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Edited by Mrph1 on Nov 30th 2023 at 11:03:59 AM
Yeah, I feel like if people did that they'd just be shot - especially if they're minorities. The police already shoot black Americans who are unarmed in their own apartments; getting a chance to run a military-style siege and shoot a whole building of them would be a dream come true for white cops.
It's been fun.- Trump chips away at liberal U.S. appeals court majorities
- Judge: US can't deny passport over refusing to pick gender
Trump chips away at liberal U.S. appeals court
These 13 courts wield considerable power, usually providing the last word on rulings appealed from lower courts on disputes involving federal law.
Their rulings can be challenged before the U.S. Supreme Court, but most such appeals are turned away because the top court typically hears fewer than 100 cases annually. Eleven of the courts handle cases from specific multi-state regions, one handles cases from Washington, D.C., while another specializes in patent cases.
...
With the Republican-led Senate rapidly considering and confirming many of his judicial nominees, Trump already has appointed 26 appeals court judges. That is more than any other president in the first two years of a presidency, according to Russell Wheeler, a scholar at the Brookings Institution think tank, although he points out that there are more appellate judges now than in the past.
Trump’s Democratic predecessor, Barack Obama, appointed 55 in eight years as president.
Only four of the 13 federal appeals courts currently have more Republican-appointed judges than Democratic selections.
(For a graphic showing Trump's impact on federal appeals courts, click tmsnrt.rs/2PPsGtM)
The two appellate courts closest to shifting to Republican-appointed majorities are the Atlanta-based 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals and the Philadelphia-based 3rd U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Trump already has made three appointments to the 11th Circuit, leaving it with a 6-6 split between Democratic and Republican appointees. The 3rd Circuit, to which Trump has made one appointment, now has a 7-5 Democratic-appointee majority, with two vacancies for Trump to fill.
Should further vacancies open up on those courts, Trump’s appointees would tip the ideological balance.
...
Flipping courts that have solid Democratic-appointee majorities will be difficult for Trump. The San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals has seven vacancies and Trump has already filled one. Even if Trump fills all of them, Democratic-appointees would still hold a 16-13 majority.
Trump and conservative allies have criticized the 9th Circuit for high-profile rulings against his administration including over the legality of the president’s ban on people entering the United States from certain Muslim-majority countries...
“You have to have a wave of Democratic-appointed judges taking senior status for Trump to have any hope of flipping the 9th Circuit,” University of Pittsburgh School of Law professor Arthur Hellman said.
Judge: US can't deny passport over refusing to pick gender
The U.S. State Department's varied explanations for rejecting the application weren't reasonable, U.S. District Judge R. Brooke Jackson said in his ruling, forcing him to set aside the decision as "arbitrary and capricious."
The ruling is limited, but advocates said they hope it leads to expanded gender choices on federal identification.
Dana Zzyym, who was born with ambiguous physical sexual characteristics and identifies as nonbinary in gender, not as male or female, sued in 2015. Zzyym had requested "X'' as a gender marker on a passport application, and it was denied.
The judge in 2016 ordered the State Department to reconsider. Zzyym applied again and refused to select either option provided on the passport application, feeling that it would be untruthful.
The department again denied the application in 2017.
Jackson dismissed the department's explanations for rejecting the passport, including concerns that it would complicate the process of verifying an applicant's identity and determining eligibility based on federal, state and local databases.
The agency can legally reject passport applications for a good reason, but "adherence to a series of internal policies that do not contemplate the existence of intersex people is not good reason," the judge wrote.
The State Department said in a written statement that it was reviewing the decision and coordinating with the Department of Justice on next steps.
The ruling only applies to Zzyym, but Lambda Legal senior attorney Paul Castillo called it a "groundbreaking, first-of-its-kind" challenge to limited gender options on federal identification.
...
The International Civil Aviation organization, the U.N. agency that sets standards for international travel documents, says gender should be marked on passports as male, female or "X for unspecified." Several countries issue passports with gender designations other than female or male, including "X'' or "O."
A number of U.S. states similarly issue driver's licenses or ID cards with "X'' as a choice for gender markers, including California, Oregon and Washington.
Look with century eyes... With our backs to the arch And the wreck of our kind We will stare straight ahead For the rest of our lives
Okay, aside from the night scheme having decided to grey out all text for me...
Oh good I'm not the only one that's happening to. I had a hell of a time trying to find the right place to put that complaint?
Anyway, regarding that twitter thread; Eh, I would say that when accused of something getting a lawyer is in fact the smartest thing you can do, because most people don't know shit about the law. And then there's that saying that about a lawyer representing himself. He has a point about the rest of it, though.
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That gun politics in the US are racist as all hell. The second amendment, in practice, does not apply to people with adequate melanin levels in their skin.
Historically, a whole lot of gun control legislation was motivated by the desire to disarm african amricans so that they could not shoot back at violent racists. - This is a history that starts with laws to disarm ex-union black troops, and repeated itself in the surge of gun related laws that got put on the books in response to the black panthers routinely practicing mass open carry.
Edited by Izeinsummer on Sep 21st 2018 at 6:23:43 AM
This is what I support too, having more armed people in society in the name of gun control is a tad counterproductive.
"Einstein would turn over in his grave. Not only does God play dice, the dice are loaded." -Chairman Sheng-Ji YangI'll be honest, I don't have the foggiest idea how you're supposed to find that normally, since it's not obviously under any of the sidebar categories, nor is it in the top navigation bit unless you're already on roughly the right page. Seriously, "click random things in the community section at the bottom (or the corresponding links in the navbar)" to find the link to the bugs section is a bit... opaque.
I'd like to arrive at a point where the average politician doesn't have to be a gun expert to be considered eligible to discuss the topic. Right now it's way too common to dismiss anyone's opinion as uninformed unless they meet some arbitrary standard established by the people who own the guns, which always seems to move whenever it's convenient.
Apparently, not knowing the precise technical difference between semi-automatic and automatic (to borrow an example) means you're not allowed to have an opinion about gun control. "Sit down and let the real men talk," is what they seem to be saying, as if "not wanting to be shot" is somehow a naive position to hold.
In other words, you have to stipulate that gun ownership is an established, unalterable fact before you're even allowed to enter the conversation. Fuck that noise.
Edited by Fighteer on Sep 21st 2018 at 10:46:02 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"Legislators, by necessity, are generalists. They have to be: nobody can be an expert in every topic up for consideration. Committee memberships can allow people to focus more on the things they are knowledgeable about/interested in, but when matters come to the floor, you need them to be broadly understandable with a minimum of specialized knowledge.
Indeed, that's one of the major reasons why Congress relies so much on expert testimony during hearings: they are the ones who have to try to help a room full of politicians grasp the details of complex subjects.
Edited by Fighteer on Sep 21st 2018 at 10:28:02 AM
"It's Occam's Shuriken! If the answer is elusive, never rule out ninjas!"That's one of the ways (among many) that the GOP is worse than the Democratic Party. The GOP panders to a voter base that is much more hostile to expert testimony when the experts are telling them things they do not want to hear. Which means that the actual elected politicians do not listen to said experts.
Disgusted, but not surprisedI'd like to reiterate a sentiment that I saw going around when it was Parkland survivor David Hogg being dismissed as an ignorant pleb who knows nothing about guns:
You don't need to be an expert in firearms to become an expert in being shot at.
Edited by TobiasDrake on Sep 21st 2018 at 8:57:06 AM
My Tumblr. Currently side-by-side liveblogging Digimon Adventure, sub vs dub.This editorial comes, appropriately enough, from a website called LongReads, but it's by someone upset with the Economist giving Steve Bannon
a stage to continue spewing his racist bullshit, and why debating with the racists is virtually always a losing proposition for democracy.
Every day, people on the internet ask why I won’t “debate” some self-actualizing gig-economy fascist or other, as if formal, public debate were the only way to steer public conversation. If you won’t debate, the argument goes, you’re an enemy of free speech. You’re basically no better than a Nazi, and certainly far worse than any of the actual Nazis muttering about not being allowed to preach racism from prestigious pulpits. Well-meaning liberals insist that “sunlight is the best disinfectant,” anti-fascists disagree, the far right orders more popcorn, and round and round we go on the haunted carousel of western liberal thought until we’re all queasy.
This bad-faith argument is a repeating refrain of this low, dishonest decade, and this month it built to another crescendo. In the U.S., The New Yorker bowed to public pressure and disinvited Steve Bannon, Trump’s neo-nationalist former chief strategist, from its literary festival. And in the U.K., The Economist chose to do the opposite.
I’m accidentally responsible for a very small amount of the fuss here. I was due to speak at the Economist’s Open Future festival, where Bannon was scheduled to be interviewed by the editor in chief directly after the “future of Me Too!” panel I’d be on with journalists Laura Bates and Ally Fogg. My note to The Economist, in part:
To speak personally, my opposition to Bannon’s place at this conference has nothing to do with wishing to see him silenced — that would be infeasible as well as illiberal.
I’ve spent much of the past five years hearing out and attempting to debate people like Bannon, and in my experience it only emboldens and legitimizes them. As far as I am concerned, I am not interested in hearing those arguments again.
Bates agreed, writing that “there is a very small minority of cases in which it is justified to refuse to participate on a platform alongside a person because they explicitly and deliberately advocate hatred and harm to groups of people on the basis of their race, sex, religion or other characteristics. It is my belief that Steve Bannon meets this high standard, that his deeply racist, misogynistic, white nationalist views pose real threat and harm to a large number of people, and that it is therefore irresponsible and damaging to provide him with the legitimacy of such a highly respected mainstream platform as The Economist.” Fogg said that “to invite contributions from Steve Bannon, and furthermore to schedule his appearance immediately after a discussion about what happens after #Me Too!, directly contradicts the very essence and message of the #Me Too! movement. This schedule honors a man whose primary claims to fame are establishing an online magazine that specialized in inciting misogynistic and racial hatred and then maneuvering a self-confessed sexual abuser into place as the most powerful politician on earth.“
To me, refusing to appear alongside Bannon was an obvious choice, as obvious as the protest against Donald Trump’s visit to Britain earlier this year, when millions of people made my country inhospitable to a president who has done nothing to deserve our deference. Bannon, unsurprisingly, disagreed, calling New Yorker editor David Remnick a coward for rescinding his invitation.
We probably should have anticipated the disingenuous firestorm that followed. We should have anticipated the accusations of being the real fascists for refusing to make nice with white supremacists, the harassment and You Tube hobgoblining from self-appointed defenders of free speech, who seem to have forgotten that for Bates, for me, and for any other woman who flashes the merest inch of independent thought online, harassment is nothing terribly new. It’s just Tuesday.
There’s a term for this sort of bad-faith argument: it’s called the justification-suppression model. The theory is that bigots refrain from directly defending their own bigotry but get hugely riled up justifying the abstract right to express bigotry. So instead of saying, for example, “I don’t like foreigners,” they’ll fight hard for someone else’s right to get up on stage and yell that foreigners are coming to convert your children and seduce your household pets.
Focusing the conversation on the ethics of disseminating speech rather than the actual content of that speech is hugely useful for the far right for three reasons. Firstly, it allows them to paint themselves as the wronged party — the martyrs and victims. Secondly, it stops people from talking about the actual wronged parties, the real lives at risk. And thirdly, of course, it’s an enormous diversion tactic, a shout of “Fire!” in the crowded theatre of politics. But Liberals don’t want to feel like bad people, so this impossible choice — betray the letter of your principles, or betray the spirit — leaves everyone feeling filthy.
There’s no way to come out of this convinced of your own political purity. The thing is, though, that establishing your own political purity isn’t what progressive politics are supposed to be about. As Ms. Marvel says: Good is not a thing you are. It’s a thing you do. This is not about censorship. It never was. It’s about consequences, about drawing a line in the sand.
That can be harder in practice than it sounds. The problem with taking a stand within and against respectable organizations is that however righteous you may feel, you create a lot of work for people in that organization — especially people lower down the chain of command who don’t get to make the big ethical decisions. And it takes rather a lot of courage to defy the customs of polite society, especially if it means compromising social capital you yourself have worked hard for. Some people speaking at the Open Future festival are female activists of color whose positions and profile deserve the same institutional recognition that Bannon doesn’t.
The Economist defended its decision to keep Bannon on the program:
The future of open societies will not be secured by like-minded people speaking to each other in an echo chamber, but by subjecting ideas and individuals from all sides to rigorous questioning and debate. This will expose bigotry and prejudice, just as it will reaffirm and refresh liberalism. That is the premise The Economist was founded on. When James Wilson launched this newspaper in 1843, he said its mission was to take part in “a severe contest between intelligence, which presses forward, and an unworthy, timid ignorance obstructing our progress.”
I don’t believe that holding this position makes anyone evil or stupid. I understand why people cling to it like shipwreck survivors on a floating door. The problem is that it relies on two pieces of magical thinking: number one, that intellectual ideas are the same as moral ones, and number two, that the sucking ethical vacuum at the center of public life can be replaced with a commitment to the polite forms of a free society.
There’s a good case to be made for what anarchists call “prefigurative politics” — the idea that part of the way you build a better world is by creating a version of the world you want to see. The Occupy movement did this, creating microcosms of sharing societies based on mutual aid and consensus, before the camps were summarily squashed by police. The culture of “debate” operates on similar lines but at a much higher budget: it’s live-action roleplaying of a Classical fever-dream of a society where pedigreed intellectuals freely exchange ideas in front of a respectful audience, the sort of society that would have made certain ancient Greek philosophers drop their hemlock in excitement.
Personally, I prefer an exchange of ideas that is less hierarchical and performative, because I’ve found that a lot of the people whose voices matter most are people who don’t put themselves forward as spokespeople, if they are invited at all. Or written dialogue, because it gives all parties more time to think and reflect. Or any format where good ideas are what count, not how good you are at showboating and humiliating the other guy.
Remember the U.S. presidential debates of 2016? Remember how the entire liberal establishment thought Hillary Clinton had won, mainly because she made actual points, rather than shambling around the stage shouting about Muslims? What’s the one line from those debates that everyone remembers now? It’s “Nasty Woman.” What’s the visual? It’s Trump literally skulking around Hillary, dominating her with his body. It’s theatre. And right now the bad actors are winning.
- * *
The far right does not respect the free and liberal exchange of ideas. It is not open to compromise, and it does not want a debate. It wants power. Last week, when I was on the evening news discussing my refusal to attend The Economist’s event, the showrunners sat us in front of a big screen with Bannon’s face on it — twice. And that, of course, is the problem.
Steve Bannon, like the howling monster from the id he ushered into the White House, exploits the values of the liberal establishment by offering an impossible choice: betray their stated principles (free, open debate) or dignify fascism and white supremacy. This weaponizes tolerance to legitimize intolerance. If we deny racists a platform, they feed off the appearance of censorship, but if we give them a platform, they’ve also won by being respectfully invited into the penumbra of mainstream legitimacy. Either way, what matters to them is not debate, but airtime and attention. They have no interest in winning on the issues. Their image of a better world is one with their face on every television screen.
The marketplace of ideas is just as full of con artists, scammers, and Ponzi schemes as any other marketplace, and as always, when the whole thing comes crashing down, it’s ordinary marks who lose everything. Bannon is that rare thing: a true Gordon Gekko in the attention economy, a man who is both troll and true believer, a man whose lack of integrity is part of the ideology: win at all costs and screw the other guy, because fools and their morals are easily parted. There is no deeper truth to be divined from “holding him to account,” no point at which his racism and xenophobia will somehow become unacceptable to a public that has already bought its penny stocks in neo-nationalism.
Mere weeks ago he told a gathering of the far-right National Front in France to be proud “when people call you racist, when people call you xenophobic… wear it as a badge of honor.” Too many well-meaning liberals are clinging with ten fingernails to the idea that their institutions are robust enough to withstand fascism. They believe, because the belief is soothing, that the marketplace of ideas cares about the value, durability, and quality of its wares rather than how shiny the packaging is, how catchy the jingle, how many times it shows up in your peripheral brand awareness until it’s the one you reach for on the shelf. They’re the equivalent of the people who tried to sell cars in the 1920s by taking out full-page ads solemnly explaining how unlikely their machines were to break down rather than trying to sell you a dream of freedom and potency on four wheels.
The left is catastrophically losing the PR battle in the marketplace of ideas. Inviting someone like Steve Bannon to your conference about how to build a free and open society is a little like inviting Ronald Mc Donald to your convention on solving world hunger.
I’m not saying that there’s no point in talking to the far right at all. I have interviewed members of the far right in my capacity as a journalist. But academic research and investigative journalism are very different from formal public debate. Public debate — at least the way I was taught to do it at my posh school — is not about the free exchange of ideas at all. You only listen to the other guy so you can work out how to beat him, and ideally, humiliate him. I’m choosing my pronouns deliberately here. The format is fundamentally an intellectual dick-smacking contest dressed up in institutional lingerie, and while there are plenty of women out there who can unzip their enormous brains and thwack them on the table with the best of them, the formula is catastrophically macho.
People rarely change their minds in the course of formal public debate. Not the people on stage, and very few of those in the audience. Years of robust debate in my capacity as a commentator and journalist have taught me that you don’t change minds simply by pointing out where someone is wrong. As a dear friend once told me, trying to bring someone over to your side by publicly demonstrating that their ideas are bad and that they should feel bad is like trying to teach a goat how to dance: the goat will not learn to dance, and you will make him angry. The ways people actually change their minds is by reading the mood of those around them and then going away and thinking about it, by being given permission to think what they were already thinking, or by being shamed into realizing how ignoble their assumptions always were.
Plus, being better at debating does not make you right. It just makes you better at debating. Any prep school debate champion can tell you that a bad story well told can beat a sober litany of facts, though it helps if you also have facts on your side
Curating debate participants is itself a political choice, because the terms of a debate inform public opinion as much as its content. I’ve lost count of the number of evenings I’ve spent in the role of “shouty leftist” juxtaposed with a set of Tory talking points in a suit, with ten or fifteen minutes (if we’re lucky, a whole hour) to decide whether poor children should be allowed to eat during school holidays or whether migrants deserve human rights. What matters is not who wins on the merits. What matters are the terms: who gets to speak, and who must be silent.
The idea of the public sphere has always been elitist in practice, if not in principle. The people most likely to lose out are some of the least likely to have been trained in the art of public speaking or to have spent the past decade building a career in the media. They were too busy holding down four jobs, or trying to escape a civil war, or practicing medicine in a different language in a country they fled to with their family, or raising and then mourning their children. These are the people whose voices are truly being silenced, whose place in the lofty theatre of formal political debate is not subject to public discussion because they were never invited in the first place.
- * *
The far right are not themselves committed to the principle of free speech. Far from it. In my encounters with neo-nationalists and professional alt-right trolls I have found them remarkably litigious — more than willing to use money and legal threats to silence their more serious critics. I’ve been legally prohibited from describing racists as racists. That’s why you’ll see so many news outlets use phrases like “alleged white supremacist” or “the deportation policy, which critics have described as xenophobic.” It’s not because there’s serious doubt over where these people stand, it’s because journalists are silenced by threats from speech “defenders” who have the money and spite to shut down their critics. I will not be bullied by bad-faith actors trying to rules-lawyer my own principles against me into treating neo-Nazis with respect they don’t deserve.
They are unscrupulous. They incite violence. It’s not my place to tell anyone else who to host at their events, but I can make a choice as a free individual about who I choose to associate with in a professional context, and the more of us who make that choice, the stronger the message it sends.

@ Septimus Heap: Not even on the same bloody continent!
Trump delenda est