Indiscreet Function

For political reasons the government would obviously rather pretend their hands are tied and defer to the court. But something is presumably bothering them about the guidance, which I guess is a good sign

Just from a process standpoint the correct thing to do here is to figure out a policy and do a clarifying amendment to the Equality Act, there's no reason to treat FWS as the last word or to try to resolve every policy question with reference to it

"Encouraging" is probably too strong but I think this is the first not terrible sign the Labour government has given on this

There's also a difference between people who oppose attacks on civilians and people who don't, and as I understand it he is on the right side of that one

They don't want to fight Hamas or to perceived as occupiers which makes their ability to directly coerce it rather limited. They want to be there with its (perhaps reluctant) acquiescence.

There is a legal case for a third term: by the natural law, the king possesses the fullness of sovereignty, and while he may choose in the normal course to conform his enactments to the traditional constraints of his office, he always retains the power to suspend them

The US sees this as being about Hamas but I wonder if Turkey and Egypt see it as about deterring Israel (not in a "we'll fight you" sense but in a "this heightens the political consequences for you of turning every ceasefire issue into another episode of mass violence")

Relatedly, the weaker he is as a political figure the easier it is for SCOTUS to turn away his bad arguments, hurting Trump to Biden/Harris's benefit is a very different proposition from removing an albatross on Haley's successful GOP administration

I'm sorry for asking such a basic question but is the case for public development here just as a matter of subsidy or does it facilitate lower cost construction in some way?

Trump was incredibly weak in 2021 and moving fast with the investigations could have kept him weak and instead it was slow-walked while his allies manufactured a different narrative and he regained his Republican alliances

Even if they did he comes out much weaker: his hold on the Republican Party is broken (they just won an election with someone else), and that conviction is in the public consciousness

If Trump was in prison and Nikki Haley thrashed Harris, which she would have, we would be in a different better world and the anodyne stuff about optimal issue positioning would be the normal fare of election losers

Yeah this is the postmortem I want, I am more sympathetic than 95% of Bluesky to the issue positioning stuff but the more basic issue is that Biden's whole job was to arrest the threat to the constitutional order and he failed utterly

Biden did seem to have buyer's remorse but yeah

Hi Will! Thanks for your skeets! Not going to argue this out with you, hope you have a nice day.

I don't know what the answer is (I know some people are working on it) but it's part of why I'm queasy about the victory laps of the First Amendment absolutists in the face of Trump's abuses.

I don't think Biden should have manufactured a pretext to shut down the sale of Twitter to Musk but on the other hand there's actually something really weird about how the law treats such a transaction almost exclusively in terms of shareholder value when the social effects are obviously way bigger

Here is another agreement (I think) with Stancil. We are rightly wary of top down content-based speech interventionism from the government and we see how bad this can get every day. But the health of civil society and the information environment just is necessarily a big political concern

Humans are deeply social and our modes of communication are part of the material base that structures our society, big disruptions in modes of communication readily produce big disruptions in other parts of social life

And this is likewise right, people say "they said this about every new media technology" and yeah they were right every time bsky.app/profile/bill...

I disagree with a lot of Stancil's political takes but I think he is 100% right about this

I support proposals 2-4 on the NYC ballot, which would make it moderately easier adjust zoning for higher-density housing development. I have to say, seeing how controversial this is among people I know is giving me some new sympathy for the angry YIMBYs online.

Vermeule probably still believes this

I meant "iterative"--polling is an iterative process--but "interactive" works too I guess. Not sure if me or autocorrect

NPR has the draft proposed rule, which would describe the ostensible legal basis, but it does not appear to have published it

1. This is incredibly scary and deeply evil.
2. It would be helpful to understand better the legal authority they have to do this and the plausibility of a challenge, assuming equal protection and Section 1557 are out

Any prediction you make about this is one a good pollster will also be able to make (and adjust for) so it's tricky and the better assumption is probably not to expect a D bias. But that's what I reasoned in 2020 and 2024 too

Because polling is an interactive process, I think a big q is whether you decide this means 2028 polls will be D-biased (based on induction from 16/20/24) or have no prior (because pollsters will adjust)

Remember "peak oil"

Not that it changes the basic picture but this poll is much less favorable to Mamdani in its bottom line than the two released today which might have commensurate effects among Jews