site banner
PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   21292 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 9, 2023

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

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

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

  • Shaming.

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

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

13
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Duncan v. Bonta drops, again:

Here, a stay is appropriate.

First, we conclude that the Attorney General is likely to succeed on the merits. In New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, the Supreme Court reiterated that “[l]ike most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited.” 142 S. Ct. 2111, 2128 (2022) (quoting Dist. of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570, 626 (2008)). The Attorney General makes strong arguments that Section 32310 comports with the Second Amendment under Bruen. Notably, ten other federal district courts have considered a Second Amendment challenge to large-capacity magazine restrictions since Bruen was decided. Yet only one of those courts—the Southern District of Illinois—granted a preliminary injunction, finding that the challenge was likely to succeed on the merits.

It's not surprising to find the 9th Circuit finding in favor of a gun control law at en banc, though some people are surprised that the vote was the exact same as before SCOTUS sent it back down. No firebreathing VanDyke dissent this time, and while it's somewhat funny that I can predict exactly how well Hurwitz's 'it's just a temporary emergency stay!' aged like fine milk, it's still disappointing he couldn't be bothered to either vote differently or provide a deeper analysis of Bruen as a concurrence. There's some fun discussion from Nelson about whether the 9th circuit's newly-created comeback rule is compliant with federal law, and apparently the court claims that it'll even request briefings on the matter... but since five of the judges out of eleven in the en banc panel are those newly-senior judges that the law does not allow on en banc panels, I don't think it'll be any more compelling to them than the violation of process back in 2020 were when they were doing it explicitly.

The fun part is the explicit text of that original order: "Judgment VACATED and case REMANDED for further consideration in light of New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U. S. ___ (2022).". That quote, above? Is all that the 9th Circuit's en banc panel did, in terms of considering Bruen. As Butamay points out :

Despite this clear direction, our court once again swats down another Second Amendment challenge. On what grounds? Well, the majority largely doesn’t think it worthy of explanation. Rather than justify California’s law by looking to our historical tradition as Bruen commands, the majority resorts to simply citing various non-binding district court decisions. There’s no serious engagement with the Second Amendment’s text. No grappling with historical analogues. No putting California to its burden of proving the constitutionality of its law. All we get is a summary order, even after the Supreme Court directly ordered us to apply Bruen to this very case. The Constitution and Californians deserve better.

Does this count as massive resistance to a direct order from the Supreme Court? I'm sure someone (if not huadpe, now?) could argue otherwise: emergency stays with perfunctory logical support are not exactly unusual, and the majority do mention Bruen for almost a whole paragraph. But it's more plausible to read this the opposite direction, especially given the Court's willingness to punt on procedural issues whenever plausible (and sometimes even when not). Getting GVR'd repeatedly and with increasingly strict-yet-ignored direction is nothing to party about, but it isn't a loss, either. You can make a media spotlight out of it, if you're on the 'right' side, but that's not the real motivation.

It's another two or four years to enforce unconstitutional laws, to mark those who don't comply with an unconstitutional law as felons, to build alternative methods to harass and exclude those who comply but don't agree, to cost your opponents tremendous amounts of money (only a fraction of which they may get back), and to wait for the composition of the Supreme Court to change or be changed.

The only post-Bruen challenge the Supreme Court has taken is Rahimi, and that's clearly to give them a chance to backpedal and find that a restraining order is certainly a sufficient reason to take away a person's gun rights. The Supreme Court is simply not interested in people having gun rights, only in grandstanding about them.

I would be interested in hearing what 2A advocates consider the legal boundaries of the 2A in terms of what states (or congress) are allowed to prohibit. Presumably raising an army or building nukes is off the table, and while the space between that and these magazine bans is obviously immense, the constitution is pretty vague.

I'm going to try to be charitable, but this is a discussion space where people will provide amazingly dishonest analysis while claiming a straight face.

Founding-era behaviors included issuing letters of marque to private individuals who then took their cannon-equipped privately-owned and fully-staffed ships off a hunting. Beyond the practical issues with trying to ban such a thing -- the recent campaign for increased enforcement of state and development of federal anti-paramilitary laws in practice has mostly been calls to go after the political speech that gun control advocates don't like -- the pretense that they survive constitutional scrutiny because of a bad read of Article One powers is laughable.

I think there are a few major categories of firearm-related regulation that are pretty well-supported under current text and history analysis:

  • Regulations focused on preventing injuries to the user or third parties from the otherwise-lawful use of a firearm, flowing from laws about gunpowder storage or dangerous and unusual weapons. It's perfectly legitimate if the fire code requires you not to store fifty tons of ANFO in the middle of a city, or for fifty pounds of gunpowder to be in a fireproof containers; people doing stupid stuff that could break their own hand or wanting a stock Viper is not part of the Second Amendment. There's a bit of messiness on the edges, since you can have either laws pretending to be about the safety of a firearm but (charitably) about criminal use or (uncharitably) about making gun ownership difficult, such as the Californian Safe Handgun Roster, or laws that are requiring extreme costs to chase tiny or dubious benefits such as some safe inspection statutes, but the common law rule that a private citizen should not be liable for the criminal use of their property really cordons off a lot of that. Other areas, like lead ammo regulations, are I think legitimate areas of public debate, so long as they are not backdoor gun or ammo (or for mercury, primer) bans.

((I think these practically cover nuclear weapons, simply because of the mix of incidental radiation exposure and fallout and large minimum yield make them very much the archetype of "infernal machine" that was often banned in the early United States, but I also think it's kinda irrelevant.))

  • I don't like 'sensitive places' as a legal term because it's invited (often hilarious) abuse, but then again I expect Newsom would have abused a comma-separated list had Thomas written one instead, and there's very clearly a historical record of restrictions for some very specific locations. Areas with highly-restricted access, that have restricted access and the government is acting as the property owner, or where lawful use is impossible or dangerous, are more reasonable than everywhere but the sidewalk.

  • Specific findings by a court of dangerousness of an individual person. Most of the limits here are due process ones, rather than second amendment-specific matters, but modern law has permitted a ton of due process violations here because guns ick. The process must be appealable both on matters of law and fact, must be an adversarial hearing with criminal-law-typical standard of proof, must have the right to confront their accuser, must be based on concrete allegations and with an actual statutory definition of dangerousness rather than courts treating it like a restraining order++, must respect property rights, so on. I'd argue that the analogue to surety laws requires a Second Amendment-specific way to expunge loss of rights (and federal law means that the ATF is supposed to be doing it right now, it's just not funded), but I don't expect SCOTUS to ever be willing to establish that.

  • While I think they're bad policy, age restrictions up to age 18 are probably constitutional.

wanting a stock Viper is not part of the Second Amendment

Given the historical tradition of private ships and cannon, what excludes a zero down, 25% APY Viper loaded up with some cute girls for a weekend? Not financially prudent but that's not constitutionally relevant.

Ah, sorry, I mixed up names. I was thinking the Vektor, a famously unsafe concealed carry pistol.

The AGM-80 is more just wildly impractical.

And when you said this, I was trying to figure out

  1. What’s wrong with the Vector?
  2. What idiot was trying to conceal one?!

I was thinking of the other other Viper.

What is this place?

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

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

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


Why are you called The Motte?

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

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


New post guidelines

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

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

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats