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PaperclipPerfector  1d ago (text post)   7222 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 29, 2026

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Opol Ra

Or: Which way, Hapa parent?

I.

Have you guys ever heard of One Parent One Language? Basically, the idea is that if a parent speaks a second language that they want to pass down to their kids, they should speak to their kids solely in that language. So, for example, if you are a German/Spanish speaker and your wife is a French/Spanish speaker and you live in Spain, you speak to the kids only in German, your wife speaks to the kids only in French, and you and your wife speak Spanish to each other (and, of course, the kids learn Spanish in school). The ultimate goal is to have the kids be fluent in German and French as well as Spanish as adults.

Sounds simple enough, but there is a snag. How do you have conversations with the whole family? In the happy case, you and your wife speak, or at least understand, each others' second language (in our example, you also speak French and your wife also speaks German), and there's no problem: you understand what the kids say to your wife and she understands what the kids say to you.

However, that's rarely the case outside of highly polyglot areas of Europe (Switzerland?). In America, or at least my corner of it, the most common pairing that isn't two monoglots is an English monoglot and a diglot. So Father speaks to the kids in English and Mother speaks in, say, Mandarin, but Father can't speak a lick of Mandarin. This doesn't much matter when the kids are preverbal, but what is the future for such an OPOL family when the kids are old enough to have meaningful, grammatically complex conversations with a variety of vocabulary, spoken at normal adult velocity (or even faster, if passions are inflamed or someone is a naturally quick talker, or a mumbler)?

We can lay out a few possibilities:

  1. Father learns Mandarin and we're back to the happy case. The US foreign service estimates 2200 class hours to learn Mandarin. Father doesn't need to speak Mandarin, he only needs to comprehend it, but he's also not taking classes, he's trying to pick it up from "immersion" that happens whenever the family is all together. This is rare. Mandarin is among the hardest languages for native English speakers to learn, so maybe this could work for, say, Spanish, but I doubt that this works in the long run. It's easy enough to pick up ve a bañarte ahora but I doubt that you can work your way up to actually substantive conversations as an adult with such minimal exposure.
  2. Mother and the kids say everything twice, once in Mandarin and once in English. This is an unbelievable pain in the ass and completely destroys conversational flow. I seriously doubt that anyone can keep this up over a decade and a half. I suspect that this scenario degenerates into one of the following.
  3. Father guesses what Mother and the kids are talking about based on picking out a few words he knows. This is only practical for the most basic conversations ("baño! I know that one!").
  4. Father checks out of the conversation when Mother and the kids are talking.
  5. The family avoids having any substantive conversations when together.

A cursory perusal of threads about dinner table conversations on /r/oneparentonelanguage bears out that these options seem to be exhaustive. Tellingly, very few people discussing this problem have kids older than six or so; presumably the details of their life become too embarrassing to publicize or they compromise on OPOL.

II.

To put it simply, any option besides option 1 (and maybe option 2, but it's not a stable equilibrium) entails the total obliteration of joint family life. Mother addresses the kids or she addresses Father, but she does not ever address her children along with her husband. This seems to be just fine in the eyes of many women who I bin as "type A elder millenials" who seem to treat the kids as royalty and the husbands as the help. These women would trade off adult social cohesion in favor of a little more comprehensible language input for their kids all day every day. These are the women who, if their kids interrupt an adult conversation, tell the adults to wait while they talk to the kids.

A word about my own situation: my parents both speak English and Russian, which I and my siblings all learned since Russian was all we spoke at home. My sister married a man who doesn't speak Russian and had kids, and I married a woman who doesn't speak Russian either. Any time we're together and I say something in English for the benefit of all the adults present ("should we think about lunch?"), my sister badgers me about saying it in Russian unless I was specifically addressing someone who doesn't understand Russian. Meanwhile, her husband's Russian skills have been eclipsed by his kids, and I don't think he's ever going to catch up, so option 1 and 2 are basically off the table. The only remaining question is how far down the list the family is going to end up. I've seen Chinese/American couples where the parents bring kids to the park and the Chinese wife finds other Chinese women and chats with them in Chinese while the husband looks off into space (they are also doing OPOL). I expect we are going to see a lot more of this sort of thing in the future and I don't think it's going to be pretty to see the products of marriages like this. The /r/aznmasculinity poster problem is only the beginning.

III.

This naturally raises the question: why bother? Why not just teach your kids English at home so you can have conversations as a family and forget about all this nonsense? Some might believe that there's cognitive benefits from multilingualism, but I'm pretty sure those are bunk, and my sister has never brought them up. The arguments I've seen are:

  1. This allows them to have a shared language with their grandparents. I think this is fair, certainly our parents are less comfortable in English than Russian. Of course, my sister is constantly on the outs with our parents, so I'm not sure how practically useful this is. Even so, it seems insane to prioritize the kids' relationship with their grandparents over your relationship with your spouse.
  2. It's a matter of passing down the heritage. This one I find objectionable. I do not see much value in possessing "Russian heritage" and I hope that my kids see themselves as Americans rather than Russian-Americans or whatever. Our family came to this country because it is better than the place we left, why do we want to preserve the vestiges of the bad old country?
  3. Access to Russian culture. I'm glad I can read Russian literature in the original and I get a lot out of it, but I don't know that it's worth torpedoing my family life so that my kids can get the same benefit.

The base rates for language retention in second generation speakers (besides Spanish) in the US are quite poor. The overwhelmingly likely result of doing this to your family is that your kids don't speak your language as adults and they do not have a sense of the family as a cohesive unit. The odds of their kids speaking your language, even if it's Spanish, are effectively zero. Is it really worth splitting your family for this?

I think any reasonable person has to say no. I knew that marrying my wife meant that the odds our kids speak Russian is basically zero (at the time I didn't consider the simple solution of alienating my wife to pass on the language). If I wanted my kids to speak Russian, I should have married a Russian. If my parents wanted my kids to speak Russian, they should have stayed in Russia. This is America, you don't get to raise your kids in an insular culture unless you go fully Amish. You don't get both the freedom to come to this country, love a woman from a background different than yours, marry her, and start a family AND somehow pass on your idiosyncratic foreign background without compromising the relationship that is the bedrock of the family, namely, that between the wife and the husband. And I think that's basically as it should be.

I'm a little confused. At least in the Chinese case in most major cities there are "Chinese schools" you can send the kids too that are most analogous to me of the "catholic school" I attended growing up which was a couple hours a week at the catholic school. Where they learn Chinese and cultural stuff. I'm slowly learning some Mandarin and our plan is that the kid(s) will attend Chinese school and be able to speak Chinese but that the language of the household will be English. I've never heard of the concept of a one parent language and it indeed sounds like insanity.

I speak 2 languages. My wife speaks three. We only have English in common. We tried OPOL, but as my kid learned to speak my wife's main language, she didn't know English, and so I couldn't speak to her at all. Since I was at work all day, my kid never learned English, so I insisted that OPOL stop and my kid just be taught English.

Because of my wife, my social exposure to immigrants and their children is extremely high. Furthermore, I have learned 3 living and 2 dead languages, am employed as a French immersion teacher. For all these reasons, I question the value of kids learning domestic Mandarin or Japanese or whatever. OPOL usually doesn't lead to kids speaking the language the way I speak English. It leads to them knowing all the language you need for home life ("bedtime," "toothbrush," "clean your damn room!"), in a slang frozen in whatever era the mom left the old country. So if the kid ever wants to do business in China, or watch Chinese movies, etc, he's going to need focused study, or he'll speak Mandarin the way Tony Soprano speaks Italian. The choice ends up being between "limited communication with one parent and you never really reach fluency in Mom's language unless you buckle down and study" or "as much communication as possible with both parents and you never reach fluency at all in Mom's language to fluency unless you buckle down and study."

Option 2 has a much better cost/benefit ratio.

Yeah. I'm in Malaysia where my wife's family speaks a mix of Mandarin and Hokkien. They did Mandarin schooling and consume enough mainlander media that they're comfortable talking with Mainlanders, but a lot of Malaysian Mandarin speakers I know feel quite uncomfortable speaking with mainlanders due to the accent and word choices being different.

Likewise my 2 year old speaks a pidgin of Malay, Mandarin and English presently. I've got a bit more than her in both non-English languages, and it's fairly normal for Malaysians to learn this way as it's one of the most multi-lingual countries in the world and it seems to work for them. In an affluent Chinese household typically it's sort of an OPOL setup, albeit with the maid/nanny speaking Malay or Indonesian to the child, family speaking Mandarin and school/online sources trending more English.

A lot of wall of text and speculation abut something that is usually a non-issue.

Point of the practice is to ensure that the kids learns the Mandarin/whatever-speaking parent's language in the age and by same process everyone learns their native language. My personal theory is that the point of one parent one language is not necessary, having constant and separate contexts for different languages is. ( “I speak Spanish to God, Italian to Women, French to Men, and German to my Horse.”) Purpose is to avoid kid learning a creole when he/she is a toddler, and one parent one language is a clear and relatively easy rule to stick with. However, it isn't usually sufficient. If the language learning is carried by parents only, the common occurrence is that kid never learns anything beyond kid level vocabulary and is likely to actively forget it in teenage because it's not cool and appears useless. This is the process how minority languages die in larger empires. Successful Mandarin/whatever-speaking parent supplement it with some Mandarin kindergarten, later hopefully some Mandarin school or other classes, perhaps spending some time in the native country, hopefully establishing a friend circle in the relevant language, and most importantly, access to Mandarin/whatever-speaking media that seems cool.

By the age kids are old enough for substantial family discussions over dinner table, yeah I suspect the common experience is that everyone speaks in the common language. By that point experiment has been proven successful or not, the kid already should have plenty of other spaces to keep up the Mandarin use than one parent only.

E: I should add, all of this is kinda irrelevant if you want your kids to integrate to American mainstream culture, whatever it is and will be. Described practice can work, but these days very point of it is to pass on some sort of hyphenated multilingual, possibly multi-ethnic heritage. Historically some other purposes are attested, too, odd eccentrics have done it with classical languages or Esperanto or otherwise languages considered high status (19th century Russian aristocrats apparently spoke French to each other because of the coolness factor), and Russian probs don't have such status in the USA in foreseeable future.

I'm not sure why you say it's a non-issue after I laid out how the cases I encounter IRL keep having this issue.

Successful Mandarin/whatever-speaking parent supplement it with some Mandarin kindergarten, later hopefully some Mandarin school or other classes, perhaps spending some time in the native country, hopefully establishing a friend circle in the relevant language, and most importantly, access to Mandarin/whatever-speaking media that seems cool.

You can probably make this work for Mandarin in areas of the country that have a lot of Chinese people and if the home languages are Mandarin and English. But if you don't have those things, or you are trying to raise kids trilingual with a third language that doesn't have schools nearby, you are going to have to make some tough choices. As far as I can tell, the choices usually involve fracturing family communication for uncertain benefit.

I'm not sure why you say it's a non-issue after I laid out how the cases I encounter IRL keep having this issue.

Sorry, I admit that I got bored reading because what you describe in part I did not match the IRL people I know. It sounded like there was going to be several paragraphs about some ludicrously overcomplicated hypothetical issue. But I guess I have to admit it is totally possible people tie themselves to knots about language at home.

e: And yes, my sample of people is heavily conditioned on the expats and kids of expats whose parents switched countries once or twice. One of the people I am thinking of is son of expat parents, he keeps touch with friends in various countries over Discord and so. All tri-or-more-lingual people I know are language nerds who have learned the 3rd and others languages the traditional way.

I think you (and apparently a lot of OPOL devotees) are overthinking it.

The research does generally support OPOL theory, in terms of being the most effective way to raise bilingual children. But it is not the only way. The idea that "Mom speaks to the kids in English, Dad speaks to the kids in Russian" is well and good, but it doesn't mean that if Mom and Dad talk to each other in English in front of the kids that you've ruined their bilingual education.

I don't know how strong the evidence is for "cognitive benefits" of multilingualism (though I've seen enough anecdotal evidence to believe it) but I do know a lot of kids grow up regretting that their parents never taught them their native language.

I'm rather skeptical of the claimed cognitive benefits. Much like learning a musical instrument, it seems like more of a proxy for having highly motivated, involved parents who are providing general intellectual enrichment. It's quite difficult to separate out the effect of a specific activity.

Some of my cousins live in Canada, and there it is also subject to an interesting selection effect. French immersion programs are, on paper, intended to make more Canadian students able to communicate in both official languages. In practice, it's how the upper-middle class gets their kids placed in better public schools. Generally ESL students are not eligible for French immersion, since they are receiving supplemental English lessons. This makes the pool of French immersion students significantly higher SES and less "diverse".

Yeah I live in a country with very high multilingualism rates and there are plenty of people I know who speak 3 or 4 languages that I wouldn't exactly call Intellectual Titans otherwise. IMO it's really down to neuroplasticity when the languages get picked up, and I'm also probably overestimating how good they are at their non-primary languages since I don't think they'd be capable of writing a dissertation in them even if they can get by colloquially.

it doesn't mean that if Mom and Dad talk to each other in English in front of the kids that you've ruined their bilingual education.

That's not the salient question. The question is how Mom and Dad have a conversation with each other and the kids at the same time. Clearly such conversations are a significant fraction of language use in the home and having these conversations in English is compromising on the amount of language practice that the kids get, as well as encouraging the kids to be lazy in talking to Mom in Russian. There's no free lunch here.

I do know a lot of kids grow up regretting that their parents never taught them their native language.

UMC children of immigrants who grew up in a weird halfway culture and never developed their identity as Americans hold all kinds of regrets about their parents. They forced them to learn an instrument, or they didn't send them to music classes, or they didn't teach them their native language (despite fighting tooth and nail as children to speak English), or they taught them their native language but they didn't pass down the secret cooking techniques, or they taught them the native language and passed down the secret cooking techniques but didn't cultivate a relationship with the extended family, etc etc. These are mostly window dressing around the anomie of not fitting in.

The simple solution to multi language social spaces is that in any shared space where there is the potential for a person who doesn't know language X, you speak the universal language regardless of if they are there or not.

The idea that one wants to teach the kids a different language is fine. Teach them. But as soon as it starts creeping into situations where not everyone can understand you have a discipline problem. No swearing at the TV in Russian and no Chinese in the kitchen!

The problem of doing things this way is that the parents actually have to take responsibility. It's much easier to not have to put in effort, and just talk to your kids in this language whilst the other parent does it in another, rather than actively sitting your kids down every evening and doing some genuine teaching. But it's a recipe for negative social structures within the home, like you overview.

All in all it's a problem of low agency parenting in a low stakes environment. To veer slightly off topic:

Parents want 'good things' like their kids knowing multiple languages, being pitch perfect and doing well in school or sports, but they don't know why. You hit on this in portion III. It becomes harder and harder to justify teaching your kids a language or otherwise doing hard things when in practicality it is only used to impress grandma and grandpa, who might quickly turn to the universal language when they hear how poorly their studies have been going. There are no real stakes, no weight. This is because fundamentally there's no vision for the future. The kids don't actually have a purpose. The family doesn't exist in a serious context.

People like to blame the 'economy' for the downwardly mobile, but it's practically always the parents that failed. They were disinterested in securing a prosperous future for their children because they themselves are not serious. There's no identity, no ego, no belief, no nation and no border. It's all up in the air, to be discarded at whatever convenience.

Parents want 'good things' like their kids knowing multiple languages, being pitch perfect and doing well in school or sports, but they don't know why.

I'm actually going to go ahead and disagree with you there. They maybe can't exactly articulate it, but I think the fundamental reason, at least in the circles I'm in, is status. Very original take, I know. But the fact is that having multilingual kids "in touch with their culture" is high status among the generation having and raising kids today (I'm thinking basically people in their 30s and early 40s).

Same goes for perfect pitch. Are they ever going to need it? Maybe not, but it impresses others (and it preserves some optionality, what if Sally does want to become a musician after all? Of course, it would be better for her to be a surgeon). It's not just Grandma and Grampa that are being impressed, it's also your friends with kids, with whom you (as a mother) are trapped in a bitter status war in which quarter is neither asked for nor given. It's absolutely critical that you have the most well rounded little angels in the mom group. Husbands are typically dragged along and are happy to just grill.

I think that the "each parent pretends to only understand a single language" thing is a bit silly if carried to extremes.

The more reasonable approach would be that everyone defaults to the shared language in joint discussions, but the bilingual parent talks with the kids in the non-shared language on other occasions. If the kid replies in the shared language, she can tell him how to phrase that sentence in her language. "Can I stay up and watch a TV show" -- "Du meinst, kann ich laenger auf bleiben und Fernsehn schauen?"

Other reasons for teaching your kids two languages are if you are uncertain in which country you will stay. If an US expat and a German raise a few kids in Germany, teaching them English from age zero will enable the family to move to an English-speaking country without too much trouble. By contrast, if their monolinual son is in seventh grade when they want to move, the first year of school will likely be very difficult for him, because two years of English is unlikely to be enough to follow the lessons.

The more reasonable approach would be that everyone defaults to the shared language in joint discussions

I have not found many OPOL followers who do this.

Other reasons for teaching your kids two languages are if you are uncertain in which country you will stay.

Fair, though this is not a consideration in the cases I've seen (basically zero chance my sister moves to Russia or these WMAF couples move to China).

I have not found many OPOL followers who do this.

Would not be surprised if American / reddit OPOLers are unhingedly overboard with this. European expats and like that I know from work seem to have it more like quiet_NaN describes.

SCOTUS: Catholics for Mass Immigration

As a gambit, Trump and Miller’s was always an extremely long shot, but it acts as an illustration of the seriousness of the national issue, and of the pernicious role of intellectual catholicism on the American right. This has less to do with lay Catholics, who are sometimes reactionary and sometimes liberal, or with very online rightist Catholics, whose devotion is questionable but who largely find the maximalist aesthetic interesting or more defensible than megachurch Christianity, which I sympathize with, or who find inspiration in its (arguable, the reality is rather mixed) historical antisemitism for their own LARPing.

One thing Roberts, Kavanaugh and ACB have in common is that they are all the court’s Catholic Intellectuals as an ideological grouping. This separates them from the other Catholics on the Supreme Court - Thomas left Catholicism and then came back to it but his conservatism is not distinctly Catholic (we can argue about this but it isn’t the thrust of my argument) and largely appears to view himself a jurist in both a conservative and a black conservative tradition that is not Catholic; his mentor and inspiration Sowell is (surprised to be writing is here - he’s 96 and still kicking) an atheist by all accounts. Alito is more devout but invented his own complex rationale for abandoning any form of integralism and essentially adopting WASPlite Conservatism With Ellis Islander Characteristics. Gorsuch rejected Catholicism. Sotomayor is nominally Catholic but openly lapsed as per her writings, so there is no need to even get into ideology with her.

Roberts, ACB and Kavanaugh are all much more products of the institutional Catholic Church. They continue to have senior roles in ‘official’ or semi official church organizations from which it would be extremely humiliating to be removed and where they ultimately, beyond many abstract layers of theological management, answer to the Pope, who is basically Zohran Mamdani if he was a little uncomfortable around abortion. If Thomas was denied communion on account of his politics I imagine he would laugh or ignore it; if ACB was I think she’d be very, very upset indeed, and it is laughable to think this isn’t the kind of motivator these people (who have spent most of their lives in this Catholic intellectual bubble surrounded by other Catholics) care about.

Catholicism is essentially a third-worldist institution - the largest, best funded, and most successful on earth - and has been for many decades. Third worldism as envisioned by its proponents was always more about the ‘south’ versus the ‘north’ (meaning countries with demographically european majorities, plus maybe japan) than it was about achieving socialism, which was really a second-tier target. Third worldism’s central organizing objective is ameliorating this supposed imbalance, this terrible and - in the eyes of the Church and its intellectual adherents - un-Christian state of affairs. Mass immigration is the central tool in this toolkit, since with enough of it (due to the vast majority of the world’s population being in the “global south”) the global north simply ceases to exist and one has won by Largely Peaceful™️ (and therefore very Christian) default. Catholicism is a global, transnational, extremely well functioning institution able to deploy tens of billions of (often tax) dollars towards this ideological aim; even more importantly, it has an entire ecosystem of forums, think tanks, colleges (including those on whose board the Roberts’ sit and with whom ACB has her central academic affiliation) and lobbying groups that exist to convince other ‘conservative’ Catholics (in the sense that they support some semblance of traditional marriages restriction of abortion etc) that mass immigration is actually lindy, wholesome chungus, and holy and you will go to hell if you fight it just as if you were a rapist, a murderer, or got ten abortions.

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops (the closest the US Church has to a governing body) is staunchly pro-life but staunchly pro-immigration. So is the (American) Pope. Conservatism for me and my issues, but not for thee and yours, you might say. By some estimates, USCCB affiliates have settled more than 30% of all refugees to the United States since 1980, almost all from the third world. Expecting this to have no impact on the court’s conservative justices, 5/6 of whom are somewhat Catholic and 3/6 (the aforementioned) are closely tied to the modern Catholic intellectual tradition was delusional. The Catholic Church is almost definitionally, as a transnational organization, less concerned with national borders. Far more of its adherents are would-be migrants and refugees than the people who would suffer in rich countries by their presence. Over the last two progressive papacies, by far the majority of the Catholic Church’s opprobrium for the United States has been about mass, and especially illegal, immigration. Of course, statistically, most Central and South American and Haitian illegal migrants - who are the migrants actually affected by the birthright citizenship debate since they can’t naturalize themselves - are literally Catholic.

This is part of the problem of talking about ‘social conservatism’ versus ‘economic conservatism’ or liberalism. If you hate abortion and have a kind of condescending pity for homosexuals but support the third-worldification of America, you are still a tradcon and the right will cheer as you’re appointed to the Supreme Court. Amy Coney Barrett has Haitian children. There are hundreds of thousands of Haitians illegally resident in the US, who have kids who look just like her kids but who weren’t lucky enough to be adopted by a rich American family. She was never going to vote to repeal birthright citizenship which, for all the legalistic arguments, is an inherently nativist-sympathetic move (just as it was when England repealed it in 1981, and when Australia did 5 years later), even if its proponents profess to and indeed do support mass immigration in general. Is your country for the world or is it, at least, for you and the people you choose to let in?

In America, our Catholic rulers have decided it is for the world.

My dudette, I am sympathetic to some of your points, but the snark level makes it difficult to tell which are serious.

In any case I don't think the Roman Catholic justices need to worry about excommunication. Their bishops are far too institutionalist to impose it, even if they felt it were appropriate.

Amy Coney Barrett has Haitian children. There are hundreds of thousands of Haitians illegally resident in the US, who have kids who look just like her kids but who weren’t lucky enough to be adopted by a rich American family.

For this reason I was highly skeptical of ACB from before or around the time she was nominated.

She had already personally imported two members of a low human capital populace into the United States. With conservatives such as these, who even needs progressives?

Great. Now you are making me defend the Catholics.

With your complaining about the Evil Catholics on the court, I can not help but notice that all of them except for Sotomayor were appointed by Republican presidents. In particular, two of the three you identify as strongly Catholic (ACB and Kavanaugh) were appointed by President Trump. Perhaps ask him why he did not appoint some gun enthusiast evangelicals which favor rounding up the illegals and sending them to megaprisons in some shithole nation, or blow up their ships before they arrive?

To get the obvious out of the way: the SCOTUS upholding birthright citizenship is not that surprising that we need conspiracy explanations. The plain language of the 14th, plus a century and change worth of legal precedent based on a textual interpretation of the 14th is not something you overturn easily. In fact, overturning it would have been legislation from the bench almost as bad as Roe. We do not need to suppose that the conservatives who voted for birthright citizenship are stooges of the pope when the alternative explanation is that they are textualists who are reluctant to say "actually the constitution means X when it says Y because it would be really convenient for the object level decision if it did."

Also, if you think that the Vatican would excommunicate anyone over being against open borders, think again. Giorgia Meloni was elected as prime minister of Italy on a platform of zero tolerance for illegal immigration. She is openly and performatively Catholic.

I am also sorry to inform you that some brands of Christianity do not make good foundations on which you can project arbitrary political messages. Christianity comes with its own ideas about what is good. Caring for the plight of the needy was very much instrumental in early Christianity spreading. There were certainly papacies where this message was lost almost completely, but a general attitude of "let the third worlders drown, who gives a fuck" is not compatible with Catholicism. (In better news, there are plenty of choices for religions which are long on not giving a fuck about others. Vance, Hegseth and his ilk might be better off worshipping Huitzilopochtli, Odin or Khorne.)

Also, do you have some source for the Vatican (or even Mamdani) arguing that the best way to fix global poverty is just to open all the borders? Personally, I do not believe that open borders scale very well. Supporting the needy in a First World country seems much less effective than supporting them directly in the global South. Rescuing drowning migrants is, in my mind, not a part of a coherent plan to tackle global poverty. Instead, it is something you do because it is the thing a decent human should do, and you realize that you do not have the stomach to crucify enough migrants to deter them from coming, and do not trust any (hypothetical) utilitarian argument that this would lead to better global outcomes.

I see what you're doing here.

Normally, I don't love this kind of thing and I'd even chide you for not "speaking clearly," but I have to admit this is well done. I am not even certain you aren't sincere.

What is she doing here?

Sounding the alarm about the machinations of [[[Insidious Hibernia]]]. I dare say @2rafa may be the only real white man left on this board.

There is a type of post that essentially goes: “All of the people behind this particular bad thing that happened are Jewish. Let’s unpack that,” but 2rafa wrote the post about Catholics instead.

I noticed the irony on my first read-through, but the thought that it was a bit never occurred to me. I still don’t think it’s a bit, but it certainly apes the style.

I believe she's sincere. 2rafa's view generally is very strongly opposed to immigration and she's even made commentary in the past about how Catholic and German immigration into the United States fundamentally changed the nature of the country. I also believe she lives in the UK (London?) now because she believes the US is a lost cause due to immigration.

I admit it's very interesting for a Jewish lady to have such a strong attachment to Anglo-Saxons (of course if we go too deep on this we'll get down our own "migration into the country fundamentally changed the nature of society" story) that she'd go to bat for them against the Germans or the Italians, but nevertheless hers is a unique stance and I find it interesting even when I think she's wrong.

Let's sanity-check this for a moment.

Let us consider comparable First World countries. If your theory holds, then the influence of the Catholic Church should positively correlate with mass migration. So, for instance, you might expect Ireland to be considerably more supportive of mass migration than England. Italy should be more supportive of it than Sweden. Spain should support it more than Denmark. Even in America, we should expect the US to be, though influenced by the Catholic Church, less supportive of mass migration than the entirety of Central America and South America.

Is this what we actually see?

I applaud the inventiveness of the top-level post - "the US is controlled by an elite conspiracy of Catholics" is a nice change from "the US is controlled by an elite conspiracy of Jews". But it doesn't survive more than a few minutes' consideration.

If nothing else, I think it requires a very specific and narrow level of Catholic ideology in power. The USCCB supports refugees and immigrants while still opposing abortion, euthanasia, LGBT, and so on - well, how are all those latter issues doing? We just saw the pope being quite critical of AI bots. I guess the Catholic conspiracy had better get on to that immediately, because man, it is doing a bad job of stopping those in the US.

This is true, and it's a good thing. Multiculturalism elegantly refutes the protestant notion that there can be authority without authorities. Protestants behold the society they created, where each person's own preferred interpretation of "good" are paramount... and weep. They have no ability to argue for the preservation of their culture as such, because their entire culture is founded on rejecting tradition. Appeals to racial solidarity fail because race is transparently a constructed category invented by 19th century aristocrats to convince poor people to be complicit in their own oppression.

If you would only convert to the true church, you would understand that all of culture that is actively worth is propagated not by heritage, language, or skin color, but by priests, monks, and sisters.

Multiculturalism elegantly refutes the protestant notion that there can be authority without authorities.

This is not a Protestant notion.

Obviously Protestantism acknowledges authorities in some sense - the Bible is clearly authoritative, for instance. You must be taking the view that 'authorities' must mean some sort of human organisation.

But Protestantism clearly allows for the existence of human organisations and governance. Even leaving aside secular governments, which hold authority in their proper (and limited) spheres, every Protestant tradition that I'm aware of has governing authorities in the church. Protestant churches have synods and assemblies and all the tools of government. What Protestants assert is that these authorities, though valid, are necessarily subject to higher authorities, which includes the likes of scripture.

Authorities exist but they are bounded in a way that they are not in Roman Catholicism. The Protestant case would be that the Catholic investiture of absolute interpretive and governing authority in the institutional body of the church is a kind of idolatry.

Allows for? You are downplaying it. Exhibit A, Protestantism as practiced by Cromwell and contemporaries did not proscribe validity each person's own preferred interpretations, they banned public celebration of Christmas and other popery.

Cromwellian theocracy is one of the possible political arrangements compatible with Protestantism, I would say. But it is not required by Protestantism either.

I've never understood this specific type of Catholic triumphalism. Not only did the Catholic church pretty much entirely fail to conserve early Christian culture, or the universal church (where Western insistence on changing the Nicene Creed drove a split with the East), or pre-Reformation Catholic culture, or European monarchy (and attempts were made!) it also fails to convey its own teachings to its own members. The supposed authority of the Church yields a Catholic lay culture that is poorly catechized and where the overwhelming majority of weekly churchgoers oppose the church's own teachings. This might be a tolerable situation if the church was trading off quality for quantity, but (at least in the US) the opposite is happening: Catholicism is shrinking.

I highly recommend reading Barna or other pollsters on these sorts of things. The first thing that you realize when you start to look at the numbers is that Christians really need to be better catechized. The second thing you realize is that the denominations that, stereotypically, don't know what the word "catechism" means are doing a better job at it than Catholics (somehow).

If you would only convert to the true church, you would understand that all of culture that is actively worth is propagated not by heritage, language, or skin color, but by priests, monks, and sisters.

That seems contradicted by the behavior and beliefs of roughly 100% of Catholics historically, though. While one can argue for more or less immigration on prudential grounds, all non-church institutions and culture not being worth preserving doesn't seem to be a common viewpoint. What do you base it on? I don't mean this in a pejorative way, but that posture seems more akin to radical protestantism than Catholicism or Orthodoxy I'm familiar with.

I’m sure hereandgone will enjoy Father’s homily this weekend about how the Irish tricolor is cringe and non-Christian, and the Irish really should stop trying to preserve Irish Gaelic because heritage and language are not worth propagating. Leave the culture to the religious orders and the priests, please.

As we all know, Catholic cultures are completely apologetic and nonplussed about their heritage, culture, and language.

This is sarcastic, for the mods’ sake. But your position is very silly.

Your post basically hangs on this:

The US Conference of Catholic Bishops (the closest the US Church has to a governing body) is staunchly pro-life but staunchly pro-immigration. So is the (American) Pope. Conservatism for me and my issues, but not for thee and yours, you might say. By some estimates, USCCB affiliates have settled more than 30% of all refugees to the United States since 1980, almost all from the third world. Expecting this to have no impact on the court’s conservative justices, 5/6 of whom are somewhat Catholic and 3/6 (the aforementioned) are closely tied to the modern Catholic intellectual tradition was delusional.

But this passage is not adequate to the task of holding up your argument. The USCCB is not "pro immigration", it advocates for treating people (including, but not limited to, immigrants) with kindness and dignity as befits someone made in the image of God. Nor does the church in general require anyone (supreme court justice or otherwise) to take any particular position on immigration policy. Believers are urged to follow their judgement as to what is prudent, based on love for their fellow man. And the justices, being highly educated people who know well what the church does and does not require, would be well aware of this. It is in no way "delusional" to believe that the justices are following their own reasoning rather than falling in line behind the USCCB, despite your assertion to the contrary.

I don't know much about American Catholicism, but it seems awfully hard to square:

The USCCB is not "pro immigration", it advocates for treating people (including, but not limited to, immigrants) with kindness and dignity

with:

USCCB affiliates have settled more than 30% of all refugees to the United States since 1980, almost all from the third world

The latter is what my high school history teacher would call 'crunchy' and the former what he would call 'woolly'. Our essays always had to be full of crunchy statements and avoid woolly ones, because an argument full of wooly statements can basically argue anything at all without evidence.

Here's the crunchy parts of what the USCCB actually says:

We bishops advocate for meaningful reforms of our nation's immigration laws

Safe and legal pathways serve as an antidote to such [trafficking] risks.

I would have quoted more but it's an unhighlightable PDF (surely a mortal sin?). But anyone reading can look at it themselves. I don't think it's too uncharitable to say that their solution to America's illegal third world immigration is to simply make that migration legal. Less charitably, to replace de facto open borders with de jure open borders.

That seems pretty pro-immigration to me...

Unfortunately, I have no idea what the actual facts behind "USCCB affiliates have settled more than 30% of all refugees to the United States since 1980" are, since none were provided. What are these affiliates, and what does "settled to the US" mean? I can envision very different scenarios that could be described by those words. So, without any real information about that (and also, you weren't the one advancing that point in fairness), let's focus on the PDF you linked (which I was able to highlight just fine btw, so I'm guessing there's some client differences in play). It actually says something very different from what you quoted, if you take it in context:

We recognize that nations have a responsibility to regulate their borders and establish a just and orderly immigration system for the sake of the common good. Without such processes, immigrants face the risk of trafficking and other forms of exploitation. Safe and legal pathways serve as an antidote to such risks.

I think it is fair to say that the USCCB does not, based on that statement, support a complete cessation of immigration into the country. But neither are they advocating for simply opening the borders. Doing that would go against the statement that "nations have a responsibility to regulate their borders and establish a just and orderly immigration system for the sake of the common good".

The statement from the USCCB is pretty light on what they envision a successful immigration policy might look like. But while it's true that they say they think our nation's policy needs reform, they also imply that national security is a legitimate concern in designing such a policy ("Human dignity and national security are not in conflict. Both are possible if people of good will work together."), as well as state outright that nations should regulate their borders (in the quote up above). They also state that we must recognize the inherent dignity of all people:

The Church’s teaching rests on the foundational concern for the human person, as created in the image and likeness of God (Genesis 1:27). As pastors, we look to Sacred Scripture and the example of the Lord Himself, where we find the wisdom of God’s compassion. The priority of the Lord, as the Prophets remind us, is for those who are most vulnerable: the widow, the orphan, the poor, and the stranger (Zechariah 7:10). In the Lord Jesus, we see the One who became poor for our sake (2 Corinthians 8:9), we see the Good Samaritan who lifts us from the dust (Luke 10:30– 37), and we see the One who is found in the least of these (Matthew 25). The Church’s concern for neighbor and our concern here for immigrants is a response to the Lord’s command to love as He has loved us (John 13:34).

So in other words, they prioritize the importance of upholding the dignity of all people (immigrants as well as our existing citizens), with a focus on love, and finding a way forward which can meet the needs of all parties involved in the situation. I personally think that's pretty much what I said in my previous post, so I don't think that this document really refutes anything I said. In either case, I do not think that such a position qualifies as "pro immigration". They are not in favor of immigration per se, nor against it. They are instead focused on the dignity/love angle which is orthogonal to the question of what our immigration policy should be. Sometimes love is going to mean we should accept the less fortunate from other countries, and sometimes that is going to mean we should place restrictions so as to better serve the welfare of the people already living here.

I think Catholicism even to Roman times was a slave religion and Universal Church. I don’t believe you need say their helping out compatriots today in the third world to find the reasoning for why Catholics have a lot of trouble denying immigrants.

Things like HBD or if you just want to call it racism is just very hard to square with Catholicism. It’s probably not even easy to square with Christianity and other sects but American Christianity does seem to have evolved immune responses that is more difficult for Catholicism to pick up. There is too much theological baggage that just can’t be repudiated and still maintaining their the original and true Church because Christianity is fundamentally a slave religion. Which I think was perfectly fine for Europe when they just dealt with Europeans or war with Muslims. There is just a huge parallelism with turning away a migrant and baby Jesus being turned away from the Inn in the nativity scene. Catholics were useful for abortion battles but the same thing probably going to be bad for immigration.

Maybe is just doing copium but I think at a minimum there is a 50% chance or more that within 20 years birth rate is changed. The Trump administration didn’t build this case the way the judges like. It’s better to take small steps than the whole thing at once. Just keep working exceptions and yes you probably have to quit appointing Catholics to the Court.

It's not Catholics, it's everybody. The median person at least. But Catholics like Nick Fuentes will keep blaming the Jews, because, let's face it, the Jews are to the left of the other religious groups so they were earlier on the scene and are always going to be over-represented in leftism. Not to mention the Israel issue.

Jews are of course overrepresented in leftism, but today wasn’t about Jews. The only Jewish person on the Supreme Court, appointed as a liberal justice, voted with the liberals, as would be obvious. In the same way, the black justice appointed as a liberal voted with the liberals, and the black justice appointed as a conservative voted with the conservatives.

The travesty is that three conservative Catholics - including two (ie enough to invert the majority ruling) appointed by the current President - voted to oppose his reasonable agenda, made clear more than a decade ago, to deter illegal immigration, which they conveniently didn’t mention opposing until now, long after their appointment by said president.

The travesty is that three conservative Catholics - including two (ie enough to invert the majority ruling) appointed by the current President - voted to oppose his reasonable agenda, made clear more than a decade ago, to deter illegal immigration, which they conveniently didn’t mention opposing until now, long after their appointment by said president.

“If you’re going to be a good and faithful judge, you have to resign yourself to the fact that you’re not always going to like the conclusions you reach. If you like them all the time, you’re probably doing something wrong.”
--Justice Antonin Scalia

Now admittedly the right wing has a better judicial philosophy (originalism/textualism) to vote in non partisan ways on the Supreme Court when compared to the left wing (living constitutionalism). Judges should interpret the laws as it read by the common person at the time - not how they feel should be the best outcome for their political side.

The travesty is that three conservative Catholics - including two (ie enough to invert the majority ruling) appointed by the current President - voted to oppose his reasonable agenda, made clear more than a decade ago, to deter illegal immigration, which they conveniently didn’t mention opposing until now, long after their appointment by said president.

There is nothing whatsoever that constitutes a "travesty" in justices voting against the actions of a president who appointed them. That is, in fact, the entire point behind having an independent court which serves for life. They are not meant to be an extension of the president's will, rubber stamping whatever he does. Moreover, even if the president's agenda is reasonable (an assertion you didn't bother to substantiate, but just assumed as fact), that does not therefore make his actions in pursuit of that agenda reasonable. He might be taking illegal actions in service to a reasonable goal, and in that case it is the duty of the judiciary to rein him in - that's what checks and balances are all about.

The only Jewish person on the Supreme Court, appointed as a liberal justice, voted with the liberals, as would be obvious. In the same way, the black justice appointed as a liberal voted with the liberals, and the black justice appointed as a conservative voted with the conservatives.

Yes. But on average, how do Jews and Blacks vote compared to Whites? Do you understand my point now?

The travesty is that three conservative Catholics - including two (ie enough to invert the majority ruling) appointed by the current President - voted to oppose his reasonable agenda, made clear more than a decade ago, to deter illegal immigration, which they conveniently didn’t mention opposing until now, long after their appointment by said president.

An original American would say it's a papist conspiracy to flood the United States with papist hispanics so the Pope can rule over the US.

An original American would say it's a papist conspiracy to flood the United States with papist hispanics so the Pope can rule over the US.

Samuel Morse was never wrong, only early, and the plea for the west has been rejected.

An original American would say it's a papist conspiracy to flood the United States with papist hispanics so the Pope can rule over the US.

They might, and that would be closer to an accurate interpretation of today’s decision than that of many a modern American political commentator.

Historically, the United States had an open borders immigration policy. Perhaps we should say that the country was flooded with nativists?

Eh, I'd take good old Leo as leader of the free world over Trump.

While I do not have anything against Leo in general, any Vatican which had the ambition to rule the US by proxy would likely be as much of a disaster as Trump is.

The Supreme Court has issued a ruling on Trump v. Barbara (birthright citizenship). 6-3 striking down Trump's executive order. You can find the ruling here: https://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/25pdf/25-365_4hdj.pdf

I've only had enough time to skim the ruling thus far. Jackson wrote a concurrence which I won't bother to read because she's the second most retarded member of the court (Sotomayor still reigns supreme in retardation). Kavanaugh partially concurred on the basis that this needed to be done by act of congress as opposed to executive order, but otherwise generally agreed with the Trump admin's interpretation of the 14th amendment. Thomas and Gorsuch outright dissented. Alito had his own separate dissent. Thomas's opinion includes several historical examples of people born on US soil to people not lawfully in the US who were denied citizenship, and I was not aware of these examples previously, making his the most interesting. Well that and the fact that it agrees with my 100% objectively correct and indisputable view of the matter of course.

This is roughly how most court-watchers expected this decision to turn out, but it still doesn't change the immense disappointment I feel over this news. Someone here earlier this week or last week said that this decision will be our generation's Dred Scott regardless of how it is decided, and that it will tear the union apart in similar fashion. Demographic changes in the West generally are leading to ever increasing tension and dysfunction, and I fear this decision will ensure that a breaking point is reached soooner, rather than later.

The meltdowns in response to the ruling have been pretty incredible, looking at a lot of comments on X would have you believe that the SC just decided to institute birthright citizenship today, instead of them just not changing the law of the land precedent of >150 years. No one alive knows a US without birthright citizenship.

If it's so damaging, why are we one of the wealthiest and most powerful nations not just in the world but in history? Even if you're a pessimistic doomer who can't appreciate the country today because you've gone too fast on the hedonic treadmill and who thinks the 90s or the 60s or the roaring 20s or whatever were Peak America, those times were also under birthright citizenship.

Conservatives even considered it a point of pride! Here's the great Ronald Reagan on immigration https://www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/remarks-presentation-ceremony-presidential-medal-freedom-5

And since this is the last speech that I will give as President, I think it's fitting to leave one final thought, an observation about a country which I love. It was stated best in a letter I received not long ago. A man wrote me and said: ``You can go to live in France, but you cannot become a Frenchman. You can go to live in Germany or Turkey or Japan, but you cannot become a German, a Turk, or a Japanese. But anyone, from any corner of the Earth, can come to live in America and become an American.''

Yes, the torch of Lady Liberty symbolizes our freedom and represents our heritage, the compact with our parents, our grandparents, and our ancestors. It is that lady who gives us our great and special place in the world. For it's the great life force of each generation of new Americans that guarantees that America's triumph shall continue unsurpassed into the next century and beyond. Other countries may seek to compete with us; but in one vital area, as a beacon of freedom and opportunity that draws the people of the world, no country on Earth comes close.

But modern "conservativism" isn't conservative. It's a corrupted cult of personality based around grievance politics, and racial grievance politics is just a subcategory of that. If modern "conservatives" had any balls left, they would rise against the welfare state they think is attracting parasites, and not against stuff like H1B visas, scientists, engineers, and other great additions to the country. It's not very complicated

Micheal Tracey even made a great point about how victimhood complexes have consumed these "conservatives" so much that they've even largely stopped caring about abortion.

What they fundamentally need is a perpetual Victimhood Complex to sustain themselves, even when they wield enormous state power. This also sustains their ability to browbeat recalcitrant GOP-leaning voters when the next Presidential Election rolls around, because they can emotionally-blackmail these voters about why they must vote Republican, despite any misgivings, because it's just soooo existentially vital that a Republican President fill any forthcoming Supreme Court vacancies -- that's the only way to right this grievous wrong re: Birthright Citizenship, and avert the total destruction of America. (Even as the purported mass baby-murder genocide, which their "Supreme Court Or Die!" talking point would've been predicated on in the past, continues apace)

AI + death of Western manufacturing means that mass bodies are less important to running a productive economy. Social spending/gibs are large and getting larger each year as a result of a large population of those who can't easily be employed productively. Moving to a developed nation is now maximally a 36 hour experience of plane transfers and you retain complete communication with everybody from your homeland.

It doesn't require a gigantic genius to see how this confluence of factors might make it a bit different than when Destiny was being Manifested. Your absolute best case scenario is that the genius quotient of the newcomers is high enough to somehow produce sufficient outliers to cover the rest, but as increasingly lower layers of the barrel are able to emigrate that seems unlikely.

The meltdowns in response to the ruling have been pretty incredible, looking at a lot of comments on X would have you believe that the SC just decided to institute birthright citizenship today

Where are you seeing these "meltdowns"? I've seen a lot of grumbling about Roberts being a coward (making this a day ending in 'y') and mockery of Jackson but nobody on the right that I've seen seems to be particularly surprised by this outcome. Pretty much everyone I know was expecting a 7-2 decision with Thomas and Alito in dissent. If anything the fact that we got Kavanaugh and Gorsuch at least nominally on side with the option for future legislation left open feels like a reason for cautious optimism. We may not have scored, but we did move the ball downfield.

Sean Davis, CEO of the federalist, among many other crazy ideas suggested the dissolution of the union and forced sterilization of all tourists which is definitely the biggest meltdown I've seen. But there's been others. Micheal Tracey points out the issue here

These tough guy right-wing pundits have the same emotional dysregulation issues as the most frantic Trans activists. Always with the knee-jerk cognitive distortions: the constant melodramatic catastrophizing, the whiny performative bellyaching at the slightest perceived adversity.

Sean Davis, CEO of the federalist, among many other crazy ideas suggested the dissolution of the union and forced sterilization of all tourists

Link? If your characterization is accurate I would acknowledge that as warranting a sincere "WTF Dude?" but most of the responses that I've been seeing have been more like this one. You can dismiss it as "cope" if you like, but I don't think Pinsker is entirely wrong.

Time will tell.

Because America “Akshually” sucks to live in now. And I can say that because I’ve been living in Argentina. Immigrants actually are kind of awful. We’ve been essentially ethnically cleansed out of NYC. I’m sick and tired of being exposed to gun violence in Chicago. San Francisco is a boring Asian town now which use to be like the people from Full House. Besides the quality and safety of our cities declining we’ve made it worse by not building housing in our cities and also subsidizing immigrants so that you either need to make 7-figures or live on welfare to live in a big city. The fact that the American Dream of living in a big city doesn’t exists anymore Akshually does mean immigration sucks and black crime killed neighborhoods. So sure America is great if you want to live in a 5k sq foot house with a giant truck far enough away from any immigrants to not deal with them, but if you actually want to live in an community then the American Dream dead.

It just better not living around immigrants in ways not captured by GDP goes up. The social contract was broken in America and people realize that now.

So sure quote Reagan. The issue with Reagan is he was wrong. The Italians successfully became Americans but that’s it. Of course the Italians invented Western society so perhaps it’s never should have been surprising they eventually assimilate.

We’ve been essentially ethnically cleansed out of NYC.

NYC is still plurality white and I know plenty of people living there who love the life. This "ethnic cleansing" does not seem to impact them.

sick and tired of being exposed to gun violence in Chicago.

Chicago sucked even worse in the "good old days!"

San Francisco is a boring Asian town now which use to be like the people from Full House. Besides the quality and safety of our cities declining we’ve made it worse by not building housing in our cities

This is what people want! So many American voters want the NIMBYism, and the boring sprawl culture. We don't build because citizens are constantly opposing new construction. I think it's lame too, but it's obvious that people genuinely disagree and love extreme sprawl without construction. You can see this with your own eyes if you visit any local city council meeting when new construction comes up as a topic.

and also subsidizing immigrants so that you either need to make 7-figures or live on welfare to live in a big city.

The main form of federal welfare that helps with housing is section 8, and those are highly limited. It also only applies to renters (therefore about 2/3rds of people are not applicable at all), and only 12% of renters have it. Other things like project based rentals are even less common.

But also you don't need seven figures. The median household income in my state's big city of Charlotte is ~83k. Not even six figures. Given that is the median, plenty of people live with less than that.

The fact that the American Dream of living in a big city doesn’t exists anymore Akshually does mean immigration sucks and black crime killed neighborhoods. So sure America is great if you want to live in a 5k sq foot house with a giant truck far enough away from any immigrants to not deal with them, but if you actually want to live in an community then the American Dream dead.

The American dream is an immigrant concept! The dream is coming to the land of opportunity, working hard and building up your life through your sweat and tears because of our historical libertarian freedom loving meritocratic ideals. Crime rates are also misleading, they are hyperlocalized. Unless you hang out on the kill streets (and if you're not a useless loser working part time at a McDonald's, you should be able to avoid it) then you avoid most crime.

People like Jensen Huang, a Taiwanese immigrant from a middle class family, Jan Kuom, a Ukranian immigrant raised in poverty, or Hamdi Ulukaya whose family were Kurdish dairy farmers before moving are living proof it still exists. You just need to be worth something. Stuff like the many Indian and Chinese immigrant workers in tech companies is lower level examples of this too. In the US if you can't make something of yourself and you want to, it's because you suck. It hurts to hear the truth, but it is the truth.

It just better not living around immigrants in ways not captured by GDP goes up.

Nope, GDP is the best metric and is great in part because of basic mathematics https://www.cremieux.xyz/p/the-boring-reason-gdp-is-inevitable

But why even throw in a random complaint about GDP to begin with except to signal economic illiteracy?

“ So many American voters want the NIMBYism”

  • this occurred post WW2 after a great migration and what was termed as “White Flight”. It’s basically impossible at this point to discern whether it occurred because of technology or crime. The urban schools became ghettoized which meant you have to pay private school tuition which meant making a lot of money. Cheap urban living became non-existent.

Is Charlotte a big city? I haven’t lived there in 20 years but I thought it was car-centric sprawl.

Chicago also wasn’t a shithole until posts 2016. They did effective segregation before then so the bulk of the crime was contained to neighborhoods avoided.

I suppose I have a very simple take on this, which is:

The Fourteenth Amendment clearly says birthright citizenship. Therefore birthright citizenship.

That's the end of it, surely? We don't need to import anything else. The supreme court's only job is to say what the law is. I think that birthright citizenship is an incredibly bad policy. The US is a small and radical outlier for having it; almost every other country on Earth is more sane.

However, I do not see any other way to interpret:

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside.

That's what it says, so that's what the law is. It's stupid, but it's the kind of stupid that requires a constitutional amendment to repeal. Get on that, America.

The Xth Amendment clearly says Y. Therefore Y.

lol. lmao, even. It's a great ideal, but it's very clearly not the reality.

  • The second amendment guarantees the right to keep weapons of war in case military action is needed, and yet people have trouble getting their hands on a duck gun.

  • The fourth guarantees personal property, and yet that property can be suspected of a crime and seized through civil asset forfeiture without triggering those protections.

  • The fifth protects against self-incrimination, but a judge can still jail you if you forget (or "forget") how to decrypt a harddrive.

I'm sure people could add more to the list.

The US is a small and radical outlier for having it; almost every other country on Earth is more sane.

I wish I could include Canada in that list. As of the start of the year we don't just have birthright citizenship, we have ancestryright citizenship, where you are Canadian if any of your ancestors were Canadian, back to the founding of the country.

lol. lmao, even. It's a great ideal, but it's very clearly not the reality.

I am shocked, shocked to hear that the United States supreme court has acted lawlessly!

In case the sarcasm was not clear, I wholly agree that the history of the supreme court is full of politically-motivated or agenda-driven rulings that do not conform to the plain original meaning of the text. Barely two hours ago I complained about some of them.

I do not consider lawless past action to license lawless future action. The court has behaved badly in the past. That does not confer a right to behave badly now or in the future.

and subject to the jurisdiction thereof

What do you understand this phrase to mean? And why wouldn't it have sufficed to just say "All persons born or naturalized in the United States", why was the "subject to the jurisdiction" part needed at all if it says it as clearly as you claim?

"All people to whom United States law applies", basically. In practice it means "not the Reservations, not diplomats". I think the original meaning of the phrase is pretty clear, and interpretation of it to confer birthright citizenship goes back to the 19th century.

In my effortpost, I referred to an old old comment of mine, where I said:

my highest aspirations for most administrations these days is that they give us interesting cases that clear up confusing Constitutional issues... and I think there’s a decent chance the Roberts Court can still do that on some of these matters.

After having (mostly) read the opinions, if I'm judging by this metric, I have to say that Roberts' majority opinion is a fail. To be clear, I am not saying that the opinion is wrong. On the contrary, as the saying goes, the Supreme Court is not final because they're right; they're right because they're final. So, yeah, they're final, and so they're right. But I do not think the majority opinion cleared up the confusion.

I don't think he really cleared up what was going on in WKA. Primarily because for the critical step, he just did what the Court did in WKA - turn to Schooner (DRINK!). One of the primary areas of interest was, in turn, what Schooner did and how it should be understood. On this point, Roberts was somehow even less informative than WKA. He didn't even quote the entire critical passage! Didn't even get to the part about the "implied license" under which people enter the country. As I said in the effortpost, the Court wants the Full Schooner, but it doesn't want to engage with it. It doesn't even touch on the full panoply of hypos that Schooner touched on.

The second major confusing question is how anything works with Indians. Indian law is confusing, yo. He could have at least said, "Indians are weird, yo." But he didn't even do that. I think this is basically the one, crucial sentence:

Indians born under those dominions, he concluded, were not “citizens or subjects of the United States,” but members of “alien and sovereign tribes.” [citing Kent]

Like, what counts as a "dominion"? What is it to be "under those dominions"? Does Roberts think it matters whether an Indian woman, carrying the child of an Indian man, wandered off the reservation and gave birth in non-tribal US territory? How does any of this work?

The biggest, most major sources of confusion are pretty much just swept under the rug.

I don't know that I buy the dissents, either. I at least felt like I learned some things from Thomas that I hadn't seen in the briefs/cases. He gave the most plausible explanation for what could have been the motivating reasoning behind the shift in language from the 1866 CRA and 14A, but I'm not qualified to assess the truth thereof. He really shines in making it visceral how confusing it is to read WKA. And I hadn't quite noticed in reading Fuller's WKA dissent that it could be read as agreeing with the majority that the child of a domiciled alien would be a citizen, but dissenting instead on the grounds that WKA, specifically, was not/could not be domiciled. I need to find time to go back and read it again; as of right now, I don't know whether I think this is a plausible reading or not.

I'd probably want to stew with it all and (re-)read some of the citations before saying who I find ultimately more persuasive. But I'm not sure either of them are "right" (as in, not the regular sense of right; ya know what? we've already covered this). That is, I'm not sure either view really provides a clear, convincing, comprehensive theory that fits all the pieces together and makes it less of an atrocious mess.

So I feel a bit better about my conclusion that the topic is an atrocious mess. I can take comfort that at least Kavanaugh agrees with me that the Constitutional question is "not straightforward". I'd like to also hope that Gorsuch was thinking something similar when, in his brief separate writing, he said, in a somewhat measured fashion, that he thought Thomas' view "better accords with the Clause's original public meaning". I'd like to remember his statement in oral arguments ("It's a mess"), and view him as agreeing with me that it's a mess, and then saying something along the lines of, "If the two best explanations for what's going on are Roberts' opinion or Thomas', I guess, if I have to, I'll take Thomas'." I'm not sure if that's where I'll end up after stewing with it longer, but it seems plausible.

Of course, the Constitutional issue being a 5-4 I think also supports my prior opinion that it is much messier than most people thought going into it.

Oh, and also of course, I feel a bit vindicated in my more recent prediction (in the effortpost here, rather than in my comment years ago at the old old old place) that we were likely not going to get a real, detailed, coherent opinion that cleared stuff up.

I am glad for this ruling because it accelerates the demographic downfall of the United States. I say that not as a leftist but as someone who believes that Trump 1 was the absolute last call to do something about the demographic situation, and now the United States populace must face the natural consequences of their actions. The quicker, the better. Let it be a lesson for the history books.

I think at some point in the next 10 years, assuming a relatively normal timeline (no nuclear Armageddon, no singularity, etc), we will probably see either a grand bargain or a runaway convention resulting in some significant changes to the constitution. In this scenario, is Jus soli is one of the first things to go. People on the right hate it, and other than a few groups of ideologues (devout neoliberals, the everything-is-racist caucus, etc), the rank and file on the left don't seem to care about it that much. They seem much more concerned with full on economic Marxism at the moment.

It's hard to imagine any coherent conception of a nation with borders that can be infinitely exploited by any person who manages to give birth within them.

This being anything other than 9-0 is an ominous level of partisan hackery. Like it or not, the Constitution is unambiguous with respect to birthright citizenship.

Expect future decades of the big issues of our time being decided by judges because legislatures have abandoned their responsibilities, and declining civic participation and partisanship frustrates any attempts to amend constitutions.

It is unambiguous.

All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States

The inclusion of the clause is unambiguous that not all those born in the United States are subject to its jurisdiction. Its enshrinement in the Constitution is the US government defining a hard limit on its own sovereignty. The argument of Wong Kim Ark is that "People born here are under US jurisdiction" when, for the clause, that is explicitly denied by 14A. Its first test and major precedent was a complete inversion of the language.

It's somehow worse than that. We see with these rulings that successive courts read 14A as though it were written:

All persons born in the United States are citizens of the United States

That's not what it says, and to emphasize as it's beyond question, this is the obligate read of 14A by every court that has upheld categorical birthright citizenship. As their read necessarily omits the clause, they are tacitly admitting that with the clause their read is wrong.

And, qualitatively, Gorsuch consistently breaks ranks in preference to the text of laws as-written. If it were "unambiguous" in your sense, he would have joined the majority.

Its first test and major precedent was a complete inversion of the language.

The general understanding is that "not under the jurisdiction" covers invading armies and diplomatic staff of other countries (and also Indians with internal self-governance).

Of course, the tendency to naturalize immigrants (or at least their descendants) is much older than the 14th (slavery non-withstanding). Most ancestors of today's US citizens were neither Native American nor part of the Mayflower.

This doesn’t make any sense. If illegal immigrants are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States, then there is no legal basis to deport them.

I think that’s easy to get by “to have jurisdiction you must be able to enforce jurisdiction” - if your not able to deport perhaps because you don’t know they are even here then you don’t effectively have jurisdiction. If you refuse to deport them but are able to deport them then you do have jurisdiction.

No, that's not true; it is accepted that diplomats and children of diplomats are not subject to the jurisdiction of the United States for the purpose of that clause, and they can still be deported.

No, they can be declared persona non grata, after which if they are not recalled they become subject to the jurisdiction of the United States and can then be deported.

What's your opinion on Obergefell? Was that ominous?

For what it's worth, and I realise this wasn't directed at me, I think Obergefell does join the long list of decisions based on the Fourteenth Amendment that are indefensible on their own merits. One of the reasons I think the Fourteenth was a mistake was that it is sufficiently open to be read so as to smuggle in any policy change along these lines.

I disagree with the policy outcome of Obergefell, but that is irrelevant to the legal reasoning. As regards the law, I think the material substance of Obergefell was a matter for congress, not the courts.

Yes. I think that legalizing gay marriage is/was a good thing, but I am skeptical of doing it via tenuous legal mechanisms rather than via the elected representatives of the people or referendum. I don't think that ruling was as tortuously reasoned as Roe v Wade (or the dissenters in this judgment), but it took an issue that should've been decided by legislatures and instead hinged it on a 5-4 decision on shaky grounds. At this point it does not look like gay marriage is particularly at risk of being undone but we've been through this before and it's no guarantee of it surviving forever.

It is clear that in the aftermath of Obergefell both the left and right wings of American politics have decided to use the courts as their primary means of advancing their "big issues" rather than Congress, or god forbid, actually persuading the public.

It is clear that in the aftermath of Obergefell both the left and right wings of American politics have decided to use the courts as their primary means of advancing their "big issues" rather than Congress, or god forbid, actually persuading the public.

If the courts didn't want to be used as a backdoor to legislation by tenuous legal mechanism then the courts should not have seized the power of the legislature by backdooring legislation by tenuous legal mechanisms.

Certainly. No disagreements here. I have been very vocal about this in Canadian politics, which is all the worse given that we (ostensibly) have parliamentary supremacy and the means to enforce it.

I think the legislature has abdicated its power to the court (and the executive), much more than the court seizing it.

This reminds me of Obamacare. Everyone was told “not a real issue” as the received wisdom was “clear” but when you actually look at the received wisdom it just isn’t clear.

I don't think Thomas is a partisan hack. He has a clear and intellectually coherent theory of what the Constitution in his head says, and rules accordingly. It's just that the Constitution that was agreed at Philadelphia, ratified by the States, and rededicated to the proposition that all men are created equal by the blood of the Union dead in which the Reconstruction Amendments are written, says something else.

Alito, on the other hand...

Goresuch, I am genuinely surprised by on this one.

And kavanaugh? Maybe that should make you pause and think perhaps your position isn’t air tight.

I think that literal interpretations of the Constitution don't work in practice though, because it almost unambiguously says that the government can't stop me from having nuclear weapons. I'm pretty sure that "arms" back then just referred to weapons in general. Someone correct me if I'm wrong.

And if that's the case, we have had a very weird situation for a long time now where the 2nd Amendment has been interpreted in a very limited way even though the clear reading allows all weapons.

It could be argued that this is what the amendment procedure is for, though. I wonder if it would actually be possible for an amendment that limits the 2nd Amendment to certain types of weapons to be ratified in today's political climate. There would be obvious slippery slope concerns from many people.

I imagine that if the current regime of stretchy interpretations fell (i.e. the SC really came out and said that sorry, but the law as written says yes to personal nukes, deal with it), it would take between nothing and a single tiny backyard plutonium spill for bipartisan momentum for a constitutional amendment to circumscribe the 2nd to materialise.

But it would be really really hard for them to agree on an actual amendment. Somehow you would need to get 3/4 of congress to agree to one specifically worded amendment when all of them are going to have very strong opinions in opposite directions. I suppose the threat of random people having nukes would motivate people to compromise, but it still wouldn't be easy, and whoever was the most radical and stubborn about refusing to budge would get more of their way by making others compromise towards them.

If the Democrats win big in 2026 and 2028, most likely they pack the court. If they are feeling magnanimous, they may instead cordially invite the remaining Republicans in Congress to provide input to their amendment drafting sessions in exchange for political support back home to get the amendments ratified.

I do have the feeling that politicians tend to be able to draw on remarkable reserves of ability to compromise and act cooperatively when their personal interests are actually threatened (as they would be by randos with nukes). The wild defections you are talking about seem to be the province of things the electorate may care deeply about, but the politicians themselves are happy to game.

think that literal interpretations of the Constitution don't work in practice though, because it almost unambiguously says that the government can't stop me from having nuclear weapons

I'm still not convinced that this is a problem

Anyone who is has the resources and know-how required to procure and operate an F-35 or Nuclear Weapon is going to be a lot more than just some "fringe whacko" in a compound somewhere.

You don't personally need the resources or know-how for most of this (besides operating but even that can be simplified by bad actors) so long as people can sell you or gift you one. Decentralized terrorist groups like 764 already grooms random local depressed nutjob kids to shoot up schools among many other types of crime, imagine what damage coordinated rival nations could deal if these nutjobs could have access to major weaponry.

And if we ban selling or gifting major weapons but not guns, then we have already established there is a distinction and they do not count as "arms" in the same way.

Also, if nukes are a constitutional right then obviously forming associations to develop and build and sell them is also constitutionally protected.

"You can own a gun, provided you can file one out of a block of iron and personally mine the saltpeter for the powder because we ban the sale of guns and anything which might be helpful in making or using them" would go very much against the spirit of 2A.

Also, if nukes are a constitutional right then obviously forming associations to develop and build and sell them is also constitutionally protected.

General Atomics (GA) and Honeywell International (HON) are both publicly traded companies.

imagine what damage coordinated rival nations could deal if these nutjobs could have access to major weaponry.

Then this is no longer a legal matter but rather one of foriegn policy.

We make it known that if material furnished by your nation is used in such an attack that attack will be treated as having come from your nation and let the rivals police themselves.

This has multiple flaws.

  1. What does "material furnished" mean? Do all guns and bullets have to be exclusively made from minerals mined and put together in the US or else it counts as a shooting by a foreign power? If the gun is stored in a Russian made holster, is that a Russian attack? If we don't make it extremely strict, then there's lots of inevitable workarounds created to provide the "pieces" of advanced weaponry to be easily constructed and used.

  2. What about proxy groups? Private organizations that go through deniability chains from those nations can furnish weapons for nutjobs. There will be sophisticated plans where building a convincing casus belli will be difficult. They won't be like al-queda taking credit for 9/11.

  3. It doesn't even take rival nations, just sophisticated networks like the aforementioned 764. They spend some of their child porn money on materials and supply it to a crazed member. Gonna be hard to charge most of them. If giving someone a gun as a gift who just totally coincidentally proceeds to use it in crime can't be charged, then the same would apply to a missile or drone or anything else. "Oh we didn't know he would blow up that building with the rockets we provided him for his birthday". They can produce a lot for their own legal deniability, just like they already do. If we can't get them for shootings, why should I expect we can do it for anything else?

I feel like you are being intentionally obtuse.

Material furnished is exactly what it says, if a nation or any other organization gifts or sells that material outside normal channels they are on the hook for how it is used.

I also dont understand your preoccupation with deniability, we're not talking about citizens with consitutional rights, we're talking about sovereign nations. "Drop the act, we know it was you" is a perfectly valid realpolitik response to such behavior.

Material furnished is exactly what it says, if a nation or any other organization gifts or sells that material outside normal channels they are on the hook for how it is used.

"Outside normal channels" what does this mean? Can a terror group just host a raffle that NutJob McGee just happens to win for a free missile?

I also dont understand your preoccupation with deniability, we're not talking about citizens with consitutional rights, we're talking about sovereign nations. "Drop the act, we know it was you" is a perfectly valid realpolitik response to such behavior.

Outside of what the other comment said about framing, it also means "what if we can't really track it well to begin with?". The exact amount, if any, involvement of Saudi Arabia involved in 9/11 is still contended to this day.

21 years after, we still don't seem to know if a single guy Al-Bayoumi had knowledge of the attacks beforehand, and if they were an intelligence agent working for the Saudi government. This of course is despite the initial reports in 2004 concluding there was no connection.

In 2022, the FBI stated that "there is a 50/50 chance al-Bayoumi had advanced knowledge the 9/11 attacks were to occur". Al-Bayoumi also helped the hijackers find housing in San Diego. Al-Bayoumi stated that he simply befriended the hijackers and also denied being a Saudi government agent. The Saudi government also denied that Al-Bayoumi was an agent.

Did they know? Were they involved? I don't know! There's apparently 50% chance that this guy, who may or may not have been an intelligence agent (and if he was may or may not have been doing it under orders from above) might indicate Saudi involvement. Maybe.

And they found circumstancial evidence for it! Just no smoking gun of direct links.

Operation Encore was a secret FBI investigation launched in 2007 to investigate the alleged links of Saudi officials to the September 11 hijackers.[51][52][53] According to The New York Times, "circumstantial evidence" was uncovered but no direct links were established.[54]

Under your argument where presumably we should respond to vague traces of government involvement despite layers of deniability, should we have gone after Saudi Arabia too or not?

And maybe the FBI does know the answer for sure and just won't tell us plebs, but that's an assumption. Intelligence apparatuses have been known to make plenty of mistakes, either on accident or "on accident". How do we trust them to be this mystical source after multiple decades in the middle east based largely off (in good faith) a huge mistake and (in bad faith) a lie about WMDs.

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I also dont understand your preoccupation with deniability, we're not talking about citizens with consitutional rights, we're talking about sovereign nations. "Drop the act, we know it was you" is a perfectly valid realpolitik response to such behavior.

A hostile nation could make a genuine effort to frame another nation, though.

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In modern America you amend the Constitution thru the Supreme Court. I guess you could call that a common law system. And it’s still a hard thing to do.

@The_Nybbler last week.

Birthright citizenship is obviously supported by both Constitution and statute, but I imagine there's a lot of wrangling over the wording of the opinion of the court (which may be unanimous, maybe 8-1 if Alito is as much of a hack as one ex-poster claims).

Looks like your departed poster (darwin?) didn't go far enough and there's three partisan hacks on the court.

Surprised me in both directions, actually; I figured Roberts, like Kavanaugh, would also lean on statutory rather than constitutional claims, and I didn't expect Gorsuch or Thomas to go that way. Although MadMonzer is right here -- Thomas isn't a partisan hack, he has a very solid idea of what the Constitution says even if it ain't right. For instance in Mullin v. Al Otro Lado: "[A]ny statute that forced the President to allow aliens to cross the border against his will would appear to exceed Congress’s enumerated powers, and a court could not enforce it against the President." -- he gets this from the Article II vesting clause, which is a pretty severe stretch. I would expect that Congress gets to decide which aliens get to cross the border, and certainly the law has always worked that way.

Although MadMonzer is right here

What is the world coming to? Roberts decides a case when the option to punt is available, The_Nybbler agrees with me on the Motte, and Germany exit the World Cup early on penalties. If we are far enough off the old timeline, perhaps England have a chance to win the thing.

Like it or not, the Constitution is unambiguous with respect to birthright citizenship.

No, it really isn't: "Every person born within the limits of the United States, and subject to their jurisdiction, is by virtue of natural law and national law a citizen of the United States. This will not, of course, include persons born in the United States who are foreigners, aliens, who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States, but will include every other class of persons." - Jacob Howard, drafter of the 14th Amendment

Children of foreigners, aliens, and diplomats were not intended to be covered by the 14th by the very author of the amendment.

Ehhh, I really don't think Howard meant aliens the way we now understand aliens. And this is assuming he meant aliens as a separate category rather than as explanatory of what he meant by "families of ambassadors or foreign ministers".

I did some research on this and this is a good summary: https://old.reddit.com/r/asianamerican/comments/1i6pbh1/from_1866_when_the_senate_was_debating_the_14th/

I read the debates itself as well: https://www.congress.gov/congressional-globe/congress-39-session-1-part-4.pdf

Really wished someone transcribed the whole thing for easy search and copy paste but Howard had no objection to the comment by Conness:

The proposition before us, I will say, Mr. President, relates simply in that respect to the children begotten of Chinese parents in California, and it is proposed to declare that they shall be citizens. We have declared that by law; now it is proposed to incorporate the same provision in the fundamental instrument of the nation. I am in favor of doing so. I voted for the proposition to declare that the children of all parentage whatever, born in California, should be regarded and treated as citizens of the United States, entitled to equal civil rights with other citizens of the United States.

And Howard had plenty of objections when others say things he didn't agree with during that debate (such as on the matter of Indians untaxed or not taxed, etc.)

Children of foreigners, aliens, and diplomats were not intended to be covered by the 14th by the very author of the amendment.

Is that how you parse that quote? It seems to me he is referring exclusively to the children of foreign diplomats. Not three different categories of people (i.e., foreigners AND aliens AND those who belong to families of ambassadors...).

Howard in other instances seemed to very clearly anticipate that the 14th would apply to the children of people from other countries who were not (yet) American citizens. In any case, the amendment as written very obviously does not make the distinction you are purporting Howard to have made.

I think it critically depends on whether you read "foreigners, aliens," as opening a list with three entries or whether "aliens" is a clarification of "foreigners", compare:

[...] persons born in the United States who are foreigners (aliens) who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States

I think the 'who' makes the three-element-list reading at least awkward. It's a very "spoken out loud" construction. I would expect "who are foreigners, or aliens, or who belong".

"This will not include persons born in the United States who are foreigners."

"This will not include persons born in the United States who are aliens."

"This will not include persons born in the United States who belong to the families of ambassadors or foreign ministers accredited to the Government of the United States."

I'm struggling to find any other way to parse it.

Because it's not a list of three categories. It's a description of one category, of which all three are needed to qualify. I.e. that citizenship is not withheld from aliens AND foreigners AND children of foreign diplomats, but rather children of foreign diplomats who are also aliens and foreigners. (Otherwise, for example, someone who had say, a foreign diplomat father and an American mother, born in America, would not receive birthright citizenship.)

I think semantically it is meant to be understand this way for a number of reasons: the alternative explanation is not consistent with Howard's purposes otherwise OR the final wording of the amendment, it doesn't make sense to describe newborn children being born as foreigners or aliens within the context of the rest of the amendment, and if it was a list it would certainly be more clear if there were ors/ands in between the items.

If I were to say to say, for example, to a car dealer that I only liked cars that were "red, fast, fuel-efficient"; I would expect him to understand that I want a car that is all three, rather than one car of each.

OK, but switch your hypothetical back to the negation that we're dealing with and it comes out my way.

If I want to see every car on the lot, but that this obviously doesn't apply to cars that are red, fast, fuel efficient, then don't bring me the red F150.

Other parse: this will not include person born in the United state who are foreigners AND aliens AND belong to (the families of ambassdors OR foreign ministers). So to be exempt you'd have to be a foreigner and an alien and be born to an ambassador or minister accredited to the USA.

That's an incredibly motivated reading which would not be used in the vast majority of other contexts. If someone wants a vegetable soup but asks you to exclude red, orange, purple vegetables, you're not going to toss in some carrots and tell them that they weren't crazy stripey polka-dotted carrots with red and purple on them. It's clear what they meant.

The text does not use the word AND, it's just a list of three things and then says "all other classes are included", meaning that these three classes are not. There are not logical operators being applied here. I suppose an OR could be implied, but I don't think mathematical logic was developed or widespread enough for them to speak that way (since there's often ambiguity between OR and XOR). Just listing the three traits which are excluded, and then saying "all other classes are included" is pretty clear.

Your construction makes no sense. First, the punctuation would be wrong. Second, describing diplomats as foreigners and aliens would be surplusage on top of surplusage.

Diplomats could be married to US citizens, or possibly be a US citizen themselves. Apparently there's been quite a few Canadian diplomats who are also American. There's also one of an American ambassador to France who had French citizenship through their marriage.

If the argument that using foreigners and aliens is to clarify that children borne of diplomats who happen to be U.S. citizens as well, then that moves me not at all.

Well there's also the big issue that if it's surplus then there is no reason whatsoever to include the final bit of foreign diplomats being included.

If I wanted to ban all fruits, I would not say "this ban includes fruits, and also apples". Apples is included under fruits. It doesn't make any sense to include them separately. If I wanted to make it clear that fruits contains something contentious, I would say "this ban includes traditional fruits and tomatoes" to clarify that tomatoes are included as a fruit here.

If diplomats would be included under the "aliens" and "foreigners", then why mention them? Presumably there's either

  1. A distinction between them and they kept it in mind that some diplomat children might not be alien/foreign

  2. Considering diplomats as aliens or foreigners is disputed for some reason,

  3. It's meant to be specifically fitting all three categories.

  4. We are meant to consider that US citizen who happens to be a diplomat to us of some kind actually make non citizen child.

Not quite, it's possible to be a foreigner but not an alien, e.g. a US citizen who also has German citizenship. It's also possible to be an alien but not a foreigner, e.g. a native American back before they were all given citizenship; and it's definitely possible to be an ambassador/foreign minister without being either a foreigner or an alien and you use this language specifically to ensure that it doesn't apply to US ambassadors or foreign ministers who are also US citizens for instance in their own right separately.

The UK actually does something like this. If you're just a random migrant spending time on almost any "residnence" visa category in the UK after 10 years you'll be eligible for ILR (permanent residence basically). However if you're specifically in the UK as an exercise of being part of a foreign nation's retinue to it's mission in the UK there are additional issues and you can't just apply for ILR or naturalisation until you are no longer not subject to immigration control (basically not until your formal status as a diplomat has ended).

It would make perfect sense for children of ambassadors and foreign ministers while they are serving in their capacity as an ambassador/foreign minister to be carved out of US citizenship as a way to not create direct US ties and jurisdiction (like e.g. family law jurisdiction) over a family member of a serving diplomat of the other country, which the other country almost certainly would not be happy about.

Also - I dislike the framing by @johnfabian where everyone who disagrees with him is a partisan hack. He thinks it's clear - fine. I, like you, don't think that it is clear, and I think we need to recognize that reasonable people can in fact disagree on this stuff, and not just throw out insults.

But why should the author's opinion matter, if the opinion is not explicitly written into the text of the actual Amendment? That would open a whole can of worms. If that is what the author meant, why did he not write it into the Amendment? After all, it seems to have not been completely obvious, since he felt the need to comment on it.

It isn’t dispositive but it is instructive. That is, if the answer is “obvious” then how did the drafter understand it to mean something else? That is at least a clue that it isn’t obvious.

The ambiguous word in the text on which everything hinges is “jurisdiction”. The author explained how the word “jurisdiction” is to be interpreted, with examples. How are his comments not relevant?

This is far outside of my domain of expertise, maybe there were other relevant considerations (e.g. historical precedent) that force a different interpretation of “jurisdiction”, I don’t know. But if the author’s comments on his own amendment are being reported accurately, then “he should have been more explicit” seems like an incredibly weak rebuttal.

Because when trying to understand what someone wrote into law it's useful to read what they themselves believed was the meaning of the words they wrote. This is totally uncontroversial legal practice.

Important thing is that 5 justices agreed to the main majority ruling which means this issue is hopefully settled and dead for another 130 years. The right is free to try to change the constitution if they don't like the consequences.

I'm halfway through Alito's dissent and man is that dude a hack. Same level of bad as Sotomayor.

Roe v. Wade was overturned only 50 years later, Brown v. Board of Education overturned Plessy v. Ferguson only 60 years later.

50 years/60 years are also good enough for me. By then the makeup of the US will be so different to right now it'll be effectively a different country regardless!

Why would you be happy about this ruling and then say the US would essentially be a different country. The US or Rome is the great country the world has ever seen - why would you want that dead? There is nothing more important than preserving the US.

He genuinely hates the US and the West and would like to see it collapse.

It's because this is good for him and his likes, and not for the likes of me.

The revolutionary-minded are seldom correct about what they think is good for them

Wrong. I think there's a lot good about western countries and their history and everything. It's the people I mostly have an issue with, not the countries themselves. The USA for example I think has it in it to become the shining city on a hill it aspires to be, the geographic expanse, the natural beauty, the resources, it's the people and more specifically the mindset of these people that irks me.

Because the people of Pakistan totally would have built something so much better if they were simply on the magic soil of America, obviously.

The country IS the people, not the land. Land is a resource. You're essentially saying that you want to destroy me, my people, and my culture so that someone else can have my stuff. That is pretty antagonistic and make you unambiguously my enemy.

If someone says you hate "the US and West" they don't mean you hate the geography or natural resources. It is the people, culture or institutions that would be the objects of hatred.

In fifty years the Latinos, Indians, East Asians and Muslims will have Irishified and the United States will be back to being 85 percent white.

I know I might be feeding a troll, but are you aware of the evidence that European ethnicities don't fully assimilate, as well as the fact that the genetic distances between white Americans and the races you listed are more than 5 times as large as those between European ethnicities? If you're not trolling, I don't understand how in 2026 such naive blank slatism feels plausible to you.

Oh, you mean like how Boston is an Irish city, not an American one, and now places like Houston and Los Angeles are going to be Mexican cities, and Dearborn will become Muslim?

Yes, the replacement will continue apace. The slope is still slippery, and we are still sliding.

With how "melting pot" has been deemed Nazi-adjacent in the past decade, in favor of "salad bowl" or "mosaic," I'm skeptical that repeating history in this way is likely. With immigrants and their children being actively discouraged against assimilating, it's going to be hard for them to "Irishify," even before you get to the superficial differences. Arguably we're seeing some of the fruits of that change in attitude towards immigrant assimilation today, with the strong anti-Jewish push happening on the left.

I think this depends on whether you consider the melting pot a project that must be actively pursued and that is sensitive to "leftist project" policy decisions, or an unavoidable consequence of dense cohabitation and intergroup mobility that someone just happened to slap a laudatory label on

Perhaps, and it's certainly possible that it's just something that happened that someone slapped a label onto, but I'm not sure there's such a thing as a positive "unavoidable consequence" that isn't sensitive to "leftist project" policy decisions or any "project" policy decisions. There are about a Graham's Number times more ways things can go negative than they can go positive, and in the rare cases where the positive things happen by chance, they seem extremely easy to destroy, either completely by chance or due to people specifically attacking the parts that make things positive, as is the case here.

Latinos are pretty likely to just be tan white people in another generation or two, they’re already assimilating and they want to be white.

No they will not be tan white people. They will either be nearly identical to native Europeans or be servant class. That is how it works in Mexico. So the most likely path is they will be tan people who clean your table and home.

They’re already majority euro by ancestry, and are intermarrying at high rates- it’s unlikely that ‘Mexican Americans’ will be genetically distinctive in 100 years.

Bell Curve 2 with a lower mean merging into Bell Curve 1 with a higher mean, thus creating a merged Bell Curve whose mean is the weighted average of its two constituents, is still a bad outcome when we could have just stuck with Bell Curve 1 and prevented Bell Curve 2 from coming into the picture in the first place.

Fair point. But it'll be a more inclusive "white" which I'll take.

The East Asians are pretty much already there, and Latinos can probably make it, too. But Indians and Muslims? I don't see it. They will remain distinct, unassimilable groups, like blacks.

The East Asians are pretty much already there

Not even close, in any way. Happas are very acutely aware of their own non-whiteness.

in a contrast to other groups historically, this seems more far more imposed from within the minority than from the majority.

Second or third generation Indians have mostly already assimilated in my neck of the woods.

What does that even mean? Are they only 25% or 12.5% Indian on average? Because otherwise I can point out an important way in which they failed to assimilate.

I’ve found upper caste Indias (and Pakis etc) as probably the group that easiest assimilates to the US. Especially in the upper class. We have right-wing Indian politicians in the west.

There’s basically zero East Asian or non-European Latinos in power in the west. Caste probably significantly matters for Indians and Muslims. And a wider variety of outcomes.

Norman Mineta (Japanese) was in the cabinet when Gary Locke (Chinese) and Ben Cayetano (Filipino) were Governor. Mazie Hirono (Japanese) is in the Senate, Hung Cao (Viet) is acting secretary of the Navy, Elaine Chao (Chinese) is Secretary of Transportation.

So, Hawaii and Washington governors, Senator from Hawaii, and a smattering of cabinet roles.

Not a lot of non-European Latinos in power in Latin America either.

Everything that has been said about Mamdani was said word-for-word about Kennedy.

Kennedy wanted to tax specifically white rich people?

They accused Kennedy of being a communist? Because that's what I hear about Mamdani when I turn on the radio.

Yes, Kennedy being soft on Communism to the point of being a secret or not-so-secret red was a constant rhetorical drum beat on the right, like it has been about every single democratic politician since FDR. Look at the “Wanted For Treason” flyers that were being passed around Dallas the day he was murdered.

Nobody ever called Kennedy a Ugandan Muslim.

I think it would be fair to just call this 5-4 so I guess this is still in play. This is probably 9-0 or 8-1 in 2018.

This might be worth Trump ignoring the court and challenging their authority which has always been an important balance of power. He could just lose the citizenship paperwork.

The question now comes down to how long does Sotomayors health hold up. Birthright is dead if anything happens to her and the GOP holds the Presidency.

Believing that it’s actually 5-4 requires believing that either Kavanaugh will fold or that Congress (to satisfy him) passes the requisite law with a 60 seat senate majority which the GOP is not going to have, and even if it did have it you’d need in the region of 65-70 GOP senators because the liberals will vote against it just like Roberts and ACB did.

You only need 50 Senate votes. And yes it’s time to get rid of the filibuster. The legislature should doing more legislating and the courts less.

Someone here earlier this week or last week said that this decision will be our generation's Dred Scott regardless of how it is decided, and that it will tear the union apart in similar fashion. Demographic changes in the West generally are leading to ever increasing tension and dysfunction, and I fear this decision will ensure that a breaking point is reached soooner, rather than later.

Sounds to me like the there will be increasing tension and dysfunction regardless of whether your stated position was affirmed or struck down. The decision is just another signal/marker of the continuing trend that you're describing. Dredd Scott can be viewed as a bad decision that made things worse, but one can also see that even if Dredd Scott ruling was reversed (that Dredd Scott became a free man by staying in the free Missouri territory), there would still have been a Secession. Congress (and by extension the People) punt on something long enough then yeah it will come crashing down on them. This is exactly what the People deserve.

Leaving it as a statutory question would have given an out that did not demand taking the amendment process or ramming the hardest-right justices through the courts as the least escalatory answer.

Dred Scott, once issued, couldn't be reversed: even were Scott freed, he couldn't become a citizen. Indeed, under Dred Scott, Scott couldn't even sue anyone over anything in federal courts in the future. That's why Dred Scott made non-legal avenues the only available ones, either direct defiance of the holding (eg the Territorial Slave Act of 1862) or the eventual war.

This isn't quite that bad, but the calculus for immigration restrictionists is still far uglier than Roberts had to make it.

agreed. I personally don't think this is Dredd Scott level of bad, I don't think people will secede. I also haven't read the thing yet but Kavanaugh left it open for Congress to make some laws.

Sure but Roberts for unknown reasons reached the constitutional issue when he needed just statutory.

I think Robert killed any chance the texturalism will be a future legal theory. Robert’s declared birthright isn’t texturally therefore unless GOP drops birthright (I believe it’s doubtful) then we will likely see a litmus test on Birthright for future GOP judges and it’s tough to swap a recent precedence so they will be likely adopting new legal theories to justify their views.

And we're back, with the final Supreme Court decisions in merits cases for this term.

First up is West Virginia v. B. P. J. in which a 6-3 court holds that state segregation of sports by biological gender violates neither Title IX nor the Equal Protection Clause of the 14th amendment. Technically it's 9-0 on the Title IX question but 6-3 on the equal protection angle. This opinion also covers Little v. Hecox which was a case on the same question out of Idaho.

Next, we have National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission in which a 6-3 court rules that limits on campaign coordination with political parties is a violation of the first amendment. The FEC has other rules, the court rules, that prevent the appearance of corruption and these rules do not serve that purpose.

Finally, we have Trump v. Barbara in which a 6-3 Court (with Kavanaugh, Roberts, and Barrett joining Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson) find that the citizenship clause of the 14th amendment applies to children born to parents here unlawfully or temporarily. Technically Kavanaugh concurs with the ruling because he believes Congress' codification effects this rule, rather than the 14th amendment requiring it. This is much closer than I was expecting it to be after the oral argument.

Outcome-wise I don't think any of these were too surprising. Gorsuch has a concurrence in B. P. J. where he talks about how this opinion is consistent with Bostock (where he was the author). The Barbara concurrences and dissents and opinion run to 194 pages which gives some sense for why it may have taken so long. I obviously have not read them all in full yet but I imagine they're going to be full of different takes on the same historical sources.

Technically Kavanaugh concurs with the ruling because he believes Congress' codification effects this rule, rather than the 14th amendment requiring it.

I'm still digesting it all, but I read Kavanaugh as stronger than that. I think he affirmatively believes that 14A would allow the exact same rule as the EO, but only if it was done by statute. That is, on the 14A Constitutional question, the vote was 5-4.

Re trans and sports.

Read this ESPN article. It is a lesson in how to editorialize a purported “straight” news story (no pun intended).

https://www.espn.com/college-sports/story/_/id/49225515/supreme-court-upholds-state-laws-banning-transgender-athletes

This opinion also covers Little v. Hecox which was a case on the same question out of Idaho.

Mostly accurate. The majority found that it was essentially same question, but the specific facts were less favorable to the three dissenters. In the dissent they argue that Little v. Hecox was moot, and focus on entirely on West Virginia v. B. P. J..

Gorsuch has a concurrence in B. P. J.

My general impression is that this is both to to square with Bostock v. Clayton County, and to set the ground for potential future cases where the question of: Does Title IX require schools to exclude transgender girls from girls’ teams. My speculative read, is that, the funding clause argument Gorsuch makes suggests that since it's not explicitly notified to the funding recipients that Title IX forbids the use of biological sex for grouping, using biological sex is allowed. This might also suggest that since it's not explicitly notified to the funding recipients that Title IX forbids the use of some other definition of sex, using some other definition is allowed.

My expectations I guess were wrong on birthright especially with already having a 5-4 vote. I thought Robert’s would jump on Kavanaughs view and give the legislature a crack at it. On one hand you only need to flip 1 vote how to get rid of it, but it’s Alito and Thomas who get appointed next. Barrett will be around for a long time. Kavanaugh is in favor of striking it down but will he break with precedence now on a 5-4 vote. Basically can retry this if the right justice dies soon.

I guess I get a small win on predictions being one of the few in the camp it was in play.

To add more information gleaned from scotusblog live chat:

  1. West Virginia v. B. P. J decides that states may segregate sports by biological gender. And already working through the lower circuits are lawsuits asking that states must segregate sports by biological gender.
  2. National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission. I will be interested in the first and second order effects of this.
  3. Trump v. Barbara. Kavanaugh concurred on the ruling but dissented on the opinion, so it's more like 5.5-4.5 . And Thomas has a 91 page dissent.

I think perhaps Title IX could be read to require segregating sports by biological gender, but if the Court's going to take up a Title IX case I'd much rather they just strike it down.

Zohran Mamdani won three US House of Representatives seats last week. Claire Valdez in NY-7, Brad Lander in NY-10, and Darializa Avila Chevalier in NY-13 each won the Democratic primary after being endorsed by Mamdani, knocking-off two incumbants in the process. These are all 80-20 Democratic districts, so there is no realistic chance of any of them losing in the November.

Darializa Avila Chevalier is the one still making headlines a week later. She is, as far as anyone can tell, an actual communist. Rumors are that she personally founded Columbia University Apartheid Divest when she was a student there in 2016. Her stance on policing? She's against it.

Center-left politicos are currently melting down that someone like this won and is being accepted by the party apparatus. Credit to them for denouncing socialism I guess, but did they not know who their base is? Did they completely forget all of those "defund the police" chants from 2020? Did they not know that those people vote Democrat?

Some people want to kick Chevalier out of the party, bless their hearts. This wouldn't work even if it were feasable. Democrats need votes from leftists to be competative nationally. A party at war with its own base cannot stand.

I question the idea that progressives and socialists are the Democratic Party's base. The last three Democratic Party Presidential candidates have been Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, and Kamala Harris - definitely not socialists, and also not real progressives in the modern sense of the term "progressive". Progressives and socialists are loud online, but they don't seem to make up a dominant fraction of the Democratic Party's voters. The Party needs their votes - well, it needs as many votes as possible - but that doesn't necessarily mean it would gain more votes by shifting "left" than it would lose by shifting "left". It might or it might not.

This was the fracture that started with Bernie v Hillary in 2016. The progressives and socialists have all the energy, but the party is arranged so that the Inner Party controls the mechanisms, and has functional veto power over the commons. The progs and socs might not have the power to win, but they can absolutely cause a mess if they're feeling betrayed or uppity enough to cause a Democrat Party civil war.

When the old squad doesn't have that fresh squad smell and you need a new squad. In a way I wish Mamdani and his wing of the party good luck. The reactions of the purple blob are quite entertaining.

Everybody feels betrayed by the establishment right now. Not undeservingly. So it is not surprising that antiestablishment sentiments are thriving, especially in the places where the pie not only stopped growing, but is actively shrinking.

Some people want to kick Chevalier out of the party, bless their hearts. This wouldn't work even if it were feasable. Democrats need votes from leftists to be competative nationally. A party at war with its own base cannot stand.

Disagree. All either party, donkey or elephant, actually needs to do to win elections is to be normal enough to win the center. The far left and far right are both small minorities, and they'll probably hold their noses and vote for their party anyway to prevent the "nazis"/"commies" from winning. (See: Christians voting for Trump.)

Unfortunately, you appear to be right when it comes to winning nominations. It's a really broken system - it's gotten so bad that the incredibly strong incentive of winning elections isn't enough to keep the parties sane.

Thats not thé typical failure mode of Republican nominations; Ken Paxton for all his many baggages is not actually that extreme a candidate for Texas republicans.

"Normies" on the Democratic right will never vote for Republicans; it's socially unacceptable to even think about it. The Democrats' right flank is secure, so they can safely move left to keep the highly motivated socialists happy. Strategies aimed at the center don't work for that reason.

No party's "flank" is ever "secure". If you move leftward, you're inevitably going to lose some people to the other side. That's just the nature of aggregating millions of different opinions. Now, I agree that the Democrats seem to believe what you just said, and that's why we ended up with Trump twice.

If I had a nickel for every time someone bitched about how a politician's policy was terrible, and I suggested "Well, you could vote for the Republican", and they looked at me like I was suggesting they consume their own children, I'd at least have enough for a can of soda.

Yeah, my circle of friends is certainly similar. But consider that we probably don't generally hang out with the median voter. :)

Yes, but independents, undecideds, and casual voters might decide to abstain from voting or vote for Republicans instead of voting for Democrats if the Democrats move further toward cultural and/or economic leftists.

I think you’re more or less correct.

Historically, a cooperative opposition could get support for pet issues, pork spending, that kind of stuff. Today Congress has delegated or abdicated a lot of those levers. At the same time, stumping against the other guy is more important (electorally…) than ever. So you’ve got a bunch of partisans with no incentive to run towards the center.

I want to say this has been true since the 2008 crash, but that might just be my youth showing.

I gather that I am a bit older than you and I would agree that TARP was a major inflection point.

This seems most correct. In the Trump era, there's less willingness to (publicly) swing over to the other side by Dems who are disappointed with their own politicians' performance. I'm sure many will do so privately yet I'd guess in lower numbers than years past.

So the risk for Dems is mostly that their candidate is so off-putting or blatantly unqualified that voters stay home. But (moderate) voters staying home would mean that the more extreme wing, by actually showing up, is driving more of the outcome. In safer blue districts, you'd expect this would mean the extreme candidates can win unless the GOP opponent is able to eke it out.

I dunno, I haven't seen a situation where some Dem candidate is so bad that it actually activates more of their base to come out and cast a vote against them in protest. I bet some local elections it has happened.

Although it is 'odd' that I notice alt-right figures like Nick Fuentes flogging the "Trump/Other righty politician is too friendly with Israel, we must vote Democrat to punish them."

You never, ever, EVERRRRR see a lefty extremist going full "Vote for Donald/The Republican candidates down the ticket to teach our side a lesson!"

I'd say this has resulted in somewhat of a 'dual strategy' where the Democrat establishment, which historically has a tight leash on its own national-level candidates, will let extreme candidates run without interference at lower levels, whilst yanking the chain and ensuring that such candidates can't reach the point where they are contesting less safe, more critical positions. I also think this strategy is starting to get away from them.

There was a lot of talk about the establishment blaming Bernie-bros for doing exactly that in 2016. Not sure how credible.

I can’t decide whether I buy into the national vs. local strategy explanation. It could work; lower levels are a lot more visible than they were in 1992. If it were true, though, what’s the mechanism for tightening the leash? Are there a bunch of midlevel Dems who mellowed out to get a Senate seat?

@Dean convinced me, at one point, that Obama’s campaign basically hollowed out the Democrat back bench. I think that (and the ensuing Trump whiplash) might be enough to explain the issues.

Not sure how credible.

Barely.

High estimate of 12% of the Bernie bros actually pulled for Trump is not nothing, but not quite a credible threat (to be clear, I don't think Fuentes' calls to vote Dem are a credible threat either).

If it were true, though, what’s the mechanism for tightening the leash? Are there a bunch of midlevel Dems who mellowed out to get a Senate seat?

I'd normally guess its simply funding and access to party resources to run a campaign, but in reality I'd bet they will straight deplatform or cancel them with kompromat.

Which is the approach they've applied with Platner, it seems. How many times has a Democrat pol who was gaining momentum gotten hamstrung by "allegations" and "leaks" when they run afoul of the national party line? I can think of a few offhand.

You never, ever, EVERRRRR see a lefty extremist going full "Vote for Donald/The Republican candidates down the ticket to teach our side a lesson!"

I think there were plenty of us who did this in 2016, and then again in 2020, both after the primaries, if you wanted to see the democrats go in the bernie direction after being disappointed by obama and democrat supermajorities in 2009. Although the culture war issues shifted such that I just abandoned the democrats anyway instead of trying to push them in any direction.

Actually the Fuentes strategic vote-for-democrats angle didn't really make sense to me at first, as someone who never really had much hope in the republicans in the first place, and am still just wanting to see the current democrats punished, wiped out, and remade as something else. But then I realized it's almost an identical feeling for him and other young guys as the 2016 era bernie bros: they actually want to see a lot of the current republicans wiped out and remade as something better, and are looking strategically to the future: 'if hillary wins, the democrats are actually more fucked long-term, she'll be the automatic candidate again in 2020, some goof is her VP next in line, no more competitive primaries for a long time, people learn the wrong lessons, etc.'. 'If vance & rubio aren't severely damaged, then there won't be an open competitive primary with any oxygen for something better / more extreme in the republican party for a decade or more'.

Maybe it's always guys in their 20s who are more willing to make moves like this. Though as you guys mentioned, for a lot of people who could never stand the social stigma of switching to voting republican, the usual (more cowardly IMO) path is just to try to loudly vote 3rd-party as punishment to at least be slightly strategic as a voting block.

I will say that having Labour win in the UK was almost certainly better than having the Tories limp back in, even if they had an anti-immigration leader. They would have been under constant attack from a Left who could plausibly claim that they would be able to fix voter concerns in a nice and sensible way and voters just need to get the Tories out.

That was Keir Starmer's whole platform, and it's failed totally. Now, the Labour government has done a lot of damage - decriminalising homelessness this morning, so now we can have our own tent cities! - but they've actually tried reasonably hard on immigration and (in a sense) on public order, and failed totally. Which has produced a much stronger sense of 'the current system is completely broken and needs radical (R)eform' than anything the Tories could have got a mandate for.

It feels kind of perverse to say "I hope my guy loses" but losing isn't always a terrible thing. I suspect Trump 2020 would have been a far less powerful president than Trump 2024.

It feels kind of perverse to say "I hope my guy loses" but losing isn't always a terrible thing. I suspect Trump 2020 would have been a far less powerful president than Trump 2024.

Sometimes to win a war you have to choose to retreat from certain battles

"I dunno, I haven't seen a situation where some Dem candidate is so bad that it actually activates more of their base to come out and cast a vote against them in protest. I bet some local elections it has happened." - Arguably a variation of this has happened in California local elections with Chelsea Boudin and various SF school boards members. You can at least piss off folks enough that they will vote to recall and that at least is some message.

Yeah, I've pointed out that particular case before, where rank incompetence is enough to get you removed if you make your local community's lives noticeably worse.

Although Karen Bass is seemingly testing the limits of that premise.

Of course, Chesa got a high-paying, high prestige job RIGHT out the gate, so the Dem machine takes care of their own too.

Although Karen Bass is seemingly testing the limits of that premise.

Only if you believe the count was honest

That's partially my point. if you can massage the numbers then even rank incompetence isn't necessarily enough, it might require literal criminal charges.

I suspect Chicago has been that way for a longgggg time.

I would never vote for Trump, for sure, but the Republicans haven't sought moderate votes with a presidential candidate since Romney. I would have absolutely voted for someone like Rubio over Harris in 2024.

Well, no one's been the Republican nominee since Romney other than Trump, who has a unique gravitational pull over the Republican party but is deeply divisive. He also won more than a few moderates in 2024 -- enough to swing the election in some key constituencies.

I would also note that the Obama attack energy against Romney can be attributed to the way Republicans reacted to Obama's first term -- if anyone in politics has been demonized unfairly, it's Barack Obama. I disagreed with him on things, but Republicans treated him like the coming of the antichrist. Both McCain and Obama ran remarkably clean campaigns, although I think McCain would have made a better president. (Far better than Romney, as well.)

I think the real thing here is not that the GOP doesn't want to seek moderate votes, but that Trump uniquely energizes both his supporters and his enemies. I think it'll be good for American politics that he's a term-limited old man who won't be with us for all that much longer (natural causes, of course -- he's 80), because he has too much of a gravity well for his actual competence at governing to justify.

I recall how Romney and McCain were smeared as right wing extremists. The Romney campaign publicly asking the Obama campaign to please decrease the use of Nazi and fascist rhetoric and imagery to attack him. We had moderate Republican candidates.

We know the vitriol they get and how gracefully they lose. Trump didn't appeal to the center and was equally smeared as a fascist, but he got more votes than Kamala.

I don't contest any of that, and I certainly appreciate that being toxic is clearly the winning strategy for both sides, especially in primaries.

But I would vote for a Romney-like over Hillary or Harris in a heartbeat.

So you voted for Romney and McCain?

No. I thought Obama was good abd vastly superior in 2008, especially with Palin as a proto-Trump and even more with Obama's Iraq war opposition since I view that war as a huge error. I greatly regret not voting for Romney in 2016, though in my defense I think that Obama and Romney were both basically good choices. Today, I do not believe there is any scenario in which the Democrats present me with a good candidate, but the Republicans keep giving me Trump. It would take very little for me to vote against a Sanders-esque Dem nominee - probably literally anyone except Vance or with the last name Trump.

So there is no pleasing you

In a British accent That's not right...

Maybe, but there is also not much criticizing me that I would not swing. McCain was an old man hawk with a populist side kick - the obvious wrong choice. Romney was a good choice but this is the coin flip of centrist vs centrist - okay, I lean Dem based on this, but, I mean, I dont think we will ever see a candidate on either side as good as either of these guys for at least a decade. I think it has been extremely correct to vote against Trump every time, thougb I cede that has handlers did a pretty good job on his first term - unfortunately, Trump inmediately undid all the good of TCJA in his second term.

If you thought Obama was a centrist, the "there is no pleasing you" just expands.

Obama is a radical.

Hillary was a radical, far to the left of her husband.

Biden was a corpse, who's regime was run by radicals.

Kamala is a radical.

I voted for both; never voted for Trump.

Chevalier openly called for "Death to America" and for ending western civilization!! Letting her ANYWHERE near any sort of political power is like giving Brenton Tarrant a machine-gun. Frankly, I don't think I belong in a nation where such a specimen can be elected. It certainly is no longer the country I grew up in.

Did she? Or was it just a group she founded, after she had left?

I don't think she can be kicked out, seeing as how she's DSA not Democrat. But I also think she's not going to do much more than make a few fiery speeches, possibly try a few stunts and get slapped down for them (like early career AOC did) and settle down to cultivate a political career (like AOC did). She was selected by the same king-makers (the Justice Democrats) who got AOC and a slate of others elected, so my take on all this is: (a) it's New York, this sort of stuff will run locally but not nationally and (b) she will not, in fact, rock any boats; she'll work on keeping her seat by keeping on the right side of the college-educated white liberals who elected her.

If I'm being cynical (no, me?) expect an appearance in a couple of years time at the next Met Gala with her own designer togs emblazoned with the right-on messaging just like Sandy from the block 😁

The DSA win has already flipped Newsom on the wealth tax (he opposed it before, he supports it now); Hakeem Jeffries has already feted them. The Democrats know this is the future of their party.

Possibly. Getting seats in Congress, yeah, but are there any DSA senators and not just House of Representatives? As for Newsom, I think he realises California is where his bread is buttered, even if he runs for president it'll be a Kamala-style result, so keeping on the good side of the edge cases until he can wangle some kind of move away from California into the higher echelons of the party (if there is such a thing). I wonder if he'd be interested in running for the Senate? But given the backlash against Scott Wiener, this is risky and demonstrates why he'd have to stay on the good side of the crazies.

DSA winning seats in select local districts is entirely possible. DSA as new third national party and being relevant on a national scale? I don't see it, and if any DSA affiliate did manage a run for national office (like AOC and the presidency, something often wistfully mentioned) I think the person would have to considerably soften their policy positions. Go all-in on "new, high-paying, union jobs" (which we all know are now a dying if not dead breed) and economic populism, cool it on "Stalin was the greatest person who ever lived, I find it really hard to pick my favourite between him and Mao".

but are there any DSA senators and not just House of Representatives?

By my count so far there's Platner in Maine plus AES in Michigan, though the latter still has to win the primaries. Am I missing anyone else?

Platner in Maine

The guy everybody was losing their life over? I think it'll be very damn interesting to see what he does once he sits his backside into the seat, and if he just votes with the mainstream Dems or decides to get up on his trotters and call for the People's Socialist Revolutionary Republican Democracy Democratic Republic right this second 😁

The DSA is not going to be a third national party; it is taking over the Democrats. And with the Democrats it gets the Democratic juggernaut. Policy positions don't matter because the Democratic right flank is secure -- no matter how far left they move, they won't lose people to the Republicans, because it's simply socially unacceptable for people who have gone Democratic to ever vote for Republicans.

no matter how far left they move, they won't lose people to the Republicans, because it's simply socially unacceptable for people who have gone Democratic to ever vote for Republicans.

Even if it's socially unacceptable, that doesn't mean it doesn't happen (I'd guess it happened pretty significantly in 2024). And things that are socially unacceptable are socially unacceptable until they're not. Depending on just what a DSA takeover of the Democratic party is like, I could see that changing pretty quickly. I just hope it doesn't get to that point; people are naturally very excited/depressed right after a particular election result, but I'm hopeful that this doesn't portend a trend.

The DSA might lose the Democrats some seats in New Jersey (some of our most Democratic areas are also our most Jewish, and not squishy Palestinian-supporting Jews either), but I'm fairly sure that in general, the social unacceptability of Republicans is deep-seated and effective. The success of Graham Platner --- death's head tattoo guy -- polling ahead of Susan Collins (squishy Republican, often breaks the party) in the Maine Senate race demonstrates that.

Susan Collins always polls behind a democrat at this point in an election cycle, I wouldn’t read too much into that democrat being graham platner.

Newsom is triangulating, not flipping. He opposes a state wealth tax that is actually on the ballot and has a real chance of passing; he supports a national wealth tax that is entirely theoretical and will not be passed anytime soon (hopefully...). This allows him to deflect future primary criticisms of him being in the pockets of billionaires by saying it's just the badly implemented and foolish state level tax he opposes.

He doesn't actually care about wealth taxes as a policy one way or another, except insofar as they help or hinder his way to the White House. But his current strategy balances the competing stories he's selling to donors and primary voters in a reasonable way.

Well he kinda is in the pocket of billionaires, just not all the billionaires. But the tech and Amazon-type golden goose needs to be kept alive and not slaughtered to open it for more eggs, and Newsom is smart enough to realise that. So Keep California Safe For Moguls, and the rest of the country has no moguls (except maybe Noo Yawk) and he doesn't care if the Easterners are stupid enough to kill their geese.

He doesn't actually care about wealth taxes as a policy one way or another, except insofar as they help or hinder his way to the White House. But his current strategy balances the competing stories he's selling to donors and primary voters in a reasonable way.

All accounts of Newsom I've heard from Democrats who would be close enough to him to know - which isn't many, to be fair - has him pegged as an empty suit with no beliefs of his own that will say whatever is necessary to gain power. This was criticism levied against prior Democratic POTUS candidates Hillary Clinton and John Kerry, neither of whom succeeded in their runs. Presuming that these accounts about Newsom are true, surely Newsom himself knows the relatively low recent success rate of Democratic POTUS candidates with this kind of personality. So I'm left wondering what his play for the POTUS is, since it's been considered essentially common knowledge that he would run in 2028 since at least 2024 (the oft-repeated claim that Trump's election in 2024 means the end of democracy in America notwithstanding). Perhaps he will shock the world and just not run in 2028 and is playing 4D chess to set himself up for a successful 2032 or 2036 run?

While I have heard the same I would also have caution - Newsom from what I can tell is like Vance, lots of accusation about phoniness/empty suit/whatever and it's convincing enough that people close to them and on the same side agree.

On the other hand plenty of people disagree and think they got the stuff. This is in contrast to the classic empty suit: Hillary, who seems privately hated by everyone.

Additionally Newsom is legit charismatic, in a way that Vance, Harris, and Clinton are not.

So I'm left wondering what his play for the POTUS is

Honestly I don’t think he would even make it out of a fair Democratic Party primary. He would whiff it big with the Deep South, which is the most important region in Democratic primaries. Now given the recent track record I think there’s a good chance he gets a rigged primary and wins that, but he would flop in the general against basically anyone. He’s the white male Kamala Harris.

He’s the white male Kamala Harris.

Among the California electorate, he's consistently run 7 or so points ahead of Kamala. That's still a touch below the average Democratic politician--Kamala always did extremely poorly, even among California Democrats--but he's a stronger politician.

he's a stronger politician.

Oh he definitely is, but his attempts at rebranding recently have been laughable - "I'm a dyslexic Irish Catholic rebel from a hardscrabble upbringing where my mom worked three jobs! (and meanwhile my dad introduced us to the Getty family and I got to go to school with their kids and hang around with them and get the patriarch to fund my businesses, but it's not like I'm privileged or anything)".

Moment he goes national and tries the "I understand the hard lives of middle class people, I was one myself" he will be slaughtered. Sure, Gav, ordinary lower-middle-class folks get to shut down SF City Hall for an entire day to oblige the wedding of their billionaire pals:

Stanlee and his team carpeted the entire rotunda of City Hall with bright teal and pink Persian rugs, completely transforming the space. “We draped all the archways on the second floor and first floor with turquoise and rose pink velvet drapes with 12” long gold thread fringe,” he explains. “We hung in waterfall fashion off the grand staircase railings, from top to bottom, thousands of pale pink dendrobiam orchids. Large stone urns on pedestals filled with pastel roses were through the rotunda and a top the staircase. I wanted to channel Ann,” Gatti says. “The colors, patterns and fabrics were a nod to Ann.”

...“San Francisco’s City Hall is designed to inspire awe—a symbol of the city’s power and resilience after the devastating 1906 earthquake and fire, with its white marble detailing and soaring dome that looms more than 300 feet overhead,” Hamish notes. “But despite the architectural magnificence—and the panoply of state, with Nancy Pelosi officiating and Governor Newsom and Mayor Breed in attendance—the ceremony managed to feel extraordinarily intimate and personal, with Tobias’s charming vows and his passionate kiss that dislodged Ivy’s crown!”

ordinary lower-middle-class folks get to shut down SF City Hall for an entire day to oblige the wedding of their billionaire pals:

As a very limited defense, anyone can rent out SF City Hall for weddings. See https://www.sf.gov/private-events-at-city-hall ; it's even relatively affordable, for a San Francisco venue. (In fact, I got married in the same space! Despite tragically not being a billionaire pal of Gavin's, and having nowhere near the pull to get Nancy to officiate/get stock tips from.)

  1. It's worth noting that, whatever their other faults, Kerry and Hillary did survive the primary process and get nominated. If his model is "I have the most control over the outcome of the primary process; the general election will be decided on economic macrotrends," then it makes sense.

  2. The other Clinton was the ur-triangulator, and he was very successful, though the political climate now is sufficiently different that it's hard to draw useful generalizations from it.

  3. Newsom isn't optimizing for Democrat-as-President; he's optimizing for Newsom-as-President. It's impossible for him to sell himself as a principled left wing ideologue or a committed moderate reformer. Given his biography and character traits, maybe he's making the calculation that, win or lose, baldly embracing reptilian cunning and ambition is a better strategy for him than trying to win people over based on trying to sell another narrative.

Yeah, my view is that he was really obligated to Biden who swung the party behind him and supported him all the way during the recall election that failed. Newsom might have managed that on his own, but Biden's support was the signal that everyone better settle down and stop making waves for the rest of the Dems.

So I'm left wondering what his play for the POTUS is, since it's been considered essentially common knowledge that he would run in 2028 since at least 2024

Ambition, since he is a politician. Vanity, since he's Gavin. Yearning for more, since the governorship is as high as he can get and that's term-limited. Manoeuvring for influence and moving into a position where he's a string-puller in the party at large, perhaps. He's still young in political terms, maybe if he figures the Clintons are on the way out eventually he wants the new dynasty to be the Newsoms?

Also in the news, Scott Wiener gets harassed out of a trans pride parade.

I can't find the full version of the video, but there's a bit where someone says something like "You've done a lot for the gay community, but...", where the lot is stuff like protecting 24 year olds who have sex with 14 year olds.

THAT GUY isn't far left enough anymore.

It's worth noting that even the San Francisco subreddit mostly thinks that harassing Wiener like that was a bad thing.

The people who genuinely think that this harassment was a good thing are a small minority in the overall "leftist" coalition.

The vocalisation doesn't sound sincere at all to me. It sounds like a right-wing activist LARPing as a leftist.

The amazing thing is how the extremists really do sound like the conservative caricature of the lefties. "Surely they can't be like that in reality/Whoops..." The lead-in to the "but we hate you!" screaming by the maker of the video was 'in your wildest dreams' stuff:

"Scott, I think your legislation on trans issues and your legislation specifically protecting queers on sex offender registry is fantastic. Like, I really applaud you for that and I think you deserve to be here for that".

You did not just say that. Tell me you didn't. Imagine a GOP politician getting praised for protecting people on sex offender registries 🤣

(There was also criticism of his housing policy and aligning with YIMPYs (sic) before launching into the stuck record you've been terrible you've been terrible you've been terrible stuff).

The amazing thing is how the extremists really do sound like the conservative caricature of the lefties.

Uh, yeah, because a lot of that isn't conservative caricature. Sometimes conservatives come up with a strawman position that it turns out the left actually holds, but much of the time conservatives are actually merely NOTICING.

Shhh, Nybbler, we are not supposed to NOTICE because nothing happened, nothing at all, and if it did it was the right wing fascist bigot haters who did it, and if it wasn't then it could have been, and anyway it was a good thing it happened!

The amazing thing is how the extremists really do sound like the conservative caricature of the lefties. "Surely they can't be like that in reality/Whoops..." The lead-in to the "but we hate you!" screaming by the maker of the video was 'in your wildest dreams' stuff:

AIUI, there is talk of a problem among the Republican campaign staffers that it's hard to do attack ads because people think literal descriptions of Democrat rhetoric and policies are insane exaggerations. E.g. the "Yes, fuck you, we literally mean no more police at all" candidate for the House.

Kamala's 2019 run was an absolute gift to the Republican campaign because all they had to do was run the ad with the clip of her solemnly nodding about "absolutely, gender reassignment surgery and treatment paid for by the taxpayer for illegal immigrant criminals in jail, I am fully for that".

Golden. And she walked herself into that one because she misjudged that pandering to the progressive extreme was the way to go, forgetting that "it's Joe's turn now" and that she was giving way too many hostages to fortune. She did get her reward as his VP but that was as much "well he said he was gonna pick a black woman, might as well be her" as anything else.

Clearly a crack squadron of secret false-flag right wingers are attending protests solely to push random internal schism stuff

It's not about pushing internal schism stuff. It's about trying to tar and feather the Jews and any pro-Israeli sentiment as pedophile-coded. And yes, that reeks of rightoid mentality. Leftists do not think or talk that way.

The leftists don't passionately oppose pedophilia because doing so is low-class and right-wing coded, so just like they don't oppose Israel or the Jews because doing so is low-class and right-wing coded. The way the left phrases these things is they're against sexual abuse of the vulnerable and against the colonialism of marginalised groups like Palestinians.

just like they don't oppose Israel or the Jews

They're in the news going hard on this since October 7.

It was the leftists screaming anti-Semitism, my friend. You can't No True Scotsman your way out of this.

Leftists do passionately oppose pedophilia- often defined in nonstandard ways, but still.

As usual, it's who, whom. Leftists are totally fine with George Takei getting introduced to the wonderful world of gay sex at 14 by a camp counselor, but God forbid a man in his thirties should date a college girl!

Gay sex is different from straight sex, so it’s not a double standard at all- just bad values.

Yeah. So much of the Epstein stuff and I'd argue the whole '17.9999999999 years sick fuck' manifestation is more Left-wing than Right

The leftists don't passionately oppose pedophilia because doing so is low-class and right-wing coded

Which leftists do you know? The ones I'm in circles with love talking about "the Epstein class".

In the same way they love body- and homo-shaming when it can target the outgroup. "The Epstein Class" feels like a good soldier to send to war - same reason it gets spammed by twitter posters from third world countries with mass, normalized child rape.

Most of those same leftists will turn around and say it's a human right for 15 year olds to have access to books that tell them how to get on Grindr, even though that sort of thing is almost exactly what Epstein actually did.

I think that's as strong evidence that leftists care about opposing pedophilia as Republicans' calling out voter fraud in recent elections they lost is evidence that they care about opposing voter fraud. These are just easy weapons lying around to pick up and throw at enemies, nothing more, nothing less. That's even before getting into the fact that, almost certainly, Epstein and his ilk account for less than 0.1% of all pedophilic crime that happened during the time period when they were (are?) active and are almost certainly dwarfed by activities done by much lower class people that those same people conspicuously try to ignore or downplay.

"The Epstein Class" is a right-wing shibboleth. An actual leftist would say "the capitalist class" or "the bourgeoisie."

While they're often talking about largely the same group, the worldviews are quite different: one world model runs on sexual blackmail, and the other on asymmetric bargaining power enabled by control of capital.

In my hard left coastal city, blues LOVE talking about the Epstein class in exactly those words

Have you been on social media in the last year? Redditors love their Epstein references

Leftists (meaning, here, Democrats and affiliated groups) are very eager to call out the Epstein class and variations of it that do center specifically on sexual immorality; this can be seen in everything from Reddit comments to statements by national Democratic politicians. Though it's less a belief in a conspiracy of sexual blackmail driving history and more a belief in the inherent corrupt perversions of the rich.

"Actual leftists" using your more materialist framing exist but have essentially no power.

Some Dem politicians that have used the phrase "Epstein class" include Jamaal Bowman, Graham Platner, Jon Ossoff and Ro Khanna who, according to this, coined the term. New York City DSA, at least, also uses the term.

I saw a longer clip from this recording with a pretty epically ridiculous line. Paraphrasing:
"You can't call yourself QUEER if you don't support Gaza!"

O__O

It's just another variation of "injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere" applied absolutely and with minimal thinking. Exact same phenomenon as anthropogenic global warming - i.e. "climate justice" - activists being virulently pro-Palestine, to the extent that Greta Thunberg, the biggest celebrity to come out of the anti-AGW movement, is now more in the news for her anti-colonialization-by-Israel activism these days.

It made me laugh. I don't like Mr. Wiener so seeing him hoist on the petard of the exact same protests etc. levied against conservatives, this time by the T part of the LGBT alliance beshrewing him (during Pride Month, even!), was deeply satisfying to my worst instincts. Alas. Let me weep for my sins.

There's always some entertainment in seeing somebody get Rowling'd but enabling people to die on the particular absurd focus on Palestine is probably not a good idea

Palestine maybe not, but ol' Scotty there could not do enough for the trans cause - he co-authored that family law bill seeking to include so that "if you don't affirm your child's new gender, you are a MONSTER and should HAVE NO RIGHTS you horrible ABUSIVE BIGOT and we are gonna get the judges to TAKE CUSTODY AWAY FROM YOU for the child's safety" (it got watered down in subsequent readings) so I am enjoying seeing him get the same "boo hiss fuck off we hate you" treatment he was happy to dish out to those who did not hold the Right Think Opinions On Dead Kids, such as parents who might have wondered "hey, how come my son is now a daughter? can we talk about this?"

(I know custody cases tend to be a steaming mess where kids are pawns in the parents' battle to destroy each other, and throwing changed gender orientation of a minor after the parents split up into the mix is just dumping chum in the water, but come off it Scotty).

From a leftist perspective, Scott Weiner has a questionable record on Israel. He’s funded by J-Street and supports providing Israel with “defensive” weapons.

Given the opinions of the base, one really would expect the left-flank of the party to take a harder line on this.

tl;dr: the left is in an existential crisis because of Israel.

I wanted to write a post on the recent shifts in lefty rhetoric. The big one is 'This isn't Woke 1.0 anymore'

To define a few terms for convenience sake. The 'base' is the politically active far left portion. The 'establishment' is the more 'moderate' one. Popular examples of viewpoint representatives of the 'base' online are Vaush and BadEmpanada. Popular examples of the establishment are Contrapoints, PhilosophyTube and Destiny.

The big shift from the base can be described thusly: Performative woke stuff is out. You can no longer signal that you are in favor of soft social causes that are otherwise irrelevant to broader critiques of capitalism and colonialism or similar lefty theology. This might hold interesting connotations for transgenders as an untouchable priestly class in leftism. But in practice this just means that there have been some genuine changes at the grass roots level. And they are putting Palestine first as a purity test. The base is making this adjustment due to a series of genuinely devastating political losses.

You can say it begins with the Biden admin not standing up to Israel after Oct.7. The base got to feel what it's like when their representatives and institutions don't go along with them. This was a thing the base really cared about. But the establishment ignored for, at the time, seemingly no good reason. Come election season, Harris doubled down on this 'don't ask don't tell' position on Israeli overreach. This made the base even madder. If folks remember a few weeks back, the infamous 'Election Autopsy Report' that the DNC didn't want to release, the base was projecting whole heartedly that they lost because Harris was soft on Israel-Palestine. So not only was the base getting ignored, they also believed they were losing because of it.

To make matters worse, Trump started doing things this term. DOGE, along with the USAID thing happened. It was the first sign that the left as a whole was starting to lose grasp on just what was going on. The first symbolic defeat they've felt in a long time. The right was genuinely running a victory lap waving around all the ridiculous lefty causes that had been receiving millions of dollars. Hating Musk and lighting Teslas on fire was, as far as political activism goes, ineffective at actually achieving anything, even if just rhetorically or cathartically. Alongside this ran legislative defeats like the passing of the OBBBA and the ICE apocalypse alongside Trump admin actions against colleges and campuses. Those were principally establishment defeats, but the base got to pay the price.

Lets put ourselves in the shoes of the base. After having been gassed up through propaganda that Trump was going to make the sky fall down, there are now people from their ranks that are dead. Some jailed for a long time, and others permanently damaged, either physically, mentally or professionally from participating in lefty activism, with nothing to show for it. At the same time the base has not just been losing internally to the establishment, but they've also been watching the establishment lose externally to the right.

What's worse, they're now competing for space online against the likes of Theo Von, Tucker Carlson and similar, who have been filling the moderate 'I like healthcare and dislike Israel' void on the right/center. At the same time they have no leverage over the more extreme right wingers that occupy X and alternative streaming sites. This is a far cry from the 2017-2020 years where the left could exert pressure on the media landscape at will. A clear example of their loss of power.

Now, why can't the establishment just mend things with the base? Why are they huffing and puffing about the extremists in their own backyard? Why can't they give them institutional cover like they once did? Outside of the right genuinely becoming stronger due to a lack of censorship, there is a one word answer: Israel. The establishment can't compromise any more on Israel. They have to vote yes when Israel asks for arms. They have to stand up and clap for Netanyahu. And the base is redefining itself around the singular cause of Israel bombing children in Gaza being a bad thing.

There's no more intersectionalism. There no more 'sit down a black woman is speaking'. The base has slowly realized that organizing around words and ideas is stupid. You need something concrete as a barometer. And they are slowly enforcing that the actual program is not gay sex, protesting for black criminals or men in womens sports, but dead children in Gaza. And if you don't get with the program, regardless of who you are or identify as, you can be dismissed on those terms.

Will this last? I don't know. The establishment has usually managed to reign everything in come election year. But it might be that with changing demographics on the ground, and the reckless actions of Israel, that the American left is genuinely swirling down the drain of a third world communist toilet because they can't say no to infinity immigration and Israel.

The left was a coalition of jewish oligarchs who wanted to flood the west with migrants and dismantle western civilization and leftist who want the same thing. The issue is the Jewish elite have no interest in dismantling wall street and are hard core Jewish ethnonationalist. Uniting a principled leftist with Jeffery Epstein's pro Zionist billionaire friends over their united hate for straight white people was doomed to failure in the long run. Their fundamental values and motivations are incompatible.

Yeah, there was a lot of stuff that could be said that I didn't to not get banned. But it's a very interesting dynamic compared to on the right.

See you on the other side king.

Oh look. It’s that time again. And again. Yeah.

Given your continued flagrant violations of the rules, we are banning you permanently.

Have a nice day.

Outside of the right genuinely becoming stronger through X, there is a one word answer: Israel. The establishment can't compromise any more on Israel. They have to vote yes when Israel asks for arms. They have to stand up and clap for Netanyahu.

Why?

Because they have power and can't afford to be that stupid.

Israel may be unpopular, but Palestine is genuinely run by an evil regime that would behead every American if they had the power to do so. And it's not just a bad regime, its popular. If you have power you can smile nicely at the "queers for Palestine" people, but you still have to keep the reality in your head that not only would those people be beheaded in Palestine, you probably would too

So the establishment is widening a rift in their own party because... The evil Palestinian regime would otherwise behead every American if given the chance? Which would somehow be more likely to happen if the dems stopped bending the knee for Israel?

I can see the vague emotional outline for 'Palestinians are radical muslims and that flies on the face of lefty progressivism' but trying to connect that to any genuine geopolitical reality feels like a real stretch.

Granting for the sake of argument that this is true, there are lots of groups in the world that meet that criterion (the easiest example for reductio ad absurdum probably being any assorted Islamist militia in Africa), without the US subordinating every other national interest to supporting whoever happens to be fighting against them.

Disinterest is an option everywhere. In Israel the results would be worse for Islam.

I’m not asking why these Dem leaders are not taking a clear stand with Hamas against Israel. I’m asking what perceived tangible political risk is there in them parting ways with the Israel Lobby and refusing to yield to them anymore.

I’m asking what perceived tangible political risk is there in them parting ways with the Israel Lobby and refusing to yield to them anymore.

All the people with money and brains seem to still like Israel. Or at least understand that it is a significantly lesser evil than the regional alternatives.

All the people with money and brains seem to still like Israel.

Paul Graham and Nassim Taleb would suggest otherwise.

Regardless, it seems more like the people with money who like Israel are willing to basically devote their entire fortunes towards supporting Israel whereas the people with money who don't like Israel have other priorities.

The voter base hates Israel, but the donor base still generally likes Israel (at least the theoretical concept of Israel, not necessarily the current government). Imagine the political blowback from pissing off

  • The Media,

  • Big Tech,

  • Big Finance, and

  • Lawyers

All at the same time.

They’re fine with letting Arab Muslim refugees into America. Why would they have objections to letting Arab Muslim refugees into Israel?

They probably have an Aversion to seeing lots of beheadings

If they had such a strong aversion to beheadings they wouldn't have enthusiastically supported Al Qaeda taking over Syria

I’m also curious. The establishment has chosen to do this but I haven’t seen any particular reason why they would have to do it. They just seem to really want to do it.

If you don't know why, it's probably old and complicated and involves real national interest, which is why you don't know about it.

So, for instance, as to why we "have" to sell Israel weapons, it's because that was part of the deal Carter brokered for peace between Egypt and Israel, a peace that has lasted nearly fifty years now. We also "have" to sell Egypt like 80% of what we sell Israel. That's the deal, from the Realpolitik '70s. Egypt leaves the Soviet Union as main sponsor, Israel leaves France as main military sponsor, and they buy American and agree not to use the US guns on each other.

So, we don't have to do shit. We can withold weapons from the Israelis, but that scotches the peace deal with Egypt which puts the Suez in play (and so on down the line of international consequences). Also, the weapons we provide tend to be the most targeted and high-tech. The Israelis make much of their own hardware, and are plenty rich enough to get reasonable options from elsewhere except for our best stuff. The idea that the US military hardware is the only thing between Israel and defeat is ridiculous and ahistorical. US military hardware is what stands between the Palestinians and an Israel that doesn't have Patriot missiles, but can build their own artillery. Not sure that's better for anyone.

Which is why we keep voting to do it.

We can withold weapons from the Israelis, but that scotches the peace deal with Egypt which puts the Suez in play (and so on down the line of international consequences)

Well, supplying Israel with weapons led to the Houthis blocking the Red Sea so...

That's not true and you have to know that, otherwise this conversation is pointless.

Whatever the aims or results of the Iran operation, it wasn't because Israel has Patriots. And that situation wouldn't be improved if Egypt, Israel or both decide to leverage the Suez every time they get mad at each other.

US military hardware is what stands between the Palestinians and an Israel that doesn't have Patriot missiles, but can build their own artillery. Not sure that's better for anyone.

I think a lot of people don't realize (or don't want to acknowledge) that if Israel were to be unable to effectively defend its population from terrorist rockets and mortars and missles, their reponse wouldn't be capitulation or negotiation. It would be annihilation. As it would be for pretty much any polity in existence whose civilians are being relentlessly targeted and killed by a militarily inferior opponent.

As it stands, Israel has the breathing room to be more judicious in their attacks, even if it really doesn't look that way to the uninformed, who call use of more than one JDAM "indiscriminate and unproportional carpet bombing". But without the Iron Dome, I think we'd be reminded what carpet bombing really looks like, and I wouldn't blame them (or anyone else) in their operational situation.

Israel has a population equivalent to the population of Denmark if we subtract Palestinians and ultra orthodox. Israel's natural resources are meager. If Israel was subjected to the same sanctions as Russia they would fold like a house of cards. There is no way Israel can be sustained while having hostile relations to all its neighbours and while being sanctioned by the west.

More comments

Some people want to kick Chevalier out of the party, bless their hearts. This wouldn't work even if it were feasable. Democrats need votes from leftists to be competative nationally. A party at war with its own base cannot stand.

It's rather worse.

Leftists (defined as people sharing these views or sympathetic to them) are small minority of the population, but they form large part of D activists and organizer cadres, the party officers and NCO's who make the party actually work on the ground.

The party needs 1937 style purge, but such operation needs Georgian genius. Watch for new man/woman/nonbinary person coming from Atlanta.

Are you subscribing to the interpretation of Dreaded Jim that the Great Purge of 1937-38 was a manifestation of left political singularity?

The insane activist types are where all the energy is. Yglesias-style slow boring can't compete for low-information voters in the modern media environment. Cut the leftists out and the vibes die.

It is worth remembering that Yglesias doesn't actually disagree with the activist left's goals, he just wants them to keep those goals on the DL until after they get elected.

The whole point of his "Popularism vs Populism" bit was that left wing activists would be better served by trying to boil the frog slowly rather than turning the heat up all at once.

Yglesias explicitly does not support the "Palestinian Cause" (which he sees, in my view correctly, as the destruction of the Jewish State and the reversal of the displacement of Palestinians from what is now Israel proper). The activist left are river-to-the-sea Palestinian maximalists, and right now they are saying that this is their most important issue.

He also explicitly opposes, apparently sincerely, the standard leftist positions on public order, market-rate housing, and frankly almost every economic issue except climate where he has expressed an opinion.

The only area where Yglesias explicitly supports leftist goals and only disagrees on tactics is climate. On open borders, he is personally in favour (but acknowledges that this is not an electorally viable position for the Democrats, and favours compromise with the electorate) whereas it is the organised left which tends to hide the ball while de facto supporting open borders through non-enforcement. He probably also agrees with a bunch of unpopular left-wing views on issues around race and sex, but they are mostly issues where the left have won and are playing defence, and therefore the activist left find it hard to give a crap.

The current incarnation of the populist right is fundamentally single-issue on immigration, so from your perspective Yglesias and the far left agree on the things that matter. But that is a function of how you see the issues, not how they do.

Yglesias explicitly does not

On historical grounds I conclude that Yglesias is closely aligned and simply lying about it.

(The only reason I don't say "totally aligned" is that even he and Klein can't possibly be stupid enough to throw themselves under the bus.)

Eh, I can believe Matty is still trying to do the Obama technocratic progressivism thing, like a Japanese solider holding out on a remote island decades after the War, but the problem with openly coming out in favor of tactical lying is that people tend to hold it against you forever.

I don't think Yglesian popularism necessarily involves tactical lying (although all politicians, populist, popularist or otherwise do a lot of it), and I don't think Yglesias personally is engaging in tactical lying about his political views. He definitely hasn't "come out in favour of tactical lying" in the sense of saying that elected Democrats should be saying more things that are not true. He is smart enough to know that enough things are true that you can make almost any argument by selectively emphasising true statements.

The essence of popularism is to talk about your popular policies and not about your unpopular policies. That can involve lying, but it can also involve ignoring awkward questions, whataboutism, agenda manipulation, and all the other not-technically-lying things that are staples of political communication. And, of course, it mostly involves saying true things about your popular policies while using the other set of staples of political communication to get heard. Once you put it this way, it really is just common sense, but common sense which the internal politics of the Democratic Party makes controversial.

The thing Yglesias is mostly pushing back on when he talks about popularism is Ford and Hewlett Foundation funded advocacy groups making Demoratic candidates and electeds say unpopular far-left things as a flex in intra-left factional politics, which (unlike doing unpopular things which are either nonpartisan good ideas or advance a left-wing partisan agenda) is all cost and no benefit.

He definitely hasn't "come out in favour of tactical lying" in the sense of saying that elected Democrats should be saying more things that are not true.

He tweeted literally that back in the day. Can't find an easily linkable version now, but something like "Yes, advocates should fight dishonesty with dishonesty. That's an honest view." I mostly remember because people have been throwing it in his face for a decade.

I'm sure he deeply regrets saying it now, whatever his feelings on the topic.

I don't think Yglesias personally is engaging in tactical lying about his political views.

Matt Yglesias has said, historically, that lying for political reasons is good. Article on the topic with a few extra links.

I don't think Yglesian popularism necessarily involves tactical lying (although all politicians, populist, popularist or otherwise do a lot of it), and I don't think Yglesias personally is engaging in tactical lying about his political views.

He has, he knows it, and he's not even good at it.

Stacy Abrams will go down in history as a writer of adequate love poetry and brutal dictator, clearly.


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