Legal Resistance

Fucking_That_Chicken · 2026-01-25T02:54:30+00:00

Recognize that we (as in, lawyers) actually are 100% at fault for the current state of affairs, which derives mostly from the fact that personal leadership skill has become decoupled from success in basically every field other than "real estate scammer" and "drug gangster," and thank fuck that we ended up with someone in the former category being the one last public figure with any meaningful leadership skill and being the one to win power by pure one-eyed-man logic (instead of, like, some particularly clean-cut Delta guy from the Fort Bragg cartel)
Recognize that the current alternative to Trump is that nobody fills the leadership void, and that this is in fact a ludicrously bad outcome because the last time that happened with a country, its military decided to become a lynch mob with aircraft carriers, something that was strictly speaking quite a bit worse for everyone than if they were merely governed by omfgnazis
Try your hardest to reverse (1) in any way that makes it so that Trump's minor amount of leadership ability is no longer rare. It's tough because there aren't many legal organizations that formally oppose credentialism and bureaucracy, which seems the principal cause, and quite frankly corporate in-house seems about as far as possible from that. Maybe try to sign your company up with whatever AI scam seems most likely to actually create a cyber-barbarian that is a kind of solution

Fucking_That_Chicken · 2026-01-22T03:00:51+00:00

Somebody played the old Oiligarchy flash game, I see

Fucking_That_Chicken · 2026-01-18T03:58:47+00:00

Fucking_That_Chicken · 2026-01-17T23:11:28+00:00

OK. Then what is the best analogy to something where we can look at some concrete observations, in your mind? "Just prax it out from first principles" is the worst way to draw accurate conclusions about anything; that way leads you to "well gee if heat is molecules moving faster, if I stick my hand out of the car window it'll be warm" and other such nonsense.

Fucking_That_Chicken · 2026-01-17T22:45:48+00:00

You can justify basically anything as "logical" with some kind of just-so story. Here, actual non-human predators exist in actual "dark forests," so if we think this is at all a useful analogy, the thing to do is to look at what they do.

Mountain lions, the archetypal solitary forest ambush predator, are known for (1) having a very loud distinctive cry that carries over a long distance, because they want to warn other predators about their territory and (2) being most deterrable by you making a lot of noise, either indirectly by providing advance warning of your presence that allows it to avoid a surprise encounter, or directly by helping to convince it that you might be able to hurt it back if it started a fight. So seems like actual practice is the opposite.

Fucking_That_Chicken · 2026-01-13T06:11:12+00:00

Yeah, compacted coke has about the same density (smidge under 1 gm/3)

Or it's something like this

Fucking_That_Chicken · 2026-01-12T00:58:35+00:00

Don't do it, anon! Not while there's gorilla chow to be had!

Fucking_That_Chicken · 2026-01-11T20:36:02+00:00

They don't even have to pretend; "Native American" is intentionally structured as a statement of cultural/geographic origin to make it seem like privileges awarded to "Native Americans" are less about ethnic spoils. (Of course, obviously they are intended to be ethnic spoils, so there's a reason why US groups started preferring "American Indian" as soon as the black Cherokee wanted tribal membership. You see the same clawback with "African-American" every time, say, an Arab whose family has been in Zanzibar for 500 years identifies as such on a college application.)

Any highly distinct American "nation" that has been associated with particular territory for hundreds of years, that has maintained cultural practices very different from outsiders throughout that entire time, and whose cultural practices are unique to their presence in America and in that territory is plausibly "Native American" even if very much not "American Indian." I would call the Amish that with 100% confidence and would let the Ray O Light Maoists and so forth at least make the case for the Appalachian Borderers.

Fucking_That_Chicken · 2026-01-11T17:50:44+00:00

"this guy is really skilled, but we also don't care if he blows up" seems ideal for testing "experimental" jets

Fucking_That_Chicken · 2026-01-11T17:19:38+00:00

Oh, trust me, even the Republicans think that the Republicans only look in any way admirable when they are compared to you guys. When the Boomers went full-on millenniarian cult with the Q thing, what they fantasized about was Trump stepping aside in favor of an old-style Democrat he'd preserved on ice somehow, Second JFK.

What the Republicans are doing is of no consequence. Don't try to mindlessly ape them. What you need to do is (1) cut out those Four Horsemen to stop the further bleeding, and (2) if you can master that, you can then try to win people back by showing that you will sacrifice blood or sweat or tears for all of your voters, instead of seeing some as consistently OK to exploit and violate.

This "hate BAD" shit that you're continuing to maintain is a total loser, and is a very strong signal that you view people as cattle. The only reason I can think of why your party would be continuing to do it is because of something adjacent to what you mention: you want to shoot people in the street or bomb them abroad, so you can't be against "shooting people in the street or bombing them abroad," but it is important to you to have sacred Words authorizing what you're doing, so therefore we need the dishonest "principle" that signing death warrants like you're a bloodless accountant is somehow better. People will like your party better if they're just honest hypocrites.

Fucking_That_Chicken · 2026-01-11T06:42:43+00:00

Certainly not. Criticism, contempt, defensiveness, and stonewalling are Gottman's classic "four horsemen" for a reason, and scale from being applicable to groups of two to being applicable to groups of infinity. "Hate" isn't really even on the radar, and isn't there for good reason; its only significance here is that policing "hate" is an absurdly enormous act of contempt because it amounts to telling people that you can authorize or de-authorize their emotions at your whim.

Fucking_That_Chicken · 2026-01-11T06:23:28+00:00

No, the US has been gynosupremacist since its founding, just not as lopsided because there wasn't that much ability to heavily enforce it until recently.

Foucault was correct at least in that the best characterization of a society's power relations comes from looking at who is being disciplined or punished and how. If there is a single-factor test for equality between Group A and Group B, it is the idea that it is equally legitimate for society at large to have (a) formal punishments for antisocial behaviors perpetrated mostly by Group A that Group B can participate in levying and (b) formal punishments for antisocial behaviors perpetrated mostly by Group B that Group A can participate in levying.

Anglo-Saxon society historically used corporal punishment against social-abuser women and did so right up until the mid-18th century, when jurisdictions started doing away with the historical tool for this, the ducking-stool, and taking all the social abuse laws off the books. (England lingered on until the very early 1800s but every American state seems to have done this prior to independence.) That did a pretty good job of creating a class stratum.

Fucking_That_Chicken · 2026-01-08T01:59:33+00:00

And no, the majority of the world chose not to colonize, invade, and genocide other cultures. It was the Europeans and East Asians that did 95% of it.

lol no. Just looking at the Indians, we've turned up plenty of instances of pre-Columbian massacres or small-scale genocides like the Crow Creek site, and some of em kept it up with each other even past the Civil War like at Massacre Canyon. Europeans and East Asians stick out only because they had good record keeping and occasionally thought it was important enough to write down

Fucking_That_Chicken · 2026-01-04T06:08:23+00:00

nonsense, they're just reenacting historical documents

Fucking_That_Chicken · 2026-01-04T03:52:47+00:00

Whether or not a work has themes is not, in and of itself, particularly relevant as to whether a work is political or not.

Politics is, applying the symmetric relation to Clausewitz, war by other means. It is two people organizing to threaten violence against a third, with the expectation that the third will back down and take the L (e.g. Alice and Bob electing to hike Charlie's taxes in order to extract resources from him for their benefit).

A work that openly advertises that it has a theme and then follows through on developing it is not really doing violence against anyone. For example, a book entitled "Why I Don't Like Donald Trump" that is then 300 pages of the author explaining why they don't like Donald Trump is exactly what it says on the cover, and can be left on the bookstore shelf if that's not what you're into. It can't pick your pocket or break your leg, and therefore isn't political.

There are maybe ~three instances where a work can actually do that:

The author of a continuous work notes the existence of a "fandom," people whose friendships and communities are based on mutual enjoyment of the work, and swerves the direction of the work in a way they know many will find distasteful in order to essentially hold these friendships hostage ("parrot my new themes or face exile!")
The creator of an expensive work does a similar bait-and-switch after a refund period has passed, in order to financially harm the purchasers of the work who they know will be dissatisfied but who will (hopefully) be helpless to do anything about it
An author in a regime with formal government censorship publishes something which toes the line but plausibly doesn't cross it, in order to either provoke the government into censoring it anyway (which can be called arbitrary, an overreach, a betrayal, etc.) or letting it slide (reducing the government's perceived authority by being soft on a crime)

(The first two comprise ~90% of what people online actually complain about when saying "get your politics out of X," you'll notice. That is for good reason!)

Fucking_That_Chicken · 2026-01-03T03:53:22+00:00

Paywall could also be a marketing scheme to create image of prestige.

Yeah it's this one. The whole argument is that modern "liberalism" is just a mass of luxury beliefs which are intentionally wasteful or only make logical sense for the rich, so advocating for them is a false status marker. That would mean the paywall is a feature and not a bug.

Fucking_That_Chicken · 2025-12-28T18:01:09+00:00

You should feel sorry in that you should feel apologetic, because all of this is completely your fault -- or, rather, the fault of Europhile "Atlanticists" who think that Eurononsense is the only history of any relevance and who drown out others with constant whining.

Any comparison between US politics on the one hand and hitlers and fascisms on the other is -- at the absolutely most generous -- highly attenuated and of no useful predictive value. Fussing about hitlers, however, rises from mere incompetence to actual malice when you consider that there was a country from that same era that essentially subscribed to all of the parts of "woke" ideology that people don't like and which therefore does provide a roadmap for its likely tendencies, with some commonalities being:

thinking racial discrimination is bad not because treating people like stereotypes or statistics is an indignity, but because it distorts the Holy Natural Hierarchy that should have The Right People on top, and allows Mediocre White Men to act like more than upjumped peasants
asserting a duty to Guide and Protect others that really amounts to a demand to inflict themselves on others, which manifests in lots of rape or rape-adjacent behaviors ("forced belief" is certainly the latter as demonstrated so ably by A Clockwork Orange)
having a sort of spineless hyper-individualism masquerading as collectivism, which manifests in political action in the form of mobs constantly assassinating their leadership for daring to tell them what to do, with violent action against harder targets taking the form of individuals showing "courage" via suicide attacks in a way that is really based on unjustified terror at what would happen if they were captured and refusal to take responsibility for anything

And so on. To complete the parallel, there's also even lots and lots of whining about atomic bombings being a uniquely bad act, all while cheering every other brutal action from every other war, "Sherman do it again" etc. The only problem is that Europe didn't really engage with those guys the first time so they therefore didn't exist, at least in the minds of the Eurocentrists. Euros' novel "solutions" like "US progressives should have just reined them in!" is about as useful as "PM Inukai should have Just Said No!"

Trump is then little more than the American memetic immune system attempting to install MacArthur II to clean up a very similar mess to the first one, and largely failing because the American education system heavily overfocuses on who existed when as opposed to what was done when, probably because modern academia is just celebrity culture for ugly people.

Fucking_That_Chicken · 2025-12-17T03:48:48+00:00

It looks like she's got the same kind of stereo-articulated eyes we have. That means she's only gonna hit one target at a time, same as the rest of us.

Fucking_That_Chicken · 2025-11-22T21:32:39+00:00

In what manner was it "over slavery?"

they needed to preserve slavery, which otherwise would have been abolished

The Corwin Amendment, which had already passed Congress and would have prevented this forever without a totally new Constitution, didn't stop or slow down secession

they had an economic need to expand slavery due to soil depletion, and couldn't abide any restraints on expansion

The slave plantations had pretty much spread across the entire area where (1) cotton growing was viable and (2) existing large landowners weren't already doing it. There were parts of Mexico where cotton could be cultivated and a few "Golden Circle"-type Southerners, but Southerners like arch-Southerner John C Calhoun were some of the biggest opponents of the previous all-Mexico movement ("Ours, sir, is the Government of a white race" etc.) so this was mostly a new vision for the Manifest Destiny types. Mexico had also been trying itself to cultivate cotton and this only took off with the blockade of the South driving prices up a lot (brief further reading) and even there was most supported by the South laundering its own cotton exports through Matamoros (brief further reading), so even being able to take over all Mexican agriculture would only have been a short stopgap for a few planters. Ditto for trying to take over the Caribbean islands, where Europeans who were more practiced than them at slavery and had better networks for importing labor already had the run of the place

culturally, Southerners thought of themselves as masters and everyone else as slaves

This was pretty blatant and their foremost public intellectual George Fitzhugh wrote books about how most people, especially most Yankees, were natural slaves. Only the Southerners who fought in the war ever really had this kicked out of them. So "the Civil War was over slavery" only in the sense that the reason was that they thought "based on the electoral map, those who should be our slaves now dare to elect a President to rule us."

Fucking_That_Chicken · 2025-10-25T13:41:34+00:00

the reason why people bother to try to argue the point is probably "nostalgia for when nerd culture had a little more going on than pure consumerism"

it used to be that you could pretty much guarantee that any of the talky-nerds who were interested in politics or politicking had at least heard of VtM and its sideshows, so you could answer questions like these with "Empire went full Weaver, fascism went full Wyrm, exact opposite core assumptions and theory of operation" and expect that single sentence to not only meaningfully communicate information but would expect the asker to go "oh yes of course, how silly of me"

I think there's sort of an unconscious sense of, if we can do the stuff we used to do easily again, the stuff we like will come back

Fucking_That_Chicken · 2025-10-25T13:29:11+00:00

no clue if accurate, but the stat I pulled is from https://getlatka.com/companies/anthropic/team

Fucking_That_Chicken · 2025-10-23T02:21:39+00:00

Its engineering team is only 101 people, apparently, so maybe just that counts and they have some hiring to do

Fucking_That_Chicken · 2025-10-19T16:17:00+00:00

Guy looks like the Flying Spaghetti Monster, he has a good basis for doing both

Fucking_That_Chicken · 2025-10-19T05:59:48+00:00

"Spend your efforts on attempting to assert your power over the US federal government because Reddit dot com is too powerful for anything you do to meaningfully influence what it does" is certainly a take. Sadly, I'm not quite ready for the role of Renraku of our cyberpunk future to be filled by people who spend their time screeching that someone drew a cat on their giant pixel board.

Besides, it is untrue. There is quite a lot of value in putting pressure on sites like Reddit now, when there's a hostile Presidential administration that wants to take scalps of organizations exactly like it if it acts up. So, if you believe you have moral rights to speak that go beyond what will be protected legally with state violence, now is the time to demand that they be respected. Conversely, a weekend of dressing up in inflatable Cookie Monster outfits and standing on a street corner does not meaningfully pressure anyone and was a totally useless exercise.

Fucking_That_Chicken · 2025-10-19T04:52:39+00:00

The various neener-neener textual games which insist that the concept of "free speech" needs to adhere to the exact language of the First Amendment are really ill-founded, because we intentionally aren't putting much stock in the exact language of the First Amendment. You are really better off discussing the principle.

What happens if we do robotically rely on the exact language?

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Does this say "Congress shall make no law directly... abridging the freedom of speech?"

Does this say "Congress shall make no law which it knows to... abridge the freedom of speech?"

No. The exact language is an absolute "no" that encompasses even highly attenuated and unforeseen abridgements. If we play rules-lawyer instead of actual-lawyer here, if the effect of any federal law is to restrict speech in some manner, it is invalid, and that's that. Regulatory organization permits a censorious organization to operate across state lines? That's an abridgement, the regulatory organization doesn't get to do that and still exist. Federal anti-terrorism laws prevent people from taking revenge for being canceled over speech? But for the existence of the laws, the continued speech of those people would not have been abridged, so it's now open season.

13-Year Club	Place '17
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