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PaperclipPerfector  7d ago (text post)   21971 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 21, 2026

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Courts have been making the definition of seizure or detention very expansive. I know of a couple cases in my home state of Washington.

In State v Sum they ruled that an officer waking a man sleeping in a vehicle, asking for identification, and saying he was investigating a stolen vehicle, constituted seizure. They vacated Sum's conviction for giving a false name subsequent to the seizure. They also added a racial component to the law's hypothetical reasonable observer, "an objective observer is aware that implicit, institutional, and unconscious biases."

The Washington State Supreme Court ruled in State v Meredith, relying on the racial dimension introduced by Sum, that officers asking for proof of payment from someone on a bus constituted a seizure, and that the officers lacked cause for the seizure. The decision vacated his conviction for giving a false name subsequent to the seizure. The lead opinion stated that fare enforcement has a “known, racially disproportionate impact” and later said its holding served “to mitigate the known, racially disproportionate impact of such fare enforcement practices."

In both of these cases the stakes were low. Meredith had already served the 58 day sentence that was vacated. The details of Sum's sentence aren't available, but it was also already served. Both were misdemeanors.

In both cases advocacy orgs like the ACLU pursued the cases on behalf of the defendants. Funnily enough the region's transit orgs filed amici briefs in favor of Meredith.

In both cases we had men who were already making net negative contributions to society, and who had their stupidity amplified by well funded organizations to make it even more difficult to rein in the behaviors of men like themselves. The defendants don't even have to show up for the apellate court hearings. I had ChatGPT try to find evidence that they did attend, and it was unable to find any.

The Washington State Supreme Court is very blackpilling. They essentially rule like kings, vetoing citizens initiatives, and rubber stamping acts of the state government which are obviously against any clear reading of the state constitution.

The state is controlled by an interlocking grid of far left institutions. Merely replacing one won't help. The whole rat's nest has to be slowly unwound which would take decades. Change is essentially impossible.

I get the sense that this is how it must be in Europe, even more so with the supranational EU and European courts that exist far removed from any democratic control.

Democracy is essentially dead in a lot of places.

Democracy works.

Washington residents voted for this.

They also voted for 35 dollar car tabs.

And the Supreme Court that overturned them. And they never punish those Supreme Court justices. The last justice to lose a reelection bid was Richard B Sanders in 2010, and he was replaced by Charlie Wiggins. Sanders was conservative, Wiggins a liberal. Wiggins was on the majority opinion in the court's 9-0 decision that held that the death penalty was unconstitutional becuase of disparate racial impact.

The voters don't punish overturning initiatives, so the Court is free to reason to achieve its desired outcomes.

the court's 9–0 decision that held that the death penalty was unconstitutional becuase of disparate racial impact

Link

The decision does not appear to be based on disparate impact. Rather, the justices relied on a report finding, with p-values of 4.8–11.1 percent, that race was a factor in the application of the death penalty. (In a footnote, they declined to use the common p-value of 5 percent as a "mechanical bright-line rule".)

That's 'disparate racial impact' with numbers attached.

No, disparate impact would be "blacks are more likely to be death-penalty-eligible criminals, so they get the death penalty more often" or "among death-penalty-eligible criminals, blacks commit more depraved crimes with more aggravating factors, so they get the death penalty more often". The study found that, among death-penalty-eligible criminals, and controlling for differences in aggravating factors, blacks got the death penalty more often.

(The justices cite three different versions of the study, but provide convenient links only to versions 1 and 2. The version that I have provided here is version 2, the "Updated Beckett Report". I don't care enough to look for version 3, the "Commissioner's Report".)

This is an example of how results based on "controlling for confounders" are inherently dubious for complicated fields like social science. Fundamentally the researchers are coming up with a list of potential confounders (which must be legible across many individual cases, available to the researchers, etc.) and assuming that anything left after they're controlled for must be whatever signal they're looking for. I recommend this SSC post as a classic example of this, in which a study on the impact of bullying controls for bullies targeting unpopular disadvantaged kids using the Bristol Social Adjustment Guide. In this case this is what they controlled for:

The model presented in Table 6 includes only case characteristics that would have been known by judges and jurors: the number of prior convictions; the number of victims (included here as a binary variable for one victim/multiple victims); the nature of the defendant’s plea; the number of applied aggravators (as determined by the judge or jury); the number of mitigating circumstances identified; the number of defenses offered; and whether the victim was held hostage. (We also tested the significance of a concomitant sex crime and whether the victim was a law enforcement officer; neither of these factors was found to be a significant predictor of sentencing outcomes and are not included in the model shown below).

This misses nearly all the details of the case. They count the raw number of official "applied aggravators" but not what those aggravators are. They count the number of prior convictions but not their severity, the number of mitigating circumstances and number of defenses but not what those are or how convincingly they are argued. They check whether the victim was held hostage for some reason but not other similar specifics (chosen controls tend to be arbitrary and vary widely across studies on the same subject). The people making the decision have all the details that a set of controls can't possibly encompass, and we know the controlled factors differ by race, yet any systematic difference in their decisions is assumed to be a product of racial discrimination rather than everything they didn't control for.

Imagine a study trying to determine if the date of birth on a birth certificate is a biased indicator of age. Group 1 is stereotyped as being older than Group 2, does this influence the date written down when they're born? Naturally the study controls for age, with a multiple-choice question to choose an age range ("[B]: 20-29 years old"). They find that, while Group 1 does pick older age ranges, even after you control for age [B] respondents in Group 1 have an earlier date of birth than [B]s in Group 2. In fact, a later more sophisticated study outright asks for age, and finds that 25 year olds in Group 1 have an earlier birth date than 25 year olds in Group 2. Needless to say, this is a perfectly expected result even without any birth-certificate bias.

Interestingly, after controlling for race of defendant, the number of mitigating circumstances is no longer a significant predictor of decisions to impose death.

In other words "race" and "number of mitigating circumstances" correlate strongly enough that if they didn't put "mitigating circumstances" in their model any difference in sentencing from mitigating circumstances would be assumed to be due to racism. Naturally they don't consider whether the same thing might be happening with factors they didn't control for.

Second, the regression results indicate that case characteristics explain only a small proportion of the variation in the case outcomes analyzed here. Specifically, case characteristics alone explain only 9% of the variation in prosecutorial decisions regarding whether to seek death and 20% of the variation in juries’ sentencing decisions.

Unexplained variation documented in the results presented here suggest that other extra-legal and social factors –not captured by our statistical models – are playing an important role in death penalty case dynamics.

Interestingly their conclusion calls the variation not explained by their model "extra-legal and social factors". I don't think it's really "extra-legal factors" when the jury makes decisions using methods more complicated than "count up the number of applied aggravators".

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