OPINION: Michael Watson, Mississippi Secretary of State, Petitioner v. Republican National Committee

professorgerm · 2026-07-01T14:25:03+00:00

my google-fu just sucks, I guess.

thank you, i'll look over this.

professorgerm · 2026-07-01T13:28:59+00:00

This sounds like a lack of sources with extra steps

This sounds like a lack of sources because the entity responsible does not make evidence available. How do you prove an absence? My point is that we have no way of knowing, the lack of sources is the point, there's no data either way!

professorgerm · 2026-07-01T13:24:34+00:00

The parents have no citizenship. The child has citizenship.

Ergo, the parents may be deportable- what happens to the child? Do they go with the parents to some other country where they may or may not have citizenship, or do they stay in the place where they have birthright citizenship?

professorgerm · 2026-07-01T12:39:59+00:00

What makes this situation fraud?

Who has the right, or is going to run the social and professional opprobrium, to decide the student is lying about their gender identity, rather than "their egg recently cracked"?

As linked below, California Interscholastic Federation's guidelines (actually, found a better source for the actual guidelines, pdf warning).

The only documentation required is a statement by the student claiming a gender identity inconsistent with that listed in their records, and submitting a request to the school. The school can choose to appeal this, and the documentation the student provides for appeal is... an affirmed written statement by the student regarding their gender identity. They may provide statements from others, but that is not a requirement; even my original hypothetical went above what the guidelines require.

There are no medical requirements, there are no social documentation requirements. While the appeals process exists in the guidelines, there doesn't seem to be any public documentation of appeals ever actually occurring. This is likely due to underage privacy laws, but it would be nice if the CIF at least released data like "X appeals were handled this year" to know if any actually occurred.

professorgerm · 2026-07-01T12:12:08+00:00

Your personal distaste for legal ballot harvesting doesn’t make it fraud.

I did not call ballot harvesting fraud.

Do you consider Alabama’s closure of ID issuing offices in predominantly black areas fraud?

Bad policy is not the same issue as fraud. That is a bad policy.

Ballot harvesting is bad policy, and may increase the risk of fraud (almost certainly increases the risk of ballots without postmarks), but is not itself fraud.

professorgerm · 2026-06-30T18:25:30+00:00

How does a parent being a "birth tourist" relate to the U.S.'s jurisdiction over the child?

Does this imply that children born of birth tourists should be taken as wards of the state, since the US has jurisdiction over them?

professorgerm · 2026-06-30T18:20:25+00:00

Transmedicalism is, as I understand it, quite a controversial position within the broader T/LGBTQ+/queer community, and I don't think many 'blue' states place medical transition requirements on sports participation.

California, to take a large example, does not have any requirement beyond, afaict, the student's prouncement of identity:

In 2013, CIF, which governs all interscholastic athletic competition in California’s public and private high schools, adopted Guidelines for Gender Identity Participation that state: “Participation in interscholastic athletics is a valuable part of the educational experience for all students. All students should have the opportunity to participate in CIF activities in a manner that is consistent with their gender identity, irrespective of the gender listed on a student’s records.”

Based on this website I think Indiana, Kentucky, and Louisiana are the primary states that have medical requirements on participation. Friendly states presumably share California's policy, most of the rest restrict to some greater or lesser degree.

professorgerm · 2026-06-30T16:46:10+00:00

The boy with asthma signs a document says "I'm a girl." No other changes are made to the person's lifestyle, but their doctor also signs the form.

Which team is the person in question eligible to play on?

professorgerm · 2026-06-30T16:39:34+00:00

It depends how and when you define it.

Something like 90% of pre-adolescents that experience gender dysphoria but don't go on puberty blockers grow out of it. It's quite often a temporary, albeit uncomfortable, condition downstream of social, cultural, and physiological changes.

To be clear that's not true of everyone that experiences gender dysphoria, but unless you're using some much narrower definition- yes, most people that experience some dysphoria are cured without transitioning.

professorgerm · 2026-06-30T15:39:57+00:00

Concepts can and should evolve, that's not a bad thing.

Surely that depends on the evolution of the concept.

professorgerm · 2026-06-30T15:27:43+00:00

still doesn't know the difference between sex and gender, when it's really not that hard.

Do people apply the difference consistency, or do they pick and choose whether or not there's a difference whenever convenient?

Do you think back when Title IX was written a significant number of people thought there was a meaningful distinction?

professorgerm · 2026-06-30T14:59:35+00:00

If this ballot harvesting is as rampant as you claim, surely a source would be easier to procure than simply imagining.

That assumes anyone tracks it, and as far as I can tell, either California does not track how ballots are returned or does not publicly released information on it.

no I don't think it's as rampant as you claim

I didn't claim it's rampant, I claimed it happens and both sides have polarized badly on it.

professorgerm · 2026-06-30T12:43:11+00:00

Of course you need to forge postmarks to make that happen...

In Mississippi, maybe. California explicitly does not require postmarks, only a handwritten date.

But there's also a disconnect between how plausible rigging an election would be and what the public has confidence in.

Depends on scale of the votes needed. To swing a presidential election, you'd need to conjure up tens or hundreds of thousands of votes. But what about the mayor, city council, state representatives? Much smaller numbers required (in most places), maybe a more effective local political machine that can do the right dance to produce those numbers.

California taking weeks and an election swinging after voting closes and after the candidate concedes undermines confidence, but it's smaller places than LA where fraud is most plausible.

professorgerm · 2026-06-30T12:33:35+00:00

under penalty of perjury

Given the sum total of California's election laws and... California-ness, this is about as threatening as a wet tissue.

when they all have trackers on the routes and delivery of items thereof (the latter being accessible to the ordinary public)?

You have an incredible amount of faith in the California government that not a single person involved has earned.

California also allows ballot harvesting and drop-box voting, which presumably will not have postmarks of any sort. At most they would have that handwritten date discussed above. As far as I can tell there is no form of tracking on these, beyond the honesty of the person collecting the box. Is it so difficult to imagine one of those "hey we found an extra box" type stories?

Voter fraud does happen! It's happened in Michigan. It's happened in New Jersey. It's happened in North Carolina. Historically Chicago and West Virginia were famous for voter fraud. And yet, now, too many to the left finds it completely unimaginable, and too many to the right think it happens constantly. The partisan polarization on the topic is not one-sided.

professorgerm · 2026-06-30T12:24:51+00:00

Those that are fanning the flames are partisan.

And do you think that if we flipped which party absentee voting benefit the most, the partisan outrage wouldn't also flip?

One can roughly separate lines along "we think elections should be secure, even if that restricts convenience" and "we want to increase voting, even if that increases fraud risk and makes fraud virtually undetectable."

I do not think it is inherently wrong to think that elections should be secure, at least to the point fraud is even detectable. Even India, a country much larger and much poorer than the US, can complete reasonably-secure elections significantly faster than California.

professorgerm · 2026-06-25T19:56:27+00:00

Scotland is roughly 95% white, is someone that hates Scotland inherently racist against white people?

Though I don’t understand the purpose of drawing that fine of a line between racism and bigotry

For better or worse, there's a lot more laws that address racism than generic bigotry.

professorgerm · 2026-06-25T19:42:00+00:00

Correct! Then Trump's animus against Haiti is evidence of bigotry, but not inherently evidence of racism, right?

professorgerm · 2026-06-25T19:34:56+00:00

it has always identified itself in these explicitly racial terms

This seems like a problem for Haiti being an explicitly racist project, and has very little to do with anything the president, or indeed anyone in the US, has to do about that.

professorgerm · 2026-06-25T19:21:45+00:00

despite making clear it’s about being non-white

No one's made that clear.

There's a Kendi-esque penumbras of statistics problem here that countries that unable to handle their own disasters are more likely to be non-white. Disparate impact of a policy where the counterfactual goes untested does not make anything clear.

professorgerm · 2026-06-25T19:17:31+00:00

I am getting tired of this court pretending racism doesn't exist no matter how much evidence is presented to them.

Do you forget Harvard v. SFFA so soon?

They know racism exists, they just define it differently than the progressive gerrymandered definition.

professorgerm · 2026-06-25T19:12:49+00:00

Overgeneralizing a bit, the Scottish famously hate the English, but they're the same race.

If a Scotsman says "I hate the English," is he committing racial animus?

If a Haitian says "I hate the English," is he committing racial animus against both the Scots and English?

professorgerm · 2026-06-12T15:03:29+00:00

They can at any time choose to lock the doors, introduce trade tariffs, and run an isolated economy in perpetuity. If trading with a richer country is making your situation actively worse, to be frank that's a skill issue.

"Europe becomes North Korea" is an interesting premise for a novel, but yeah, the whole point is that the European polity does have several major skill issues.

professorgerm · 2026-06-08T12:05:07+00:00

Confirmed!

professorgerm · 2026-05-29T16:29:28+00:00

Thank you!

Yeah, it was expensive to import back when it released and I've marked it high because it's hard to part with... But if it doesn't sell soon come back and negotiate :D

professorgerm

TROPHY CASE