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Cake day: March 3rd, 2024

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  • Yes, I agree with that reading of history, but just because things have been a certain way, doesn’t mean they have to be that way. I concur that the historical precedent for the SCOTUS is to stand in the way of progress, or often to cause regression, but that doesn’t mean we have to quietly accept it. Especially if and when there have been historical departures from that trend that demonstrate things can work differently, and work well.

    (Not trying to be confrontational, just trying to prevent a nihilistic reading of your comment.)



  • I had heard about this case basically removing a powerful tool for the SEC and effectively requiring them to spend way more money trying cases in front of a jury, but I didn’t know there were so many other agencies that aren’t even allowed to bring jury trial cases and are only allowed to bring the type of case that the SCOTUS basically just eliminated. More and more I’m having trouble not seeing the actions of the SCOTUS majority as a deliberate attack on the US government itself rather than “correcting” earlier rulings that have been precedent for decades.



  • Roberts turned to history in his opinion. “Since the founding, our nation’s firearm laws have included provisions preventing individuals who threaten physical harm to others from misusing firearms,” he wrote.

    Some courts have gone too far, Roberts wrote, in applying Bruen and other gun rights cases. “These precedents were not meant to suggest a law trapped in amber,” he wrote.

    In dissent, Thomas wrote, the law “strips an individual of his ability to possess firearms and ammunition without any due process.”

    The government “failed to produce any evidence” that the law is consistent with the nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation, he wrote.

    “Not a single historical regulation justifies the statute at issue,” Thomas wrote.

    Am I taking crazy pills? Why is some arbitrary reading of history the sole mechanism by which these opinions are being made? What happened to the textual literalism these justices claimed to follow? Doesn’t that require reading the words in the Constitution and making judgements from that?

    Why is the arbitrary choice of legislative implementation of the state governments of the 1800s determining what laws states are allowed to have in the 2000s? If they passed a law that was unconstitutional, but no one challenged it for 200 years, then it’s suddenly not only constitutional, but now a metric against which new laws can be judged to determine if they are constitutional? How is that anything but laws “trapped in amber”?

    Did I miss the slow court transition to this singular decision-making process? Or was this a sudden shift that I just missed the headlines? I knew they used suspicious historical reasoning in Dobbs to throw out abortion rights, but do they do that for every case now?


  • Humans getting it? Yes, from farm animals. Humans getting it from other humans? Not yet, but I wouldn’t bet on that staying the case forever.

    There are two aspects that make this different from COVID. One is that the mortality rate is much higher: near 50%, whereas COVID was around 1-3%. That’s the bad difference. The good difference is that it’s a flu variant, and we’ve studied flu variants for a very long time. I’ve heard there’s already a vaccine, but I haven’t verified that claim from any reputable health organization.

    So if people actually follow health advice from officials, this could be handled much better than COVID. But if they don’t and they get it, it’s a coin flip if they die. And people are already doing things like drinking more raw milk because the CDC has identified the virus as being in raw milk from infected farms, so draw your own conclusions.


  • The Tribunal accepted that creed should include non-religious belief systems, yet still rejected ethical veganism because it “does not address the existence or non-existence of a Creator and/or a higher order of existence”.

    What the hell kind of “non-religious belief system” addresses the existence or non-existence of a “Creator”? Are they trying to expand “creed” just enough to cover a particular definition of atheism and absolutely nothing else? The whole point of atheism is that is doesn’t have to address a “Creator” because the laws of nature work just fine without that question being addressed. Sure, some flavors of atheism take a stance on the question, but not all of them do. Are those flavors of atheism suddenly not a “creed”? How could they possibly justify that without applying a biased religious lens (which by its very nature violates basically all atheist “creeds”)?

    Edit: I just realized this is exactly like when people who do not understand the first thing about homosexuality ask a male couple which one is the “woman.”


  • I was expecting some kind of analysis showing that otherwise normal people who adopted GOP politics simultaneously transitioned to showing sociopathic behavior, like in a measurable, scientific way. Instead the author gives a definition of sociopathy (“acting without feelings of guilt, remorse, or shame coupled with a tendency to reject the concept of responsibility”) and proceeds to label the policy positions and enacted laws of the GOP as sociopathic.

    Applying neuroscience terms developed for individual people to actions of groups does not seem scientific at all. Isn’t that the field of sociology? I’m not really sure how such a labeling helps the conversation, especially from a neuroscientist. I don’t disagree with the positions, but this isn’t neuroscience, so I can’t really take this author as any sort of authority or expert on this; I feel like this article has the same level of expertise as a Lemmy comment (like mine).




  • The 10th amendment doesn’t change the supremacy clause. It simply makes explicit what’s implicit in the supremacy clause: federal law takes precedence over any and all state laws and constitutions when they are made in pursuance of the US Constitution, so the 10th amendment clarifies that if it’s not a power granted to the federal government by the US Constitution, then it’s reserved for the states. To invoke the 10th amendment in this case you would have to prove the federal government is acting beyond its constitutional scope, which would require either proving it’s going beyond EMTALA or that EMTALA itself is unconstitutional. They are not making either claim in this case.




  • That’s part of what makes Trump’s talk of a 3rd term both ridiculous and terrifying. It would violate the Constitution, so a radical change to our country would have to happen for that to happen. All of our “inalienable rights” are guaranteed by the Constitution, so if they throw it away for a 3rd Trump term, they can throw it away for anything else they want. Want to go back to only white men who own land voting? It’s the Constitution blocking that. Making treason a crime? The Constitution. Once they break that, we’re hosed.


  • When his form was released to the public, Justice Thomas included an unusual addendum, a statement defending his acceptance of gifts from Harlan Crow, a real estate magnate in Texas and a donor to conservative causes. He had “inadvertently omitted” information on earlier forms, the statement said, which also sought to justify his decision to fly on private jets. He stated that he had been advised to avoid commercial travel after the leak of the draft opinion overturning Roe v. Wade.

    So saying he has “acknowledged” them is being very generous. He’s still making excuses and not taking responsibility for breaking the rules.

    Including the advise about avoiding commercial travel after the Dobbs draft leaked is a non sequitur I’m having a really hard time not interpreting as a dog whistle to a political audience. Sure, avoid commercial travel, but include the gift of travel in your documentation. Why bring up Dobbs except to hint that he believes he’s being persecuted for doing his job, despite the fact that the binding, precedent-setting opinion has no legal basis at all. That’s not my conclusion, because my personal conclusion would be garbage since I’m not an expert. That’s the conclusion of countless legal experts and the dissenting justices.

    But sure, you were so rattled by this unprecedented persecution of a sitting justice that you “inadvertently” omitted huge gifts from conflicts of interest in your disclosure forms. You still did it, so take responsibility.


  • Republicans in Idaho asked the Supreme Court to decide whether state bans or federal law take precedence.

    This is absurd. Federal law always takes precedence, even if it’s a section of a state constitution versus a law passed by Congress. Period. It’s the supremacy clause of the US Constitution, and it’s quite clear. The supremacy clause doesn’t cover executive order, but this case is about EMTALA, a law passed by Congress.

    Now if they want to argue the Biden administration’s enforcement of that law is going beyond the bounds set by the law, that would be something SCOTUS would need to decide. But as far as I can tell they aren’t arguing that. They’re saying if the Court lets the Biden administration require emergency abortions in opposition to state law, then that will let them require elective abortions as well, which is an even more absurd claim since the scope of EMTALA is strictly for medical care when the health or life of the patient is at risk without it.