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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   32496 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 7, 2025

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This is an interesting political theory case study. What happens when congress passes a law, but then everyone realizes that the law is bad before it even comes into effect? One might think that the obvious answer is that congress would repeal the law, but that would be profoundly embarrassing for the congresspeople who just voted for the law last year. Much easier for them to simply look the other way as the law is openly flaunted.

I don't think the law is bad. As Zvi said:

TikTok is not purely an op. TikTok is a legitimate highly predatory business, and also TikTok is an op.

There have been surveys showing that most TikTok users would prefer that TikTok not exist (they're still there because everyone is there and that imposes social costs on anyone who's not), never mind the non-users. It's got massively-negative externalities - and at least part of those externalities are malicious attempts by the PRC to destroy the USA.

It is one of the roles of government to destroy things with massively-negative externalities. This is one of the primary clauses of the social contract - "we'll deal with the villains in an orderly fashion, so don't murder them in the streets". Yes, not all TikTok bans would be net-positive; Zvi was an opponent of the RESTRICT Act, for instance. But this one looks good; the scum just managed to bribe their way out.

Has people "realised that the TikTok ban is bad"? Are there identifiable Congresscritters who have flipped that would mean that the ban would no longer have a majority? I haven't noticed anyone changing their mind on this point who hadn't just agreed a lucrative business transaction with a TikTok investor. I haven't seen anything happen that would change a sensible, normal person's mind about TikTok since the ban was passed.

Occam's razor says that Trump flipped for personal reasons (probably his relationship with TikTok investor Jeff Yass), and that the reason why Congress doesn't care is that a supermajority of Congressional Republicans defer to Trump about essentially everything.

Vladeck elaborates on the difference between lack of enforcement and dispensation and why dispensation is a major problem.

His distinction:

But the power to decline to enforce a statute just isn’t the same thing as the dispensing power; the former does nothing to alter the potential liability that those who violate the statute might face; the latter at least purports to render them formally immune.

Seems both threadbare and tremendously wrong, though. The various and length delays to the ACA's individual and employer mandate were not only retrospective, nor accompanied by anyone panicking that they could face future liability had the government changed its mind afterward. The DACA authorizations left specific people immune to civil litigation even well after a different President was elected specifically on the matter of changing the rule, and courts stayed those changes!

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