quiet_NaN
4hr ago
The German Tourist doesn’t pay US taxes.
Because they are not allowed to work on a tourist visa.
If you manufacture cocaine in Colombia the US claims jurisdiction.
That is an interpretation I could get behind. As the US de-facto claims worldwide jurisdiction, and enforces their laws through kidnappings and drone strikes, every human is born under their jurisdiction and is as such entitled to the US citizenship, so they at least get to vote on the people who will order drone strikes against them.
(TBH, I would much rather have the US stop attacking random people than offer citizenship to every Afghani and Venezuelan, but it is still better than nothing.)
quiet_NaN
16hr ago
The phrasing in 14A is "subject to the jurisdiction thereof".
Think about it this way: if a Native American killed another in some reservation in 1840, it seems very likely that US officials would have considered that to be a matter for the tribal authorities to deal with. Likewise, if the French ambassador murdered another Frenchman in the embassy, it seems possible that the US would decide to let the French justice system deal with it rather than figure out if they can arrest him without causing a diplomatic incident.
By contrast, if a German tourist stabs another German tourist in NYC, the state of NY will very likely claim jurisdiction over the matter. Same if one undocumented immigrant murders another one.
By your standard, an Irish migrant could have decide to take his family back to Ireland, and would likely have gained the Irish citizenship for any US-born children, so all of his family "belong[ed] to a sovereign polity that is not the USA" -- but that is simply not the text which was ratified as the 14th.
quiet_NaN
17hr ago
There are a lot of very good reasons to get rid of it in the modern world.
We have a process for it. It is outlined in Article Five, same as for getting rid of any other amendment (e.g. the second).
quiet_NaN
17hr ago
Side notice: Maduro is hardly a Bond villain.
First off, 2A does not only guarantee the right to bear guns, but also the right to buy or sell guns (I know, with certain restrictions). If an anti-gun government passed legislation which outlawed all commercial manufacturing of handguns and all sale of firearm parts, the SCOTUS would be very likely to say that this would have the end effect of making it implausible for civilians to own firearms.
So for the purpose of the thought experiment, we do not need to assume that the weapon will be lovingly hand-crafted by some deranged group in some compound any more than mass shooters printing their own handguns.
Nukes and F-35s are only really affordable for the billionaire class, though I suspect that plutonium for bombs could likely be bred rather cheaply if there was sufficient demand for it, perhaps a few millions per nuke?
But you do not need that level of firepower to cause a state to fail. Elderly MiGs are probably in the price range of anyone who can scrape together a few millions. If they were protected by 2A (so you are free to take your MiG with full weapon systems when crossing the US), this would challenge the present US air defense concept, which I assume is based around the fact that hostile jets will not generally appear out of nowhere over the skies of Kansas and attack random towns. Likewise, if the law allowed you to buy 18-wheelers full of chemical explosives for your 2A needs, that would tremendously increase the amount of damage any given mass murderer could do. Radiological weapons would be another low-hanging fruit, if it became legal for citizens to own dirty bombs as an area-denial weapon (e.g. for use in cold wars against their local HOA), we have enough spend nuclear fuel worldwide to give every American 30TBq or so, which would certainly be enough to kill a few people by accident -- or dozens with malice (to say nothing of crashing the local property market).
quiet_NaN
1d ago
Before Bruen, the 2A was primarily considered using "interest balancing" unlike every other constitutional amendment.
The difficulty with 2A is that a straightforward reading is not really compatible with a stable modern society. A crazy man with a flintlock musket can only do so much damage, despite it having been the state of the art weapon system for the bulk of military forces. A crazy man with a flock of explosive drones or a fission bomb can do much more damage, and no country can survive engaging in mutually assured destruction diplomacy with the craziest 1% of their citizens individually. Different people may draw the line in slightly different places for 2A, but very few believe that no line should be drawn at all.
This is not so much different from limitations on the 1A. Should it be allowed to promise people rewards for committing crimes? Should it be allowed to make fraudulent bomb threats or SWAT people? Should a mob boss go free as long as all he did was talk to his underlings? All of these are restrictions on free speech, but they are obvious restrictions which are required to have a functioning state at all.
quiet_NaN
2d ago
I think that my statement is at least technically true, because "it is harder to sex id clothed persons than nude persons" should hardly be controversial.
Now, you could claim that it is only true in that technically sense, as in "it is more reliable to tell apples from oranges through genome analysis than it is to tell them apart through looking at them" -- which would be technically true if there is some weird apple where eyeball id is less than 100% accurate, but functionally false, because nobody is ever likely to encounter that counterexample in the wild, and insisting on running every fruit through PCR is utterly pointless from telling apples from oranges.
For pre-pubescent kids, I do not think that it is particularly easy to tell their sex absent social norms ("boys have short hair and wear blue clothes with dinosaurs, girls have long hair and wear pink clothes with unicorns").
I will grant you that after puberty, most people can reliably pass for their sex even without social cues. Voice register alone probably suffices. I will also grant you that societies can eliminate most adversarial examples by simply punishing trying to pass as a sex you were not assigned at birth by stoning: if I see a bearded Taliban gunman, I do not really have to check the inside of his pants to know what genitals he will have. It is technically possible that it is a trans-man on T, but I would expect there to be less than one such instance in all of Afghanistan.
In freer societies, people are allowed to pass as the other sex/gender, or not prominently display their beard or breasts to the world and thereby sort themselves into one of the categories.
It might be that the rest of the world is much better at id-ing sex in Western adults than I am. Perhaps the rest of you have basically a built-in millimeter wave scanner and I am just to autistic to notice. I mostly rely on secondary sexual characteristics (which can easily be acquired through HRT, or even faked through props) and social conventions.
Luckily, there is very little reason for me to know the sex of a random person in the street. The only exception would be "can we produce offspring together" (which of course also hinges on other factors). I am a member of a K-selected species, the number of times a trans-woman has tricked me into courting by pretending that she could bear my children has been exactly zero. In practice, "could we beget viable children?" is rarely the first thing on my mind when I encounter a person in the street.
The way I see it, genders have their origins in traditional sex-based roles in societies, but I do not think that it needs to stay that way. Things evolve. Ridley Scott is obviously not a mounted warrior aristocrat. To my knowledge he does not maintain any warhorses or plate armor, does not have a fief granted to him, does not follow the code of chivalry and has never been seen leading a cavalry charge against the enemies of his liege. Yet he is a Knight Grand Cross of the Order of the British Empire.
Still, I am totally fine with saying "he got a knighthood". In case there is any confusion, I can use the term GBE and everyone will know what kind of knight he is. In 1100CE this would never have been possible, but today cavalry has been obsolete in warfare for a century, so we can repurpose the term.
Human females were mostly reduced to their reproductive capability in earlier societies. This seems obvious from the quaint custom of referring to them as either Miss (eligible) or Mrs (married). (There was probably a third category of woman who had sex before marriage and was therefore ineligible to bear heirs, but I doubt there was a honorific for that role.)
Today, society has recognized that human females can also contribute in other ways than making babies. Very few people are interested in whether an unmarried woman who has her uterus removed for medical reasons should be called Miss or Mrs. Granted, gestation still happens in vivo, so the bearing of children is not yet as obsolete a concept as shock cavalry, but much less important than it was 100 years ago.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I think we are just arguing over semantics. Of course, if "gender" and "sex" are co-extensive, then there is no need for two different words.
If we were in a society of peafowl or nudists, that would work. You just see the colorful plumage (or the penis) of the person you meet, and you know for certain that you are dealing with a male.
In most human societies, it is not as easy to identify the sex of another person. Asking them to show you their genitals is mostly frowned upon, so you rely on Bayesian evidence -- beards, breasts under clothing, gendered clothes, height, hairstyle, behavior, voice register. All of these can be mimicked, and depending on the social setting some trans people might pass.
"Sex and gender are co-extensive" is a claim which can only be made if one has two different words. Even if it was, it might still be worthwhile to keep the two terms around to discuss this fact. Physics has a concept of "inertial mass" and "gravitational mass", even though as far as we know both are co-extensive.
If I were to ask evangelicals if they supported "traditional gender roles", I think most would affirm (even if they would prefer the vaguer phrasing of traditional family values). If I asked them if they supported "traditional sex roles", they would likely be confused. Am I some freak talking about missionary sex, or an even greater freak talking about sexual roleplay, or am I talking about some ancient environment, as in "males specialize in hunting mammoth, females in picking berries", and could I please avoid saying the s-word?
For what it's worth, I am not a gender fanboy. My (mostly underinformed) impression is that while there are some social sciences who do an admirable job of cargo-cult science, gender studies do not even rise to that level and are probably about as epistemically useful as theology. I just do not think that the main concept they are (presumably) dealing with is devoid of meaning.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
With the Church, the main thing horrifying people was not the crimes (though there was likely a higher rate of sex offenses than for the general population), but the cover-up.
If the RCC had dealt with sex offenders by sending them to some monastery on some desolate island with no kids around for 200 nautical miles, then that would have pissed off people a lot less.
Instead, the main goal was generally to keep the reputation of the church intact. If people complained, perps were given new parishes where they could continue to victimize minors.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
I read a bit in that study, and I am not exactly overwhelmed.
The abstract talks about X2 statistics. Now I am not a statistics nerd, but I have encountered the letter χ (chi) in passing and happen to know that it does not identify as X or x.
Also, what one sentence claims, the next takes away:
Among adolescents who underwent medical gender reassignment, psychiatric morbidity increased markedly during follow-up [...]
Only to note that [my addition, emphasis mine]:
After adjusting for prior psychiatric treatment [which was a contraindication to gender reassignment], all gender-referred adolescents had similarly elevated risks of psychiatric morbidity
In the study itself, the key variable of interest was simply boolean:
Need for specialist-level psychiatric treatment before the index contact (yes/no) and thereafter (yes/no) was recorded.
The impact of the quality of life on visiting a psychiatrist is hard to quantify. Both a patient who is undergoing exposure therapy to better deal with their fear of spiders before moving to the countryside, and a patient locked up in forensic psychiatry after killing someone during a psychotic episode would simply fall in the "specialist-level psychiatric treatment" bin.
The statistics section briefly discusses confounders:
In the next step, controlling for possible confounders: Birth year and index year and finally adding the need for specialist-level psychiatric treatment before the index contact.
There is no discussion of any of the less obvious confounders. After all, some patients got interventions and some did not -- based on their case histories, not on some RNG, so they must systematically differ. Trivially, having gotten a medical gender reassignment might make a patient more trusting to seek out sensitive medical help (e.g. psychiatric care) in the future. Or perhaps the eye color of the doctor deciding on the intervention is both correlated with their decision -- green-eyed doctors approve more, but getting treated by a green-eyed doctor will also drive 10% of patients mad. (Unlikely, the point here is to illustrate the required paranoia when separating confounders from the effect of the intervention.)
As a data point for the benefits and risks of gender-related interventions, this study does not tell us a lot either way.
quiet_NaN
4d ago
- people with dysphoria pre- some form of transition (blockers, hormones, surgeries)
- people with dysphoria post- transition
- people without dysphoria as controls
One problem is that when considering the effect of an intervention, this is basically an apples-to-oranges-to-licorice comparison.
The gold standard for determining the effect of an intervention would be a randomized controlled trial (RCT). Take a patient and then prescribe them either a puberty blocker or a placebo, so that neither you nor they know what they got, and then follow up on the outcome years later.
Obviously this is hard to do for ethical reasons. But anything else risks simply measuring confounders. Perhaps the people opting for intervention simply had a higher trust in their medical system, and consequently were also more likely to seek psychiatric help with other problems. Or a million other things.
The kind of people who say "no one should transition" don't so much believe some one "isn't their stated gender", they question the very concept of gender. I think it's a strong argument, "gender" is effectively a religious belief. Specifically it seems that it's a secular version of the belief in a soul, and I think it's fair to say that this is not a valid basis for a medical intervention
This is not my experience. The anti-trans side believes very strongly in their conception of gender, hence all the bathroom bans. Someone who actually rejected the concept of gender might preach some kind of pansexuality where you simply do not care what kind of sex bit your partners have. They might reject the very concept of straight and gay couples because There Is No Gender, Man.
By contrast, the people most offended by trans people believe very strongly in the existence of gender, they just happen to think that it is identical to sex-assigned-at-birth.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
The Iranian deal is also unlikely to cure cancer and pause AGI research. Better people than Trump have tried to solve the Israel-Palestine conflict.
The way I see it, the current incursion into Lebanon was likely a response to Hezbollah attacks which were a response on the US/Israeli bombing of Iran. If three years down the road, Hezbollah has recovered enough to decide to send rockets towards Israel, it is unlikely that Iran will close the Strait over Israel returning fire.
"Recognizing the right to exist" is overrated anyhow. Northern Cyprus is not recognized by anyone (except Turkey), yet they do not get invaded. Ukraine was recognized as a state by Russia, did not stop them from getting invaded. I am sure the PRC is reluctant to use the official name (Republic of China) of Taiwan (and they may or may not invade eventually, but how much they recognized them beforehand makes little difference.
If Iran could "drive all the Jews into the sea" at little cost to themselves, they would do so. Likewise, if Israel could turn Iran into a failed state a la Somalia at little costs to themselves, they would also do that in a heartbeat. Luckily, neither is in the position to do either.
As an aside, "Israel's right to peacefully exist" is very much moot because their current government is not trying to exist peacefully. They fully support settlers taking over the West Bank (where the Palestinians are ruled by less murderous organizations), and pretty much leveled Gaza to destroy Hamas. If Netanyahu and his even-further-right ministers had consistently destroyed illegal Jewish settlements in the West Bank, you could argue that Israel is just trying to exist peacefully. But instead, their plan seems to be to create a Greater Israel consisting of whatever territory they can grab.
quiet_NaN
5d ago
Anyone who wants to thwart the establishment of a Palestinian state has to support bolstering Hamas and transferring money to Hamas
I was aware that he was doing this, but I was not aware that he was on the record saying as much. I am totally bedazzled on how he could stay in power after Oct 7. Any opposition party who just printed this slogan on a billboard with his name underneath it should have won against him handily.
It seems that the Israeli right and Hamas were conspiring to prevent a two-state solution, and both got their wish. Of course, they both have quite dissimilar ideas about the specifics of how the one state should look like. Given Oct-7 and the Israeli reaction to it, it positively seems a monkey-paw variety of wish for either of them.
While MAGA deserved to lose their little Iran adventure, Netanyahu deserved to lose even more. His whole strategy for dealing with the Palestinians is to press the "defect" button as fast as he can. That is rarely a winning strategy.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
It just makes less sense from my POV (the MOU was seen as a victory for Hezbollah, it would make no sense to undermine it).
Seconded. The US-Iran deal is not bad for Hezbollah, e.g. it acknowledges that Iran has an interest in what happens in Lebanon.
It is also not bad for Hezbollah's overlords, i.e. the IRGC -- otherwise Iran would simply not have signed the deal.
My understanding is that Hezbollah did attack Israel with rockets when the Iran war began, and in return Israel bombed Beirut and invaded south Lebanon, and is openly destroying villages with the aim of displacing Lebanese.
Quite frankly, I do not like Hezbollah, but them attacking Israeli troops in Lebanon who are busy with genocide-through-displacement seems one of the less objectionable things they did.
quiet_NaN
6d ago
Let me rephrase that. I think nuclear war -- even though probably not an x-risk -- is really bad and we should try to avoid things which make it more likely, including reducing the number of warheads, disincentivizing states from obtaining nukes and incentivizing nuclear disarmament.
Suitable tools to do that are diplomacy and sanctions. And first and foremost, international law. Sure, like all law, it is just make-believe, but in practice it works well enough. Denmark could afford a nuclear program, and if they felt that the Gemans were going to invade again sooner or later they would have one. Instead, they get to live in a pacified Europe where the marginal security offered by nukes is simply not worth it.
I feel that Trump and Bibi are just accomplishing the opposite. Now, I am fine with using Stuxnet to destroy Iranian centrifuges. Bombing their enrichment program is probably already an undue step of escalation (especially as it likely used intel learned from UN inspections), as is assassinating their nuclear engineers. Killing their head of state in a botched attempt at regime change sends a terrible message.
Any country in the world which has less cozy relations with Trump than the Saudis will notice that recently, one head of state got kidnapped and one got assassinated by him, and how it was basically impossible for these states to hurt the US militarily. They will also notice that North Korea was not targeted, and conclude that this likely has something to do with their nuclear weapons.
The Iran debacle showcases that in a world full of strongmen, you want nuclear deterrence. Any supporter of the Iranian regime who was on the fence wrt nukes will conclude as much -- Iran can't squeeze the balls of the world economy through Hormuz forever.
Netanyahu seems like a foolish hero of some Greek tragedy who wanted to thwart the prediction of some oracle and thereby causes it to be fulfilled. His and Trump's violent disregard for international law have made the world less safe everywhere.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
Why wouldn't they just invite Russia in to offer a marginally less shitty deal than the one you're proposing USA should offer them?
I think traditional Russian allies in the ME are Syria (under Assad, mainly) and (wait for it) Iran. If Russia started bombing Iran, they would need to find someone else to build their drones against Ukraine, and I am not sure if Israel has the production capacity.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
They're continuing the war in Lebanon and stating that they intend to continue the war in Lebanon regardless of its impact on the stated policy goals of the USA.
They are obviously lying. Israel had excuses to invade Lebanon since forever, and it seems very likely that the Hezbollah attacks which provoked the current excursion were in turn a response to the attacks on Iran.
Wrecking the peace talks is the real objective, not an unintentional side effect.
Not that this detracts from your point.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
For what it's worth, I read
So plan trusters, antisemities, pro-Palestinians, shitlibs, anyone.
as obviously tongue-in-cheek. After all, very few here self-describe as antisemites or shitlibs. The fact that you did not include a slur for the people taking the side of the Israeli government (genocide apologists?) does not mean that you did not want them to reply, and the banned poster was not arguing in good faith.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
It seems rather obvious that the Iran war was Israel's idea, and they managed to sell it to Trump.
There are ways they can respond to the odd missile which do not blow up the world economy. Blow up a few more pagers or whatever.
but when the Israelis said "Never again", it wasn't just an empty statement.
Come on. How many thousand Jews does Iran murder in their camps per day, again?
Sure, Oct 7 was bad, and Iran is partly to blame for arming the murderous thugs known as Hamas, but it was still just a terrorist attack, not a genocide. Personally, if I were arguing for Israel's side of things, I would stay the hell away from genocide rhetoric, because the party most likely to have crossed the line from ordinary war crimes to that is not Iran.
For example, they are demolishing villages in Lebanon. The aim is clearly to forcibly displace the native population. Arguably, that is already genocide.
Personally, I have very little sympathy for the objective of keeping Iran away from nukes. "A Middle-Eastern country run by bloodthirsty, slightly genocidal religious nutjobs has nukes" is something we have survived before. If we can get Iran not to develop nukes with some modest effort (e.g. Obama's deal), I am all for it. If we need to wreck the world economy to prevent it, it is simply not worth it.
What's really funny is that Israel's enemies don't understand that it's America that protects them from Israel. The dissolution of the friendship between the US and Israel is not good news for Iran, Syria, etc.
We will just have to see, won't we? I am a bit skeptical that their current strategy of jeopardizing the opening of Hormuz will endear them to the autocrats of the gulf states. Israel does not have the manpower to occupy Iran. I think it is fair to say that cowing Iran through conventional air power has been tried extensively. Extending the bombing to civilian infrastructure will not help.
Perhaps they can nuke Iran, but at that point the gulf autocrats might feel obliged to do something about them for appearances sake, even if they secretly welcome them decimating a rival regional power. Their population does not get to vote, but Israel killing a few tens of millions of Muslims might still incite some anger.
Last year, Israel weathered the Iranian drone and missile attacks very well in part because the US and their regional allies were shooting them down. If the US decides that the crazies bombing each other in the ME does not concern them, things might turn out differently.
On a longer timeline, being cut off from US military tech will definitely hurt Israel. How many different weapon systems can a country of nine million citizens develop by themselves, really?
quiet_NaN
7d ago
Wait, Trump and JD say (some) things which sound obvious and true to my ears? Is today opposite day or something, or has Trump's handler been replaced?
At least the Israeli ministers are still acting like comic book villains. They think that if they can thwart a US/Iran peace, perhaps they will still get their favorite outcome of Trump glassing Iran.
Personally, I think Trump should simply give Netanyahu 24 hours to retreat from Lebanon before we find out how well protected the IDF troops there are against US airstrikes.
quiet_NaN
7d ago
To be fair, what Trump did to his NATO allies was much less of a betrayal than the move Israel is now pulling. If he had invaded Greenland or made a deal where Putin gets to invade the Baltic countries without US interference, that would be in a much more similar ballpark.
The US has been waging war against Iran on behalf of Israel. Israel considers Iran to be a threat to their existence (not entirely without reason, though at this point who is ultimately responsible for the bad blood between them is akin to the hen-egg-problem).
If you call on your big brother to help you in a fight, that means that you are conceding control of the fight. Of course, a smart elder brother would refuse to fight for a younger sibling just itching for blood, and consider that their sibling will likely throw their interests completely under the bus, but that does not make Israel's behavior less bad.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
I am from Europe. The principles of international law were not developed by some pink-haired idealists, they were agreed upon after we spend a few millennia murdering each other and were getting really really good at it. Even if they are unevenly enforced, they still lead to an outcome which is vastly better than the alternative. Like OSHA handbooks, they are rules written in blood.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
It is almost as if violating international law because you have the most guns has negative downstream effects, and showing restraint might have been a better long term strategy. Who could have predicted that?
I still hold out some hope that the US/Israel relationship will turn sour and the next US president will not be shoulder deep in Bibi's rectum. Not having the top military superpower do their bidding might make Israel a bit more reluctant to escalate.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
Hormutz is just a repeat of that, except us europeans didn't even bother trying this time around.
The US violated international law by attacking Iran. Iran predictably retaliated by suspending innocent passage through Hormuz, which is also a violation of international law. What exactly should a law-abiding European nation do? We do not have the military capability to sink the US ships threatening Iran and destroy the Iranian ability to threaten innocent passage.
Personally, I would just have made a deal with Iran where it lets through ships destined for Europe and gets French enriched uranium in return. Instead we mostly did nothing and hoped that Trump would chicken out eventually, which it now seems like he did.
quiet_NaN
8d ago
The 300 billion fund is a trap for Iran and the regime. They may get the investment, but not ownership.
What would be stopping them from nationalizing the investment in a year?
The usual strategy is that whenever someone nationalizes the properties of US companies, the US backs a military coup in that country, but if the US could stage a coup in Iran we would not be in this place.
It is up to the courts, not the executive to interpret what the laws mean. And courts tend to follow past rulings for the most part, which is bad news for anyone who wants to get rid of birthright citizenship.
If the executive could just define what words in the constitution meant there would be no point to having rights in the constitution in the first place. President Newsom could just define that 2A meant "the portion of the upper human appendage, from the shoulder to the wrist and sometimes including the hand" by "arms".
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