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PaperclipPerfector  2mo ago (text post)   37693 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 8, 2024

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To be fair, I'm not sure he believes it.

There's a point, here, if he did. There's a (neurotically) strong libertarian argument that goes something like a) Law is enforced at the barrel of a gun, b) every law has to have a punishment against violators to be meaningfully enforced, and no matter how many layers deep you try to bury the punishment it either boils down to a stern talk or serious harm and usually the latter, and c) no system of punishment will be clear from abuse or corruption, and our system is particularly bad. Every small tax means some fraction of a person strangled, every locked building or stupid regulatory rule means some fraction of someone getting shot by the feds, banning drugs pushes people to less safe drugs from less trustworthy sources that fry their brains, prison sentences mean rape (and 'consensual' sex that isn't), so on. That doesn't make every law automatically invalid -- sometimes people need shooting, and sometimes even shooting people that don't really deserve it is worth the cost -- but it resists the urge to flinch away with caveats about how all these problems would go away if people Would Just comply, or if only the police behaved better, or only the fuehrer knew, knowing that they never will.

But White has never made those arguments. Even in Garner's case, which is about as sympathetic to his positions are possible, it was always just that the Cops Were Bad. And he can't, because he wants to have the power of the state at hand for too many trivial things.

Okay, well, there's a steelman where even if White doesn't believe it for everything else, Immigration Is Genuinely Different; enforcement is unusually difficult, and no small number of immigrants are, if not legally refugees, at least fleeing from poverty in countries with high rates of violent crime. But White's not making that argument, either, here. It's that his enemies, the ones here, want to do these awful things themselves, and White doesn't even try to Pepe Silvia a how, nevermind a why, into place.

That's not the point of the whole mess. If you somehow pinned him down (without getting blocked) he'd probably point to the Flores homicides, or less charitably the alleged ICE eugenics, but there's reason he doesn't point to them or anything else here.

It's like trying to disprove that "jailers could not possibly be so incompetent, cruel, or indifferent as to let such a high-profile prisoner commit suicide" by providing thirty-five really compelling examples of deaths or near-deaths in jails and prisons, until you look again and only three of them were suicides (and one attempted suicide), one of which involved the jailers literally urged the victim to kill themself, none of which were high-profile. He has more examples of jailers killing their charges directly, ie exactly the sort of thing that proposed in the Epstein conspiracy theories he's supposedly trying to debunk! But you agree with what he's saying until you realize that he's not saying anything about the original question.

That's not an optimistic thing -- in many ways, it makes a lot of his earlier works (that I trusted too!) a good deal more painful to read than if he'd merely had his brain dribble out one ear in the meantime. And it's worse when you start seeing that pattern show up more and more (for a still-right-wing example, see Blackman at Volokh, and to a lesser extent on the libertarian side Balko) as you look for it.

If I had to try to steelman him, I'd say that:

At some point, in my opinion, violence against not just the government doing it and the private people joining the violence but the soft-target think-tank, media, and academic aparatus that empowered it becomes morally and philosophically justified.

has a certain amount of wiggle-room, in that he's not saying shooting up think tanks right now is morally justified, but that it could become morally justified at some future point (presumably when people are actually being rounded up and herded into camps). And, I guess I can follow his reasoning - if you really believe we are on the verge of becoming a Nazi dystopia, and then we really do become a Nazi dystopia, sure, I'd probably agree that all bets are off and anyone who was complicit is fair game.

Of course, I do not believe we are about to become a Nazi dystopia, and I do not have confidence that if someone really did go shoot up a Federalist Society meeting right now, White wouldn't making hemming and hawing noises about reaping what you sow, etc.

I think Ken really lost it about the time that Clark backstabbed him during the whole Vox Day contratemps.

The thing is that once you're being herded onto the trains trucks (do you think we're Europeans or something?!) the think tanks are already superfluous to the ruling power, and the more independent-minded might already be waiting for you at the wall-building camp.
So if it's not ok to shoot them first, and too late to shoot them after, there's never actually a good time to go murdering intellectuals, or advocating for it.

The dedicated violence advocate has to go with either "preemptive mass executions" (hard sell, but I'm doing my best) or "can't wait to shoot down Biden UN super-predator stealth drones with my trusty hunting rifle unless they ban it first" (cope)

I haven't read Blackman in years now, did he just get even more partisan? I remember it being almost refreshing when he first started.

He's a little more partisan, charitably because of things like Baude/Paulsen, less charitably having seen a niche for Not-Obviously-Crazy Guy Providing Trump Legal Foundation. But that's kinda a different frustration.

I'll use this piece as an example. It's not wrong (uh, mostly; the aside about no one following Barrett on or off the court is especially lackluster as a contrast to Thomas), or even particularly partisan (uh, mostly; the swipes and 'compliment' at Sotomayor).

But break out the argument in reverse. Blackman wants to persuade you that "Even if an erroneous precedent cannot be overruled, courts should isolate the damage, and decline to extend it to new circumstances." Literally the subhead and closing argument. That's not an unreasonable thing to say! What's the buildup to it?

  • Robinson was peak Warren Court activism.
  • Thomas wanted to overrule Robinson.
  • The majority said that this case was not implicated by Robinson.
  • The plaintiffs wanted to extend Robinson.
  • The majority said they don't want to.

These are reasonable as summaries of the case, even if some progressives would want to emphasize different parts instead. They slot very nicely around his argument. They're also just not evidence for or against that argument; at most, the last point is just an example of a court doing that.

If Blackman was trying to present a story of the case, this would be compelling, but he's not. It'd be fine if he was providing advocacy as a purely normative matter, but he's not really doing that, either. He's telling you that you (or the courts) should do all these things, but every point on his list could come back with a time machine and a goatee and turn out to have happened the opposite way, and he'd still believe and tell you the same conclusion. These bullet points are not evidence; they're part of a story he's putting together such that the conclusion fits. It makes sense, if you already believe him, but if you don't there's absolutely nothing here that can or should change your mind.

He doesn't always fall this way -- he links to a (rarely downloaded) paper he wrote on the topic that is... not great, but at least winks underlying facts, this is a pretty direct normative argument, this is extremely bound to specific facts. It's not even always bad when he does this sort of narrative-writing framework-shifting stuff.

But it's something he's doing, in ways that aren't visible to many readers (myself included not that long ago!), where that invisibility seems likely to be bad for many of his readers.

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