onfocus

“They had to fudge how they’re calculating the turnout rate to get there, and they’re not even taking into account margin of error, and all these other methodology issues about the current population survey to arrive at that number,” he said. “Someone knew what they were doing.”

Yes, it’s called lying.

Conservative Chief Justice John Roberts said at a Wednesday judicial conference that the Supreme Court must be cautious about overruling precedents, warning that it can create problems if done for ideological reasons.

I would laugh at the hypocrisy of this ridiculous comment if it wasn’t so infuriating. In fact, I’m 100% sure this is victory lap trolling after gutting the VRA, not an earnest statement.

Congress has authority to limit the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court under Article III, Section 2, Clause 2 that says that the appellate jurisdiction of the court shall be subject to “such exceptions and under such regulations as the Congress shall make.”

Rep. Sean Casten lists some ways congress could rein in this out-of-control Supreme Court.

...to paraphrase former justice Potter Stewart, you know the corruption when you see it. And we see the out-of-control corruption in the increasing willingness and brazenness with which the Court reaches down into judicial process to find notional bases upon which to make policy for the country which it simply desires to make, frequently ignoring the appellate process, the fact-finding of trials, basic issues of standing. The corruption runs so deep there is simply little effort any more to hide it.

This is a good summary of the corruption.

There are many theories swirling around for why they have increasingly chosen to abandon their basic duty to legal transparency. And the likeliest one is also the simplest: They’re cowards.

I believe the Roberts Court will be known as the court that brought down the institution in this form. Only significant restructuring will restore faith in this thoroughly captured enabler of authoritarianism.

In a 6-3 decision, the U.S. Supreme Court kneecapped the Voting Rights Act (VRA), the landmark civil rights law that restricted racial gerrymandering and racial discrimination in voting for sixty years.

This isn’t justice based on careful deliberation. This is corruption in the service of white supremacy.

Decades of research in developmental psychology have shown that moral reasoning develops through consequences—not punishment, necessarily, but experiencing the effects of your actions on others, receiving honest feedback, having to accommodate reality as it actually is rather than as you wish it to be.

This isn’t too far off from the software brain mindset that Nilay Patel was warning about in the previous post. Maybe software brain is intensified by the fact that tech culture is run by billionaires who never face consequences.

You can’t advertise people out of reacting to their own experiences. This is a fundamental disconnect between how tech people with software brains see the world and how regular people are living their lives.

Nilay Patel explains the disconnect between tech culture and culture at large around AI.

“I think this is a creative and ambitious bill,” he said. “It tries to get around Citizens United by arguing that corporations only have the powers the state chooses to grant them, and that Hawaiʻi can decline to grant the power to spend money on elections. That’s a genuinely innovative idea.”

Nice to see a state even contemplate asserting its power to regulate. Fingers crossed.

The NASA flickr account has stunning high-resolution images from the Artemis II trip around the moon.

The Varieties of Democracy project at the University of Gothenburg has done this measurement for more than a decade, establishing a consistent metric that allows for comparisons between and within nations and determinations of how democracy has changed over time.

Nice liberal democracy we used to have here. Too bad we couldn’t keep it.

The complete and utter failure of the metaverse is a reminder not just of the fact that the future Silicon Valley is force feeding us is not inevitable, but that quite often these oligarchs quite simply cannot relate to real people, don’t know how or why people use their products, and very often have no idea what they’re doing.

What could we have done with $80 billion dollars? People like Zuckerberg shouldn’t control what we spend that amount of resources on.