Outlaws fill the mountain caves

[wildgifthorses]

I have to admit that it's horribly tempting in spite of myself to attempt to express my serious views in a format that isn't—for even the glibbest—the clearest or best...

[wildgifthorses]

Formal experiments make it so tempting to irritate followers with a conceit forcing unnatural syntax and wording on sentiments lacking in substantive meat. Rather than keeping a regular meter a proper expression of well-defined views has to conform to the structure of thought and proceed at the rhythm of actual news.

[wildgifthorses]

There's also the very slippery construction of the category of "abuse" in that post... it's funny because they seem to be aware of all the obvious criticisms of what they do and so they raise them but then without really having any persuasive rebuttals other than shouting louder. I never really thought of people in that area as having a guilty conscience but I think maybe that one does. It's weird it's a weird post.

[wildgifthorses]

listen up tumblypoos and let a real government-backed online content moderator learn you a thing

[wildgifthorses]

Thank god we have people like you around then, to advocate for their autonom- what's that? To make sure they get in trouble if they post self-harm pictures on the internet or get too close to adults who aren't their parents?

[wildgifthorses]

listen up tumblypoos and let a real government-backed online content moderator learn you a thing

[pmamtraveller]

Jeff Wigman - Bad Dog, 2020

[wildgifthorses]

I guess specifically I just care way way more about civil liberties and criminal procedure issues than pretty much anything else at SCOTUS, and the liberals are definitely better on those issues but among conservative justices the more "originalist" ones tend to be better. And there is enough variance on both sides that the "pitched partisan warfare" model of the court has never seemed true of the stuff I care about. And I think that court-packing and more openly political justices will lead to worse decisions on those issues because popular views on civil liberties and criminal procedure tend to be deeply illiberal within both parties, so good things mostly happen through quiet elite consensus, which SCOTUS as it currently exists basically serves to enforce.

[centrally-unplanned]

I find myself in the same camp as you on the civil liberties topics, and in general that the current SC is - while obviously partisan and sometimes nakedly so - much more balanced than many people give it credit for. But while on civil liberties they have an elite consensus at odds with the public that is good, on my pet topic of technocratic expertise and governance they have an elite consensus at odds with the public that is really bad, actually! Between the unitary executive theory and the dismantling of Chevron Deference, the current SC consistently maintains that the government building agencies to actually govern is illegal, which no one writ large wants. Republicans right now are essentially banking on partisanship to save their own policy agenda via the SC just giving them carveouts.

And I do think this makes choosing partisan ride-or-die justices kinda inevitable. The current crop of justice are being practical in many ways; but on this topic they just haven't thought the consequences through.

[wildgifthorses]

I'm a lot more sympathetic to anti-technocratic politics in general than I think you are, and I am kind of doubtful about the strength of public opinion on that issue (other than among PMC libs for whom it's a core class interest) but I agree that a much more partisan SCOTUS is probably inevitable at this point, both because that's where the overall black-hole gravitational pull across all government institutions is right now and narrowly because they don't seem able to control themselves around election-law cases that make the court seem like a crucial partisan prize.

[wildgifthorses]

I guess specifically I just care way way more about civil liberties and criminal procedure issues than pretty much anything else at SCOTUS, and the liberals are definitely better on those issues but among conservative justices the more "originalist" ones tend to be better. And there is enough variance on both sides that the "pitched partisan warfare" model of the court has never seemed true of the stuff I care about. And I think that court-packing and more openly political justices will lead to worse decisions on those issues because popular views on civil liberties and criminal procedure tend to be deeply illiberal within both parties, so good things mostly happen through quiet elite consensus, which SCOTUS as it currently exists basically serves to enforce.

[wildgifthorses]

Like, I think it's interesting (and correct) for the Federal Reserve to have an acknowledged quasi-constitutional status as politically independent from the executive. I don't really care that much about FTC independence or whatever. Maybe I'm just in a SCOTUS-defending mood because of Chatrie but the outcome in Slaughter/Cook really doesn't seem that bad to me in any respect.

[eightyonekilograms]

It’s great to have Federal Reserve independence. What you cannot have is all three of

Federal Reserve independence

Independence for nothing else

Originalism

You have to pick two.

… well I mean clearly you don’t have to, because nothing matters anymore. But still.

[no-sharks-on-the-sun]

"originalism is just a paper-thin justification for the conservative justices doing whatever they wanted to do in the first place" remains undefeated imo

[wildgifthorses]

I think you're just severely underestimating the extent to which this is how other judicial philosophies work as well lol

[wildgifthorses]

Like, I think it's interesting (and correct) for the Federal Reserve to have an acknowledged quasi-constitutional status as politically independent from the executive. I don't really care that much about FTC independence or whatever. Maybe I'm just in a SCOTUS-defending mood because of Chatrie but the outcome in Slaughter/Cook really doesn't seem that bad to me in any respect.

[eightyonekilograms]

It’s great to have Federal Reserve independence. What you cannot have is all three of

Federal Reserve independence

Independence for nothing else

Originalism

You have to pick two.

… well I mean clearly you don’t have to, because nothing matters anymore. But still.

[wildgifthorses]

Yeah it seems like this is clearly a case where originalism has to give way idk

[wildgifthorses]

Like, I think it's interesting (and correct) for the Federal Reserve to have an acknowledged quasi-constitutional status as politically independent from the executive. I don't really care that much about FTC independence or whatever. Maybe I'm just in a SCOTUS-defending mood because of Chatrie but the outcome in Slaughter/Cook really doesn't seem that bad to me in any respect.

[wildgifthorses]

Central bank independence being way way more recent than many people assume is downstream of floating exchange rates / the end of the gold standard being way way more recent than many people assume. This stuff is all about as old as video games.

[no-sharks-on-the-sun]

are you insinuating that sometimes the "originalists" on the supreme court do things for political reasons instead of directly interpreting the constitution?

[wildgifthorses]

This post was not meant as an own on the Supreme Court. I had completely forgotten there was a recent case about this — I just like the history of monetary policy. I haven't read the SCOTUS opinion but it is obviously true that Fed independence is a central pillar of the modern US government's institutional arrangement, and "preserving functionally important institutional features" is a much less interesting and (hopefully) much less controversial version of "political" decision-making than, like, ruling for the GOP's partisan advantage or whatever. It's just a matter of not following principles off a cliff, which I think anyone would tell you has to be part of any judicial philosophy.

[wildgifthorses]

Central bank independence being way way more recent than many people assume is downstream of floating exchange rates / the end of the gold standard being way way more recent than many people assume. This stuff is all about as old as video games.

[wildgifthorses]

It's funny that the American system of government serving as a model for the old world extends way past the French Revolution or 1848 constitutionalism all the way to, like, central bank independence, which was innovated in the US in the late 1970s and spread around the world mostly in the 90s to the point that it's now considered a standard bedrock institutional feature of first-world governance.

[wildgifthorses]

I'm waiting on a better source than Ken Klippenstein before coming to any conclusions about Mitch McConnell. Also, McConnell has been one of the least Trump-loyalist Republicans still in the Senate so if his seat becomes vacant that is bad.

[wildgifthorses]

I stood on the basketball court that night and thought seriously. The ball was hard and cold, and it bounced with the sound of an outsized steel ball-bearing. Yet it seldom came near me. There were times when I could have walked away unnoticed from the court. Even when I seemed in full view of my team-mates, my thin body might have been as transparent as ice. I tried to think of myself as containing something solid and enduring. I still imagined the space inside me as containing a soul. And even at the age of eighteen I kept the image of my soul that I had first acquired as a small child. My soul was a buoyant object shaped like an Australian Rules football. Its surface should have been white and delicate like a petal but it was more often grey and soiled. Knowing from theology that my soul belonged to the spiritual order of things, I had come to imagine it as superimposed on my lungs and stomach and liver - a pale wash on a separate sheet overlaid on the full-colour diagram of my insides. I got no reassurance from thinking of my soul. It belonged more to God than to me. And it was too little distinguished from the souls of others. When the basketball team lined up to be photographed - all of us practicing Catholics of the late 1950s - the men around me had thrust their chests at the camera as though they hoped the photograph would show the rows of white football-shapes floating inside rib-cages.

Gerald Murnane, Landscape with Landscape

[kushblazer666]