admiralteal

The political reality in ND is that having the (D) is the end of the road for you. Since neither party actually represents a specific policy platform, I guess it’s 6 of 1 in an environment like that.

After all, what are modern Republicans even about? Obviously they want to deny global warming, police uteruses, kill queer people, theocratize the government… but what policies do they actually care about that aren’t equally present in the Democratic caucus?

Look, there’s definitely some people who lean “libertarian” on paper who have valuable and interesting insights. Chuck Mahron/Strong Towns, for example. They’re A+ in political ideas and messaging and you can definitely see NAP center stage if you read between the lines of what they are saying. Except I’ve never heard him use the word “libertarian”. I suspect because he knows it is a poisoned brand and just generally doesn’t like labels, though that’s just supposition.

But apply some Bayesian theory here and don’t engage in any No True Scotsmanship. If someone tells you they are a “libertarian”, that information on its own should give you HIGH confidence the person is somewhere between “Republican who has a gay daughter he doesn’t want to see lynched” and “total crank sovereign citizen type”. There’s 1,000 false positives for every true one.

If I were you, holding the sincere beliefs I have no reason to question you having, I would not want to be identified by that word.

Plenty of protected political speech involves deception with gain (especially gain of political office). Inciting violence is already against the law… and that law is a form of censorship.

I’m concerned about the repercussions of allowing SCOTUS to set the precedent of what can and cannot be said or written by citizens or media to protect the feelings of others.

And I am saying they already can do and did and you need to engage with that and not pretend there’s some magical line that cannot be crossed. Defining what is and isn’t protected speech is a complex and ever-ongoing negotiation. The links you provided are evidence of this – are evidence that I am right. There isn’t a clear categorical definition that separates the protected from unprotected – what is protected and isn’t protected is defined only by where the censorship starts.

You should be highly concerned with the repercussions of the SCOTUS’s decisions. They’re a corrupt institution that historically nearly always act as a brake on expanding civil rights. Good news for you on this subject, this SCOTUS would never let a hate speech law stand – they quite like to see vulnerable people persecuted. More good news: there basically are no hate speech laws. The only government agencies censoring political speech right now are far right conservative ones like Florida, doing the exact thing you fear. It aint progressives and it aint happening with support of progressives.

But you can’t pretend that speech isn’t speech and censorship isn’t censorship just to make your own political ideology easier to reckon. That’s just embracing censorship in a different way.

Again, many forms of censorship are uncontentious. Here we have links to two forms of censorship that are such. If there’s some new kind of censorship you find objectionable, identify it and make the case for why it is worse than its counterfactual.

I don’t think he’s being sincere.

What does “protected by ‘free speech’” even mean? Who is this free speech and how are they protecting or not protecting anything?

Fraud is a form of speech. It’s putting ideas out into the world – ideas that induce a false understanding in another, typically to reap some material benefit to the fraudster… but lots of the protected forms of speech do that.

The state punishes this speech by outlining a procedure for a harmed party to punish the fraudster, backed by the authority of the state (i.e., lawsuits).

Just because speech is part of a contract doesn’t magically transmogrify it into non-speech. Besides, what even constitutes a “contract” isn’t something we can say is fully and perfectly defined…

So here we have speech and punishment for it. That sums up to censorship. And how do we decide what is and isn’t “fraud” and so does or doesn’t qualify as protected speech? It’s complicated. Very complicated. We have a huge statutory framework. Legal tests. We’re still trying to specify the line. The target shifts through all of history. Cases get overturned and updated and our frameworks and tests evolve. Sometimes we go too far. Sometimes not far enough. Sometimes the shifting reality of how our society operates changes the balancing point. Sometimes we have simply been wrong and regretted it.

Now I think I know what you actually are trying to say. That political speech needs to be highly protected from government meddling. That’s hardly a radical idea. I don’t know any credible person who disagrees with it.

But there’s also a significant legal grey area between which, for example, it becomes hard to identify where political speech ends and direct calls to violence start. Surely it isn’t protected for a political leader standing in front of a riled mob to point across the street to his political enemy and shout “go kill him, now!” But where’s the exact point where the rhetoric shifted from “proper” political speech to a call to violence, exactly? How much subtext and implication are we going to accept? How riled does the crowd have to be? Either way, by outlining a point where speech can end you up punished, we’ve censored that speech. And censorship through civil action is still censorship, don’t be confused.

In its best form, the state exists to help balance rights in tension. When one person’s speech rights are out of balance with the harms that speech inflicts on another (such as in fraud or an incitement to violent), the state exists to mediate that. And we should want it to be just and fair when it does, and balance that tension in a way that creates the best possible environment. Join the reasonable people and discuss where you think things fall on that balance. Don’t pretend there’s some magical and inviolable difference between this censorship and other kinds that are acceptable, though. Have a reason.

You aren’t answering me. You’re deflecting.

Are we legalizing fraud or not?

But literally all modern states have media censorship. Literally all of them. For example, prohibitions on libel or fraud. That’s censorship. Confidentiality of national secrets is a form of censorship. Hell, even copyright laws can be interpreted as a form of censorship.

In modern history, it’s typically the right wing dictators that got voted in through “legal” means, and it’s the right wing dictators that achieve power by slowly controlling what can and cannot be said by the media. The leftist dictatorships, if you want to call the soviet-style ones as such, do so through violence and the military. You have it exactly backwards which sins here come from which wing. It doesn’t pass a common sense test, so I think you may need to go back to school.

And let’s not get bogged down in utter bullshit. We’re talking about “progressive” censorship here, which almost certainly means hate speech laws. There have been exactly zero dictatorships that flowed out of political movements of intentional inclusivity. Neither the Nazis nor Soviets were concerned with “hate speech”. They both were all about it.

To be clear, I object to both comparisons-- both to the population-wide demographics and the law-wide one – though I do clearly think it’s a conversation worth having.

Because it fundamentally misunderstands what the purpose of representation is. Representation is not an ends on itself, so “matching” population demographics is useless for anything other than identifying likely discrimination. It’s not a numbers game. There’s no “but hey, look how close we truly are to achieving good representation!” It’s not that, because it’s still remarkable that this many queer people have been put into power. They’re the exception to prove the rule that the field is still inherently hostile to them.

The goal isn’t “equal” or “proportional” representation or anything like that. The goal is elimination of the systemic discrimination. The goal is ensuring that brilliant new minds aren’t being filtered out for being different from the social norms. This is back to the old RGB quote.

That’s libertarianism in a nutshell, though. A political ideology founded from liberalism which claims to reject all of liberalism while also being just the same as liberalism embraced by people who actually kind of hate liberalism. It’s a lot of very confused voters registered to that party.

Literally everyone censors speech, and is fine with it. Everyone, with exceptions so scant that may as well not exist at all.

Laws that prohibit workplace harassment. Defamation. Laws that punish incitements to violence. Laws that punish fraud and confidence scams. Laws against insider trading. Even things like RICO. These are ALL, in varying forms, limits on speech that are basically uncontentious to most normal, well-balanced people. These are limits on speech so ubiquitous and accepted that people have actually somehow convinced themselves that somehow “free” speech is clearly categorically different than these other things even when it plainly isn’t.

The only people sincerely for (edit: total) free speech are honest-to-god anarchists. True “free speech absolutists” basically do not exist, and when someone claims to be one it really just means they want to be able to get away with using racial slurs in public.

Being queer doesn’t make you worse at law. Preexisting discrimination and discriminatory forces in law world is causing that number to be so much lower than the wider population and the best way to forcefully address that is to increase representation and visibility in that population.

These are elite positions. Everyone on the short lists, queer or not, is qualified for the job. The choices made at that point are not for picking the “best” candidate because there is no “best” candidate. There’s different choices. Different viewpoints. Different backgrounds. Different politics.

And I think the Biden administration is making good choices as far as appointments go. Intentional choices. Choices meant to make a culture shift that needs to happen.

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Putting Dijon on a hotdog or wearing a tan suit was considered a major political blunder in recent history.

It’s also not just voting against Trump.

Biden on climate is an A student. The inflation reduction act, according to basically every climate wonk, gives us a real chance at achieving necessary goals both under its regime and thanks to further future legislation it certainly unlocks. Things are looking less bad right now than they have for a long time in spite of all the worsening indicators. And it’s written with intense virtuous cycles built-in that will make it VERY sticky policy once it builds up a couple of years worth of inertia. The fact that he got it past an overtly hostile senate that had at least 51 anti-science, anti-climate, fossil fuel shills turning up to vote is nothing short of a policy miracle.

Trump, on the other hand, has vowed to reverse everything that could still be reversed about the IRA (a frustratingly large amount, unfortunately, could still be undone by executive fiat thanks to its still-developing political base). He’s vowed to double down on every kind of fossil fuel subsidy. He’s vowed to restore coal power even though it’s horrible for everyone involved and the most expensive kind of energy production. He’s vowed to fight windmills just because he doesn’t like their aesthetics – literal quixotic shit.

I won’t defend Biden on Israel for even one millisecond. His position is heinous. It’s evil. And if he loses in November, it will almost certainly be the reason why and he’ll deserve it. But it will probably also spell actual global war and apocalypse fueled by climate within all of our lifetimes. It may sound dramatic, but a Trump win will bring us from feast to famine and may spell the actual end of our civilization.

This very article has already been updated to say the story is not true.

The guy’s talking about concentration clamps for migrants as part of his final solution.

Be scared. Vote.

On the one hand, Project 2025 is deeply terrifying. It’s a recipe book for full-blown authoritarian fascism in the US. And its stance towards climate may actually herald in an ending of this phase of human civilization because of how monumentally, mindblowingly stupid and evil its contributors are.

On the other hand, Trump would never do what he was told. He would never be organized or deliberate enough to carry it out. He’d just keep tweeting all day and being completely, psychotically capricious. So at least I know that particular cake is unlikely to be baked.

The really obnoxious thing about all this stuff is that Biden’s record on climate is excellent. It stands on its own, even before comparisons to the pure anti-science madness of Trump. Which progressives mostly don’t even know about, and even the ones who have a vague idea he’s done something often hand wave it all as insufficient or misguided without bothering to know even the most basics of basics about the policies.

Climate is an existential threat and it would be hard to come up with any more effective policy for addressing it within the American system than the IRA and other actions Biden has somehow managed to get through a majority climate-hostile Senate. It’s been excellent. Get out and vote for more of it or else we may all be doomed.

Though to be clear, policies that disenfranchise violate equal protections and the moral foundations of democracy from the start. Even if she had been 100% certain it was then illegal for her to vote, she did nothing wrong. Maybe did something illegal, but the law is what’s wrong. If we had a legitimate court system, her case would be an easy opportunity to toss the bad law.

This is the exception to prove the rule that the other interests are definitely illegitimate. This is the website telling you that they give away your data for illegitimate purposes.

It’s not a surprise. We knew this was true. But seeing it’s spelled out like this is a little galling.

Illegitimate: not authorized by the law; not in accordance with accepted standards or rules

The website is basically admitting that they’re using your data maliciously, intentionally, by having this distinction.