gattsuru
3hr ago
I generally don't downvote and don't like the downvote brigade, but it's not a very good post, and one of a pretty long series of not-very-good post of a similar type magicalkittycat makes. The "victimization crisis" is just unfounded Bulverism, the "presumably there should be mass desire for movement somewhere if we're fucking something up in a significant way and we just don't see it" is one in a long series of actively refusing to see the evidence in front of his own face, and it doesn't actually interact with the claims of the post it's reacting to so much as just pretend that they didn't real to start with.
Which is why he didn't get responses: there's not much point in trying to debate with someone who's just going to deny the potential relevance of any evidence (this is, afaict, the last time I did downvote him) or going to duck out the second his point is demonstrated as vacant.
gattsuru
13hr ago
From here:
Several ways forward here given the choice of Roberts/Barrett to nullify the 14th Amendment and extra-constitutionally replace it with their own language:
1) Nullification. States issue birth certificates, and they can just stop issuing them to non-citizens. Roberts/Barrett can deal with the fallout and litigate each birth individually.
2) Pack the court. If Robert wants to be a politician who writes laws instead of a judge, then he can fight with 10 more unelected legislators in robes.
3) Deny entry to all pregnant foreigners.
4) Deny entry to all female foreigners.
5) Require sterilization of all foreign visitors prior to entry.
6) Dissolution of the Union. A nation which can’t even restrict who gets to be a citizen isn’t a nation.
7) Amend the Constitution. This is pointless, because once a judge decides he can rewrite the Constitution at will (as Roberts and Barrett did today), the actual text is meaningless. But this is what most GOP politicians gravitate towards because they are useless.
If you think all these options are not great, understand that that is what happens when unelected judges decide that they are in charge of the country and get to write its laws.
I don't think Tracey's summary is accurate -- which shouldn't be a surprise, given Tracey's general behavior in other contexts -- and this is pretty explicitly a parade of horribles rather than a real proposal, but I don't think Davis is being particularly healthy as a response, either.
gattsuru
22hr ago
There's something weird going on in it. There's the obvious dislike of the financial side, from the title on down, but if that were the real story, Midi Health (and any other competitors? but I've heard of this sort of thing happening from normal general-practitioner work, just less sexual and less formalized) would be a top-line item, not a footnote, and the BVC would just be scamming the rich people out of what 'everyone' should have.
A lot of it seems like it's borrowing from anti-woo stuff, and there is legitimate history there: a lot of men's sexual health stuff has been snake oil, sometimes literally, and women's isn't much better. But the specific claims here are relatively well-supported in the evidence, and the stuff that isn't (eg, estrogen supplementation post-cancer) is on better ground than the summary suggests.
The Bulverist take is that the writer hates (especially rich) men, sees this as a way for wives of rich men to trade their health to stay sexually desirable to men, and couldn't actually come up with the information to support that position. But that's not very charitable.
gattsuru
23hr ago
I think the suspension is of the felony prison sentence. Still means he'll likely serve six months for killing a man.
gattsuru
1d ago
Grant to Viramontes and Grant, consolidated as a question specific to the AR15. Disproves the "waiting on ANJRPC" hypothesis, but doesn't leave any real valid explanation for why this took five months. It's now got the record for most relists before a grant.
No information on the rest, which is ... a decision. Lamont had significant overlap, so refusing to consolidate it with is a choice. Nothing on the magazine cases, which means Duncan's inevitably going to be punted down to the 9CA and back up again later.
All of the under-21 questions were denied cert, with no explanation. That's a real big mess, since it's a massive pool with a major circuit split, but I don't think any conservative's going to be making arguments to this court about consistency anytime soon.
gattsuru
1d ago
Leaving it as a statutory question would have given an out that did not demand taking the amendment process or ramming the hardest-right justices through the courts as the least escalatory answer.
Dred Scott, once issued, couldn't be reversed: even were Scott freed, he couldn't become a citizen. Indeed, under Dred Scott, Scott couldn't even sue anyone over anything in federal courts in the future. That's why Dred Scott made non-legal avenues the only available ones, either direct defiance of the holding (eg the Territorial Slave Act of 1862) or the eventual war.
This isn't quite that bad, but the calculus for immigration restrictionists is still far uglier than Roberts had to make it.
gattsuru
1d ago
I don't think Yglesian popularism necessarily involves tactical lying (although all politicians, populist, popularist or otherwise do a lot of it), and I don't think Yglesias personally is engaging in tactical lying about his political views.
gattsuru
1d ago
Yeah, fair. And some circuits have rejected geofence warrants as general warrants, so it's not implausible.
Fourth Circuit opinion
Thanks, corrected.
gattsuru
1d ago
Why wouldn't it be a reasonable search, given that the police in Chatrie had a warrant?
My personal read of the Fourth Amendment is that the warrant clause is disjoint from the right to be secure from unreasonable seizures, and a warrant does not automatically make a search reasonable. But, to be clear, SCOTUS does not agree with me. McNeely holds that a blood draw is perfectly valid as a subject of a warrant. I think this leads to very bad places, as evidenced by what rubber-stamp warrants often lead to, but that's just my position.
And, yeah, it's a punt-of-a-punt from SCOTUS.
gattsuru
1d ago
I haven't followed the politics closely, but my impression is that Bukele was also a mayor of a major city and had pivoted to a hard anti-crime posture a few years before he got the presidency, so it's not like he or his policies were just showing in El Salvador completely fresh, either.
Chatrie joins a host of other weird post-Carpenter lower court cases (pole cameras, mosaic cases, Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore) where connection between the 4th Amendment's text and a more general free-standing limit on police action gets messy. If the rest of 4th Amendment caselaw wasn't such a clusterfuck, this wouldn't be so rough, but instead simultaneously a) if you're guilty, you can get out of it by arguing the police searched someone else too aggressively, b) if you're innocent, you have no recourse but being found not-guilty, and c) a host of other actual search of you specifically still don't count because mumblemumble. And it's just a punt onto the merits: I fully expect the 5th ED: 4th to go "okay, it's a reasonable search", maybe even snark about how technically precedent doesn't require warranted searches to be reasonable, and then SCOTUS to deny cert on the eventual appeal.
Watson is one of those cases where the textualist and originalist arguments could genuinely go either way. In theory, Congress could answer the question, in practice it won't. And military ballots make the election day cutoff hard to abide by (even if the Clinton-era mess makes everyone hypocrites).
Cook is... ugh. It's an important enough case that, as much as I bitch about Kavanaugh's results-oriented position, I at least have sympathy for it here. But on top of the questionable legal grounding, it's a decision answering arguments not even at question before the court, while punting the actual matter in question into an unsolvable procedural gimmick so it'll go away and not come back.
gattsuru
4d ago
FCfromSSC was talking about FRTs, which don't fall under the strict definition of machine guns.
((uh, arguably. I am not a lawyer, no guarantees that the ATF won't shoot you and your little dog too anyway.))
But the FOPA1986 specifically prohibited the transfer or possession of machine guns unless authorized by a state or federal agency, unless they were lawfully possessed before that period (the ATF further regulated this to require a tax stamp). Combined with the other exceptions and regulations, this basically made new manufacture or transfer illegal for normal people.
Except transfer or possession that the ATF authorizes are excluded, because they're a federal agency authorizing FFLs. And while the ATF has a lot of discretion for giving out FFLs, once they've done that, the SOT that authorizes transfer or manufacture of NFA weapons is just normal tax documentation, and the ATF has no authority to reject it. You just can't sell any NFA weapons to anyone that isn't in the same category. It's really stupid, and it's the sort of thing where you're giving the federal government your home address and fingerprints, but it's... pretty much just straight-up legal.
gattsuru
5d ago
Generally have to deal with the paperwork for an FFL-SOT to (legally) buy the actual automatic component. It's in a kinda messy legal area, but more because of the legal overhead and warrantless searches from the FFL side than anything with the SOT.
You can by forced-reset triggers without any paperwork (other than any other gun purchase), but how close they match 'real' full automatic is in the eye of the beholder, and the feds are kinda schizophrenic about them. Some states also separately prohibit FRTs/
Birthright citizenship has the awkward situation where there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that the modern read isn't the same as the historical one - most clearly with needing explicit statutory authorization to make Native Americans citizens - but the modern one has been around and has so many massive ramifications that the stare decisis arguments vastly overwhelm a bare EO.
If the court finds a birthright citizenship not only supported but required by the Constitution, I could see a 7-2 or even 6-3 breakdown (though they might be styled as concurrence-in-judgement). Roberts has a lot of motivation to constrain the bounds of the decision and to get a 9-0 or 8-1 if at all possible, though, and limiting the opinion to just 'existing statutes say people born here are citizens, change the law and then we can talk again' is both easily available and bypasses a lot of the messier questions, if only because the statute (despite using the exact same words) was written in 1952 ED:the 1920s, so it simplifies all of the originalist arguments. But it would be a really obvious punt.
gattsuru
5d ago
I don't have a position on the general question, but "jurisdictional land-grab" is a pretty common expression in discussions of law. See here for a 2015 example on pages 2 and 4; here for 2014. I think the Waters of the United States rule popularized it as a more literal term-of-art than its historical use, but the only thing I can say, and with weak confidence, is that it was coined sometime after Kelo v. New London because otherwise the libertarians would have used it everywhere.
It's heavily focused on connotation, as normal "land grabs" in the resource extraction business world usually meant large-scale destruction of natural environment and/or displacement of peoples, but the applicability here isn't that much of a stretch. The state commanding internal behavior of religious, moral, and ethical institutions is something that was both initially disclaimed and completely replaces whatever moral codes those institutions were able to field on this particular matter.
((Conversely, this is probably the stronger argument for it being bad AI-gen: a remotely questioning approach with a 23B LLM and maybe a 7B one can give concrete examples of this process: CLS v. Martinez, Rotary Club of Duarte, Bob Jones University, these are not new cases.))
gattsuru
6d ago
In the article it's labelled "Fig. 6", and it's for all convictions, not just sex crimes.
Ah, thanks. I glossed over that one. That's... a lot more of a discrepancy than I would have expected.
How did you get the correct link?
The raw text is https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_%21JrTm%21,w_1272,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdf803be8-5743-4154-be73-d753d4d02a59_1725x394.png, but the https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/%24s_%21JrTm%21,w_1272,c_limit,f_webp,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/ block is a helper that probably only works in combination with other code (javascript?) on the substack webpage proper.
The real CDN location is the https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fdf803be8-5743-4154-be73-d753d4d02a59_1725x394.png block, but it has some URL-encoded characters. %3A is a :, and %2F is /. If you don't want to manually decode it, there's a bunch of web pages that will do the change for you.
gattsuru
6d ago
I think the screenshot link needs to be this to work. Do you mind spelling out where is the 71% coming from?
But yeah, this has been a long-standing problem, and not one specific to the UK. There's also a tendency for people to get marked as white who... well, I'm not great at telling race, but it doesn't take a lot of effort for these examples. You can even get progressives to admit it happens when it's useful to their arguments. And then on top of that, many jurisdictions outright try to avoid convictions that could have immigration consequences, so two people with the same actual bad behavior might get marked down into different categories based on what their recorded race is.
I don't want to go to full radical skepticism on the numbers, here, but it's hard to take the public numbers seriously.
gattsuru
6d ago
Wolford v. Lopez Dropped
Holding: Hawaii’s law prohibiting licensed concealed-carry permit holders from carrying handguns on private property open to the public without the property owner’s express authorization violates the Second and Fourteenth Amendments.
Alito, 6-3.
Hawaii's statute here was not unprecedented. As one of multiple jurisdictions with a post-Bruen tantrum bill, it joined New York City, Chicago, New Jersey, California, and Maryland. It was unusual only in the sense that the 9th Circuit did not offer an injunction, even as the California law had been enjoined by the same court and panel.
In that sense, this case will not have broad impact: only Hawaii had a standing version of the statute, Hawaii has separately made possession and lawful carry near-impossible in ways this case didn't touch, and the holding is specific to this case. On the other hand, this sticks a fork in the other five lawsuits, as much as anything can be a sure bet when it comes to law or judges doing their jobs, and there's a lot of dicta that has broader implications. On the gripping hand, this court has been shipping broadsides and warning shots on the Second Amendment for over a decade; it's hard to expect the actual holding and clear rule to stick, and implausible any amount of hinting dicta would.
Some general notes:
- The majority is even more straightforward than I expected. Alito is, bluntly, padding the majority, it's still only 24 pages, and even then it's still half history lesson and a couple pages of a lengthy hypothetical to explain the statute's impact on the law-abiding.
- It's also very loud about it. Alito's a grumpy writer at the best of times, and there's a lot of the text that's telegraphing his dislike of the lower court and state legislative defiance, here. The "Spirit of Aloha" shows up, and VanDyke gets a nice quote. The biggest tell is just "After Bruen, Hawaii and four of the other five States called out by our decision adopted a new method of restricting law-abiding citizens from carrying firearms for self-defense."
- Alito does still duck on the question of the law's purpose, though: "Petitioners and the United States argue that the new default rule was enacted to undermine our decision in Bruen, but whatever the purpose of the new law, the shift from the old common-law rule unquestionably imposed a new and significant burden on the exercise of the right that this Court recognized in Bruen."
- The analysis of historical analogues takes up the most paper, but Alito's "step one" analysis has the most meat to it. A lot of lower courts have ducked the Second Amendment by including interest-balancing or historical analogue tests before a plaintiff can even argue the Second Amendment is implicated, and Alito pretty heavily ties that off if they follow the holding here. Big if, though.
- It's a 6-3 split. Duh. Technically the liberal dissenters are just saying Bruen shouldn't cover this law. Kagan by saying the historical analogues are close enough in a way that would make any law an analogue for anything else in a one-paragraph dissent that's threadbare, while Sotomayor and Jackson draw up an alternate universe where it was just a property law and didn't implicate the Second Amendment at all. But that's a pretty weak fig leaf, and Jackson outright says "I think Bruen was wrongly decided". There were a lot of people trying to pull tea leaves from Hemani, and the tea leaves are just that they didn't want to be voting against potheads, and that's not going to apply to anything else.
- There's a Barrett concurrence that mostly seems written to counter the Sotomayor/Jackson position, which is fair, but also kinda shooting fish in a barrel since Jackson doesn't really seem to be interacting with concepts like "We don't do this in the 1A context". She does also bash Hawaii's attempt to use Black Codes as support, which are joined by Thomas and Gorsuch. There's a II-A section that explicitly draws out what sort of prohibitions she would accept, that notably no one else (even Roberts!) joins... but it's also more constrained than the exceptions Alito and Roberts have signed onto before, so I dunno that it's worth reading too deeply into it.
- At least in the short term, both Wolford and Hemani are likely to mean more for what happens to other cases, not their own holding. There's still the hardware and under-21 cases, they haven't been granted or denied cert yet, and not much time before the summer break. The narrowness of these decisions would make any GVR clearly pretextual, and pretext that's doomed to fail, especially in cases like Duncan that have already been GVR'd once before in Bruen. At best, it buys two years while Roberts yells 'don't make me pull over' to brats who know he won't. ... but that doesn't make it implausible.
gattsuru
6d ago
The former ends up as serosorting, either because people avoid serodiscordant pairings or everyone who doesn’t ends up HIV positive, and either form is compatible with enough ART compliance to drastically reduce the threat of new infections, even if out of survival than for any moral cause.
It’s definitely not good, both in the obvious ways and in some less obvious ones (mixing multiple strains of HIV and other STDs is a bad idea).
But actively seeking to cause or receive new infections, by tautology, will mitigate at least some of those countervailing physics. While the objections to bugchasing/giftgiving are more focused on the moral aspect — and it is a moral abomination — the pragmatic side of things does exist and probably takes more of the weight if you look at it unblinkered.
The material support for terrorism charges seems the least likely to survive, and even that more because of the costs of defending the use of the statute rather than losing in court. Humanitarian Law Project supported the law even in the face of much more speech-focused conduct, but it was so highly pre-enforcement that it probably should have gotten a punt on the merits. Here, with this level of coordination, it's likely to survive... if the feds want to keep supporting it. A Dem presidency reversing on that bit would be political, but it would be arguably reasonable allocation of resources if it's the only thing being seriously appealed.
There's a lot of commentary assuming that they were charged on the designated foreign terrorist group prong, and that would be subject to review based on how well-grounded (or liked) Trump's designation of antifa is, but there's a separate "predicate acts" version that doesn't require the designation, and it looks like that's the version used here.
The fireworks-as-explosives bit and destructive vandalism are pretty mainstream, and they're a pretty sizable part of the sentence. They're also such a sizable part of the sentence because of the terrorism enhancement.
I'm not a fan of prosecutors being able to bring up owned materials that were not used in the crime -- especially medical gear like tourniquets -- but it's pretty well-supported by the judiciary. From a pragmatic, rather than legal standard, the combination of bringing AR-15s, tourniquets, and body armor to a place you intended to throw lit fireworks at people is uncommon enough a behavior that it's a reasonable thing to take inference from.
The sentences seem high for the pure aiders-and-abetters, since they weren’t convicted on pretty much anything involving the shooting itself, but that’s easier to raise as a philosophical argument than as a legal one. The courts have pretty strictly constrained proportionality complaints and condoned inclusion of uncharged conduct, and it was only a pretty recent sentencing guideline change that prohibit (mostly) the use of acquitted conduct.
gattsuru
6d ago
There's a small faction of the tumblrite left that's willing to... 'defend coomers' is probably a strong word, but at least make allies of convenience with them. It tends to be very flaky around the more it involves sexualization of women and especially women-as-coomers-like, but it's there.
But they mostly fall into the hard-progressive activist section; they just have a broader understanding of the correct sociosexual development.
gattsuru
6d ago
Sorry about the nitpick.
Because it's hard to fuck in a fursuit without getting heatstroke? Should I even ask? Do I really want to know? Tell me anyway.
Just picky about his hookups (cw: nsfw audio). Dude's pretty built, so I guess he can afford to be, but pretty far from what the stereotype would say.
There's a social conservative complaint that 'demisexual' just describes normal sexual functioning, and from a social conservative perspective that's probably not wrong so much as overloading the definition of 'normal'. But when the uwu maid outfit gay guy is less comfortable with a one-night stand than urquan, it points to something that exists as a meaningful distinguishing marker.
Uh, I'd caveat that the summary has 20% of HIV-negative men in the sample not caring about the HIV status of their partners, and the full document has 7.5% as HIV-negative seeking HIV-positive specifically. That's not the strict definition of bugchasing -- they could theoretically just practice very safe sex -- but it's closer than the HIV-positive-seeking-HIV-negative 1% number (actually 0.4% in the full paper).
On the other hand, I'll also point out that the sample was selected from a 2003/2004-era bugchasing-specific website, and that the total N=1228. That's... not representative, and while it's probably not the strict maximum (ie, I think there were probably more than a hundred bugchasers in the United States in 2003), it's closer to that than a good population-level estimate. I'm... not sure there even is a modern equivalent -- in addition to the survival pressures, a lot of the reasons behind bugchasing-as-a-kink just collapsed as it became understood HIV could be avoided or managed.
I'm aware of one bug-chasing-adjacent incident (technically, just an HIV-positive guy being incredibly careless, but close enough for government work) in the furry fandom, and the convention circuit treated the guy more seriously than they did a fellow who brought a loaded gun. Even as a fantasy, there's only two-digits worth of bugchasing images on e621; that doesn't just get dwarfed by (other) snuff or gore as a category, it gets dwarfed by extremely specific forms of gore. A quick google search pointed to a modern descendant of the website Grov-Parsons monitored... with <500 members. I couldn't find many others, and none of them were bigger.
The end result of the mix points heavily to "if you want to stop X from happening, stop X from happening", not fucking around three or five levels distant.
((Conversely, there are serious financial and resource allocation arguments. PReP spending is a nonzero line item, and while the actual breakdown by orientation and location gets complicated because it's nonlinear, but the Ryan White CARE Act started in the hundred-million range and got to the billion range. Not the worst payoff compared to some other public health spending, at least if you buy the metrics at face value, but neither would they be topping the chart at effective altruism metrics, nor do them seem immediately better turn than 'dudes, just go with frottage'.))
Separate from the bugchasing thing, I'd also point out that many of the people who seem extremely transgressive in summary aren't necessarily so in actual sexual practice. There's a thirst trap fursuiter on youtube with a recent output titled things like "How to FLUSTER your BOYFRIEND", "GOOD BOYS sit on your LAP", "I got EXPOSED for this..." and has a body count of six, total. I'm not going to say that all of the extreme and transgressive people aren't, in reality, but a lot of people who seem like a lot are much more boring than it looks.
gattsuru
8d ago
That's a very painful watch. It's not so absolutely clear that I want to stake a wager on it, but there's... very few alternative explanations I can come up with. Doubly so in Canada; it's not like the cop could argue that she though it was a CCWer gone mad.
((Extremely dark humor:
Unfortunately, there's a plausible alternative explanation: dead leaf and grass matter will produce phosphate as a byproduct of decomposition, and it's fairly common for pool installations to have early-spring startup phosphate problems downstream of either water or piping contaminated by that decayed matter. It's a well-enough known problem that the implementing company during the repairs would do some purges as a matter of course, but depending on the size of the pump and filtration system, that may have been hard to actually do. And taking in water with moderate phosphate amounts is common: the Obama-era reworks took in Potamac water that was pretty gross about it.
On the flip side, the amount of phosphate fertilizer necessary to produce an algae bloom in a 7m gallon tank is about the size of a milk jug if dumped directly in, and maybe the size of a backpack if just dropped in the grass near the pool, so the malicious explanation is pretty plausible, too.
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