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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   31693 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 26, 2026

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In an update on the case of the 5 year old kid in a blue hat taken away by ICE, Judge orders release of 5-year-old detained by immigration authorities in Minnesota.

I was curious what the judge actually wrote, so I delved into the actual court opinion which I found here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.txwd.1172886492/gov.uscourts.txwd.1172886492.9.0_3.pdf . And it seems this judge clowned himself with the most insane deranged court opinion I've ever seen. I've seen some performative court opinions, but I think this one takes the cake with gems like:

Apparent also is the government's ignorance of an American historical document called the Declaration of Independence.

Civics lesson to the government: Administrative warrants issued by the executive branch to itself do not pass probable cause muster. That is called the fox guarding the henhouse. The Constitution requires an independent judicial officer.

Observing human behavior confirms that for some among us, the perfidious lust for unbridled power and the imposition of cruelty in its quest know no bounds and are bereft of human decency. And the rule of law be damned.

Interestingly, the court opinion makes exactly 0 legal arguments to support its decision.

I'm increasingly disappointed that activist judges aren't even pretending to be arbiters of the law, but are just doing whatever they want. Of course you expect an enemy judge to make his decision and figure out the justification later, but you expect them to at least think backwards and figure out some kind of fig leaf of legalese to claim that he actually believe that is the law. Instead this judge makes a mockery of the process. And of course for whatever reason, federal judges have never been punished for not doing their jobs.

At least the kayfabe of pretending we live in a country with laws I think is critical for legitimacy. At least for now the court of appeals can write a quick "your a retard" order on Monday, but even so it's a bad look.

For a neutral-ish perspective on the court opinion, try giving an AI the court opinion and asking what it thinks.

PS: AI told me that that the same judge is a known joker and is known for writing this punny though legally sound opinion here: https://storage.courtlistener.com/harvard_pdf/8725121.pdf

Bud Selig-Barry Bonds.

I guess baseball is the American past time so it’s fertile field for finding a parallel for American politics and in this case asylum abuse.

Steroids were of course illegal back when Bonds and everyone else was doing them. Bonds is not in the HOF because he took steroids despite having a legitimate argument for being the GOAT. I’ve never agreed a HOF should have a morality clause. The villains can get in too. It’s in the name “fame”. But this is basically a way of declaring Bonds a criminal. Selig is conveniently in the HOF. I have never understood this about the HOF since Selig was the enforcer of the rules and it always seemed to me like he made steroids unofficially legal.

Asylum under the Biden administration is very similar in my opinion. Asylum laws were never designed for people like Conejo. Everyone knows this. He is clearly an economic migrant. This is also weirdly basically a holocaust law in design since it’s from the post-war period. We have a Democratic process for making laws and Biden clearly allowed the law not to followed. He’s the Bud Selig in this situation.

Conejo I am going to call an illegal. Even though he claims to be following the asylum laws if he actually understood the law he would know the law doesn’t apply to him. He’s frauding America. I am not sure if a Spanish first person is even capable of understanding the word asylum or read the legalese; he just has counsel telling him to sign here etc and say these words. He’s of course my Barry Bonds in the situation. Following the system by how it is working during the 2020-2024 and not the spirit or letter of the law.

Obviously we need to just deport the guy if we want to be a nation of laws. You can’t care if he has a cute 5 year old kid with him or then the first thing anyone who sneaks into the country will do is get their gf pregnant and then hide for 9 months. And that’s basically open borders with zero control over who lives here.

I guess this is just more evidence that Biden was the villain either thru choice or dementia. If you want the rule of law to mean anything then we need to follow the law honesty and you can’t have huge gaps in what the law means like asylum.

I’ll joke I am a fascists now. That’s because I don’t think we have or had the rule of law recently. At which point opting-out of our system is just recognizing what has already happened. Legitimacy was already losts.

For the record I do think first safe country can be a little stretchy. For Venezuelans they come close to the purpose of asylum legalese. And I think it can be argued when you have 10 million asylum seekers it would be unreasonable for them to all go to the first safe country which is basically Colombia. If you view them as legitimate asylum seekers then it would be reasonable to spread them out across the major countries in the Americas. I don’t think during WW2 people would reason Switzerland needed to accept 10m Jews. If you also view Venezuelans as legitimate asylum seekers then I think creating 10m asylum migrants makes an US-Venezuelan hostilities as Just War with the US being the hegemon of the Americas.

I don't understand, what is your argument against this judge's decision? It seems like you're just assuming consent on this. The decision seems like obvious common sense to me, it's the bare minimum I would expect from a judge with any integrity. Standing up for American values, the constitution, and freedom isn't "activism", that's what judges are supposed to do.

  • -15

The kid was/is in custody since his father was taken in on a lawful warrant and his mother refused to take him. It doesn't take a gigantic legal intellect to think why doing your best to force through 'Depriving any legal birthright American citizen of their parents is against the constitution and American values' opens up a gaping channel for future mischief.

Standing up for American values, the constitution, and freedom isn't "activism", that's what judges are supposed to do.

But that also leads to abuse of the Starfleet Academy sort: "mommy may have been an accomplice to murder, but we can't send her to space rehab! because that would separate her from her kiddy-winkie! so mommy can commit crimes and get away with it! that's the just and fair thing to do!"

Why did the mother refuse to take the child? How about if instead of deporting daddy, he had been sent to jail for crime? Would it be "no, he has a five year old child, you can't send him to jail"? What about all the five year olds who get taken in by state agencies because no parents/parents in jail?

Especially when coupled with abused birthright citizenship

Orders from trial courts only rarely contain opinions. The judge decided to write a brief opinion critical of the administration from putting him in a position where he had to issue the order. Why? Because he can. Judges make performative comments like this all the time, it just usually happens during motion arguments when nobody is there but the court staff and the attorneys.

This isn't true at all

This isn't true at all

I agree. In federal court in the US, when the judge writes an opinion, there is normally an explanation of the decision. Sometimes the judge will make a decision orally on the record and explain his reasoning in that decision. It's very unusual for the court to make a decision without any explanation. Sometimes it happens with evidentiary objections at trial, but if there are written motions it's very rare.

In this case, there was kind of an explanation, but it doesn't really conform to what federal courts normally do. It's virtually certain that there are precedent cases on the issue of whether an arrested pursuant to an administrative warrant is legitimate. So that ordinarily, a federal judge would cite to a couple of those precedents and explain why, in his view, the precedents do or don't apply.

Edit: The most charitable interpretation I can think of is that rov_scam is recounting his experiences in state court in his state

That's definitely part of it; even for the specific question of bench trials brought all the way to final judgment, there's a lot of state courts (and even some state appeals courts!) that just don't do opinions for all but the most noteworthy matters.

I think some of the confusion is more about what counts as an 'order'. For laypeople, we tend to think of judicial orders as serious decisions: even if we recognize the difference between a final appealable order and something like a motion to stay, the latter's about as far down the line as we really put in the same bin.

But there's a lot of other things that are 'orders' in the sense that the court will fuck you over if you don't obey it, but not 'orders' in the sense of any serious legal decision. At the lowest level, there's a lot of stuff that's just 'we're going to next meet at X date' or 'parties should send me Y paper of Z pages on A, B, and C' subjects, withdrawal or substitution or an attorney, extension of time, yada yada. These are orders, technically, but they're just standard process stuff rather than serious evaluation of legal policy. In the middle, there's things like orders on motions pro hac vice, or discovery orders, or even demands to prepare around certain topics. These are 'decisions', but they're decisions that have a fairly standard answer, or where the logic underlying them is self-explanatory in the order.

At the higher end, there's stuff that could plausibly be serious and sometimes even final orders if granted, but basically never are and don't really need serious introspection to get there: this entry is an order on motion for judgment on the pleadings, and that'd be worth a long digression if it were actually granting judgement, but it's not, and it's very rare for that sort of order to exist. Recognizing a jury verdict is technically an order, and there's some ability for judges to issue things like judgment notwithstanding verdict, but it's not something you have to explain most of the time. Sometimes this stuff gets an opinion, and sometimes it doesn't, even when it's a final order.

By contrast, it'd be a little weird to see a final judgement for a federal case (where not settled, defaulted, consent judgements, yada), without an accompanying opinion explaining the law in detail. It probably happens, though the examples I can find tend to be civil forfeiture cases that are closer to default than I'd consider.

The messy bit is where, exactly, this order falls. Grants of writ of habeas corpus are kinda appealable orders, depending on situation, but they're not exactly the 'everybody's presented their full argument and had their day in court', either. I'd expect to see at least some attempt at a serious explanation for a high-profile case, but I can't swear every single one has been treated seriously by the courts, either.

((On the gripping hand, neither Grok nor Claude could find an example of a federal grant of the writ of habeas corpus without an accompanying opinion. Which doesn't mean much!)

I think some of the confusion is more about what counts as an 'order'.

To a large extent, I agree. But I think that for the most part rov_scam is the source of the confusion. Because any way you slice it, for this type of decision, a federal court would normally explain its reasoning -- either in a written opinion or by reading something orally into the record. The fact that you don't get an explanation for other types of motions and/or in some other courts is irrelevant.

And as I noted elsewhere, in this case the court did actually explain its decision. It's just that the decision appears to be bizarrely deficient in its analysis. Because this can't be the first time a court was confronted with the issue of the validity of an administrative warrant. The court should have cited the applicable precedent authority on this issue and then applied it; or explained why it applies; or explained why it doesn't apply; or whatever. Even if there is no precedent on this issue, stating that the United States has violated the separation of powers is not something you do lightly. You cite authority on that issue (which surely exists) and explain why it applies or doesn't apply.

The bottom line is that this is an objectively bizarre opinion and the Occam's razor explanation is that it was somehow informed by TDS.

I'm confused wasn't the kid taken into custody on account of parental abandonment and not having an available legal guardian? It's not like the kid was arrested perse and trying to rule 'Immigration law cannot be enforced on the parents of dependent birthright citizens' has obvious issues and misaligned incentives.

I'm increasingly disappointed that activist judges aren't even pretending to be arbiters of the law, but are just doing whatever they want.

To me this, just proves that the Trump admin has (accidentally?) struck a small vein strategic gold. Apparently directly antagonizing the left causes a small but significant fraction of their institutionally embedded partisans to lose control and let their masks slip. This seems like evidence in favor of the efficacy of further accelerationism and direct antagonism from the right. Previously, it was believed by many on the right that long-march leftists were simply too clever, disciplined, and coordinated to challenge directly. Instead, the only option was to "exit" or to go full Benedict Option. But no longer. It must be frustrating for the more self-possessed and strategically-minded leftist partisans who are quietly manipulating procedural outcomes in a plausibly deniable way. Their grandstanding compatriots are giving away the game.

The Gramscian concept of the Long March Through the Institutions as determined by mainstream liberals was based on the assumption that the only token right-wing opposition that will arise will come from loser cucks like Mitt Romney, John McCain or Jeb Bush. It was never supposed to be challenged by someone like Trump.

The Gramscian concept of the Long March Through the Institutions was developed by Gramsci, who was not a mainstream liberal. The mainstream liberal concept of institutional dominance is much less sophisticated - basically that liberals dominate institutions because institutions are IQ-selected and liberals are smarter than conservatives - and this opinion is an example. Judge Biery assumes that everyone smart enough to read a legal opinion already agrees with him, so there is no need to write in a way which assumes good faith on the other side of the argument, or that seeks to persuade.

It was developed by Gramsci for his fellow Marxist-Leninist cadre. Otherwise he is dead and forgotten by everyone besides dissident rightist political theorists. Those who have implemented it are identitarian mainstream liberals – feminists, LGBT+ activists and liberal culture warriors in general. Them coddling their own sense of intellectual superiority is beside the point. The point is that the Long March by definition represents the opposite of accelerationism. In other words, it succeeds as long as the marchers and their opponents are both decelerationists. To the extent that you ever reveal your true motivations at all, you only do so when you’re already structurally unremovable from power, when the limited but irreversible gains you’ve been steadily making reach critical mass. As OP correctly pointed it out, this assumes “that long-march leftists were simply too clever, disciplined, and coordinated to challenge directly”. What this also entails is that hardliner leftist culture warriors are to be reined in so as not to alienate the normies too soon.

That seems like a certain way to make sure your positions aren’t very high IQ for long.

I am disappointed that the Trump admin has returned him. His asylum case looks obviously bs to me since Ecuador is not an extremely dangerous country and there are many places between the US and Ecuador. If the Biden admin can just do something illegal then I have no issue just ignoring a court on deportation. Being a nation of laws was broken before Trump showed up.

Apparently directly antagonizing the left causes a small but significant fraction of their institutionally embedded partisans to lose control and let their masks slip.

Too bad for Trump that it doesn't matter. Similarly to when 4chan tricked the left into thinking the OK sign was a racist thing... it didn't knock the left out of power, it just mean now you could get canceled for the OK sign.

Cancelling people for the OK sign does have the potential to alienate normies though, provided that the anti-woke media spins it the right way.

I don't think people here understand how totally goulish "Mother of two shot through window of car as she tries to escape", "ER nurse who loved his dog and had a concealed carry permit shot in back X times by ice after his weapon was seized trying to defend woman", "Small child in cute hat taken into ICE van, has to be forcibly released by judicial order." looks.

You can look at the images on your screen, and no amount of "But the context! She was a radical! He was a terrorist who scuffled with the cops a week before! Little bro was illegal!" is gonna matter. It's the vibes that count here, and the vibes are rancid.

I might put something on the main culture war thread next week, but as a practice draft of that comment: This is the Worst Thing To Happen in optics since Iraq, a war so bad yet so important to the cultural right it got a black guy elected president and made a generation more atheist and more leftist than anything since the great depression.

If the rightists don't learn from the past, it's gonna happen again.

Reform literally always has bad optics; conservatism (currently leftism) defines itself by being on the right side of those optics.

This is why reform is hard.

Optics debates are inherently bad faith. Every time someone says "The optics of this are good/bad!", they're manifesting their own claim.

Personally, I think Democrats really need to worry about their optics of "retarded, violent street crazies". And all of those white, Democrat Karens harassing Latino and gay/black Feds! Dems look so racist it's crazy! Just like they did with Bull Conor and segregation. Terrible optics. They really need to spend a lot of time defending themselves over this crap.

This is one reason I think Trump has a lot of room to do whatever he wants. I don’t think there is a coherent pragmatic Democratic Party right now. He might lose the mid-term but he can do things without 50% approval because when the big election occurs the Dems won’t be able to unit. It feels like a fractured party right now.

Your attempt to pull a UNO Reverse card here falls flat, because the implied accusation against your interlocutor of concern trolling is not credible. On a forum like this one, it is a given that basically nobody wants the DEI/pro-immigration/pro-trans/? wing of Democrats to win, and therefore the parent poster's concern (that ICE's strategy might lead to just that) is more likely than not genuine. On the other hand, you are not even trying to convince anyone that you would be unhappy if the Democrats' access to power suffered due to any putative bad optics.

The parent might not favour your specific brand of Republican politics, especially if that brand is just "more power to God-Emperor Trump and his goons", but it seems very plausible that they are coming from a place that is more like "please, surely none of us want to go back to the Obama/Biden years, so stop doing things that will lead to that" than "I want you to stop doing things your party likes and start doing things my party likes". It might of course be that the former is not very compelling to you because you are one of the people who have memed themselves into valuing everything other than "whatever Trump does, or perhaps more of it" at minus infinity so there is simply no viable solution that involves any form of restraint, but if so that would make you unusual enough that you should state your value function explicitly rather than just shit-flinging because you assume your interlocutor knew this about you and wanted to troll.

On a forum like this one, it is a given that basically nobody wants the DEI/pro-immigration/pro-trans/? wing of Democrats to win

This seems like a square (if obviously non-malicious) example of that "consensus-building" thing the rules prohibit. And, in point of fact: hello! I want them to win. Not without qualifications, I have considerable misgivings with aspects of the mainstream "woke" left, but I still find them the least bad option.

Fair. I mean, I want more people who want them to win around! In this context, it just seemed more expedient to talk down Iconochasm who felt besieged/mocked by and snapped back at an outgroup that most likely was not involved in that exchange at all.

Every time someone says "The optics of this are good/bad!", they're manifesting their own claim.

Yes, but the claim is just that "Democrats do/don't like this".

Personally, I think Democrats really need to worry about their optics of "retarded, violent street crazies".

They don't, because control of the media means the normies will see the retarded, violent street crazies as good and normal and the people they are fighting as fascists.

Yes, we have two Hispanic agents who shot a white guy dead, but the narrative that ICE is going around rounding brown people is not hurt in one bit by this.

we have two Hispanic agents who shot a white guy dead

That's extremely - "funny" is the wrong word to use here, but it's sure something.

Queer

In the

appearing, feeling, or behaving otherwise than is usual or normal

sense

With no apologies to Alanis Morissette, I believe the term is "ironic".

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Yes, but the claim is just that "Democrats do/don't like this".

Sure. But "Democrats don't like this" is a very different claim than "the optics of this are bad".

Sure. But "Democrats don't like this" is a very different claim than "the optics of this are bad".

The link is "Democrats control the optics".

But isn't it true that the american public is largely moving against ICE in polls? Incidentally I also think that it's crazy what the "protestors" are getting away with, including being called protestors in the first place. But unfortunately, most people don't seem to agree, which is what the optics argument is referring to. Yes, the bad optics are also arguably partially downstream from highly sophisticated media propaganda, but not entirely, and it doesn't change the fact that most people who hear about this are against it.

My point is that "optics" as a concept has a pseudo-Uncertainty Principle. Because it's entirely about appearances and impressions, it's impossible to talk about without interacting with it. For example, saying this

But isn't it true that the american public is largely moving against ICE in polls?

Normalizes the idea it's purporting to describe. The line between descriptive and prescriptive blurs. You could just as easily say that in spite of all the rioting and harassment and crimes, a large majority of Americans still want to deport all illegals and a supermajority want to deport all illegal criminals.

We're a decade past the two screens epiphany. "Optics" are extremely silo'd. Addressing the concept at all necessarily involves accepting a partisan framing, which necessarily involves promulgating it.

There is no dispassionate analysis here. It is impossible to talk about "optics" without defacto engaging in Mean Girls style social manipulations.

But unfortunately, most people don't seem to agree,

And stating this normalizes that belief. The choice of framing itself functions as an act of persuasion.

The Motte is a tiny and obscure forum. Posts here are not going to normalise anything or materially affect the outcome of the culture war, even on the off chance that they persuade a significant number of posters here. In fact, assuming this is necessary to make it possible to have a reasonable debate here at all; if you treat this forum as a pulpit where posts must be judged for their effect on the course of history rather than their factual content, you just reproduce the grandstanding popularity contest dynamics of Xwitter and Reddit.

One of my favorite parts about this website is how people manage to express my ideas in ways much more descriptive and eloquent than I ever will

Great stuff, thank you for sharing

Normies don't read the anti-woke media.

I remember that companies cancelling people for the OK sign was a spectacle so cringy that even Bill Maher ridiculed it on his show, which is normie-friendly entertainment by anyone’s standards. When the woke overplay their hand and they come across as desperate and shrill, even the media that isn’t particularly known as anti-woke will not play along with their agenda.

I remember that companies canceling people for the OK sign went on for many months, and the New York Times posted breathless images swearing various figures were making OK signs in public.

There was a high school in Chicago that chose to reprint the yearbooks at a cost of over $50,000 because some of the basketball team was doing the OK sign. (They weren’t. It was the circle game.) Extra hilarious because most of the team members making the sign were black.

Which is just another case of a news report alienating the normies even further.

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left causes a small but significant fraction of their institutionally embedded partisans to lose control and let their masks slip.

Just as an example, Technology Connections (calm, nice, midwest technology YouTuber) just went absolutely brain numbingly ballistic after an incredible video on renewables, nullifying all the work.

I can totally imagine a pro fossil fuel person watching the video, changing their mind, watching the coda about politics, and then doubling down...

I wish supposedly objective people would stop doing this.

That was a terrible video; he starts by talking about the moral superiority of midwesterners. And then he goes to silliness, like suggesting that buying half a tanker truck of gas over 15 years is unreasonable. Honestly, I expected it to be a whole tanker truck, so I guess I wasn't off by that much. But that's wrapped within the sillier thing -- he's banging on about how the fuel can only be used once.... but that's true of any energy. He complains that pointing this out is a "gotcha", but it's just a response to his own "gotcha" about fuel being single use. He's on somewhat more solid ground when instead talking about economics, but then the details matter and he just glosses right over the "what about nighttime" issue. He also then goes and compares the price by the palletload of solar panels to the retail price of gasoline (rather than considering the delivered price of electricity, including batteries -- unless he's ONLY going to use his car at night, so he can charge during the day).

"There's a 27 Megawatt solar farm build in DePue, Illinois. Why is that?" Answer: subsidies, in the form of selling indulgences Renewable Energy Certificates.

And then in the rant section, after he's constructed this whole case that solar either already does or soon will make economic sense, he complains about Republicans taking away subsidies. Bitch, please... do you not believe your own case?

I think the most confusing part of this video was dumping on Starlink. Legacy telecoms don't want to provide Internet to Assfuck, Minnesota? We can just launch satellites and beam down high bandwidth Internet to any point on the globe between the Arctic and antarctic circles? Everything is working as intended, the market provides. What is the problem?

But it's ridiculously impractical and requires continual expensive maintenance by chuds (like Musk); the existing technology is good enough or even ideal in certain circumstances, so we should just stick with that.

You know, kind of like electric cars.

If only there were a video describing this phenomenon. Here's one that springs to mind.
The frustrating part is that he's proven he knows better than to do this. (And yes, this naturally applies to his pet social issues too.)

But it's ridiculously impractical and requires continual expensive maintenance by chuds (like Musk)

It's a good thing those cell towers erect themselves!

Just as an example, Technology Connections (calm, nice, midwest technology YouTuber) just went absolutely brain numbingly ballistic after an incredible video on renewables, nullifying all the work.

And yet he's still friends with the Aging Wheels guy, who's red tribe-coded as fuck, quirky hobby aside.

Is the Aging Wheels guy red coded? I mean, he's got the homesteading stuff going on, but I never got that impression. He loves quirky european cars, electric cars, etc...

Well, he owns land in the middle of nowhere (grew up there as far as I understand), has several trucks and a bunch of farm animals. Not exactly a blue stereotype.

I would seriously guess not anymore.

A lot of Blue's had their brain break in the last few weeks - it's even being reported by mainstream media (Mark Halperin)

Technology Connections has always reminded me of another nice, friendly, but left-wing technology youtuber, CathodeRayDude. He's a little quirkier than Technology Connections and covers more old PC stuff, but he has the very similar vibe of "geeky leftist dork who believes he is enlightened by his intelligence."

CRD has a very droll sense of humor and he's fun to watch, but he definitely has a nasty habit of going on unnecessary political tangents where he insults the right, especially about trans issues because his partner is transgender. But mostly he complains about capitalism and how all jobs are awful with a kind of antiwork energy, which kind of makes my eyebrow raise, because I feel like if he weren't dating a transgender person or weren't from Oregon, he'd be a self-employment bro talking about how you've got to make your own money away from the corporate machine, small businesses baby! kind of guy.

What I don't understand is why people with this personality -- which is often skeptical, critical, capable of immense analysis of technological and engineering tradeoffs -- are often unable to see that there are elements in politics where different policies have different tradeoffs for different people. Energy policy is one of the clearest ones, where its obvious why Californians with living memory of smog and pollution, and Oklahomans and Texans and West Virginians, would have different assumptions about the value of burning fossil fuels for energy.

What I don't understand is why people with this personality -- which is often skeptical, critical, capable of immense analysis of technological and engineering tradeoffs -- are often unable to see that there are elements in politics where different policies have different tradeoffs for different people.

There's been recent, massive, and overwhelming change to see conceding any genuine motivation for the political enemy as not merely misguided or wrong, but active and malicious betrayal. The Blue Tribe's further down that slope, but the Red Tribe isn't exactly slow at it, either.

((for an extreme example, I'm trying to write up the Varian Fox verdict, and it's a mess because the only people covering it are the ones that are absolutely uninterested in the pro-trans viewpoint, while the pro-trans people are largely unaware it happened.))

I don't know the cause. It's tempting to point at the growth of 'animus' as a Kennedy-school legal theory, or social media filtering, or increased polarization, or the takeover of HR-focused careers, or just external pressures making being the knee in search of careerism.

But it's bad, and it's getting worse, rapidly. There's always been a little on the edges, where knowing enough about guns set you outside of the acceptable discussion window with gun control advocates, even when that knowledge was necessary to make the very laws gun control advocates wanted. Now, it's hard to think of a culture war fight were that isn't the norm.

Perhaps worse, even for those of us autistic enough to be skeptical and analytic, where do you think the information's going to come from? A Blue Triber that goes looking up some Red Tribe values, you're going to be lucky if the best you find just looks like an overt scam site; more likely you'll get to something like thefp or fox news that 'everyone knows' isn't even a good model of what Red Tribers think, and completely disconnected from reality. And Red Tribers going to wikipedia can honestly say the same thing. What's left? Talk to your Other Tribe friends?

hat I don't understand is why people with this personality -- which is often skeptical, critical, capable of immense analysis of technological and engineering tradeoffs

As someone who is old enough to remember how tech people used to be (and is more or less one of them), this change makes zero sense to me.

IMAO, this sort of thing is where, "the past is a different country," saying gets its teeth. Again, IMAO and all that, but the barriers to tech were higher and different, the PMC hadn't yet metastasized, kids could still fail out of public schools, colleges were not yet degree factories with extra steps, TFR decline wasn't quite a Thing beyond the Doomers, the American monoculture had yet to be fractured by the internet, Western ideology seemed ascendant in the larger world, Social Media had not yet been unleashed upon the world, etc. etc. etc.

Somewhere in my head there lies an ill-formed effortpost on these themes. If I can keep myself from getting too turgid in my prose, I may even write it and perhaps post it.

The progressive tech weirdos purged all the other tech weirdos who didn't keep their head down, so the only ones you'll hear from are the progressives.

RIP, the entire video was totally reasonable until he launched into an unhinged rant about how republicans are evil

As a long time watcher and patreon supporter of his, I'm afraid to watch that video.

It was obvious for years he was chafing at the thought of not being able to discuss politics without risking a large portion of his viewership, but it seems the restraints are gone now.

Yeah, honestly one of the less surprising crashouts I've seen to the ICE situation. I like his stuff, but he's always strongly given off that very particular nerd vibe I became super well aquatinted with in college, of the intelligent guy who bases his identity on being the "smartest guy in the room", and in so fully embodies the Freddie deBoer "politics is obviously solved" aspect of wokeness.

I doubt that his viewership is going to care about this.

It was completely and disappointingly unhinged, every stereotype of disgruntled leftists, 0-100, etc.

I watched some of that reasonable video, and my only conclusion was, this seems to be an example of two films on the same screen.

He introduces oil energy by describing some uses, but underplays that importance (nearly all modern wealth is built upon the super high energy return provided by fossil fuels). When that high energy return stops any time, we have to get much much poorer.

Isn't the whole point of the video that we won't get much poorer if we switch to renewables?

Depends on which "we" you're talking about.

"We" meaning urban white-collar folks in places like southern California, who already own EVs with high quality roads and charging infrastructure? Yeah, they can probably make it work, and they'll see a nice benefit from less air pollution.

But for people in rural areas, small islands, or especially in 3rd world countries? That's going to be rough. It's not just a matter of producing enough energy, it's getting it where you need it. A lot of these people have no power grid (or a highly unreliable one), no engineers that can maintain an EV, and no one coming to help them if they suffer rough weather or an extended blackout. For that, the ability to store up "energy on demand" in a simple can of gas or propane tank, is absolutely necessary. The heat that it generates is also just as important as the electricity.

Ironically, a lot of these people are also early adaptors of solar, since it works well in a small off-grid capacity. You can use a solar panel to charge lights, computers, cell phones, etc during the day, then at night you either go to sleep or burn some propane when you need to. They can also use a simple EV for short range trips that they can charge from home, while also using gas for longer trips. It's a very practical solution to save money and get more independance while still having that oil when they really need it. But forcing these people to go "100% renewables, 0 fossil fuels" would be impossible, and lead to a lot of resistance from some of the best solar advocates.

Could be, but it's false.

Amusingly, the order was initially dated February 31 https://twitter.com/ASFleischman/status/2017712436409733160

I tend to be critical of strongly worded opinions that strive to be historic.

But if you're going to do one, you've got to make sure you haven't issued it on the 31st of February

He's not the only person; my parents just got an electric bill due the 30th of February...

Do they intend to pay it on the 12th of Never?

Isn’t Biery making the legal argument of “administrative warrants issued by the executive branch to itself do not pass probable cause muster”, i.e., the Fourth Amendment? Your claim of “exactly 0 legal arguments” seems exaggerated.

I ran the opinion through AI (Claude), and while it agrees that it’s heavy on rhetoric, it also said the 4A argument is strong.

Also, small typo in your appeals sentence: it should be “you’re”, as in “you are”, not “your” (possessive).

Also also, you may enjoy this joke: What's the difference between God and a federal judge? God doesn't think he's a federal judge!

Claude

I'm quite surprised at this result, because gemini and chatgpt are both adamant that the opinion has no legs to stand on.

I know that Claude used to have document tokenization problems, which caused quite bad hallucinations when a document was attached. I'm not sure if it's been fixed or not.

The claim that Administrative Warrants are categorically invalid under the 4th because "the fox can't guard the henhouse" is fantastically stupid, and completely upends the entire apparatus of administrative enforcement. Administrative Warrants not signed by a judge have never been held so, only when attempting to enter private areas (such as a home) would the 4th Amendment be implicated. As the two were picked up in public, the reasoning is facile.

There are precisely two federal judges I would trust to oppose administrative warrants on originalist principles. There is a coherent argument to be made (that I mostly agree with), but there is a zero percent chance this judge would apply such a principle fairly across the board.

Not to worry, it's one of those "category invalid" things that will be categorically invalid only when it's convenient for the side making the decision. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives, for instance, will never have a similar problem.

Please don’t run things through AI and accept its output. Lawyer here and AI gets things wrong all the time.

I've seen a few examples of lawyers praising AI for its legal mind. What does it get wrong in your experience?

I think the replies are somewhat overstating how bad LLMs are - they do have all those failure modes, but the rate at which they fail in those ways isn't that high. And also sort of assuming that the alternative is any better - getting a smart domain expert to spend some time answering you question is of course much better than getting an LLM to, but you weren't gonna do that anyway. At the same time, I agree that 'I (nonexpert) asked Claude and it said this' isn't that useful of a contribution, and when not guided by an expert the LLMs are probably not gonna be that informative on an issue of this complexity.

LLMs are generally terrible at any sort of task where accuracy and rigor are core constraints. Imagine the full range of legal opinions that exist on the internet, intelligent, retarded, and everything in between. Now imagine what the average of that mass of opinions would look like. That's effectively what you're getting when you ask an LLM for legal advice.

Otherwise see @gattsuru's comment below.

Necessary starting caveat: Unikowsky is an absolute putz when it comes to anything Trump-related, and his analysis should be recognized as on the "ought" side of any is-ought divide, and, more damningly, an "ought" that will not apply to any case where he doesn't like the victim. That doesn't completely destroy his analysis about AI effectiveness, but it does undermine how and what he's evaluating.

For more specific problems:

  • Hallucinations happen. Newer models are better about avoiding them, but they're still prone to it. This is critical because, whether it's a hallucinated citation, incorrectly summarizing the contents of a citation, or hallucinating facts or claims by parties in the case, it's a central example of sanctionable behavior.
  • Even large-context models struggle with the amount of information in a lawsuit, and most models aren't large-context (and many APIs will obfuscate when you're getting downgraded).
  • Worse, they get loopy under certain nonobvious situations: going toward the last 20% of a context size, repeating a word too often during a prompt, so on.
  • It can be very hard to get the LLM to understand core constraints for a specific environment. Citing out-of-circuit cases as if they were binding, not checking if a case was overruled or constrained to its own four corners, even basic formatting stuff can be a problem, here.
  • Most LLMs, unless very carefully prompted, are people-pleasers. They'll quite happily give you the answer you want, even if you aren't explicitly saying what you want, even when this means disregarding well-known counterexamples

There's a defense that people, even lawyers or judges, make many of these same mistakes, and that's true. It's still a problem and a limitation.

AI can be a useful tool, but it's a tool.

I disagree with your claim that Unikowsky's analysis on Trump is outcome-driven against him. Directly, you accused him of letting his bias against Trump drive him to think that Trump could be removed from the ballot. Yet, when the case was actually decided, you can read Unikowsky's take on it. He doesn't explicitly say what he thinks should've been decided, but while he thinks that from the 'law nerd' perspective it's wrong, he ultimately seems more sympathetic than not to the claim that the practical consequences of keeping Trump on the ballot mean it's worth deciding it 'wrongly'. Which is outcome-driven in the other direction!

IME, everything you say about LLMs here is correct ... which is why anyone using AI for something of legal import ought to use multiple AIs to check each other's work. Having Grok / Opus / GPT fight it out should be more effective.

... summoning not 1, but 3 uncanny entities to grant wishes in tandem ... I think I'm starting to get why demonic possession coming in groups rather than one demon is so common. (That, or hallucinations and ticks don't respond to exorcisms as well but do know how to change their name mid exorcism, but the one that's a cautionary tale about overusing AI is more immediately relevant?)

God damn it, please reality would you stop making the more unhinged exegeses of Revelations sound like they're coming true? I mean, the kind of thing that was all about "the locusts are helicopters, the sign on the forehead and hand is embedded chips". Now we've got "our name is Legion for we are many" due to Grok et al all uniting in one hivemind (Moltbook).

I really did not want to be living in the End Times.

I read the article. It’s somewhat interesting but the interesting question is what did prediction markets say. Most SCOTUS opinions are easily predicted (and frequently written about).

I’d expect an LLM to do better there compared to areas with less items written. In the example I was referencing, if an LLM could step back and try to understand the regulatory scheme, it would have understood its answer was counter to the scheme. Once you know that, you have to really study to make sure you aren’t missing something. But not sure it’s capable of that meta check.

Pretty much everything. Literally yesterday there was a question asked by a generalist that he ran through an AI. The response was the opposite of the right answer as there was a specific reg on point.

I also find that AI is bad at understanding the meta analysis behind cases (ie doesn’t really understand the policy and therefore has a hard time generalizing).

It is a better google but still wrong—sometimes in clear ways like the ref on point and sometimes in less obvious ways where it doesn’t understand nuance.

It's quite a mindfuck to have AI produce like 700 lines of code that work on the first try, which would cost like $500 to have a human write, but if you ask it to write a 1000 word essay it goes by in a blur that seems okay at first but if you read it with your brain on it sounds bad and wrong.

In truth if you look at the code more closely you could make it much prettier and more sensible but it all kind of works well enough that you don't care. Whereas it's really hard to make a written essay acceptable.

Hell, I've had AI give confidently wrong answers to things as straightforward as page limitations under specific local rules, which normal google would have answered just fine.

One would expect him to outline the factual circumstances of the arrest and why a warrant would be required in the first place.

No, one wouldn't expect that. Orders from trial courts seldom come with opinions. I file hundreds of motions per year and exactly zero have ended in a written opinion. If I'm lucky I might get an explanation from the bench. Usually the judge doesn't say anything but that he'll take it under advisement and he signs an order prepared by counsel a week later.

No, one wouldn't expect that. Orders from trial courts seldom come with opinions.

Are you talking about federal courts? It's pretty normal for federal courts to either file written opinions or to read an opinion into the record.

It's common, but I don't think you realize how many motions are filed in a typical case. Not many come with opinions, even the contested ones

It's common, but I don't think you realize how many motions are filed in a typical case. Not many come with opinions, even the contested ones

Just so we are clear, you are saying that it's common in federal court for judges to decide contested written motions without a formal explanation, either by way of a memorandum opinion or by reading the explanation orally into the record?

Is there any rule for which decisions come with opinions and which ones don’t?

For example, Pennsylvania Rules of Appellate Procedure § 1925:

Upon receipt of the notice of appeal, the judge who entered the order giving rise to the notice of appeal, if the reasons for the order do not already appear of record, shall within [60 days] file of record at least a brief opinion of the reasons for the order, or for the rulings or other errors complained of, or shall specify in writing the place in the record where such reasons may be found.

But that's specifically for decisions that are appealed.

Thanks for the clarification. I've read about five court opinions in my lifetime, so not very familiar with the standard structure.

Related article:

The saga of Judge Pauline Newman is well known. For three years, the Federal Circuit has not assigned any new cases to Judge Newman because she refuses to obtain certain medical tests. Back in April 2023, I described this process as a stealth impeachment. A judge without any cases is no longer a judge.

I suspect the most obvious reply is that there is a difference between impeaching a judge and simply taking away their cases. After all, Judge Newman retains her fixed compensation and title. I am not so convinced. A judge's job is to decide cases. Imagine that Congress passed a statute providing that any judge who rules against President Trump will no longer be assigned any new cases, but they can keep their salary and title. Or what if Congress were to pass a statute divesting jurisdiction over every suit filed against the executive branch in Boston, and reassign those cases to the Amarillo Division of the Northern District of Texas. How would Judge Young and his colleagues respond?

Imagine that a federal judge decided that he would no longer offer any rationales for his decisions. He would simply invite the parties to court, listen to their arguments, and announce a judgment for the plaintiff or the defendant from the bench, and then adjourn court. Following that oral order, the clerk would enter a judgment for the prevailing party. The judge explains that he only needs to issue an order, and no statute requires him to explain his reasoning. The Circuit Court consistently reverses this judge's rulings, and grants writs of mandamus, but the judge continues his practice.

Based on this "pattern or practice" of rulings, many litigants in the district file misconduct complaints. Could this complaint proceed, and if so, could the Judicial Council order that no new cases would be assigned to the judge until he begins to issue reasoned decisions for at least some of his rulings?

Welcome to Banana republic tactics, where the only thing that matters is tribe loyalty and where the state is just out there as a resource to be plundered. I remember a case from my country where a judge was assigned a lot of cases outside of his area of expertise. He was then slammed by disciplinary action for too many cases not being decided on time, and was impeached on those grounds. Of course lazy judges who had similar infractions got a free pass.

As I said, prepare for more of for my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law. Just look at all the insane fraud that was discovered recently. The thing is that for many people - especially those hailing from corrupt environments - this is not a fraud. It is rightful spoils which need to be claimed and directed, so money flows to proper coffers aligned with a correct tribe, thus protecting the spoils from enemies claiming them. Exactly as with old eastern bloc "socialist" saying: he who does not steal from the state steals from his family.

It is obvious if you think about it - you have large swaths of population that think that USA is an illegitimate fascist state. Stealing and defrauding such a state so that it can be destroyed and abolished more quickly is a good thing. It is similar mentality of how many people saw the illegitimate socialist states, the state capacity fell as people not only lost trust but started to actively hate it or at least saw it as an opportunity if stealing was normalized.

This seems absurd about a 98-year old judge. It seems far more likely to me that the 98 (!) year old judge is just genuinely having cognitive issues. I have some elderly relatives who are younger than that and are about as sharp as you can hope for at that age, but just like with LLMs if you speak to them for a few minutes the picture is different than if you do for a few hours, and neither I nor they would want them to be federal judges.

Let me offer a fanciful hypothetical (perhaps not as fanciful as a hypo about the Alien Enemies Act and the British invasion). Imagine that a federal judge decided that he would no longer offer any rationales for his decisions. He would simply invite the parties to court, listen to their arguments, and announce a judgment for the plaintiff or the defendant from the bench, and then adjourn court. Following that oral order, the clerk would enter a judgment for the prevailing party. The judge explains that he only needs to issue an order, and no statute requires him to explain his reasoning. The Circuit Court consistently reverses this judge's rulings, and grants writs of mandamus, but the judge continues his practice.

Sometimes I wish the Volokh conspiracy contributors wouldn't make it so patently obvious that they never practiced law a day in their lives.

Even in the types of cases where written orders are rare, judges will typically make an oral record which is also typically available in transcript. This is standard in criminal law, for example. If a judge is just like, "Guilty, 10 years in the department of corrections for you" that would be both incredibly rare, and quickly overturned.

It’s pretty obvious that Blackman is referencing the kind of cases that customarily require an opinion being drafted; not the basic motion practice for many attorneys.

Except no such category of cases exists. There are categories of cases that are more likely to get an opinion, but that's no guarantee that you're going to get one, even if the trial judge really likes to hear himself talk. I have had a few cases where the judge wanted us to provide additional briefs on a relatively new argument we were making and I thought he might issue an opinion but he didn't, even though he seemed interested in the legal basis of a hearsay exception that he made up himself.

I do public interest litigation, and 90% of the orders I recieve include some sort of written opinion. Your experience is by no means universal. Cases involving matters of public importance or setting new precedent usually get written opinions.

This seems pedantic. You know what Blackman means. High stakes important cases where opinions are common. Most lawyers don’t practice in that space but Blackman is talking about cases that will go to circuit cases frequently and are of import.

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