It's hard for me to read this and not come away thinking that elite lawyers like @NoahRFeldman just see the law as a game. They have no concept of how ideological control of courts affects regular people's lives.
Like, seriously, Feldman's argument boils down to, yes, Barrett's decisions would literally kill people and strip them of fundamental rights, but we ran in the same elite social circles and that's more relevant to whether she's qualified.
Feldman is in no danger if Barrett strikes down the ACA, or lets states jail women for abortion, or ends gun control, or shuts down programs that help Black people get into the school where he teaches.
He might "disagree" if she does this, but he clearly can live with it.
They did this with Kavanaugh too. Oh, he's a great carpool dad! And he gave Amy Chua's daughter a job!
Who the fuck cares? I literally don't give a shit who he is as a person, and if I did, the measure of it was how he treated Christine Blasey Ford, not his equals in academia.
I'm truly sick of all these pompous Ivy League law professors lecturing the left to consider judges only on their degrees and connections, as Republicans transform the Supreme Court into a political weapon.
They live in a toxic bubble of their own social status.
We need fewer takes on the judiciary from people like this, and more from public defenders, immigration lawyers — attorneys who may not have an Ivy diploma and cocktail parties with circuit judges, but are on the front lines of defending the rights of the downtrodden.
• • •
Missing some Tweet in this thread? You can try to
force a refresh
So I've wondered for a while too how Starbucks become such a huge target of online Gaza boycotters, since they aren't on the BDS list and don't even operate any locations in Israel.
I've looked into it and it turns out there are two extremely silly reasons for this.
First of all, it turns out that anti-Israel Starbucks boycotts didn't start with the Israel/Hamas war. In fact, it goes back WAY further than I ever imagined.
This started all the way back in 2006.
Specifically, in 2006, an antisemitic satirist named Andrew Winkler wrote a parody "Letter to Customers" from Starbucks' then-CEO Howard Schultz, who is Jewish, to thank them for all the profits the company will use to supply the IDF with weapons. spiked-online.com/2009/01/14/isr…
You know what? I'm going to set aside all my liberal arguments (we need affordable housing, segregation is bad) and libertarian arguments (zoning infringes on property rights) for why zoning reform is good, and I'm going to make a *conservative* argument for it.
Car-dependent suburbs as they exist today were built at least partly for a good, well-intentioned reason, which is that many people who need big city jobs nonetheless want to live in a small, closely-knit community that shares values and takes care of each other.
But, car-dependent suburbs also very often fail in this purpose, because the zoning that dictated how they were laid out does not allow for organic common spaces and places of public gathering.
They lack a "Main Street" that was common in small town life for most of our history.
There are a lot of reasons CAHSR has been so delayed and over budget, and a lot of them have been bad things — NIMBY lawsuits, grifting by contractors, the desire by politicians to use the project as a jobs program.
But I'd like to discuss one GOOD reason it's taken so long.
And that reason is: California officials conceived of this project, from the start, as a core trunk service that will connect and modernize all the currently disjointed and outdated rail systems in Northern and Southern California.
IOW, it's not just about building a line from point A to B, it's about making the whole of CA navigable by rail. It's about creating a system where you can hop a commuter train in the Bay Area, catch a bullet train to SoCal, then take another commuter train to your final stop.
With Detroit seeing a population and economic rebound, it's worth exploring what exactly caused the city to fall so hard — because there are REALLY important lessons for a lot of other U.S. cities, some of which are making similar mistakes to Detroit and not realizing it.
The standard answer that politicians and economists will give you is "the auto industry changed, there weren't as many jobs as there used to be, so the population declined."
This is true, but it's really not the whole story.
The follow-up question here, that rarely gets asked, is, WHY does a population crash mean the city goes bankrupt? There are fewer taxpayers, sure, but there's also fewer people using public services, so shouldn't it all kind of even out?
Biden gave Netanyahu months — literally months — to explain what his plan was for keeping the civilians he forcibly evacuated to Rafah safe if they bomb that area.
He was very clear they needed to have that plan or we'd cut him off.
Netanyahu ignored him. Totally blew him off.
The U.S. has *already* at this point bent several of its own laws that require countries receiving our weapons sales to allow a certain level of humanitarian aid in, to keep Israel supplied for a war that it absolutely has the money and manufacturing to prosecute 100% on its own.
Netanyahu has no one to blame but himself for Biden losing his patience and drawing a line on invading Rafah.
Yes, Hamas has been a bad faith actor. Yes, they started the war. That doesn't mean Israel gets a pass to flatten civilians in the city ISRAEL TOLD THEM TO GO TO.