To be fair, if lower courts were this resistant to "civil rights" supreme court cases, the national guard would be occupying city hall in most major cities.
JTarrou
1yr ago
All interesting enough, but Dick Heller still doesn't have a carry license twenty years after filing his lawsuit and fifteen after winning it, so it's all navel-gazing.
The Supreme Court does not enforce their decisions, and the lower courts are in full revolt.
They can lose every case and yet the law of the land remains in direct opposition to the SC decisions.
It's almost as if the court system is as much LARP as congress.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Sure, I expect that black people who live on "sleepy cul de sac"s are probably a lot more middle-class than east-siders. There's more than one group of black people in the country. And I do expect that the middle and working class blacks would absolutely want more cops and better responses, but all that doesn't really matter much if the people in teh social groups of the ones doing the crimes don't. That part probably varies community to community, but I'm sure it isn't uniformly pro-policing.
JTarrou
1yr ago
The important thing is not the crime data, but the black community's view of the data. Which I doubt any of us has access to. I'm somewhat skeptical of the claim myself.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Can we take up a collection for Kulak or something? He might have an interesting point if we could ever hear what the fuck he's trying to say. I don't know how much money six thousand substack subscribers is, but a shitty chinesium mike is like forty bucks. I got five on it.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Is it a meaningful enough distinction to send your daughter to live in Qatar?
JTarrou
1yr ago
I think you've hit on one leg of a very important elephant.
I've noticed similar phenomena from gun clubs to veterans organizations to churches to beer-league sports. Commonly there is a life cycle, and if the initial stages are strong enough, the legacy can live on a while. But ultimately, unless external conditions are producing more of whatever fed that cause, it dies. I've noped out of a few organizations just because I didn't want to be the last guy holding the bag. When they start canvassing for board members, I'm done.
Some of it is just failing to adapt to the times, but if you adapt to the times too much, you can also crater your organization as it loses focus and splits. For example, if your Street Rod org started taking roller skates, it probably wouldn't help.
Another issue is that almost all organizations eventually end up being run by the people who can be assed to show up and do the clerical work necessary. This naturally concentrates power in the hands of a small minority who can steer the organization along their personal preferences. Occasionally this is done well, but that's a rarity.
A third is that any successful organization is going to generate good will and money, which are natural targets for idiots, grifters, con men, politicians and degenerates everywhere.
JTarrou
1yr ago
I don't have anything handy, no, and I'm packing for a fishing trip early tomorrow morning, so I won't be looking for one any time soon. If anyone can show that rape is rare in by female for female erotic fiction, I'll withdraw my assertion based on nothing more than the dozen or so that I've read.
JTarrou
1yr ago
This sensible advice will always founder on the rocks of female sexuality. Women do not want to be safe, they do not want safe men, and if the literature they consume is any clue, practically every "romance" novel has a positively described rape scene in it. Rape is simultaneously a hideous crime and the central sexual fantasy.
Gay guys don't want to catch HIV, but they want to do all the stuff that produces that outcome. Straight dudes don't want to get stabbed by a crazy girlfriend, but they definitely want all the stuff that produces that outcome. We are all enslaved by our own sexuality to a greater or lesser degree. Some people don't have much trouble with it, but it's a reliable failure mode of humanity.
JTarrou
1yr ago
If we want to reverse any of this with any semblance of our current society intact
Seems like a big "if". There is nothing left of the law, the constitution or our civil society. Nothing to save, nothing to conserve. Nothing to lose but our chains, as the kids say. We are fast approaching truly epic and colossally dangerous amounts of freedom.
JTarrou
1yr ago
That era started in the early '90s. Every president in the last thirty years has had at least an impeachment attempt. This is nothing new, this is chapter and verse, US modern politics.
JTarrou
1yr ago
a more effective method for achieving goals
the only truly unalienable right
I think you're arguing something I'm not arguing against.
Violence is uncertainty. Both about who will prevail and who expects to prevail.
I most certainly do not overlook this, it's what makes the system as fair as anything else that exists.
The rest of your comment seems to think that I said violence was the best political system, but that is not my argument. How power is produced from violence is a corrupt and despicable business, but we call it politics. None of that impacts my argument that violence is the only inherent human right.
It is the only method by which the truly disadvantaged can inject some uncertainty into their otherwise certain outcomes.
JTarrou
1yr ago
we live in the era that states have monopolies on force.
No, we don't. From Prigozhin to Weaver to Rittenhouse, our modern states have long lost (if they ever had) any sort of monopoly on violence.
Your formulation is incorrect, however. Men have a right to self-defense in the preservation of their own lives, not murder.
Obviously I disagree. All rights can be misused, but the right is underlying, ineradicable. A right means nothing if it is only the right to do something in a manner prescribed by society in a given time and place. Violence is always an option, if not always the smart or moral one. Point is, the right is "unalienable" in a very real sense. Nobody can take it from you. Because of this, it underwrites all other rights, because if they are trampled far enough, we can activate the most ancient and powerful of all rights.
JTarrou
1yr ago
Social status games are just violence with extra steps.
Also, the ADA is not about disabled people, disabled people are a McGuffin to let big capitalism strangle small capitalism.
Disabled access laws are class warfare intended to enrich trial lawyers and bankrupt small businesses.
It's using the violence of the state to enrich the parts of the economy who will not miss the "dead weight loss" because they build a new store every week, rather than the parts which have a legacy building which is harder and more expensive to retrofit.
There's no status here, no morals and no ideology. Just violence and money. Status is what gets sold to the rubes.
JTarrou
1yr ago
There is only one natural right in man, and that is the ability to do violence.
All other rights spring from this basic fact. We have social and political rights because someone in history stuck a bayonet in someone else who was trying to deny those. Any right not backed by violence will wither and disappear in short order.
The last argument of kings is the final right of every man.
JTarrou
1yr ago
I'm sure there's an emanation from someone's penumbra that creates an exception to anything that's unpopular in law schools.
JTarrou
1yr ago
That's the beauty of it, with leftist control of the justice system, they can just do this in thirty day chunks and by the time any judge ever hears it, it will be "moot" because that particular policy ended and a new thirty day one just started.
JTarrou
1yr ago
I think I agree with you.
Transhumanism is a techy way to not have to deal with the Only Serious Philosophical Question.
Handwaving a universe beyond our bodies is a way of passing the buck on living correctly with what we have.
I get the appeal, it's the same desperate escapism that fuels every other utopian religion.
It's just always wrong. There is no escape from the human condition. Life is pain, and anyone tells you different is selling something.
Most people will believe anything that lets them avoid this simple and basic conclusion.
"Because you do not love yourself, otherwise you would love your nature and her commands."
JTarrou
1yr ago
Agnosticism is a method. A/Theism is a choice about personal morality, and whether to outsource it.
For God, like everything else, the devil is in the definitions. If you want to believe in god, change definitions until you have one that works for you. In one sense, there is no god. In another, everyone has their own god. In a third, god is created by the belief and institutions of the religion.
Who or what do you serve? How do you spend your time, energy and money? What causes do you kill and die for? What gives you meaning and purpose?
For a rough functional definition, that's your god.
They sign things that need signing and attend meetings with higher, then relay that stupidity to the soldiers. In my experience, which is perhaps not completely generalizable, they never leave the wire.
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