Thing that annoys me, inspired by Matt Yglesias' column this morning.

I went to Hong Kong just before the handover, in May 1997. I spent a lot of money to go- it was a lot more expensive then.

I did it because I knew China was a Communist tyranny and would ruin it. I was telling everyone who would listen back then that China was obviously the modern Nazi Germany and all the claims about how free trade would democratize them were BS seeded and spread by folks who had vast sums of money they wanted to make.

It's late at night (not where Claire is, of course), and it might be worth exploring this hypothetical and what it really tells you about pro-lifers and pro-choicers, religious types and secular types.

So first, I'll state the obvious, you of course save the baby. Why?

https://twitter.com/clairlemon/status/1957238830408548771

Well, I'm going to state something at the beginning that's going to surprise you-- it's not because human life doesn't begin at conception, although that question is more complicated than pro lifers say it is. (There's an identical twins hypothetical that gets at that.)

instead of stopping participation in the marriage to browbeat her into having sex with you, you could consider... discreetly cheating?

to me this scenario is just the classic example of how once matched sex drives become mismatched, which is sooooooo common.

https://twitter.com/thechosenberg/status/1956017000305578342

because of all the cultural presumptions around monogamy and the claims that it is the natural state of things, people assume that it is natural for two human beings to live out their lives having perfectly coordinated and synchronized sex drives the entire time.

I will tell you, being ratio'd by the people who.... um.... passionately oppose trans women's participation in sports, and reading their responses, certainly didn't convince me that they just passionately care about c i s women and hold no prejudices against trans folks. I'll just pick one particular line of response-- at least 30 people (5% or so of all responses) responded by saying trans people are mentally ill and we shouldn't cater to their delusions.

And I'm sorry, but people who say that, say that with glee. They mean it as an insult.

"Why can't we just have one binational state in Israel-Palestine? Jews and Palestinians can live together!"

Well, no, we can't. For all sorts of reasons. A thread. First, how exactly is this going to work? I remember Matt Yglesias doing a podcast with Robert Wright, who is a big one-stater. And Yglesias made a clever point. He said all the organizations that support 2 state solutions have extensive and detailed plans about how it will work.

The stories about ICE abuses are a good jumping off point to talk about something that I think low key is one of the worst things the legal conservative movement has done-- eviscerate the Bivens doctrine for suing federal officials who violate the Constitution.

https://twitter.com/ajlamesa/status/1952774834825379993

Bivens is named for Bivens v. Six Unknown Named Agents of the Federal Bureau of Narcotics, a 6-3 decision of the early Burger Court, basically from the same era as Roe v. Wade.

Bivens held that innocent people could sue federal agents for violating the 4th Amendment in a search.

Hot take on Singapore-- its Achilles Heel is that it is a grossly authoritarian society with draconian punishments for lawbreaking. Americans would not like that.

But that kind of society probably DOES benefit the working class.

https://twitter.com/tracewoodgrains/status/1952242705939202301

Singapore's system means that if you are working class you don't grow up around lots of crime. It means that if you are the type of person who is likely to face severe drug addiction that drives you to homelessness the government will simply stop that from happening.

There are all sorts of problems with the "Israel = South Africa" analogy, but one under-discussed problem is that the fight against Apartheid depended on everyone having honest, reachable goals.

The Palestinian Cause is dishonest and its goals are unreachable. During Apartheid era South Africa, the ANC made its ultimate goal clear, and it was not dismantling the South African state. It was eliminating race discrimination (grand and petty Apartheid) and giving Black South Africans the vote. That was it.

China basically took over Tibet, which had been independent. Since then, they have meddled in the country's religion, and invited Han Chinese to move in and change the ethnic/religious composition of the province.

And yet, nobody is seriously saying China must pull out of Tibet. The reason, of course, is that China is very powerful and we all understand the realities of the situation.

The best we can hope for is to use various forms of policy in the long term to moderate China's behavior. And even that has a pretty low likelihood of success.

With Terry Bollea's (Hulk Hogan's) death yesterday, it's a good time to look back at the biggest thing I was ever involved in. For over 3 years, I spent more than half of my worktime on one case-- Bollea v. Gawker.

It was Charles Harder's case-- I handled "the appeal side". I didn't even attend the trial in Florida-- it was tried by Charles, Ken Turkel, and Shane Vogt. But what I did was write almost every legal argument Bollea made in the case, including trial briefs, summary judgment and injunction papers, and several appeals in different states.

This is a good jumping off point for me to talk about what is wrong with the International Criminal Court, a not completely terrible idea in theory that has in practice become unworkable and unrealistic and probably just has to be completely rethought.

https://twitter.com/HillelNeuer/status/1944202762482221323

There's basically 2 reasons why a lot of folks understandably might like to have an International Criminal Court. First, it formalizes something the world has been doing since World War II (and really since the American Civil War in some embryonic senses), war crimes trials.

Ever since I developed my theory about the OJ case, I have become a consumer of stuff written about the case.

There's something that gnaws at me.

In 2025, most smart people know he was guilty.

But many still believe the bad arguments about DNA that the OJ defense made. My basic thesis is this, and I say this as someone generally skeptical of prosecutors: the stuff prosecutors say about DNA is right, and the stuff that defense and defense experts say about it is wrong. Honorable (in that it puts the state to the test), but wrong.

I am going to try and add some value here, in light of the pushback I got for saying Obergefell v. Hodges is safe.

I am going to talk about "how to predict what SCOTUS will do in the future in politically salient cases".

Obviously, like all predictions, nothing will be 100%. But the basic idea is "how do you actually gain some notion of what the Supreme Court is likely to do?".

Or another way of putting it is "how do we know which cases are safe and which ones are on the chopping block?".

And that latter way is a nice way of stating the question.

Folks, the reason i think Lia Thomas is a bad actor goes back to 2022. The first reporting about this had nothing to do with Riley Gaines, who swam for Kentucky and didn't meet Thomas until the nationals.

It had to do with Thomas' Penn teammates.

nypost.com/2022/01/27/tea… That original January 2022 story was based on extensive reporting about what Thomas' teammates were saying. And it paints a very stark picture of a person, Thomas, who doesn't give a hoot about the fears or concerns of c i s women and only cares about herself.

The real, nonpartisan lesson of Trump v. DVD, the South Sudan deportation case, is that the Convention Against Torture system is really based on the assumption that people are going to be deported back to their homes. And it doesn't work well on third country deportations. With respect to being deported back to your home, the system works well. You get a notice of deportation because you are illegally here, and you bring in witnesses and testimony and documents and show that you will be targeted for official torture if you are sent back home.

I will say one other thing on my mind about this Mamdani stuff, which is despite the Left's pose of being very class conscious, they really do not understand (or maybe do not care) about the connection between gaming affirmative action and similar systems, and class privilege. I have said this before, that I knew some people who gamed affirmative action back in the day. People who had always called themselves white but had distant relatives who were HIspanic or Black and when college or job applications came around discovered the One Drop Rule.

Remember this? Justice Thomas getting mad at the rest of the Court for applying rules that he, in complete vanity opinions, performatively states he is too pure to believe in?

He just did it again this morning.

https://twitter.com/dilanesper/status/1928473541214621792

In MacRae v. Mattos, he is outraged about what he contends are massive, ongoing violations of free speech of public employees going on. They are losing their jobs because they speak on controversial topics. Sounds bad.

His opinion starts at page 15 here.

supremecourt.gov/orders/courtor…

OK, here's my comprehensive Mahmoud thread. It's a terrible decision.

First, it creates massive privileges for religious objectors to sexual content, while leaving secular parents with the same objections out in the cold.

https://x.com/dilanesper/status/1939014163319468336

It flouts the rules of evidence and treats completely hypothetical classroom discussions as sufficient to trigger a free exercise violation and a court injunction.

https://x.com/dilanesper/status/1939079952114352463

One broader-than-Mahomoud take (and one that sounds a bit like Justice Thomas, if he were a Lefty instead of a Rightie)-- none of the Court's recent "free exercise" jurisprudence is textual. None of it is about the actual EXERCISE of religion. To be clear, and I will concede, this is a bit of an overstatement. For instance, the expansion of the "ministerial exemption" is at least in some sense textually justifiable. After all, ministering is part of practicing a faith. (I'd still argue they take it too far, though.)

A quick thread on some democratic theory, to address some comments I got from both the far left and far right on my Supreme Court threads.

A lot of people have very inflated views of how much power judges have. Before you talk about anything the Constitution requires, your first principle has to be "judges are unelected, politicians are elected". Seriously, learn that mantra. Live it. Eat it up.

It means that politicians have far more latitude than judges do.

I'm seeing the usual "SCOTUS will reverse itself on universal injunctions when the Democrats win the presidency", and no, I don't think they will. Indeed, while his name isn't in Barrett's opinion, you cannot possibly understand how we got to Trump v. CASA without Matt Kacsmaryk. You might ask, "why would a conservative court be mad about Matt Kacsmaryk?".

Well, think about it for a second. Imagine you are a mainstream conservative Justice. You want to move the law to the right. You also have some principles. And you don't want to be seen as a hack.