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Cake day: July 3rd, 2023

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  • I mostly agree with you. The AND was kind of crammed in outside the list too, though; they’d written it as NOT bullet: limit 1, bullet: limit 2, AND bullet: limit 3. Basically I don’t think it’s implausible that they intended it to be maximally restrictive and just screwed that up. I just think that applying the law as though it means that requires interpreting the law differently from how it’s written, and different in a way that harms the defendants, which you previously weren’t supposed to do. Which seems super dumb.


  • I wasn’t suggesting the lawyers or the Justices should have talked about DeMorgan’s law, but rather that it would have been a helpful point for Mother Jones to bring up in the article, to make sure people are on the same page about the logic. You’re right that the notation is probably not helpful though.

    The actual legal argument is pretty simple. The law as written is maximally lenient, but also not very logically consistent (e.g. the redundancy indicated in the article). So it seems like some kind of error occurred in the law-writing process. The question is whether they actually meant to write it as maximally restrictive or whether they screwed up in some other way. That certainly seems like ambiguity (a stance supported by the evidence that multiple courts decided these cases in different ways), and the prior standard was that in the case of ambiguity, you had to interpret the law to the benefit of the defendants, which here would be maximally lenient, and indeed also as written. The supreme court has basically reversed that, saying that you can interpret it as maximally restrictive as long as you’re pretty sure that’s what they meant to say. That’s a very different standard.

    I think this case is maybe the equivalent of that photo of a striped dress that blew up the Internet a few years ago. Nobody thinks it’s particularly ambiguous, but they come to totally different conclusions about what the obvious correct answer is; just because the ambiguity isn’t necessarily obvious to the individual reader doesn’t mean it’s not there.


  • Yeah, I feel like the article should have made reference to De Morgan’s Law in order to explain the two interpretations. That’s the one that says !(A && B && C) = !A || !B || !C, and !(A || B || C) = !A && !B && !C.

    In English, there’s no proper grouping operator, so it’s basically it’s a question of whether you distribute the NOT or the AND first over the list.

    The Justices are saying that the ambiguity is completely resolved by the way the restrictions don’t make sense if you interpret it the other way. But the underlying assumption there is that the laws of this country are logical, free from needless repetition and contradictory requirements, which is a TERRIBLE assumption. Our laws are at best written by a committee of people not very familiar with the subjects of those laws, and at worst written by scam artists who then paid to slip them under the radar and into the books. They’re full of idiotic errors, deliberate sabotage, and absurdities. That’s the whole reason for the thing about the lenient interpretation, and this decision will change that in a way that gives judges a whole lot of power to do more harm.








  • I reject your premise that loving Israel means being unable to tolerate any criticism of Israel’s actions. I’m a citizen of the US; I would argue that I’m critical of the US because I love it, and want to see it improve. That’s why I’m so critical of our military and our foreign policy. We commit a lot of war crimes; it’s a huge problem. I’m also critical of our shitty healthcare system, our lack of social safety nets, our institutional racism, and so forth. As an individual I don’t feel like I have a huge amount of agency to affect those things, but I do try my best, including voting and communicating my views to those around me.

    So yeah, I think it’s totally fine to be Jewish, and totally fine to love Israel. What I don’t think is fine is being okay with every aspect of Israel’s current actions in Gaza–in particular, the multiple instances of the killing of journalists, health care workers, and children, and the extreme restrictions on supplies entering the country. Those aspects are all obscene. The level of suffering in Gaza overall right now is unbelievable.

    If someone takes offense at my calling those actions by the military obscene, I would argue that’s not a matter of Judaism. That’s a matter of rather extreme nationalism.




  • Er…I suspect that part of the point is that their previous method of execution was lethal injection, and there was a pretty well-documented shortage of the drugs for that. They got really expensive. I suspect that’s around the point where someone looked into alternatives and came up with this.

    I think you’re probably right that the method seeming maybe more humane to some critics was part of the appeal of this particular method, but I think the main goal was probably cost reduction and ensuring that supply chain issues couldn’t interrupt their murdering any more.