domain:betonit.substack.com
Harlequin5942
47m ago
I'm illustrating the motte-and-bailey by analogy.
"I don't want CP in video games" is the motte. "This particular censorship is desirable, at a minimum" is the bailey.
OliveTapenade
35m ago
In an attempt to broaden access to the program, Jewish Federations of North America (JFNA) have held trainings to help other faith groups improve their grant applications, including hosting a joint webinar with the U.S. Council of Muslim Organizations (USCMO). JFNA and the Orthodox Union joined with the USCMO, the Sikh Council for Interfaith Relations, and several Christian denominations to call for increased funding to the program. The joint lobbying effort resulted in Congress appropriating twice the previous year's funding for 2021.[17]
This seems like an odd thing to do if the whole thing is a Jewish scam.
OliveTapenade
39m ago
Synagogues in Australia do this - I believe the guards are mostly volunteers who are trained on the synagogue's own payroll.
In the past I found it a bit odd, since noticeably mosques and gurdwaras don't do this, despite Muslims and Sikhs also being religious groups that are widely hated, and which are actually more publicly identifiable than Jews due to their headscarves and turbans, but since October 7 I have re-evaluated a little and am more understanding of Jews feeling a need for special security.
I suspect socio-economic factors also play a role - Australian Jews are on average wealthier than Muslims or Sikhs, and thus more able to pay for security. It's also possible that the fact that Jews are indistinguishable in everyday life makes synagogues more vulnerable to random attacks, not less. If I want to attack a Muslim or Sikh, it's relatively easy to identify one on the street and then attack them when they're most vulnerable. (To be fair, most attacks on Sikhs are a result of people mistaking them for Muslims - actual anti-Sikh sentiment is quite rare.) However, if I want to attack a Jew, I need to go to a bit more effort to identify who's Jewish, and observing people going to synagogue is a good way to do that.
WhiningCoil
11hr ago
There is all that. Although it seems baked into the post is the unsaid premise that the problem is the laws were crafted poorly/maliciously. But, IMHO, the problem is all the enforcement agencies have been captured by neoliberals. And so there simply is no law that they won't interpret in the manner that most suits their objectives. I mean, already with the constitution, you'd think "shall not be infringed" is clear as day. But to a neoliberal lawyer, or a judge that decides "The second amendment does not exist in my courtroom", it's all very nuanced.
So I suppose my opinion is that no law can possibly be crafted to prevent these enforcement agencies from just doing whatever they wanted to do anyways. As such, if you really want to curtail their behavior, you must abolish them.
But I'd be willing to settle for abolishing the undemocratic regime where unaccountable agencies get to make up whatever regulations they want without any oversight from congress, and seeing how things go from there first. A guy can hope.
Trump banned diversity training in the goverment in his first administration. https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/09/25/trump-executive-order-diversity-training-race-gender/3537241001/
In contrast Biden administration was super woke. Trump and people like Rufo will work together anyhow. I wouldn't have too high expectations, but there is going to be considerable difference even from a mostly ineffective Trump who pushes right a bit, versus a Biden administration pushing quite far left.
There are those who want a neutered right, and frame the alternative with negative exaggerations and fearmongering. The reality is like Democrat administrations purged a lot of people in the goverment to put their own loyalists in charge, it isn't only fair for the right to do this to govern in a different manner than that, but also the only way to change things.
Wanting a neutered right, is not the agenda of genuine moderates but people who are on the same side as Biden.
How we got here was through Republicans like Romney called moderate but who supported BLM. And through liberals, framed as more moderate than they are, but who actually are quite far left culturally and implemented those changes. Only a political coalition that genuinely opposes the intersectional agenda can genuinely push it back.
The right is the only coalition push back these things. Can the center do this? Well, some of the people called far right, or considered part of the right if one tries to objectively judge how much they pander to different identity groups, ironically people like Trump are closer to the center than many other people (falsely) labeled moderate like Mitt Romney.
Those usually carrying the moderate or liberal labels, are insufficiently against the whole woke agenda, and too much for it. So they won't push back and can't put it away. What some of them seem to be doing is to sometimes try to pretend they are already doing this. So there isn't going to be a genuine attempt by liberals and people like Romeny to put the woke away, but there might be attempts to define wokeness narrowly, and still support the same agenda. The limited hangout maneuver.
In my opinion, the most likely path for making idpol unfashionable is a foreign-policy presidency. Doesn’t really matter who. We’re not getting a “fresh prince” decade by cranking up the domestic outrage.
Yes, but that will solidify idpol and it will still be fashionable but not dominating the national conversation, until the focus passes and a new Floyd hysteria emerges. That something isn't as discussed as much as previously, does not stop it from being a problem. Moreover, it can coexist just as it continues to coexist with covid focus or the Israel conflict with Palestinians. Moreover, foreign policy presidencies tend to be presidencies engaging in idiotic destabilizing expensive wars that make the MIC richer, but are actually damaging towards their country and the world. Which isn't to say extreme isolationism is the solution.
Identity politics are always here to stay, the question is if we got a sane and fair arrangement, or one that gives valid reason for people to oppose and incentivizes political conflict. Which doesn't change unless the ideology of modern new left liberals and even those in the establishment conservative parties who aren't actually conservative who agree with them stops being influential. Because it is an agenda that does try to screw over, and increasingly at that, the progressive intersectional coalition outgroups, such as white Christian men. The way to have peace, and to relax culture war intensity is to enforce something better and more even handed. Which as is the case always with even handed policies, sharing elements with other groups, shares in a vein diagram ground with the genuine far right. Additionally, it is itself definitely seen by those with the new left liberal agenda as far right, and labeled at such. Although, that isn't actually accurate, and has to do with the strategy of the far left to label everyone other than them with pejoratives.
What is important to understand is that we are never going to get a fair arrangement that reduces culture war intensity, under the hysteric paranoia of the far right, that leads people to oppose reasonable positions because they associate them with the far right. In fact there are issues where even the most hardcore people on the far right have legitimate grievances about their favorite groups being mistreated. And it is in fact possible and preferable to the current situation to share grounds with anyone on issues they have a point, and refuse to share ground with them where they are wrong.
From liberal-ish space, what would aid to relax tensions, is an attitude of compromise and understanding that there has been a real problem of cultural/identitarian progressive overreach. That overreach and progressive extremism also relates to the neutering of the right.
RandomRanger
Just build nuclear plants!
1hr ago
In Australia we have 18C. Speech is free so long as you're not racist. Plus we have pretty aggressive anti-defamation laws.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Section_18C_of_the_Racial_Discrimination_Act_1975
gattsuru
12hr ago
The Death of Trust in Bipartisan Lawmaking
The Pregnant Workers Fairness Act is a 2023 law, driven by nearly a decade of cross-party and cross-tribe interests, best summarized by the intro to this 2018 Atlantic piece:
Mattes honed in on one particular case from the Times story, in which a salesperson at the healthcare company Novartis, a single mother was told by her boss she should consider an abortion. “She didn’t, and after her maternity leave, she said they advised her not to pursue any more promotions due to her ‘unfortunate circumstances at home,’” Mattes said. Those weren’t unfortunate circumstances at home, Mattes said: “That is her son Anthony. Pregnancy isn’t a disease. Babies are a blessing.”
On this particular issue, the conservative Mattes had an unusual ally. A week earlier, several hundred miles away, New York’s Democratic governor Andrew Cuomo had ordered an investigation into New York companies accused of pregnancy discrimination...
While a 1978 amendment to Title VII established pregnancy as a protected characteristic, the PWFA's congressional support saw it as too limited in scope and in what accommodations it could require businesses to hold.
Another point, however, dropped in mid-April:
This isn't necessarily new, or a surprise: some courts had already held that the 1978 Title VII amendment protected abortion as a pregnancy-related medical condition, albeit with the more restricted scope. There are good pragmatic or philosophical arguments in favor or against, either in regards to abortion specifically or as a law in general, and some !!fun!! questions about a possible that the EEOC's rule-making treats as purely theoretical. There are some, if not exactly strong, arguments that the text of the law requires it.
Several Republican congresscritters who voted for and cosponsored the bill promptly blasted this interpretation, swearing that they were sure and assured it wouldn't happen. Social conservatives, on the other hand, prompted sang I told you so.
Mattes and his organization do still exist, but haven't commented on the new regulation. They're not, it can be fairly readily assumed, in a huge hurry to partner with the ACLU on statute-writing or sponsor-wrangling any time soon.
Okay, well that's not a policy I actually care about, so it's at least kinda funny, and .
FFLs and How To Get Your Dog Shot By The ATF
The 2022 Bipartisan Safer Communities Act had many components, but one of many that gun rights advocates pointed out at length as a matter of concern, even well before the law's language was fully concrete, was the redefinition of gun dealers and engaging in the business of firearms sales, from "principal objective of livelihood and profit" to "predominantly earn a profit". The ATF released its final rule on this new statutory definition in early April, shortly after shooting someone in the head while all their agents forgot their cameras at home, explicitly citing the BSCA's new language as cause.
Three guesses on how that went, and the first two don't count:
The activities described in these presumptions are not an exclusive list of activities that may indicate that someone is ‘‘engaged in the business’’ or intends ‘‘to predominantly earn a profit.’’ These presumptions will provide clarification and guidance to persons who are potentially subject to the license requirement and will apply in administrative and civil proceedings.
The presumptions will be used, for example, to help a fact finder determine in civil asset forfeiture proceedings whether seized firearms should be forfeited to the Government and in administrative licensing proceedings to determine whether to deny or revoke a Federal firearms license. These presumptions do not apply in any criminal proceedings but may be useful to judges in such proceedings when, for example, they decide how to instruct juries regarding permissible inferences.
The only thing that the new rule explicitly does not consider to be "predominantly earn[ing] a profit" is if an individual is liquidating all or part of their owned firearms, without (ever?) purchasing new ones, and I wouldn't bet my pet's life on it. In some ways, it's kinda impressive: the final rule, as opposed to the original proposal, reacted to gunnie concerns about the underspecificity of one resale exception by explicitly removing firearms owned for personal protection from it. In some cases, it breaks from the text of the statute. Halbrook highlights a statutory exception that the ATF refines down to covers repair and customization.
I've written before about the same act smothering archery and hunter training programs at schools, and while this was eventually (and to my surprise) amended, that passed late enough to leave programs screwed over for last school year. We'll see how many schools are willing or able to bring them back.
All around me are familiar faces, Worn out places, worn out FACEs
The Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act is a 1994 statute from the old days before backronyms were popularized outside of the military, and consisted of three major prohibitions:
- blocking someone from trying to access or provide abortion services
- blocking someone exercising or seeking to exercise the First Amendment right of religious freedom at a place of religious worship
- destroying or damaging a reproductive health care facility or a place of worship
It was considered the height of bipartisan compromise at a difficult time (and Bill Clinton's statescraft, in contrast to the then-expensive Assault Weapons Ban), and like many laws from that era, it reflects a draconian view of punishment. While a first nonviolent offense can 'only' result in a maximum of six months imprisonment and a 10k USD fine, these numbers scale rapidly for repeat offenses, and can be rapidly stacked, even in marginal cases, with other charges to boost the scope of a trial and the possible punishment.
Uh. Except you might notice a pattern in what direction both the successful and failed cases go, and what prongs of the FACE Act they cover. It's not that the feds never prosecute someone for clear violations of this law; they just do it by using an entirely different law that predated and does not scale, and accept plea bargains for the most minimal punishments. That disparity has been around for a while, even if it's only become more obvious with Jane's Revenge floating around.
It does not, as a matter of law, matter whether the FACEs is ever enforced against a specific political viewpoint. And from the view of the 'don't break the laws, fucko' or 'don't block access to public spaces' caucus, I've got little sympathy for protestors getting burned when they signed up for the frying pan. But if you sent a message back in time to the 1994 GOP and told them they were just repeating the 1988 18 USC 247, I doubt they'd have trumpeted it.
Joe Wilson and the Affordable Care Act
There's a number of famous controversies during the run-up to the passage of the Affordable Care Act, along with some lesser-known ones. The extent trans-related healthcare would be covered and what expectations that invoked was a sleeper, while the question of "encouraged end-of-life" care rather famously got above the fold at length.
Joe Wilson is best-remembered, to the extent he's remembered at all, for one of the better-known ones. He shouted out "You lie" during the middle of a joint session of congress where then-President Obama disavowed that "our reform efforts would insure illegal immigrants", a matter Republicans feared would be thrown.
Thanks to the Biden-Harris Administration’s actions, today’s final rule will remove the prohibition on DACA recipients’ eligibility for Affordable Care Act coverage for the first time, and is projected to help more than 100,000 young people gain health insurance. Starting in November, DACA recipients can apply for coverage through HealthCare.gov and state-based marketplaces, where they may qualify for financial assistance to help them purchase quality health insurance.
To be fair to President Obama, he's (officially) been out of office for the better part of a decade. To be less fair to Biden, there's no statute changed about any of this in that whole timeframe, and Obama was using the future tense. Whatever Obama thought he was proposing, this is what his proposal got, and it's not like he's complaining.
Wilson received a reprimand for his outburst. There'd be some irony in him living long enough to crow about it, though he hasn't done so yet. And even if he did, being right is cold comfort for anyone other than the politicians.
One of These Things Is Not Like The Others
The Affordable Care Act, unlike the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act or Pregnant Workers Fairness Act or Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, was more the result of long negotiation rather than long negotiation and compromise between the parties. There are no Republican cosponsors or even congressional votes for the law to be betrayed, because there were no Republican congressional votes for the ACA at all; at most, there were some (long-booted) Blue Dogs.
Quite a large number of moderates, of one stripe or another, drew that as a particular failure. They could, we were told, have gotten more serious concessions; they could, we were told, have achieved their own separate goals. How much they were moderates or 'moderates' often said how much 'they' in the previous passages stood for the GOP or for that particular person's particular goals. During the second half of the Obama years, many of the particular goals side painted the Republicans as the Party of No; after, this obstinate unwillingness to give up a slice of the cake was drawn as both cause and effect of various Republican maladies, from poll numbers among young professionals to failure to integrate into the administrative class to the price of tea in China.
The PWFA and BSCA rulemakings and FACEs prosecutions come as the punchlines to those particularly jokes. No one's come away from any statute feeling the GOP has a better finger on the interests of the public, or was able to represent its people's interests better than the What's The Matter With Kansas asshole. Perhaps these laws are all cherry-picked, and every other major bipartisan statute had everyone walk away smiling, or the GOP betrayed the Democratic Party. Nor, given the speed that even matters as simple as dictionaries have turned to political ends, is there any way to promise that the next time would be different, or that even laws and statutes that conservatives badly want would be resistant. Indeed, the longest delay was the case where they compromised in no amount at all!
You still don't get that many tries to break trust, and it's expensive to rebuild.
orangecat
3hr ago
Can you respond to his point about the judge that said it does not exist in her courtroom?
That seems to me the bigger issue.
durdenhobbes
3hr ago
I'm more impressed than anything that Gobert had the wisdom as a man, father, and husband, not to suggest his wife make medical decisions based around a basketball game.
NullHypothesis
3hr ago
Same reason why women can denigrate men based on their height but men can't judge a woman based on her weight, even though one is a mutable characteristic and the other is immutable.
For a woman, a lot of her social status and worth does stem from her appearance. To insult a woman's appearance, or to even rank her lower relative to her peers in terms of attractiveness, is to denigrate her very existence. Their looks determine who they get to date, who becomes friends with them, and how people treat them. A woman's academic or athletic ability relative to her peers is not as important since women aren't competing with each other on the basis of academics or athletics, especially when it comes to the dating market. Also, women are more neurotic and take these things more personally than a man would. A man that complains women call him ugly would be labeled a loser and an incel. A woman complaining is a victim that needs protection, and being a victim (only for women and minorities) gives you social brownie points nowadays.
Notice it's not really men pushing against this sort of ranking, it's mostly women. The only men that do are male feminists or men who have to criticize in lieu of reputation harm.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
2hr ago
But the ECHR does caveat hate speech, dangerous speech and so on
Yes, that's what "no right to free speech" means.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
19hr ago
While I am sure that there is some antisemitism, I'm annoyed by this being the standard for whether people that are trespassing, camping illegally, detaining others illegally, and so on are worthy of condemnation. I really don't even care whether what the mostly peaceful protestors are on about, whether I agree with them just doesn't actually play into whether I want them to knock off the nonsense. If you're trying to camp in a park, cops should show up and inform you that you that you're not allowed to do that. If you insist on doing it anyway, they should arrest you and remove your stuff from the park. The idea that the basics of evenly enforced law are up to whether the scofflaws are antisemitic or not is absurd (and plainly anti-constitutional).
Stellula
17hr ago
I'm honestly getting sick of hearing the word 'antisemitic' as if this is some major moral standard that matters. It is honestly starting to make me...anti-semitic.
I'm a Catholic. If I were to imagine s/anti-semitism/anti-Catholicism/ for all of these things I keep hearing from official government sources, or from the news media (but I repeat myself, hey, oh!) it would just make me laugh. Imagine Karine Jean Pierre starting off her daily press briefing by talking about the "concerning rise of Anti-Catholic sentiment in The United States" or how "Anti Catholicism is never acceptable" or can you imagine the congress passing a law condeming "anti Catholicism" or changing some educational standard to make it so that public schools were required to teach students that Mary was born without original sin?
You know something funny happening in my neighborhood: there is some kind of Jewish center here for students. Since October 7th[1], there has been a police officer posted outside of this building every day, seemingly 24 hours a day. And yet, my house, 2 blocks away, routinely has things stolen from the yard, has had people attempt to break into it, etc. My Church, a few blocks away again from this Jewish student center, has had to put up a large fence, and get our own security to watch over things during mass. What the hell is going on here?
This stuff is ridiculous to me. Yes, don't hate the Jews for being Jewish, but also...you can absolutely criticize anybody for anything; this is America. This is one of our founding ideas.
[1]: I hate having to constantly say this, but October 7th was probably the most horrific thing I have ever seen. Just maximally horrible and brutal. I get why the Israelis want revenge for this. I just don't think I should have anything to do with it, and don't think I should be funding it.
plural
1hr ago
Yeah, and it shouldn't matter either way. If you think it's important to tease apart the minutiae of this example in defense of something that is clearly not pornography then I'll take this conversational detour as an agreement that people deciding that things need to be censored or banned based on a passing familiarity with the content should be ignored.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
3hr ago
English law doesn't even recognize that concept; the US's notion of protecting it was a reaction to it being non-existent.
Later nations gesture vaguely at the concept, but if it's in their law, it's always explicitly prefaced with "unless we really don't want to".
Trump got rid of the worst excesses of Title IX, which Biden just made even worse with a (literal) vengeance. Did you pay attention to that one?
This "trump never did anything so don't support him" thing bothers me coming from liberals because it's transparently dishonest. Just say "I'd rather have Biden's "misgendering-is-a-crime" Title IX policy" than try to trick people into thinking there's no difference.
Quantumfreakonomics
7hr ago
Much like the SAT requirement rollback, I suspect what happened was that internal metrics/vibes were so laughably bad that everyone started to hate it. Nobody actually wants to read that drivel anyways.
NullHypothesis
3hr ago
“People do not have a right to feel comfortable in their ideas. This is a university. This is a place to challenge people’s ideas. Discomfort is not the same thing as danger.”
Interestingly this statement is said by a pro-palestine student protestor. The previous time I heard this sentiment was from conservatives criticizing universities for being too left-leaning/left-biased. The question is, would this student be just as supportive if someone came to their school to push far-right talking points? The difference between the two is that one side has far too many proponents of its idea explicitly calling for the death/genocide of another group and the other side gets their views and ideas framed as violence and calls for genocide. Also, in my opinion, the universities have been far too tolerant of one but not the other.
It's only tolerance if you tolerate the intolerable. It's only freedom of speech if you support the speech of those you disagree with the most. At the same time, is it morally/ethically inconsistent to choose to hold people up to their own standards?
MaiqTheTrue
Zensunni Wanderer
1hr ago
I mean ideally people should be aware of the issues around network security to the point of being able to make reasonable decisions on whether a given networking device is safe to use much like they do every day with other devices and vehicles and activities. No one looking at a lot full of cars doesn’t make sure the car has airbags and seatbelts and antilock brakes. That’s not a super deep understanding of automotive technology, it’s pretty basic. And in home network security I think you should know enough to look for the basic security features. I wouldn’t buy a networked baby monitor that didn’t have at minimum password protection and encryption. I’m not an expert but I know enough to know that unencrypted information can be viewed by anyone with the appropriate receiver and that a device not protected by a fairly strong password is open to hacking. I think people are treating PNP devices differently than they treat other similar devices. It’s not that they are incapable of due diligence, it’s that they see computer devices and the systems around them as too complex to understand. They aren’t.
As a topic expert (despite myself, embedded is both fun and hell) I did not want and continue not to want any government standardization of software because:
- I know they'll fuck it up, because they fucked it up before
- It's the one high paying career left that you can bootstrap yourself into with just smarts and a computer, no expensive certification and years of guild dues needed
- It opens the door to further regulation of what I'm allowed to do with compute, and I happen to enjoy my freedoms
- I see no demonstrated need for intervention that can't be addressed by private society
Just make IoT doodad manufacturers liable for bad things that happen with them and the problem will sort itself out, no state intervention with the potential for universal surveillance and totalitarian control needed.
The real reasons people want to do this shit are economic and strategic, they don't like that the Chinese are beating everyone at the doodad game and want protectionism through the backdoor. It's the same reason you can't easily buy American ETFs in the EU, because they don't care to include the handful of made up documents that are mandated by law at the advice of European financial institutions that enjoy proximity to the rule makers.
Let us not mince words: nobody gives a shit about the end user here. This whole game of being "regulatory leaders" only works if the major players of the industry you are regulating actually want to help you prevent further competition.
You can have protectionism and regulation if you want, but you can't get that and innovation. You have to choose.
I genuinely cannot think of a single "smart" device that has made my life better but it's easy to think of a ton that have made my life a little bit worse. This isn't a privacy or security thing. The devices are genuinely pointless and annoying. We recently unplugged our Alexa because it was pointless and annoying. There was probably a week where I could come up with contrived tasks for it to help with so I could pretend it wasn't completely stupid. I'm tired of tech people telling me I need this or that and making it impossible to find a house in the Bay Area with a normal boring thermostat. It's an immense treat that the used grill I just bought has no electronics built in.
The best argument for IoT devices was that they were a lot cheaper than normal devices because a VC was spending some pension fund's money to "build market share."
orthoxerox
I realized I can change my flair color to Barbie pink
3hr ago
Rudy did everything right.
Supah_Schmendrick
4hr ago
Yeah, where else in history has a populist, vernacular, radically anti-clerical, vegetarian, dualist form of Christianity that denied the literal truth of the eucharist ever popped up? Clearly with the death of the Cathars all prospects for a pacifistic, gender-egalitarian Christianity died forever and for all time.
netstack
Texas is freedom land
12hr ago
MIT no longer requires diversity statements for faculty hires.
Allegedly. The only sources I’ve seen covering this are not exactly paragons of journalism, citing emails rather than anything public. MIT’s own website still describes the practice in glowing terms. I am curious whether the general population of MIT staff—the ones maintaining their websites—is in favor of this change, or if any of them were consulted.
Assuming this is credible, let’s make some predictions.
- social media backlash: guaranteed.
- news backlash, a la NYT: high. This is red meat for opinion columns, as evidenced by the fact that conservative outlets are already crowing about it. But maybe I’ve misjudged, and no one in the mainstream actually cares?
- policy reverted: low. I predict a whole lot of nothing. The people who most care about this are less likely to have leverage over MIT. If it does get rolled back, I predict it’ll be downstream of administrative drama within the school.
- policy spreads to other elite universities: medium? I have no idea which way the wind is blowing. Outlets are trumpeting their preferred conclusion. But I suspect this is going to be localized.
Irrelevant. Obviously, people can choose to regulate something specific away. The question is whether there has been "any" innovation in "any" other industry (that is, the non-bits ones that have more regulation). Unless you're claiming that the US has no regulation on the oil/gas industry, the shale revolution, which literally has changed the world at a geopolitical scale, is a huge counterexample.
But there are many others. Space X. Ozempic. Etc. It's really hilarious to have all the huge techno-optimists, who think that AI and tech more broadly is going to revolutionize literally everything, and at the same time, they imagine that the tiniest amount of regulation on fucking light bulbs will grind literally everything to a halt.
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