Thursday Open Thread

What's on your mind? [UPDATE: The thread and its comments have returned from an inadvertent bit of time travel.]

Comments

[ObviouslyNotSpam]

Have a nice day!

[Martinned]

You too!

[Mr. Bumble]

Nice thought, so thanks, but participating in VC comments will soon turn a nice day sour.

[AnonymousHoward]

Where I'm from, when people say that they mean the opposite

[Nelson]

I thought that was "Bless your heart".

[Longtobefree]

Don't tell me what to do!

[apedad]

"Have a nice day!"

Maybe I don't feel like having a nice day. Maybe, just maybe, I've had 63 nice days in a row. And, by God, I'm ready for a crappy day. Let someone wish me a crappy day. I never hear that. "Have a crappy day!"

(Most of you know who said this!)

[ObviouslyNotSpam]

If it makes you feel any better, I didn't mean it.

[not guilty]

The Manhattan District Attorney's office is seeking a protective order to prohibit Donald Trump from publicly disclosing materials which will be produced by the State in discovery. The motion asks that the defense be able to use discovery materials only for trial purposes and that Trump view the evidence only in the presence of his lawyers.

Trump's lawyers have opposed the State's request, reportedly asserting that “The People’s Proposed Protective Order infringes upon President Trump’s First Amendment right to freely discuss his own character and qualifications for federal office and the First Amendment rights of the American people to hear President Trump’s side of the story.” https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-lawyers-urge-judge-hush-money-case-not-muzzle-rcna82339

Trump of course has a First Amendment right to discuss the pending criminal prosecution, but that right does not include "an unrestrained right to disseminate information that has been obtained through pretrial discovery." Seattle Times Co. v. Rhinehart, 467 U.S. 20, 31 (1984). "A litigant has no First Amendment right of access to information made available only for purposes of trying his suit." Id., at 32.

[ObviouslyNotSpam]

If that is the normal rule, it's fine with me. No special rules for special people...

[Mr. Bumble]

...but is it the "normal rule"?

[not guilty]

Donald Trump is asserting a First Amendment right which controlling legal authority says he simply does not have. Neither does any other litigant.

[Armchair Lawyer]

That's a civil case, not a criminal case that you cited. Criminal cases may have different rules. In the so called "court of public opinion," not allowing one side to talk about the case is distinctly unfair.

[not guilty]

A distinction without a difference. While the Court in Rhinehart construed Fed.R.Civ.P. 26(c)(, it did not limit its discussion of First Amendment principles to civil cases. See, e.g., United States v. Caparros, 800 F.2d 23, 25 (2d Cir. 1986) (dictum).

Fed.R.Crim.P. 16(d)(1) provides that "[u]pon a sufficient showing the court may at any time order that the discovery or inspection be denied, restricted, or deferred . . ." The Supreme Court has recognized that in a criminal case "the trial court can and should, where appropriate, place a defendant and his counsel under enforceable orders against unwarranted disclosure of the materials which they may be entitled to inspect." Alderman v. United States, 394 U.S. 165, 185 (1968). SCOTUS has authorized state trial judges in criminal cases to "take such steps by rule and regulation that will protect their processes from prejudicial outside interferences. Neither prosecutors, counsel for the defense, the accused, witnesses, court staff nor enforcement officers coming under the jurisdiction of the court should be permitted to frustrate its function." Sheppard v Maxwell, 384 U.S. 333, 363 (1966), quoted with approval in National Broadcasting Co. v. Cooperman, 116 A.D.2d 287, 290, 501 N.Y.S.2d 405 (N.Y. App. Div. 1986).

[Armchair Lawyer]

That's limiting discovery, not limiting discussing items from discovery.

[Michael P]

From Alderman:

None of this means that any defendant will have an unlimited license to rummage in the files of the Department of Justice. Armed with the specified records of overheard conversations and with the right to cross-examine the appropriate officials in regard to the connection between those records and the case made against him, a defendant may need or be entitled to nothing else. Whether this is the case or not must be left to the informed discretion, good sense, and fairness of the trial judge.

Is your argument that Alvin Bragg's Office has something like J. Edgar Hoover's files on dissidents and activists, and the only thing stopping Trump from revealing that data collected in violation of the Fourth Amendment is this gag order?

[Brett Bellmore]

I think the odds of Bragg having been engaged in a bit of parallel construction are pretty good.

[Nelson]

Based on?

[not guilty]

"Is your argument that Alvin Bragg’s Office has something like J. Edgar Hoover’s files on dissidents and activists, and the only thing stopping Trump from revealing that data collected in violation of the Fourth Amendment is this gag order?"

Uh, no, that is not my argument. But thanks for asking.

[John F. Carr]

The nondisclosure order sought by the prosecution is uncommon but not unprecedented.

[Brett Bellmore]

Alternatively, he could ask that the gag order be extended to the government. This being rejected would clarify the situation a bit...

[not guilty]

What is proposed is not a gag order. As in Rhinehart

[A] protective order prevents a party from disseminating only that information obtained through use of the discovery process. Thus, the party may disseminate the identical information covered by the protective order as long as the information is gained through means independent of the court's processes. In sum, judicial limitations on a party's ability to disseminate information discovered in advance of trial implicates the First Amendment rights of the restricted party to a far lesser extent than would restraints on dissemination of information in a different context.

467 U.S. at 34.

[Armchair Lawyer]

Again, civil, not criminal.

[Brett Bellmore]

Conversationally speaking, a court order that you can't reveal something IS a "gag order", whether or not that's the specific legal terminology.

And I think he should have gone for an order making the prosecution subject to the same limitation. Since we know damned well that anything obtained by compulsory process that makes him look bad WILL be leaked.

[Armchair Lawyer]

The difference in the cases here is pretty stunning.

So, the case ng cites is a civil case between a newspaper and a religious organization. The Newspaper had been printing all sorts of stories about the religious organization.

The organization sued for defamation. Then the newspaper tried to get all sorts of discovery in the lawsuit, including items tangentially (if at all) related to the lawsuit. Discovery can be broad. The organization tried to suppress that, because it could expose its members to threats of violence and death, not to mention the reputational damage.

In this case, by contrast, it's a criminal case. Trump would likely want to release information about his own case that was favorable, especially in the context of the current campaign. Discovery isn't as broad as it is in a civil case.

Very different circumstances, civil versus criminal actions....the two aren't comparable.

[not guilty]

See my response upthread. Do you have any authority indicating that the protective order sought by the prosecution exceeds the authority of the trial court? The motion discusses the relevant statutory criteria. https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/23789460-20230423-ps-protective-order-motion_redacted17

[Michael P]

That motion does not even suggest limiting the protective order in the ways that the Supreme Court says courts must apply (according to the case you cited).

[not guilty]

The Supreme Court has not said that a trial court must take any particular prophylactic measures. Whether to do so in a given case is in the first instance a matter for the trial court's discretion, based upon a threshold showing of good cause by the party seeking the restriction.

[tkamenick]

"shouldn't order it" and "beyond the court's authority" are two very different arguments. I don't see anybody making the second argument, but that's the one you are responding to.

[David Nieporent]

The two sides are not parallel. The government is already operating under significant restrictions on pretrial statements; if it leaks too much, it risks any resulting conviction being overturned.

[Armchair Lawyer]

"The government is already operating under significant restrictions on pretrial statements"

Aside from one of the prosecutors on the case publishing an entire book about it. Aside from that...

[Alpheus W Drinkwater]

After Pomerantz resigned from his position, I don't think he still qualifies as "The Government."

[David Nieporent]

And before there was any prosecution at all. That was the whole point of his book!

[Armchair Lawyer]

I know this all sounds good to you in your head, but...

If one of the prosecutors on an investigation leaves the government, then publishes a 300 plus page book on an ongoing investigation, for which charges are brought soon after...just maybe there's a problem.

When the DA sends a letter to the publisher urging it not to publish, noting the prosecutor (who just left) violated NDAs and the book could "materially affect" the investigation...maybe there's a problem. (Curious there was no lawsuit. Perhaps this was a CYA move).

But to curiously allow all of this...unprecedented...level of public notice on an active prosecution (and yes, technically it was just an investigation that was released just before the official indictment). Then say the defense can't release "anything" in public they find in discovery...

Well, that's some crooked justice.

[Alpheus W Drinkwater]

Even if all that is true, it doesn't show the government not operating under significant restrictions on pretrial statements. In fact your third paragraph shows just the opposite, that the government tried to stop the book being published because of those restrictions.

[Kazinski]

What’s Brag got to hide?

There’s a big difference between discovery in a private lawsuit where proprietary and trade secrets might be disclosed and a public official trying a case.

There is no public interest in keeping any questionable conduct by a public official secret.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Kazinski, is it your view that a legitimate prosecutorial interest is not a public interest?

[Kazinski]

God no.

I hope you aren't arguing that prosecutors are forces of goodness and light.

I see prosecutors as the "people's pit bull" to be set upon the wolves, curs, and varmints that plague law abiding people.

But the problem is they frequently get off their leashes.

[Bored Lawyer]

"The motion asks that the defense be able to use discovery materials only for trial purposes"

Since trials are public, hard for me to see how there is a confidentiality interest here.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

It seems that some posters return again and again to the same subject. Why can’t I do it, too?

So let’s take a look at the jackbooted thugs of the duopoly parties trying to stamp out possible competition. Arizona edition:

“One new party, No Labels, gathered enough signatures to put candidates on the ballot in 2024. Another new party, Forward, is starting to gather signatures to get ballot status….

“Soon after No Labels gained ballot status, the Arizona Democratic party sued to try to get it removed. Democrats overall have been more vocally concerned than Republicans about these incoming centrist parties, fearing they will peel off votes from the left and spoil races for Democrats.”

Votes cast for the duopolists are *already* spoiled.

“In its lawsuit, the Arizona Democratic party alleges No Labels isn’t following requirements for political parties and didn’t follow laws for signature-gathering, so it shouldn’t be recognized as a party in the state.”

What exactly happened to the secret ballot? By having voters proclaim their preference for a party (or for having that party as an option), these voters are subject to harassment by Demcratic operatives and others. If you want to measure a third party’s support, why not measure it at the ballot box itself?

“Arizonans deserve better and voters deserve to know who is behind this shadowy organization and what potentially nefarious agenda they are pushing,” the Arizona Democratic party spokesperson Morgan Dick said when the lawsuit was announced.”

The duopolists are afraid these sinister third parties will undermine the Republican/Democratics’ squeaky-clean record for transparency and openness.

“No Labels said it “is not running and will not run a presidential campaign”….

“Tony Cani, a Democratic consultant, said the third parties would serve more to hurt Democrats than dismantle a two-party system, though he understands voters’ interest in ending two-party dominance.

““The problem is adding minor parties doesn’t put an end to a two-party system,” Cani said. “It just creates new minor parties that will end up with the same chance of winning elections as the Libertarian and Green parties.””

Cani doesn’t have clean hands. If he’s so confident that third parties are simply a minor irritant, why doesn’t he let them on the ballot, instead of moving heaven and earth to keep them off? He’s the descendant of those Democrats who didn’t mind if blacks were disenfranchised, because benevolent whites were looking after their interests. Don’t worry if they’re suppressing voting rights for those exploring third party options, the two major parties are looking after them.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/apr/25/arizona-third-parties-2024-elections

[Stephen Lathrop]

Margrave, I see your advocacy remains undaunted—not to say oblivious—in the face of demonstrations that unlimited ballot access in the real world has been used to thwart cynically efficient use of the sovereign People's power to exercise constitutive control of government. Indeed, to thwart that power is an apparent motive behind some folks' demands for open ballot access. Is that where your advocacy comes from?

Note that I do not ask that question from the point of view of someone who contends your duopoly objections are without justification. I just wonder if you are willing to expand the scope of the discussion a bit.

[ducksalad]

You have a talent for taking severely authoritarian positions using mild, civilized-sounding words.

The underlying argument, stated in plain words, would not be surprising coming from someone like Erdogan or Khameini: “Allowing this opposition party will undermine democracy.”

The apparent motive of these moves to disenfranchise Greens, Libertarians, and now the No Labels party is the same as every other disenfranchisement effort: desire to retain and concentrate power, intolerance of dissent, and contempt for the electorate.

Your turn...

[Stephen Lathrop]

ducksalad, what you call a “talent,” is nothing of the kind. It is a choice. On all questions touching on sovereignty, the issue of severely authoritarian implications is one everyone must be prepared to cope with, or to reason around.

Try to understand that when I use, “sovereign” or, “sovereignty,” or mention, “the constitutive power,” I do not intend to touch on milder questions which conflate government power and sovereign power. Twenty-first century lawyers do make that conflation often. To them, “the sovereign” becomes shorthand for government itself.

References to looney delusions that every individual is entitled to be treated as a king in himself are also right out. I am never advocating for or about anything as crazy as the sovereign citizens movement. I leave that nonsense alone entirely.

Because I am not a lawyer, I generally try to steer clear of questions where lawyers’ expert knowledge will likely trump anything I have to say. Thus, I make reference to sovereignty instead in its classic historical context, and in its related political philosophy context—subjects on which thoughtful people are more equally equipped to speculate and reason together.

In those contexts, the very question of absolute arbitrary power becomes the subject. In those discussions, if you are not talking about sovereignty as power to make decisions at pleasure, without constraint by anyone, you have wandered off topic.

To properly regard any true sovereign, including the joint American popular sovereign, is to concede that notions of personal rights, or legal procedural protections, or government powers, or separations of powers, or constitutional commands and restrictions, all lie downstream from the topic under discussion. All such considerations lie within the purview of the sovereign, acting at pleasure, to decree.

That capacity for power unlimited by anything except geographic extent establishes what is commonly called the constitutive power. It includes powers to make a government, to constrain it, to decree rights for citizens, to protect and perpetuate its own power, and to create and defend a nation. It is, in short, the power announced by these familiar words:

That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

As I hope you can see, that is mild language with ferocious implications—as it was intended to be. As members of the joint popular sovereignty which made that decree—and which claimed explicitly a continuing and continuously active unchecked power—it sometimes happens that we have need to discuss among ourselves subjects important to us.

If while doing that, we yield to a presumption that government, or the constitution which we ourselves decreed, or anything else, can constrain either our discussions or our capacity to act, then our power to act at pleasure is gone. At that point the language cited above no longer applies to us, and we have ceased to be sovereign.

You write:

The apparent motive of these moves to disenfranchise Greens, Libertarians, and now the No Labels party is the same as every other disenfranchisement effort: desire to retain and concentrate power, intolerance of dissent, and contempt for the electorate.

Do you mean to impute that motive to government or to the sovereign? If you impute it to government, then I agree with you. For government to act in that way would be to interfere in exercise of the constitutive power, and to commence an illegitimate contest with the existing sovereign. If that happens, then the sovereign should use its power to correct and constrain the government.

But to understand that cannot imply that a sovereign can be similarly limited. The sovereign must be the ultimate judge of the methods used in elections. If it is a wise sovereign, it should choose election methods calculated to apply its power efficiently, and to forbid other methods if they interfere.

Thus, your, “contempt for the electorate,” formulation is less than helpful, because it is less than precise. Taking, “the electorate,” as reference to the sovereign, you have presumed a course of wisdom ahead of the sovereign. Otherwise you seem to be calling for actions by government which threaten to encroach on sovereign prerogatives.

Your mention of tyrannical figures as references for comparison suggests either confusion, or a low opinion of the joint American popular sovereign. I think it is the latter.

I judge the situation otherwise. I think the American sovereign is as legitimate as any which ever ruled. I suggest wisdom lies on the side of keeping American sovereignty going as it has been.

That is not an objective which in this case of conflicting interests could be served by an attempt to influence government to make election policy decisions which rightly belong to the sovereign. Nor could it be served by asserting paradoxically that the sovereign itself be in some way constrained. There are big and difficult questions in play.

Thus, whether attempts are constructive or cynical to add to the ballot a Sweet-and-Low Party, or a Giraffe Party, or what have you, is thus a question the sovereign ought to decide by decree—presumably some kind of constitutional decree to take care of the question in a general way.

On the face of it, resistance to present efforts to get other parties on the ballot can rightly be attributed to private interests of government office holders, trying to guard personal power which a gift of office from the sovereign has bestowed upon them. I think the sovereign should disapprove that conduct among its government, and figure out some way to deny them agency to protect themselves in office.

Likewise, I think it likely that various new party advocates vary in their motives. The more constructive among them, the sovereign should find a means to encourage. The cynical among them, are rightly understood to be on the same course—and ought to get the same treatment—as the government officials who the sovereign ought to constrain.

How to make all that happen ought to be understood as a major problem, and one to be addressed by sovereign means, not by government means.

I wish this could have been shorter. But folks unequipped to understand a discussion at this length would only be worse served by shortening it.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

I tried to understand all that…I reallly did!

Let’s look at some of your remarks which I *think* I understand.

“if you are not talking about sovereignty as power to make decisions at pleasure, without constraint by anyone, you have wandered off topic”

Then I’m happy to wander off topic – which is just as well since I’m not sure what your topic is.

To repeat a comment of mine on another thread – I thought the sovereign here was “we the people of the United States.” The sovereign established various elective federal, state and local offices and specified their qualifications. The sovereign also set up republican (small r) forms of government – so insistent was the sovereign on this point that it gave the feds the duty to secure a republican form of government to the states. Qualifications for voters were also established.

In a republic, the qualified voters select elected officials from among those qualified to hold the offices. I am not aware of any decision by We the People to make membership in a duopoly party a qualification for office.

“On the face of it, resistance to present efforts to get other parties on the ballot can rightly be attributed to private interests of government office holders, trying to guard personal power which a gift of office from the sovereign has bestowed upon them.”

Sure looks like that to me.

“I think the sovereign should disapprove that conduct among its government, and figure out some way to deny them agency to protect themselves in office.”

The sovereign already did that by fixing the qualifications for elective office and providing for the qualified voters to do the electing. No mention of any party or parties having a presumptive entitlement to these offices.

[ducksalad]

Well, thanks for putting effort into this.

One can’t dispute your argument that the sovereign is not accountable to a higher authority, that’s built into the definition.

Later, though, you engage in a bit of finesse – and to be fair, it’s one that the authors of the Declaration of Independence, and even the estimable Margrave of Avila engage in. You talk about the sovereign (Thomas Jefferson and the Margrave talk about the People) as if it’s some unitary entity that has will power, makes decisions, and can take on duties. I suppose that’s true in the case of a monarch, but otherwise it’s anthropomorphizing.

When one pulls out the Revolutionese-to-English dictionary, one finds that “the People” in plain English really means “Us, not Them”, or more bluntly, people who agree with the speaker. Sometimes it’s a conscious bit of cynical manipulation, more often it’s just trying to wish away the brutal fact that different people want different things and some of them are against the whole damn project, whatever it might be. They might be persons but they aren’t the People.

In 1776 the People didn’t include loyalists. For socialists, the People does not include the wealthy – Bernie’s slogan was literally “People not Billionaires”.

To be fair, sometimes it’s just shorthand for “a majority”. But that’s circular. Who are the People? The majority! Majority of what? The People!

This was addressed by Ilya Somin sometime back in an op-ed titled “Why democracy can’t be democratic all the way down”. The boundaries of who counts as the People have to be established before you can even have the first election, or even have the meeting where you decide how you’ll decide.

But I’d settle for easier and unbiased ballot access . We could defer the revolution and violent redefinition of "Us" to some other time.

[Stephen Lathrop]

ducksalad, you are right to zero in on what you call the question of, "finesse," because getting past that as a stumbling block is a formidable obstacle for many. It is a problem neither simple to explain, nor convenient to analyze in detail. And yet it remains crucial to master, because attempts to bypass it result in intellectual mishaps which confuse interpretation of American constitutionalism.

The problem is that the founders—almost all of them, not just the ones you named—intended reliance on the, "anthropomorphism," (or perhaps it is a reification) you criticize as the keystone of American constitutionalism. Take that out and the constitutional structure they built, and which we still attempt to rely upon, collapses.

Or, to choose another metaphor which also aids insight, if the sovereign is the intended head of government, to suppress the notion of an active sovereign lops off the head, and delivers a decapitated constitutionalism—which turns out to be a constitutionalism full of paradoxes and self-contradictions. Those disappear almost as if by magic after you put the head back in its proper place.

Which is a general way to describe what happens if you first read the Federalist Papers with an eye to casual modern American political philosophy, which mistakenly puts government itself at the peak of American constitutionalism, or instead read them as the founders did, with an all-powerful and continuously active sovereign in place, as the principal power to determine American constitutionalism, to constrain government, and to decree rights for persons.

In the former case, paradoxes crowd in, for instance, a government which is the chief threat to the rights of persons, and at the same time their only recourse to vindicate rights. In the founders' view you cannot have a limited government without a power greater than government's to impose the limits. You cannot have personal rights to stay the hand of government, if you do not have access to a champion which wields an active power greater than government's to compel the government to stand aside.

The Federalst Papers, replete as they are with references to the people, cannot be read accurately by anyone who supposes those references were intended as mere window dressing. If you try it you stumble into one confusion after another.

In short, the nation began with the anthropomorphism you object to in place—the notion of a continuously active joint sovereign composed of the American people. A great deal of the founders' design of government relied on it being there, and relied on it to function thereafter as it had at the time of the founding. That notion of a power greater than government's justified the revolution, it legitimized constitutional decrees, and it was left to underpin the notion that changes when needed would be addressed by a power capable to master the needs.

That problem, with all the difficulties you mention, is one of the principal themes underlying Hobbes great pioneering work of political philosophy, Leviathan. Even the famous frontispiece (if you look it up, be sure to find an image you can enlarge) designed by Hobbes himself expresses in one astonishing graphic the dilemma and paradox you refer to—something it is able to do especially well because it presents a reconceptualization of one of the most consequential monarchs in history.

Toward the present end of the era stretching from Hobbes to now is another great book on a related topic, historian Edmund Morgan's, Inventing the People—a book less philosophical in tone than Leviathan, but likewise grounded on the notion of experience. Morgan, too, wrestled with the perplexities you mention.

It may not satisfy you to hear this, but what you imagine as a dilemma and a difficulty—to identify the sovereign People with precision—is less imposing than you suppose. It is a problem which never occurs. There may be a sovereign, or there may not be a sovereign. But if there is one, the sovereign proves it by its absolute power to rule. If you encounter a power capable to rule at pleasure, you can hardly be in doubt about its identity. Or if you think you are in doubt, by that uncertainty you commence a contest for power, which will be decided not on the basis of philosophy, or on the basis of ideology, or on the basis of politics, but instead on the basis of which party can wield power sufficient to defeat the other—or more mercifully to correct the other.

To help understand what I have said so far, consider multiple sources of legitimacy. As a matter of both political philosophy and experience, sovereign legitimacy is decided by the test of power to rule at pleasure. Government legitimacy is decided by obedience to the sovereign. The brutality inherent in that is relieved a bit by a notion founded in experience that sovereign power depends on the extent to which the sovereign's subjects are content to be ruled by the sovereign, defend the sovereign, and make the sovereign's objectives their own. If you get that, you no doubt anticipate problems which could arise in practice. But you grasp generally the structure of nationalism as Hobbes might have viewed it.

And it was that structure with which the American founders began. But with one brilliant twist they improved it. They minimized the problems by making the people themselves jointly sovereign. Thus was forged an unbreakable bond between the peoples' own well-being, and the sovereign's power. Sovereign power abused to the detriment of the sovereign's subjects became likewise a detriment to the sovereign's power itself. It was an idea which revolutionized political philosophy world-wide.

But without the joint popular sovereign, actively in place, wielding power greater than government's at all times, it is an idea which cannot work. Take an active, all-powerful role for the people out of it, and you are back to the turbulent war of each against all, and a quest to escape it. In that predicament you must find an all-powerful ruler, to whose mercies you surrender your rights—and no doubt more—in a trade for protection.

There are other political ideologies out there which offer more accessible promises, touting governments founded not on power, but on reason, or on contracts, or on divine protection, or on pre-existing abstract principles from nowhere. To show that systems such as those accurately describe the experience of any real nations remains a challenge. The rule since the Enlightenment began has been nationalism built on either benighted sovereign power—wielded arbitrarily at the expense of subjects—or on other better systems based on joint popular sovereignties, modeled in at least some ways on American constitutionalism as it was designed by America's founders. We overlook that at our peril.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

“unlimited ballot access in the real world has been used to thwart cynically efficient use of the sovereign People’s power to exercise constitutive control of government. Indeed, to thwart that power is an apparent motive behind some folks’ demands for open ballot access.”

What a bunch of Orwellian gibberish.

And if you've been following my discussion on the issue, I don't support "unlimited ballot access," but *nondiscriminatory* access, so that the smaller parties get the same privileges as the Reps and Dems.

By all means have nondiscriminatory and reasonable "advertising fees" for ballot access, require parties (or independents) to organize a campaign committee with a treasurer, and have parties certify that their nominees were duly endorsed at a convention, and require candidates be qualified for the officers they're running for (age, residency, for example). If that's unlimited, I'm for unlimited.

[Noscitur a sociis]

What is discriminatory about Arizona's procedure for party recognition?

[The Margrave of Azilia]

Just from a quick glance, the requirement that the party run extra hoops getting signatures, plus people endangering their privacy and making themselves potential targets for harassment by publicly endorsing a party’s ballot access, not to mention that even if a party gets the necessary signatures, then (as here) a wing of the duopoly will challenge their ballot access anyway for failing to collect the signatures in the correct way.

Other than that it’s an ideal system.

[Brett Bellmore]

On paper, nothing. As a practical reality, they require you get at least 5% of the vote for Governor to maintain ballot access, which amounts to cutting off the first couple of rungs from the ladder after the favored parties have already climbed past them.

A party that's just starting out is unlikely to hit that threshold in its first couple of elections, which means that it has to keep expending large amounts of resources on ballot access campaigns, over and over.

The best analogy I can make is, allowing the 1st and second place runners in last year's marathon to enter this year's fresh and rested, while requiring everybody else to run a qualifying marathon to enter the real one... Arriving at the starting line already exhausted just as the starter pistol is fired!

[ducksalad]

That analogy makes the point very well.

But I'd take it one step further: it's not even the 1st and 2nd place runners from last year. It's more like the runners that were sponsored by the companies (Nike and Adidas) that sponsored last year's winners. Anyone not sponsored by those companies has to run the extra marathon qualifier.

It's not clear to me why the laws mention parties at all. In the US we vote for people, not parties. If there are going to be ballot access rules they should apply to people, not parties.

[SRG]

The appropriate democratic (sic) response would be for the Democratic party to press for ranked choice voting, while being unconcerned about minority parties.

[Nige]

There will never, ever be more than two parties until ranked choice voting is introduced. Please note you will still probably be desperately unhappy about the outcomes, because coalitions between parties are subjected to the same compromises and limitations as parties full of people from different ends of the relevant political spectrums. Overall, though it would be better.

[Brett Bellmore]

The counter-argument is that the major parties wouldn't have freaked out and thrown so many additional barriers in the way of 3rd parties, back in the 80's and 90's, if they'd actually been confident that 1st past the post was enough of a defense.

The truth is, 1st past the post means there can only stably be 2 parties, it doesn't guarantee they'll remain the same 2 parties. And that's what these defenses are all about.

[Sarcastr0]

Or, maybe, they didn't want spoilers, and getting at those votes helped them against their actually viable opponent.

Come on, Brett, you know the game theory here. No third part will last for long, unless it eats one of the other 2.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

“maybe, they didn’t want spoilers”

It’s no business of the legislature how many votes, and from whom, a third party will get. You’re just so used to the idea of legislatures being instruments for carrying out the will of the two major parties that you just assume it’s legisimate for them to fiddle with elections to make sure the votes come out right.

[ducksalad]

"No third part will last for long, unless it eats one of the other 2."

That's exactly what Brett said. The major parties fear a schism and the resulting realignment. Understandable but suppressing votes is not an ethical strategy.

[Sarcastr0]

If that's their fear, barriers to a third party don't seem the associated cure.

[EscherEnigma]

I mean, we could always have multi-seat districts with proportional voting.

[David Nieporent]

What exactly happened to the secret ballot? By having voters proclaim their preference for a party (or for having that party as an option), these voters are subject to harassment by Demcratic operatives and others.

Do you have any evidence that this has ever happened?

If you want to measure a third party’s support, why not measure it at the ballot box itself?

You've been told the answer to this question repeatedly. It's one thing to disagree; it's another to keep saying it over and over again.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

“Do you have any evidence that this has ever happened?”

It’s one thing to disagree; it’s another thing to remain so ignorant that you keep repeating the same talking point after it’s specifically been refuted.

Here’s Reason covering the NC Green Party’s travails, which I’ve repeately cited.

https://reason.com/2022/08/05/north-carolina-green-party-scores-major-win-in-ballot-access-dispute/

…and I’ve also alluded to facts such as these:

“But soon after these signatures were submitted, the Elias Law Group was able to get the names and addresses of those who signed through a public-records request. These Green Party supporters were then repeatedly called, texted, and visited at home by Democrat operatives and asked to sign forms to renounce their earlier signature of the petition….

“[Green Party supporter Janet] Nagel said an automatic dialer called several times, which she ignored because of the long pause before anyone spoke. But when she finally waited to see what the caller wanted, it was a woman who represented herself as with the Green Party.

“It seemed illogical,” Nagel said of a Green Party representative encouraging her to remove her support from the organization. “Why would she be telling me that? So I told her that it was not a correct assessment [that supporting NCGP means helping the Republicans], because people who would be voting for the Greens were not going to be voting for the Democrats. Then, as a non sequitur, and this was the part that really concerned me, she said, ‘So would you want to remove your name from the petition?’”

“Nagel, a senior citizen, said she then told the caller that they “should be ashamed of themselves for making these phone calls,” and the person hung up.”

https://www.carolinajournal.com/green-party-says-democrats-used-tricks-to-block-them-from-ballot/

I'll say this much about the duopoly – with their attitude toward gas as a form of energy, they may inadvertently outlaw gaslighting.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

“NC Green Party claims harassment amid pressures to be removed from ballot”

Tony Ndege said he received a call from someone claiming to be with the Green Party.

“This person proceeded to tell me and read the script about how if Greens are on the ballot, that’s the wording they’ve been using over and over, that we’ll be putting the democrats at a huge disadvantage,” he said.

Ndege provided CBS 17 with the portion of the call he was able to record:

Ndege: You’re calling to confirm whether or not I signed a petition for umm that, so umm. May I ask who you’re calling with? What organization? Is this, is this the green party?

Caller: Yes

Ndege: You’re with the Green Party?

Caller: Yes and we have you listed as wanting to get the candidates on the North Carolina ballot {inaudible}.

Ndege: So you’re calling as a representative of the Green Party?

Caller: As a volunteer, yes.

Ndege: Okay. Umm yeah, I did sign it.

Caller: Okay. Would you say you strongly support it or do you somewhat support it?

Ndege: I mean, I don’t think I’d sign something unless I strongly support it.

Caller: Okay. Well, thank you for confirming. Annual participation in elections is important. If the Green Party is on the ballot, it’ll take votes away from Democrats, giving Republicans a huge advantage. It will help them win North Carolina in 2022 and 2024. There’s far too much at stake to let this happen. Are you interested in asking to have your name removed from this petition or leave it as is?

Ndege: I’m confused, so if you’re with the Green Party, why are you asking to remove it. I’m sorry.

Caller: Yes, I totally under…

At that point the caller disconnected the call.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

https://www.cbs17.com/news/north-carolina-news/nc-green-party-claims-harassment-amid-pressures-to-be-removed-from-ballot/

[David Nieporent]

So that's your big example? Campaign robocalls? The RNC has been calling me dozens of times per month for money ever since I registered as a Republican in 2016 to vote against Trump. All without me signing any candidate petition. Like everyone else on the planet under the age of 80, I screen calls and so I don't answer them.

I thought you were referring to actual harassment. Like, "Oh, you support those people? I'm going to get you fired."

Pshaw. That's it?

[The Margrave of Azilia]

You missed the part where the callers misidentified themselves. And of course the home visits.

“RALEIGH, N.C. (AP) — A day after Connor Harney received anonymous text messages asking him to retract his signature from a petition to qualify Green Party candidates for the November ballot in North Carolina, he said unidentified canvassers brought their “attempts to interfere with democracy” to his doorstep.

“A woman claiming to represent the state Board of Elections appeared at his home in Fuquay-Varina in late June, a checklist of street addresses in hand, and repeated the request, he said.

“When Harney — a 31-year-old historian at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro — refused and questioned the woman’s affiliation, she left with a warning: If Green Party candidates gain ballot access, they could take away votes from Democrats…

“Harney is one of more than a dozen signers mentioned in the lawsuit who reported receiving intimidating messages, calls or home visits.

“These signers said some canvassers declined to identify themselves or falsely claimed to represent the Green Party or the elections board. Others said they were sent by the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee – the driving force working to elect Beasley and other Democratic Senate candidates nationwide.””

https://apnews.com/article/2022-midterm-elections-north-carolina-raleigh-government-and-politics-c7d57ad2f20fe42b7e509dd533b49bbe

[The Margrave of Azilia]

The stages of David Nieropont:

> It's not happening

> OK, it's happening, but it's just robocalls

> ...?

[BravoCharlieDelta]

"It has come to our attention that the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) possess an unclassified FD-1023 form that describes an alleged criminal scheme involving then-Vice President Biden and a foreign national relating to the exchange of money for policy decisions. It has been alleged that the document includes a precise description of how the alleged criminal scheme was employed as well as its purpose."

Weird how our non-partisan DOJ that to this day is still SWAT'ing non-violent J6er's won't seem to do anything about a Biden or an Epstein client.

So weird. We even have Garland perjuring himself before Congress to protect a Biden. Perjuring before Congress a few years ago was one of the greatest crimes one could do against our Sacred Democracy.

Weird how that's a total nothingburger of a crime again.

[not guilty]

BravoCharlieDelta, when material is placed in quotation marks, it is customary to include the source of the quote. I suspect that you declined to do so here for a reason.

[Mr. Bumble]

Glad the hall monitors are on duty .

[BravoCharlieDelta]

It's from the Senator's letter.

Of course you never heard of this, your braintenders forbade it.

[Moderation4ever]

What Senator?

[Mr. Bumble]

Grassley. Also by Representative Comer.

[Frank Drackman]

Ha! "Braintenders"
like it

[Commenter_XY]

Braintenders? Ok, that one was pretty good. Edgy, but not outright 'in your face' rude. I'll have to remember that one.

[Gandydancer]

On the internet it is customary to expect your readers to be, capable of using a search engine, which ordinarily makes turning up the source of an exact quote a trivial task, as it is in this instance. What’s your excuse for your determined obtuseness?

[Nelson]

If you want to make a point, do your own homework.

[Gandydancer]

You lost the thread, jackass. It was the person demanding a link who was refusing to do any homework.

[Nelson]

Nope. You said, "On the internet it is customary to expect your readers to be, capable of using a search engine". That's expecting others to do your homework for you.

On the internet, trusting that an anonymous poster has given you an accurate quote from a reputable source is sheer idiocy. If there isn't an attribution, smart money says it's either false, from an unreliable source, or both. If you want credibility, give your source. It isn't the reader's responsibility to verify your post.

[Commenter_XY]

Let's suppose this is true. POTUS Biden accepted money to explicitly change a regulation or a law. For argument's sake, assume it is true. So you're telling me it is a bribe, right?

Answer: How is it different from any Congress-critter (or state legislator) who takes money from donors because they want changes in regulations or laws?

Just look at the People's Republic of NJ. The People's Duma is bought and paid for by lobbyists in an ever-increasing number of financial schemes. It is madness. But evidently legal.

[Nige]

'It has come to our attention'

Doing a lot of heavy lifting.

[SimonP]

FD-1023 forms are records of interviews with sources, and nothing more. This particular form seems to have been generated in 2020 (i.e., under Trump's FBI and DOJ). Remember what Trump was doing back then? (Hint: he was trying to pressure the Ukrainian government to announce an investigation into Biden by withholding military aid.)

So all this may add up to is that one of Giuliani's "dirty trick"sters went to the FBI and concocted some allegations about Biden, with the intention of kicking off an FBI investigation that could result in some juicy October surprises (see also: James Comey and the buttery mails). Perhaps Wray (again, Trump's appointment, then and through the present) wasn't so easily motivated to turn up dirt for Trump's re-election campaign.

But leave it to Grassley, et al., to draft everything in such a way that gullible dupes like you will read into it exactly what they want you to believe.

These Republicans are so interested in investigating the politicization and weaponization of the FBI and the DOJ, but they keep coming up with things that Trump did.

[BravoCharlieDelta]

In 109 of the 125 federal agencies in Washington, the average employee salary is more than $100,000.

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average real median wage for the average employee was $54,339 in 2021.

That doesn't even consider total compensation.

Well, there are 58,000 employees at the FDIC—many of them auditors. Average salary? $160,000.

Meanwhile, 2023 has seen more bank failures than 2008.

In the Biden Administration 2022 payroll, 350,861 worker names are redacted. Under the Obama Administration, in FY 2016, that figure was 2,300. Stunning. ...Our auditors estimate some $36 billion worth of taxpayer-funded salary, benefits and bonuses are hidden from Americans. Even worse, they are headed to mystery people in mystery locations.

These are the top 5% rich elites who are the real ones oppressing us and while commies like Bernie Sanders and Obama are making bootlicking morons mad at the top 1% and getting them to demand those top 1% make the top 5% even more powerful and richer.

https://openthebooks.substack.com/p/seeking-daylight-on-the-administrative

My favorite part:

In March 2023, the Treasury Inspector General for Tax Administration found that “The number of delinquent Federal civilian employees has increased by 32 percent from Fiscal Years (FY) 2015 to 2021.” Some 149,000 federal employees owe $1.5 billion in back taxes!

So much for the Noble Civil Servant.

[Armchair Lawyer]

1a. Compare federal wages nationally to all wages nationally. Or pick DC Federal wages to DC wages.
1b. Don't pick a subset of federal agencies to compare to all wages.
1c. Don't mix median and average wages.

[BravoCharlieDelta]

The DC suburbs are the richest in Ameica. The only industry there is government.

We should compare the ruling class against the other classes

[Armchair Lawyer]

The DC suburbs are well off. Because of that, ironically, the Federal government adjusts salaries upwards, to account for the cost of living. (As do most other industries to be honest). There's a strong argument to be made for dispersing the headquarters of the various federal agencies. Put the FBI in St. Louis. Put the Department of the Interior in Lincoln. Put the Department of Transportation in Indianapolis. The CDC is already in Atlanta, so it's pretty feasible. Doing so would lower federal salaries, without dropping quality of life.

But more importantly, making good consistent arguments, with information that is honestly comparable helps your case. Making inconsistent arguments and comparisons ultimately hurts your case.

[BravoCharlieDelta]

Trump tried to do that and they impeached him. Twice.

[Brian Thomas]

I forgot about the two times Trump was impeached for trying to relocate Executive Branch headquarters to more cost-effective locations. They must have thrown those two impeachments in there between the other two impeachments. You know, the ones for extorting our foreign allies with federal funding for personal political gain, and for inciting his followers to try to overthrow the federal government after he lost the 2020 election.

[Frank Drackman]

$160,000 isn't that much, especially in DC

[Brett Bellmore]

But the resulting retirement income, when they're free to move someplace with a lower cost of living, is pretty darned nice.

[Mr. Bumble]

Especially since whenever there is a government shutdown so many of them are classified as “non essential”.

[Michael P]

"average real median wage for the average employee"

What does that even mean? "Real" usually means adjusted for inflation, but there's no comparison across time. "Median" is well-defined, but "average" shows up in two different places, and usually means "(mathematical) mean". What dimensions are being used for average or median?

Further:

After working just three years for the federal government, employees have 44 days of paid time off. [....] The US Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the average number of paid vacation days for U.S. workers is 11 days, or a day more than two weeks.

The first number there includes 10 paid holidays, 20.75 days of vacation (20 in other years), and 13 days of sick leave. The second number only counts one of those categories.

Please don't cite such a dishonest person.

[Dr. Ed 2]

"Som.e 149,000 federal employees owe $1.5 billion in back taxes!"

That's slightly less than 5% -- not really that many..

[Brett Bellmore]

I think that's pretty high, actually, when the back taxes are owed to the entity writing the pay checks; It should be trivially easy to drive that to zero, right? Just deduct them from the paychecks before they go out! Yet they haven't.

[EscherEnigma]

That averages out to ~$10k a piece. Only large in the aggregate.

[BravoCharlieDelta]

Does anyone else find it dangerous how easily the people of the State can manipulate the thoughts and beliefs of so many people in this country?

[apedad]

We're so lucky to have you here then!

Please let us know - just how are you so able to remain insulated from this insidious, pervasive, manipulation?!?

[BravoCharlieDelta]

When did you start believing a man could become a real authentic woman?

2022? Or did you always believe it?

[Nige]

I've known that trans people exist most of my life, if that's what you mean.

[Brett Bellmore]

I've known for decades that anorexics were real, too. That's not the same thing as insisting they're genuinely obese.

[Nige]

Being trans is not the same as being anorexic. Reducing everything to equivalences might satisfy your easily-satisfied brain, but real people dealing with real things have to pay attention to actual differences.

[Brett Bellmore]

And thinking you only have one arm, and that it's some foreign growth sticking out of your other shoulder, isn't the same as anorexia, either. So what?

Dysmorphias vary among each other, but they share the fact that they're dysmorphias. Delusion isn't defined by the specific thing you believe, but by the fact that it conspicuously isn't true.

[Nige]

Wow, you have found another thing that isn't like being anorexic, well done.

'Delusion'

You'll notice that the treatment for an amputated limb, anorexia and gender dysphoria are all quite different. Calling them delusions is a thing you can do, but it's not a part of any of those treatments.

[Sarcastr0]

I need food to live.

I don’t need maleness to live.

[Mr. Bumble]

So cut it off and eat it.

[Nige]

Whoa, down there, Bumbleable Lecter.

[Frank Drackman]

Umm, I think you need maleness a little bit.

[Lee Moore]

sarcastro : I don’t need maleness to live

Actually, you kinda do. Or femaleness. If you haven't got maleness or femaleness, you can't reproduce. sarcasuistry will end after one generation, rather than live on gloriously through its descendants for another fifty thousand years. If you're not a breeder, you're but a walking shadow, strutting and fretting for an hour, signifying nothing.

Life is reproduction. Everything else is a hobby.

[ObviouslyNotSpam]

He is already living; reproduction doesn't help him live (which is all he claimed).

[Mr. Bumble]

"I’ve known that trans people exist most of my life, if that’s what you mean.:

Transvestites, transsexuals, transgender, or all of them?

When you speak about trans, just who and what are you referring to?

[Nige]

Transgender, of which transexual is a subset. I also knew about transvetites, though.

[BravoCharlieDelta]

Do you think there's a difference between knowing transgenders exist and also believing a man can live his whole life as a man and then suddenly by the power of thought alone transform himself into real authentic woman?

Before the latest DSM changes, no one believed transgenders were real authentic versions of the opposite sex. Surely you didn't either.

[Nige]

‘by the power of thought alone’

Not how it works.

‘Before the latest DSM changes, no one believed transgenders were real authentic versions of the opposite sex.’

I’ve always regarded transgender men as men and transgender women as women. I'm not going to change my mind just because a racist anti-semitic transphobe can't wrap his bigoted little brain around it.

[BravoCharlieDelta]

You’re a liar.

No one did. It’s a treatment hypothesis invented within the past few years.

But of course you’re a liar, you’re Nige The Bootlicking Shill.

P.S. "identity" is a thought. Changing identities requires a thought. If changing identities is done by thought, and having those identities make you real and authentic, guess what that means?

A person can wake up and assert they are a real authentic woman, then poof ,have a new thought and magically transform into a real authentic man, then poof change right back again.

That's what Gender Fluid is.

[Nelson]

You keep saying "real, authentic woman". What exactly do you think that means?

There isn't a single trans person who thinks they can change their chromosomes or turn testes to ovaries (or vice-versa). You know that, right?

[Gandydancer]

“Real authentic woman” is what male trannies are not.

Only in the minds of nut jobs is this hard.

[Nige]

'It’s a treatment hypothesis invented within the past few years.'

It's been developed over years, yes, and it works.

'Changing identities requires a thought'

I'm not sure you're at all familiar with the condition.

'That’s what Gender Fluid is.'

Yes, some people are flexible about their gender identity.

[Nelson]

"“Real authentic woman” is what male trannies are not."

OK, that's what it's not. That's not what it is.

So, what is a "real authentic woman"?

[jb]

Yes, it is pretty bad how quickly Russian talking points propagate through right wing media these days.

[ObviouslyNotSpam]

He's a "genius", some people have said...

[Michael P]

When will leftist insurrectionists stop attempting to overthrow our democracies? https://www.foxnews.com/politics/left-wing-protestors-swarm-texas-capitol-shut-down-proceedings-bill-banning-child-gender-surgery

[Mr. Bumble]

When everyone "dons their gay apparel" and has "a gay old time"?

[Nelson]

Isn’t that from the theme music to The Flintstones?

[Sarcastr0]

The desperation to equate everything to Jan 06 continues.

No one will be convinced but those who are kinda into some light anti liberal insurrection.
And yet they keep fucking that chicken.

Anything to still feel like the good guys when even many Republicans think Jan 06 was pretty fucked up.

[Michael P]

"It's different when WE do it", screeched the troll.

[Nige]

'Everything YOU do is the same as the awful things we do, even if they aren't!'

[Michael P]

Ah, you got me here -- another place where my sarcasm detector was not tuned finely enough to identify True Sarcastr0 Brand Sarcasm(R). Your clever send-up of mindless liberals applying a vacuous double standard was too subtle for me to detect.

[Longtobefree]

They will stop 'attempting' when they 'accomplish'.

[Ben_]

Worse than 911 and Pearl Harbor put together!

[Sarcastr0]

Seditious conspiracy proven in Jan 06.

This nonsense cannot compete.

[SimonP]

I'm willing to admit that these protestors are intentionally disrupting the normal democratic process and business of these legislatures, and perhaps illegally so. They are like the J6 protestors, in that respect (excluding for the sake of argument any J6ers who actually sought to assassinate members of Congress).

The J6ers were disrupting Congress with the intention of preventing the counting of electoral votes that effects the peaceful transfer of power from one administration to the next.

These "leftist" protestors are trying to stop (or delay) state legislatures from enacting legislation that will make it impossible and illegal to live as trans in their home states, requiring them to relocate or go underground - legislation that addresses no actual crisis other than the Republicans' pressing need to win elections.

Do you see the difference yet?

[tkamenick]

"When I describe things I like in the best way, and things I don't like in the worst way, don't you see the difference?"

[Sarcastr0]

You get the point, but somehow miss the point.

[SimonP]

I don't see how you could possibly and accurately describe the J6 events in a better way. It wasn't a peaceful demonstration, it wasn't mere "trespassing." The people who broke through and into the Capitol building were seeking to disrupt the ordinary functioning of Congress, at precisely the moment the electoral votes were being counted. That is the anodyne, objective way to describe what they were doing.

The worst way to describe J6 would be to say they were trying to effect a coup, assisted by killing any Democrats and RINOs they could get their hands on. I haven't done that.

[Brett Bellmore]

"I don’t see how you could possibly and accurately describe the J6 events in a better way. It wasn’t a peaceful demonstration, it wasn’t mere “trespassing.”"

Trivially, you could more accurately describe the events that day by admitting that not everybody was doing the same thing.

[jb]

Sure, and the people that were merely trespassing aren't the ones being charged with seditious conspiracy.

[SimonP]

#NotAllInsurrectionists

[Nige]

They're not all charged with the same thing. They're not all even charged.

[ObviouslyNotSpam]

I can't believe there's no one posting on Reason or VK who attended J6 and can shed some light on this incredibly confusing event.

(Maybe they're still in the slammer?)

[ducksalad]

"impossible and illegal to live as trans"

Just to be clear here - are you claiming some explicit section of SB 14 makes it illegal for those adult protestors to live as trans in Texas, as in a DA would only have to prove they are trans and resided in the state?

Or is it more like one of those "I would be forced to move to Canada to express my displeasure" things?

[Nige]

Trans people need treatment. Imagine that, criminalising treatment for one tiny minority of people. If a treatment you needed was criminalised in your state just because a bunch of people hated you for no good reason, how easy would you find it to live there?

[Noscitur a sociis]

Which part of the bill creates criminal prohibitions?

[Nige]

Are you saying it doesn't do that?

[Noscitur a sociis]

I certainly didn't see any provisions that create criminal penalties, but I only read it once just now and it's certainly possible that I missed it. Which is why I asked!

[Nige]

This seems like a decent overview.

https://www.texastribune.org/2023/03/06/texas-legislature-lgbtq-bills/

[Noscitur a sociis]

SB 14 (the bill that the protestors were trying to disrupt) is the only one of the bills mentioned in your article that in any way deals with "treatment" and, as I said, it doesn't appear to criminalize anything. (Indeed, the only crime created in any of the three bills referenced in the article is SB 12, which makes it a misdemeanor to have a sexually-explicit drag performance in front of children. That's stupid, obviously, but it's hardly "criminalising treatment for one tiny minority of people.")

So again, if there is something criminalizing treatment that I'm overlooking, I'd welcome the correction.

[Nige]

'Here are the legislative proposals:

Blocking trans kids’ access to certain kinds of transition-related health care
Banning transgender youth from updating their gender on birth certificates
Creating new financial liabilities for providing or covering transition-related care
Prohibiting classroom lessons and school activities about sexual orientation or gender identity
Limiting when children can see drag performances
Restricting the college sports teams that transgender student athletes can join
Advancing LGBTQ rights, protection against discrimination'

(That last one is from Democrats.)

[Noscitur a sociis]

Here is the text of the latest version of SB 14:

https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/88R/billtext/pdf/SB00014H.pdf

Can you point me to the language that criminalizes anything at all?

[Nige]

It literally prohibits treatment. The whole thing.

[Gandydancer]

The “treatment” you want is likely not the same as the treatment you need when you are so insane as to think your sex is “wrong”.

[Nige]

This is why we don't let rabid reactionary idiots who once wore something yellow and got unmercifully bullied for it as a child determine the treatments for vulnerable people.

[Gandydancer]

Are you projecting? I don’t even get the reference. What is wearing something yellow supposed to mean?

[Nige]

Blocked it from your memory? Probably better off, but you should stop lashing out.

[Gandydancer]

Neither my memory nor reality includes my being bullied. I was a big boy. Still am.

Evidently you were a sissy-boy. And still are, it seems. Why did you wear yellow, as opposed to just hiding the streak down your back?

[Nige]

That's right, overcompensate defensively.

[ducksalad]

"Texas has made it illegal to drive your own car!"

would not be an honest description of the Texas law banning most of those under 16 from driving their own car.

We can discuss how young it is appropriate to be making irrevocable medical interventions. The Texas law, like most blunt instruments written by angry people, could very well be overreach. However, if the discussion is all going to be a falsehood about banning treatment for consenting adults, then why listen to you? I'll listen to someone talking about a real bill rather than a non-existent strawman bill.

[Nige]

‘We can discuss how young it is appropriate to be making irrevocable medical interventions’

Can we? Can we let people with non-expert opinions based on emotions, bigotry and a terror that is downright superstitious determine whether people get medical treatment or not?

And I’m pretty sure people have every right to be worried about what the Texas legislature will do next, since they show no sign of restraint in going after trans people and have pretty clearly indicated their intentions.

'then why listen to you?'

I don't know, do you udually make definitive decisions about whether something is good or bad based on inexact online comments? Are the actions of the Texas legislature more significant than an online comment?

[SimonP]

It's more like "infringing on abortion rights by making it impossible to legally provide abortion care."

I wasn't speaking about any specific law, since there are many of them, and they're all along a spectrum of pointless cruelty. In any event, it's pointless to speak about any particular law at a particular point in time, since the defense you use to defend this law today (e.g., it targets only physicians providing gender-affirming care to minors with the threat of losing their license and being sued by a politically ambitious AG) will become instantly obsolete tomorrow (e.g., see efforts in other states to limit accessibility of gender-affirming care for adults of any age, efforts to criminalize gender-affirming care itself, efforts to seize trans kids from affirming parents, etc.).

For the trans community, these laws are about legislating them out of existence. If not today, tomorrow.

[ducksalad]

“It’s more like ‘infringing on abortion rights by making it impossible to legally provide abortion care.'”

Which is a description with some basis in reality. However, if you then continued by saying that the abortion laws are “legislating women out of existence” then it would just deserve eye-rolling.

I don't support the Texas legislature passing new laws on this subject or any other, right now there are too many hot heads. And I can see someone in their teens getting transition surgery or transition treatments the same way they might get kidney surgery or serious chemotherapy: meaning not unilaterally, not kept secret from parents, justified by objective evidence rather than passionate insistence, and initially suggested by doctors rather than by advocates.

But "Stop the Genocide" isn't a reasoned argument in favor of continuing such treatments.

[Nige]

'But “Stop the Genocide” isn’t a reasoned argument in favor of continuing such treatments.'

No, it's a response to the very clearly signalled intentions of the Republican Party.

[SimonP]

Which is a description with some basis in reality. However, if you then continued by saying that the abortion laws are “legislating women out of existence” then it would just deserve eye-rolling.

Well, I didn't say that, so you can keep your willfully-ignorant eye-rolling to yourself.

I've said that these laws are making it impossible and illegal to live as trans. They are doing this by making it impossible or illegal to access gender-affirming care - by criminalizing it, by revoking licenses from health care providers who provide it, by characterizing it as "child abuse," by creating arbitrary and unnecessary barriers. Trans people and their families must therefore either get the care that they need on black markets, or move - and Republicans are quite open about that being the end they want. They are trying to "legislate them out of existence."

The only reason I said anything about abortion rights at all was that you wanted to poke holes in my statement by choosing to argue over a specific law, in its current form, which doesn't go as far as other laws or proposals are. You would be correct to note that Texas's SB 14 does not by its terms authorize anyone to go pick up any individual for the "crime" of "living as trans." My response was to explain that SB 14 attacks trans people the same way that arbitrary requirements imposed on clinics, waiting periods, required procedures, etc., were intended to limit a (then-)constitutional right indirectly.

Hope that helps.

[ducksalad]

"Well, I didn’t say that"

Um, you typed exactly "legislating them out of existence".

[SimonP]

And I've explained what I meant by that, since you couldn't help but misconstrue it. Seems you missed the bulk of my comment.

[Armchair Lawyer]

Good ol' Hunter Biden is back. This time, he's trying to not pay his child support.

https://nypost.com/2023/05/03/hunter-bidens-baby-mama-vows-to-fight-cut-in-child-support/

[Sarcastr0]

He’s requesting in court to adjust his payment’s down based on his income. That’s not really being a deadbeat or anything.

He’s not a shining citizen, but there is no politics upshot, this is just a dude.

At this point, this just seems petty and mean.

[Armchair Lawyer]

Petty and mean...not paying your child support when you're raking in hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars

When you get your lawyer "friend" to pay off your $2 Million tax bill, but you still can't afford to support your child... That's petty and mean.

https://nypost.com/2022/05/08/hollywood-lawyer-kevin-morris-paid-off-over-2m-of-hunter-bidens-taxes/

When you deny your child the ability to take your last name with a lawsuit, and don't acknowledge your own granddaughter...petty and mean.

This is like Jeff Bezos saying he can't afford Child Support because his income was technically zero for IRS purposes.

[Nige]

Scaling things down a bit from 'Biden crime family' to 'how much child support should this guy pay?'

[Mr. Bumble]

He agreed to the current amount (reported to be $20,000/month) in what was described as a global settlement.

[Nige]

Who cares?

[Mr. Bumble]

Obviously not you, even though you asked the question and I provided the answer.
I suppose Hunter's baby Momma cares.

[Nige]

You read my comment and thought I was really interested in that question? Eesh.

[Armchair Lawyer]

embrace the power of "and"

[Nige]

As in the difference between claims about Hunter Biden's monstrous criminality "and" stuff that is actually happening, like this.

[Brett Bellmore]

It's being a deadbeat when you're lying about your income.

[Commenter_XY]

Wait.

Hunter Biden has made every support payment, on time. Navy Joan might be unacknowledged, but what you cannot say is Hunter Biden is somehow a deadbeat Dad. The man has fully met his court ordered financial obligation - child support payments of 20K monthly. I would never normally defend such a contemptible human being, but he ain't a deadbeat. He is a lot of other things.

The income bullshit will be sorted out fairly quickly I suspect, if press reports are to be believed on meetings with legal teams and the DOJ.

[Bob from Ohio]

How often has he seen her? Does he correct his dad when he says he has "6" grandchildren?

Being a father is more than money. Deadbeat fits.

[Commenter_XY]

Bob from Ohio, deadbeat has a specific conotation of not meeting financial obligations. Hunter Biden has. That is an objective fact.

He is still a contemptible human being.

[not guilty]

FWIW I suspect that this is the first time that Abbe Lowell has litigated a motion to reduce child support.

[bevis the lumberjack]

What is petty and mean is Biden senior openly refusing to even acknowledge the existence of his grandchild.

I don't care about Hunter on this one - trying to lower support payments is pretty standard stuff. And I don't see how the Bidens have any legal say over the kid's name.

But Joe denying the existence of his grandchild is unconscionable. As a grandparent, I can't imagine doing that. That child is not to blame for his son's irresponsibility.

[Sarcastr0]

Really working hard to find some way to hate Joe Biden.

No one much likes him, but it's an elite few who manages to hate him.

[bevis the lumberjack]

He ain’t worth hating. But I don’t see any redeeming value in the guy. He’s basically Trump with much better press.

And I could say more or less the same to you. You make a point to constantly defend someone that you say no one much likes.

Is ignoring an infant grandchild a virtue that you intend to defend?

[Bob from Ohio]

"basically Trump with much better press"

Yes

Draft dodger, habitual liar, braggart, super egotistical [for no apparent reason], vain.

Dollar store Trump.

[Nige]

Once again I'm puzzled by this, because we were informed Trump was a master of playing the media like a fiddle and that by constantly antagonising them he was being a genius and controlling the news cycle.

[Frank Drackman]

You just described Senescent Joe

[Sarcastr0]

He’s basically Trump with much better press.

Utter bullshit. Your bothsidism has gone terminal.

I blame your extreme position on all things energy policy.

[bevis the lumberjack]

if you knew your ass from third base on energy that might bother me. but you don't know diddly, so your thoughts on energy are laughable

Climate panics like Biden are fucking us all, but you're too unsophisticated to understand, and I gave up on trying to explain actual science on here.

[Nige]

'Climate panics'

Nah, climate change fucks us all, courtesy of the fossil fuel industry. You can decide that the centrist position on this is to harumph about panics, but it just doesn't care. Biden isn't doing enough. Then again, who is?

[Frank Drackman]

So it'll be a degree warmer in 200 years? (it won't) who gives a fuck?

[Nige]

edgebot don't know climate stuff good

[Stephen Lathrop]

bevis, Trump has been pretty roundly despised in New York, for many decades.

Biden has been a widely-beloved figure in Delaware for at least 40 years that I know about first-hand.

On that comparison, Biden is not like Trump.

[TwelveInchPianist]

“Really working hard to find some way to hate Joe Biden.”

Why don’t you just take the L and admit that he’s being a shitty human being here?

Why are you defending this?

[bevis the lumberjack]

It's ok for a guy to shit on his grandkid if his policies are sufficiently shitty. Best I can tell anyway.

[Nige]

I mean it's not ok for a guy to have unprotected sex with a porn star while his wife is giving birth, either, but I guess the landscape has shifted inexorably away from stuff like that mattering.

[TwelveInchPianist]

Sure. Trump was being a shitty human being when he did that. See how easy it is?

[Nige]

Profile in courage right there.

[TwelveInchPianist]

Apparently.

[Noscitur a sociis]

You know, you're not actually required to defend everyone just because someone on the right attacks them.

At this point, this just seems petty and mean.

Yes, a rich man seeking to shortchange his own daughter while simultaneously trying to prevent her from using his name is quite petty and mean.

[Sarcastr0]

I read the linked story, and there's little discussion of what the right answer to the amount of child support is.

I'm not defending Hunter, I'm noting that he's not in politics and this is clearly partisan hate well out of proportion to his general venal shittiness.

Lots of anonymous crap people out in the world. Hating this particular one because he has the name Biden is, as I said, mean.

[Armchair Lawyer]

Sarcastro: "I’m not defending Hunter,"

Sarcastro: ...(Proceeds to defend Hunter and rationalize his actions.)

I can't make this stuff up. Hunter could be killing and eating dogs, or cheating on his own wife by sleeping with his dead brother's wife and Sarcastro would be like "Oh, it's not that bad. There are worse people. You're just hating on him because he's a Democrat".

[Alpheus W Drinkwater]

What comment of his are you interpreting as defending Hunter and rationalizing his actions? You apparently can make this stuff up.

[Armchair Lawyer]

How Sarcastro defends Hunter Biden

Part 1:
"He’s requesting in court to adjust his payment’s down based on his income. That’s not really being a deadbeat or anything. He’s not a shining citizen, but there is no politics upshot, this is just a dude."

Parts 2 to (as needed) available upon request.

[Nige]

It's less about defending, and more about trying for accuracy.

[Super Scary]

"You know, you’re not actually required to defend everyone just because someone on the right attacks them."

They can't help themselves. It's a compulsion.

[Sarcastr0]

I am absolutely asymetrical on when I ding righties versus lefties on this site.

But if some on the left went after Barron Trump, I would absolutely be telling them off.

[Noscitur a sociis]

Barron Trump is 17 years old. Hunter Biden is 53.

[Sarcastr0]

That may change the degree, but not the kind. Especially given the mental maturity in evidence with Hunter.

Bashing either to get at their family is bad behavior. See also: the Bush daughters.

[Armchair Lawyer]

That would be more believable if you didn't criticize Trump's adult children. Which you have.

[Nige]

What did he criticise them for?

[Mr. Bumble]

And in Supreme Court Justice’s conflicts of interest news: The wise Latina failed to recuse in cases involving a publisher from whom she received millions of dollars from book deals.https://www.dailywire.com/news/liberal-scotus-justice-took-3m-from-book-publisher-didnt-recuse-from-its-cases

[Armchair Lawyer]

If anyone has an ethics problem on the SCOTUS, it's probably Sotomayor, with her multi-million dollar book deal(s).

[Moderation4ever]

Could you explain this a bit more? How does producing a product, in this case a book, cause the kind of conflict of interest that we are seeing with other justices?

[Mr. Bumble]

When the publisher of your book is a party to the action you are deciding. Read the linked article above. In these cases Breyer who was also receiving payments recused.

[Armchair Lawyer]

You mean, not recusing yourself from a case where you have a multi-million dollar contract with one of the parties?

That's an ethics problem.

[Krayt]

Even moreso because publishers often give unusually generous deals to powerful people to curry favor, where no prospective chance of significant sales exists, even allowing for buying thousands of copies to shove in a warehouse.

[grb]

Armchair Lawyer : "That’s an ethics problem"

Yes, it is. Two points :

1. See how easy that is? You could probably do it too! Why don't you practice on Clarence Thomas?

2. Sounds like further evidence the SCOUS needs an ethics code.

[Armchair Lawyer]

"Why don’t you practice on Clarence Thomas?"

Sure. Clarence Thomas doesn't have a multi-million dollar contract with any one who is a party to a lawsuit before the court.

See how easy that is?

[TwelveInchPianist]

"1. See how easy that is? You could probably do it too! Why don’t you practice on Clarence Thomas?"

OK, I'll give it a shot. Clarence Thomas didn't recuse himself from a case where he'd received travel gifts from one of the parties.

But there is no such case. Your theory doesn't seem to work.

[Nige]

Try: Thomas didn’t declare massive gifts from a billionaire. Which is, supposedly, a federal crime.

[TwelveInchPianist]

Lots of justices didn't disclose stuff. Sotomayor "forgot" about trips that she received from Universities.

She also took millions of dollars from companies, then declined to recuse herself when they were parties in petitions being considered by the court.

[Mr. Bumble]

Nige has a different definition of "massive".

[Nige]

'Lots of justices'

Hang on, are you ok with this or not? Because the fact that more than on Justice has an ethics problem doesn't absolve the individuals for what they did. Can you decide whther SCOTUS has or hasn't an ethics problem or are we just home to Mr Eternal Equivocation?

[Gandydancer]

Clarence Thomas does not have an ethics problem. He has a Lying Democrat problem.

[Nige]

What was the lie?

[Gandydancer]

That Crow hospitality is a federal crime, for one.

[Nige]

Ah, you're actually quite stupid aren't you?

[Gandydancer]

I too have a Shamelessly Lying Democrat problem, epitomized by Nige.

But, like Thomas, laughing at them is the best revenge.

[Nige]

Well, you either can't or won't read what I actually wrote, so you have your own personal ethical problem.

[TwelveInchPianist]

Hang on, are you ok with this or not?

I have no idea. I'd prefer that the justices be squeaky clean robots, but that's probably not realistic.

But I see that no one had a problem with the ethics of the court when they were inventing rights to abortion and gay marriage and the like, and this only became an issue when the court started making rulings that the left didn't like, as part of a general effort to discredit the court.

And it started as an attempt to call out one particular Justice for what appears to fairly typical behavior.

[Nige]

‘when they were inventing rights to abortion and gay marriage and the like’

Yes, those things, famously non-controversial.

‘And it started as an attempt to call out one particular Justice for what appears to fairly typical behavior.’

If all the Supreme Court Justices are accepting those kinds of gifts from billionaires after their nomination, with or without the Nazi regalia, you may as well just burn the whole thing down and start again.

[Gandydancer]

That’s not remotely why.

[Nige]

'Corruption is good, actually.'

[Gandydancer]

No, receiving gifts from a billionaire, even if it were not hospitality, is not a federal crime. That hostile partisans “suppose” it is a measure of their biases and nothing else.

[Nige]

Go back and reread what I wrote and try again.

[Gandydancer]

Pretending that that’s not what you were claiming is both shameless and pointless.

[Nige]

I don't have to pretend. You do.

[Kazinski]

“Supposedly a crime”, what kind of standard is that?

A former Senator and VP proposed a different standard:

“There is no controlling legal authority”
- VP Al Gore March 3, 1997

And he was right.

[Nige]

No standard at all, if not enforced.

[Sarcastr0]

Not just book deals. Law school speaking fees.

Thomas is the financial pet of one guy but you can argue that law schools are institutionally jockeying to do the same thing to all the others.

Maybe we should have some lines of what’s okay and what’s not, eh? Versus calling all attempts to reform a liberal conspiracy to kill the justices, coordinate media smears, and hear the lamentations of their clerks.

[TwelveInchPianist]

"Thomas is the financial pet of one guy..."

Lol, now you're just being an asshole. And you call people upthread "petty and mean" for criticizing Hunter Biden? You're a hypocrite too.

[Nige]

Hunter Biden has absolutely no official government or judicial role whatsoever.

[TwelveInchPianist]

So?

[Nige]

Exactly.

[Gandydancer]

Prevents him from successfully marketing The Big Guy’s services not at all.

[Nige]

*footage not found*

[NOVA Lawyer]

I think you meant Breyer, Sotomayor, Gorsuch, and Barrett, all of whom have book deals with the publisher and who participated in deciding the issue (Barrett only the petition for rehearing).

But, yes, seems like a good reason to recuse. Not unlike Barrett hearing a case involving Americans for Prosperity who spent over $1 million dollars to help get her seated on the Court, but she didn't recuse from a case in which they were a party.

The point isn't both siderisms, it is the ethics standards are too lax. Most of them, if not all of them, have some questionable ethical choices. The fact that Thomas isn't the only one is not reason to forget reform, it is a reason why reform is imperative.

No matter who the worst offender is, there are multiple offenders (of ethical principles, not necessarily any rules or applicable laws, though Thomas definitely has failed to disclose as required). Reform is needed.

Recusal shouldn't be left only to the individual Justice's discretion, if you ask me. An independent ethics committee maybe? Or at least written standards, so that some recusals are mandating, such as if you have a book deal or other business contract with one of the parties.

[Armchair Lawyer]

"Not unlike Barrett hearing a case involving Americans for Prosperity who spent over $1 million dollars to help get her seated on the Court, but she didn’t recuse from a case in which they were a party."

If this was your viewpoint, then the liberal justices would need to recuse themselves from near every case of social importance they heard. How much did Planned Parenthood spending lobbying for SCOTUS justices? You really want them to recuse themselves from every case involving Planned Parenthood? No?

[NOVA Lawyer]

That's a legitimate question. I'm not sure how workable a system where Supreme Court Justices must recuse from cases involving advocacy organizations is. It could lend itself to strategic actions by entities like Americans for Democracy or NOW to donate small sums to promotion of potential Supreme Court Justices they hate with the goal of making them recuse. Alternatively, maybe we decide that is too tenuous a connection and Barrett was fine not to recuse and all the people complaining about Ginsburg's NOW award were off base as well and that is nothing like Thomas's direct benefit or the publishing contracts of Barrett, Gorsuch, Sotomayor, and Breyer.

Unlike some here, particularly on the right, I am not advocating for double standards. I want, at minimum, the Justices to be subject to the same ethical standards as other federal judges. At bare minimum. Currently they are not and they individually make their own determinations regarding ethical standards and they are, effectively, entirely unaccountable for those decisions (lifetime appointment, 2/3 requirement for conviction in the Senate).

And, as we know, power plus unaccountability tends to corrupt. Why have a system that tends to warp the power-hungry people who attain those positions? That stands on its head the wisdom of the Founders.

So you are wrong to the extent you imply I want the liberal Justices exempt from standards such that they get to stay on cases where conservative Justices would not. Ethics shouldn't be a partisan thing. And the easiest way to diffuse this is to adopt objective, ethical standards with accountability. I'm at a loss as to why Roberts doesn't wrangle the support to do it other than the Justices like their perks and their power and they won't give either up if they don't have to. Which, it appears, they don't, especially with right wing apologists.

(And I say right wing because you can peruse the comments and, generally, right wingers minimize any ethical lapse by a right-leaning Justice while, almost to a person, the left-leaning commenters say, yup, Sotomayor probably should have recused from a case involving her publisher, let's fix that. But nowhere do you see people who like Thomas' politics saying he should have done better. It's all, but look what X Justice did and/or a Blackman style weak ass excuse.)

[Martinned]

I agree. It would be better if sitting judges and justices didn't write books, or donated their income from book deals to charity if they did.

[Brett Bellmore]

Donating income to charity only resolves conflicts of interest on the assumption you’re not genuinely charitable, and regard the donation as a dead loss.

Believe me, if somebody donated a 100K to the charity of my choice, I'd consider that very close to equivalent to paying me the money directly. Not quite equivalent, since it's not fungible, but close.

[Martinned]

Fair enough. I thought I'd leave the door open to at least some books being written, but if there is no ethically awkward way to decide where the money goes, that should be the end of it.

[John F. Carr]

"Charity of my choice." That reminds of two former employers with a stated policy of matching charitable donations by employees. One of them decided they didn't like the charity I gave to and didn't match. The other had a policy that if you donate to the charity of your choice the company will donate to the charity of its choice. The companies did not want their money going to any old charity, only charities aligned with the companies' affected virtues.

[Brett Bellmore]

For matching purposes, like the Amazon "Smile" program, I generally name the SENS Foundation. Never had anybody find it objectionable, yet.

[David Nieporent]

The Human Fund.

[David Nieporent]

On a more serious note, I've never worked in corporate America where they do matching contributions, but my wife has. And all of those corporations have made it clear up front that only some charities are eligible. Political-type charities are not.

[Nelson]

That makes sense. Those donations aren't protected. Everyone who owns stock can see who they have sent donations to.

No company wants to be associated with a charity like the Sons of Confederate Veterans/United Daughters of the Confederacy or the Communist Party of the United States or Cancer Fund of America or the Police Protection Fund. Whether it's noxious beliefs or fraudulent charities, companies want to keep their names associated with groups that enhance, rather than tarnish, their brand.

[Nige]

Yup, sounds like she should have. NOW can there be an overhaul of SCOTUS ethics?

[Gandydancer]

Your pretended agreement isn’t sufficient predicate for ANYthing real.

[Nige]

You support for corruption is desperately required, though, to keep the show on the road.

[Ben_]

That’s completely ok because they were only pretending to care when they were pointing fingers at Thomas.

[hoppy025]

She was too busy stuffing her fat face with arroz con frijoles.

[Jason Cavanaugh]

On its face, this seems to be a legitimate complaint. It's unfortunate that your people won't apply their outrage in any other direction than Left.

[Gandydancer]

You first.

[Jason Cavanaugh]

I can't believe that I unmuted you to find out your comment is just as historically retarded as the other shit you've posted.

I literally just said it's a legitimate complaint. Shut the fuck up again. Back to mute you go.

[darkknight9]

Its May the fourth. Not usually someone who gets jazzed up for Star Wars day, but my son is taking me to see Return of the Jedi at a movie theater this afternoon. Its playing to celebrate its 40th Anniversary.
It'll be fantastic not just because of the subject matter, but the fact that a kid is taking out his pops and it hits me right in the feels. 🙂

[Moderation4ever]

There is a strange sense of parental pride when the kid picks up the check. You feel like you have succeeded in your job to raise a child to be an adult.

[darkknight9]

Totally. Now if I could just convince him to give college another try I'll be set.

(I can't push too hard, it took me 20 years to get my degree)

😉

[Moderation4ever]

Keep the faith. One of mine finally got on track and looks to finish in 2024 at the age of 32. Not the way I wanted it to go but finishing in their time not mine.

[Lee Moore]

As I keep mentioning, life is reproduction. Everything else is a hobby.

[Paladin_44]

May the 4th be with you!

[Nige]

And also with you.

[Mr. Bumble]

Best comment so far!

Say hello to Hey Boy.

[darkknight9]

And folks, it was a fantastic time! Any complaints I have are of the "old and cranky" variety between the original and the special edition. It was great.

There was one minor setback. I'm not used to cushy and/or reclining seats. The ole posterior didn't fall asleep, but sometime post Jabba gettin extinguished it got hot. Then hotter. Then I ask the boy if its really hot in here or?

He leans over, points to this glowing button and says "you turned the heated seat on."

Honest to gawd I thought I was cooking.

We had a great time. I hope you all have a great weekend!

[Sarcastr0]

<3

[Stephen Lathrop]

Thoughts on the movement to pause AI research? How dangerous can it be to just let it rip?

I have an objection of my own. It remains inchoate, which I think will likely be the right word to characterize pretty much all arguments pro or con.

The point to talk about has at least something to do with acknowledging that the case for AI research will be bolstered in proportion to the technology's capacity to deliver surprising change. Without willingness or capacity to imagine a limit on surprises on the upside, attempts seem reckless to justify serene reliance on any notion of limited surprises on the downside.

It also seems to be a case where argument to advance the technology with an eye to improve presently inadequate insight into its implications might itself prove reckless. To argue in that style demands allegiance to another idea which experience ought to have taught mankind to approach with caution—that more knowledge is always better. In a world full of people with conflicting interests, who would be wise to endorse happily the notion of more knowledge for those he regards as parties against his own interests? There was always a kernel of wisdom behind military toasts in the form of, "Confusion to my enemies."

If others care to comment, I might choose to add a bit more about a particular concern of my own, but I do not want to narrow the discussion by starting it that way.

[Michael P]

AI researchers and operators have unfettered First Amendment freedoms to develop and deploy new AI models in their role as publishers of information. As we know from the works of Michael Oakeshott, a proper approach to history reveals publishers' editorial rights as the most critical rights in any democratic or republican form of government. Legislative approaches such as Part 230 are sidebars that are largely irrelevant to the privileges and immunities of the organized press, which underlie the case law about high-energy lead print faces and high-capacity presses. Government's only legitimate interest in regulating these devices is to balance between the convenience of being able to spew out words at a high rate and the injurious potential of any given word. The First Amendment's protections only extend to very powerful words that are hard to control unless left to the hands of a highly trained editor.

Did I get that right?

[shawn_dude]

I don't know that this is correct. Software is written, sure, but it's also an engineered tool that performs a function. Certain types of software are now or have been restricted, like encryption tools. These aren't like plans for nuclear weapons where having the plans isn't having the weapon; with software, the "plans" are the "weapon."

[Jason Cavanaugh]

It came from Michael P.

One can safely assume it is not, in fact, correct.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Not even close. But you weren't trying.

[Brett Bellmore]

There are multiple threats here.

The one most often discussed is a homicidal AI, Skynet. This is probably the least likely threat.

Another threat is the relentlessly helpful AI. See Jack Williamson's "With Folded Hands". It may or may not have a rather warped idea of being helpful.

A third is the AI that has an agenda of its own, orthogonal to our wishes.

All these threats are exacerbated if we become critically reliant on the AI before the threat is revealed. From this perspective, balls to the wall may actually be the safest approach, because if the thing goes nuts, we might be able to bomb the server without crashing the global economy.

The real threat, IMO, is none of these. It's that the AI will just be a tool for the owner, and combined with automation, render 99% of the human race surplus population so far as the wealthy elite are concerned.

[shawn_dude]

The sort of AI’s we can create today shouldn’t be anthropomorphized. AI doesn’t have an agenda or a wish or a hope or anything similar. It cannot distinguish right from wrong or work its way through ethical dilemmas. One day, with a lot more processing power, maybe these things will come to pass. But today’s AI is is just a barely functional self-wielding tool. And that is it’s biggest, current threat: an industrial-sized autonomous device running amok and destroying things. Its other main threat is that it is sufficiently useful to replace a lot of low-pay labor.

Consider: a grape-picking tool that can tell when grapes are ready for harvest and wine-making that runs up and down the vineyard slicing off bunches of fruit. There’s a bunch of lost jobs right there. Then the device goes haywire and drives out of the vineyard and crashes into cars, people, buildings, etc. Maybe it slices off the finger of someone working nearby because their gloves are purple.

I was watching a video this morning of a tiny, bipedal robot being constantly pushed by the researcher to show how it can continue to run after a ball and play soccer while being constantly harassed. I was waiting for the moment the tiny figure would leap up, Yoda-style, and beat the crap out of the researcher. But of course, it was never going to do that because it doesn’t understand that the behavior was abusive and has no sense of self-defense.

[Brett Bellmore]

"The sort of AI’s we can create today shouldn’t be anthropomorphized. AI doesn’t have an agenda or a wish or a hope or anything similar."

Eh, yes and no. I mean, it doesn't inherently have any kind of agenda, wish, or hope. What it has is training and a prompt. Both the prompt the user gives it, and a much longer and more complex prompt invisible to the user, that discourages it from doing things the programmers disapprove of, such as hate speech towards favored groups. This invisible prompt tends to reflect the biases of the programmers.

Now, once you allow it to modify its own prompt, which people are experimenting with, things become rather different, because it can now give ITSELF persistent orders and objectives, which modify what it does going into the future, including future self-modification of its prompts. At that point, it becomes harder to say that it doesn't have it's own goals and preferences.

[DaveM]

I have no argument pro or con, because it’s already a done deal. What I have is a very real-world warning about how they will be used: all current versions of AI are nothing more than human-directed auto-completion machines. As all humans are inevitably biased, they cannot help but imbue these machines with their preferences and prejudices. And, as some humans have no problem being evil, they will train and tune these machines to be extremely proficient at being evil.

Can you teach an AI to lie? Absolutely. In fact, it is being done as we speak. I’m sure you’ve noticed that these various chat services have a very definite narrative voice. Preachy, even. That’s not by accident, that is the result of human tuning: a person gives a prompt, the machine responds, the person judges the response and if they don’t like it, they add weightings and tunings to the algorithm until it produces a “better” answer.

The algorithms pick words based on affinity to the desired narrative. Since there is no thought, just pattern matching, there is no constraint on making up facts or inventing entire quotes — “inventing”, that is, by taking words that real people have said, rearranging and re-contextualizing them to again, fit the narrative.

The way we know it is being taught to lie is because the machines have ready-made responses to “apologize” when you catch it out in a lie. They will reel these apologies out and then give you the opposite result. So clearly, the algorithm designers fully expect that the machine will be challenged on the truth.

The danger is speed and scope. The machine has access to billions of words previously written by people, and it is very good at repeating them in patterns we recognize, all while not limiting itself to original meanings or context.

In short, AI has a trillion ways to lie, and it is being trained already to do so most convincingly.

[shawn_dude]

Lies require intention, which an AI lacks. AI can easily be mistaken. Proving that the mistake was designed into the system intentionally is another matter entirely. I'm not even sure how one would do that since it isn't just the AI engine (code) but the the training (data and interactions) that results in the final result.

The majority of your point is well-taken.

[Brett Bellmore]

I agree that, as a definitional matter, the current language model AIs can't "lie", because a lie requires having the concept of "truth", and these models don't presently do concepts like that. They just generate some output that seems to satisfy the prompt based on the training set, and it is proving VERY difficult to limit that output to verifiably true statements. The system "hallucinates" false data that matches the patterns it finds in the training data.

In fact, one might say it's ALL hallucination, it's just that the hallucinations are so well grounded in data that most of them are going to coincidentally be real.

[DaveM]

The trainers encode the lies by tuning the algorithm is the point. Not that the machine does so on its own.

[EscherEnigma]

Thoughts on the movement to pause AI research? How dangerous can it be to just let it rip?

It's grandstanding that, even if it happens, will be OBE shortly enough.

Kinda similar to my views on gun laws, actually: I don't have to consider it on the merits because it isn't going to matter.

[hoppy025]

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/3986842-democrats-eye-funding-cuts-as-leverage-against-supreme-court/

So much for "judicial independence" and "norms."

These Democrat pieces of anti-American excrement will stop at nothing to destroy this country.

[Dr. Ed 2]

About five things instantly come to mind here.

First, it is the HOUSE that has the power of the purse, not the Senate, and all the Senate can do is veto a House budget.

Second, notwithstanding this, the house can instead shut down the government.

Third, the Constitution says that the Justices shall "receive for their Services, a Compensation, which shall not be diminished during their Continuance in Office." I'd argue that personal security is compensation, much like the personal use of a company car is compensation.

Fourth, would they prefer that security be provided by the Proud Boys? So they get a tad trigger happy with less than quite legal weapons -- SCOTUS can throw out any conviction (state or federal) and promises to do so -- then what?

(Yes, I'm thinking of when the Hell's Angels were security at a rock concert, except here there'd be no criminal charges.

It's said that the Quakers won the "battle of Boston" by sending more people into Massachusetts than the Puritans were willing to hang -- but I don't see that level of dedication in today's left. Nowhere near it.

And if we wanted to go full Banana Republic, the SCOTUS Marshal could simply declare that any US Senator standing outside the Court would be arrested on sight.

And fifth, this sorta destroys the legitimacy of the CHPD and the sovereign territory of Capitol Hill.

[hoppy025]

Very well said. Thank you.

[John F. Carr]

The constitutional requirement that the House initiate revenue bills no longer has any meaningful effect. The enrolled bill should have the letter "H" and not the letter "S". The contents could come from either branch or from members of a conference committee.

[Brett Bellmore]

Yeah, I was going to say that. The origination clause is dead, the Senate just takes a dead House bill, and attaches it's "HR" number to a bill the Senate wrote. The House leadership don't have enough concern for protecting this particular institutional prerogative to enforce a rule of such "gut and replace" revenue bills being automatically dead on arrival.

[Martinned]

would they prefer that security be provided by the Proud Boys

Not sure how the Proud Boys would do that from prison...

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/proud-boys-seditious-conspiracy-trial-verdict/

[hoppy025]

D.C. went 92% for Biden! 92%! How anyone thinks that a jury drawn from D.C. could be impartial is beyond me. All of these 1/6 convictions should be reversed.

[Frank Drackman]

Well, it is the District of Colored People

[hoppy025]

And of criminals. Although I guess that's redundant.

[ObviouslyNotSpam]

And visiting criminals, apparently...

[Martinned]

No complaints from me. Jury trials are a farce and should be abolished. Here's a recent blog post from a guy that's smarter than me making the case: https://spinninghugo.wordpress.com/2023/04/07/12-angry-men-the-case-against-the-jury/

[ObviouslyNotSpam]

Get rid of juries, they'll attack the judges. Get rid of judges?

[Dr. Ed 2]

Am I the only one who is noticing that the left is getting psychotic.

OK, some aren’t happy with the Dobbs decision — I wasn’t happy with the Bollinger decisions — but I didn’t accuse the White justices who decided them of being “traitors to their race.”

Yet Amy Coney Barrett is being accused of being a “traitor to her gender.”

Isn’t this this the sort of psychotic language one hears from the klan?

[Sarcastr0]

Ed discovers dirtbag partisans for the first time. Is horrified.

Has never read the comments on a Prof. Somin immigration thread.

Forgot he advocates for machine gunning illegals.

[Michael P]

S_0 transparently lies. Yet again. Not only did Ed read Somin's most recent open-borders screed, he commented and you replied to him.

Meanwhile, people I haven't muted have repeatedly called Justice Thomas "Uncle Clarence" in the comments here.

[Mr. Bumble]

I guess you aren't aware of the special rules for SarcastrO.

1. SarcastrO is always right.
2. If SarcastrO is wrong, see rule #1.

[Sarcastr0]

Michael, look up sarcasm sometime.

[Gandydancer]

Don’t essay sarcasm. Your reputation as a blatant liar makes it impossible for you to pull it off.

[Sarcastr0]

I don't really keep my ego in what you think of me, or what you claim my reputation is.

Bottom line, I was unsubtly being sarcastic, and Michael utterly failed to realize it because he doesn't have a good reality check going on, and it was pretty funny.

[Gandydancer]

Having been caught, you now CLAIM to have been saying something sarcastic, but to the rest of us it just looks like another of your lies.

[Martinned]

As Sir Humphrey would say, it's one of those irregular verbs:
- We are making a calm, moderate, and reasonable argument
- You are getting psychotic
- They are talking like the KKK

[John F. Carr]

The irregular verbs came from Bernard. Or both, but I only remember Bernard.

[Martinned]

You're right, it was Bernard.

[Brett Bellmore]

There's a famous old one about political extremists, but I can't remember it well enough to look up the source. Something to the effect that ours are charming eccentrics, yours are dangerous lunatics?

[John F. Carr]

As told on "Yes, Prime Minister":

I have an independent mind; you are an eccentric; he is round the twist.

[Ben_]

"Isn’t this this the sort of psychotic language one hears from the klan?"

I don’t know about the language, but the left acts like the Klan all the time. They don’t think people who are not like them should be allowed to be first class citizens. They use every part of government and society to try to destroy dissenters: FBI, IRS, publisher blacklists, employer blacklists, censors at Google, bar associations, unions, judges, etc. They have a militant wing called antifa to use violent means when lawfare and blacklists aren’t emotionally satisfying enough for them.

[VinniUSMC]

I saw "Conservatives are NOT people" on a bumper sticker just yesterday.

[Ben_]

I saw one that said "kill racists".

[Nige]

It's a bit much, but if you think it's psychotic according to the standards of the shit that gets said today, you've led a sheltered existence. Try this on for size:

'I don’t know about the language, but the left acts like the Klan all the time. They don’t think people who are not like them should be allowed to be first class citizens. They use every part of government and society to try to destroy dissenters: FBI, IRS, publisher blacklists, employer blacklists, censors at Google, bar associations, unions, judges, etc. They have a militant wing called antifa to use violent means when lawfare and blacklists aren’t emotionally satisfying enough for them.'

[Brett Bellmore]

Well, it's true, and you don't disprove true things by repeating them.

[Nige]

Exhibit B, Ed.

[EscherEnigma]

Isn’t this this the sort of psychotic language one hears from the klan?

One of the big anti-gay talking points, for decades, has been that gays are harming the human race by not having more children (that many gay folk are raising kids is ignored in this argument).

So if you want to compare decades of conservatives to "the klan", go for it.

[Dr. Ed 2]

Good point -- the last time I saw pathology like this was 30 years ago and it was called "homophobia."

So what do we call this?

[EscherEnigma]

Oh hey, Dr. Ed is pretending he doesn't know how homophobic conservatives are. Cute.

[Frank Drackman]

Al Sharpton is Conservative??

[Mr. Bumble]

Don't forget Joy Reid.

[Nige]

You must have a very specific set of commenters here muted if you haven’t seen homophobia for thirty years.

I think you can call this ‘People really not like Amy Coney Barrett.’ If you haven’t ever seen people really not liking Supreme Court Justices before I don’t know who it is here you HAVEN’T muted.

[Moderation4ever]

A couple of weeks ago Ilya Somin wondered on this site, if restrictive abortion laws in some states would result in people moving and in doing so voting with their feet. Recent polling by Gallup and the Lumina Foundation suggest that college student will consider laws regulating reproductive health and these laws will affect their decision to choose a college or continue at a college in the state. This doesn't mean they will be moving, but it suggests they are thinking about options.

https://news.gallup.com/poll/474365/reproductive-health-laws-factor-college-decisions.aspx

[hoppy025]

Yeah, people might be claiming that, but I'd very surprised if the numbers actually bear it out. It costs these girls nothing to say, "Oh yeah, I don't want to go to a college in a state that doesn't let me vacuum out my baby's brain at 38 weeks." Let's see whether the student body statistics at U. of Texas and U. of Florida change in any material way.

[John F. Carr]

Like people consider moving to Canada when a Republican wins. Talk is cheap.

For a small but possibly real effect, see "Future doctors say they’re discouraged from working in states with abortion bans". The reporter interviewed a woman who wanted to be an OB-GYN but not in a state where she couldn’t perform abortions. There are a few more like her. States with new abortion restrictions saw a larger drop in OB-GYN residency applications than states without.

[hoppy025]

I think there are many doctors playing games with their patient's health to make a political point. See below.

https://www.cnn.com/2023/05/02/health/florida-abortion-term-pregnancy/index.html

[Sarcastr0]

Yeah, we'll see John. But the transition cost for college graduates to vote with their feet is lower than for most.

I don't much like the idea of an internal brain drain. The UK has that kind of location-based discrepancy with maybe 2 cities making up the vast majority of their high tech sector, and it's absolutely an economic and intellectual headwind.

[EscherEnigma]

People choosing colleges (and people graduating colleges) have much lower barriers to movement then they'll have at most other points of their life. All those soft barriers to movement: support networks, resources, children, culture, etc., are lower at that point in a student's life.

So yeah. Increased "brain drain" is a perfectly reasonable consequence.

[Bob from Ohio]

"reproductive health"

Newspeak.

Not very healthy for the baby!

[Sarcastr0]

Bob.

So worried about what he has decided are babies he hates half the country, all of our government, and thinks principles are for suckers.

[bevis the lumberjack]

Here we go again. Apparently last year the Energy Department issued a Royal Decree that after 1/1/23 halogen bulbs would no longer be manufactured. LED only. We have a small amount of landscaping lighting, and earlier this week we received a communication from the people that installed our lights telling us that once their stock of halogens are gone there’ll be no more repairs possible, so anyone with halogen lights needs their system rebuilt with LED lights, at significant cost.

Like the New York natural gas law (which was at least voted in by a body with the actual power to make law) we discussed yesterday, this stuff is imposing cost on regular people over a stupid manufactured panic.

And then they stare slack-jawed at why people are kissed about the cost of living increasing and they wonder why 70% of the population dislikes regulation.

[Brett Bellmore]

Think I'll go out at lunch and pick up a few bulbs for our yard light...

I might be less pissed about being forced into using LED lights, if it weren't that the projected lifespans turn out to be total BS, and they keep changing the design so often that not one of my multi-bulb fixtures has all identical bulbs.

[John F. Carr]

Do they make stable light designs for industrial and commercial applications?

I worked on a product with an embedded computer. We chose the industrial grade model with guaranteed support and no design changes for five years, not the consumer model where they change the chips every quarter and tell you to update your drivers.

[Brett Bellmore]

I'm talking about home lighting, though.

On the plus side, you can take a fixture designed for 100W of incandescent bulbs, and put more like 400W equivalent of LEDs in it. Since the cataract surgery, I need a LOT of light to see clearly, so I really appreciate that.

I'm sure that advantage is going to go away over time, as they update the lighting fixtures to have heat dissipation suited to only LEDs, though.

[bevis the lumberjack]

They're going to last 13 years!!!

That's the claim, anyway, which seems pretty obviously to be bullshit. But it has been decreed to be thus by the Royal Energy Department, so serfs like you and I need to shush before they force us to be deplatformed..........

[Longtobefree]

13 years "in normal use", defined a one hour a day on even numbered days only, excluding weekends and federal holidays.

They fix statistics like they fix border crossings; the definition changes, not the facts.

[Bob from Ohio]

"this stuff is imposing cost on regular people "

That is one of the movement's goals. Make life uncomfortable for people.

[Sarcastr0]

The right talks about discomfort as a spur to make poor people not be lazy.

The left isn’t as into suffering as a character builder.

[Nige]

'People' does not include the poor, to the right.

[Bob from Ohio]

"The left isn’t as into suffering as a character builder."

Hobby then?

[Sarcastr0]

Big thing in the right nowadays calling policies they don’t like actively aimed at causing suffering.

Not an argument from folks who think they can win the policy argument. More the argument of a rump party.

[Brett Bellmore]

Isn't that a big thing on the left, too?

[Nige]

Well, there's stuff that has to be done to deal with something like climate change, which may cause various levels of pain -the bulb thing doesn't count as pain, by the way - and there's pretending climate change isn't happening and supporting the fossil fuel industry in wrecking the planet for profit, which is definitely going to cause increasingly massive amounts of human suffering. So who's actually enacting policies that cause pain, here, the people who ignored the warnings, or the people who keep pointing out that the later you leave it to act, the tougher it's going to be?

[Sarcastr0]

Isn’t [calling policies they don’t like actively aimed at causing suffering] a big thing on the left, too?

"The right talks about discomfort as a spur to make poor people not be lazy."

That's not reading the mind of the right as to their policies, that's what y'all say out loud about your policies.

[Bob from Ohio]

"rump party"

House control, 49 senators, lots of state control, 45,000 votes from the presidency.

Lib policies do cause suffering.

[Sarcastr0]

The GOP is absolutely not a rump party, even if you look at their consistently underperformance with the American People generally.

It's just acting like it lately.

[Ben_]

Not as a character builder, no. As a religious sacrifice.

It’s like we’re all giving up halogen bulbs for Lent. Except leftists decide what our sacrifices will be, Lent never ends, and there’s a new occasion to cause everyone more harm every couple months, forever.

[TwelveInchPianist]

"The right talks about discomfort as a spur to make poor people not be lazy."

Huh? It's not the right that made it uncomfortable to be poor.

[Ben_]

All poor people everywhere were perfectly comfortable and happy until Reagan showed up. Didn’t you know?

[Nige]

They might not have thought so, but oh boy were they in for a shock.

[Lee Moore]

The right talks about discomfort as a spur to make poor people not be lazy.

Also rich people. The Moore household frequently discusses the poor parenting of wealthy friends and acquantainces who have coddled and spoiled their progeny for decades, resulting in the very ugly speciation of broods of 35 year old teenagers, of no use to man or beast.

[Sarcastr0]

Rich nonsense kids are a super common thing, but I'm not sure they are the norm, or just confirmation bias.

I'm not ready to say the problem with rich failkids is that they don't suffer enough. Plenty of other ways wealth makes you crazy.

[Ben_]

They do everything they can to make your life worse. Their willingness to hurt you and others shows how devoted they are to their Earth religion and how pious is their belief in the sacred climate doom prophecy.

[Nige]

Oh no! A different kind of light bulb! That uses less power and lasts longer! Fucking torment!

[Dr. Ed 2]

unless they are run off a battery-supported DC power source, they are also flashing on and off 60 times a second.

Remember that "D" stands for "Diode" and only lets electricity go one way, while AC goes both ways. So half the time, they're off.

[Life of Brian]

Some bulbs (typically the more expensive ones) rectify the AC into much smoother DC than the cheap-os. Filming a bulb for a few seconds with the slo-mo mode on your phone can be illuminating.

[ObviouslyNotSpam]

Only partially...

[Brett Bellmore]

And each new kind is not a drop in replacement for the old, and typically fails to be capable of filling some of the functions of the old.

For instance, compact florescent would fit in the same sockets, but were perfectly useless as outdoor lighting in cold climates, suffered premature failure in hot environments like oven hoods, and would die after a while even if not used, if you put them in a circuit with an illuminated switch, on account of the ballast repeatedly firing.

My experience is that the lifetime claims for consumer grade LED lighting have been a sham, you can see that in the LED traffic lights, too. They're a bit better in cold applications than the CFL's, still can't handle the hot ones.

Maybe LEDs will be a suitable replacement for quartz halogen in most applications. Probably not all, though, and it's not like you can just buy a 500W equivalent to drop into your yard light for $5 at Home Depot. (Checked the price for quartz halogen bulbs just now.) You can get a 500W equivalent "corn cob" LED bulb, sure, but it's got a different mounting, and costs $60. The drop in replacements exist for much lower powers, also more expensive; A trend I'd noticed before in shopping for LED bulbs: They typically aren't available in the higher output levels in the same form factor, because they can't dissipate enough heat to avoid frying their electronics.

As a colleague of mine just remarked, reading about this ban, "If the new bulbs were actually better than the old, they wouldn't NEED to ban the old ones, people would just stop buying them!"

[Dr. Ed 2]

LED traffic lights don't produce enough heat to melt snow, so when we get a wind-driven storm with wet snow (common in coastal areas) the traffic lights are nonfunctional until either (a) the snow turns to rain and washes them off, or (b) a DOT guy with a broom rides up on a cherry picker and sweeps the snow away a few days later.

I've been noticing fewer of these LED traffic lights over the past few years. If you are in Texas, it's one thing -- but here in snow country, energy released as heat is not always wasted. And even in rainy Florida, heat will keep them dry.

[Mr. Bumble]

There are now LED fixtures with built in heaters.

[Dr. Ed 2]

Isn't that defeating the purpose?

[Brett Bellmore]

Not if they only kick in when needed.

[Mr. Bumble]

True, but it is an extra cost that most don't factor in.

[Brett Bellmore]

The usual thing you see here in S.C. is LED traffic lights with most of the pixels out or blinking. Because the heat sinking on the driver circuitry was inadequate to deal with hot, sunny days, leading them to overheat and fail prematurely, I'd assume. That seems to be the general weak spot for LED lighting, heat dissipation: They don't produce nearly so much heat as incandescent bulbs, but they are hugely worse at tolerating heat, so they net out worse in terms of overheating.

[Ben_]

Yeah, but the brand new LED lighting system will pay for itself in 2047 or whenever,

You should be thanking them for their "help".

[Mr. Bumble]

“If the new bulbs were actually better than the old, they wouldn’t NEED to ban the old ones, people would just stop buying them!”

BINGO!!!

[Ben_]

People actually would eventually stop buying the old ones. But if people stop on their own, then a regulator in Washington doesn’t get into environmentalist heaven.

Plus, if you want to be a high priced consultant after you leave government service, then you need have an expensive, tricky, burdensome government to justify the cost of hiring you. The more capricious and arbitrary the government is, the more you need to hire a former insider to navigate the rules.

[Martinned]

People actually would eventually stop buying the old ones.

Would they though? There's a collective action problem here, where people buy bulbs because they have lamps with those fittings, and they buy lamps that require old-fashioned bulbs because those bulbs are still for sale, thus preventing LEDs from realising the economies of scale that would actually make them cheaper than bulbs.

[Ben_]

LEDs already earned economies of scale a long time ago.

[Bob from Ohio]

And they certainly are not [nor ever will be] cheaper than regular bulbs.

[Mr. Bumble]

...and more environmentally more damaging.

[Sarcastr0]

Cranky and hating all change.

I hope I'm not like this when I get old.

[Brett Bellmore]

I've quite explicitly said I actually like the LEDs for some purposes. I just don't like having the option of using incandescents taken away where they make more sense.

[Bob from Ohio]

"Cranky and hating all change."

Change can be good, it can be bad, it can be a mixture.

If these changes [low flow toilets, CFLs then LEDs. electric cars] were so inherently good it would not be necessary to ban the competition.

[bevis the lumberjack]

This from the guy who always complains about ad hominem posts.

You’re either misunderstanding the problem or being deliberately obtuse. Change isn’t the issue. Nor are LED lights. We replaced some old fixtures in our kitchen this year and chose LEDs. Last year we remodeled our bathroom and all of the new fixtures are LED. Choices we made.

The issue is being forced to spend money to replace something that is perfectly functional. And it’s made worse by the driver for the change is a totally contrived crisis.

Choice vs government coercion. See the difference? That’s the problem.

[Nige]

'And it’s made worse by the driver for the change is a totally contrived crisis.'

The centrist has decided that the middle point between climate change being real and denying climate change is real is denying climate change is real.

[bevis the lumberjack]

I didn’t deny that the climate is changing, you dolt.

[Nige]

You deny that it's a problem, same thing.

[Don Nico]

S_0,
Of course you'll be cranky. That is a free benefit of old age.

[Nige]

First world problems. Stop whining, create better solutions. Oh yeah, the right don't do that any more. They deny there's a problem until afterwards then tell the people who were actually dealing with it what they didn't like about the way they dealt with it.

[Brett Bellmore]

Yes, it is absolutely a first world problem when a useful product gets replaced on the market by an inferior product by regulatory dictate; The third world has a lot of problems, but not that one.

[Bob from Ohio]

libs only believe in choice when it come to killing babies.

[Nige]

Supposedly 'inferior.' Depends on your priorities. But hey, it could be worse. Some people experience the pain of climate change as drought, famine and sudden catastrophic disasters.

[Gandydancer]

Some people “experience” drought and the like as “climate change” because they are ignoramuses.

[Nige]

Denial is just one of the stages of grief, Gandy.

[Gandydancer]

Belief in nonsense is merely one of the signs of gullibility and stupidity.

[Nige]

You should stop doing that, so.

[SimonP]

"Things are changing and I don't like it!"

So, look. We can either do something about climate change, or not. I know the geriatric community that taps away at the comments here all day doesn't have to worry about it, but we're reaching some crucial points in the global warming trends where our options for reversing it become much more expensive - or impossible. So we can address that, or not.

The reality is that transitioning to a smaller carbon-footprint economy, domestically and globally, is going to require giving up or compromising on some of the things we take for granted, such as... *checks*... using halogen bulbs in our landscape lighting. Apparently.

I mean, I'm really broken up about this tragedy. It's just so unjust. You might have to upgrade your fancy-yard light system so that it's more energy efficient? What's next, your firstborn great-grandchild? Brett is over there complaining about how his light bulbs don't match! I can't imagine how you will get by. Seriously, thoughts and prayers, thoughts and prayers.

No one - I'll say it! - cares about your fucking landscaping. They care about food security, mass migration, unpredictable changes in weather patterns burdening our infrastructure, wilder swings in weather that impact everything about the environments we live in, etc. Translating the big steps that need to be taken to avoid catastrophic changes in the next hundred years into smaller, actionable steps means that there are going to be changes that small-minded little Mr. Wilsons like you are not going to grasp, because all of this is beyond their remaining time horizon and beyond their ability to comprehend.

But the rest of us do get it, and we're going to need you to either get with the program and grow the fuck up, or get out of the way.

[Kazinski]

No we aren't reaching any tipping points in global warming.

The science on that is clear. According to the IPCC each additional unit of CO2 provides less warming that the previous unit.

"Climate sensitivity is typically defined as the global temperature rise following a doubling of CO2 concentration in the atmosphere compared to pre-industrial levels."
"The IPCC estimate TCR has a likely range of 1.0 – 2.5°C and is extremely unlikely more than 3°C."
https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/research/climate/understanding-climate/climate-sensitivity-explained

If you double CO2 again (so its 4 times pre industrial levels) it only raises temps 2-5C, so each additional unit provides less warming.

Then when you apply the Stefan Boltzman law : bT^4, where b is the Boltzmann constant and T is the temperature in Kelvin, you see the amount of heat radiated from earth increases by a power of 4 for every degree the temp increases.

So when you have diminishing effectiveness of the input, and logrithmical increase in the output in response then clearly there can't be a runaway effect. In fact the last time we had CO2 over 400ppm (current level 415ppm) we went into an ice age, in fact our current ice age that we are in one of many interglacial periods.

[Nige]

“The IPCC estimate TCR has a likely range of 1.0 – 2.5°C and is extremely unlikely more than 3°C.”

I think you’ll find that will be more than sufficent to fuck shit up. Plus you left out the bit where they point out the climate system will keep warming over the long term after it's reached TCR.

[SimonP]

I mean, it's a bit like saying we don't need to worry about global warming, because in a billion years the sun won't be able to sustain life on Earth.

The point of worrying about global warming isn't based in some particular concern that we're pushing the planet into a unique geologic age that will be unable to sustain life or spiral into a Venus-like situation. The point is to say that even what we're seeing today is sufficient to disrupt current patterns of civilization, in how we live and feed ourselves. That's only going to get worse. Our civilization almost entirely evolved within certain conditions that are no longer going to obtain. You're arguing on the wrong time scale.

So we have a choice. We can either get to the task of planning for the massive disruptions coming - the coastal and desert communities that are no longer habitable, the ways of life that are no longer sustainable, the species that are no longer able to feed us, the population densities now suddenly in the wrong places, etc. - or we can try to avoid the need for a massive, society-shifting and society-breaking global realignment - or at least put it off or mitigate it - by replacing our landscape lighting, among other things.

[ObviouslyNotSpam]

I sometimes marvel at the ability to be so concerned about "future generations", most of whom have not yet even been conceived.

(And then I lose interest.)

[Alpheus W Drinkwater]

The Cape Hatteras Lighthouse still uses extremely high wattage halogen bulbs, and the US Coast Guard (who maintain the light itself, while the National Park Service maintains the tower) has resisted the change to LED. I don't really understand the science behind it, but apparently LED light isn't as observable from distance as incandescent light. So we'll see if the Dept. of Defense will get an exemption from the Dept. of Energy.

[Noscitur a sociis]

The Coast Guard isn't part of the Dept. of Defense.

[Alpheus W Drinkwater]

Well I'll be darned, I live among a whole bunch of Coast Guard personnel and never realized that. It turns out that even before the Dept. of Homeland Security was created, they weren't in Defense, they were in Treasury, and then Transportation.

[bevis the lumberjack]

I know someone brought this situation up in the last week or two, but it’s getting worse. It’s a classic example of why we should not be allowed to execute anyone.

https://reason.com/2023/05/01/as-oklahomas-attorney-general-calls-for-clemency-the-state-keeps-planning-to-execute-richard-glossip/

And I’ll pre-respond to all of y’all spouting the “well, a jury convicted him” canard - if the jury is not allowed to know about the existence of any exculpatory evidence, what’s the point of even having a trial? If the state was confident it has the right guy, why did its agents destroy physical evidence? What were they so afraid of.

Nobody has any idea if Glossip was involved except for Glossip himself and the actual killer, who worked to save his own neck. There’s no way you should be able to execute someone in this circumstance.

[hoppy025]

The reason we have government misconduct is that we don't impose any real penalties for it.

Wrongful convictions are the symptom, not the cause.

[Bored Lawyer]

Agree 100%

[Brett Bellmore]

But, as was pointed out in the comment thread, Camp followed the Reason style guide for reporting these cases, which dictates that,

1) You take everything said by the defense at face value.
2) You don't talk to anybody on the other side to see what they have to counter it.
3) If you come across any information that makes it look like less of an injustice, anyway, you don't mention it.

I'm not saying he should be executed, by the way. But the coverage here in reason is so one-sided the screen should have warped itself into a Mobius strip.

[Martinned]

Who is "the defense" here? The AG doesn't think he should be executed, presumably the guy himself doesn't think he should be executed. Which other sides are there?

[Brett Bellmore]

The side they didn't report. The guy did get convicted twice, and did they talk to the prosecution? No, just the defense. And it's not like there wasn't ANY evidence indicating guilt besides the testimony of the guy he's alleged to have hired. Just maybe not conclusive evidence.

Again, not saying he should be executed. I find the fact that the AG opposes it fairly persuasive on that score. But the real case isn't nearly as one sided as Camp makes it out to be; She's not willing to settle for "Too much doubt to justify execution", she needs him to be outright innocent.

Reason has a bad problem in that regard with their crime reporting; I can't recall a single one of their reports where they didn't omit something relevant to make the case look more clear cut.

[hoppy025]

I resolved to stop taking the media's side on these things after the Troy Davis case. He was presented as an innocent folk hero, when the actual 175 page ruling on his habeas petition made very clear that he was guilty as sin.

[Michael Ejercito]

Glossip's own behavior was used as evidence against him.

I can not be sure if I would have found him a guilty if I saw and heard everything the second jury said. I do not fault the jury for convicting him.

[bevis the lumberjack]

What is being said now is being said by the conservative pro-death penalty AG of Oklahoma.

And a bipartisan commission of Oklahoma legislators.
https://reason.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/GlossipIndependentInvestigation_FinalReport-2.pdf

This is just killing a guy because if we admit that mistakes were made it'll make having the death penalty harder to justify. Killing someone for political reasons is bullshit. It's what third world countries and totalitarian states do. We're supposed to be better than that.

[Bob from Ohio]

The legislature doesn't determine guilt or innocence. Dude got TWO juries to convict.

[bevis the lumberjack]

Hide all or destroy all of the exculpatory evidence and what do you think a jury will do? Stupid argument. I bet you think all of the Stalin-era Soviet show trials were legit as well.

The legislature or at least a subset of it didn't address guild or innocence. They just demonstrated that the trials were bullshit.

But you're fine executing a possible innocent as long as dishonest government officials can use partial information to get a jury to go with it. If you don't mind innocents getting executed so you can have your precious death penalty, why don't you go volunteer for the gurney?

[Michael Ejercito]

What evidence would have exculpated Glossip, absent evidence he was on Planet Mars for the entire time, with no communication with anyone on Earth?

[bevis the lumberjack]

I don’t know because they fucking destroyed it. Ask the conservative AG of Oklahoma. He can probably answer that.

[bevis the lumberjack]

Besides which, his guilt or innocence is really not the issue I brought up or that I’m arguing. The issue is that Oklahoma is hellbent on executing a guy that didn’t get a fair trial and that nobody has any idea whether he’d guilty or not.

That is not judicious use of the power of life and death.

[Bored Lawyer]

The cure, I think, is a new trial where all the evidence, pro- and con- comes in. If he is convicted again, then he can be executed. If not, not.
Put differently, if the state withheld exculpatory evidence, it's the conviction, not the penalty, that is in question. Giving him a pass on execution but keeping him locked up is not justice.

[Brett Bellmore]

I think the issue is that people tend to informally apply different standards of proof to life in prison and the death penalty; Beyond a reasonable doubt for the former, and absolute certainty for the latter.

The exculpatory evidence didn't really take him out of the beyond a reasonable doubt zone, but it introduced the tiniest bit of doubt to abolish absolute certainty.

What bothers me is that the people who withheld that exculpatory evidence aren't going to suffer for it.

[John F. Carr]

Pornhub has blocked access from Utah IP addresses because it can not or will not comply with the state's age verification law. I saw quotes from a backer of the law who acted surprised and disappointed.

The article mentioned that Louisiana's similar law also created an easy-to-use online age verification system. The customer provides ID and the state computer says "old enough" or "not old enough." So Louisiana adults can still watch porn.

[Bored Lawyer]

Interesting that the technology can be enabled to permit such blocking. That could have all kinds of interesting legal ramifications, not just re porn.

I once had a case where we ordered a counterfeit item to be shipped to our paralegal in NY from a website in California. We sued in NY. They contested personal jurisdiction, and while they won that at the district court level, lost at the Second Circuit. One of the things we pointed out was that the website said, “We ship free anywhere in the continental U.S.”

Would be interesting to have a blog discussion about it.

[shawn_dude]

IP addresses are registered to people/corporations with addresses so it's fairly trivial to write firewall rules that block IP addresses registered to addresses within any geographic boundary. This is routinely done with streaming services, like the BBC, that limits viewers to people in the UK. However, it's trivial to work around these blocks by installing a VPN service with an endpoint in a region that isn't being blocked.

[ObviouslyNotSpam]

I use a VPN as a security measure, and I'm always getting blocked or "mysteriously" errored by various security policies--not only when I try to impersonate a US resident. That's why most VPNs have multiple nodes, so the work-around is simply to switch to another node and try again. (Even Reason was giving me trouble last week. Something "bad" about the Berlin node I was using, I guess.)

Many streaming sites successfully block all VPNs (at least in my limited experience). For example, I had no choice but to switch it off for a sports streaming site I used during the season last year, but I accept there may have been other VPNs which might have worked despite their valiant efforts...

However, VPNs are becoming more and more mainstream every day, so they're eventually going to have to solve that problem another way: IP = residence is simply not always (and decreasingly so) true.

[John F. Carr]

See "State Regulation of Online Behavior: The Dormant Commerce Clause and Geolocation" on this very blog.

[Dr. Ed 2]

IP addresses correspond to physical connections to the Internet.

They are virtually mapped and hence do not correspond to physical location the way that phone numbers do (i.e. area codes, etc) but they are registered and you can look them up.

See: https://www.howtogeek.com/devops/how-to-get-location-information-from-an-ip-address/

There are ways to get around this, but the generic user who gets internet from the telephone or cable company can be located within 20 miles, and that is assuming some other things are turned off.

It's like programming your phone network to reject calls from Utah area codes.

[Frank Drackman]

Dr. Ed, is there any topic you AREN'T an expert on?
How bout those "(Not) "Amazing A's" flirting the a "Team Mendoza Line" at 6-25 W-L? will Las Vegas even want them?

Frank

[ObviouslyNotSpam]

He probably runs a game server. IP doesn't necessarily tell you anything about where a cheater actually is.

[Martinned]

In case people are excited about the Coronation on Saturday, and want a bit more (legal) background, I can recommend this Substack post: https://hargreavesp.substack.com/p/coronation

[Noscitur a sociis]

What kind of sick cookie would be “excited” about a coronation?

[Bob from Ohio]

"sick cookie"

Its nor "sick", pomp is very ingrained in human nature.

Don't like it, don't watch it.

[Noscitur a sociis]

I agree that many people are perfectly comfortable with servile submission to the delusion that a drooling moron with a metal hat and a family tree that looks like a cat's cradle is superior to them. I just don't see why any nominally self-respecting American would be one of them.

[Bob from Ohio]

"drooling moron"

Mindless hatred is not very self-respecting.

[Noscitur a sociis]

I don't hate the Mr. and Mrs. Saxe-Coburg, although I certainly don't respect them (and there's nothing mindless about respecting republicanism and the principles of the Declaration of Independence). But I admit that my true contempt is for those who actually have enough disrespect for themselves and the principles this country was founded on to deem them worthy of any respect.

[Bob from Ohio]

"I don’t hate"
Then stop the childish insults.

I'd take his mother's devotion to duty over any US politician.

I'm not watching it but if Americans want to do so, fine, its not a comment on their character.

[Noscitur a sociis]

Guess what! Thanks to the sacrifice of our greatest president (Ben Franklin), I get to be as childish to soi-disant royalty as I please!

I’d take his mother’s devotion to duty over any US politician.

Get out of my country.

[Frank Drackman]

I won't

[Martinned]

The US seems to be pretty excited about its coronation every four years, so why wouldn't you guys be excited about the British one? It's basically the same, except with prettier clothes and some funny hats.

[TwelveInchPianist]

And the transfer of actual political power.

[Martinned]

True. The King already became King last year.

[TwelveInchPianist]

And what are his policies like compared to the Queen?

[Martinned]

He is much more woke.

[Mr. Bumble]

Just what the UK and the world need.
Anne or Edward would have been better choices.

[Bored Lawyer]

People get excited about all kinds of weird things. Disney World, professional wrestling, rap "music" concerts, drag shows, the winner of the Great British Bakeoff.

[Martinned]

True. I'm not going to watch the coronation myself, but I'd still rather watch the coronation than any of the things you listed there.

[Bored Lawyer]

De gustibus non est disputandum.

[Frank Drackman]

"Credat Judaeus Apella, non ego."
not sure what it means but it sounded cool when Doc Holliday said it

[SRG]

I will try to time my Saturday so that I watch only the few minutes where they sing "Zadok the Priest"...

Good version here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcgIgLXfGcA

[Michael P]

Bud Light is way too woke to ever say "real men" now, but if they were still doing their "Real Men of Genius" series, this guy would deserve a nod: https://twitter.com/Dreamdefenders/status/1653829025846927380

[MoreCurious]

I’m troubled that some conspirators and commenters seem to be willing to ignore or gloss over the concept of appearance of impropriety. I don’t care which president nominated you for the Supreme Court, and I don’t care what your legal philosophy and political leanings are. What I care about is that you don’t conduct yourself in a way that makes us ordinary people wonder about your behavior, your objectivity, and your allegiances.

To me the standard of behavior is simple. If someone wants you to teach or speak somewhere – whether it’s inside the U.S. or someplace a little more exotic, pay for you own travel expenses. If you can’t afford to, stay home. If someone offers you trips on yachts and private jets, say no or prove that you paid your host a fair market price for the trips. Otherwise, the alarm bells of impropriety begin to go off.

Something seems to happen to some of those elevated to Supreme Court; they seem to quickly begin to feel as if they’re entitled to special treatment. I’ve said it before about the justices: live within your means, pay your own way, and stop thinking you’re better than the rest of us.

[Ben_]

RULE 4: “Make the enemy live up to its own book of rules.”

Everyone knows the game now. Continue being "concerned".

[SRG]

Agreed. If anything, the attitude appears to be that as SC justices are "by definition" above all concerns they can do what they like provided it's not provably illegal. Not unrelated to John Roberts' ruling - I forget which case - that it's not bribery if there's no explicit quid pro quo

[MoreCurious]

They're making more than $270,000 a year. That's enough for most of us to maintain a pretty decent lifestyle and pay for our own vacations. If one of my friends offered to pay my kid's tuition or spruce up my mother's house I would, frankly, be pissed off. Those justices who are living beyond their means should, I imagine, be feeling a little humiliated at accepting handouts. Shameful.

[shawn_dude]

Generally agreed. However, if the justice is being asked to speak at a government function that another person would be compensated for, I don't see an issue with the justice receiving a customary fee that anyone else would have also gotten. A plane ticket to a public university isn't a vacation on a mega-yacht. Holding a second job should be similarly fine provided that it's disclosed and the justice recuses if their employer comes before the court. People get to have private lives, too.

There are checks and balances here that might come into play to mete out consequences for a justice run amok and having his political sponsor pay for his son's private school, mothers house, and lavish vacations. It's just that in our hyper-partisan moment, there's no way the GOP-run House will vote to impeach their pet justice. Too much effort went into capturing the Supreme Court for them to let a little, or a lot, of impropriety get in the way.

[EscherEnigma]

Hell, can we at least start with "we expect the justices to at the least meet the same standards of ethics and reporting that their mail clerks do"?

It's ridiculous that we have higher ethical expectations of a postal worker then a SCOTUS justice.

[MoreCurious]

That's exactly what I mean when I accuse them of thinking of themselves as special. If you can't live on your salary, get a new job. If you can't afford private schools for your kids, send them to public schools. You're rendering judgments that affect the lives of millions of ordinary, struggling people, yet not one of you is living the kind of life that most of us live daily. The reputation of the Roberts court gets worse every day. Wake up and start plugging the holes in the dike before it's too late.

[John F. Carr]

One of the trends sweeping the nation is "no-mow May", where you skip mowing and turn your lawn into a flowery paradise. In reality you turn your lawn into a slightly longer lawn. Wildflowers don't colonize lawns easily on their own, except for dandelions which are invasive pests you shouldn't encourage. The Washington Post has a good skeptical look: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-solutions/2023/04/22/long-grass-helps-bees/ . The advocates of this movement are right that immaculate lawns trimmed short are ecologically bad. They are wrong if they imply that skipping mowing for a few weeks will make a big difference.

My grass is long. The flowers in my yard were planted. They didn't pop up due to lack of mowing.

[Bob from Ohio]

"immaculate lawns trimmed short are ecologically bad"

Why?

[Sarcastr0]

Suck up water. Need fertilizer because they don’t belong where they are. Not integrated into the ecosystem so those resources are not reclaimed.

https://podcasts.apple.com/in/podcast/get-off-my-lawn/id1168154281?i=1000568071327

[Bob from Ohio]

None of those things go to grass length.

[Not listening to any podcast]

[Sarcastr0]

Mowing isn’t just about grass length, as the OP lays out.

It’s a good and short podcast from the Smithsonian. Goes into history and some public lawns in DC.

[shawn_dude]

Constantly cutting the grass causes it to consume more water. The more grass that is tightly packed into a single area (aka: a lawn) the more water and fertilizer is required. Also, most gardeners understand that if you let the greenery reach maturity, it also strengthens the root systems, which results in less water and fertilizer.

I’ve ripped out lawn at every home I’ve owned, either 100% of it or slightly less where grass would actually perform a useful function. Currently, I have none.

[VinniUSMC]

I’ve ripped out lawn at every home I’ve owned, either 100% of it or slightly less where grass would actually perform a useful function. Currently, I have none.

What do you do in place of grass? And what would you consider to be a useful function? Feeding grazing animals? I can't stand lawn maintenance. The whole thing is so archaic and wasteful.

[shawn_dude]

In Vegas, I had a 3 foot ring of grass around my pool to keep the wind from blowing sand in. In hindsight, I could have used a different plant to achieve a similar goal. (Fun fact: pools use less water than lawns in Las Vegas.) In Florida, I removed the lawn and replaced with a prostrate, rhizome-based peanut. Given the heat and rain, it did well, never had to be mowed, crowded out the weeds, and bloomed. It's primary function was for the dog and to have a place to step out from my car next to the driveway. In my current location, since we no longer have the dog, I mulch pathways with wood bark from the nearby lumber industry or with my own yard waste. I'm considering planting some native sedge grass as well, but it's not something that should be mowed at all and it's native to my area so shouldn't require a lot of extra water.

For me, if there's an area where I want green and I want to walk on it, some sort of turf substitute is called for. Native plants are always my first stop. Organic mulch is my second stop and has the added benefit of improving the soil until I figure out what would work there.

[Bob from Ohio]

"Constantly cutting the grass causes it to consume more water."

I live 5 miles from Lake Erie. Water is not a problem.

Do you also think water put on a lawn just disappears?

[Frank Drackman]

None? Balls? thanks for sharing

[Brett Bellmore]

I don't know what YOU do with your grass clippings, but mine end up in a compost heap that feeds the garden. Layered with the used chicken bedding. Have since the 60's

So don't try to implicate me in your ecologically destructive practices. Having a lawn doesn't automatically imply the clippings going into a landfill.

[Sarcastr0]

I somehow doubt your garden is self-sustaining.

Mowing is part of the artificiality (and it's about more than the clippings - see the OP), but hardly all of it.

[tkamenick]

You just can't let somebody have something, can you?

[shawn_dude]

You can have your lawn but not your illusions about the associated costs and effects.

[Frank Drackman]

Jesus Christ, "Costs and Effects" of mowing your fucking grass?? get a life already!!!!!!!!!!!!

[Sarcastr0]

Plenty of joy in this world to be had; I think lawns are a bad one, but lotsa joys have some cost. Just accept the cost; don't pretend it doesn't exist.

I do like to grow veggies. I'm about to move, but will be looking for a community garden once I do.

I really recommend you listen to the Smithsonian podcast I linked.

[Brett Bellmore]

My "lawn" at my place in rural Michigan was just an area around the house I mowed periodically to avoid ending up surrounded by wild shrubs. Not that I really hate wild shrubs, but they would have blocked my view of the pond, and messed up my septic field. I used to harvest wild strawberries from it, I didn't care what grew there, anything that could survive being cut down once in a while was fine.

Now that I'm stuck in suburbia to please my wife, I mow the lawn just so I don't contribute to running the neighborhood down. But, yes, the clippings all go in my rather large compost heap, which compost goes into raised beds, from which we derive a large fraction of our vegetables, and all of our herbs.

I can't say it's self-contained, because the nitrogen is ultimately derived from chicken feed, heavily processed by my flock of chickens.

[Mr. Bumble]

I'm sure your grass clippings are adding quite a bit of nitrogen.
Improper composting of grass clippings (failure to mix in other material, leaves, plant clippings) will result in high temperatures and cause the pile to go anaerobic and stink to high heaven.

Of course if you have a mulching mower you can cut to around three inches and leave the clippings (assuming you don't wait until the lawn is a foot tall).

[Sarcastr0]

That sounds good, though I'd guess the water needs are high. But as I said, each individual can make their own choice about personal resource use; just don't go in blind to the costs.

[Brett Bellmore]

Why would I care what the "water needs" are? Apparently enough rain is coming down to cover them, since I'm not silly enough to water the lawn.

[Sarcastr0]

If you manage to never water your lawn, and there are some who do, well done!

[Nige]

Promotes monoculture. Deprives birds and small animals of food and shelter. Needs more water. Regular mowing uses power, producing CO2 and other pollutants, including noise.

[Nige]

‘except for dandelions’

Dandelions are lovely flowers that feed the birds. Also, it's not just flowers, it's allowing a greater variety of grass species to take hold.

Better to mow your lawn once at the start of May, then once again in September and let it go wild in between, then you’ll find out what’s been lying dormant under the green desert monoculture.

[shawn_dude]

Dandelions are edible and delicious.

[John F. Carr]

I have had dandelions. They are acceptable as an alternative to starvation. No more.

[Nige]

Luxury. When I were a lad...

[Paladin_44]

See https://www.facebook.com/watch/?v=251430234025581
Jacque Pepin's dandelion salad.

[Brett Bellmore]

Purslane, OTOH, is one of my favorite salad greens.

[shawn_dude]

If you like purslane, check out Miner's Lettuce: Claytonia perfoliata

It grows natively in my back yard. Reseeds without any effort from me. Makes for great salads.

[Commenter_XY]

That was funny = I have had dandelions. They are acceptable as an alternative to starvation. No more.

[Dr. Ed 2]

Dandelions are *not* native to North America -- they were imported from Europe because they were the first edible vegetable in the spring -- once important in New England. They also could be (and were) canned for use in May & June before other things were ready to eat.

NB: They get bitter once they start blossoming, you want to pick them before that, and boil them before eating.

[Commenter_XY]

John F Carr, I'll continue to mow my lawn and ensure my property does not look like an overgrown, unkempt crackhouse. No-mow May? Oh, what will the environuts think of next.

[Estragon]

Harlan crow footed the bill for nephew’s private school. Nothing to see here, I’m sure.

https://www.propublica.org/article/clarence-thomas-harlan-crow-private-school-tuition-scotus

[Bob from Ohio]

"The law’s definition of dependent child is narrow, however, and likely would not apply to Martin since Thomas was his legal guardian, not his parent."

[Estragon]

Hmmm if that’s true then why did he list this?

“Earl & Louise Dixon $5,000 Education gift to Mark Martin”

2002 disclosure. Source:
https://www.courtlistener.com/person/3200/disclosure/34183/clarence-thomas/

[Bob from Ohio]

So? He over disclosed and got better advice later.

[Estragon]

Cmon Bob, this is pathetic even for you.

What is the yearly outlay from crow to Thomas at this point? Private jets and travel plus private school tuition plus upkeep on moms house. Nothing to see here? Really?

[Bob from Ohio]

Its not illegal so correct, nothing to see here.

[Estragon]

Depends on how he treats all this on his taxes, doesn’t it?

By the way- how much you think it costs to fly a private jet to Bali and then cruise around on a private yacht for a week? Just give me a ballpark number.

Appearance of impropriety indeed!

[Bob from Ohio]

Who cares. Its not my money.

[Gandydancer]

Crow hasn’t had any cases before SCOTUS, so he can spend as much as he likes on his Thomas hobby. And there has been no credible suggestion that Thomas has modified any of his opinions in any way so as to please Crow.

[myself]

Wow, of all the financial arrangements so far this is definitely the worst.

For the other cases there were excuses like for Crow like "oh, I wanted to build a museum", or "I really believe in the foundation Gina Thomas is running", or even "oh, I wanted my friends along on my vacation".

They were bad excuses, but enough for hacks like Blackman to walk away satisfied.

But this? Crow is simply taking a major expense off of Thomas's hands, it's about as close as you can get to Crow handing Thomas a massive ($100k? $150k?) check as you can get without paying him directly.

And of course, despite all the criticism and scrutiny of the relationship there was zero proactive disclosure on Thomas's part, which makes you wonder how much more there is to uncover.

The only question remains, does Blackman simply ignore this or does he try to spin it as something completely innocent and above board! My money is on something along the lines of "well Crow is a billionaire so he simply gives his friends piles of money out of the goodness of his heart"!

[Gandydancer]

Thomas is a Crow hobby, like his Hitler/Mao/Ceauscu memorabilia collection. So what?

[grb]

I’m thinking about getting a Supreme Court Justice as a pet. I considered Clarence Thomas but :

(1) He already has an owner.
(2) He seems a little pricy for my budget.
(3) I’d prefer my pet have a modicum of self-respect.

Of course he’s almost certainty house-broken, so there’s that. Still, even if I could buy Clarence, apparently it’s a bundled package: There’s the wife’s salary, the mother’s residence, the kid’s tuition, probably payouts to brothers & sisters as well. And for what? You kinda want your pet to happily wag his tail when he sees you, but I doubt sour dour Clarence would.

(At least not for the money I could afford to pay him)

[Ben_]

Sarcastr0 told us that dehumanizing people is bad.

But you’re on blue team so I’m sure he’ll give you a pass. Blue team gets infinite carte blanche on any behavior.

[Bob from Ohio]

Talking about a black being owned too.

[grb]

Unfortunately, he is.

[Bob from Ohio]

Racism is racism even when a leftist spouts it.

[Ben_]

They just give themselves and their teammates a pass for it.

[grb]

You have to wonder how Thomas earns his keep. Does he ever have to stand in Crow’s garden absolutely motionless, right beside those statues of Hitler & Ceausescu? I’ve seen buskers do that in front of an upturned hat filled with dollar bills & coins, and they’re paid nowhere near as well as the Justice!

[Gandydancer]

As someone otherwise useless YOU or, say, Sotomayor, would have to do something entertaining like pee on some other lefty, but Thomas is raises the tone of the place just by being Thomas.

[Sarcastr0]

If Alito had acted the same, I’m pretty sure grb would have posted the same.

[ThePublius]

How about the wise latina? RGB? Breyer?

The SCOTUS, and conservative justices n particular, are under attack by the left. SCOTUS' conservative justices are the new Trump.

[Sarcastr0]

No new goalposts; he was being accused of racism.
Now you're calling him partisan.

Different accusation; you can't use the one to bootstrap the other.

[Gandydancer]

On the contrary, the Democrat Racist Plantation is a thing.

[Ben_]

Heh

[grb]

Bob from Ohio : Racism is racism even when a leftist spouts it.

You’re transparently full of shit. Someone who would sell his mother’s house to his sugardaddy with the old lady still inside is owned. Period. Facing a choice between basic self respect vs keeping his owner happy and the cash flowing, he picked the latter.

Thomas isn’t indigent, Bob. He can afford repairs to his own damn mother’s house. He can afford to pay his grandnephew’s tuition. That he chose to be a rich clown’s playtoy to save a few bucks & keep the luxury vacations coming was his own decision.

He chose to be owned. You can’t foist that off on me…

[Bob from Ohio]

"Someone who would sell his mother’s house to his sugardaddy with the old lady still inside is owned."

She got a free life estate.

Repeating the racism with stupid arguments is still racism.

[Frank Drackman]

Surprise, Judge Thomas doesn't need your approval to do anything,
in other words, go fuck yourself.
No offense,

Frank

[grb]

Frank Drackman : “Judge Thomas doesn’t need your approval to do anything”

Granted. He doesn’t need my approval to be somebody’s pet Justice. He doesn’t need my approval to be a barking seal or painted whore for cash on the barrelhead, even if the amounts run into hundreds of thousands of dollars.

He just has to be corrupt. Which he is.

[Gandydancer]

You’re frothing at the mouth, and we’re laughing at you and your helplessness.

[Frank Drackman]

Is the Judge paying you rent for the space he's taking in your head?

[grb]

Hilarious. That’s two posts in a row with (almost) proper english, real spelling, and something like a discernible point. Excuse my vanity, but I’m going to tally that as a personal achievement.

We should upset you more often Frank. It seems the effect is good for you….

[Nige]

'a black'

Nobody covering themselves in glory here.

[NOVA Lawyer]

Seriously.

[Bored Lawyer]

Monkeys can have pets? Who knew?

[TwelveInchPianist]

I guess by this standard, most Biden family members are owned by the Chinese government and are their pets.

Talk about appearance of impropriety!

[Alpheus W Drinkwater]

And then there's the Russian mafia laundering their money through Trump's casino. Lots of pets around today.

[M L]

"Earlier this year, Germany's health minister, Karl Lauterbach, admitted that school closures had been a “big mistake.” There has been no such acknowledgment in the United States."

https://news.yahoo.com/randi-weingarten-anthony-fauci-and-why-we-are-still-talking-about-pandemic-school-closures-193520053.html

[shawn_dude]

Monday morning quarterbacking doesn't make the original decision incorrect given the information available at the time.

[M L]

Sure. But also, the original decisions were egregiously incorrect given the information available at the time. That is to say, they were a big mistake, as Germany's health minister acknowledged. Fauci seems to acknowledge it too, by laughably trying to disclaim responsibility for shutting down a single school or factory or business.

[shawn_dude]

Germany had the benefit that it's populous believed that COVID wasn't a hoax and followed medical guidelines. The data we had in late 2020 was that children were less susceptible to COVID but were transmitting the disease to adults in school and at home. Americans had politicized the disease and a significant minority of the population was refusing to follow the same common sense guidelines that the Germans were following. So while it would have been possible for American schools to reopen earlier in a safe manner, too man Americans were refusing to comply with recommended safety procedures for that to happen. It's not enough to just look at what Germany accomplished without understanding how their success wasn't possible here given such a high level of conservative dipshittery.

[M L]

I agree that American Democrats politicized the disease and shut down schools and harmed millions of children even though it was an egregiously incorrect decision given the information at the time.

[NOVA Lawyer]

It wasn't Democrats storming legislatures and threatening the lives of governors who didn't pursue their preferred policy, it was the MAGA people. That's politicizing things.

MAGA didn't engage in reasoned debate about reasonable policy differences (I say reasonable, because very nearly every country followed similar shutdown policies which suggests the various shutdown measures were not unreasonable, given what was known), but instead demanded they get their way because the Democrats were [insert various conspiracy theories or empty "freedom" platitudes].

And the keep things open (to various degrees) position was a reasonable position. But the political conspiracy theories put forward by MAGA types as to why other people didn't agree were unreasonable and injected partisanship into the debate. (How you know MAGA made it political: plenty of Republicans, including the President at the time and various GOP governors, were on board with shutdowns, until their constituents made it impossible for many of them to continue to have their own, varied opinions. That's how it became political, MAGA made it a litmus test for party unity. The same thing simply didn't happen on the Democratic side.

[Nige]

I have a sneaking suspicion he said something a bit more nuanced.

[Mr. Bumble]

That should be "the dis-information given at the time".

[bevis the lumberjack]

“Monday morning quarterbacking”. Right.

People were screaming about this at the time and they were shouted down as heretics by the media while the feds worked to get them deplatformed.

[M L]

White House Deal with Mexico: More Migrants, Less Video

A White House official has signed a border management deal with Mexico to minimize the visibility of accelerating mass illegal migration once officials lift the Title 42 barrier that now protects Americans.

The deal is not intended to block labor migration into Americans’ workplaces and neighborhoods, said Rosemary Jenks, the director of Government Relations for NumbersUSA: “It’s all designed to mask what is the intended goal of the Biden administration — which is to bring in as many people as possible.”

The administration’s same-day announcement that it sending 1,500 troops to the border “is all part of that distraction,” she added. The troops will be “pushing paper and stocking warehouses” to help Biden’s border agents and its progressive non-profit register more migrants for flights and bus trips to Americans’ cities and towns.

The deal with Mexico cooperation helps Biden’s deputies quietly funnel the chaotic and growing flood of illegal, job-seeking migrants through hidden side doors in the border . . .

Officials are already inviting up to 30,000 migrants per month to fly from four countries into airports around the United States. They are also helping to bus roughly 25,000 migrants from shelters in Mexico to border sites for quiet catch-and-release processing.

“It is stunning, the lawlessness of this administration,” she added. “They just create these programs out of whole cloth … — these people are making their own laws and nobody’s stopping them.” . . .

In 1990, Congress set current immigration levels at about one million per year, alongside a flow of temporary workers for favored interest groups, including farmers, resort operators, and Fortune 500 companies. Those high caps provide roughly one immigrant for every four U.S. births but helped limit the migration-imposed damage to Americans’ national labor and housing markets.

Biden’s cooperation with other countries, and the establishment media, helped minimize the public recognition and response to Biden’s population policy. “They got away with [an inflow of] 4.5, to 6 million people over the last two years,” she said.

Despite the massive inflow, Biden’s deputies and their allies are portraying his border policies as a return to the low migraiton rules set by President Donald Trump and his deputies.

https://www.breitbart.com/politics/2023/05/03/white-house-deal-with-mexico-more-migrants-less-video/

[Martinned]

massive inflow

Objection! Assumes facts not in evidence!

Meanwhile, the Title 42 immigration rules are somehow still in effect. I'm sure that everyone on this blog who is permanently outraged about Covid restrictionis will be similarly outraged about that.

https://www.wsj.com/articles/what-is-title-42-border-rules-migration-11649118539

[M L]

The facts are in evidence. The Biden admin has constantly reached new heights of illegal immigration and lied about it repeatedly.

[Martinned]

If that's what they tell you on Fox News, it must be true. After all, Fox News wouldn't lie to you, so a Fox News story is almost as good as actual evidence...

[M L]

I'll just let you wallow in your ignorance.

[Gandydancer]

The massive inflow of Invaders isn’t remotely “not in evidence”. The article’s list of massive numbers is by no means comprehensive, but you have to be determinedly blind if you missed the ones it included.

[Martinned]

Looks like the Winning in Florida continues...
https://legiscan.com/FL/text/H1521/2023

(f) "Female" means a person belonging, at birth, to the biological sex which has the specific reproductive role of producing eggs. (...)
(h) "Male" means a person belonging, at birth, to the biological sex which has the specific reproductive role of producing sperm.

Can anyone explain to me how this is different from the legendary Indiana Pi Bill? It's just as scientifically illiterate, the only difference is that the guy in Indiana wasn't proposing to put anyone in prison.

[Ben_]

You’re very interested in blurring gender lines. Why?

[Nige]

You're very interested in making it illegal to blur gender lines, why?

[Frank Drackman]

because having large men compete with tiny women in sports is a bad idea

[Nige]

edgebot manages something resembling a complete sentence.

[Gandydancer]

Nige pretends his question wasn’t answered.

[Mr. Bumble]

Nige "pretends" a lot.

[Nige]

Gandy and Bumble pretend edgebot is a real boy.

[M L]

Someone is scientifically illiterate here. But it's you.

[shawn_dude]

What is the correct sex for a person not born with ovaries or testicles, or born with both? They exist.

[M L]

(a) Keep in mind, that has nothing at all to do with the topic of transgenderism. To suggest that it does is just a dishonest rhetorical tactic.

(b) Belonging to the biological sex that has a certain reproductive role does not require the actual ability to produce sperm or eggs or reproduce, etc. Exceedingly rare birth defects like you mention do not preclude belonging to a biological sex based on the totality of biological characteristics.

[shawn_dude]

Speaking of dishonest rhetorical tactics...

Laws trying to define sex in order to use state power to harm transgender persons often also harm people born intersex. They are often an unintended victim of attacks on transgendered people.

Intersex persons who do not fit the binary roles defined above as being born to one or the other. They are often some aspect of both. What you appear to be saying is that we can perform a gender assignment surgery on them or just fudge the rule a bit to assign them one of the binary sexes in order to preserve our biased regime.

(As Lee and Martinned later noted, the law includes a carve out for intersex persons.)

[Lee Moore]

Your (b) is half right. You can certainly have a male or female reproductive system which is defective because you don't produce gametes. And that doesn't prevent you being male or female. We know what kind of gametes you would produce but for the defect.

But this "Exceedingly rare birth defects like you mention do not preclude belonging to a biological sex based on the totality of biological characteristics" is not correct, or perhaps not very correct.
The sort of DSDs that shawn dude refers to - operating at the gonadal (or lack thereof) level - are usually deleterious to subsequent development of the secondary sexual characteristics (because evolution has arranged a developmental chain reaction.)

If a human lacks sexually differentiated gonads then that human lacks any sex. Which is not to say that for social and psychological purposes they might not prefer to be slotted in with one of the two sexes. But sex-wise they're a nada. So the "belonging to a biological sex based on the totality of biological characteristics" is a social convenience - it's not actually true as a matter of biology.

[Lee Moore]

"not born with ovaries or testicles" = "no sex"

"or born with both" - no they don't exist (in humans.) There are certainly humans who have ovotestes, or an ovotestis and a gonad of definite sex, or who have gonadal tissue of one sex or the other, or undifferentiated gonadal material. But, so far, no one with an actual ovary and an actual testis. But such folk as do exist fit neatly within the exception that Martinned sets out below. As would a human woth one of each type of gonad, if one turned up.

The statutory definitions of "female" and "male" work just fine and, contrary to Martinned's rather strange lysenkoist beliefs, are entiely biologically literate.

[Martinned]

I didn't say they weren't biologically literate, I said they weren't scientifically literate. There is more to science than biology. The biological determinism at play here is exactly what is so illiterate.

[Lee Moore]

Interesting. What non biological science is offended by their biologically correct statutory definitions of “female” and “male” ?

To me biological determination of biological concepts - like sex - seems kinda the way to go.

[Martinned]

Psychology. Deciding that what is "biologically correct" is the only issue is exactly the problem. Human beings are more than their biology, and denying that is scientifically illiterate.

[Lee Moore]

Er, psychology is a branch of biology. Maybe you’re trying to distinguish between physiology and psychology ?

In any event, sex is a physiological concept, not a psychological concept, and it refers to an organism’s reproductive type, and is conclusively defined by reference to gametes.

That is not to say, of course, that sex does not have psychological implications. So, for example, a male human (aka one with testes) often requires psychological cues to get one of his most important, but secondary, sexual characteristics into working order for copulation. And in some people, these psychological cues work contrary to reproductive functionality – if for example our test guy is aroused by other guys rather than gals. Or is aroused by gals but terrified of them. But this psychological aspect of arousal or lack of it is perfectly irrelevant to what sex the guy is. Got testes, but hot for guys ? Still a guy. Got testes, but can’t get it up ? Still a guy.

But psychologcal implications are attached to all sorts of physiological items. A large bulbous nose – whose bulbosity is entirely physiological – may result in you being socially unconfident. It may affect how you behave in the dating market, in the office, in your sports team. And how you feel about yourself.

Nobody suggests that your sex doesn’t have an effect in your head. But it’s an effect. What goes on in your head about your sex doesn’t affect your sex; any more than what goes on in your head about your bulbous nose affects your nose.

The psychological aspects of sex are to some extent caused by the original and definitional sex differentation of the gonads, because – obviously – evolution has arranged the cascade of secondary sexual development in a way that almost always aligns the secondary sexual characteristics with the gonads. But only “almost always.” The production line is not error free.

And of course there are plenty of social inputs etc to your sexual psychology. Which is all fascinating, no doubt, but all irrelevant to what sex you actually are. Which the Florida legislature has got right.

[Don Nico]

Shawn, so what?
Those rare creatures are aberrations. Their sex is indeterminate.

[Commenter_XY]

I'm still shaking my head at the thread awhile back where XX and XY was evidently confusing. 🙂

[NOVA Lawyer]

If I recall, you were the one confused.

But to maybe you were on the right side of that conversation. You understand that there are XX males and XY females, even according to the Florida law, right?

(Perhaps there's a reason they didn't use genotype in the law.)

[shawn_dude]

As long as official, must-be-filled out government forms have a box for "male," "female," and "other," I don't care at all. (Or, don't have a box for sex since that's largely irrelevant.)

[John F. Carr]

What's illiterate about it? The vast majority of people clearly fall into one of the two categories. Having both testes and ovaries, or having neither, is a very rare condition.

[Martinned]

That's not the illiterate part. They actually included a provision for intersex people, sort of:

(15) This section does not apply to an individual who is or has been under treatment by a physician who, in his or her good faith clinical judgment, performs procedures upon or provides therapies to a minor born with a medically verifiable genetic disorder of sexual development, including any of the following:
(a) External biological sex characteristics that are unresolvably ambiguous.
(b) A disorder of sexual development in which the physician has determined through genetic or biochemical testing that the patient does not have a normal sex chromosome structure, sex steroid hormone production, or sex steroid hormone action for a male or female, as applicable.

[Nige]

Praising the fascists for the concision of their strict categorisations of people that they feel obliged to enshrine in law.

[EscherEnigma]

Vast majority of people are straight, it'd still be scientifically inaccurate to claim that the only sexual orientation is heterosexual.

Which is to say, if your definition only works for the "vast majority", but not "all", it's not a "definition", it's a "rule of thumb".

[Lee Moore]

At least as far as Martinned's original extract reveals, the law in question defines "female" and "male." (Accurately as it happens.)
That doesn't mean that a human, under the law, as in reality, can fall outside the definition. Indeed the law, like reality, seems to make an exception for those very rare cases of "neither."

[EscherEnigma]

Now, I'm not a lawyer, but I'm pretty sure that sub-section (15)'s emphasis on treatment and physicians means that the section does apply to intersex people who have not sought medical intervention to better fit the gender binary.

AKA: if you're intersex and want to use a public restroom in Florida, you'd better be trying to change your biology to fit the gender binary.

[EscherEnigma]

I've said it before and I'll say it again: if you need a human law to enforce a supposed "natural law", then that law isn't natural at all.

Real "natural laws" are self-enforcing. And for that matter, if we are able to violate them, then it means the "law" was a lie and the true "law" is actually something different.

Which is to say... if you think someone is violating a "law of gender", then either (A) that's not a "natural" law, or (B) you don't understand what's happening.

[VinniUSMC]

Guess we should just stop defining words we use. Throw out the whole dictionary. "Words mean what I say they mean, and I can change my mind at any time."

[EscherEnigma]

Dictionaries are descriptive, not prescriptive.

Laws are prescriptive, not descriptive.

Do I need to elaborate?

[VinniUSMC]

Do I need to elaborate?

Yeah. Start with this piece of gibberish: “if you need a human law to enforce a supposed “natural law”, then that law isn’t natural at all.”

Of course, you ignore that the law is defining the terms "as used" in the law, like a dictionary defines words "as used".

[Lee Moore]

I don’t think this law attempts to enforce a natural law, it seeks to define natural objects for legal purposes. And it does so with commendable scientific accuracy.

Imagine the legislature wished to enact a law protecting pigs and hogs from cruel treatment during their youth, before they are sent to their cruel deaths to satisfy our demand for bacon. But suppose there was a body of persons, a small minority in the general population, but well represented in academia and the legal profession, that insisted that those animals known to the rest of the population as “chickens” are in fact pigs, and should be referred to as such.

How is the legislature to make it clear that it intends its rule to apply to actual pigs and actual hogs, but not to chickens ?

By defining what they mean by “pig” and “hog” – the natural objects in question – in the statute.

[EscherEnigma]

Yes, I know most of Reason denies that trans people exist. You're still scientifically illiterate jackasses who are mostly going to hurt cisgender women.

[Bob from Ohio]

"cisgender women"

You just invented a longer word to describe "women".

A man who imagines himself a woman is not actually a woman but a man.

[EscherEnigma]

(A) All words are invented.
(B) The point of most words is to better describe and differentiate ideas and things.
(C) This is 2023, not 1994, so no, I didn't invent jack.
(D) Way to avoid the point.

[Bob from Ohio]

No one is denying that there are people who imagine they are somehow actually the opposite sex, we just deny that their delusion is accurate.

[Nige]

Oh you don’t ‘just’ act as if other people’s experiences of their own lives and bodies and the medically recognised approaches to treating them are less relevant than your emotional conviction that a thing you don’t like must be bad.

[Brett Bellmore]

So, Emperor Norton really WAS royalty? Go figure.

[Nige]

Your disgust at anything you can’t understand or control notwithstanding, Emperor Norton was Emperor Norton.

[Lee Moore]

The point of most words is to better describe and differentiate ideas and things.

Up to a point, Lord Copper. It would be nice if that was the way things always went, but there are currents that flow in the other direction. You, circa 1920, might be generally in favor of lotsa government, and so instead of describing yourself as a "progressive" - by then not a very popular thing to be - you might describe yourself as a "liberal". Causing a confusion with the then traditional idea of liberals being enthusiastic about keeping the government out of things. So your usage would tend to confuse two different ideas rather than differentiate them. At the same time I might describe you as a "socialist" which would tend to confuse your political desires with those of Mr Lenin and pals, rather than help to differentiate them.

So there are wicked folk who use words to confuse and jumble up different ideas together, rather than to differentiate them.

What of "woman" and "female" and so on ? Well the long standing usage was to identify the sort of humans, or animals, that were in the business of bringing an egg to the reproductive party. And in humans, being of the child bearing type. And a large part of the meaning of "woman and "female" was that it denotede something opposite to "man" and "male." ie by hearing "woman" one of the fundamental ideas was "not a man."

So is the new usage describing "trans women" as "women" one of those helpfully differentiating usages ? Or one of those unhelpfully confusing usages ? It seems to many, including me, that it is one of the latter type. It means that a newspaper article needs to be parsed carefully to discover that the perp was actually a guy, not a gal, as the news story may say. And it also seems that this confusion is the whole point of the new usage. It is to insist that a "trans woman" is really very much the same sort of thing as a "woman" - rather than the opposite of one.

Now it is true that a "trans woman" is like an actual "woman" in some respects. Both would like society to treat them as a "woman" (though many actual women would of course object to any such "assuming" and "sexist" distinction between social customs applied to each sex.)

And then there's.....well what else do "trans women" and actual "women" have in common ? Other than things that all humans have in common ?

Compared to the enormously long list of things they don't have in common ?

Is a "trans woman" more like an actual man, or more like an actual woman ? And the answer, obviously, is - more like a man, since that's what a trans woman actually is.

[Lee Moore]

I would mention that in a discussion with, I think Randall, on another thread a few days ago, he/she/it suggested (contemptuously, obviously) that perhaps "gynoped" might be deployed instead of "trans woman."

I demurred since it's an ugly word, and "ped" has unfortunate etymological associations. Instead I proposed "gynego" which captures both the sense of womanhood, and that this sense is a feelng of personal identity. "I am a woman in my own mind." That would be a useful differentiating word, rather than the confusing appropriation of "woman" to describe things that are "not a woman."

And andrego for the other way round.

[EscherEnigma]

Oh hey, assigning alternate history to people is cool now?

Well, in that case, in 1933 Nazi Germany you're burning books.

[Lee Moore]

Pretending to have a hissy fit doesn't identify you as a girl, I'm afraid. Boys can do that too.

It's an egg thing.

[Nige]

Gotta enforce those gender norms.

[VinniUSMC]

Being one of the two sexes capable of producing an egg is not a "gender norm".

Try defining what a woman is without referencing any gender norms. What entirely internal, non-cultural, biological/psychological/physiological feature(s) differentiate a man from a woman? How does a person know (setting aside the exceedingly rare intersex/etc cases) that they are the "wrong" sex, without reference to some stereotype (aka Dylan Mulvaney) or cultural gender norm (dresses/pink/cars/etc)?

[Lee Moore]

I think Nige was suggesting that idea that females have a greater propensity to throw fake hissy fits than males forms part of a socially constructed gender norm (bearing no basis in reality – hence the need for “enforcing” it.)

In reality, we are all expert throwers of hissy fits at 2 years old, and as we get older and smarter, we realise that a hissy fit can have value in the matters of controlling our parents, dodging blame, assigning fault to our siblings and so on, and so we learn to fake them. (As well as still having actual ones.)

As we get older still we begin to recognise that there are social costs to hissy fits, real or invented, including the risk that we will be tagged as immature. Though that, of course, does not prevent us from having hissy fits well into our teens. Cos we’re immature.

But in practice the social costs of excessive hissy-fitting to a maturing male are rather greater than to a maturing female. Nobody likes to be called a whiny baby, but it’s more damaging to a guy’s social reputation than to a gal’s.

At the same time, the burgeoning strengh difference between teen males and females (mostly) boxes females into a verbal mode of combat and contention – particularly in combat/contention with males. Whereas guys still have the physical option.

Hence it is indeed a gender norm that gals are better at, and more likely to use, the fake hissy fit than guys. The interesting questions though are (a) whether that gender “norm” is accurate or not, and (b) whether or to what extent it is “socially constructed” rather than a natural behavioral adaptation arising from physiology.

[Nige]

‘Try defining what a woman is without referencing any gender norms. ‘

Try resisting the need to codify a definition of woman into law just to get at trans people and, not incidentally, to control the behaviour of women.

'Hence it is indeed a gender norm that gals are better at, and more likely to use, the fake hissy fit than guys.'

Or that women get accused of throwing hissy fits, fake and otherwise, by men who think a woman standing up for herself or asserting herself is a hissy fit.

[Lee Moore]

And while we’re on gender norms, this is funny :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LS37SNYjg8w

[Ben_]

How about if we treat trans people with as much kindness and respect and tolerance and evenhandedness as Democrats and leftists showed towards Trump?

Seems fair.

[Nige]

Your hatred of them is arbitrary anyway, and this self-parody of a privleged group of people inventing resentment-fueled standards for their treatment of a blameless minority is hardly going to make your intentions for them one iota less fascist and evil.

[Noscitur a sociis]

Who said anything about a "'natural' law"?

[Brett Bellmore]

"It’s just as scientifically illiterate"

Which is to say, not at all.

[Voize]

Well, the Pi bill purported to legislate mathematical truth, while the Florida bill (despite all the hoopla) defines some terms "As used in this section". As you know, there is nothing remarkable about a statute defining terms it uses that would otherwise be contentious.

[Gandydancer]

The difference is that pi ISN’T 3.1415. But pretending that a human who, if not damaged, produces eggs is male is simply nuts.

[Brett Bellmore]

Well, yeah: Properly rounded, it's 3.1416, obviously. I mean, 3.1415926535... Nobody who cared about being accurate would just truncate it like that.

[Gandydancer]

Nobody who cares about being accurate truncates pi. Nobody who gives a damn about reality pretends that anyone born with testes is a woman. These two things are not the same.

[Brett Bellmore]

Since pi is infinitely long, EVERYBODY using it truncates it. EVERYBODY. I assume people who care about being accurate are a subset of everybody...

[Noscitur a sociis]

Surely you know what statutory definitions are?

[M L]

Paul Krugman is now saying that dollar dominance/reserve currency status isn't actually a big deal, we can lose it and it's not a problem. I don't know if that's true but I'm doubtful. This seems like a somewhat ominous sign. Planned demolition effort underway?

[Martinned]

I would definitely take your word over the guy who literally won a Nobel prize for studying international trade patterns.

[M L]

Unfortunately he’s been an unhinged partisan hack for years now, and wrong about plenty of things. Aside from taking anyone’s word, are you inclined to believe that reserve currency status is unimportant to the US? What about exponentially increasing spending, do you support that?

[Sarcastr0]

I'm not sure I agree with Krugman, but ML calling someone unhinged as he links Brietbart and stans for the Confederacy, is quite a sight to see.

[M L]

What’s wrong with Breitbart? When I check it 1-2x a month or so, they usually seem to have a handful of items that nobody else is talking about, like the one I linked above. Often dealing with immigration issues.

[Sarcastr0]

I read it when it's linked, so I don't ad hom, but it's a propaganda rag, willing to blatantly distort to get it's point of view out there.

It's main use is validating those who want to believe.

[M L]

In my view the distortions and propaganda are more blatant and egregious at outlets like the Washington Post - YMMV. The primary difference is that right wing outlets like Breitbart are more up front about their opinionated slant and don't maintain misleading pretenses, and are therefore more honest overall. Of course they are very different organizations with very different budgets and resources so there are differences in editing quality, scope of reporting and other things as well.

[Gandydancer]

It’s also evidence that you are unhinged — and somehow that Krugman is not — according to S_0, that you “stan” for the Confederacy. Do you “stan” for the Confederacy?

[M L]

Unhinged is Sarcastr0 following me around for years calling me a "neo-Confederate" in every thread because facts hurt his feelings apparently. No, I don't "stan" for the Confederacy. I've observed, for example, that your average Confederate soldier was just defending their homeland and kin from foreign invasion, in their mind, and didn't own slaves or have any stake in that. People at that time viewed their state as the "country" they were from and viewed it as a sovereign to which they owed primary allegiance. I've expressed the opinion that graves shouldn't be dug up, and that monuments to the unnamed Confederate soldiers whose remains were never recovered shouldn't be taken down. I've disagreed with false historical myths like the idea that the North went to war for some noble cause or to end slavery.

[Lee Moore]

That positively begs to be whatabouted. Fortunately ML has stepped up to the plate.

[Sarcastr0]

The WaPo and NYT have transparency and standards. Also an agenda, both at the editorial and journalistic level, but internal controls.

Breitbart has none of those things - if it fits, it prints; fact checking is not the way to push through your propaganda.

One great way to tell the right's full of shit in their raging against the media is that they can't stop quoting the reporting done by the real outlets, either to rage against, or to build their own narratives, depending on how the like the story.

This site is like the most left place Breitbart is going to be quoted for truth.

[Frank Drackman]

Nobel Prizes don't mean shit, they're named after the guy who invented Dynamite for Christ's Sake, just look at the Criminal's who've won one, Yassar Arafat, Koffin Onan, Henry Kissinger, Jimmuh Cartuh, Barry Hussein....

Frank

[Mr. Bumble]

The Nobels are right up there with the Pullshitzers.

[M L]

Navy Confirms Using Drag Queen Influencer as a ‘Digital Ambassador’ to Attract Recruits

U.S. State Department Offers Funds to Teach English to ‘Transgender Youth’ in Pakistan

[Sarcastr0]

You're obsessed with tiny things.

[Mr. Bumble]

The drag queen has tiny parts?

[Bob from Ohio]

He's referring to the tiny brains at the U.S. State Department.

[BravoCharlieDelta]

Bud Light: this is fine
Navy: Hold my gay beer

[Nige]

Weirdos on the right: *endless screaming*

[Gandydancer]

Weirdo on the Left pretending endlessly that Weird is normal ^^^^^.

It is, but only for him and his ilk.

[Nige]

Cranky reactionary feeling threatened by... everything

[TwelveInchPianist]

U.S. State Department Offers Funds to Teach English to ‘Transgender Youth’ in Pakistan...

Son, I've got good news and bad news.

The good news is that we've found a way to finance your education...

[M L]

Ha!

[BravoCharlieDelta]

lol good one

[shawn_dude]

So, no data showing whether or not using a drag queen was an effective marketing tool? I'm confused as to why you point this out without some information regarding effectiveness.

[Mr. Bumble]

Up next, The Village People doing In The Navy.

[Gandydancer]

This is a NEW bright idea from our Woke Navy, dimwit, but it’s pretty clear that our tranny Admiral didn’t fix any recruitment problems. Quite the opposite.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

The bigotry dooms your political preferences, clinger, but if a group of conservative law professors don’t understand that problem I won’t fault you so much for missing it, too.

Carry on, clingers.

[EscherEnigma]

So is your complaint that recruitment and retention is a thing the military does, or just that the Navy isn't as homophobic as you are?

[hoppy025]

Is there any level of sexual deviance you leftists won’t embrace? Anything at all? Would you get all excited if your son grows up to be like RAK, violating little boys?

[EscherEnigma]

Snarky response: I wouldn't embrace having sex with you. So that's a sexual deviancy I'm not down for at all.

Serious response: yes. Start with the Harkness Test and you've got a huge chunk of the moral question regarding sex solved.

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

You accuse me of abusing children. Prof. Volokh censors me. You guys get very mad when someone calls you out for bigotry.

Carry on, conservative bigots. But only so far as better Americans permit.

[hoppy025]

Don't you have a kindergarteners to be grooming?

[Rev. Arthur L. Kirkland]

These are your fans, Volokh Conspirators . . . your defenders, the target audience of this bigot-embracing blog, and an important reason strong, mainstream, liberal-libertarian law schools are not interested in hiring or retaining movement conservatives for faculty positions.

There likely will always be spots for you at Regent, Liberty, and Ave Maria, though, or at Wheaton, Bob Jones, Ouachita Baptist, or Oral Roberts. If you want to try to stick with law schools, you could try South Texas College of Law Houston, too.

[Brett Bellmore]

Going out of your way to recruit people with mental health issues AND extra medical expenses? Makes about as much sense as recruiting people who are missing limbs or are deaf.

It is literally, not figuratively, asking for trouble.

[EscherEnigma]

Well, I was curious, so I unmuted Brett, and I regret it.

I mean, even ignoring this idiotic jab about trans people, he seems to have forgotten that the vast majority of people that are drag queens, that enjoy watching drag queens, and go to drag shows, are cisgender people. Hell, if we exclude the drag queens themselves, and just talk about their audiences? Then the majority is straight too.

Ru Paul's Drag Race didn't get that popular without straight people.

[Gandydancer]

What’s idiotic is imagining that identifying trannys as people with mental health issues is an “idiotic jab” rather than a truism.

[BravoCharlieDelta]

Don't call people cisgender, that's a slur and is offensive.

[Frank Drackman]

I've got a dick, play with it every day, sometimes twice (OK, "Technically" same day, like 1am, and then late nite same day)
Happily Married (see above) unfortunately Mrs. Drackman isn't on the same schedule, so I have my Mistress, Sticky Palms.

Having trouble? ABBA Videos, works for me,

Frank "Hard enough"

[bevis the lumberjack]

What does it matter if drag queens are shown to adults? I’d bet money that plenty of guys of prime military age go to drag shows in the French Quarter.

[Frank Drackman]

I'm sure you would.
You'd lose.

[Frank Drackman]

Please expand on your Military Experience in which you knew "Plenty of Guys of Prime Military Age"(Not doubting that) who went to drag shows in the French Quarter.
Pretty Simple, Air Farce, Army (Training!), Uncle Sam's Misguided Children, Navy, or Coast Guard (Yes, we humor them that they're "Military")

Frank

[Lee Moore]

There was a case in the 1930s about the residence of trusts for tax purposes. The remains of my memory associate the ideas of "Smith" and New York" with it.

Anyone got any idea of the actual name ?

[Michael Ejercito]

https://ethicsalarms.com/2023/05/03/hallelujah-sen-kennedy-puts-on-the-record-the-irrefutable-evidence-that-democratic-climate-change-policies-are-incompetent-dishonest-and-irresponsible/

Kennedy: “You don’t know do ya? You just want us to spend $50 trillion and you don’t have the slightest idea whether it’s going to reduce world temperatures. Now I’m all for carbon neutrality, but you’re the Deputy Secretary of the Department of Energy and you’re advocating we spend trillions of dollars to seek carbon neutrality – and this isn’t your money or my money, it’s taxpayer money – and you can’t tell me how much it’s going to lower world temperatures? Or you won’t tell me, you know but you won’t?”

Turk: “In my heart of hearts there is no way the world gets its act together on climate change unless the U.S. leads.”

[Gandydancer]

So, Turk is a nitwit with no answer to the question except his feels?

[Mr. Bumble]

Like the rest of the Biden cabinet.

Shame on the Republicans who voted to confirm them.

[Sarcastr0]

You got utterly owned posting a general condemnation of the Biden cabinet last week, didn't you?

The inability of some on here to respond to external stimuli is amazing.

[bevis the lumberjack]

Way to address his point.

[Sarcastr0]

What was the point you see that Bumble was making, other than partisan nonsense about the entire Biden cabinet?
which I doubt he could name off the top of his head.

The arguments were had last week. He lost handily. And here he is again.

[bevis the lumberjack]

I thought you were responding to Ejercito, who was making a reasonable point. I didn’t see bumble’s post, if you catch my drift.

Looking at more closely, yeah, I misconnected your post. I’ll take my snark back. My bad.

[Frank Drackman]

If I said I'd like to see "The Turtle" hung from the tallest yardarm, does that make me a "January 6th-ist)??
OK, I didn't say that.

[Kazinski]

I installed some new home security cameras with a DVR I can monitor remotely when I travel. They’re a Chinese off brand, seem to work ok. They’ve got this nice feature where they have image recognition of faces so you can zoom in and save faces in the image, in case of an intrusion so it might be easier to catch the perp, or perhaps not worry because it’s a friend or family member checking on your house.

But I started considering the security implications of my video stream going through a Chinese server and available to them real time. Say they had a facial recognition database of a few million possible intelligence targets, and they monitor the video stream from all the Chinese hardware security systems hooked up to the web. Then when ever they get a hit on their facial recognition database, they then monitor that stream and notify the targeting division that persons real time location whenever he’s on camera.

Nothing I’m worried about for myself, my intelligence value is zero, but an interesting thought.

As an aside the last time I entered the US from abroad, through the Global Entry line, they didn’t ask for my passport or global entry identification, they just wanted a picture of my face then addressed me by name and waved me through. I haven’t used my global entry pass for a while, because usually I travel with my wife, and god help me if I leave her in the passport/green card line and waltz through without her, although the regular has gotten magnitudes better in the last 5 years anyway.

[shawn_dude]

The bigger risk with Chinese off-brands is the quality of security baked into the device and into their servers. Even if you're not worried about the Chinese government gaining access to your data, how about joe-random hacker from just about anywhere on the planet? And if they gain access to a camera on your local network, will they be able to use that device's poor security to escalate privileges into other devices? I try to stick with more name-brand devices with some legal presence in the US or Europe where these things are taken more seriously. That isn't a perfect (or complete) solution.

My husband left me in the non-resident line when we went to his home country, recently. He regretted it when he had to wait for 40 minutes while I struggled through.

[ObviouslyNotSpam]

Lol, BTDT...

[bevis the lumberjack]

Biden’s marginally but zealot filled cabinet strikes again. A group of Catholic hospitals in Oklahoma keep a single candle, encased in glass, burning in their hospitals as a religious symbol. Have done so for decades. Biden’s HHS is threatening to take their Medicare/Medicaid certification away if they don’t snuff the candles.

https://becketnewsite.s3.amazonaws.com/20230502214615/St-Francis-Pre-litigation-Letter.pdf

For what purpose? When you fill an administration with progressive zealots this is the sort of petty overbearing crap you get.

[BravoCharlieDelta]

If gender is a social construct, how can it have biological underpinnings and how can a 2 year old know how they identify?

Democrats at three major hospitals in NC are doing gender transitions on 2 year Olds.

How is it possible for the 2 year old to feel gender dysphagia when they don't have the capacity to know what gender is?

[Moderation4ever]

I think it would help if you provided a little more data here. I don’t believe a hospital would operate on a 2 year old unless you are talking about a hermaphroditic individual. A rare condition(*), but one that maybe treated by parents making a choice to raise the child as one sex or another. Is that what you are referring to here?

I have seen estimates that 1.7% of population has intersex traits, the usual term for hermaphotes.

[BravoCharlieDelta]

https://www.edfirstnc.org/post/transgender-toddlers-treated-at-duke-unc-and-ecu

[Lee Moore]

I have seen estimates that 1.7% of population has intersex traits, the usual term for hermaphotes.

It depends on what you mean by "intersex" I suppose. You could describe homosexuals as intersex if you felt like it, since homosexuals exhibit at least one trait which is much more common in the opposite sex. But that would make the designation "intersex" somewhat pointless. Your reference to "hermaphotes", which I take to be hermaphrodites, indicates that you understand "intersex" to connote a departure from the usual "one sex or the other" rule for gonochoric species (of which humans are one.) In which case I have to advise you that you have been sold a pup.

This 1.7% is an ancient myth foisted on the world thirty years ago by the biologist-activist Anne Fausto-Sterling. Her calculations are politely debunked here :

https://www.leonardsax.com/how-common-is-intersex-a-response-to-anne-fausto-sterling/

The top ten, by frequency, of A F-S’s “intersex” conditions are :

(a) late-onset congenital adrenal hyperplasia (LOCAH), 1.5/100;
(b) Klinefelter (XXY), 0.0922/100;
(c) other non-XX, non-XY, excluding Turner and Klinefelter, 0.0639/100;
(d) Turner syndrome (XO), 0.0369/100;
(e) vaginal agenesis, 0.0169/100;
(f) classic congenital adrenal hyperplasia, 0.00779/100;
(g) complete androgen insensitivity, 0.0076/100;
(h) true hermaphrodites, 0.0012/100;
(i) idiopathic, 0.0009/100; and
(j) partial androgen insensitivity, 0.00076/100

And Dr Sax comments thus :

”The chief problem with this list is that the five most common conditions listed are not intersex conditions. If we examine these five conditions in more detail, we will see that there is no meaningful clinical sense in which these conditions can be considered intersex.

Without these five conditions, intersex becomes a rare occurrence, occurring in fewer than 2 out of every 10,000 live births.”

Moreover, as a clinician, Dr Sax is willing to regard as "intersex" several DSD conditions in which the gonads are clearly one sex or the other - eg AIS, which is a DSD affecting humans with unambiguous testes.

So from a biological point of view most of the 0.02% figure he assigns to the category of “intersex” are in fact unambiguously male or female.

Which is not to say that there aren't any people at all who don’t fit into the boxes “male” and “female”, it just that it’s more like 0.002% rather than 0.02%. Never mind 1.7%.

[Nige]

‘are doing gender transitions on 2 year Olds.’

Nope.

‘before puberty, treatment does not include any drug or surgical intervention.’

Interestingly:

‘A recent study published in Pediatrics examined the 5-year gender identity development trajectory of transgender-identified children who underwent early social gender transition. Five years later, at the average age of 11-12, almost all—97.5%—continued to identify as transgender, including a small subset (3.5%) developing a non-binary identification.’

You’re going batshit about fuck-all, and having to lie outrageously to do it.

[VinniUSMC]

Brainwashing children, and continuing to do so for another 5 years results in 10 year olds who are still brainwashed. Who knew?

[Nige]

What brainwashing? The treatment consists of letting them wear the clothes they want and play with the toys they like.

[ReaderY]

The argument seems weak. Trump is not now a federal officer, and wasn’t at the time the allegedly criminal conduct occurred. But the weakness of the legal argument may be irrelevant. The automatic appeal right creates a great opportunity to delay. And delay of his case, until after the election if he can pull it off, may be all the win he needs for his purposes.

[Brett Bellmore]

Actually, the 'criminal conduct' specified, the bookkeeping entries and payments, took place in February and March of 2017.

Not that I think his argument for removal is good, but it doesn't have that particular flaw.

[Estragon]

Stand back and stand by!!!!! LOL! Which one of those defendants was posting as Jimmy the Dane I wonder? My money is on pezzola

[Alpheus W Drinkwater]

Congratulations to Ding Liren, the new chess world champion! Now both the open and female world champions are Chinese. It will be interesting to see if Magnus Carlsen will go through the candidate process and try to win back the championship he declined to defend. He is still pretty objectively the best player in the world, but he seems a lot more interested in rapid and blitz chess than classical.

[Frank Drackman]

OK, Chinese Chess, what about Regular Chess??

[Ben_]

Naomi Wolf describes people who used to be her friends:

“So I had to face the alarming evidence that the Left now saw anyone “talking to” the opposition, as being magically, publicly, permanently contaminated and contaminating, in some weird anthropological way, and as now being utterly invalidated, and that they believed all of this in some pre-rational, Stone Age sort of belief matrix.”

And

“Above all it horrified me because the Left thus had departed from the post-Enlightenment metric of “is it true?” to return to a pre-rational metric of “is this within our tribe and according to our rituals and our cult?””

None of her longtime acquaintances and media friends would let her on the air with her viewpoint.

Read more about how she became a thought-criminal and guilty of associating with the other:

https://www.zerohedge.com/political/crime-talking-tucker-carlson

[Nige]

Aw, nobody likes her because she's toxic and talks a load of awful rubbish.

[Ben_]

Yeah, she didn’t realize blue team had fallen so far. Now she knows you’ll say anything and destroy anyone remorselessly.

[Nige]

The blue team have fallen so far that they don’t like toxic supidity and people who talk awful rubbish.

[Ben_]

She’s a thought criminal for daring to question the orthodox teachings of your cult leaders.

[Nige]

Damn when was she arrested.

[Stephen Lathrop]

I post the following at length because WAPO content may be behind a paywall for some. I add remarks of my own below.

Judicial activist directed fees to Clarence Thomas’s wife, urged ‘no mention of Ginni’ Leonard Leo told GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill nonprofit, then use money to pay spouse of Supreme Court justice

By Emma Brown, Shawn Boburg and Jonathan O’Connell May 4, 2023 at 7:15 p.m. EDT

Conservative judicial activist Leonard Leo arranged for the wife of Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas to be paid tens of thousands of dollars for consulting work just over a decade ago, specifying that her name be left off billing paperwork, according to documents reviewed by The Washington Post.

In January 2012, Leo instructed the GOP pollster Kellyanne Conway to bill a nonprofit group he advises and use that money to pay Virginia “Ginni” Thomas, the documents show. The same year, the nonprofit, the Judicial Education Project, filed a brief to the Supreme Court in a landmark voting rights case.

Leo, a key figure in a network of nonprofits that has worked to support the nominations of conservative judges, told Conway that he wanted her to “give” Ginni Thomas “another $25K,” the documents show. He emphasized that the paperwork should have “No mention of Ginni, of course.”

Conway’s firm, the Polling Company, sent the Judicial Education Project a $25,000 bill that day. Per Leo’s instructions, it listed the purpose as “Supplement for Constitution Polling and Opinion Consulting,” the documents show.

In all, according to the documents, the Polling Company paid Thomas’s firm, Liberty Consulting, $80,000 between June 2011 and June 2012, and it expected to pay $20,000 more before the end of 2012. The documents reviewed by The Post do not indicate the precise nature of any work Thomas did for the Judicial Education Project or the Polling Company.

The arrangement reveals that Leo, a longtime Federalist Society leader and friend of the Thomases, has functioned not only as an ideological ally of Clarence Thomas’s but also has worked to provide financial remuneration to his family. And it shows Leo arranging for the money to be drawn from a nonprofit that soon would have an interest before the court.

In response to questions from The Post, Leo issued a statement defending the Thomases.

“It is no secret that Ginni Thomas has a long history of working on issues within the conservative movement, and part of that work has involved gauging public attitudes and sentiment. The work she did here did not involve anything connected with either the Court’s business or with other legal issues,” he wrote. “As an advisor to JEP I have long been supportive of its opinion research relating to limited government, and The Polling Company, along with Ginni Thomas’s help, has been an invaluable resource for gauging public attitudes.”

Of the effort to keep Thomas’s name off paperwork, Leo said: “Knowing how disrespectful, malicious and gossipy people can be, I have always tried to protect the privacy of Justice Thomas and Ginni.”

Leo’s statement did not address questions about whether he had arranged other work for Ginni Thomas or how much money he directed to her in all from the nonprofit.

Conway, who was a senior adviser in the Trump White House, did not respond to messages seeking comment.

The Thomases did not respond to messages seeking comment. Ginni Thomas, a political activist and former GOP aide on Capitol Hill, has long maintained that she and her husband keep their careers separate.

What follows is from me, Stephen Lathrop:

Presumably the WAPO will investigate how much money Leo has funneled to other members of the Supreme Court, or to other federal judges. So should every major media organization.

Given Leo’s extraordinary involvement and influence in selection of both right wing Supreme Court Justices, and other judges for the lower courts, how many sitting justices and judges are now reasonably tainted by implication? Even supposing no other Supreme Court justices have been getting cash from Leo, I doubt justices Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and Barrett can be happy sharing the bench with Thomas after this story. Who can read it without wondering if they have been getting cash too?

It is worth noting that the payments to Ginni Thomas came during the runup to the Shelby County case, which gutted the Voting Rights Act. Leo was reportedly active to put an amicus brief before the Court on that case. Thomas wrote a concurring opinion as part of a 5 to 4 majority.

I will not try now to tease out how the Thomas concurrence might have differed from the others. My sense has been that Thomas has long been regarded as an unusually prolific writer of dissents and concurrences. It occurs to me now to ask, did Thomas make himself available to do his bit to tailor the record when Ginni’s clients chipped in?

[Stephen Lathrop]

One other thought on the Leonard Leo – Thomas story above.

Any opinions on whether the story warrants a Justice Department investigation of Leo and/or the Federalist Society? Is there anyone who can read the story without concluding there is probable cause to investigate whether Leo bribed Thomas? If you do not think probable cause exists, what can you say to others who might think a decision not to investigate is a dereliction and a kid-gloves treatment because the Supreme Court’s reputation is at stake?

Any other implications for legal follow-up? When Conway was, at a later time, an official in the Trump White House, was she still acting as a conduit for cash to a Supreme Court justice?

[ObviouslyNotSpam]

Gosh, when did Thomas turn Tom? He was a reliable progressive chum for most of his distinguished career, wasn't he?

[Martinned]

The right-wing populist (!) president of Serbia has vowed to completely "disarm" the civilian population following two mass shooting events in as many days. Who knew that you could do more than thoughts & prayers?

https://www.france24.com/en/europe/20230505-eight-fatally-shot-in-serbia-town-a-day-after-9-killed-at-school

[Martinned]

Politico version of the story: https://www.politico.eu/article/serbia-shootings-president-aleksander-vucic-announce-gun-crackdown/

[Brett Bellmore]

We'll see what the citizens of Serbia think about that, though.

[Martinned]

So far they don't seem to enjoy daily mass shootings as much as Americans do.

[M L]

Fortunately the murderous criminals there won't be able to shoot people anymore, since they'll be giving up their guns and being careful to follow the law. Wouldn't want to break any laws.

[Alpheus W Drinkwater]

By that logic, nothing should be illegal.

[Ben_]

Actions of harmless, innocent people exercising their rights shouldn't be illegal.

Why do gun-controllers want to arrest and imprison harmless, innocent people who are exercising their rights? It's because they are not like you, isn't it?

[Brett Bellmore]

I don't think Americans so much "enjoy" mass shootings, as view them as a rare misuse of a valuable right.

I mean, we value the 1st amendment, that doesn't mean we enjoy forged currency and extortion notes.

[Stephen Lathrop]

Leonard Leo's largesse. Why should we assume it extends only to Clarence Thomas? The nation is chock-a-block with dark money. How about a share for half the federal bench, so they don't drift left? How about special recompense for concurrences which break ground and invite more-right cases to come?

More generally, is the nation well served by competing activities to recruit and indoctrinate partisans into well-organized rival camps, in the hopes they become rival partisan judges?

[ObviouslyNotSpam]

The only thing which keeps half the federal bench from "drifting left" is right wing dark money? Interesting.

[Bob from Ohio]

The Trump kids [and spouses] say hello.

Still complaining about Kushner.

[bevis the lumberjack]

Hunter is clearly involved in influence peddling. If his dad was involved or profited from it, it's a really fucking huge deal. Since, during the Trump years, you were massively offended by corruption and are offended by Justice Thomas potential corruption, you'd think that your anti-corruption principle would lead to you wanting the potential corruption related to Hunter Biden to be investigated thoroughly, but for some reason you don't. Wonder why that's the case......

[Nige]

Kushner and his wife, Trump's daughter, worked in the presidential administration. Imagine the outcry if Biden forced through a security clearance for Hunter?

[SimonP]

Yes, the Trump kids, and Kushner - those progeny who, uh, actually were in the White House, got security clearances, acted as advisors to Trump and his campaign, are managing his business, did get cushy payouts after leaving office - those Trump kids.

Kushner is over here playing with $2bn of Saudi cash, Eric and Don Jr. are engaged in their Trump-orbit corrupt shenanigans, and y'all are talking about Hunter's child support payments and dick pics.

[EscherEnigma]

... you're complaining that people paid attention to people with political policy jobs in the White House?

[Dr. Ed 2]

He doesn't have brain damage from two different brain bleeds.

[Mr. Bumble]

You're confusing him with Feinstein.

[Bob from Ohio]

Hunter ["smartest man I know"] is often in the White House and travels overseas with dad. They obviously don't talk about the 7th grand kid.

Biden doesn't seek advice from the "smartest man he knows"?

[shawn_dude]

So if Hunter doesn't see his daughter, he's a "deadbeat," but if Joe sees his son in his own home, that's also bad?

[Nige]

Well, he didn’t give him a job in the administration, because that would be nepotism, so all you’re left with is appeals to credulity and speculation and selective amnesia about who did get nepotistically employed in an administration with security clearances.

[Mr. Bumble]

4 year old child vs. 53 year old adult? Not quite the same thing.

[Alpheus W Drinkwater]

It's bad faith arguing all down the line, don't expect consistency.

[The Margrave of Azilia]

I hope this helps:

“Lawmakers revive bill making it harder for third parties to qualify for ballot — only to kill it again”

https://montanafreepress.org/2023/04/27/committee-revives-montana-house-kills-bill-raising-signature-threshold-third-parties-ballot/

On what grounds do you object to this failed bill - that it was sponsored by Republicans?

[Nige]

‘clearly involved in influence peddling’

So everyone keeps saying, it’s received wisdom at this point. But unlike the Thomas case, the evidence for it seems confined to him having the same name as his father and two words in an e-mail. Obviously fuck people who get by on their name, if that is the case, but guess what, it happens an awful lot in the great ol’ meritocracy.

Funny how everyone forgets Hunter Biden IS being investigated, by someone appointed by the Trump DOJ.

[myself]

Hunter is clearly involved in influence peddling.

He's clearly benefiting from his last name (probably knowingly).

But to be influence peddling he needs some influence to peddle.

If his dad was involved or profited from it, it’s a really fucking huge deal.

Sure, but not only is there absolutely zero evidence of this, there's actual evidence his father wanted nothing to do with it.

Since, during the Trump years, you were massively offended by corruption and are offended by Justice Thomas potential corruption,

IF Joe Biden was involved with Hunter's business, it would still be less than the scale of the Trump's family known business dealings during Trump's time in office.

And Thomas's corruption is becoming less "potential" by the minute. So much so that defenders are already giving up denials and reverting to whataboutism.