The quoted excerpt is limited to "electoral politics" and I think it is largely correct about how electoral campaigns work, they are not exercises in issue persuasion

I think there's a difference between "don't speak ill of the dead" (a dubious norm that can have negative effects as to public figures) and "don't revel in someone's death" (a good and morally healthy norm, rarely defeasible)

Always funny how for some people "moral relativism" means "thinking morality is more complicated than what I was taught as a child"

There is a difference between whether the biological sex system is binary and whether individuals can be sorted into binary biological sex categories. The first is much more defensible than the second. But the second is what you need f you actually want to sort individuals

The AI discourse and the birth rate discourse are sort of interesting in combination because if you think AI will bring long-run large increases in productivity (which does not seem like a bold prediction!) then it's not clear why you should worry about the birth rate

I think you can have this view but the price is that you have to reject that gender terms like "man" or "woman" work the way they are conventionally taken to work--they become robustly lifestyle choices or social scripts

A total violation of international law. Eswatini is imprisoning people from multiple countries no crime, based on no violation of law in that country, and with the direct knowledge and acquiescence of the United States.

This statement pretty blatantly expresses support and solidarity specifically with the attacks

The Zionism remark here is also substantively bad--it's just not true that "every definition of a Jewish state ends up in some articulation of illiberal values"

Drop Site is doing critical coverage on the Gaza genocide and the Iran War, and this revolting excuse for “reporting” threatens the credibility of their entire operation. A glute massage is a real thing that professionals administer for athletic training. Not an invite to a boyfriend to rape you.

Questions not to ask the BPJ majority

Yale Law School in the news and it's not embarrassing?

And God said: all the teams from the Americas will lose in the round of 16

“A society that is threatened by children playing is a worthless society. A philosophy that can be threatened by children playing has no value to a free people.” www.liberalcurrents.com/there-is-no-...

Trump gets involved with the world cup and corruptly gets a suspended player reinstated. Now, the US team is being humiliated by Belgium. Everything Trump touches turns to shit.

The lesson here is that Mamdani should have called Infantino

He lied about every single thing. Everyday. He ran knowing full well who he is while presenting himself as someone else (poorly). He wasted everyone’s time & money & shattered people’s credibility. He used the political process as a vanity project to the detriment of the folks he wanted to represent

Dropping in from my voluntary exile from the platform to say that if they don’t withdraw the endorsement and urge Platner to drop out, they will both have utterly disgraced their legacies

Platner needs to go, the sooner the better.

I always think it is more comprehensible if you think of Supreme Court justices as senators from their party. Then the radicalization of Roberts after 2020, the general greater embrace of Trump by Repubs over time since 2016, the move to fight in the gerrymandering wars, are all in character.

Another way you could think about the Supreme Court: the point of a written constitution is "to separate fundamental law from ordinary politics" (as Baude rightly says here: blog.dividedargument.com/p/thoughts-o...) Does the Supreme Court live up to this? It seems pretty obvious that it does not

What are the stakes of this dispute? Richard Re indicates that part of it is the implications for reform proposals (he clearly has court-packing in mind)--arguments for reform should be "conscious" of the Court's "dual role" blog.dividedargument.com/p/on-seeing-...

The Supreme Court's conservative justices vote like Republican senators who don't have to worry about primary challenges, which is to say: - where they have sincere policy differences from Trump, they aren't afraid to push back - as Republicans, they have a partisan interest in protecting him

You knew Trump would still find a way to ruin the World Cup I'm a beyond-diehard USA fan who thinks Balogun's red card was wrongly given, but this taints everything. I'd rather lose by the rules (which includes bad officiating) than win with rank corruption

I'm not doing the "how can you root for the US team" thing, you do you, but for me personally it's going to be hard after this

It's fair to be critical of how the liberal justices handle the Title IX issue in BPJ. Most of what Sotomayor writes on that issue is unhelpful. Jackson is better but it's unclear how her theory helps challenge trans exclusions that (unlike her sex stereotyping example) are based on "biological sex"

If you put together BPJ's "biological sex" reading of "sex" and you combine it with Bostock's but-for methodology (switch the characteristic and hold everything else constant), you get the bizarre result that the comparator for a cis woman in a garden-variety discrimination case is a trans woman

This is true but it's also good to have a certain tolerance for this kind of view, like other substantively bad religious views (e.g. about hell) that are longstanding, deeply held, and not going anywhere

Not enough people are paying attention to this. The UAE is fueling the civil war in Sudan, arming the RSF who the Trump admin admits is committing a genocide. And yet, this admin refuses to hold them accountable. We should be asking why. x.com/nickkristof/...

On the left: Gorsuch in 2026 (in BPJ), reading Bostock to focus solely on the meaning of "because of" because nobody disagreed about "discrimination." On the right: Gorsuch in 2020 (in Bostock), opining at length on the meaning of "discriminate" (because it was, in fact, actively contested)

A large, influential, and previously unknown literature shows why Balogun deserved that red card

Me, 3 hours ago: “What is soccer? Where is it played?” Me now: “Most egregious red card in football history…no one is calling that on Messi!”

The thing about DSA is that as an organization it's a horrible mess and has members who constantly say and do stupid things, but also most of the politicians affiliated with it are perfectly fine and behave in office like ordinary left-wing Democrats

Matthew Vines' op-ed in NYT is less offensive than other stuff he's written recently and mostly just seems to reflect someone who is focused on persuading a particular hostile audience and is annoyed that the dynamism of social reality gets in the way

All right, one more on BPJ. Justice Jackson raises an important question about sex stereotyping discrimination against trans women: if you penalize a trans woman for violating stereotypes associated with women, is that sex discrimination under the majority's theory?

One of the striking things in the opinion is that Kavanaugh breaks his quotes of the text of the amendment to omit "intercollegiate," presumably because BPJ is in high school. Everyone just goes along with this presumably because they don't want to answer a broader Title IX question

At the risk of belaboring, here is a clearer way of putting the problem here. In general unlawful discrimination involves (a) action based on a protected ground that (b) injures the target. It also needs to be within the general area covered by the statute and not subject to an exception.

I do not think the Supreme Court's drive-by holding that "sex" in Title IX means "biological sex" (i.e., natal sex/sex assigned at birth) is correct

I think this is in a way the most troubling part of BPJ. Kavanaugh wants to be seen as a nice guy (he disagrees "respectfully" with the plaintiffs' arguments) but he won't respect their identities. And Thomas's concurrence is truly vile and would have been beyond the pale five years ago

omg Elliot Cosgrove

A lot of people clearly prewrote birthright citizenship decision press releases and they really should have revised them after what we actually got

The Supreme Court today addressed one of the most pressing threats to the nation today: banning this high school sophomore from playing school sports with her friends 🫡🫠🙃

I am genuinely astounded by Barbara. 5-4. Unbelievable.

So Monday they destroy independent agencies with a transparently ad hoc exception for the Fed that undermines the credibility of the main holding. And Tuesday they split 5-4 on whether the Citizenship Clause means what it says and they should say so. Not an impressive two days for the Roberts Court

Justice Barrett remains the best conservative justice and it's not especially close.

Some BPJ thoughts: 1. The Title IX holding is narrow and readily distinguishable in the next case: lots of references to sports, reliance on the sports-specific Javits Amendment. Some dangerously loose language about Bostock though. 2. The equal protection holding is not narrow and very harmful.

Ganz is right about Cook. But more generally I think the separation of powers decisions would be more defensible if they in fact were focused on promoting the healthy functioning of the capitalist system for investors, instead of being rooted in a simplistic political theory about the presidency

Not saying what happened to Wiener had nothing to do with antisemitism but also should account for: - a lot of left politics in SF is weird - Wiener's battles with parts of the left in SF on other issues, like housing - Wiener having not an especially left-wing long-term record on Israel/Palestine

This is laughably inadequate

"Alito, dissenting": one of the most beautiful two-word phrases in the English language