domain:mgautreau.substack.com
George_E_Hale
insufferable blowhard
1d ago
Interesting. It certainly seemed to be something like this, but it was in Arabic and right there on Twitter so I assumed it had to be less tawdry somehow.
Jiro
1d ago
Scott originally gave as an example "There isn’t enough Stalinism in this country!" There isn't enough leftism is an obvious extension.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1d ago
While I'm not a lawyer, I don't see how there could be any such retroactive action, considering the constitution explicitly forbids ex post facto laws. Presumably even if we do get rid of birthright citizenship, it would apply only to future cases, not past cases.
jake
1d ago
"Now, sure, every time in the last 200 years that a nation declared itself as enlightened atheists guided by pure reason they immediately proceeded with the worst atrocities yet visited upon man, but hey, what's religion got to do with anything?"
You're better than this response, not least of all because your challenges were answered and you missed it in your haste to throw down the "tl;dr lol."
Avarice is self-evidently ruinous. Caprice was explained at the top:
When birthrates decline in an otherwise prosperous nation the cause is always the same: multiple avenues for intrasexual competition where women attain status aside from wifehood and motherhood.
Left to their own devices, the majority will choose serial fleeting satisfactions rather than the long-term happiness that comes in continuing the human race by creating more people. This is capriciousness.
I do agree my jab at the end was hyperbole, but it's because my timeframe is right. Simulacra will reach ubiquity before "Generation Supercritical" reaches the age of majority and adopts them in mass. As for you calling this doomsaying, I'm deathly serious about my concerns, I don't see the flaw and I think about this constantly. If you do, if you think you have a superior understanding, if you see how we get out of this mess of young people seeing no purpose in life, especially when automation comes for everything, I'm all ears. I want to be wrong, I would want you to be right, because then all posterity doesn't hinge on this one achievement.
Lewis2
1d ago
Eh, I know a number of couples who ended up married because of a surprise pregnancy in the 80s and 90s, some of whom would admit that they probably wouldn’t have stayed together otherwise. Heck, it’s still not completely uncommon where I grew up. Getting pregnant and then not getting married is seen as pretty low-class. Some do it anyway, but they were usually trailer trash to begin with.
SubstantialFrivolity
I'm not even supposed to be here today
1d ago
But he wouldn't be the legitimate ruler in this case, because he can't be. I don't deny that there's a group of people who are so fanatical about Trump that they will follow him no matter what he does. But it's not enough to get him re-elected.
Felagund
1d ago
I was pretty sad to see that Louisiana v. Callais was delayed. I was looking forward to that.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
1d ago
The NIST-accepted theory is that the fire caused the floor trusses (not beams) to lose stiffness, sag, and pull the outer columns inward, which initiated the collapse. Loss of stiffness and strength due to the fire was a cause, but not the proximate cause, of the collapse -- the buckling of the columns was.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
This depends on your definition of mainstream.
If Trump declared elections suspended tomorrow and proclaimed himself first emperor of America, he would have more supporters than Obama trying to run for a third term, and lots of his opponents would object less. But CNN would run one with the headline 'fascism is here- Jews bewarned' and the other with the headline 'respected elder statesman reenters the ring'.
cjet79
1d ago
I think it's the same for most defenses of basic rights. Either defend the rights of scumbags or everyone loses the right.
Happens in free speech when it's Nazis that need defending. Happens in criminal law when it's pedophiles or rapists getting railroaded.
And of course the question gets asked why not just defend the right for "decent" people. But "decent people" always tends to start looking a little too much like "my political allies".
It would be nice to not have this slippery slope hanging over our heads for every basic right.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Lot's of people unironically treat Trump as a king/emperor. He's the American Marius and everyone knows he represents a break in the system, personalizing power into more personalistic arrangements.
Now which of his associates will turn Sulla?
child support is to support the children
I've had this argument about a hundred times, so I'm going to experiment with a new track:
What about "child support", as currently practiced in the liberal west and particularly the United States, evidences that it is about supporting children—without referencing its name in any way, shape, or form? If I gave you a sheet describing the terms, functions, and conditions of C.S. with the name at the top blacked out, what elements would lead you to suspect ah ha, the primary function of this policy is to support children! What elements would you point to in order to refute the competing hypothesis that the primary function of the policy is actually mother support?
This is an open challenge. Anyone reading should feel free to answer.
grognard
Intel Pentium III 450 / Nvidia Riva TNT2 Ultra / Corsair 128MB PC133 / ABIT BH6
1d ago
Play it for the vibe not the challenge.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Among other things, it bears pointing out that there was no republican support for ACA, and no republican support was expected. The final version was a compromise between mainstream democrats and blue doggers, not between republicans and democrats.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
So? He's still a Democrat
Not a normal and mainstream one. He was a well known and prominent 'blue dogger', which exempts him from the usual rules around democrats. It could mean many things but 'moderate republican who steals more' is a reasonable and common formulation.
Can you show non-blue dog democrats criticizing Obama without careful phrasing?
jkf
1d ago
slightly worse than Coitus interruptus.
Coitus interruptus is pretty good though -- it works pretty much every time, you just need to not fuck it up. That's kind of your point I guess, but the other methods do all have their downsides too. Kind of like the COVID vaccine, one needs to consider one's own risk profile.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
And this applies to both Obama and Trump, although Obama played more in keeping with the mos maiorum and Trump is just straightup the great MAGA king.
Gaashk
1d ago
In addition to what others have said, hormonal birth control is, indeed, under explored and under discussed. If you go to a doctor and ask for birth control, she won't necessarily talk about the psychological side affects of it, and it can cause changes in sexual preferences related to hormonal cycles.
This is the "birthright citizenship" case: does the Court agree with the Trump administration that some people born on U.S. soil are nevertheless not American citizens? IDK! Because the Court doesn't answer that question.
I'm honestly a bit frightened by this one. I don't find most of Trump's stuff all that worrisome but this seems potentially pretty society altering.
My parents were illegal immigrants. They had me here in the late 70s so I had citizenship by birth. My parents have since received amnesty and even applied for citizenship and received it as well. But I think if the EO holds I don't see why they could not apply this retroactively. If it makes sense to do it for the future it makes sense to do it for the past too.
My parents would have more standing to stay in the US than I would.
Would be kind of funny to have to pack up and start a new life in the old country though in middle age.
MathWizard
Good things are good
1d ago
Is $200k the limit on the amount that Keith's insurance would cover? If not then Keith is entirely in the right here, and the bankruptcy judge should not have required the limit of 200k in the first place. There's no reason the amount should have been relevant for this ruling except if it would be dis-chargeable via the bankruptcy.
If it is the insurance limit then the best outcome would be the $1.6 M being the official amount awarded and the $1.4 M being retroactively discharged by the bankruptcy.
It's unfortunate that the laws aren't smart enough to do the obvious thing.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
Trump's appeal to his base is in large part being the legitimate ruler who performs the proper rites of rulership with the right pomp and doesn't do anything worse with their tax money than steal it. They didn't abandon him after J6(I did; Trump proved himself weak by not doubling down). 'Legality' has nothing to do with it. It's about 'better coverage than 5g'.
hydroacetylene
1d ago
The Jet A open air burn temperature is 1,030 °C, considerably less than the melting point of even lower melting point steels.
I am not an expert on 9/11, but isn't the idea actually that the fire weakened the steel causing it to collapse under the weight of the tower, not that the steel melted?
I hate to break it to you, but the same applies to any other area of the law, including whether the state can revoke your own liberty for a period of years. Yes, there's the added protection in that case that you will be entitled to an attorney if you can't afford to pay for one, which attorney will probably do an adequate job but might not, but in any event, all the other concerns you raise still apply.
And the additional due process rights, and numerous opportunities to seek freedom, and the burden of proof falling on the government, and the burden of proof being much harsher on the government, yada yada.
As a side note, while that attorney was on record for the appeal, it isn't clear that the guy was represented at the initial hearing. Based on the available record, I'm inclined to believe that he wasn't.
It's possible, but a) we don't know and b) there's absolutely a lot of well-represented and reasonable clients that just don't present well to judges, especially when you're talking 80-year-olds.
There are attorneys in Pennsylvania who specialize in this sort of thing and no, it isn't cheap, but it's what you have to do.
Yeah, that this is "what you have to do" is a good part of my objection. Access to justice and civil rights dependent on thousands or tens of thousands of dollars is a right denied. (The other part is that it's far from clear that would be enough.)
But they're not; this is the case of someone who was already adjudicated ineligible to purchase firearms based on a separate proceeding, at which the right to own firearms was collateral to the determination.... The procedural posture here is no different than that of a convicted felon petitioning the court for an expungement so he can buy a gun legally.
Yes, the procedural posture here treat someone who had a mental health commitment like a convicted felon. Is that proceeding to issue a mental health commitment equivalent to the conviction of a felon?
I can't find the process New Jersey used in 1980, since a 1987 revision to state law was noteworthy for requiring a finding of dangerousness and mental illness, but the current law still allows initial holds for 72 hours without ever seeing or hearing from a judge, and an intermediate period up to 20 days with a court order under reduced requirements. Even assuming that T.B. had something more serious than a rubber stamp in 1980, it still had nowhere near the burden of proof, clear notice of law he was violating, or any similar due process right. (He near-certainly wouldn't have had access to an attorney, even had he seen a courtroom, and might have even been ex parte for the court hearing given the state of laws in other nearby jurisdictions at the time.)
There's a reason that this overlaps closer to the GVRO or various Red Flag laws -- but those processes are intentionally supposed to be temporary! The federal laws here apply even to mental health episodes that happened before the GCA1968 was even passed, and they chase a person to their grave unless specifically expunged.
Is the action here similar? Felons can be disarmed because being a felon is a long-lasting indicator of propensity to act violently outside the law (although even that's kinda marginal given how broad modern 'felonies' have become). Was T.B.'s issue in 1980 some long-lasting inherent problem that would likely recur? Or was it one time event? We don't know. T.B. provided some evidence that he had no current mental illness. No one on the court provides any evidence against that, they just woolgathered about how it wasn't trustworthy enough in some vague ways that their guts didn't like. The judge specifically said that these gutchecks pointed "not that he’s dangerous".
In any event, it's hard to see what the court did wrong here. The guy has the burden of proof to show he should get an expungement, and he provided very little evidence beyond "I'm not nuts and you should take my work for it".
From a statutory perspective, the petitioner is only required to prove that their illness is in remission or substantially improved; the court (and the original medical director) are the ones to "find" if the petitioner "will not likely act in a manner dangerous to the public safety and finds that the grant of relief is not contrary to the public interest" based on "the circumstances of why the commitment or determination was imposed upon the petitioner, the petitioner's mental health record and criminal history, and the petitioner's reputation in the community". The petitioner demonstrated that their condition was substantially improved, and provided some evidence that they were not likely to act in a matter dangerous to public safety. And the judge, rather than pointing to some part of the petitioner's mental health record, or reputation in the community, or circumstances of their original commitment, said that they didn't like some of the evidence the petitioner provided or the petitioner's demeanor, and then the case is done, caput, do not pass go, do not collect your rights or your 200 USD.
I frankly have no idea how the judge in question here can honestly take a look at a forty-year period with no criminal history or further interactions with the mental health system or criminal justice system, a commitment that the judge found was motivated by the man attempting to strangle his wife, and say "I don’t know if that means that his condition is substantially improved or in substantial remission." I don't have high opinions of New Jersey cops! But I don't have that low an opinion, either.
That would just be annoying in other contexts. I'd like a lot more due process and a lot less 'whatever some jerkoff judge thought was good policy between ranting in their chambers', but I'm not optimistic about matters as simple as ['maybe judges shouldn't hear trials on laws that they pledge specifically to support'.
Here, we are talking a constitutional right, a petitioner who has never been convicted of a crime and may never have seen the inside of a court room before this appeal, and a judge who has rewritten the law until his or her only guiding star is 'what can I imagine' and only boundaries are 'could impact the public interest', in a jurisdiction that has spent literal generations and has extant caselaw demanding "the citizen acts at his peril" in this context. It is a problem when there is an unclear burden on the petitioner to fight any evidence that any judge may ever want or make up, in a hearing that becomes an adversarial hearing against that judge, and where there is no further opportunity or discussion before trial about what the judge decided was the magic words beyond 'hire the best and most specialized lawyer possible'.
T.B. here might well (maybe even likely would) fail an honest analysis of dangerousness, but we didn't get that. T.B. might well (maybe even likely would) fail an honest analysis of improvement in mental health condition. We don't even get a judiciary interest in that. At best, you can argue that this complied with the statute, as long as you put a heavy thumb on judicial interpretation of the 'well, it doesn't say we can't' sort. The courts could have subpeona'd medical records, or written that the petitioner refused to provide access. The courts could speak to a criminal record or lack thereof. The courts could have pointed to some critical issue in the original commitment hearing, if any existed, pointing to likely repetition or recurrence. They could have asked his wife or coworkers or doctors if he was strangling them. They didn't. Nor, for that matter did the judges comment on a lack of submissions on these points from the petition’s side.
They tea-leafed whether a guy could remember a name of a medication while speaking extemporaneously, or whether he might forget to use a safety. They announced that he needs some time working in the mental health system to prove to them he had gotten better (how long? why would that matter to an 80-year old?). And then they washed their hands of any questions of whether he was a danger to the community or mentally ill or what say you.
To treat this as in the interest of justice because you, personally, can smell a rat, in a case you couldn't be bothered to look at the first sheet before writing about?
A child support order is going to say, throughout, "for the support of the child" and among other things will typically specify that support will end when the child turns 18, etc. If we have to black out every mention of "child" then I suppose it might be hard to figure out what the purpose of the order is.
The fact that the support ends when the child reaches age of majority, and that the calculation of support is based on the child's needs, not the mother's. ("Mother support" is called alimony, and as I mentioned already, it's awarded rarely nowadays, usually only in a marriage of long standing where one spouse has substantially depended on the other and has no ready means of earning income once separated.)
I am guessing your grievance is that the mother (or, more rarely, father) is given $X per month in child support and nothing really prevents her or him from spending it on heroin or lotto tickets. True except inasmuch as failure to care for the child would be subject to court oversight and in extreme cases loss of custody, but if Mom puts all the child support in the same pot of money as her other sources of income (let's assume she has a job, which most often she does) - how would you prefer to make sure she does not personally benefit from the child support? Suppose you think she's spending too much money on clothes for herself. But she can always say "The child support money is what paid for the food Child ate and the Child's clothes, I bought my clothes with the other money." You could argue that without the child support she wouldn't have been able to afford to buy clothes for herself. While true, the point of child support is that children add expenses. If she weren't taking care of the child she could afford to buy clothes for herself.
I have also had this argument about a hundred times. It always boils down to a desire to be punitive and/or bail on financial obligations, almost always rooted in a sense of bitterness and injustice, not actual concern for the welfare of any children in question.
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