Slightly hyperbolic title, but not by much.

When the Roe draft was leaked a couple weeks ago, most of the politicians here in NY have been engaged in mass virtue signaling about how people need more abortion, including looking to make abortions more available, and even some discussion about using tax money to pay for basically abortion tourism (come to NY, get an abortion, then go home).

Yet, earlier this week, we had this ludicrous "gem", with the NY State court of appeals hearing arguments about how Happy the Elephant

has an interest in exercising her choices and deciding who she wants to be with, and where to go, and what to do, and what to eat, and the zoo is prohibiting her from making any of those choices herself.

This is beyond Clownworld. We must allow people to murder babies however and whenever they want to, but this elephant over here needs human rights!

Candace Owens pointed out on Twitter that the majority of violence committed against both blacks and asians are done by blacks.

A democratic congressional candidate literally sent her a picture of a Klan hood as a reply

And, when reported to Twitter's health and safety team, they said "Nah, it's fine"

Apparently she's bringing in the cops on the grounds that this may constitute a hate crime, but even if that does pan out, Jack has now said:

"Misgender someone, and you're banned. Send Klan memorabilia to black conservatives, and you're fine!"

I seriously hope that guy just lost his website, because this has to be the most explicit evidence of bias yet.

So, a story on this is here, and the full opinions are here. There's been a long-running series of lawsuits coming out of NY (and probably other places too, I'm just more focused on NY cause I live there) over the fact that Cuomo decided to limit the number of people who could attend religious services due to the virus. In a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court shut down the rule yesterday.

But, the reason I'm posting this here is not so much the ruling itself (though I think its a huge win for freedom overall), but because of the rationales. I can't help but think that only one of them is actually caring about the law.

For the majority opinion, written by Gorsech, had the following opening and closing lines.

Government is not free to disregard the First Amendment in times of crisis.... It is time—past time—to make plain that, while the pandemic poses many grave challenges, there is no world in which the Constitution tolerates color-coded executive edicts that reopen liquor stores and bike shops but shutter churches, synagogues, and mosques

From Breyer's minority opinion

The Nation is now experiencing a second surge of infections....The nature of the epidemic, the spikes, the uncertainties, and the need for quick action, taken together, mean that the State has countervailing arguments based upon health, safety, and administrative considerations that must be balanced against the applicants’ First Amendment challenges.

I'm sorry, what? Since when does the Supreme Court rule on health arguments? The text is very clear, "Congress shall make NO LAW respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances." It doesn't say "Congress shall make no law unless there's a virus which has a <2% fatality rate across the whole population." This is an attempt at an insane new level of judicial activism. This isn't twisting the law to fit, this is saying "well, the law is nice and all but doesn't matter here"

Guessing you've all heard about the twitter debacle yesterday, but if not - http://archive.is/UIr39

Coming off this, though, we've learned several things:

1. Either people can break into multiple extremely high profile twitter accounts easily (in which case Twitter's security is garbage) or someone with access to Twitter admin tools can pretend to post as anyone (in which case anything anyone says on Twitter is suspect)

2. It seems Twitter has blacklists for trends and search terms in place. From other potential (unverifiable) screenshots I've seen they may have flags for reply deboosting, shadowbanning, and similar things associated with each account as well

3. This got the government very interested in them again, and at least one senator demanding (ironically enough, via Twitter) that Jack cooperate with the feds on the investigation here.

So, is Twitter dead now? Given that it was already in a shaky place to start with, I don't realistically see how anyone could continue using it in good confidence at this point.