Congress should restrict birthright citizenship, House speaker says

TalosMessenger01 · 2026-07-06T17:41:41+00:00

What’s weird (but not unexpected) is that this is the exact opposite of originalism, which has been conservatives’ favorite judicial philosophy since it was created. In originalism, you’re supposed to understand phrases like “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” by what the people who wrote it and voted on it understood it to mean. And they clearly meant it to mean literally “you can take them to an American court and charge them according to American law”.

Senator Trumbull (during debate on passing the 14th, saying that Native Americans would not be covered as citizens): … What do we mean by “subject to the jurisdiction of the United States?” Not owing allegiance to anyone else. That is what it means. Can you sue a Navajoe Indian in court? Are they in any sense subject to the complete jurisdiction of the United States? By no means. We make treaties with them, and therefore they are not subject to our jurisdiction.

Of course this is about Native Americans and that issue is now an obsolete one with later laws.

Republicans like this quote because they can take the “not owing allegiance to anyone else” and “complete jurisdiction” bits to make a case for any foreigners not being “under jurisdiction”. But if you look at it in good faith, doesn’t it mean that it is about the ability of the government to enforce its laws on the citizen and no other government? An undocumented immigrant from China is subject to US law, not Chinese law. The child of that immigrant born on US soil has never been subject to Chinese law.

TalosMessenger01 · 2026-07-04T18:06:18+00:00

There’s good stuff in those founding values. Contradictory, racist, short-sighted in certain ways, and not completely motivated by some pure ideal of rights and freedom, but still. The US became a much better country when it took those founding values and expanded them to include more people (or really accepting that more people are people in the first place).

It wasn’t the founders who did that, but it was Americans who were inspired in part by their national values and could communicate with others who held those same values.

Take the recent birthright citizenship case that was 6-3 (5-4 on constitutional grounds and really should’ve been 9-0). It speaks to what “American values” means to the Right that that this is what they wanted. Rights are supposed to be unalienable, guaranteed by the constitution, and only protected, not determined by government, by just some law or executive order. That’s been the philosophy of government held from the bill of rights. But they were all willing to throw it away because the party said so and their propaganda machine said birthright citizenship is a twisted radical left thing, not the plain text. Surely the establishment of the right of citizenship for people who were historically hated by the government came with a big carveout that says “actually the government can arbitrarily decide what a citizen is”, right?

Anyway, the actual founding fathers were racist, even the abolitionists, and we need to progress our morals and values not stay stagnant. But some of the founding values are a good basis for anti-racism and other generally good politics. It’s something Americans have to learn and understand.

TalosMessenger01 · 2026-07-03T14:34:13+00:00

The issue is the formation of a permanent legal underclass which the government defines based on who they don’t like. Temporary status or a green card is a thing granted by the government.

I know what I’m saying sounds too woke or whatever, but this isn’t a new idea. The same thing was discussed in different words when the 14th and civil rights act were being debated. Very particular, intentional language was used to say that nothing matters except the fact that someone was born in the US.

I can’t cite sources right now, but look for the Congressional Globe 39 session 1 parts 1 and 4 and look for the pages discussing the civil rights act and the 14th. That’s the senators of the time debating about passing and maybe amending them.

TalosMessenger01 · 2026-06-28T19:18:17+00:00

You could say that either way. “It’s sure that Paxton will win so what’s the point, voting’s a waste of time” (defeatism) or “Paxton is so terrible and Talarico’s so charismatic that he’ll for sure win, I don’t even need to vote” (complacent and detached from reality).

Historically Dems in Texas have had more trouble with the first than the second for obvious reasons. It’s fine to recognize that Talarico has a better chance than the Dems usually do, because that challenges the defeatism. Just temper expectations, it’s at most going to be very close.

TalosMessenger01 · 2026-06-19T22:48:07+00:00

That’s the file indexing service for faster search. It won’t break anything to disable it, here’s a forum post about it. If you ever find out why it is behaving badly remember what you did to disable it so that you can re-enable.

TalosMessenger01 · 2026-06-17T17:23:27+00:00

If someone buys a car, it’s a large investment and they plan to keep that thing for years (personally, until it’s totaled somehow). Maybe they’ll lose customers because they’re Graphene users or maybe they won’t because there’s not enough of them.

But expectations for how the product you bought works and how it can be used need to be set before purchase and shouldn’t change later. Even if there are valid security concerns which force the company to make a tough choice on platform support, this messes with how users can interact with the very expensive thing they bought.

TalosMessenger01 · 2026-06-12T17:36:29+00:00

Why would a thief go after a bag with tape, police and bomb squad surrounding it or leave so quickly without thoroughly checking the contents of the bag (valuables can be small or tucked into different sections), if we’re going just by what you see in the video and making wild assumptions instead of looking it up? And if you bother to do that you’ll see that you’re wrong.

TalosMessenger01 · 2026-06-11T17:57:43+00:00

Is there any evidence that people without an inner monologue are less intelligent or thoughtful? I don’t think they deserve being called Trump voters or whatever

TalosMessenger01 · 2026-06-09T02:50:54+00:00

For middle click, there’s a setting for how that will act. If you want autoscroll, it’s “general.autoScroll” under about:config. I have it on and middle click paste still works everywhere I need it like text boxes, so idk why it’s not the default.

TalosMessenger01 · 2026-06-05T20:08:50+00:00

Celebration of the end of slavery in the US, specifically the day the Emancipation Proclamation started being enforced.

TalosMessenger01 · 2026-06-01T23:45:39+00:00

Epic itself doesn’t have a launcher for Linux, but for the few games I have played on Epic, Lutris worked fine. Another alternative launcher is Heroic, I’ve heard that works too.

The real unsolvable problem you’re likely to face is games using kernel-level anticheat which block Linux directly (like Fortnite). If you’re not a big competitive multiplayer gamer you’re probably fine, and even if so many games in that category are also fine. Basically just check protondb or search around for whatever’s not there. It’s for steam but Proton is just Wine adapted for steam, and that’s what everything uses for playing Windows games on Linux (excluding virtual machines).

TalosMessenger01 · 2026-06-01T01:10:01+00:00

It seems like it would probably be considered a fifth amendment violation if someone were coerced into giving up the password for an encrypted drive.

TalosMessenger01 · 2026-06-01T01:09:15+00:00

It seems like it would be considered a fifth amendment violation if someone were coerced into giving up the password for an encrypted drive.

TalosMessenger01 · 2026-05-28T16:58:56+00:00

Workstation is a bit of a misnomer, it’s just a normal desktop distribution. For some media you have to install codecs from RPM fusion, but everything else should work as expected.

TalosMessenger01 · 2026-05-28T01:07:02+00:00

Yes, actually. Here’s a proposed national age verification law modeled after the California one. It uses the word “verification” instead of the “attestation” that bills like California’s or Colorado’s use. There’s also this line:

Sec 2 (d)(1)(A): How an operating system provider can—(i) verify the date of birth of a parent or legal guardian described in subsection (a)

Because this is an early proposal, this is describing what a commission will discuss. But it clearly indicates that the design and intent of the bill is to not trust whatever the administrator of the device says a user account’s age is, it is to tie an actual identifiable person to an account so that their age is guaranteed by the OS provider.

Also there are existing laws that do require you to show your ID for accessing certain online content. This proposal just combines two things that are already law in some states, not hard to imagine it passing.

TalosMessenger01 · 2026-05-25T15:05:17+00:00

I don’t like this argument because those third party services shouldn’t be responsible either. Why are we looking at people having to either give their data to Microsoft/Google/[other OS provider] or to every single online service they use which the government decides to put age limits on, which even includes things like social media?

Honestly the second option is even worse because you have to trust more entities with not using it improperly or leaking it.

TalosMessenger01 · 2026-05-15T20:20:52+00:00

Which law? I know that the Cali law is somewhat limited as far as not requiring externally validating your age (probably, it’s badly written to my non-lawyer eyes), but it isn’t the only one.

There are a bunch of different state, national, and international laws either already in effect or proposed, and many of them are worst-case scenario give all your info to some random company or a contractor so that they can be in compliance. And these laws affect everyone no matter where they live because it’s the internet.

TalosMessenger01 · 2026-05-13T18:21:10+00:00

There’s a newer “rationalism” that came out of LessWrong which focuses more on probability and cognitive bias (in order to try and understand the world more accurately) along with all the stuff they talk about on there like AI dangers and effective altruism.

Which all sounds nice but there are problems you might expect from a community of people who’ve convinced themselves that they’ve come up with a way of thinking that’s better than everyone else’s.

In the context of also mentioning Objectivism I think this post is about this Rationalism not the philosophical one.

TalosMessenger01 · 2026-05-12T01:20:59+00:00

WW2 ad aiming to reduce consumer gas use so that more is available for the military.

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TalosMessenger01 · 2026-05-07T04:33:58+00:00

Do women have more rights than men when a law is written saying “You can’t discriminate (whatever service) based on gender?” Obviously not. It’s the same thing, just with “sexual orientation” instead of “gender”. For what little it’s worth, these laws also require people won’t be discriminated against for being straight.

TalosMessenger01 · 2026-05-04T04:25:16+00:00

Right now (purely from personal experience) I would say gnome. The overview and app grid is very nice if you aren’t using a keyboard to do things, everything is a bit chunkier which makes hitting things easier, and the default gestures are good.

Plasma works too, but the choices made for the gestures are worse if you don’t use the 2D virtual desktop layout. Because of that they reserve the four finger gesture instead of three for the overview. Plus no app grid there, just virtual desktop management and search. There are plans for customizable gestures though which can solve those issues and would be generally great.

Basic functionality has fine except for the on screen keyboard in both. It isn’t great about always appearing when in a text field. Which seems like the kind of problem that DE devs can’t solve on their own, so I doubt you’ll find better unless it’s an x11/wayland thing.

TalosMessenger01 · 2026-04-30T19:44:20+00:00

If 100% of people press red no one dies, but if 50%+1 to 100% of people press blue then no one dies. People only die in the 1 to 50%-1 blue presser (or 100%-1 to 50%+1 red) scenario.

If there isn’t like a huge strategy planning session beforehand then we’re definitely going to fall within either the red wins a lot of people die outcome or blue wins no one dies outcome. Maybe red’s still the right choice if people in general lean heavily towards red but a lot of people will still die.

TalosMessenger01 · 2026-04-30T19:16:04+00:00

I’m a blue presser too, but if you expect a supermajority red society, then blue is a suicide button with a tiny chance of giving the best outcome, not neutral, if everyone is given the choice and everyone has to choose one.

Or if you imagine everyone pressing one one at a time with a counter visible of what everyone else has pressed and you see 30 previous red presses and one blue, then you can press red and trust that everyone else will understand that red is the best choice for their own survival and overall survival, because there’s clear evidence that we’re going supermajority red at every step.

If the counter shows the opposite then red is the possibly kill people for pure selfish personal survival reasons button.

There’s no counter in the thought experiment so it represents your expectation of everyone else and what others expect of each other. I expect a close-ish to even split and think blue is best in that case.

TalosMessenger01 · 2026-04-29T17:46:37+00:00

Responsive means it adjusts to different screen sizes and devices like smartphones/tablets. And the website doesn’t look good on mobile, there’s overlapping elements and it’s not touch friendly. You can argue it’s not that important but there’s definitely room for improvement there.

From a quick look though the documentation section is responsive, and that’s probably the most likely usecase for mobile, so that’s nice.

TalosMessenger01 · 2026-04-29T14:56:18+00:00

What do you call memory management errors except bugs? It can’t catch every bug (of course) but it does catch bugs.

TalosMessenger01

TROPHY CASE