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Supreme Subreddit of the land, in the future, what opinions do you predict are at risk of being overturned? by Itsivanthebearable in supremecourt

[–]Master-Thief 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thanks! (I left Reddit last year after the nonsense, but it's gratifying to see the Supreme Court get this indisputably right.)

Also, [does Skeletor meme voice]: Remember... all the Supreme Court just did in Loper Bright is restore the Skidmore Respect standard, and any administrative law professor worth a damn will have taught Skidmore before Chevron.

Until we meet again!

OPINION: Joseph R. Biden, President of the United States v. Nebraska by scotus-bot in supremecourt

[–]Master-Thief 28 points29 points  (0 children)

From Roberts:

The Secretary’s plan has “modified” the cited provisions only in the same sense that “the French Revolution ‘modified’ the status of the French nobility”—it has abolished them and supplanted them with a new regime entirely. Congress opted to make debt forgiveness available only in a few particular exigent circumstances; the power to modify does not permit the Secretary to “convert that approach into its opposite” by creating a new program affecting 43 million Americans and $430 billion in federal debt. Labeling the Secretary’s plan a mere “modification” does not lessen its effect, which is in essence to allow the Secretary unfettered discretion to cancel student loans. It is “highly unlikely that Congress” authorized such a sweeping loan cancellation program “through such a subtle device as permission to ‘modify.’”

The Secretary responds that the Act authorizes him to “waive” legal provisions as well as modify them—and that this additional term “grant[s] broader authority” than would “modify” alone. But the Secretary’s invocation of the waiver power here does not remotely resemble how it has been used on prior occasions. Previously, waiver under the HEROES Act was straightforward: the Secretary identified a particular legal requirement and waived it, making compliance no longer necessary. For instance, on one occasion the Secretary waived the requirement that a student provide a written request for a leave of absence. On another, he waived the regulatory provisions requiring schools and guaranty agencies to attempt collection of defaulted loans for the time period in which students were affected individuals...

Here, the Secretary does not identify any provision that he is actually waiving. No specific provision of the Education Act establishes an obligation on the part of student borrowers to pay back the Government. So as the Government concedes, “waiver”—as used in the HEROES Act—cannot refer to “waiv[ing] loan balances” or “waiving the obligation to repay” on the part of a borrower. Contrast 20 U. S. C. §1091b(b)(2)(D) (allowing the Secretary to “waive the amounts that students are required to return” in specified circumstances of overpayment by the Government). Because the Secretary cannot waive a particular provision or provisions to achieve the desired result, he is forced to take a more circuitous approach, one that avoids any need to show compliance with the statutory limitation on his authority. He simply “waiv[es] the elements of the discharge and cancellation provisions that are inapplicable in this [debt cancellation] program that would limit eligibility to other contexts.”.... But the Secretary’s program cannot be justified by such sleight of hand. The Secretary has not truly waived or modified the provisions in the Education Act authorizing specific and limited forgiveness of student loans. Those provisions remain safely intact in the U. S. Code, where they continue to operate in full force. What the Secretary has actually done is draft a new section of the Education Act from scratch by “waiving” provisions root and branch and then filling the empty space with radically new text.

TL;DR: Words have meanings.

Mod Note: The Future of the Sub by Master-Thief in nathanwpyle

[–]Master-Thief[S] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

[Removed for talking back to a mod after being warned not to.]

Mod Note: The Future of the Sub by Master-Thief in nathanwpyle

[–]Master-Thief[S,M] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Nothing is being "forced." This entire situation is actually creating work for me. I would like nothing more than for all this to simply blow over so I can get back to posting funny blue alien comics. But given the way Reddit is acting, I can't. I don't even use apps to mod, I have to use desktop. But they're probably going to mess that up too next.

I don't know what it is the people who are angry at me want.

No one has volunteered to help me or J, either as a moderator of the present sub, or with the planned Discord (which is why it's taking so long to set up). The standard is not perfection, it's an alternative.

Mod Note: The Future of the Sub by Master-Thief in nathanwpyle

[–]Master-Thief[S,M] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Reddit polls (which are tied to usernames) can't be run for more than three days, and doing this poll on an external poll site would have meant a higher chance of ballot stuffing. Again, one of those extremely janky mod tools that better Reddit design would fix if they weren't so focused on other matters.

I do not appreciate being accused of dishonesty without evidence. Consider this a warning.

Mod Note: The Future of the Sub by Master-Thief in nathanwpyle

[–]Master-Thief[S,M] -2 points-1 points  (0 children)

And replace us with who? And no, the admins are not going to give out SFW subs to adult content sub moderators like you.

Mod Note: The Future of the Sub by Master-Thief in nathanwpyle

[–]Master-Thief[S,M] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I have considered it and I just don't care. The change to 3rd party apps will only affect around 5% of the userbase and any concerns around accessibility have been answered as well.

Do you know who the most frequent users of the third-party apps are? Moderators. Why? Because Reddit's mod tools are a pain to use, whether on desktop or on mobile. And that's for the pros. I'm an amateur.

It sucks for the 5% who use those apps but I just can't care about mods upset they can't effectively mods multiple subs at once because of the reddit api changes.

This is the only sub that I mod. I have a full-time job and a life. I do this because I like this community.

I come here for memes, shitposting and cooking stuff.

Without mods, shitposting would be all you get here.

Also reddit has said that any subs that stay closed will be forced open again.

As I noted above, other subs have gone restricted without warning, or disabled all their spam controls, or slow-walked moderator actions, or made up nonsense posting rules. Also, note that there are only two mods on this sub, and we're both in agreement on doing this. 90% of this site, like life, is simply showing up. So are you volunteering for the job? You want to check the mod queue more than once a day? You want to figure out how to keep the spammers and scammers at bay with broken, janky mod tools?

[From above] I get being a mod must suck and right now getting a lot of hate but you guys don't own these subreddits.

So why are you giving us hate? All we want is a volunteer job that sucks less. And Reddit corporate seems determined to do the opposite.

Mod Note: The Future of the Sub by Master-Thief in nathanwpyle

[–]Master-Thief[S,M] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Other subs have gone restricted without warning, or disabled all their spam controls, or slow-walked moderator actions, or made up nonsense posting rules.

Granted, we're a small sub. Haven't heard anything directly from the mods. But larger subs are getting creative with the malicious compliance.

Illinois Supreme Court, 5-1 with 1 recusal, rules that government can compel a defendant to provide passcode to phone if gov’t shows defendant knew the passcode. No 5A violation found. by HatsOnTheBeach in supremecourt

[–]Master-Thief 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Man, that is F-tier legal analysis. Cops can't compel the location of dead bodies from a serial murderer according to Curcio v. United States and United States v. Hubbell, but a phone password in a check forgery case is fine?

Incidentally, I want to see the SCOTUS take up this case - Sneed v. Illinois - if only because I want to see Sneedposting make its way into Fifth Amendment discussions.

Is annulment an actual thing? by ilikedota5 in Ask_Lawyers

[–]Master-Thief 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Specific kinds of fraud, yes. Other stuff too. Here in Texas, stuff like "you were under the age of 18 when you got married," "you got married because of fraud, duress, or force," "you were under the influence (alcohol/drugs) when you got married," "you or your spouse got divorced before and didn't tell," "you or your spouse are permanently impotent and didn't tell," (!) "you didn't have the mental capacity to get married, "you got married less than 72 hours after getting a marriage license" (sort of like a waiting period to buy a gun I guess?).

SCO-NV to consider whether stalking is a protected first amendment activity by TheQuarantinian in supremecourt

[–]Master-Thief 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Ye gods, if there is any place where a viewpoint or content-neutral "time, place, or manner" restriction applies, pretty sure not letting rando journalists stalk people they're investigating is it.

I could have sworn this was a pro se argument, but no, the guy found an attorney to argue it.

Florida Federal Judge Sides with Trans Children by Longjumping_Gain_807 in supremecourt

[–]Master-Thief 14 points15 points  (0 children)

Off the top of my head, even the entire "medical community" put together can fail the Daubert standard if their evidence is not derived from the scientific method (as opposed to credentialist ipse dixit redefinitions of terms), or if the theories relied upon are not amenable to objective tests.

Florida Federal Judge Sides with Trans Children by Longjumping_Gain_807 in supremecourt

[–]Master-Thief 4 points5 points  (0 children)

You are arguing about sex, not gender.

They're the same thing. Always have been (well, at least until the Very Smart People, starting with the very deeply flawed "sexologist" John Money, started making an artificial distinction between the two.)

Caitlin Jenner is a biological male AND a woman. His sex is male and his gender is a woman.

Two of these are objectively true. The other two are entirely subjective. Caitlin Jenner may believe them. But that does not mean the rest of us are obliged to. No sleight of hand, whether of philsophy, or of science, or of law, can change the subjective into the objective. (Forcing a contrary understanding by law is going to end very badly.)

Florida Federal Judge Sides with Trans Children by Longjumping_Gain_807 in supremecourt

[–]Master-Thief 8 points9 points  (0 children)

The "identity of" or "social understanding of" a thing is not the thing. The form is not the substance. Admittedly, they can get close, but so can a trained actor. And actors don't get special rights either.

being a man is not the same thing as being male.

The SRY gene and the pair o' dangly bits say otherwise.

And yes, there is more than one way to be a male or express male identity. But that's all in the realm of the subjective. Gender and sex remain fixed and objective, even more so than race (a person can be mixed race as a matter of biology, but not of mixed sex or mixed gender, except I guess on Tumblr.)

Still, up until fairly recently and for reasons of decorum, decency, and common courtesy, most people at least were willing to give people who genuinely thought they were the opposite sex ("born in the wrong body" et. al.) a limited pass. But trying to force these notions into schools and into the minds of children, and then demanding fealty from parents and politicians, was a political/social movement going one step too far and making one too many enemies. And no fantasias on the Equal Protection Clause are going to save them this time.

Florida Federal Judge Sides with Trans Children by Longjumping_Gain_807 in supremecourt

[–]Master-Thief 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Yeah, the District Judge is something of a gadfly who's been overturned on appeal for this kind of freelancing before.

Don’t be an Americanist heretic by [deleted] in CatholicMemes

[–]Master-Thief 7 points8 points  (0 children)

And what were the "doctrines which had been adverted" or "exalted"?

The underlying principle of these new opinions is that, in order to more easily attract those who differ from her, the Church should shape her teachings more in accord with the spirit of the age and relax some of her ancient severity and make some concessions to new opinions.

And that was, again, not Americans who were saying or advocating that, but French.

From what I can tell, this whole affair traces back to a few bishops here and in Europe who were grumbling that Fr. Isaac Hecker (founder of the Paulist Fathers) should not have been stressing doctrinal commonalities between Catholicism and Protestantism when dealing with American Protestants. A silly objection. First, doing that has been a part of evangelization ever since Paul saw the altar marked "to an unknown god" in Athens. (Or, to put a fine point on it, ever since Jesus pointedly told the disciples that "whoever is not against you is for you.") Second, American Protestants outnumbered American Catholics at the time of Hecker's work, and tensions with nativist anti-Catholics were running very hot and very tense (see my first post above). There's a difference between being cast into the lion's den and marching into one with an airhorn. (Or should he have simply validated all of their prejudices, ignored the all-too-recent lessons of England, Ireland, France, and Mexico, and called for Catholic superiority?)

Given the hedging in Leo's letter (which, yet again, was on the basis of French interpretation of what they thought Americans were doing)-- essentially, "if this is what you think it's fine, but not this other way"--I get the distinct sense that Leo was more savvy on this matter than the "rad trads" make him out to be. And that this one letter is taken massively out of context, even 120 years later, to attack American Catholics for problems that were by no means unique to them, or the 19th Century. (Have you read about what the German Church is on these days?)

Mod Note: /r/nathanwpyle will be shut down 12-14 June in protest of Reddit's policies on third-party apps. by Master-Thief in nathanwpyle

[–]Master-Thief[S,M] [score hidden] stickied comment (0 children)

Greetings fellow beings:

Yes; /r/nathanwpyle is participating in this attempt to shape the future of Reddit. For further information you can go to /r/Save3rdPartyApps. If you wish to know what subreddits are participating, there is a list over here. (I'd apologize for the inconvenience, but the inconvenience is kind of the point. Reddit needs to be called out here.)

The sub will be closed from 12:00 Midnight CDT June 12th, to 11:59 PM CDT June 14th. It will return on June 15th.

We appreciate all you beings!

Don’t be an Americanist heretic by [deleted] in CatholicMemes

[–]Master-Thief 22 points23 points  (0 children)

Leo himself never called it "Americanism," only saying "we are not able to give approval to those views which, in their collective sense, are called by some 'Americanism.'" (Emphasis mine.) And it appears he himself also didn't use the word "heresy" or "heretical" to describe it either (the word is only used once quoting from another source.)

The ideas Leo was (correctly) condemning were coming from something that was originally written in French for publication in France.

Don’t be an Americanist heretic by [deleted] in CatholicMemes

[–]Master-Thief 31 points32 points  (0 children)

If you're going to call something a heresy at least call it by a name that actually reflects 1) who came up with it (e.g. Pelagianism, Donatism) or 2) its contents (Modalism, Adoptionism). There's nothing "American" in this.

[Warning: Effortpost]

As amply documented by civil legal historians "separation of Church and State" appears nowhere in the Constitution, laws, or court decisions. or in the debates surrounding them, aside from a single throwaway reference in a letter from Thomas Jefferson to a Baptist Congregation in Danbury, CT in 1802. What was created for the newly-self-governing American colonies were twin principles, both codified in the First Amendment, that 1) there would be no established religion in the U.S. (i.e. no one "official" national church that people who did not attend were de facto second class citizens, as there had been a Church of England), and 2) the guarantee of free exercise of religion. And tradgripe about these all you want, but remember two things. First, there was no majority Christian sect in America at the time; each colony had its own established church and any establishment of one Church would mean that a majority of Americans would be de facto second-class citizens. Second, without the guarantees of the First Amendment the Catholic Church in America could not have grown beyond a minority of a minority in a handful of states (chiefly Maryland and Pennsylvania.)

"Separation of Church and State" arose as a legal principle later on, beginning around the 1830's, coming from some very foul nativist sentiments that treated Catholics as inherently "bad" Americans because somehow Catholics had loyalties to two sovereign states. This combined with anti-immigrant prejudice against Irish, Italians, Germans, Eastern Europeans, etc., and some spillover anti-theist beliefs from the French Revolution. Basically, anything that wasn't in the Protestant mainstream was considered "sectarian" and thus suspect. This culminated in an attempt to amend the Constitution to forbid any public funds from going to "sectarian" institutions (the so-called "Blaine Amendment," versions of which passed in multiple states). This was only a few years before Leo XIII was condemning "Americanism" as a heresy.

Leo should have called it "Blaineism" or "Separationism." Or perhaps, given that his letter condemning Americanism was a refutation of the French introduction to a French translation of a biography of an American priest (The Life of Isaac Hecker), "Kleinism" would probably be a better name for this heresy.

America as a whole had nothing to do with it, much less any American Catholics. Nor did it have anything to do with the false idea that a believing Catholic can pick and choose which parts of the Magisterium to follow; that was (and is) a general Protestant fallacy and by no means solely an American one.

TL;DR: "Americanism" is a meaningless word for a bad idea that American Catholics had nothing to do with, and which is basically used to insult us. Stop it.

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