sex" was coming from, and it seems it's from porn. And what boys (and I do mean boys, not even young men - in the linked article "transition year" is aged 15-16) are learning from watching porn is "when having sex, I should be choking my partner". That's something that can go very wrong very fast if you have no idea what you're doing, and how the hell is a fifteen year old having sex for the first time going to know what they're doing with breathplay?

For the last eight years, Eoghan Cleary has taught transition-year students a module about the dangers of pornography and how to navigate safe and consensual sex. During the class at Temple Carrig Secondary School, the teacher asks his students to make a list of what they believe is expected of them during sex.

Speaking at the launch of a new Irish report outlining the stark dangers of pornography on Thursday, Mr Cleary said the recurring things that students are putting on this list are “shocking”. Young boys said they feel they need to chase women, be dominant, be aggressive, want anal sex, and be with as many partners as possible.

In the past four years, Mr Cleary said the majority of teenage boys now say they believe they need to choke a woman during sex. Similarly, when girls were asked to make the same list, a high number said they need to be submissive during sex by allowing their partner to choke or slap them.

Other common things young girls said they feel the need to do during sex include having no pubic hair, making pleasurable noises, doing what the man says, and orgasm or pretend to. Mr Cleary said students admit that these expectations are coming from porn.

Other common things young girls said they feel the need to do during sex include having no pubic hair, making pleasurable noises, doing what the man says, and orgasm or pretend to. Mr Cleary said students admit that these expectations are coming from porn.

This sort of undermines the rest.

You won't believe he shocking things men expect from women as a result of porn!

  1. Choking
  2. Pleasurable noises
  3. Her to orgasm (or pretend to)

When late GenX was coming of age, those last two were not only part of a major motion picture, they were in the trailer.

The point is "exaggerated porn noises" during sex, even if the girl isn't enjoying herself. And choking certainly wasn't mainstream, but it's seeping out just like heterosexual anal sex, and that comes from porn. Kids are watching porn and picking up lessons from it about "this is what sex is supposed to be like", which is why we're trying to hold back the tide on minors accessing porn. Age-verification laws like the one in Texas may be futile, but the alternative surely shouldn't be "they've got Internet access since the age of six, they're gonna find porn anyway, let thirteen year olds watch hardcore BDSM, you can't stop them".

The point is "exaggerated porn noises" during sex, even if the girl isn't enjoying herself.

Yes, that was in said major motion picture trailer.

When (generic) you tell me "porn is making kids think choking during sex is normal", I'm inclined to consider it. When you say "Porn is making kids think choking, pleasurable noises, and women having (or faking) orgasms during sex is normal" I'm inclined to think you just have something against porn that might be unrelated.

when girls were asked to make the same list, a high number said they need to be submissive during sex by allowing their partner to choke or slap them.

Wait a second. Women aren't generally watching porn[1], so where did they get this idea from?

And if it's true that it's 100% downstream from men watching porn then [insert Slootpost about hypoagency, in which case "yes, they do like to be degraded" actually being the correct posture to take for both sexes], but that's also completely ridiculous. Not that reality is itself not ridiculous, but I'm more interested in the men and women who actually have at least a modicum of self-respect beyond hyper-gooning[2], or trying to make love rather than just having sex.

But then, losing virginity (for teen-aged men or women) has never really been about that- from merely 'new experience' to 'just get it out of the way' to 'processing how your life's going to be now'- and maybe the people who are going to treat sex in the 'love' sense were always going to be fine[3] and those who couldn't or won't were always going to get fucked? I'd be annoyed if I got treated purely as a human fleshlight/dildo outside of a give-and-take context, that's for sure.

Of course, we're calling it "sex education", not "love education", so love is kind of outside the purview of this exercise. Which is kind of the problem with "women like to be choked while taking it in the ass" in the first place- wanting to going straight to that seems to reveal a profound incuriousity about [the physical pleasure of] one's partner in that case. But then, it isn't necessarily about physical pleasure, is it?

[1] You... don't read a lot of yaoi, do you? That shit's about as heteronormative in its seme/uke dynamics as breathplay is- maybe the Motte should compile an essential reading list.

[2] Someone said "human fleshlight" here once, and that stuck with me. I don't understand why having sex needs to be that way though from anecdote this is [a lot of the time] functionally what happens.

[3] People joke about 'cherry-popping' for various different experiences; part of that is the newness, but part of it's also the attitude being a 'virgin' to something bestows. The reason men aren't (or weren't, for a long time) considered virgins is because they're supposed to know everything already, which was the reason to be devoted to them -> the pathway to getting sufficiently choked in bed.

Actually, I think the people less likely to get off on those things as a submissive act are also those that devotion pathway doesn't work on, and the fact the people "[seeking to be] sounding the alarm" tend to be Liberated women in their 50s [where "men being sexually aggressive = bad" was at its highest- sometimes men even believe that] is significant.

[Edit: and considering TheNybbler pointed out the even more obvious- that is, "partners are expected to enjoy sex, clearly the youth are crazy"- it's another data point in the "performative shock by frigid old women who would rather be getting choked by 15 year old men, but demonizing said men for only wanting that with 15 year old women scratches that itch too" direction.]

You... don't read a lot of yaoi, do you? That shit's about as heteronormative in its seme/uke dynamics as breathplay is- maybe the Motte should compile an essential reading list.

Look, if I want my filthy depraved kink, I get it the old-fashioned way: by going on fanfic sites. I'm old enough that I don't need to lie about age-verification anymore, but these young'uns nowadays should at least have to work that much to get their porny kicks!

I think one plausible explanation of this being "100% downstream from men watching porn" is that it is that the porn is making more sexual activities seem boringly normal and the women are getting off not to the degradation but to the idea that their partner's love for them is extreme. Thus as more extreme sexual behaviors are normalized they need to push the boundaries even further to get that adventurous kick.

A median porn video teaches a teenage male that of course a woman will be enflamed with desire as soon as you touch her, enthusiastically give you oral sex for a while, then be ready to get fucked however hard you want to fuck her, then happily switch to anal and finally let you cum on her face. Communication about consent, boundaries, or birth control?

Surely people are aware that there's a difference between reality and fantasy? Movies teach me that with the power of friendship and snarky quips I can overthrow giant conspiracies and evil empires. But I don't try that IRL because the evil empire is actually very strong.

I guess there are a bunch of retarded people like the guys who openly masturbate to lingerie adverts on the street or try to rape girls in the park who don't appreciate this fine point. But they're not going to get the message 'don't be creepy and rapey' since they're already locked in on the creepy, rapey lifestyle. 'Why would I not rape when I can, how am I supposed to fuck' they might say and be right, since surely nobody consents to sex with ugly, poor, retarded men. The answer here is using force, not education.

Also, anything teachers or the state try to do will be extremely uncool and cringe. It'll be just like the 'informed consent, no means no' training that nearly every institution has but worse. Can you even imagine how groan-inducingly awful official state-sponsored pornography will be? How woke and diverse and uncool and stilted the dialogue is?

All this would do is teach the more autistic men insanely uncharismatic bedroom talk and make them more nervous. Anyone who wants to actually get off will go to real porn, or hentai, or impossible AI girls. I think it would actually make girls more pressured too, they don't want to be an uncool, frigid, lame bitch like that girl in Safe and Respectful Physical Connection Part 4, do they?

A better solution would be punitively obliterating Pornhub and co with massive fines and lawsuits so they stop profiting off people trafficking and child rape.

Surely people are aware that there's a difference between reality and fantasy?

When you're old enough. But watching porn at a young age is trying to find out "how does this sex thing work? what goes on during sex? what am I supposed to do?" because porn is supposed to be 'real' sex (and I guess hardcore, if the distinction even exists anymore, is people having real sex on film or video). You pick up a general idea of "what is sex like?" from movies and TV, but that's not as explicit as porn, and you get directed towards porn from society around you and your peers, even if your parents try and keep it away from you.

The reality-fantasy borders are very blurred there, because these are real people really naked and really doing it. It's only when you're older that you work out that these are actors and it's all scripted and the makeup and hair removal and breast sizes etc. are artificial.

Average age of exposure to porn is now around twelve to thirteen. That's not a very mature age to be able to discriminate about "ah yes, this actress is faking her sounds of arousal, I see that the mild BDSM is added to the script just to spice it up, this is not a realistic portrayal of how people have sex in reality".

Maybe young teenage boys were always trying to sneak peeks at naked women in 'dirty' magazines, but that's not at all the same as on-demand moving images of whatever tickles your fancy.

Surely people are aware that there's a difference between reality and fantasy? Movies teach me that with the power of friendship and snarky quips I can overthrow giant conspiracies and evil empires. But I don't try that IRL because the evil empire is actually very strong.

For most behaviors, minors are exposed to plenty of real-world examples. Even in a world where driving licences were not a thing, kids would play Need for Speed (or whatever car racing games kids play these days) but still get exposed to thousands of hours observing how actual humans in the world drive their cars. They see their neighbors drive their cars every day. The two areas where most exposure is fictional are grievous violence and sex -- they will likely never see their neighbor use a gun to defend her property or have sex with her husband.

For grievous violence, this is not a big deal, because thankfully most teens do not have strong urge to kill people, and are also living in a generally peaceful society where their misconceptions are unlikely to harm them. The ones which do end up in professions where they are likely to encounter violence can be taught why emulating Rambo is a bad idea.

For sex, things are different, because a significant fraction of minors will end up having sex. Now, not all of the fictional exposure is hardcore pornography, there are plenty of Hollywood movies with fade-to-black scenes implying sex, and unless kids are watching John Wayne exclusively, these generally depict a somewhat more realistic standard of behavior than porn.

Also, anything teachers or the state try to do will be extremely uncool and cringe. It'll be just like the 'informed consent, no means no' training that nearly every institution has but worse. Can you even imagine how groan-inducingly awful official state-sponsored pornography will be? How woke and diverse and uncool and stilted the dialogue is?

I am aware of that problem. Telling minors "here is an educational and super hot and naughty video about consent and sex" will by default be as successful as telling them "today we will have so much fun learning the 7 row in the multiplication table".

As I added in parenthesis, a better idea would be to just buy the rights to stuff which is both popular and also unobjectionable from a "displaying problematic behavior" perspective. The nice thing about porn is that there is an ungodly amount of it produced, so even if you filter out 90% as problematic, you still have more to pick from than you could ever afford to pay for (or that minors could watch before becoming adults due to the runtime).

A better solution would be punitively obliterating Pornhub and co with massive fines and lawsuits so they stop profiting off people trafficking and child rape.

I have two problems with that. First, will it change the outcome? So you ban the big free-to-view US sites. Does this mean that teens will go back to jerking off to pictures of women in swimsuits, as god intended? No, because the internet is literally full of porn. You would at least need a Great Texan Firewall, and even then, I suspect that horny teenagers will find a way.

The second problem is the claim that pornhub is making profits from sex trafficking and CSAM. In a very technical way, you are correct (at least about sex trafficking) -- since there is no good way to identify sex trafficking victims in porn videos, a fraction of the videos on pornhub likely contain sex trafficking victims and add to their bottom line just as all the other videos. But your framing suggests a moustache-twirling villain CEO ordering his underlings to get him more sex trafficking and CSAM because he wants more profits, which I think is kind of the opposite of what is the case. Pornhub will earn their cut whether the viewers watch free-range amateur porn, porn with sex trafficking victims or hardcore CSAM. They have zero incentive to dabble into the latter two, because this will bring the state down on their money-printing machine for sure. For CSAM, I would assume that they spend orders of magnitude more to filter it than they make on the odd video which makes it through before it is flagged. For sex trafficking, I will grant you that there is technically more that they could do to avoid hosting the odd video. For example, they could require a notarized statement about the identity, age, residence, location and travel accommodations for anyone in a video uploaded to their platform, and I am sure some anti-trafficking charities are calling them out to do such that. Obviously they don't do that because that would destroy their business. But that is different from consciously deciding that you want more sex trafficking videos.

Suppose I had an axe to grind against letter or parcel shipping companies (perhaps I think they ruin brick and mortar stores, or have some religious objection to cardboard boxes). Saying that parcel shipping is evil and should be prohibited, while it might be my true belief, will likely not convince a majority. Instead, I could go after something which is tangentially related and very unpopular: dark net marketplaces (for the record, I think DNMs for drugs are not very objectionable, and clearly better than dealers in street corners and all the violence that brings, but I recognize that is a minority view). If we take the reported gross profits of Silk Road (100M$/year), and conservatively estimate that drug vendors spend 10% of the Silk Road commission on shipping costs, this means that FedEx and co have made at least ten million dollars per year from drug trafficking!

This is your argument in a nutshell.

Of course, if I was Texas, I would not just outlaw these companies (which would be seen as partisan and un-American), I would simply pass legislation which forces these companies to do everything in their power to stop drug parcels, i.e. mandate that ever parcel is inspected with a CT scanner by a trained operator. Oh, you can't operate profitably under these conditions? Real shame, that, but we are not going to cut you some slack when drug shipments are involved.

Meanwhile, most of the drug sellers would just switch to use the US postal service (which is not covered in the Texan regulation) and send small quantities of drugs in letters.

First, will it change the outcome? So you ban the big free-to-view US sites. Does this mean that teens will go back to jerking off to pictures of women in swimsuits, as god intended?

They'll hopefully move onto the boorus or hentai or whatever, where at least no real people suffer. It's not exactly educational content but it doesn't weirdly push incest and it's harder to confuse with reality. As far as I'm concerned, killing pornhub would be an unalloyed good. It's not like there's any prosocial value like Fedex or whoever else.

Furthermore, I've read a fair few stories about their business practices that really do resemble the mustache-twirling villain. The verification system they have from producers doesn't seem very effective. From the NYT:

Indeed, one private memo acknowledged that videos with apparent child sexual abuse had been viewed 684 million times before being removed.

Even though it's not possible to crack down on internet pornography, it is at least possible to wipe out the biggest and most obnoxious offenders and rake in a bit of cash too. You're confusing my 'loot and burn' gunboat action with nation-building.

For example, they could require a notarized statement about the identity, age, residence, location and travel accommodations

Minus the notary I think this is in place for identity, age & residence at least; federal penalties are severe and I think it's pretty widely observed in the pro world:

https://adultbizlaw.com/2012/10/22/porn-101-18-u-s-c-2257-the-basics/

We already have plenty of evidence that no, people are not aware of the difference between reality and fantasy.

My sources here are going to be limited because googling these topics is a distasteful experience.

Choking: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/article/2024/sep/02/i-think-its-natural-why-has-sexual-choking-become-so-prevalent-among-young-people

In July researchers from Melbourne and Queensland universities published a study on the prevalence of sexual strangulation among 18- to 35-year-olds in Australia and found that over half of the more than 4,700 surveyed had choked or been choked by a sexual partner. Among young people, sexual choking has become mainstream.

The prevalence study found that the main way young people were introduced to choking was through pornography (34.8%). The next most commonly reported first exposure to choking was conversations with friends (11.5%), while 9.2% had learned of the practice through discussing it with a sexual partner. One in 10 were unsure how they came across the idea and only 3.9% had never heard of it.

A majority of those surveyed (61.3%) had seen choking depicted in porn, although this included more men (71.4%) than women (51.5%).

Similarly anal:

https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/aug/11/rise-in-popularity-of-anal-sex-has-led-to-health-problems-for-women

National Survey of Sexual Attitudes research undertaken in Britain has found that the proportion of 16- to 24-year-olds engaging in heterosexual anal intercourse has risen from 12.5% to 28.5% over recent decades. Similarly, in the US 30% to 45% of both sexes have experienced it.

I don't have statistics on an increase in incest irl as a result of incest in porn (and I'm not interested in doing much googling it) but it's enough of a concern that people who work in organizations dedicated to fighting child sexual assault mention is as an additional risk of the legally produces videos, aside from the cover and camouflage those videos provide for the millions of videos of actually illegal rape

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2020/dec/16/online-incest-porn-is-normalising-child-abuse-say-charities

I don't have statistics on an increase in incest irl as a result of incest in porn

There is a sub-Reddit about "incest is not wrong". How much this is real people who really think banging your full-sibling or your dad once you're all grown up is just peachy, and how much this is a kink site, I have no idea and not much interest in finding out. But like they say, whatever you can think of, it's out there on the Internet.

Not helping are the kinds of chin-stroking 'thought experiments' on philosophy sites about "but why is consensual incest wrong, you Neanderthal knuckledraggers who aren't as big brained as I am?" and, of course, contrarians but contrarians we will always have with us.

One of my friends is a porn producer and has been in the game for a couple decades. One time I was talking to him and the whole step-thing came up, and in his opinion it's simply popular since it injects taboo into a scene without requiring anybody to do anything actually physically excessive beyond a standard pornshoot.

We're beyond saturation point for normal PIV, so just doing a quick find-and-replace in your normal script to slip in 'stepwhatever' gets you equivalent taboo value as having to recruit people to do stuff that's actually physically onerous. Also the relative paucity of large families plus the increased rate of step-relationships adds fuel to the fire.

Also the relative paucity of large families plus the increased rate of step-relationships adds fuel to the fire.

I hadn't considered that, but yeah: with divorce and remarriage and having kids outside of marriage, it's a much more 'realistic' scenario now than previously, because there is always that faint chance the hot chick you saw at the club might be a half-sibling by one of your momma's baby daddies who moved on to have other kids with other women. So you get the taboo and the nice, naughty thrill, without doing anything "physically excessive" as your producer friend says, plus it's becoming much more relatable to the audience.

Presumably, all sexual material intended to arouse is deemed "harmful to minors"?

In theory, the term's pretty clearly picked to mimic federal obscenity-to-minors jurisprudence from Ginsburg, which... is a clusterfuck, but supposedly trades socially redeeming values against what extent the material is 'patently offensive to prevailing standards of what is appropriate'. In practice, I'd expect the Texas AG's going to act more based on what he thinks he can get away with and who makes particularly good news headlines.

I do not think that viewing PIV sex on video after searching for it is intrinsically harmful. The stuff which is harmful is all the stuff where porn differs from what one would recommend as sex acts for beginners.

There's some good arguments for this policy (and some against: do gay or trans versions of those get commissioned? should it recognize any kink at all, if in very 'correct' ways?). There's even been some, albeit mixed, efforts along those lines (one 'documentary' is very popular among het breeding fans, which... uh, Shinzo Abe meme, but probably not intended). You even get really awkward discussions about what the 'correct' age for this involves, and that's not a fun thing to even consider.

I dunno. I was a late bloomer. I don't think I have a good model for a lot of what'd be best, here, or even what a lot of potential harms would be. There's a lot of motions in both law and psychology about how any exposure to even 'normal' sex early on can cause harm, but then we're relying on a bunch of (mostly 1970s) psych research, and I would prefer not to.

But my suspicion is that the Texas move was never about protecting minors in the first place, it was about getting the filth off the Texan internet by pretending to care about minors seeing boobs and dicks.

I'd expect it's even less good than that: the end result's just going to make the stuff operated by American businesses less profitable and crush smaller actors, and scare straight websites that intermix adult and non-adult content.

do gay or trans versions of those get commissioned? should it recognize any kink at all, if in very 'correct' ways?

Sure for lesbians, gays and trans. Actors who are bisexual in that they have partners of different partners in different videos are also fine. I am under the impression that group sex is not something which a substantial fraction of minors will end up doing, so how to organize a safe and fun gang-bang is probably not required. Perhaps some light BDSM, if that is not too niche, safewords and all.

The idea is not to provide a nice version of every porn genre there is, because most of the kinkier stuff is unlikely to make it into their sex lives. Most people's first sexual experiences do not involve needle play and a couple who is into that is likely to search for best practices beforehand, while a couple who is into vanilla sex might be under the impression that as they went trough sex ed and watched some porn, they are sufficiently prepared. Focus on pacing, boundaries, contraception, lube and how to have a great time when PIV is too uncomfortable.

There's even been some, albeit mixed, efforts along those lines (one 'documentary' is very popular among het breeding fans, which... uh, Shinzo Abe meme, but probably not intended).

While from the WP description, this looks like a good effort, it is notably targeted at girls, which would still leave boys to learn sexual behavior from porn.

You even get really awkward discussions about what the 'correct' age for this involves, and that's not a fun thing to even consider.

I think that until minors have unrestricted access to the internet, there is no reason to give them access to sex videos to prevent them from going to pornhub instead. Realistically, I would not want any 6-yo with unrestricted internet access. At age 12, a kid is going to have access to the internet. If you lock down their devices (and are more tech savvy than your kid), there will always be a classmate whose parents are less concerned and let them have a smartphone. Ideally, their smartphone would be configured so that it blocks hardcore porn but allows access to educational sex videos from that age, without the parent or state pushing this too much into the face of the minor. If they never google for "sex video" until age 18, no problem.

There's a lot of motions in both law and psychology about how any exposure to even 'normal' sex early on can cause harm, but then we're relying on a bunch of (mostly 1970s) psych research, and I would prefer not to.

Humans have been around millions of years longer than privacy has, so I have every reason to believe that in the ancestral environment, children would be exposed to more sex than in the contemporary Western world (though with worse illumination, depending on the taboos of their specific culture). I think a kid of any age watching its parents have sex through their ajar bedroom door will perhaps pick up a fetish or two out of the experience, but not be traumatized for life. By contrast, being made to watch, being flashed or being made to participate in sex acts is obviously very likely to disturb the development of a child (especially if it is against the cultural norms of their society).

This is just my gut feeling, but I think that my gut feeling is about as valid as 1970s psych research :)

Presumably, all sexual material intended to arouse is deemed "harmful to minors"?

Suppose we invent a new and improved form of heroin. Unlike normal heroin, you can't overdose on it, it doesn't cause chemical dependency, you won't catch anything from taking it because it comes in pill form. It also costs basically nothing. Like heroin, consuming it feels really, really good, significantly better than 99% of other experiences, and it puts you in an incapacitated stupor, often for between 1-3 hours a pop. Some people want to try to keep children and teenagers from having unrestricted access to this drug. Do you think they have a valid concern?

Like heroin, consuming it feels really, really good, significantly better than 99% of other experiences, and it puts you in an incapacitated stupor, often for between 1-3 hours a pop. Some people want to try to keep children and teenagers from having unrestricted access to this drug. Do you think they have a valid concern?

I'm more on Team Gooner, which I'm sure will surprise absolutely no one, but this metaphor seems to occlude more than it illuminates. I've got some complaints about its accuracy, but assuming it for the sake of this discussion:

`1. Why is this 'drug' different from any other over-the-counter one, not just that people want to restrict children and teenagers from having access, or even that the state gets involved in restricting access, but that it's so vital that state restrictions can put sizable burdens on adults doing things entirely away from minors? Things like alcohol or cigarettes have the obvious physical ramifications that you're pretty clearly -- no one's getting cirrhosis of the dick, here. Am I missing some other parallel, or what distinguishes gooner materials from vidya or youtube or people who get way too into painting minatures or spend every weekend at a sportsball game?

`2. Why is this 'drug' so bad for minors such that we're willing to accept onerous restrictions on adults, and yet not something we need to hold against the adults themselves. There are restrictions like alcohol and cigarettes and the entire DEA. Maybe Texas won't end up being that bad, if only by the standard being set so low, or maybe we're just being cautious because it's so dangerous otherwise?

Or are restrictions going to keep going on from children and teenagers to everyone else? Because a lot of people, including the Texas politicians writing this bill, pretty clearly want to restrict it in general.

`4. Why is it so hard for advocates of these restrictions -- either on minors, or on everyone -- to actually focus on this 'drug'? No one was gooning from a single 1970s Playboy or a couple grainy standard definition videos; it's supposedly something specific to modern porn that's so much worse... and yet the Texas law here wouldn't just cover a 1970s Playboy, but even material softer-core or less overtly prurient than that. Even people here treat hobbyist weird content as at best as acceptable side effect.

`5. There's a model of addictive personalities as responding to spaces they can't get fulfilled otherwise, in the same way that mineral deficiencies can drive people to find weird or even inedible things delicious. In addictions with serious chemical dependency or withdrawal it's hilariously wrong, but gooning doesn't seem to have those things, and some gooners even challenge themselves to go long periods without (... usually in November, for acronym reasons).

That old TLP article has a punchline in the middle about how "Pornography is a scapegoat", and while TLP puts it on ego and narcissism because... uh, well, he's a coastal psychiatrist. There's a pretty mindboggling set of statistics about the sorta thing (not-Aella) people usually do before consensual sex, and everything from dating to marriage to mixed-sex casual meetups are all down the tubes.

Is this missing nutrient model wrong, here? If it's right, might it suggest to something else that's driving more of the changes in behavior people think is downstream of a couple hours on an unexciting hobby and a jacked right wrist? Because if there's something broken in relationship formation well before sex (or, uh, handies), removing that outlet might cause people to start putting a lot more effort into working around the break... or it might end up with a stampede of people going over a creaky bridge held in place by one rivet. And given how broken relationship formation is (especially for <18s and <25s), I'm not optimistic about that.

Are you implying that masturbation (1) feels significantly better than 99% of other experiences, (2) puts you in an incapacitated stupor for 1–3 hours, and (3) can be performed as many times per day as you want, just like a real drug can be taken? If so, I think you're exaggerating a little too much.

I mean, masturbation pretty clearly does feel really, really good. It, uh, results in an orgasm.

See response here.

I guess I like orgasms more than you. Or maybe you get much more enjoyment out of videogames than I ever have.

We're talking about porn consumption, not masturbation.

  1. What number would you consider more appropriate?
  2. Are you familiar with the meme "nut, clean up, close 50 tabs"? And to put it delicately, how familiar?
  3. The argument doesn't assume people generally consume more than one pill a day, although they certainly could, and some do.

...One of the best porn-related pieces of advice I've ever seen is from The Last Psychiatrist:

You have to approach porn like a bank heist: get in, get out, you got 15 minutes and someone tripped the silent alarm. Leave nothing behind.

...He gives this advice, because he thinks people need it. Why do you suppose he thinks that?

What number would you consider more appropriate?

I've been depressed for a few years, so I may be misremembering the comparative enjoyment. But, IIRC, before I became depressed, playing video games was a much more reliable source of enjoyment than masturbating to a jade-like beauty, and fapping was merely an extra bonus that could be quickly extracted at the end of the day without requiring me to invest hours of time into it (but still requiring a significant amount of annoying arm exercise).

Are you familiar with the meme "nut, clean up, close 50 tabs"? And, to put it delicately, how familiar?

Based on personal experience, I assume that the meme is a gross exaggeration and the typical person engages in, not two-hour edging/gooning sessions, but 30-minute fap/schlick sessions.

It takes all sorts, I suppose. The meme is not an exaggeration, though, and the phenomenon is widespread enough that it is a meme and you have heard of it.

Is Texas just requiring the same sort of "age verification" that's existed since the '90s (the website asks "are you 18?" and you click "yes")?

No. This new law effectively requires adults to upload their driver's licenses for age verification.

HB 1181 requires a covered entity to “use reasonable age verification methods to verify that an individual attempting to access the material is 18 years of age or older”. To verify age, a covered entity must require visitors to “comply with a commercial age verification system” that uses “government-issued identification” or “a commercially reasonable method that relies on public or private transactional data”. The entity may perform verification itself or through a third-party service.

(I don't know what "a commercially reasonable method that relies on public or private transactional data" would be.)

what if you're homeless/transient and don't have a driver's license or any other sort of ID? That's the argument that's always been used against requiring voter ID, so I don't see why it wouldn't apply here.

Just because a really bad argument has been adopted in other contexts doesn't mean we should extend it to enabling homeless people to masturbate anonymously in the library.

So what? You don't have a right to easy porn, so even if an ID requirement is an onerous burden, onerous burdens are fine sometimes.

In this case, the law requires age verification for a web site run by a commercial entity where one third of the content on the site is 'harmful to minors', or the Texas AG can bring 10k USD/day charges even if no minor has visited the website. There's a lot of speech you do have a right to that can fall under that bar.

Maybe it's close enough to the right policy as to be worth that burden, but it needs to at least be considered in the context of what it's actually promoting, not just what the sticker on the front says.

I feel like these burdens should get their own category. It's not really onerous. It's actually very easy to meet the requirement to upload a picture of my driver's license. It's just stupidly dangerous for my well being.

It would be like if airport security asked you to stick your hand into a wood chipper that sporadically turns on to get your fingerprints. There is a helpful little red and green light to tell you when it's safe, but damn I'd rather not trust my fingers to this machine run by minimum wage employees. And of course if my hand gets mulched I'm allowed to sue the judgement proof employees, or the shell company wood chipper manufacturer, but not the government that put the requirement in there in the first place.

Yeah I don't disagree it sucks and is inconvenient and has risks. It's just they're allowed to make porn access inconvenient and risky.

I think if you are not allowed to ban something then you shouldn't be allowed to make access risky. All bans are is adding a risk component to a thing. You can at least pretend like onerous requirements serve a purpose. Where onerous crosses over into risky is where I'd prefer courts to draw a line and say "you are just banning the thing, so unless you are allowed to just straight up ban the thing, get rid of that requirement."

not allowed to ban something then you shouldn't be allowed to make access risky.

Isn't this how it is in meatspace?

Going to the shitty area of town to the adult bookstore was one of the things you could do when you turned 18.

More comments

Sure, but not in this case.

The internet has always been open for all.

Porn has been around since day one.

I remember trying to go on espn the first time I went online in maybe 1996 via AOL and porn came up. No damage done.

This is, imo, just puritinism.

I get it’s not a right … but having to wait for someone to unlock the deodorant to buy it is annoying as hell.

It is if you go off the beaten path of the internet. The difference you're recognizing is that the beaten path of the internet didn't used to be all that much of it insofar as it existed at all. But you'll still be bombarded with porn ads and porn spam if you use imageboards, pirate, etc.

You know, I am not a puritan and don't really care if porn is available. But are we really supposed to be concerned that homeless people can't access free porn? Like their presence isn't making public libraries and coffee shops unpleasant enough as it is?

Porn, setting aside you saying both "porn" and "free porn?" No, inasmuch as that seems like the least of their problems, liberty aside. Everything that a state or municipal government may deem harmful to minors? Yes. (And California already has a law against advertising guns/shooting sports to minors.) And while it's easy to say "Well, I can't think of anything like that I want homeless people to have," it's presumptuous to think this category will remain small, with SCOTUS giving governments a favorable precedent, and presumptuous to think one knows what tools/services are best for the homeless (compare politicians who propose to "fix" the cash-based economies of the working poor). (And short-sighted to say "I don't care if homeless people suffer;" they're not going to suffer purely in ways that don't affect you, no matter how much some people hope this would be the case.)

Yeah, the 'homeless person' concern is not the main objection, and I don't think anyone here's going to care what Texas' policies about low-cost IDs are.

That said, I think there are serious privacy and chilling effect concerns regarding this specific implementation and how it interacts with normal website management. The Texas law applies to any website run by a commercial entity (with a tiny number of exceptions), where more than 1/3rd of its content is 'harmful to minors', must do this verification or face sizable fines (up to 10k USD/day, plus 250k USD if a minor sees any banned content). Any web host operating in the United States that serves both adult and non-adult content, or even repeats content from its users, needs to do some pretty serious evaluations.

This wouldn't be too rough if the burden from age verification was tiny -- you take the precautionary principle to the max or divide the website and/or commercial entity -- but that doesn't seem to be the case. The plaintiffs here had a bit of a nut for a lawyer, but his claims that age verification could cost 40k USD for 100k users were plausible enough for a skeptical Texas court to accept it. That's steep but workable for a conventional commercial porn site; HB 1181 does not operate based on being a commercial site selling porn, but on being a commercial entity serving partially adult material. Even if he's off by a 'mere' couple orders of magnitude, there's a lot of websites and services where that's going to bring the risk-reward underwater, or outspend what sort of losses that a hobbyist is willing to lose out on.

So they have to get rid of the porn?

Whatever you think of porn on an individual level, it has ruinous effects on society. A chilling effect on porn is clearly 'good', even if a determined actor can still get it. 'Not having porn on hobbyist sites' seems well worth whatever inconvenience it causes to people with the weirdest hobbies ever.

More comments

This is about teenagers, not homeless people. It is, specifically, an age verification law- yes, getting around it is probably very doable for a motivated young lad, but we can reasonably assume that the people the law is explicitly targeted at are the ones most affected.

It is a privacy violation with the purpose of deterring adults pretending to be an age verification law. "Think of the children" is as usual nothing more than a cover story. As Kagan notes, if it were just an "age verification law" and the impact on adults was as minimal as possible while still achieving the goal of deterring youths then the law would survive strict scrutiny and the majority wouldn't have had to twist itself to support lower scrutiny.

I don’t actually mean to care about the homeless here - it just seems like me putting in my Drivers License to watch a Nikki Sims pov video from 15 years ago or something more obscene and German may lead to someone revealing this to people in an attempt at something.

Replace me with ten million other people I guess.

Maybe it’s an unfounded fear but there’s tens of thousands of people right now upset that Leo went to a wedding - I don’t want to not retire in 20 years because I have a foot fetish, and on occasion watch foot fetish video, of which on occasion veer towards obscenity.

The internet has always been open for all.

Well, no, it hasn't.

I get it’s not a right … but having to wait for someone to unlock the deodorant to buy it is annoying as hell.

Yeah, thieves suck.

Ah, I see. Well, that makes more sense, then.

Basically credit card transactions or services using those transactions. It might allow MindGeek-like auth, but the US doesn’t really have that. Presumably with a good faith effort to validate that the credit card holder’s name is above 18, though it didn’t come up in any args I could see.

Trump v. CASA, Inc.

So after this decision, what is actually the intended recourse for classes of individuals if the federal government subjects them to putative unconstitutional action (possibly even gish-gallopping different actions to achieve the same unconstitutional outcome)? I can see how the previous arrangement created an asymmetry in favour of case-and-jurisdiction shoppers, but the new one seems like it might equally create an asymmetry in favour of executive obsessions.

I understand that you are happy to see what you saw as an important weapon in your enemy's toolkit denied, but well, the enemy is best presumed to be crafty. If you were a progressive operative, could you imagine a way this decision could be turned against conservatives once you control the executive again?

You could always get a final ruling, rather than a preliminary injunction, from a court of competent jurisdiction.

If you say that getting a final ruling takes way too long - well, yes, that is a problem we urgently need to solve.

Per what the majority seemed to strongly imply, class actions are the new method, though Alito wants the requirements to remain strict for class certification. The somewhat jarring thing for me (not a lawyer) is that class action suits are NOT constitutionally mandated or enforced. It’s national law set by Congress authorizing them. So it was a little strange to me to see the SC “take away” the universal injunction ability from district courts on constitutional-ish grounds (really just a bit of semi tortured originalism plus some practical consideration) in favor of something decidedly extra-constitutionally grounded. For all the too-casual tone criticisms of Jackson’s dissent, she’s not really wrong in the narrow sense that this gives the administration permission to routinely ignore rulings against it in all non-party districts even if the action is blatantly illegal. Seemingly the majority is fine with this, and feels the delay created by class creation and certification and the actual arguing of the issue and the ruling (remember all this wrangling is over what to do in the time period before a case actually gets argued in full even at the district level) won’t be too excessive. That’s… honestly a little questionable. Kavanaugh wrote that he hopes the court will fill the gap somewhat by being more willing to take actual action, and action sooner, but it’s unclear if his fellow justices are actually on board with that. I think this is an error and they probably should have been okay with universal injunctions as long as they complied with some kind of fairly strict test.

IIRC around the end of the first Trump term, we got perilously close to dueling national injunctions for "must continue DACA" and "must immediately halt DACA", which isn't a sustainable way to run a national judiciary.

If you were a progressive operative, could you imagine a way this decision could be turned against conservatives once you control the executive again?

How do I get my guns in deep blue territory? The recourse there is the recourse here. If the answer is "you don't", that's also the answer here.

I don't think there is an intended recourse. I think the court was uncomfortable with the idea that some judge in Kansas City whom nobody has ever heard of could issue a national injunction preventing the president from exercising power anywhere, and they just ran with it. There was some suggestion that class actions should be used instead, but class actions are notoriously difficult due to class certification problems, and it seemed like the court was recommending class actions precisely because of these problems.

If I were litigating these matters, I'd take a "flood the zone" approach that would call into relief the practical problems of prohibiting national injunctions. It's just as easy for me to file a suit with 100 plaintiffs as it is one with 1 plaintiff, so I'd file suits with hundreds of named plaintiffs in friendly jurisdictions. I'd amend these suits regularly, as more plaintiffs came forward. Do this in enough districts and the multidistrict litigation panel will get involved and consolidate all the pending suits to one district for pretrial matters. If this happens, I then start filing suits in the unfriendly districts, which will immediately get stayed for enforcement under the standing order from the MDL judge.

If the cases aren't referred to MDL, which is a possibility if I'm only filing one case per district, it isn't necessarily a loss, because now I have 94 cases running in parallel. If more than one attorney takes this strategy, then it complicates things further. You could end up with hundreds of suits running in parallel, with hundreds of plaintiffs each, creating one massive headache for the government that will take forever to sort out and make the administration expend resources that it wouldn't have to if it were just one case in one district.

Have there been any notable cases of national injunctions being used to successfully gain value? All the ones I've heard of have been wielded by blues. If this tool hasn't been used by reds, why would removing it put reds in a worse position?

A lot of things seem to work this way lately; if a thing is only of value to one tribe, the other tribe has little incentive to preserve it.

... depends a lot on your definition of 'national injunction' and 'gain value'.

This at Table A-2 provides the most expansive definition of both, in that they were injunctions applying beyond the bounds of a courts jurisdiction and applied for at least some time, though because it measures them by what President was in place when the injunction was applied, not what President's administration started the policy that was enjoined (eg, several 'Biden-era' cases revolve around preliminary injunctions about military prohibitions on HIV-positive membership or joining, Harrison and Wilkins). (Contrast Harvard's 14 injunctions under Biden). Smashing those two lists together and focusing on the Biden admin, I'd count :

  • Texas v. United States, 515 F. Supp. 3d 627, Tipton's temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction against Biden's 100-day pause on immigration deportations. I don't think this ever got reviewed before it self-mooted, but I also don't think it actually stopped the admin from just doing it and saying it was enforcement discretion.
  • Faust v. Vilsack, 519 F. Supp. 3d 470, Holman v. Vilsack, No. 21-1085-STA-JAY, and Wynn v. Vilsack, 545 F. Supp. 3d 1271, loan forgiveness for racial minority farmers. I think this one held for at least the original program until it was repealed. Biden did work around it by using other programs or having supposedly race-neutral programs that only racial minorities were informed about, though.
  • Louisiana v. Biden, 543 F. Supp. 3d 388, ban on new oil drilling leases in public lands, preliminary injunction. Reversed on appeal to give more tailored restrictions, trial court drew it back to thirteen plaintiff states. Also an APA case. It's not clear if it actually worked; the EO in question didn't stop scheduled oil leases, but the plan for future auctions dropped dramatically.
  • Texas v. United States, 549 F. Supp. 3d 572, DACA, preliminary injunction on new admissions to the program. APA case, overturned on appeal.
  • Texas v. Biden, 554 F. Supp. 3d 818. Termination of Migration Protection Protocols (aka Remain in Mexico). Kinda an APA case? Overturned by SCOTUS and the Biden admin had just made a new memo terminating it anyway beforehand.
  • Texas v. United States, 555 F. Supp. 3d 351. Whether "shall" requires the administration to do anything to criminal illegal aliens, preliminary injunction. This is the one I keep yelling at Ben_Garrison about, you know how it ended.
  • Arizona v Biden, 40 F.4th 375, second verse, same as above except it was overturned at the circuit level.
  • Georgia v. Biden, 574 F. Supp. 3d 1337, federal workers vaccine mandate on the contracting side, preliminary injunct. 11th Circuit scaled it back to just the plaintiff organizations, their members, and the seven plaintiff states.
  • Feds for Med. Freedom v. Biden, 581 F. Supp. 3d 826, federal workers vaccine mandate on the employee side, preliminary injunction. Long procedural history, think the injunction was in place when the policy was repealed, mooting the arg.
  • Nebraska v. Biden, 52 F.4th 1044. HEROES Act loan forgivness, preliminary injunction by the appeals court. Upheld by SCOTUS.
  • Braidwood Mgmt. Inc. v. Becerra, 666 F. Supp. 3d 613. Contraception, abortion, and PReP mandate for ACA insurance coverage, weird procedural history since it's mostly a process question with RFRA stapled on the side, hence why it came up literally yesterday. The RFRA side got an injunction that looks like still applies but isn't universal? And the universal injunction on Appointments/APA was squashed early on appeal down to just the plaintiffs, overturned by SCOTUS.
  • Monticello Banking Co. v. Consumer Fin. Prot. Bureau, No. 6:23-CV-00148-KKC and Tex. Bankers Ass'n v. Consumer Fin. Prot. Bureau, No. 7:23-CV-00144. Something about the CFPB being unconstitutional and injunctions against data collection rules. I'm not even sure if these count as real national injunctions rather than just applying to a large organization with a lot of members.
  • Nuziard v. Minority Bus. Dev. Agency, 721 F. Supp. 3d 431. Another racially discriminatory aid program, preliminary injunction. I think they just made the discrimination a little more subtle, but technically the injunction applied to the end of the case and the plaintiffs got a result.
  • Career Colls. & Sch. of Texas v. U.S. Dep't of Educ., 98 F.4th 220. Higher Education Act loan forgiveness program. Preliminary injunction on appeal, under the APA. Currently at SCOTUS.
  • Alaska v. U.S. Dep't of Educ., No. 24-1057-DDC-ADM, SAVE higher education loan forgiveness program. Preliminary injunction, under the APA. Stayed on appeal, though Nebraska effectively covered the same ground eventually.
  • Missouri v. Biden, 738 F. Supp. 3d 1113, FEEL higher education loan income-based repayment program. Preliminary injunction, under the APA. I think upheld in 8th Circuit
  • Associated Gen. Contractors of America v. U.S. Dep't of Labor, No. 5:23-CV-0272-C. Something really technical about treating truckers like mechanics for 'locally prevailing wages and benefits' rules? Preliminary injunction under the APA, appeals are currently stayed.
  • Tennessee v. Becerra, No. 1:24cv161-LG-BWR. Including gender identity to Title IX (and indirectly, the ACA). Preliminary injunction under the APA. Probably mooted by the election.
  • Tex. Top Cop Shop, Inc. v. Garland, No. 4:24-CV-478. Corporate Transparency Act beneficial owner rule. Commerce clause challenge, the poor bastards. Stayed by SCOTUS, with Kavanaugh specifically writing this as an example of universal injunctions bad.
  • EDIT: All. for Hippocratic Med., 668 F. Supp. 3d at 560. Abortion pill FDA approval under APA, technically a nation-wide stay, but had the effect of an injunction. Got smacked down by SCOTUS./EDIT

Honorable mentions:

  • Price v. Barr, 514 F. Supp. 3d 171, permanent injunction against rule requiring permit to film in national parks, reversed on appeal. Not really a red-tribe-blue-tribe thing, at least directly; one of the few places I'd put myself and Merrick Garland on the same side.
  • Arizona by and through Brnovich v. Ctrs. for Disease Control & Prevention, 2022 WL 1276141. If you want to find anything on this, look for "Title 42 Immigration Case", or this clusterfuck. The preliminary injunction itself was against a Trump-era rule about immigration under COVID, but Biden hadn't officially stopped it, but Biden was defending or 'defending' it.

So there's a lot of cases, here. How you analyze them's going to depend on what you're looking for. Literally any case with an injunction broader than the plaintiffs that wasn't immediately stayed? I think you get somewhere around 15-17 cases, on about five major topics. Cases where this actually worked, if only until final review, cuts out at least five. In one sense it's damning that some of these injunctions got overturned by higher courts... but does that mean that the lower court got it wrong, the higher court got it wrong, or just that SCOTUS was trying to push the CASA button then?

Cases that would have changed if CASA was decided first? A lot of these are APA challenges that CASA specifically sets aside for future discussion, another handful were already being drilled down to their plaintiff states.

Cases that mattered? I dunno.

Wasn't there that one Texas judge all the conservatives kept shopping to?

The one who banned the abortion pill?

Judge shopping is much broader than national injunctions and will continue.

A few from the fifth circuit in the Abbott v Feds standoff under the Biden admin. I don't think it made any difference in the end.

I'm not familiar enough with the US anymore to know if what you say about reds (not) wielding injunctions is accurate, but one could imagine the theoretical possibility playing a role even if reds never did it, if, for example, we posit that blues had a more accurate picture of what the different jurisdictions could do and therefore avoided taking executive steps they know would be stopped by injunction.

The idea is to find some sympathetic plaintiff who would be affected by a statute or executive action you don't like, shop around the whole country until you find a judge who agrees with you, and then get that judge--before the case has even been tried--to indefinitely prevent the government from applying the challenged law/regulation/action to anyone, anywhere in the country. This opinion represents a potentially huge obstacle to progressive activist's attempts to stymie Trump's immigration agenda.

I think this is the right decision, BUT need some safeguards. First one is the government should be mandated to appeal or accept the outcome as nationwide precedent. A situation in which there is lawsuit in the middle of nowhere and government loses, but doesn't appeal and do what it feels in the other circuits is probably not an optimal one. Right now by not appealing the government can decide what kind of cases come to the supreme court. There must be a way for cases to percolate to SCOTUS that the government itself doesn't want to be heard.

Free Speech Coalition, Inc. v. Paxton - Pornography 6-3 conservative opinion, Thomas. First Amendment does not prohibit Texas from requiring age-verification for pornographic websites. Kagan writes the dissent.

This one's weird.

The law is probably reasonable enough or close to reasonable enough (if not necessarily my idea of well-designed), but the lower court just set it against rational basis review. Previous SCOTUS decisions either put restrictions on adult content either fully in strict scrutiny (Ashcroft I and II, where restrictions were on the basis of the content's adult nature) or rational basis (obscenity to minors, movie theatres). And strict scrutiny, at least in a free speech context, is ruinously hard to achieve, in ways that even Thomas probably doesn't want to water down. The closest obvious parallel in previous law was adult theatres, which was admittedly a pretty jank decision of its own by pretending it was separating the effects of the content from the content to justify rational basis review. But that'd be the same as no review at all.

I guess this case didn't fall close enough to the commercial speech restriction cases for the adult theatre side to be even remotely palatable? But it's Thomas, and his willingness to go to the bat for bizarrely aggressive paternalism (eg, en loco parentis) is one of the bits that's long been a go to, for better or worse. Instead, he reaches (through BSA v. Dale for some reason) to the draft-card burning regulations from US v. O'Brien, saying restrictions on speech here are incidental to restrictions on behavior, so intermediate scrutiny. From that view, it's not unreasonable.

Then Thomas differentiates it from the strict scrutiny CDA cases by saying those "effectively suppresse[d] a large amount of speech that adults have a constitutional right to receive”. But the analysis is just limited to privacy concerns and stigma (aka, more privacy concerns). Yet these restrictions have potentially massive costs to speakers, not just receivers, on adult-content sites or even mixed-content that don't go up to that mark. Likewise, he tries to distinguish the CDA as regulating noncommercial sites that would not readily take up credit card processing, but HB1181 applies to all commercial entities, not just commercial sites. Burden can't drive level of scrutiny up, but this sort of perfunctory analysis gives little idea of what the actual analysis is, especially since intermediate review is a little ad hoc to start with.

Some of that burden review is probably because the Free Speech Coalition advocate comes across as kinda a nutcase during oral args. He mentions costs to site managers once in oral arguments and it's a stunning 40k USD per 100k users, and then spends much more of his time ranting about the motivations of anti-porn people. But then intermediate scrutiny's biggest bite is specifically in the prong of the O'Brien test that asks if the government interest is tied to the suppression of information, which is where the whole anti-porn thing rises anyway.

It rounds out to normal -- Thomas does everything short of wink-and-nod to say that pretextual restrictions on obscenity-to-minors that try to cover restrictions on adults are invalid -- but it's just such a bizarre way of getting there, and it's going to invite a lot of mess from lower courts.

Gutierrez v. Saenz - ... My read: SCOTUS lets a death-row inmate file a doomed, pointless post-conviction motion that doesn't have any hope of success but will probably delay his execution for a few more years

Yeah, probably. I'm really skeptical that a DNA test with no return of Gutierrez's DNA from the few samples available would factually demonstrate that he was outside of the trailer (or for a positive result to have his advocates want him in the chair), and while I could kinda see the arguments for allowing it anyway, it's hard to care. There's a chance Texas will just punt on killing him, but it's Texas, so that's a real far outlier. The process and procedural stuff might matter for other cases, perhaps? The court just didn't like the lower courts ignoring past dicta?

The law is about pornography to minors, hence ‘rational basis’ and not strict scrutiny. Seems pretty obvious.

They actually say intermediate scrutiny, not rational basis, I believe.

The law's focus is about pornography to minors. A covered web host can be liable for ten thousand dollars per day even if they're never viewed by a minor, and the only way to host more than 1/3 "harmful to minors" material requires collecting identification proofs of age or collecting financial proofs of age (and a stayed requirement to post giant blocks of text). Likewise, someone wanting to request material from a covered web host must provide identification or financial proof of age, even if they're an adult, and even if they're requesting non-obscene-to-minors material.

Maybe those tradeoffs are worth it, but rational basis review doesn't do any such analysis.

Gutierrez v. Saenz - Criminal Procedure. A lurid murder case gives rise to a pretty boring dispute about death-row inmates' standing to request post-conviction testing of DNA evidence. I can't really figure out the nuances of the Texas law at issue or the procedural history, but it looks like the Sotomayor-led majority thinks Gutierrez has standing; he has a Fourteenth Amendment liberty interest in the ability to request post-conviction DNA testing, even though the prosecutor apparently has both the right and the express intention to refuse that request in this case.[...] My read: SCOTUS lets a death-row inmate file a doomed, pointless post-conviction motion that doesn't have any hope of success but will probably delay his execution for a few more years (Gutierrez was convicted in 1998).

Alternative read: An enormous amount of capital appeals has been about everything except whether the defendant actually murdered someone. This Court in particular has had little patience for endless appeals regarding mental capacity, culpability, IQ, age, execution methods, history of abuse/neglect and all the other sentencing-phase stuff.

But now they are signaling that they are amenable to something like DNA that can (theoretically) be relevant to the actual verdict. The message seems to clearly tell the appellate folks what not to focus on.

Without knowing specifics of a case, what the hell would DNA prove in a murder case? Did some guy shoot his own hand splattering the wall then shoot the victim?

This is why these sorts of appeals and objections are such BS. People just seize upon any possible avenue to delay an execution. Usually in such cases its not like there was a semen sample in the deceased vagina and he was convicted without testing done. Its obviously going to be some other thing.

Um, I dunno, suspect's blood found at the crime scene. Victim's blood found on the suspect's clothes, or in his apartment. I could go on but I don't have a decade to list all the scenarios where DNA evidence could be relevant in a murder case.

I think testing finding DNA evidence under the victim's fingernails that matches a guy convicted of rape would probably be fairly weighty evidence. Of course, to be weighed against everything else. Of course, that's a just-so manufactured scenario.

In this case, the perp confessed he was there to rob the victim and his co-conspirators went inside and murdered her instead. This appeals doesn't challenge his overall guilt for what happens, only whether he actually killed the victim or not. And that's relevant because the TX legislature (not a federal judge) specifically made that a precondition for the death penalty.

In other words, there is an actual factual question about what exactly this guy did.

But DNA can't solve that factual question. The jury already answered that question without DNA, which can only further implicate him. He can only go from 100% guilty to 100% guilty.

I understand and agree to that.

I don’t think it materially changes my point about the types of claims raised on appeal. His claim is weak, or even very weak, but it’s at least the right kind of claim.

Problem in this case is that it's possible that any DNA under the victim's fingernails match one of the Gutierrez's compatriots, and Gutierrez still entered the trailer and participated in the murder -- just without being scratched. Indeed, because one of his compatriots lived with the victim and had 'found' the victim's body, some of the samples should be reasonably expected to be not-Gutierrez's even if he was totally guilty as can be.

There's been fact-based determinations before focusing on guilt (even, rarely, ones that raised serious nontrivial questions of guilt: McCollum is pretty embarrassing to Scalia). I'm hard-pressed to see how that'd happen here.

Indeed. I don't disagree.

But at the very least the core of his appellate claim is on a relevant (to the TX legislature) factual matter about what happened. It might be weak, but at least he's arguing the right actual thing.

That alone puts it far ahead of the majority of far-less-defensible capital appeals that are about everything else.

That's fair; it's definitely better than the parade of 'well, you can't kill me this way' or 'oh, but I got bad advice from a defense attorney that I ignored anyway'.

my lawyer was ineffective for not investigating childhood abuse that might’ve been raised at sentencing

You can't use DNA evidence from a place to prove you weren't there, which is what he's trying to do.

Yes, I get that.

I must have written exceptionally poorly for so many folks not to actually get my point.

"Nationwide" or "universal" injunctions have been part of the playbook for activists' (especially progressive activists) lawfare for a long time. The idea is to find some sympathetic plaintiff who would be affected by a statute or executive action you don't like, shop around the whole country until you find a judge who agrees with you, and then get that judge--before the case has even been tried--to indefinitely prevent the government from applying the challenged law/regulation/action to anyone, anywhere in the country.

Oh short political memories. This was also the playbook of conservative activists, especially given that there are single-judge districts in the 5^th circuits with some very conservative jurists. You don't even have to shop them, you can 100% pick. And there were at least a dozen such nationwide injunctions against Biden-admin policies: Texas v. U.S (twice!), Louisiana v US, GA v US, NE v US Top Cop v Garland. Which was fair turnabout given Trump I given Obama (remember DACA and the DOL persuader rule, probably not) and so forth.

When there's next a D administration, it's gonna be short memories again, and everyone will trade places around a merry-go-round of pretending to be actually concerned about procedural matters. It's predictable and would be distressing except that I suppose we're all just numb to it now.

[ FWIW, if you care about my actual thoughts on the merits, I think the decision is fine. I would probably sign mostly onto Kav's concurrence which joins the opinion in full. ]

I was pretty sad to see that Louisiana v. Callais was delayed. I was looking forward to that.

This is the "birthright citizenship" case: does the Court agree with the Trump administration that some people born on U.S. soil are nevertheless not American citizens? IDK! Because the Court doesn't answer that question.

I'm honestly a bit frightened by this one. I don't find most of Trump's stuff all that worrisome but this seems potentially pretty society altering.

My parents were illegal immigrants. They had me here in the late 70s so I had citizenship by birth. My parents have since received amnesty and even applied for citizenship and received it as well. But I think if the EO holds I don't see why they could not apply this retroactively. If it makes sense to do it for the future it makes sense to do it for the past too.

My parents would have more standing to stay in the US than I would.

Would be kind of funny to have to pack up and start a new life in the old country though in middle age.

this seems potentially pretty society altering

Birth right citizenship is a bizarre American (meaning the Americas) custom. Why on earth would you reward illegal immigrants by making their children citizens? It's a planet-sized moral hazard. Just because you benefitted from it doesn't mean it's good. Crimes should have negative consequences, not positive ones.

It’s not actually. This was briefly mentioned in the dissent, but birthright citizenship was already very established and practiced English law for a long time pre-Founding. So I’m sure you can continue to argue against it morally, but in a constitutional sense this is one of the most clear-cut issues ever, if you are an originalist OR a textualist OR even a living-documentist. Want to change it? You sure can! It will take an amendment, however.

You do have to remember that immigration now is very different than what it was. Just to name three of many reasons, generally if you immigrated somewhere you were effectively settling and living there, and two, international remittances were much less practical and common, and three, there was limited to nonexistent welfare.

I'm not defending it as an inalienable right.

We did seem to feel a little differently about it decades ago, though, when we had labor shortages, low public entitlements, and loved rubbing it in the faces of communists that people were desperate to leave their nations for ours.

We did seem to feel a little differently about it decades ago, though, when we had labor shortages, low public entitlements, and loved rubbing it in the faces of communists that people were desperate to leave their nations for ours.

Who is we? Decades ago, we were fighting over it still. There's always been a category of Americans who want to dissolve states and borders and peoples, but it's not all of us.

Congress and the President are as "we" as it gets when it comes to law. Unless you want to bring guns into a discussion about SCOTUS rulings.

Immigration is probably the single starkest and most consistent example of something where the native population and the government continually operate in opposition. The government is aggressively anti-we in this regard. People continually, across the west, say they want less, and their governments bring in more.

You may find from time to time a simple majority that says we should stop illegal immigration but you won't find a majority that believes that means we should pull people out of homes they've made in the US to deport them.

Yes, I understand the strategy of letting them all in and then trusting the next admin won't be able to remove them. This is why I'm on Team Fuck The Law, Do What's Right, They All Gotta Go, and will accept any violation of law in pursuit of this.

More comments

It genuinely should be done. Amnesty was a mistake, generously; more cynically, it was treachery. Birthright citizenship is insane, and rewarding illegals for bleeding on our magic soil is deeply infuriating.

Framing citizenship as a "reward" is completely nonsensical. Citizenship is the codified form of the chains of responsibility and liberty that bind individuals and their communities together. Whether someone is born to illegal parents has no bearing on whether they dutifully maintain those chains. You're correct that dirt isn't magic, but you're completely ignoring the fact that blood isn't either-- citizens by Jus Sanguis don't have an intrinsically stronger claim. Rather, it's mundane, ordinary, sweat that ultimately cements the body politic together, and the children of illegal immigrants donate plenty of theirs. Understanding that, America grants them their citizenship without regard for the the sins of their fathers. And that would be the right, and just, and honorable way to do things even if illegal immigrants and their children weren't an economic net positive.

(I could accept the argument that America shouldn't extend citizenship to people who don't work or pay taxes in america. But only if you apply it globally and say that at the minimum America should ban dual citizenship for everyone, and at maximum all expats should be given nansen passports.)

It is functionally a reward though, and one that people are keen to give to their kids. First because the kid get access to all the benefits of being an American, but secondly that a lot of immigration law can be gamed by having a minor child who is an American. Things like priority for immigration through family connections. Or being able to live in Mexico and send your kids to American schools, or access to American healthcare. There are cases in which women will wait until literally in labor before crossing the border in hopes that the baby will be born in America and be American.

I’m not opposed to granting citizenship to a child born to legal immigrants who have lived in America for years and work and pay taxes and are working toward citizenship. It’s reasonable that if the family moved here and wants to remain that the child gets to be born an American. What isn’t right is a person sneaking in with the intention of giving birth in America and no actual legal connections to America beyond popping out a kid.

The gist of your argument is, "illegal immigration is bad. Receiving the benefits of having a citizen child is good. If we link the latter to the former we are giving people good things for doing bad things. This is unjust." I disagree with the premise (illegal immigration is better than legal immigration because they have to pay taxes but don't get welfare), but admit that it's logically sound. It's also, however, missing the point. Birthright citizenship isn't about the immigrant, it's about the baby. Yes, those children benefit from schools and healthcare-- but so do the children of american citizens. Neither the child by blood nor the child by soil have a "right" to that education or healthcare, but we as a society have pragmatically and compassionately decided to invest in our children in the (well founded) hope that they will one day repay the favor. And in the meantime, we expect our children-- of citizens and noncitizens both-- to earn their rights to vote and run for office, as delimited by the laws that make explicit our social contract.

If you think that education or healthcare are bad investments, you're welcome to argue for that. If you think that illegal immigrants should receive fewer benefits for giving birth to citizen children, you're welcome to argue that too. If you think our social contract asks for too little in return for too much.... well, I'm already pretty sympathetic to that position. But that's all orthogonal to my argument that blood confers no special qualities relative to soil.

I’m arguing that having a citizen in the family does in fact benefit the entire family including entitling the child to benefits that might well be unavailable in the home country thus creating a strong inducement to do anything possible to have the baby in America. And that without skin in the game of some form, it’s a big problem.

And the whole thing is about the immigrant because the baby doesn’t drop down from outer space. The stork didn’t deliver the baby, Scottie didn’t beam down the baby, the baby came from a woman who had sex with her husband. And therefore creating benefits for the baby by necessity creates benefits for tge family that created the baby. And I think you should very careful about how tge thing is handled.

And that without skin in the game of some form

The children belongs, from birth, to the united states of america. They cannot renounce their citizenship without paying an exit tax. That is skin in the game. The phrase " entitling the child to benefits that might well be unavailable in the home country" is logically incoherent on its face because america is the child's home country. The child doesn't get any extra special bonus benefit for illegally immigrating-- the child is just an american citizen, and always has been, and gets no more or less liberty or responsibility than any other american citizenship.

And therefore creating benefits for the baby by necessity creates benefits for tge family that created the baby.

No. Not, "by necessity." As a practical measure. There's a difference. From the moment the child is born on American soil the USA arrogates the right to seize the child from their parents, put it in protective custody, and kick its parents out of the country. The USA doesn't usually do that because it rarely makes sense to force taxpayers to raise the child instead of its parent, but the right to do so exists, is sometimes applied, and is uncontroversially constitutional. (There are laws that limit how often the government does this in practice, but the very fact that they are laws, rather than amendments, is the proof in the pudding). Parents are not their children, and children are not their parents. Whether the parent has any right to be in the country has no bearing on whether the child has a right to be in the country-- the child's citizenship belongs to them and them alone. Abrogating someone's rights based on the behavior of their relatives is simply not compatible with an individualist, democratic state.

Framing citizenship as a "reward" is completely nonsensical.

Indeed, if citizenship is a reward why aren't we going full evolutionary humanism instead of focusing on crude bloodline?

There are like poor eighth generation Appalachians who lust for Marxism that are social dead weight compared to the most skilled and industrious red white and blue immigrants eager to come in and deepen our capital and gleefully celebrate Christmas.

Framing citizenship as a "reward" is completely nonsensical.

No, it's actually just correct. Being a citizen of the US is a reward for anyone not entitled to it by blood. We're the best. Everyone knows it.

You're correct that dirt isn't magic, but you're completely ignoring the fact that blood isn't either-- citizens by Jus Sanguis don't have an intrinsically stronger claim

No, it's actually blood. Blood is deeper and more true than everything you list.

No, it's actually just correct. Being a citizen of the US is a reward for anyone not entitled to it by blood. We're the best. Everyone knows it.

I have family members who lived in the United States for over a decade, on permanent visas. They went there for work, and undoubtedly contributed to American prosperity. Their presence was completely legal.

Eventually they were offered pathways to American citizenship.

They refused, because they didn't want to be American citizens. They wanted to leave and come back home to Australia, which they eventually did. They sometimes still visit the US for business reasons, but only for short stays. They tell me quite frankly that they prefer living in Australia and view Australian citizenship as preferable to American.

Are they wrong?

No, it's actually just correct. Being a citizen of the US is a reward for anyone not entitled to it by blood. We're the best. Everyone knows it.

Just curious, since I don't often receive this kind of candor.

Have I earned it, in your opinion?

I was born here through no choice of my own. But! I've been here for five decades, speak English fluently, have two houses, was raised in the Christian tradition, have paid millions in taxes, have never been to jail, have a white wife and two white children (three including step child) who are irrefutably citizens via my wife.

Also, kindly let me know what you feel you've done to earn being an American citizen.

I was born here through no choice of my own. But! I've been here for five decades, speak English fluently, have two houses, was raised in the Christian tradition, have paid millions in taxes, have never been to jail, have a white wife and two white children (three including step child) who are irrefutably citizens via my wife.

It's not your fault your parents fucked you over, and you did the best you could. But no, you're illegitimate. I'd be willing to fast-track you through the immigration system, but you'd have to go back first. Once exceptions start being made, they get made for everyone, otherwise.

Let also let me what you feel you've done to earn being an American citizen, btw.

Oh, I was born to two citizen parents. Citizenship is mine by blood.

Oh, I was born to two citizen parents. Citizenship is mine by blood.

At least you assume so. Unless you can prove that their parents had the power to transfer citizenship, I'm just going to assume you aren't, and that goes all the way back up the chain. You'd better hope that a sufficient number of immigrants in that chain were either here before 1789 or naturalized before they had your ancestors, or else they couldn't have transmitted citizenship to their children and I'd prefer you'd be deported to South Sudan or some other country that will take anyone. At that point you can get in the back of the line behind all the other South Sudanese who want to live in the US (Good luck!).

Just curious- other than one great grandfather, all of my ancestors were in the continental US before 1776(many were in then-Spanish Louisiana, but the rest were in the thirteen colonies). Do I count?

More comments

You're not very convincing, buddy.

More comments

But no, you're illegitimate. I'd be willing to fast-track you through the immigration system, but you'd have to go back first

I appreciate the endorsement.

Oh, I was born to two citizen parents. Citizenship is mine by blood.

Well! My blood claim is probably as solid as yours is, maybe even moreso.

You're just a citizen and I am not in your framework by legal technicality.

Feel free to think that, I'm not interested in humoring foreign entitlement.

More comments

It's crazy to criticize magic soil when apparently you believe in magic water. Having a particular genetic sequence or ancestral tree doesn't establish responsibilities and liberties any better than touching a particular patch of soil. Actually, it is explicitly, legally worse at transmitting those things.

Blood is not water, nor is it magical. It's deeply physical. A people are tied by it.

It's deeply physical.

Implying that dirt isn't? Implied that a people aren't tied together by living together in the same place? This entire argument is 100% special pleading.

"A people" might be. A country is not a people; most countries are too big to be anything but a collection of peoples tied not by blood, but by a language (not always), an army (sometimes not their own) and a flag (usually their own).

A midwestern farmer and a coastal urbanist have no common blood between them. Memes might tie them closer than blood does some tribes. But not blood.

America is a collection of regional blood-tied communities -- at least, it was. I accept that rootless cosmopolitans have spread about and diluted themselves so fully they're not a people of any tribe or place, but blood is still the most important tie. Those people are just deeply unfortunate and damaged.

Framing citizenship as a "reward" is completely nonsensical

It doesn't matter how anyone on the internet frames it. Illegal immigrants (quite rationally) do treat first world citizenship as a prize and lie and cheat their way to getting it. They do it for the same reason young third world men risk their lives coming across the sea on rubber dinghies and why rich foreigners quite literally buy it.

Illegal immigrants (quite rationally) do treat first world citizenship as a prize and lie and cheat their way to getting it.

Even if I were to accept that description of illegal immigrants as being accurate, it still fails to describe the children of illegal immigrants. Babies are not rewarded by citizenship, they are entitled to it.

I'm not arguing that birthright citizenship doesn't exist. It obviously does and these children legally are entitled to it. I'm saying that they shouldn't be.

And even if having a citizen child had no benefit for the parents (clearly false, having a citizen child makes it easier for illegal immigrants to stay), that doesn't make it any less of a prize. Parents obviously do things that are good for their children. And a system that incentivises parents to commit crimes by rewarding their children is a bad one.

It obviously does and these children legally are entitled to it. I'm saying that they shouldn't be.

I think you believe that citizenship is an entitlement that belongs to the parent, rather than the child, and that they distribute it according to their will. In that model, it would make sense to say that, mechanically, "giving a child citizenship" is equivalent to "giving their parent the right to make their children citizens." Consequently, you perceive birthright citizenship as a reward to illegal immigrant parents.

Is that accurate?

Not exactly. The idea of 'parents distributing citizenship' is an odd way to frame it. States issue citizenship. I reject the idea that any non-citizen is entitled to citizenship at all. In my ideal world, children could only inherit citizenship from their parents and nobody could have dual citizenship.

Whether you frame it as states rewarding criminals by giving their children citizenship, or as states rewarding the children of criminals (thereby incentivising crime) is immaterial. The key issue is that we have a thing we want to reduce (illegal immigration) and instead of disincentivising it, states provide massive incentives for it.

More comments

This was the original meaning of citizenship, incidentally- it would be recognizable to an Athenian that one of the perks of citizenship status is the right to make citizen babies.

More comments

Anyone who gives birth on our soil, after no matter how short a period and with no matter how temporary a status, gives birth to a US citizen. Surely, justice demands there must be some quantity of sweat expended over some period of time before we recognize a deep tie of kinship and mutual responsibility?

Surely, justice demands there must be some quantity of sweat expended over some period of time before we recognize a deep tie of kinship and mutual responsibility?

the way you're asking this question conflates the mother and child, but that's the very point I'm arguing against. Certainly, the mother has only expended a very limited amount of sweat relative to what they've produced over their entire life-- but the child, at that point, has given literally everything they have to america. Even then, it's fair to say that we want another 18 years of sweat out of them before we extend them any greater liberty than the right to exist on our soil, just as we do for the children of legal inhabitants. Dipping my toe into the child-separation debate, I concede that it makes sense to say, "either leave the child with CPS or renounce its American citizenship to take it with you when you're deported." I'd disagree with that policy on practical/utilitarian grounds, but deontologically find the position blameless.

Yes, we commonly treat those who have just arrived in this world as a part of their family unit. You are born into this world with very little, except the moral and often legal right to demand the resources of those who bore you. I am conflating the mother and the child because it is what our world always and everywhere already does.

The child comes into the world with the strongest sense of belonging to a tiny nation - that of his biological family. On a larger scale than that, he belongs as a junior member, by virtue of his parent's membership, into whatever web of belonging they belong to. Thus, a Hebrew boy was taken to be circumcized and named on the eighth day of life.

They do not have the liberty to exist on our soil, because their family does not have the right to exist on our soil, and we would be wise not to dismember the tightest and tiniest of nations.

Yea, the incentive structure of birthright citizenship is insane. Unfortunately, the other end of the spectrum is a permanent generation-on-generation underclass of non-citizens like Turkish and Arab immigrant communities in Germany. Seems a difficult needle to thread.

Seems a difficult needle to thread.

For them, perhaps, but not us. But it's not our responsibility to make things easy for them, especially when a significant number of us don't want them here in the first place.

We don't need a non-citizen underclass. We don't need them here at all. And if they insist, we should exploit them.

I don’t see why ‘not automatically citizens’ is so awful a condition. US citizenship is not closed and getting naturalized is common enough we can assume the good ones will get there eventually.

I think it can be fixed. If your parents were legal at the time of your birth, you should be a citizen. If your mom crossed the border while in labor specifically so you’d be born in America, you should not be.

Unfortunately, the other end of the spectrum is a permanent generation-on-generation underclass of non-citizens like Turkish and Arab immigrant communities in Germany.

I see no problem here. They can always return to turkey or whatever.

Do you really expect anyone to 'return' to a country which they've never set foot in and whose language they do not speak?

Since their parents did it the same when they came, why not?

Amnesty was an act of Congress signed by the President. The country was also a bit different then. We wanted the labor and felt compassion for people fleeing communist hell holes.

I'm not really arguing against ending birthright citizenship going forward given how much different the circumstances are now.

Yes, amnesty was entirely legal. It was also a disaster. It is but one of many reasons I no longer care if actions are lawful or not, merely whether they direct the country in the right direction.

You mean the literal exact argument that leads to authoritarianism and the destruction of democracy? I think Democrats obviously freak out over stuff way too often and too loudly, but this is a pretty classically un-American view. The irony is rich here.

I think we should all pray that the US suffer many more disastrous times as bad at that awful period from 1988-2001.

This period was not because of the amnesty but because of the win of the cold war.

If the rule you followed led you to here, of what use was the rule?

Indeed. And since Reagan made a set of rules and it led to the golden age of the 90s, that’s exactly the right lesson.

It also led to the 2000s, and the 2010s, and the 2020s. Lots of things look really great if you refuse to look at the long-term consequences. Meth, for instance.

Trump v. CASA is very specifically about universal injunctions; none of the majority really delves into the likelihood of success in the merits, and I'm extremely skeptical that it could get more than two votes max on the merits of the underlying lawsuit.

I'm skeptical the EO will even avoid pretrial mass relief: the majority openly invites state-wide injunctions or class action lawsuits, and this would be one of the cleanest Rule 23 class actions possible. I'd be willing to bet 100 USD to a charity of your choice that there are at least three circuits where almost all children of illegal immigrants are covered by an injunction before the end of the year, and I'm only going that low because of friction effects.

The fact that they let the nationwide injunction stand for another 30 days is likewise indicative of this.

While I'm not a lawyer, I don't see how there could be any such retroactive action, considering the constitution explicitly forbids ex post facto laws. Presumably even if we do get rid of birthright citizenship, it would apply only to future cases, not past cases.

But the prohibition on ex post facto laws is about laws. The supreme court is not very consistent about when its declared constitutional rules apply retroactively, but the answer is not "never." To the extent individuals have gotten citizenship by birth due to the fourteenth amendment (rather than an act of Congress) such citizenship would be open to retroactive removal by the court.

The chances of actually striking it down in its face are actually zero. I mean that completely. Zero. If it happens I will shave my head and never comment anything about politics again ever on any website. Zero.

The chances of them weakening it via some kind of practical or legal obstacles, to the point where it is effectively dead is extremely low but not impossible. Under 5% surely. Maybe 1-2%? Still quite a reach. Maybe still that’s high.

The chances of some other procedural weakening where it is merely super annoying, that’s a little higher. I’m not sure exactly where to peg it.

The chances of practical and legal burdens and even unalterable mistakes for those currently giving birth in the next year or so are actually kinda high. But that’s by definition temporary. Not much comfort if you or your wife are pregnant right now and lack papers. Honestly I think this is the true target and goal of the administration. If you are cruel and capricious enough you might get enough people to self deport, or not make the trip over, and this helps the near term numbers and politics.

The long-term outlook for birthright citizenship is not really under any actual threat. You still need an amendment to change it. At most, beneficiaries will have to budget a little bit more on practical or legal bills surrounding the birth, but that’s already the case to some extent with any new baby birth (it’s never free)

Given that we could end up in situations where newborns in certain states acquire citizenship and other newborns don't, I would've thought the Supreme Court would issue a decision on birthright citizenship within the present term. Is it just that there's not enough time?

They don't have a current case on it; almost everything is early in preliminary process at the district or appeals level. The oral args brought up cases in the First, Fourth, and Ninth Circuit, there's no chance of the feds winning the 9th Circuit barring pod people, and the feds committed to requesting cert if they lost (for whatever a lawyer's promise is worth, lol). Bondi's statement, charitably, would involve a fast resolution to one of those cases, an October term hearing, and decisions months after that. This timeline might not give us an answer until Spring or Summer 2026 (although I think it'd be obvious before then).

But I don't think CASA prohibits all preliminary protections. The majority opinion openly invites class certification and class-wide relief, and the extent that the feds tried to argue against class certification during oral args was kinda a joke:

KAVANAUGH: If you were to oppose it, on what basis would you plausibly oppose [classwide certification]?

GENERAL SAUER: There may be problems of commonality and typicality, for example. For -- for example, there's two different sets of groups that are affected by the Executive Order. There are those where the mothers are temporarily present and those where the mother are illegally present, and in both cases, the father is neither a citizen nor a lawful permanent resident. So there might be issues of typicality. Adequacy of representation might very well be an issue. So there would have to be that rigorous application of those criteria. Now the argument may be this is a case that is a natural candidate for a Rule 23(b)(2) certification. That may well be true. The government hasn't taken a position on that. Our position is not that class certification will necessarily be granted.

((I'm increasingly thinking SCOTUS picked such a broad case because the more grounded alternatives for preliminary relief are fairly straightforward.))

What are the chances that the Supreme Court actually strikes down birthright citizenship? My impression from the start was that this was always going to be a losing case given how far back the precedent goes, but I'm far from an expert.

It's pretty low. The legal arguments aren't as obviously wrong as at first glance, but they're still a long reach, and mixing that, the reliance interests, the seeing-as-a-state problems, everything like that... I don't want to say zero, because zero isn't a probability, but it's low low. I'd honestly consider 9-0 more likely than 6-3 or 7-2.

What do double parentheses mean?

It’s a convention from role playing communities indicating either out-or-character comments or side discussions not attached to the main thrust of the current discussion.

I am not a lawyer, nevermind a class action lawsuit lawyer. The federal government's lawyer said that there were questions of typicality and gave a few groups, primarily based on the distinction between whether parents were temporarily permitted into the United States at the time of the birth. If he got his way, this would point to a couple different class actions...

But class action plaintiffs can prove they are typical members of a class by bringing more members into the plaintiff side of the bench; if you have plaintiffs on record as belonging to each of these groups, you defeat a typicality challenge.

This could be an issue for other universal injunctions, but I'm willing to put my money where my mouth is on this one.


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats