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Holy hell. The Supremes dropped some pretty nasty shit on us on the way out. Discuss and commiserate here.
Here are some pointed takes from Twitter.
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This is a terrible day for jurisprudence, but that last tweet made me do one of those internal laughs where you pull a muscle.
But her emails. Bros before hoes crap lead to this.
I’m pretty sure the NYT screenshot is talking about loans families take out independently of the student, and is reassuring the student that they will not inherit this unpaid debt when their parent dies. (Just looked it up, and Federal PLUS loans can be taken out by graduate students, or by the parents of any student, to help cover education expenses.) Not that this makes it any better, but they’re saying “if Mom dies, you don’t have to take over that loan she took out,” not “kill yourself.”
From various things I’ve read over the years, it appears that if the student kills themself, often their parents DO have to continue paying. That may just be because often parents have co-signed on these loans.
In other words, we won’t be speaking of “inheritance powder” any more but rather “debt reliever.”
Fuck, I hate this timeline.
I’d love to see a student loan case where the plaintiff refuses to pay back interest on religious grounds, and watch the Christian Dominionist justices squirm. The Bible strongly condemns usury (Deuteronomy 23:29, Leviticus 25:35-38, Proverbs 28:8). I suppose the counterargument would be “this doesn’t apply to banks”, but interest is interest, and paying it would be abetting sin. The underlying principle is no different than allowing someone to deny service to LGBTQ+ purely on faith-based grounds.
@Buttercup Q. Skullpants:
The Bible strongly condemns usury (Deuteronomy 23:29, Leviticus 25:35-38, Proverbs 28:8).
Which, of course, is the historic reason that European Christendom, finding moneylending a convenient service notwithstanding, outsourced it to Jews (who were forbidden a lot of other occupations, and the Deuteronomy passage [23:19-20; 23:20-29 covers penalties for raping female virgins] only forbids usury against fellow Jews.)
@Buttercup
I share that dream.
@Surplus
That is amazing.
If i understand correctly, this doesn’t FORBID business from serving LGBTQ+ couples.
That business doesn’t want to work for you? THEIR LOSS! Just find another one that will surely gladly accept your money!
My business, my choice. (Sounds familiar?)
This decision is also very significant, and worrying, from a boring technical point of view. Lots of chatter amongst the constitutional lawyers.
It’s all to do with standing. That is, the right to bring a court case.
There’s a long standing culture in common law that courts don’t consider hypotheticals.
That is to say they won’t give a prior indication of how they might rule in the future on a specific set of facts. You have to wait until you have a genuine controversy before you can bring a case.
That was a big problem prior to Roe v Wade. Only a pregnant woman could be affected by the ban on abortion, so only a pregnant woman could have standing to bring a claim. But, it takes a lot longer than 9 months to get a case to SCOTUS. And if at any time before you get there you’re no longer pregnant for any reason, eg the human gestation period, you lose standing.
But in this case there wasn’t even an actual factual basis. No one had asked them to make a website. It was pure hypothetical.
The conlaw lot have said the court have introduced a new test for standing The “I’m worried that one day…” threshold.
Brazil bars Bolsonaro from political office for eight years. America, take note.
@JoaquÍn
A reasonable if occasionally inconvenient take – if you live in a big, liberal city. In a big city, there are lots of alternatives for nearly everything, and the fact that it’s liberal is going to make it so that businesses which discriminate will be the rare exceptions rather than the norm. It can still be inconvenient if the next nearest location is some distance away, especially if one has transportation issues, but conservative freedoms outweigh the convenience of a few individuals who just happen to be minorities, amirite?
But the smaller the population, the fewer the local alternatives, and the less generally liberal the community, the more of those “alternatives” will turn out to be similarly discriminatory. When it comes to purely online services (such as website designing and hosting), one theoretically has nearly the whole world to choose from (so long as you speak English and/or Chinese, anyway, though you can also get a decently wide selection with Spanish), but as things get less and less purely online, the more likely that local services are involved or that you’d have to pay big fees for non-local service, so one’s options can still diminish.
It’s not as good of an attitude as it sounds on the surface.
Be careful what you wish for….
😀
Hopefully this version shows up….
ETA: >:|
https://twitter.com/PamelaApostolo1/status/1674923472173125632/photo/1?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1674923472173125632%7Ctwgr%5Ef3ce6b3d5540cde85c818e61aac8eaee5d3316c0%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fdisqus.com%2Fembed%2Fcomments%2F%3Fbase%3Ddefaultf%3Dslacktivistonpatheost_i%3D6381520https3A2F2Fwww.patheos.com2Fblogs2Fslacktivist2F3Fp3D63815t_u%3Dhttps3A2F2Fwww.patheos.com2Fblogs2Fslacktivist2F20232F062F302Famos-and-acts2Ft_e%3DAmos20and20Actst_d%3DAmos20and20Acts207C20Fred20Clarkt_t%3DAmos20and20Actss_o%3Ddefaultversion%3D4f6c84d9c117966654eabd9c43811df4
And if that doesn’t work…the picture is of a shop window with a signs reading:
“Since the Supreme Court has ruled that businesses can discriminate, no sales to Trump supporters” and “We only sell to Churches that fly a Pride flag”
@milotha
BUTTERY MALES! BUTTERY MALES! FIRST FEMALE PRESIDENT! THE FUTURE IS FEMALE! BUTTERY MALES! ETHICS IN GAMES JOURNALISM GAMERGAZI BUTTERY MALES BRUH TERRY MAILZ!!!
2016 was 7 years ago, let it go already, libs – everyone who’s not a lifeless bluecheck has moved on by now. Why don’t you start bitching about Nader or something?
“Bros before hoes crap lead to this”
Buttery males didn’t cost you an election. It should have been a cakewalk, but Hillary “let me check my focus groups” Rodham-Clinton still lost. It has been seven goddamned years since 2016, are you telling me that liberals are so pathetic you couldn’t have figured out something else to do in the mean time since then? If all of this happened because some people on the internet did a thing over games journalism in 2014, this says more about liberals and the system you hold dear than it does about whatever “I haven’t touched grass since Kurt Cobain existed” crap on the internet you sheltered pricks are still crying about 7 YEARS LATER. I don’t recall liberals crying this much over Nader. You are pathetic.
Even if you won, it’d be the same crap; we’d be hearing “but the dems can’t pass x because there’s not enough of them and some of them are turn coats!!!” incessantly. Even when you people win, somehow, the republicans still keep you from getting what you want and the answer is always the same old “VOTE BLUE NO MATTER WHO” even as the trains are being built. I;m sure all your quips about “BUTTERY MALES BUTTERY MALES 2016 2016 EVERYONE EVERYONE REMEMBER 2016 HILLARY FIRST FEMALE PRESIDENT DERP DERUP DKRE DPER!!!” will fix that.
@Redsilkphoenix:
None of your Twitter links are going to work for anyone who doesn’t have an account—the Muskrat has gone and userlocked Twitter.
I feel very perturbed about the impact of EM’s destruction of twitter. Without being a member, I personally followed 12-15 sites on a daily basis. These included Jorts (and Jean), Neill Harbison rescuing dogs in Thailand, Janet Godley (politically alert Scottish comedian), Mary Trump, Fishtopher the cat, Linda Tirado (a reporter who was blinded in one eye when shot in the face by a police office while doing her job), John Scalzi (author) and a variety of other political and feminist writers. I am not willing to join twitter and have my personal information accumulated for someone else’s profit, but I also don’t want to be excluded from the worthwhile and engaging content which until now has been so informative.
Since EM’s takeover, it has been hard to watch the increase of misogyny and racism and homophobia online. The closure of twitter to the public view – it seems that twitter will become a global communication system primarily for the worst and most hateful of people, who will use it for the worst and most hateful of reasons. EM has already made it clear that he supports and encourages the extreme right wing.
I do feel a great sense of loss at the breaking of twitter’s global social community. Many years ago, I was telling a friend about the inventor Thomas Midgely – who put the lead in petrol and chlorofluorocarbons into refrigeration, single-handedly poisoning the world – and she wittily said “and they say one man can’t make a difference!”. I think that EM is another man who has made a difference, by poisoned a very valuable social network, to the detriment of us all.
@Snowberry:
That’s not all. The online world has a ton of “behind the scenes” monopolies, some of which have a genuinely terrifying amount of theoretical power if they decide to flex it.
If you buy online, it’s likely that Paypal is involved at some point in the process (whether or not you actually use it).
We’ve just been hearing of a data breach caused by something called “Move It”, which apparently provided behind-the-scenes services to a large variety of sites.
Then there’s jsdelivr, and a bunch of google services, and cloudfront, and Akamai …
And then there’s the really huge 80,000-lb Diplodocus in the room: cloudflare. You hardly notice them except when they screw up and as a result of that screwup get in your way, whereupon almost any website in the world may suddenly disappear and be replaced by a cloudflare error page for a few minutes, hours, or more. Their ambit is DDoS protection, but the way they do it is to interpose themselves between a client website and basically everybody else, to hide the direct IP addresses to their servers. For all intents and purposes it’s a superseding overlaid wholly-privately-owned substitute for normal DNS, with all the power that that implies. If they wanted to, they could make half the web inaccessible to, say, everyone in a particular country. They can also potentially cause an outage of that scale if their data center’s night watchman trips over the wrong cable, or some other such purely accidental fuckup. This monopoly could send us all back to the 1980s with the flip of a switch … as could anyone who successfully hacked them. I wonder what they’d demand as ransom … perhaps Australia?
It goes without saying that cloudflare (and those hypothetical hackers) can impersonate or traffic-sniff any website in the world that doesn’t use https (fortunately a fast-decreasing percentage). Even with https, they could build a dossier of who visits which websites that would put google’s and Facebook’s to shame, and then use that for who knows what, or sell it to the highest bidder.
Cloudflare is a nightmare: not only an engineering single point of failure for much of the modern internet, but a potential supervillain, a potential tool of supervillains, and a single point of leverage that a despotic regime (and these days that includes 2/3 or so of the US state governments) can pressure to shut someone up or have them tracked down. IMO, cloudflare needs to be broken up even more than the giant social media companies and Microsoft, Apple, Amazon, and Google do. (And Paypal, apparently now owned by a consortium of shady bankers.)
@Full Metal Ox:
Speaking of giant tech monopolies …
What? That is both ludicrous and probably illegal. At this point doing that would be like making the NYC surface roads an exclusive private club. It’s infrastructure more than a simple web site these days.
It’s also easily the stupidest thing he could have possibly done. That alone will ram it right into the ground at Mach 11, let alone after all the other fuckery he’s done. It will swiftly become a sealed right-wing echo chamber like Parler and Voat … and quickly meet the same fate. (It seemed to be trending in that direction anyway, but this will put the pedal to the metal.)
Of course it’s legal.
Social media giants should have been broken up or forced to federate ten years ago, but I don’t see any political movement seriously advocating for that, not then and not now. The scandals so far has spurred the general public to realise the privacy and disinformation dangers of big platforms, but not accessibility ones.
It’s hard not to feel bitter, since this is exactly what I thought in early 10s would happen eventually, as people abandoned the far more democratized, if imperfect, vestiges of “web 1.5” to run to huge corporate platforms, and demand everyone else do the same, in the name of convenience.
It’s not comparable to to “NYC surface roads.” People have been having a huge party in someone’s garden, as the (comparatively more, as much as Internet ever had them) public spaces fell into disrepair, willingly deceiving themselves that this is the new public square, that will be forever free and accessible, and it’s definitely not just price dumping that will come to roost once the platforms believe themselves too indispensable to fail.
Well, here we are.
I don’t know if I need a Mastodon or Lemmy accounts, but I’m probably going to create them just to add my (special) snowflake to the snowball of discontent. Even so, I’m sceptical this will be the breaking point. But I can’t imagine a more brazen one, and fronted by the world’s publicly most punchable billionaire.
My sincere sympathy for all Americans.
Rebecca Solnit makes the point that we the people won these rights once, and can do it again. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jul/02/us-supreme-court-civil-rights-voting-fight It’s a massive job, and it’s heartbreaking to have to do it all again, but it’s possible.
It must have been such a disappointment for Lorie Smith when God told her his plans for her. Some people’s calling is noble and impactful, such as healing the sick or feeding the hungry. They can make a real difference, and be adored by millions. But Lorie’s task is to tell people that marriage is between a man and a woman, something they’ve heard a million times before and already rejected. Such a shitty, pointless, small-minded mission.
@Silver and Grey
Oh get off your high horse. SCOTUS being full of fascists is literally the fallout of letting a fascist get into the White House, that’s kind of how the US works. As for “that was 7 years ago” it’s a very privileged person who didn’t lose something or someone during the Trump regime. How very dare we have memories longer than one electoral cycle! How dare we choose pragmatism over a useless third party vote, and our own lives over some idealized dudebro-lead Revolution that is always a decade away?
I lost one dear friend to suicide and almost lost another to COVID, thanks to grievous Trumpist mismanagement (and active malice) during the early pandemic. The feds were blockading supplies to liberal cities. There is a literal mass grave in Central Park now. And people like you want us to forget because oh noooo Clinton baaaaad.
What do you think would be happening with anti-trans legislation if Republicans were still in control of all federal branches of government? What do you think would be happening with abortion? With the ACA? The Democrats might be pieces of shit, but sometimes they’re our pieces of shit.
Sincerely,
A disabled socialist trans woman who voted for Sanders in the primaries and Clinton in the general. And then Warren in the primaries and Biden in the general. Because I refuse to die for your revolution.