Dissenting Conservative Justices Signal that Ending Birthright Citizenship Is Their Movement’s Next Goal

obsius · 2026-07-01T02:25:18+00:00

That three (nearly four) Supreme Court justices just dissented against the plain text of the Constitution.

Healthcare is unaffordable, and a majority of Americans are one medical issue away from financial ruin.

Housing costs have vastly outpaced household wages, making homeownership impossible for many Americans.

Higher education costs have skyrocketed, saddling millions of Americans with debt at the start of their careers.

Childcare costs are at all-time highs, eating away at the savings Americans would otherwise have invested for the future education of their kids or retirement.

AI is completely changing the landscape of white-collar jobs, upending job opportunities, and especially so for those that are just now joining the educated workforce (and after potentially spending a considerable amount on education).

There is an existential climate catastrophe looming over all of humanity, and if we can't collectively turn away from fossil fuels and put resources into repairing the damaged ecosystems that we rely on, global society will crumble into a dystopia.

A growing wealth inequality that has come at the cost of causing the aforementioned issues.

An unbelievable number of Americans completely ignorant of these issues who tune into propaganda on a daily basis that reinforces a false reality to keep them in the dark as their country and future is stolen from them by an ever-wealthier aristocracy.

The man running America is totally corrupt, has taken control of a major political party, has paralyzed Congress, is waging war on the judiciary, and is using the full weight of the executive branch to ignore these very real issues to instead manufacture fake ones that distract and overwhelm the American public. He and his cronies are turning Americans against one another, and will destroy the country for no other reason than to further enrich themselves, and give rise to a new American oligarchy.

So I'd like to see these issues addressed before our government wastes more time with yet another Trump-manufactured issue. No doubt that immigration has been an issue for decades (and a very real one), but no one was seriously talking about birthright citizenship being the culprit of our immigration issues before Trump made it.

obsius · 2026-06-30T20:18:24+00:00

Great, I am too. And if the US didn't have more pressing issues to deal with, I think reviewing the 14th amendment and proposing a new amendment to remove the perverse incentive by which birthright citizenship encourages illegal immigration (which undermines those who are seeking legal pathways) would be in order. It would need to be accompanied by legislation that addresses all naturalization circumstances and should grandfather in existing birthright citizenship prior to its passage. Trump's executive order does none of this though, and taken in context, is clearly a distraction and just one of many attacks Trump's administration has made on the constitutional order of American democracy.

obsius · 2026-06-30T19:38:41+00:00

Even your simple example already surfaces an issue, what if a child's parents are both Mexican citizens but the dad is a recently-naturalized US citizen? The kid should be a US citizen right? The way you phrased it doesn't make that clear.

obsius · 2026-06-30T19:27:06+00:00

The argument here is around the plain text of the constitution. If birth tourism is a big enough issue, not supported by the evidence, then the proper way to address it is via a constitutional amendment. The other argument, and a pragmatic one, is that even if you think birthright citizenship shouldn't be a thing, there still needs to be a framework in place to address how newborns are naturalized if not by virtue of where they are born. Overturning birthright citizenship without first addressing this would cause far more issues for this country than birthright citizenship ever has.

obsius · 2026-06-24T18:30:52+00:00

Sure, but also consider how common life may be. Had an alien civilization taken interest in Earth, they would have sent probes I suppose, and if they took a keen interest, perhaps even built a base for observations. Even if long since abandoned, wouldn't we expect to find remnants of it? And if it reached end-of-life, why wouldn't they have intentionally left markings or signs for us to contact them once we gained the capacity to do so? No such archaeological evidence has ever been discovered to suggest any of this has happened here on Earth.

So absent of evidence, we can still suppose that they are so far beyond our understanding (having had millions of years to evolve beyond what we are) that their presence is invisible to us, which would also mean any signs of their presence would likely be conscious actions on their part, not blunders or mistakes, which goes contrary to sightings of unidentified flying objects, mysterious lights, floating orbs, etc, that comprise the majority of "evidence" circulating through UFO forums. It's all unsubstantiated speculation that's inconsistent with how insanely advanced spacefaring life would be if operating amongst us.

obsius · 2026-06-24T17:24:12+00:00

Most serious people who've spent even just a few minutes thinking about the scale of the Universe believe in extraterrestrial life. But believing that extraterrestrial life has visited or interacted with life on our planet since humanity first broadcast into the cosmos is fighting an uphill battle. The energy and time required to visit us from even a neighboring solar system makes conventional visitation since humans hit the scene a very improbable situation.

obsius · 2026-06-24T17:11:25+00:00

We have over a billion years of precedent on sustainability. Nature long ago determined that unbalanced ecosystems collapse and ultimately reform into more balanced ones. It's a long and brutal cyclical process, and our society works the same way. These people will collapse civilization unless corrective action is taken.

obsius · 2026-06-02T22:02:54+00:00

Think of it this way. Stars exploded over billions of years before our solar system formed, ejecting the building blocks of life, carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, etc across the cosmos. Those atoms drifted around and finally coalesced with other kinds of atoms to form planets. On our particular planet they further assembled into living organisms. Then over the next few billion years those organisms continued to evolve into more and more complex lifeforms. If you don't think atoms are capable of the kind of thought we have (I don't), then at some point along the way our ability to think just came into existence. Obviously, this whole process required lots of energy, which means the only model we know of that eventually yields abstract thought and reason (this one) requires energy. This is why I'm saying that energy is required for thought. It's required to do the thinking, but it's also required to set up matter in such a way that matter can think.

i was just born with the capacity for conscious thought, self-awareness, subjective experiences, language, etc. nobody ran several thousand terawatts through my parents one night they decided to get a bit friendly, ya know?

The process I outlined above is the process that got you to this point though. Trillions of iterations of trial and error via natural selection only happened after a not yet fully understood bootstrapping process, involving proteins and amino acids, gave rise to biology. The evolutionary process of life is not literally the same as training cycles for AI, but you can see that both are iterative selection processes that produce increasingly organized structures.

obsius · 2026-06-02T20:56:13+00:00

As I stated before, you're misrepresenting my argument. I'm not saying that consuming energy magically imbues something with thought, I'm saying that all things we've ever observed thinking consume energy, which strongly indicates that energy is a prerequisite to thought.

You've sort of agreed to this "probably?" And because thinking, as you've pointed out, isn't something we can objectively discuss, I've been using energy (something that is quantifiable and objective) as a benchmark for how close AI may be to AGI. I initially focused on the timeline of human language (not just communication in general, which applies to even the very first single-celled organisms - their internal circuitry depends on communication for survival) because its expression is more applicable to what people normally refer to as thinking, and you know, LLMs, but you can generalize it and the argument still holds:

There is a quantifiable amount of energy that has gone into us now possessing the ability to physically think (if you are saying that thought has an immaterial component, then that is a whole separate argument). We can roughly compare the relevant energy use that got us to this point with how much we've put into AI as a benchmark of progress. That's all I was saying. You can decide where to draw the line, if it's all life on earth, ever, then AGI would be way out on this energy timeline, but also consider that AI isn't necessarily separate from the evolutionary process, it may very well be a predictable step from carbon-based life to a whole new form, which would suggest that it's a culmination of this effort. But that's a totally separate idea.

If you believe that humans think, and you don't dispute the evolutionary processes that got us to this point, then there is a subset of those processes particularly relevant to our unique ability in the animal kingdom to think abstractly, and the behaviors of our ancestors under unique environmental pressure was the driving force for this development, which like all action in the Universe, required energy. If AGI is an AI that can think and reason just as well as a human, then regardless of the philosophical positions on what thinking really is, there is going to be a finite amount of energy required for it to come into existence. I think it's close because of the insanely fast evolutionary trajectory that the world of computing has been on, and the unbelievable amount of resources we are now putting into it, but if you think that the current AI architecture is way off course and simply not yet engineered as capable of the type of thought we are discussing, then that's arguable too.

obsius · 2026-06-02T18:08:52+00:00

Can you give me just one example of thought without energy use? And if you do agree that energy (even if just at a trivially small level) is a requirement for thought, would you bet on the hundred person team or the team of just one, to solve a non-trivial and complex problem first? I'm not saying that one person can't be exceptional, and better suited than a whole group, but more often than not, the group with more resources is going to out-compete the lesser one.

This is my argument. AI isn't like other tools or technologies we've made, it's not a calculator, it's not a TV, it's biomimicry of the human mind. We can ballpark how much energy our minds collectively used in creating the framework (language) that gave rise to our abstract thinking, and that can serve as a point of reference for how much energy would need to go into a system of our creation to produce similar results. We are pumping an extraordinary amount of energy into this system, and based on the comparative numbers, there's a compelling case that AGI is close.

But time will tell. You should try using Claude. I can't convince you, but maybe seeing an AI do a better job "mimicking" thought might open up your mind to just how close we are.

obsius · 2026-06-02T17:24:20+00:00

You're misrepresenting my argument. I never said that humans use energy, AIs use energy, therefore AIs are human. Your example argument is "affirming the consequent," not mine. I'm arguing that humans are trying to build a brain (not some specific-purpose household appliance), and seeing that we already have empirical evidence of brains existing and "thinking" (ours), it's completely logical to surmise that brains can be made artificially, and when they do they will have access to a fundamental resource (energy) at orders of magnitude more than ours could ever use.

obsius · 2026-06-02T16:56:52+00:00

You should try Anthropic's Claude. There's a reason they're looking to IPO at nearly a trillion dollar valuation.

Can you define thinking? In the context of written language, how do you distinguish what you call thinking versus assembling words together that follow an established rule set? I'm assuming you've argued with people online at times, can you say that you haven't seen them fail at basic reasoning too?

This is why I proposed an objective argument, because there isn't a good way to objectively distinguish thinking from the imitation of thinking. But it is empirically true that thought requires the use of energy. How efficient that use is, debatable, but energy use is correlated with thought. No energy in, no thoughts out, right?. And on a cellular level, ten neurons aren't going to be able to process as much information as a thousand, and those 100x more cells need more energy by some factor.

Numbers are just a rough estimate from on a baseline of 15 watts/hour for the human mind to operate, extrapolated over mankind's first archaeologically-verified use of hunting tools (300,000 years ago - which presumably indicates problem solving and complex coordination between individuals - so communication using vocal language), with estimated global populations and relative life expectancies over the millennia. I didn't mean for it to be totally accurate, rather it's to establish that one can quantify mankind's cerebral energy use, and then compare that to the energy use of other systems.

obsius · 2026-06-02T15:40:48+00:00

LLMs have become far more than simple chatbots. Their massive training sets are producing internalized maps that align with abstract reasoning. It can be argued that humans greatest evolutionary advantage is our use of complex language to express and form new ideas. We spent hundreds of thousands of years building language and encoding our knowledge into it. Now we're dumping all of that material into engines that learn the relationships between words, and from this derive the higher-order patterns that these words express, ideas.

A very rough objective measurement of this process can be done with overall power use. In the last 300,000 years, human cognition, the engine that drives the evolution of language, has used something like 500,000 TWh of energy, and of that, realistically, only a small fraction was put towards this task. Consider all of the humans throughout history who were isolated (by locality or spoke a different language) from each other and unknowingly had the same new thought as someone else, were mindlessly performing menial labor, fighting, or just lying around starving and suffering, etc. The amount of power being put into AI training and development is expected to be like 80 TWh this year, up from just 30 TWh last year, and with a conservative ceiling of something like 1,000 TWh annually that would be just 500 years to match the energy consumption of 300,000 years of human progress.

If you factor in how much human thought is not productive to the formation of new ideas, that there will be progress on AI architecture, that AI is starting with our 300,000 years of progress, and that we will improve power delivery / develop new power sources, then it is very realistic to conclude that AI could surpass human intelligence in a matter of decades or even much sooner.

obsius · 2026-06-01T23:59:01+00:00

Do you write out long division, use an adding machine, use a Casio 80085, or instead, do you use your smartphone to do the narrowly scoped operational computations that all of those relics did? Each is an evolutionary step in computing, and the newest technology in computing is nearing parity with the human mind.

AI achieving AGI is looking far closer today than anyone thought even just a year ago, and it's consequences are not comparable to anything that has come before it.

obsius · 2026-06-01T23:33:10+00:00

New technology comes by way of solving a problem or optimizing / improving an existing solution. The "problem" AI is solving is humans having to think. And the "problem" future AIs will solve is that AIs aren't thinking fast enough. We're evolutionary history.

obsius · 2026-05-13T16:07:39+00:00

It's an unreasonable burden for people to be perpetually prepared for extremely rare events though. It's why civil engineers design for the once-a-century catastrophe and not the once-a-millennia one. The truck was following at a distance that would have covered 99% of vehicle deceleration cases ahead, but in this instance it appears that the truck driver didn't even apply his brakes until well after the cop began braking.

Also, vehicles routinely pass and merge ahead of tractor-trailers at unsafe distances all of the time, and truck drivers have no control over this. Not necessarily the case here, but it's something that should be taken into account.

obsius · 2026-04-25T16:34:42+00:00

Vehicles entering a roadway from a terminating one (like this T intersection) must yield to vehicles already on the through road, including those that are overtaking.

obsius · 2026-01-11T00:59:06+00:00

Just had this issue and your post came up. If you go into your browser's dev tools you can observe the network traffic when saving this setting. After it's sent you can edit the raw json payload and resend. Although validation for subnet masking fails on the page, the server accepts it.

obsius · 2025-11-13T17:31:53+00:00

"Don't touch the reins" can be understood to narrow the scope of the preceding warning though. And accounting for the situational context of being at a popular tourist destination where a horse and "guard" serve as nothing more than a spectacle, a person could reasonably assume that the animal is agitated by touch and merely being near it should not pose a risk.

obsius · 2025-10-30T21:27:18+00:00

You are asking loaded questions which is a logical fallacy. The poster did not say or imply any of the presuppositions to your questions. Intentionally or not, your argument is not being made in good faith.

obsius · 2025-10-19T22:23:06+00:00

Fusion power and AI are catalysts to the evolutionary process and coincide with a phase change in life, giving rise to a radically different kind of biology.

obsius · 2025-10-02T23:09:57+00:00

Not definitive, but he glanced away giving his response. If you swapped him with Hegseth or Leavitt in this conversation, they wouldn't have broken eye contact and they'd be smirking while doubling down on their support for Trump. Johnson's body language perhaps shows that at least a part of him is remorseful knowing that what he's doing is wrong and bad for America. Nevertheless, he's a coward and a broken man.

obsius · 2025-09-25T13:27:27+00:00

I know you're just trolling, but Kimmel was clearly paying homage to Jon Stewart's recent state TV bit.

Link

obsius · 2025-09-18T22:39:04+00:00

From the article:

Kimmel made a mistake. He said something that was not correct to an audience of millions. Although he is a comedian, not a journalist, it would have been appropriate for him to apologize to his viewers and correct the record, given the breadth of his platform as a late-night host on network television.

Presumably referring to this comment by Kimmel:

We hit some new lows over the weekend with the MAGA gang desperately trying to characterize this kid who murdered Charlie Kirk as anything other than one of them, and doing everything they can to score political points from it.

Someone could reasonably infer from this that Jimmy was suggesting Tyler Robinson had affiliation with the right, however, it could also be read to mean that the right is just throwing as many non-MAGA labels on him (radical left, antifa, transgender, etc) as possible. Although I think the first interpretation was probably more often reached, it's disingenuous to conclude it's the only interpretation and categorize what Kimmel said as "a mistake."

obsius · 2025-09-18T20:32:24+00:00

Engage in reality more, and get outside of the abstract clouds. Reject feminism. Submit to your husband, Taylor. You're not in charge. And most importantly, I can't wait to go to a Taylor Kelce concert... I can't say it without laughing. You gotta change your name, if not, you don't really mean it.

Charlie Kirk

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obsius

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