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PaperclipPerfector  5mo ago (text post)   29533 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 13, 2023

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A legal case involving what are known as "80%" receivers is working its way through the federal court system, under the title Vanderstok v Garland.

For those of you who are not aware of the terminology, an "80%" receiver is a chunk of metal or polymer that does not meet the federal definition of a "firearm" at the time of its initial manufacture and sale. After sale, these objects are generally modified by consumers to produce home-built, unserialized firearm receivers. You may have also heard of these resultant firearms described as "ghost guns".

While the origin and evolution of the term "ghost gun" is interesting, it's considerably less interesting than the most recent 5th circuit opinion re: Vanderstok. The opinion directly quotes and cites an article from slatestarcodex.com.

ATF essentially responded with variation of the motte-and-bailey argument. See Scott Alexander, All in All, Another Brick in the Motte, Slate Star Codex (Nov. 3,2014), https://perma.cc/PA2W-FKR9. The

This interests me for a few reasons. The first is that it's only the second time I've ever seen SSC referenced in "normie" spaces: the first being the NYT hit-piece from a few years back. The second is that the 5th circuit is broadly viewed as the most conservative-leaning of the US circuit courts, so it's interesting to see one of Scott's more noteworthy pieces showing up there.

VanDerStock's case path is weird. SCOTUS has already issued a stay on the district court's vacateur of the law until the case reaches SCOTUS again or is denied, which makes pretty explicit what the expected long-term conclusion is. I don't think there was any reasonably optimistic perspective that would have any of the progressive branch notice the various due process and vagueness concerns here, but having both Barret and Roberts agree to leave the regulation in place for what's likely to be years is... disappointing, if not necessarily surprising.

The appeals court sending the case back down to the district for a new remedy... I dunno what they'd even do, here. The standard behavior, as both the appeals opinion here and the lower court both spelled out, is normally vacateur. And a separate injunction pending appeal tied to the same rule was likewise overturned. What's next: a permanent injunction against enforcement of a regulation, which SCOTUS will then stay too? A declaratory judgement that any enforcement of the regulation would be unlawful, which will only bind a tiny part of Texas?

There's a lot of options, but they're all going to make the extent courts treat the second amendment like a red-headed stepchild apparent, and it's not like the district judge has any reason to back down: the chickens are coming home to roost.

The first is that it's only the second time I've ever seen SSC referenced in "normie" spaces: the first being the NYT hit-piece from a few years back.

There's been a limited tendency toward snarky writers reaching out for outre citations, with perhaps one of the best-known being Scalia's citation to Vonnegut as a closing point for his PGA Tour v. Martin dissent. I've got mixed feelings on the practice, and it could mean something deeper, but it could just as well be a one-off.

That said, if you want to try to pull out some insight, the process does feel a bit like part of the response to @TracingWoodgrain's political collapse of public institutions. Oldham could have linked to a Cardiff Professor of Philosophy (that's what Scott did himself!), among other options, but there's reason he found a random blogger with a good point more persuasive than a PhD or a hundred-year-old-dictionary ipse dixiting it. The institutions going bad Left doesn't unavoidably give the progressive movement an unshakable control over systems of information or administration; it just invites alternative proofs. In the short term and in the specific context of judges, conservatives can now take some public institutions simply by the opposite of their word (VanDyke's "arrogant, lazy, [and] an ideologue”; “lacks humility”; and “has an ‘entitlement’ temperament" in particular are not benefits!), but over the longer term some other metastable point will come up. PoC || GTFO is a hacker ethos, but it also applies to pondering whether the exhibitionist furry mechanist-chemist or systems designer or rocket company is doing good work or not.

Deeper than that, I think there's some broader collapse of public authority. Not necessarily that our public authorities have gotten worse -- much of the collapse in trust reflects a lot of big names from the 90s and 00s making absolutely boneheaded behaviors common knowledge in ways that once coudl be papered over -- but that it's become common knowledge not just that it happens, but that no one in authority is even interested in trying to persuade watchers it doesn't. And this is bigger than the Red Tribe noticing its small remainder of public authorities can and do change their positions on a dime, and sometimes in bizarre ways. I can point to Toobin jerking it during a Zoom call while burnishing his feminist bonafides, but I can also point to a pro-sexuality Big Name who was a founding member of the Burned Furs and pretty clearly never wants to face or apologize for the contradictions.

There's problems to that! The conservative movement's difficulty with 'alternate paths of knowing' including grifters, charlatans, and outright nutjobs as often as merely radical-but-genuine actors predates the internet; the progressive movement's failure points are not as well-repeated, but just as present. But listing off the problems is misunderstanding my description: this is a process in the sense that gravity or crowd flow is a process, rather than the way microcontroller power staging is a process.

conservatives can now take some public institutions simply by the opposite of their word

Can you please post an alternative link? This just leads to an endless captcha loop for me.

Huh. The underlying link is this Atlantic piece, though it may be paywalled.

It's Blackman, so take it with a grain of salt, but it claims that the ABA's rating for Lawrence VanDyke was heavily biased: selecting many claims for generic ill behaviors without citing a specific example, giving only short and perfunctory interviews to anyone who liked VanDyke without asking about any of them about VanDyke's alleged bad traits, made questionable claims about a private interview that VanDyke denied publicly, and most critically violated its normal procedural rules giving those with a Not Qualified result after initial interview a secondary interview with a different evaluator (which did not happen) and to give the final letter to the judiciary committee at least 48 hours before the final hearing (instead giving well under 24 hours).

(I can't steelman the ABA position; this seems the strongest attempt, and that's damning with faint praise. See Grasz for another example from the same group.)

The piece is indeed paywalled, so I can't read it (I mean I can if I install a paywall bypasser, but I just don't read paywalled content instead). It does seem to me like the ABA is functioning exactly as described based on that Grasz example though. Thank you for the elaboration on your point however!

I don't think there was any reasonably optimistic perspective that would have any of the progressive branch notice the various due process and vagueness concerns here, but having both Barret and Roberts agree to leave the regulation in place for what's likely to be years is... disappointing, if not necessarily surprising.

My unrealistic hope is that they're kicking the can down the road because there's a soon to be released decision about agency powers that might apply here, which would bypass the entire gun hornets' nest completely.

I see people citing the Lizard Man's constant semi-regularly whenever some unbelievable stats are being shared on reddit

I’ve seen ‘motte and bailey argument’ a few times online in recent years unconnected to SSC, here or the general rationalist sphere. It’s possible they heard it elsewhere and then just posted the source for the citation.

I am going to give it to Scott. There are no references online to 'motte and bailey' in a context that does not have to do with castles, until Scott's 2014 article. And then it exploded from there.

It dates to Nicholas Shackel in 2005. Scott's article mentions this (not sure if it did when it was published but I think it did).

Prior to "All in All, Another Brick in the Motte", Scott mentioned the concept in "Social Justice and Words, Words, Words", which contains a hyperlink to Shackel's paper.

Archived versions of both posts also reference or link back to Shackel.

I'm pretty sure it's popularity is attributable to Scott. Even if people using it don't read him, there's probably some community overlap that causes it to end up spreading to Youtube influencer communities, and then to influencers themselves, which is when it explodes.

In any case "motte/bailey" is one thing, I've started seing "assabiah". I swear, a year or two from now we'll start seeing manosphere types talking about "the Hock".

My search and reference skills are clearly lacking at the moment, so I have to be the one to ask; 'The Hock'?

"The Hock" is the Hock, our local Forever Alone poster's quest to find a waifu in the freezing tundra of Alaska.

Huh.

Given the men to women ratio in Alaska, that wouldn't have been my first choice. A better option would probably be the Pacific Trail, but what do I know.

Jesus. If I survive the Hock and then get a girlfriend, and manosphere types then pile onto the Hock...

Andrew Tate 2.0 in the Alaskan wilderness as a kind of Bear Grylls-esque manosphere grifter is going to be dangerous. That'd get a lot of few young dudes killed. I'd probably be collateral damage as the first jackass to do this, too.

I can assure you that if you successfully complete the Hock and then get a girlfriend it will have nothing to do with the Hock itself. I don't know how to tell you this without hurting you deeply, but most women don't give a shit about stuff like this. I'm an advanced skier. I've not only skied some of the gnarliest in-bounds terrain in North America, but I felt completely comfortable while dropping in even when I hadn't seen it before. I couldn't tell you the last time I stared down a line trying to get myself psyched up to do it. I don't generally mention this to women I'm trying to date. Hell, I was out with a girl last weekend and while the subject of skiing came up, I only mentioned it because she asked me about my hobbies. I left it at "skiing" and didn't elaborate. And I was hoping more that she skied as well because I have a great group of ski buddies and we have a lot of fun in the winter and it would be nice to include her in something like that. If I had brought up all the gnarly shit in a desperate attempt to prove what a badass I am, at best she would have ignored it, and at worst it would have made me look like a self-aggrandizing asshole.

You're also forgetting that if it even were something that impressed women, you still have to get the date in the first place. Unless you're going out a lot already you better solve this problem before you do anything. What are you going to do, approach women at bars and tell them apropos of nothing that you went on a survivorman expedition and by the way, do you want to go out with me? Also, keep in mind that even if this does work, unless she's already well-versed in outdoor survival it's not going to make much difference what you actually do. Any girl who doesn't ski isn't going to be impressed when I tell her I ski the Pali face at A-Basin because to her that's completely meaningless. To her, even an intermediate run would look like instant death. The only girl who I could see that being a positive to is one who skis about as well as I do and is excited to have someone to share those experiences with. In other words, any girl who is going to be impressed by the Hock will probably be equally impressed by a guy who's been winter camping a couple times, unless she's also into that sort of thing.

We've tried man. He's in too deep now, he's made fliers and everything. Now he either has to do it or pretend to do it and never return to the motte after March of next year. In which case I'm making a documentary about my search for skookum... and possibly justice? (I'm trying to work in a true crime angle so I can sell it to Netflix.)

Look, SkookumTree has staked his whole reputation on this. If he doesn't do it, he will never be able to show his face around here again; anytime he tried to wade into the culture war thread, he would be dismissed with "isn't there a Hock you should be doing?" The mods can stop us from posting it, but nobody can stop us from thinking it. Skookum would become the laughingstock of the entire forum. What's he supposed to do, delete his account?

Better to die with dignity.

Eh, people are dumb, and the only way they ever get less dumb is by recognizing and correcting the dumbness they've previously committed to. Why hassle someone for desisting stupidity?

I thought it was sarcasm. A would-be alaskan lumberjack does not choose physical death over online ribbing.

Also reminds of the ‘jews/liberals condemning muslim immigration’ current thing and all the right-wingers who can’t take the W.

He made fliers? I missed that one. Please point me at them.

Truly A Motte Original.

I linked it in the other comment, but here it is again.

Pardon me, I must've missed it. Thanks for the spoonfeeding!

And ah, points for effort. I still don't quite think he'll go through with it, but I suppose this nudges my priors.

If you do this, PM me, I want to be involved.

Will do! But who will make the documentary about searching for us when we go missing searching for skookum?

David Zellner.

IIRC, he believes that his expedition will change him to such a degree that his newly-acquired badassness will shine through without needing explicit introduction.

Idk why you guys find that so necessarily implausible? Self confidence is a thing.

I'd say if being on track to become a doctor hasn't given him self confidence in the realm of dating women - where being a doctor is an outsized factor in success - then I think it's probably foolish to expect surviving in the Alaskan wilderness to do it. It's certainly possible, and in the general case, going through some difficult experience and surviving it through one's own wits and resourcefulness is going to help to build confidence. And it's also possible that he has a certain type of mindset such that accomplishing all that is required to become almost a doctor with the expectation of actually becoming one in the near future - no easy feat that a very small proportion of the population even have the capacity to do, much less actually carry it out - doesn't help his self confidence while surviving the Alaskan wilderness does (admittedly, this is arguably an even more difficult feat). To me, it also seems to be a rather extreme next step and taking on far more risk than is worth the reward, but it seems that the extremeness is the point, so what do I know, I guess.

I for one doubt that that Skookum will succeed in generating that kind of self-confidence by walking over an Alaskan mountain. I think he has mental issues that seem unlikely to be resolved by such actions, and I also suspect that he simply won't go through with it in the end.

And I don't mean to be offensive, I have nothing against him as such, but from what he's written so far he seems to be sometimes lucid and sometimes straight-up delusional, apparently depending entirely on the topic. I think our man has a problem, and I don't think it's a lack of self-confidence, and I don't think the solution is skiing up a mountain.

I'm not exactly sure what your plans are, but Chris McCandless died in a schoolbus in Alaska in 1992, later made famous by Into the Wild and a more recent movie, and just a few years ago the state had to remove the bus because tourists kept drowning or getting lost trying to find it.

We've been trying to persuade him not to embark on his stupid, pointless masturbatory exercise for months. He's having none of it.

My bet is there's no need, he'll drop it on his own sooner or later, probably before spending two nights outdoors.

For every Chris McCandless, there are probably a hundred dead fools that aren't made famous like this and don't have pilgrimages.

You’re most of the way to being a doctor and have US citizenship. Just wait until you’re an American doctor and marry a Filipina or a Colombian instead of wandering around rural northern Alaska in winter. They won’t care if you happen to be ugly and socially awkward when you’re a doctor with US citizenship.

She is still going to be disgusted twice over, as I am now: by my unattractiveness, and by my hypocrisy. Why not attempt the Hock and if I survive, marry a Filipina or a Columbian? I also kind of like the idea that awkward or unattractive people - especially awkward and unattractive men - should choose their own Hock or at least seriously consider it. The pointlessness is the point.

Seriously, he is? Man, between "being a doctor" and "did some pointless nature challenge", doctor wins out very easily for female attention. Let alone the US part.

Though I kind of have to snicker imagining him actually completing the Hock, but everytime he tries to tell a woman she just wants to talk about him being a doctor all day.

Though I kind of have to snicker imagining him actually completing the Hock, but everytime he tries to tell a woman she just wants to talk about him being a doctor all day.

Which is exactly what happens. Unless you're a professional athlete (in which fame generates Sexual Marketplace Value) I promise women don't care about your amazing physical achievements.

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And what good would it do you to end up probably being the next entry in this long list?

This very morning, I saw "Catgirl Kulak" quoted second-hand on Ace of Spades.

Not quite "penetrating ze cabinets" yet, but we almost got there with Cummings after all.

I saw that too and was debating sending it to him.

Should be SOP IMO. @naraburns was correct in his criticism of sociologists citing n-th-hand sources as that just wastes the readers time who have to discover the true source. A sort of manuscript tradition, but for citations. Creating work for future scholars.

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