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Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

I recently heard of yaslighting, which is where instead of convincing someone their true beliefs are delusional, you affirm their delusional beliefs and convince them they're true.

Seems to apply to a lot of things (especially transgenderism) but what I have in mind is college degree choice. Plenty of female-oriented degrees such as psychology, behavioral science, speech pathology, etc. require a Masters in order to really start working in the field. Seemingly, most of the people who study those majors just aren't aware of this.

I'm unsure whether these women just haven't googled the most basic facts of the career they'll spend their next 4-6 years pursuing, or whether they're semi-deliberately deluding themselves. My guess is the latter. If you're going to college to get married, you need to look like you have your own ambitions. Pursuing a highly-educated mate just isn't a respectable goal for women anymore.

My mother is one of these women. The way she describes it, she finished her Psychology bachelors and only then realized it would take another couple years to make a career out of it. She's extremely smart, conscientious, and logical. I can't imagine her as someone who would just forget to look into these things. During that time she married a man who would go on to become very successful, and I think that (marrying a good man, that is, not necessarily a rich one) must have been the ultimate goal all along, whatever she told herself in the process.

I'm starting to see a similar phenomenon among my siblings. My brothers have laid out step-by-step plans for college and their eventual careers. My sister just wants to study Psychology because it's interesting. None of them would breathe a word about the different expectations between the genders--the topic is somewhat taboo--but they nevertheless have Gotten the Message and are all pursuing seemingly effective strategies optimized for their gender.

My wife and I have broached the subject of Psychology careers a couple of times with my sister, and she seems actively disinterested in thinking it through. I expect she, like my mother, will get married sometime during or just after her Bachelor's degree, and claim she was unaware she needed a Master's to turn the major into a career.

This is all well and good. I find myself continually amazed at how good normies are at unconsciously separating reality from social reality and smoothly living by them both without acknowledging the contradictions. The problem arises when someone doesn't get the message and thinks the social reality is the reality, that men can "study what you enjoy" for 4 years in college with no lasting impact to career prospects or marriagability, or that women can do the same without searching for husbands and things will work out for them.

My wife is a teacher. Most of her coworkers fall into these categories. Some are men who pursued useless degrees and now work as aides. Others (the school's speech pathologists, behavioral interventionists, psychologists, etc.) are women who didn't end up getting married during their Bachelor's, and now are working very slowly towards Master's degrees while working.

American culture gets a lot of things wrong, but imo nothing so badly as gender roles. We encourage women to overeducate, in the process aging themselves out of the possibility of having children, and depriving the next generation of those who could have been their smartest and most capable mothers. It is seen as empowering and feminist to socially pressure women into denying one of the most natural human impulses, that of having and raising children, so that they can get more educated and make more money.

Telling men to pursue fun degrees (creative writing, film, political science, etc.) rather than lucrative ones is like telling them to wear makeup and wait to be asked out by women. It's a fundamental denial of reality. Those who follow such advice will generally have drastically reduced romantic success. Their prospects will be fewer, worse, and less happy to marry them than they would have been otherwise.

Telling women to not look for husbands in college, and focus on education, is similar, though its results manifest in different ways. Such women will (as they get more educated) grow increasingly unable to find comparably "impressive" partners. Many will remain single, sleeping around but never committing, while a few will "settle" many years down the road. Neither situation is great for raising a family.

Sometimes the people in the middle are hardest hurt--those who haven't bought into the modern secular ideology or the trad religious one. Women who don't go all-in on their careers, but also don't actively seek out husbands in college, and so end up in dead-end jobs with whatever mediocre husband they end up with.

American tfr fell to 1.62 in 2023, its lowest rate ever, and is even lower among our most intelligent and conscientious. Financial incentives meant to correct this in places like Finland and Turkey have accomplished very little overall. The problem is not financial, it is cultural and legal. People need to think of advice like "study your hobby and things will work out" as a malicious lie meant to signal a luxury belief. Motherhood needs to be far more prestigious than any career. Couples need to be allowed to mutually agree to contracts incentivizing them to stick together.

The truth is and always has been the truth, but more people need to be made more consciously aware of it. If women want large families, they need to start before finishing their Master's. I burned a lot of credibility with my immediate family getting married as young as I did, and sacrificing my social life and physical health to be financially ready for children quickly. This was the right decision, but it pains me to say I probably won't be able to convince them to do the same until after the crucial window has passed. I hope to convince you, though, or if you are already convinced, to offer you some ammunition convincing those you care about.

For the vast majority of people, the quality and quantity of their children will have far more of an effect on the future than anything else they could do. If you like being alive, and/or find it meaningful, it is likely your kids will too, and bringing them into the world to experience the joy of existence is an enormous gift you have the power to offer them. Less important, but still significant, 71% of Americans are happy with their decision to have children, or wish they had more, while only 10% wish they had less.

Whether for selfish or selfless reasons, having children early is the right call for most people, but our culture has conducted an enormous yaslighting campaign to prevent this from happening until it's too late.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

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).

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

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:

In the final regulation, the Commission includes abortion in its definition of “pregnancy, childbirth, or related medical conditions,” as proposed in the NPRM and consistent with the Commission's and courts' longstanding interpretation of the same phrase in Title VII. The Commission responds to comments regarding this issue below. Preliminarily, the Commission provides the following context to clarify the limits of the PWFA.

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.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

It's been a long time since we've discussed Trump, and there have been a number of developments in the court cases against him, and so I'm here to say that our long mottizan nightmare of peace and tranquility is finally over.

Florida

CNN: Federal judge indefinitely postpones Trump classified documents trial

Trump's trial in Florida over classified documents has been indefinitely postponed. (Jack Smith had requested it start the day after Trump's New York trial ended.) It turns out that new revelations made in documents Trump's lawyers requested have upended the case. CNN doesn't elaborate on what happened, for which I'll turn to this story:

Prosecutors admit key evidence in document case has been tampered with

“Since the boxes were seized and stored, appropriate personnel have had access to the boxes for several reasons, including to comply with orders issued by this Court in the civil proceedings noted above, for investigative purposes, and to facilitate the defendants' review of the boxes,” Smith’s team wrote in a new court filing to U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon.

“There are some boxes where the order of items within that box is not the same as in the associated scans,” the prosecutors wrote.

Smith’s team in a footnote also conceded it had misled the court about the problem by previously declaring that the evidence had remained in the exact state it had been seized.

“The Government acknowledges that this is inconsistent with what Government counsel previously understood and represented to the Court,” the footnote said.

It turns out that when the government alleged that Trump had classified documents he was not supposed to have, the government itself did not accurately know which documents Trump had, or which documents Trump was even supposed to have. Actually, worse than that, it turns out they fabricated some or all of the accusations. For instance, that famous picture of classified documents with cover sheets raided from Mar-a-Lago? It turns out those documents didn't have cover sheets, the FBI staged them before photographing, and they didn't even correctly label all of the documents they supposedly took:

The DOJ's Doctored Crime Scene Photo of Mar-a-Lago Raid

“[Thirteen] boxes or containers contained documents with classification markings, and in all, over one hundred unique documents with classification markings…were seized. Certain of the documents had colored cover sheets indicating their classification status. (Emphasis added.) See, e.g., Attachment F (redacted FBI photograph of certain documents and classified cover sheets recovered from a container in the ‘45 office’).”

The DOJ’s clever wordsmithing, however, did not accurately describe the origin of the cover sheets. In what must be considered not only an act of doctoring evidence but willfully misleading the American people into believing the former president is a criminal and threat to national security, agents involved in the raid attached the cover sheets to at least seven files to stage the photo.

In order to prove Donald Trump had documents he wasn't supposed to have, the goverment took documents Trump had (that the NARA gave him in mislabeled boxes) and added cover sheets for photographs to them.

Whoops!

Judge Cannon has indefinitely postponed trial while Jack Smith's prosecutors work out answers to the questions posed by all these new revelations.

Georgia

CBS: Georgia appeals court will review decision that allowed Fani Willis to stay on Trump's Fulton County case

News-watchers will remember that, several months ago, it turned out that Fulton Prosecutor Fani Willis was hiring her secret lover to work on the Trump election fraud case. He was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars while they dated and went on vacations together, for which she insisted (without evidence) that she always paid him back. This posed a serious concern of misconduct and the risk that Fani Willis would be forced off the case entirely. After weeks of wrangling, Judge McAfee ruled that Willis could stay on the case, as long as Nathan Wade did not. Trump's team appealed the ruling, and now, the Georgia Appeals Court will hear the decision:

The court's decision to grant Trump's appeal will likely delay the start of any trial, though no date has been set for it to begin. The case in Fulton County is one of four Trump is facing as he mounts a third bid for the White House. His first criminal trial is currently underway in Manhattan, where local prosecutors charged him with 34 counts of falsifying business records. He pleaded not guilty to those charges.

Re-hearing the Fani Willis conflict of interest decision might lead to a repeat of the earlier hearing, where Fani repeatedly shouted over the courtroom and judge:

Fiery DA Fani Willis loses it on lawyer during misconduct hearing: ‘Don’t be cute with me!’

“It’s a lie! It’s a lie!” Willis screamed into the microphone, prompting Judge Scott McAfee to immediately call a five-minute break.

[...[

Willis told Merchant she was “extremely offended” by the implication that Willis slept with Wade after her first time meeting him at a conference in October 2019.

Earlier in proceedings, witness Robin Yeartie — a former employee in the DA’s office who claimed to be a longtime friend of Willis’ — said she had “no doubt” that Willis and Wade were already romantically involved in 2019.

So the question of prosecuting Trump over the 2020 election in Georgia will have to wait until it's determined how much of a liar the prosecuting DA might or might not have been.

New York

This trial is the juiciest of all, as it is currently in session in New York, with the judge threatening to have Trump locked up:

CBS: Trump held in contempt again for violating gag order as judge threatens jail time

Judge Juan Merchan said Trump violated his order on April 22 when he commented on the political makeup of the jury.

"That jury was picked so fast — 95% Democrats. The area's mostly all Democrat," Trump said in an interview with the network Real America's Voice. "It's a very unfair situation, that I can tell you."

In his written order, Merchan said Trump's comments "not only called into question the integrity, and therefore the legitimacy of these proceedings, but again raised the specter of fear for the safety of the jurors and of their loved ones."

Trump has promised, in interview and social media post, that he's willing to go to jail for exercising his First Amendment rights to criticize Judge Merchan, having said in April that it would be his "great honor" to go to jail for violating Merchan's gag order.

The issue really stems from Trump's accusations of political bias in the New York courtroom. The gag order was imposed after Trump attacked Merchan's daughter for working for Democratic fundraisers:

Dem clients of daughter of NY judge in Trump hush-money trial raised $93M off the case

Two major Democratic clients of the daughter of the judge overseeing Donald Trump’s hush-money trial have raised at least $93 million in campaign donations — and used the case in their solicitation emails — raising renewed concerns that the jurist has a major conflict of interest.

Another such example is that one of Bragg's prosecutors working the case is Matthew Colangelo, who left the #3 position at DOJ under Merrick Garland to work the Trump case:

Daily Mail: REVEALED: New PROOF the anti-Trump prosecutor in hush money trial is a 'true believer' in Leftist 'lawfare'... as Matthew Colangelo is exposed for taking thousands of dollars from Democratic party

In December 2022, Colangelo, the high-flying third most senior official in President Joe Biden's Justice Department, astonished colleagues by packing his bags and leaving for the Big Apple to take a less senior role working for Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg.

Judge Merchan himself, it turned out, donated (a small amount) to the Biden campaign:

Judge Juan Merchan, who is overseeing Trump case, donated to Biden campaign in 2020

The state is arguing, in effect, that Trump, by paying Stormy Daniels in 2017, falsified business records that should have rightfully been marked as a campaign contribution, and thus constituted a conspiracy to undermine the 2016 election. The count of falsifying business records is a misdemeanor under New York State Law, but can be elevated into a felony charge if the business records were falsified with the intent to commit another crime. Curiously, Alvin Bragg has alleged that Trump falsified business records to commit another crime, but has not charged him with committing any other crimes:

The New York Case Against Trump Relies on a 'Twisty' Legal Theory That Reeks of Desperation

Ordinarily, falsifying business records is a misdemeanor. But it becomes a felony when the defendant's "intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof." Bragg says Trump had such an intent, which is why the 34 counts are charged as felonies.

Bragg had long been cagey about exactly what crime Trump allegedly tried to conceal. But during a sidebar discussion last week, Colangelo said "the primary crime that we have alleged is New York State Election Law Section 17-152." That provision says "any two or more persons who conspire to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means and which conspiracy is acted upon by one or more of the parties thereto, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor."

In other words, Bragg is relying on this misdemeanor to transform another misdemeanor (falsifying business records) into a felony. But the only "unlawful means" that he has identified is Cohen's payment to Daniels. And while Cohen pleaded guilty in 2018 to making an excessive campaign contribution by fronting the hush money, Trump was never prosecuted for soliciting that contribution.

Section 17-152 has never actually been prosecuted to this effect, so the case is entirely novel. New York is arguing, in effect, that Donald Trump engaged in a conspiracy to undermine the 2016 election by falsifying business records in 2017.

This case is a hot one as it is currently in trial, and will likely be resolved with a few weeks. The question of whether the jury can be unbiased in such conditions is ongoing.

I will omit Trump's last criminal court case, the January 6th case run out of DC, as it is currently pending on a Supreme Court decision as to whether Presidents can even be tried for official acts in the first place, which would throw the whole case back down to the lower courts to disentangle which of Trump's actions on January 6th constituted private action. It goes almost without saying that, if Trump were elected in 2024, he could have the authority to fire Jack Smith and derail both this case and the documents case in Florida.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

Your post has many at best misleading statements and characterizations. I'll try to discuss just one I'm familiar with in some depth:

Ends “Catch and Release” and formalize the “Remain in Mexico” policy.

tl;dr: Both of these claims are simply wrong. No, it doesn't end "catch and release," i.e., quickly releasing people waiting for their immigration hearings. There is a whole section which describes catch-and-release, i.e., "non custodial removal proceedings" and funds it with billions a year under "alternatives to detention" expansion. Not only does it not end it, it mandates supervision under "alternatives to detention" in situations like an adult border migrant who meets initial screening criteria. And it doesn't even actually require "alternative to detention" supervision either.

For context, Congress in the mid 1990s amended the Immigration and Naturalization Act to make release of people encountered at the border more difficult. Border migrants were detained unless there was a specific showing on an individual basis their release was necessary due to "urgent humanitarian reasons or any significant public benefit" which historically going back decades meant a high bar almost all would fail to meet. Border patrol encountering border migrants had two options; normal removal proceedings or an expedited removal process. Border migrants in either process were to be detained until their hearing, unless they met the strict requirements for release waiting for their process. Trump enforced this strict requirement for release in the US (release on parole) or they could be released and away the removal process outside the country (remain in Mexico). This policy under current law was upheld.

The Biden administration in July 2021 decided to issue an order which essentially required the border patrol to release border migrants under section 212(d)(5)(A) of the Immigration and Naturalization Act (which they did within ~15-30 minutes, see Florida v. US). "Urgent humanitarian reasons or any significant public benefit" meant almost all migrants would now qualify for release. Florida sued and won, the policy was knocked down. The Biden administration came out with a nearly identical policy two months later. Florida sued and won. This went up on appeal and was affirmed at the circuit level. The Biden admin continued along with essentially the same policy and same result anyway.

So, let's move on to this bill. The bill expands release on parole under the expedited removal process. It adds new categories, it adds new discretionary authority to the DHS secretary, it makes "urgent humanitarian reason" into an essentially subjective criteria of the DHS secretary. Instead of formalizing the strict language which was used for decades, it sets out that precedent as its own exception and then adds discretionary authority to the secretary of the DHS to determine what that separate vague language means (a DHS which has argued in court that climate change may satisfy this language). It doesn't even close the one "catch and release" door the Biden admin is currently abusing!

The most damning part for any claim the bill ends "Catch and Release" is that it adds a (b) subsection to section 235 which creates "Provisional Noncustodial Removal Proceedings." Under 235 (b), the DHS Secretary has broad discretion based on undefined "operational circumstances" to require any migrant making an asylum claim to go through this process and mandate release. Unlike the expedited removal proceeding under current law which mandates detention of most asylum claimants, 235 (b) mandates noncustodial supervision under the expanded "alternatives to detention" program which means they will be released. And even then, "alternatives to detention" supervision is not actually mandatory either! The bill allows mandatory release of any border migrant under 235(b) for up to 90 days before any determination whatsoever is completed (currently, the CBP is required to perform an asylum screen before any action is taken). It still gets worse! Any border migrant who failed to be given a "protection determination" within 90 days - there are over 1,000,000 cases on backlog for just initial "fear" screenings before AOs right now - are released and eligible for work permits immediately, and automatically passed on to end review. Wow! This subsection essentially codifies broad swathes of the Biden administration "Asylum Officer" regulatory scheme which is currently in court and likely to lose also.

It is honestly ridiculous to claim this "Ends 'Catch and Release.'" It does no such thing; a hostile administration will not only not be required to stop catch and release, but they're given new tools to justify catching and releasing any migrant found on the border and even mandate it in certain situations!

If you want to argue otherwise, please tell me the exact part of the bill which actually forces a hostile administration, one which has for years ignored court rulings by making slight changes to catch-and-release policies, to stop releasing border migrants into the United States? "We're not doing catch and release, we catch them and then quickly release them under an expanded program which releases them but under government supervision, but also we don't have to do that either" isn't ending catch and release.

The only way this bill ends "catch and release" under a hostile administration is that the Asylum Officers stamp "approved" on every asylum claim and let out the new residents with automatic work permits into the United States.

Trump swoops in

One, illegally allow in tens of millions of people into the United States; two, trick the (hopefully) absolute morons in the GOP to pass a "compromise bill" which allows a hostile administration to staff a army of bureaucrats which can more quickly adjudicate asylum claims under a "more strict" standard (it's really not) than one which could be adopted by executive fiat and then quickly stamp "approved" on large percentages of the illegally released people who now get automatic work permits. And it would have worked if it wasn't for that stupid Trump who is just so bad, doesn't care about immigration or the country, and opposes it because he just doesn't want Biden to get a win. And thank God for that.

Passing that bill would have been unfathomably stupid strategy to reduce illegals and unfathomably stupid politics at the same time. GOP voters and supporters will recognize this bill as a deep betrayal and failure and will refuse to show up in the 2024 election guaranteeing a Trump loss as well as losses in the House and Senate. It also gives your opposition a win on their worst subject and gives slight truth to media mouthpieces to claim Democrats addressed their worst subject. "Well, I tried" but am still horribly failing and polling about the topic is horrible is in fact much worse than "I got landmark immigration bill through Congress" in terms of electoral strategy.

This bill is so unfathomably stupid and/or duplicitous, I wouldn't be surprised if it actually did come from the desk of a GOP Senator. Yet another example of "is the GOP this dumb or this smart?"

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

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.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

Government Programs Should Have Legible Budgets

This kind of rule may come across as obvious, pointless, or doomed depending on your perspective.

There is an impulse among many to see a problem in society and turn to government for a solution. I strongly disagree with this impulse. But I also think that these people and myself could come to terms on some shared "rules of engagement".

To start we should agree on some basic things:

  1. There is an unlimited number of things people might want to "fix" about our society, but a limited amount of resources to spend fixing such things.
  2. There should be a way to determine how many resources we want to spend fixing a particular problem.
  3. Paying to fix the problems should be done in a fair and above board way. (i.e. reverse lotteries where you randomly get fucked over are bad).

There are many devils in the little details, but what these three basic things suggest is that there should be: A set way of collecting taxes. A budget using those taxes that pays out to various social causes. The determination of that budget can be debated upon in some agreed way (maybe by electing representatives to a 'congress'). And that all social programs must go through this set of procedures.

To address the criticisms:

"This is pointless we already do things this way."

Sometimes governments do it this way, sometimes they don't.

The Americans with Disabilities Act does not follow these rules. Private individuals are given the ability to sue other private individuals to provide accommodations for them. The threat of getting sued also encourages a lot of preemptive work on the part of companies. How much does all of this suing and preemptive work cost? No one knows. How much will it cost you to provide for people with disabilities? Maybe a standard amount. Maybe you'll be one of the unlucky ones that gets sued in a new novel interpretation of the law and you'll win a reverse lottery.

How much do you think it is worth it to help disabled people in this country? It seems like a valid political question, but right now the American Government is basically on a blind autopilot path. It cannot know how much is spent. It cannot control how much is spent. And it cannot work out more lucrative and appealing deals for edge cases.

A little while ago (maybe a decade) some university (maybe MIT) decided to put all of their classes online for digital consumption, for free. Sometime later they were forced to take down the entire archive, because they were not subtitled, and a deaf person could not access them. The deaf person wanted them all subtitled. Subtitling a free online resource would have been too expensive and not worth it. So they were instead just removed for everyone. This is the kind of problem that a competent government middleman can solve:

[In the alternative universe where the ADA creates a government middleman agency for solving disability issues.] Each deaf person is allotted $5,000 a year to solve for their disability. They can choose to spend this on hearing implants, or on paying towards having some work transcribed. If enough deaf people want a thing transcribed it gets done. No business owner or non-profit is suddenly held hostage. No single person or entity is stuck paying enormous costs. Things aren't removed from public consumption just because a disabled person can't access it. We know how much is spent on deaf people per year. Medical companies that want to solve or fix a disability have a clear customer market for potential solutions.

This is doomed people would rather have the costs hidden and less obvious.

As I said above, sometimes the government does follow the good set of rules. I'd consider an agency like NASA a good example. The American people give some vague indications of how important they think space science and exploration is to their elected representatives. Those elected representatives can talk with the scientists, engineers, and managers at NASA to determine if maybe there are some important research projects that the general public doesn't know about but might want if they did know about it. NASA's budget is paid through taxes and is a clear line item on the federal budget. For the last two decades NASA has been about 0.5% of the federal budget. Which sounds vaguely correct to me in proportion to how much Americans care about funding Space related stuff.

The cynical reason why I believe that programs have hidden or "laundered" costs is that I don't believe voters would be actually willing to fund them if the true costs were obvious. If a party has a temporary political victory the best the best way to leverage it is through hidden and laundered costs. Pass a medicare act that doesn't really change the rules until you are out of office. Pass a civil rights act with murky enforcement that can be slowly ratcheted up every year.

Despite politicians doing this pretty often, I don't think it is what voters actually want. There is a huge amount of frustration from people over these sorts of policies. Hanania's book the Origins of Woke kind of blew up one of these issues recently. But they are all going to become problems, because when you remove the funding control from government there is no funding control. There is no countervailing force to push down the costs of these various programs. And the only way to get rid of them is often just destroy them altogether. So while people might have supported the ADA if it was 1% of the budget, they might start getting pissed at the program when it balloons up to 10% of the budget and a bunch of reverse lottery sob stories start showing up in the news. And suddenly instead of 10% or even 1% of the budget, you get 0% for your cause and no one trusts you with a 1% allotment cuz they will all remember the horror days of 10%. I don't know how likely a full reversal to 0% is for any of these policies. But that seems to be whats on the table as far as alternatives go.

There is also an ongoing legal weakness to many of these policies. Now that the supreme court is mostly conservative it could start invalidating different laundered cost schemes that have been liberal policy staples for decades. Affirmative action has taken a hit. Paid housing for the homeless might get hit next.

Conclusion

In general I think we should be suspicious of any public program that tries to hide its costs, or launder those costs onto private actors. Anything that expands the scope of things that one individual can sue another for is laundering costs. If you want a social program done or accomplished, you need to be willing to raise taxes and pay for it. If voters can't stomach raising taxes to pay for a particular social program, then too bad! Nothing is free. Start comparing the costs and fighting for them in the agreed upon battlefield.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

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.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

The use of the classified cover sheets in that photo does many things

  1. It provides a lot more visual impact than just classified documents with markings.

  2. It gives the impression that it would be obvious to anyone who casually looked in the box that it had classified documents. This is important because "knowingly" is an element of some of the charges.

  3. It effectively substitutes the FBI's CLAIM that the documents were classified for the actual evidence of classification.

  4. Since the classification markings on the pre-printed cover sheets didn't have to match those on the documents, it provided the impression that the documents had perhaps a higher classification level than they did. For instance, the NPR story claimed one of the cover sheets said "UP TO HCS-P/SI/TK", leading them to believe Trump had documents related to HUMINT. I thought at the time this was odd, you don't put "UP TO" on your caveats. But it makes perfect sense for a placeholder that might be used for a wide range of documents you might find. And given that, there might well have been no HUMINT at all; the placeholder is not evidence.

  5. Since the narrative accompanying the photo in court filings did not reveal that the cover sheets were added by the FBI, it constitutes an attempt to prejudice and/or mislead the court (as well as the public)

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

The Muslim Ban was rejected by courts twice, and only a watered down version passed on the third attempt.

I think you're missing key info on the legal fight here. You're presuming the courts are some neutral arbiter here, but there was major forum shopping. All three versions were before the same judge in Hawaii who issued injunctions blocking all three. The judge was a personal friend of Obama an Obama flew out and had lunch with him after he was assigned the case. The 9th wasn't going to overturn so it was blocked until it got to the SCOTUS.

Immigration hawks noticed this and decided that they could forum shop too. So the lawsuits against Biden's policies were all filed in Red friendly districts.

Which goes back to a key point of the bill you left out. All lawsuits would need to be filed in the notoriously politically corrupt DC courts. Future Republican Presidents would likely be blocked from ever using the Border Emergency Authority. All new asylum requirements would be watered down as too strict.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

In case there's any question left about the press's lack of objectivity, the CNN article you cited -- article, not editorial, not column -- contains this bit:

The move by Cannon is a significant win for the presumptive 2024 Republican presidential nominee. The proceeding will give Trump and his attorneys a platform to air unfounded theories about the prosecution, including the accusation that it is politically motivated.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

I would wager that the point of this story is to shame Australian men in such a way that they fear male camaraderie. The story creates a fearful negative association with male solidarity, as when men get together they often discuss women. If men in a Western country decided to form male-only groups, this poses a problem to feminism — which then poses a problem to globalism and progressivism. The act of men getting together to judge women would greatly reduce feminism, promiscuity, all sorts of things, which may be seen as problematic.

Anyway, if Australia wanted to tackle gender violence, they need to do something about their aboriginal problem, because they are “32x more likely to be hospitalized due to family violence”. Next they would want to study their Somalian population, and possibly reduce all migration from that country. After that, eliminating alcohol culture would be the best big step.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

I think your last paragraph gets to the heart of the matter. Attractiveness is tied very tightly to status, particularly for women. When men are ranking women's attractiveness, their rankings are pretty close to openly articulating the status rankings of the women in question - ranking someone last in a group is basically the same thing as just outright saying, "I think she's a loser and not worthy of the same respect as the other women". When this is done with people are members of a near-group (or worse still, a friend-group), it's a fairly aggressive action to take. On the flip side, this is why ranking celebrities can be fun even in a mixed-gender group - no one has to be personally invested in it in the same way. Of course, everyone basically knows where they stand anyway, but it's rude to say it outright! If you had a group of guys where one buddy was unathletic and low-income, everyone in the room would know he's low status, but it's still a dick move to explicitly point it out.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

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:

  1. I know they'll fuck it up, because they fucked it up before
  2. 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
  3. It opens the door to further regulation of what I'm allowed to do with compute, and I happen to enjoy my freedoms
  4. 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.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

Fun fact - women are way way more critical of other women's appearance than men. In men's category waist, normal weight, clear skin - and you are stable 7. I had some of my female circle declare a 20 year old, tall, blonde, cute, normal weight, nice ass, blue eyed, B-C cup that I was interested in as completely unattractive because of her - wait for it - slightly bigger than average nose. She was also very nice/polite and smart.

And they will tell me that we are objectifying women. Yeah right.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

Australian boys make spreadsheet of girls attractiveness, national media, federal minister and state premier rush to condemn them. I'm pretty surprised this got any media attention, doesn't it seem trivial? This all happened on some discord server, it's not like they were parading it around. Does anyone think this would happen in their country?

It reportedly ranked female students from "wifeys", "cuties", "mid", "object", and "get out" to "unrapeable".

The school flagged notifying police about the list and looking into whether using the term "unrapeable" constitutes a threat, The Age reported.

I can't see how 'unrapeable' could possibly be a threat. Saying someone is vulnerable could be a threat, calling someone invulnerable is not... OK it's very rude, suspend the ringleaders - do police need to be involved? There's a certain level of hysteria here, you get the sense that the male principal fears for his job unless he takes this as seriously as humanly possible.

Allan said her thoughts are with the young women, who have received counselling at Yarra Valley Grammar.

It would be pretty crushing to be labelled unrapeable or 'get out' by your male peers, though I don't see how a counsellor could help.

Context: Australian media and govt have been panicking about male-on-female violence for a few weeks now. We recently had a mass stabbing by a mentally ill man, who targeted mostly women. Accordingly, male on female violence has increased statistically and the government has thrown a lot of money at various NGOs.

The Yarra Valley Grammar incident comes as the federal government last week announced nearly $1 billion of funding towards tackling violence against women, which has been labelled a "crisis" of "epidemic" proportions.

Additionally, there has been a lot of concern about Tate corrupting the minds of the youth. So this lets the media hit two talking points at the same time.

Merry said Yarra Valley Grammar holds "respectful relationship" classes but because of mixed messages on social media, "young boys get it wrong".

A related matter - youtuber argues that ranking women's attractiveness upsets the Byzantine system of female intrasexual competition, where every queen is praised as a 10/10 regardless of ugliness. I found the video pretty decent albeit a few minutes longer than it needed to be. It features the infamous Gorlock the Destroyer claiming to be a 10/10 (sarcastically?), which does make you think. There might be something to it - ranking women by attractiveness seems more dangerous than one might naively imagine.

In the male-dominated patriarchal society of the distant past, accusing men of being bastards or having incorrect lineage was a very serious matter. Legitimacy and preventing cuckoldry was deeply important to men, it informed the whole structure of European politics, inheritance and succession. Perhaps in the emerging future it's female sexual dynamics that will take priority and we'll see more of this kind of thing.

Premier (woman): "This pattern of violence against women — not only does the act of violence have to stop, but these displays of disrespecting women. Like, it's just disgraceful."

Lèse-majesté: an offence or defamation against the dignity of a ruling head of state or of the state itself.

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 29, 2024

Antisemitism is definitely increasing in the US on the left and right. But I don’t see it becoming central to politics for a few reasons.

The first is that the last time there was major antisemitism in European countries (including the US) Jews were the most ‘visible minority’ with any political power. Blacks in the US had no political power and this was in any case before the majority of the great migration to the northern cities had occurred. Today whites are far more likely to have issues with other minorities than Jews.

The second issue is that the right and left approach antisemitism from completely different angles. As the speech you quoted from the AmRen conference down thread suggests, the problem the hard left has with Jews is that they’re too white, and that this quality is what makes Israel an ‘apartheid state’ and ‘white supremacist’. The problem the hard right has with Jews (if they have a problem with them) is that they’re not white enough, that they advocate against ‘white interests’, undermining European civilization from within.

These views are fundamentally opposed; black nationalists and white ones can agree on their contempt for Jews but will quickly disagree on what is owed to black people. Islamists and white nationalists can agree on hostility toward Jews but will quickly disagree on the status of brown and black migrants from Islamic countries in the West. And white nationalists and some far leftists may agree that some wealthy or influential Jews support progressive policies in America but ethnonationalist ones in Israel, but their desired resolutions to this hypocrisy are literally diametrically opposite to each other.

The only theory that makes sense is the argument, advanced in some white nationalist circles, that without the leadership and financial contributions of Jewish people the organized left and center-left would crumble. I don’t find this persuasive; progressivism in the West was a powerful force long before the large scale involvement of Jews in politics and many European countries with very few Jewish people involved in political life still have large, influential, gentile left-leaning political factions that also support all the stuff that angers reactionaries.

What’s the point of the weird opinion canvassing you do here? You’ve been banned like ten times for hmmposting as @sarker said yesterday. I don’t even mind your presence because I think you post some interesting discussion points, but I wish you’d be honest about why you’re doing it.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

Departments will tend towards policies that let them do it, like stacking all the product in one spot. But does that make the drug bust illegitimate?

If the gold-plated guns were actually props (not recovered in the bust), it at least risks poisoning the jury pool. And that photo wasn't actually just a publicity photo -- it was included in a court filing by the Justice Department, so it also IMO constitutes an attempt to prejudice the court.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

The "placeholders" are part of their strategy of trying the case in the media, e.g.. Not just the visual impact of the cover sheets, but media people (including NPR in that article) using the caveats on the placeholders (provided by the FBI) to show what a horrible thing Trump did.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

I know it's hopelessly, comically naive, but I'm still just kind of blown away that this ever became a thing. There is probably nothing that marks me as more of a 90s lib than thinking that the appropriate answer to, "what will you do for diversity, equity, inclusion?" has always been, "I promise to embrace the quality of work that any potential student does without regard to their race or gender, I care about physics, not skin color". That this became not only unacceptable, but a sign that someone is actually quite racist is just absolutely amazing and completely irreconcilable with a university caring about merit.

I suspect that serious technical institutions are more likely to scrap these things for exactly that reason. You can't DEI your way to being able to do math, physics, or chemistry that actually works. Other departments are perfectly safe to keep using these political statements though - sociology departments produces can net-negative knowledge, there is no requirement that they ever do anything that actually works, and nothing about their funding relies on that changing.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

If the weather seemed especially treif/haram this weekend, it is probably due to all these flying pigs. The guardian published an article on antisemitism in the US student protests which actually tries to be somewhat balanced.

They acknowledge that there have been unambiguous incidents of antisemitism.

Then there are gems like this:

“There is a distinction between being unsafe and feeling uncomfortable. It’s very notable to see the discourse around this issue because the right in this country that’s been talking about woke culture, and how young people are snowflakes, are suddenly adopting this narrative around safety, which is really a narrative around comfort,” he said.

“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.”

Of course, if issue one is "a work of literature containing rape" and issue two is "an Israeli student encountering protesters who say stuff like 'Zionists don’t deserve to live', I have my own ideas which of these I would classify as "making one feel uncomfortable" versus "making one feel genuinely unsafe".

Even so, Norman Finkelstein, the Jewish American political scientist who is a strong critic of Israel, advised the protesters to reconsider the use of slogans that can be used against them. Finkelstein went to Columbia to praise the students for raising public consciousness about the Palestinian cause but he advised them “to adjust to the new political reality that there are large numbers of people, probably a majority, who are potentially receptive to your message”.

[...]

Once Finkelstein has finished speaking, a protester took the microphone and led a chant of “from the river to the sea”.

I think that this illustrates nicely how most of the protesters are in it for the signaling value. This is not uncommon, after all, many things we do are mostly for the signaling value. My own position that Israel should do more to minimize civilian casualties while they crush Hamas is probably something a majority of US voters could get behind, but boy is it lackluster from a signaling point of view. A student protester expressing this opinion would not get any respect for their bravery from their peers. On the other hand, calling for an intifada might be utterly devastating to the aims of the protests, but it will earn the one expressing it a lot of respect for being so brave and likely get them laid.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

It's yet one more of these irregular verbs.

I defend myself.

You air unfounded theories about the prosecution.

He is held in contempt of court for raising the specter of fear for the safety of the jurors and of their loved ones.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

Another aspect of Australian life in which feminist ideology is given an outsized influence is this list of video games banned there, which doesn't cover even all cases of questionable Australian censorship authorities decisions. Atelier Totori was in other jurisdictions given at most a T rating, was in Australia rated as 18+, with the justification famously being "High Impact Sexual Violence". Some are RC'd due Australia's drug prohibition extending to fiction, but others for depiction of apperence of minor sexuality. Determination of who "appears to be, a child under 18" is subjective and fraught with many issues including racial bias, as a 25 old Anglo is on average more visually and vocally distinct from a 15 year old Anglo, than a 25 year old East Asian is from a 15 year old East Asian. Anime artstyle compounds this problem as it has less age indicators than a realistic one, meaning that if one determined to get a game or anime banned, it is harder to find evidence characters are of age.

Hilariously there have even been cases of works of art intended to viewed by women, such as "otome" games, deemed to be offensive to what is thought to be an interest of women as a class, Refused Classification and thus banned.

Further evidence of its feminist alignment is the censorship of materials of adult materials, featuring confirmed adults, if by some arbitrary criterion they are deemed to look too young. Why is this evidence? Because men do but women do not place a premium on youthful features.

As for the alleged mass murder of women epidemic in Australia: in 2022 and 2023 (ignore the irrelevant graph which depicts only a subset of homicides, look at the table) 168 men and 72 women were murdered there. "World Ends, Women Most Affected" doesn't capture the extent of pro-women bias in what is deemed relevant by the media, at least this (obviously ficticious) headline implies both men and women were harmed in equal measure, the present scare takes the less victimized gender and makes it the primary victim.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

My annoyance with some of the other issues here aside, what exactly do they imagine is to be done about the supposed epidemic of women being targeted for violence by men? Is there really a generalized belief that the problem is insufficient scolding or insufficient laws targeting this variety of crime? Men killing women seems to have basically two main categories - partner violence and random violence from serial killers or impulsive psychopaths. The latter variety is about as looked down on and prosecuted as reasonably possible and the only thing you can really do to go even farther is being quicker to lock up psychopaths and never let them out of institutions. Partner violence could maybe be addressed by being quicker to lock up men found guilty of these sorts of violence. I quite literally cannot imagine that a more scold-heavy culture would improve either of these.

If you want to lock up obviously violent men, that's fine, the broader right will probably be happy to work with you on that. Be prepared for the usual socioeconomic splits though - this is mostly not actually a problem of posh teenagers snapping and killing their girlfriends. If you're not willing to lock up violent people, there is pretty much nothing else that's going to have any meaningful effect.

Culture War Roundup for the week of May 6, 2024

Women carry around a nagging anxiety that their own existential authenticity is always in doubt; there is an unresolvable neurosis over the possibility of being reduced to a mere biological function. The fear is that all the rhetoric about girl bosses and shatter-prone glass ceilings and a more egalitarian future really is, at the end of the day, just rhetoric, no matter how many Emmy Noethers and Angela Merkels and Jane Austens dot the pages of our history books.

A man may be a scoundrel and an outcast and a criminal, but at least these are proper symbolic roles - they require the attribution of human agency. If your identity is fully coextensive with the biological function of reproduction, then the worry is that this makes one more object than human - more like the scaffolding that supports the stage, rather than a proper player in the drama.

This is why the threat of "objectification" carries such a sharp sting. I would be so bold as to speculate that this is, in some sense, a trans-historical feature of femininity as such - the division between the human as rational agent and the human as embodied biological organism almost demands a group of people who fall on the wrong side of the divide - and therefore cannot be assuaged by any amount of empirical evidence that women are in fact capable of leading much the same types of lives and engaging in the same sorts of intellectual pursuits as men are.