A relevant fact that I don't think has been established is what the typical outcome is for a drug user who says "no" to question six on form 4437 (which asks if the purchaser is "an unlawful user of or addicted to marijuana or any depressant or stimulant drug") but isn't charged with other crimes. The fighting has mostly been Democrats suggesting that since felons who "try & lie" on form 4437 aren't prosecuted it's unusual for Hunter to be prosecuted and Republicans rebutting them and saying that Hunter is different since he actually got the gun where "try & lie" felons are denied. This still leaves the question unanswered of what is the typical outcome is for a drug user who lies and successfully obtains a gun but isn't charged with other drug-related or violent crimes. Can anyone provide examples of someone who did a similar crime and compare what penalties they faced?
The Republican-controlled House Ways and Means Committee put forth an interesting example of a tax case that closely fits what Hunter did. Steven E. Smiff was a Florida Lawyer who didn't file taxes from 1997-2011 for the ~8 million in profits from his law firm. He paid the back taxes and got thirteen months in prison. Hunter didn't pay taxes for two years on roughly three million, paid the money back, and got two years probation in conjunction with the gun crime. Hunter's offense seems less severe since it was 1/7th of the years and 1/3 of the money, but maybe he should have done four or five months for failing to pay. It does look like Hunter got off a bit light for the tax stuff, but if that's the closest comparison a Republican congressional research team can find then the five years jail per count that The National Review suggests was never on the table.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
For most of the professors I know teaching the youth, or at least Freshman and Sophomores, is their least favorite part. I'm sure they'd be happy to lead senior seminars forever.
Crime, and especially murder, is incredibly concentrated in specific areas of American cities. Unless there's another 115th North East Street right next to a 115th Terrace in Kansas City, the shootings appear to have occurred in the Nashua neighborhood south of Cunningham near the I435/Highway 169 Interchange. Nashua is ranked in the top ten safest neighborhoods in Kansas City, the 4th best to buy a home in and has a murder rate per 100,000 residents of 4.6 according to Niche.com, though they lump Nashua together with Gashland which is slightly further south.
Now that's a website designed to help people buy houses pick schools not represent crime statistics, maybe things have changed since whenever they got their data. Well here's a local news affiliate's map of homicides for each year. Notice how murders are overwhelmingly concentrated in the southern part of Kansas City. In 2023 they don't show any north of the Missouri River and Nashua is ten miles north of that. On the 2022 map I count seven murders north of the Missouri River within the I-435 loop, with most of them close to the river. The closest shooting to Nashua was two miles away and sounds like a domestic dispute (woman shot in her home after neighbors called cops due to disturbance, suspect immediately arrested). In the area bounded by I-435, 169 & 152 containing the Nashua neighborhood the KSHB homicide map shows a total of six murders since 2015. The Gas Station shooting you brought up was at East 35th & Prospect 20 miles south of where this shooting occurred.
Society was not collapsing around this guy, he lived in a safer than average neighborhood with good property values. Opinions can differ on whether or not it's reasonable for an octogenarian to arm himself before talking to a strange teenager at 10pm, but the old man's perception of threat should not reasonably have been based on the crime spike south of him.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
All porn can be used as cuckold porn if the viewer imagines themselves to have a particular relationship to the performers but that doesn't mean all porn inherently is cuckold porn. You could make the same argument about basically all forms of entertainment, that watching/listening/reading about other people achieving great things must lead the audience to either delusionally imagine themselves in such a situation or spiral into inferiority and take masochistic pleasure in that inferiority.
The flaw in your argument is that you're discarding relating to a fictional character and imagining yourself in their place as a delusion not a key part of how human societies have spread knowledge and values for thousands of years. An ancient Greek could become insecure and depressed hearing about all the cool stuff Odysseus did and knowing that they'll never do anything that great, or they could be inspired by the story to seek out clever and unusual solutions to problems in their day to day life. The audience isn't cucked by the media itself but by how they imagine themselves relating to it.
Of course the knowledge and values passed on in a lot of mainstream porn are garbage because it's an audiovisual representation of a tactile experience generally aimed at the total indulgence of the preferences of one gender (usually men). You could watch what's popular in /r/chickflixxx and then go out and do some of those moves on a female partner and that would be a non-cucked way to engage with porn since imagining yourself as the man is no longer delusional.
The place where the comparison breaks down is that the audience for blackface was white people but the audience for 'woman face' is heavily female. It's not straight men who sit around and enjoy caricatured performances of femininity, it's gay men and straight women. This is partly anecdotal since the people I know who like drag are mostly straight women, but the RuPaul subreddit did a survey and it was 50% women and 38% men, trans men outnumbered transwomen ~2:1. Given that reddit's user base skews male that might understate the prevalence of women in the drag fanbase. A random masters thesis on James Charles I found on Google says his audience was 85% female.
Then there's Chrissy Chlapeka and the TikTok Bimbo movement which seems primarily aimed at women, though I can't find demographic stats.
The kind of 'Bumbly Bimbo' performances that appeal to straight men are well, porn. Belle Delphine is also doing an obvious performance of an excitable girl.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
The Peterson work they picked to go underneath the eifel tower is not one of the violent ones. It's based on some 1400's Italian book where a lovers kiss wakes someone from eternal slumber. If you don't project ideas of racialized dominance on the stylized white and black figures it's a sort of romantic piece with people dancing around the central couple.
The violent ones are shown in galleries to precisely the sort of person likely to develop an overly intellectual view of art.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
I think young men are more inclined towards edginess and tearing down social mores than building them up. So in the Bush-era when evangelical Christianity vs. atheism was the culture war then young men probably would have been on the reddit atheism side.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
Kids like wearing costumes. People who start cosplaying at like 11 or 12 because they like the costumes in the manga they read in the school library aren't in it to get simps.
It's difficult to fully disentangle any human behavior from social and status reasons, and anyone who has a hobby that's more popular with the opposite sex will have some dating advantages. Asserting women have no intrinsic enjoyment of hobbies is a misogynistic generalization.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
You know, the idiocy of Disney's "The Force is Female" push doesn't take a genius to figure out. I was talking to my wife about it, and I just asked:
"When we were kids, how many little boys did you know who liked Star Wars?"
"Tons."
"Did you know a single girl who liked Star Wars?"
"No."
It'd be nice to have some stats on this, and I'm not broadly in contact with teenage girls but interacting with the younger generation of women in my family (nieces and some considerably younger cousins) I was taken aback by the interest in "nerd culture". There was always a contingent of women into anime and they're into the cosplay scene a bit, but the rise of D&D youtube/podcasts seems to have gotten a couple of them playing 5th edition. The mainstreaming of nerd culture and a good representation of nerd IP like Dune means that a lot of them went out and gave Dune or Lord of the Rings a read even if none of them read the Silmarillion or the Dune sequels.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
Sympathy strikes are when a Union goes on strike because of issues between a separate body of workers and their employer. For example in Denmark McDonald's refused to abide by hotel and restaurant sector wide labor agreements that were technically voluntary. So in 1988 the Danish labor movement declared a series of sympathy strikes against McDonald's
Dockworkers refused to unload containers that had McDonalds equipment in them. Printers refused to supply printed materials to the stores, such as menus and cups. Construction workers refused to build McDonalds stores and even stopped construction on a store that was already in progress but not yet complete. The typographers union refused to place McDonalds advertisements in publications, which eliminated the company’s print advertisement presence. Truckers refused to deliver food and beer to McDonalds. Food and beverage workers that worked at facilities that prepared food for the stores refused to work on McDonalds products.
McDonald's caved and agreed to the sector wide standards and today McDonald's workers in Denmark make $22/hr.
More relevant to Finland is that in 2019 there were sympathy strikes in support of postal workers that spread throughout the transportation sector and led to flights being cancelled. I'll leave it to our resident Suomiposter to get into the details of that one but you can see how sympathy strikes can be incredibly powerful tools for unions. However they can be unpopular with the general public who don't like missing flights because the postal service is fighting over how to classify package handlers.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
The "vibe shift" is a product of the center-left having won political power while feeling that it could have won more power if it weren't for the young left going all in on "defund the police" and other woke excesses. During Trump's presidency, the dem base was totally addicted to a constant stream of outrage over whatever Trump did that day. In those conditions, it's hard to get anyone on the left to care about the excesses of wokeness because Trump did something worse in their minds every day. Now he's out of the picture, people are kind of looking back on what happened during the summer of 2020 and cringing, and the center left has an opportunity to squash some of the grifters and radicals.
This is a backlash led by center left so they're not going to repeal most of the gains of "wokeness", they're still going to be broadly pro-trans and concerned about gender and racial disparities in a way that most of this site finds objectionable. But they're going to try to push back on the stupid stuff that hurts them, like trans activists demanding everyone boycott a nostalgic video game with positive trans representation because JKR said stuff they don't like.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
I don't think it's just classic American 'prudishness' about nudity. Only 1/50 parents actually objected to nudity being shown (the other two objected to not being informed) and as soon as he's interviewed the Board Chair goes off about larger theoretical issues of parental rights and how they're definitely not showing David to kindergartners (it was sixth graders). In a normal political environment an art teacher failing to send out a permission slip they normally send for something like David doesn't seem like such an organizational failure you'd need to fire the school principal.
My guess is there was a long standing disagreement between this principal and the School Board Chair and he seized on an insignificant pretext to oust the principle. Or, this chair board is so into right wing education politics that he kind of jumped at the chance to do something and overreacted to a pretty minor incident. The left isn't the only group capable of purity signaling or expensive signals of ingroup loyalty. I would expect some overly censorious decisions about what minors should see to emerge from right wing educational institutions, even if it leads to ironic results like a "Classical School" not showing David.
Ecgtheow
11mo ago
It's specifically a statute against intimidating people with burning objects written for the KKK and now applied to this Tiki Torch guy. I'm not sure how broadly that will apply given most political speech doesn't involve burning objects.
The civil rights takeaway is bizarre. Pro-segregationist southern states set the laws MLK and others were tried under not a vague, establishment. The whole point of the protests was to be arrested in order to produce news footage of well dressed non-violent black people being dragged away from lunch counters. If you look at cases like the 'Friendship Nine' they had the option to pay a fine and get out or do hard labor in prison and they did the hard labor and stayed in prison. King's most famous piece of writing was produced in prison. Jailing civil rights protestors for the six months this guy is set to serve doesn't look like a silver bullet that would kill the movement.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
I don't think you're wrong that the media is more favorable to affirmative action than the public but this post is a low effort restatement of what I suspect is a widely held opinion here and so doesn't add much value If you found a non-opinion article from a mainstream news source covering the opinion and demonstrated how the subconscious bias influenced their writing that would be a lot more interesting.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
The audience for newspaper comics is old. Unlike tech where good programmers and creatives have lots of sway writers for regional newspapers are constantly being laid off so audience demands are important than staff demands. Therefore Adams has to do something management anticipates will be objectionable to it's boomer audience rather than to a staff of college educated millennials before cancelling him.
Page 15 of the indictment is worth a quick read. Trump is recorded with his knowledge and consent by an unnamed writer and a publisher working an upcoming book, at the time (July 2021) he was being critiqued in the press by a "Senior Military Official" (probably Mark Miley) who claimed he was concerned Trump was going to order him to attack [Country A] (probably Iran ) and he dissuaded Trump. Trump wants to convince the writer and publisher that this criticism is unwarranted, so he opens this recorded meeting by saying "Look What I found, this was [the Senior Military Official's] plan of attack, read it and just show... it's interesting". Later in the meeting, Trump says:
Trump: I just found, isn't that amazing? This totally wins my case, you know. (*Here I am assuming he means the public disagreement not a legal case) *
Staffer: mm-hmm.
Trump: Except it is like, highly confidential.
Staffer: Yeah [Laughter]
Trump: Secret. This is Secret Information, Look, Look at this. You attack, and--
Further in the conversation
Trump: This was done by the military and given to me, Uh, I think we can probably right?
Staffer: I don't know, we'll, we'll have to seem Yeah, we'll have to try to--
Trump: Declassify it.
Staffer: Figure out a -- yeah.
TRUMP: See as president I could have declassified it.
Staffer: Yeah [laughter]
Trump: Now I can't, you know, but this is still a secret
Overclassification is definitely a problem, and every administration seems to have some sort of classified documents mishandling scandal, from Colin Powell, to Petraeus, to Clinton, to Nikki Haley and now Trump. That said, recording yourself showing some random writer a 'plan of attack' for a potential invasion of "Country A" while bemoaning that you forgot to declassify them while you were president is an astounding own goal. I just have trouble buying this is 'the Deep State' cleverly ensnaring Trump when he could have just returned the documents or not done ridiculous things like this. It can be true that they are out to get him, and that also he lied to his lawyers and blundered into putting himself in legal jeopardy over an easily resolvable document handling issue.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
I don't know why Pirghozin would take his army to a different continent where they'll be dependent on Russia's navy and airforce for logistics. He has no leverage there and no guarantee of safety.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Could you elaborate on what specific harm showing an anatomically correct sculpture to sixth graders does to them?
The reasons we don't want to show actual pornography are varied. We don't want to encourage kids that young to have sex by showing it to them. We don't want them to conflate the exaggerated performance of sex in porn with normal sex and have them immitate it. And we don't want them to think adults showing them pornography is normal and prime them for future abuse.
I think a group presentation in the context of art history is distinct enough from some creepy dude showing you porn alone that it's not priming children for abuse. It's not a sexualized performance or a depiction of sex children are likely to immitate. It's possible 11 year old straight girls and gays boys will experience arousal at the sight of a naked male body for the first time and seek out other depictions of naked men, leading them to engage in sex too early.
I don't think David is so fake it's impossible to become aroused by looking at him, the healthy male body is normal site of arousal for women/gay men, but he's not designed to be highly arousing either. He also expresses the Renaissance ideal that the human body is a beautiful creation of God worthy of veneration and is undeniably important in art history. The school's policy of letting parents decide through permission slips whether the harm of potential arousal at the sight of a healthy male body outweighs the educational value seems wise and it's important to note that only 1 parent of the fifty kids actually objected to his inclusion, the controversy is that they didn't issue the permission slips like they did in years past.
A non-central objection: minstrel shows were one of the dominant entertainment formats in American during the 1800's where drag is subcultural. Drag is a tiny percentage of the entertainment options available to contemporary women, where it would have been one of the few available to black audiences and performers. Women also have a lot more commercial power and ability to create their own entertainment media than slaves did. It would be much more surprising for contemporary women to make up the majority of an audience for an entertainment format devoted to mocking them, then it would for some black people to have attended minstrel shows.
Straight men are the most underrepresented group among drag consumers, and my guess is they're not less interested in mocking women than women are. If the audience for minstrel shows had been entirely Irish immigrants, black people, and contained very few native born white southerners that would indicate something pretty weird was going on.
I googled "most followed beauty YouTubers" and depending on what list you look at gay men like James Charles, Jeffree Star, and Bretman Rock are somewhere in the Top 10. Gay men might be overrepresented in their audiences relative to their share of the population, but these aren't minor figures, these are some of the most successful people in the world at selling makeup to women. As you pointed out with the gay male 'gal pal' stereotype there seems to be a large subset of women that enjoys male performances of femininity and I don't know how to prove this but I strongly suspect that they don't find them demeaning
My core question is, what do you think the women who enjoy drag understand themselves as doing? These are usually young, pro-LGBTQ women who probably self ID as feminist, do they think drag performances are true reflections of how women are, that women are ridiculous, and mocking women is fun? I'm not a woman but I googled why women like drag queens and in this thread a female commenter says "it's a laugh at a performance of femininity not at women".
That makes sense to me. Drag queens are extremely technically proficient at make-up and they don't try to look like attractive women. They take a product meant to make women more appealing to the male gaze and exaggerate it to the point of absurdity. I don't think the idea is that women are ridiculous, the idea is that the performance society demands from women is.
Edit: I guess the way I'd put it is that I suspect what is being mocked in drag is not women but the performance women are expected to do in order to appeal to straight men. This is why gay men find it amusing because they are not attracted to women and so they find women's performance. Absurd. Some straight women are also alienated or frustrated by what they are expected to do to appeal to straight men and so also find a mockery of these expectations. Amusing. Straight men for the most part. Quite like what women do to appeal to them and are there for the group that is least interested in a mockery of it.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
The attack helicopter line always seemed plausible to me because kids say some weird things. The weak part of Reed's account is that she had a tendency to frame what could be very real malpractice by the clinic in maximalist terms that make it easy to 'debunk' by finding single counterexamples
Reed claimed that it was a common tactic to say 'you can have a living daughter or a dead son' then later admitted only one clinician said that. Reed said that patients weren't warned about vaginal tissue atrophy but it's listed on the pamphlet the clinic gives out.
Reed's affidavit claims "nearly all" of the patients have severe mental illness and that the clinic "almost never" allowed her to prescribe psychological care. Then the Missouri Independent finds parents (the Freels not Hutton) who says their child has no mental health issues and pursued social transition and counseling for a year before starting medical transition. So are they the tiny exception to the "almost never" and the clinic has them on speed dial to cover for the rest, or are they typical and Reed is exaggerating the prevalence of a few outlier cases? We don't have statics here for medical privacy reasons.
To return to the salacious attack helicopter bit, originally #15 from the Affidavit says that a patient "came to the center identifying as a communist attack helicopter". Now Reed adds says that was a line from a letter recommending hormones from an outside therapist. The first account makes it seem like people were walking in identifying as attack helicopters and getting prescribed puberty blockers on their first visit when really they had been seeing an outside therapist previously who recommended the treatment. Reed said she didn't know this was a meme and was concerned about that it indicated a lack of clear gender identity. We don't have the letter, we just have that she wrote the attack helicopter line in her Notes app contemporaneously. It's possible the doctor was a hack, it's possible Reed misread a joke, but being overly credulous of the recommendations of outside therapists is pretty different from handing out estrogen to kids coming in identifying as attack helicopters.
American healthcare is individualized and it seems plausible to me that there are doctors out there giving puberty blockers and HRT to kids who don't need them, it's plausible some such doctors worked at this clinic. Reed also doesn't seem like an anti-trans ideologue, but she also wasn't careful about making precise well documented claims.
Ecgtheow
1yr ago
Are Mr. Beasts new videos with Chris diatribes about the concept of gender, or is it just the same stuff he always made but with an awkward looking two months of HRT transwoman in them now? The most recent "Beast Reacts" video has Chris and she and some other guy just react to trick shot videos, maybe they talk about gender ideology in another video but I'm not willing to watch much more of their mind numbing content.
I think 2rafa's comment about finding MTF people 'grotesque' is the real explanation. There isn't some disagreement about gender theory here, people just don't want to look at a non-passing transwoman do replacement level reactions to trick shots.
Ecgtheow
10mo ago
I've always been somewhat annoyed by signs and bumper stickers that say the Marines or the Army protect my freedom. The guys manning the ICBM's protect my freedom and safety, everybody else does power projection in service of sometimes praiseworthy and sometimes horrible foreign policy objectives.
There's a lot of reasons but I'll focus on a crude materialist explanation; Industrialized societies are are less zero sum than agricultural societies. Agricultural societies under malthusian conditions are very zero sum. Any land that your group isn't farming is a limit on the population of your group. If you look at the Free Soil Party in the United States, the concern of Midwestern whites about slavery is not that it is unjust oppression. It's that white plantation owners are going to use black labor to take land in the west that could go to white yeomen farmers (it's not just that but that is part of it).
Some of the earliest anti-discrimination measures(Executive Order 8802 and the Fair Employment Practices Committee) come out of world War II and the need to utilize black labor in the American defense industry. When the pressures to be efficient get turned up you can't afford a luxury belief like segregation. Don't confuse discussions of the costs of wokeness' and affirmative action with the idea that total segregation is somehow more productive.
There are some places where there is really intense zero sum competition in industrialized societies. Unions had a complicated history with segregation I don't have time to get into here. But overall in an industrial society there's a lot of mutual benefit in economic growth and moving people from picking cotton in a feudal system to making steel in some of the world's most efficient factories is a good way to increase growth.
South Africa is the one society that kept segregation intact through industrialization and whites there are obviously in a different position from other anglo colonies in being the minority of the population.
We also have bio-mom's for women who give birth but put their children up for adoption.
I have a cousin who was adopted by my uncle, he divorced his first wife and she lost custody due for reasons he doesn't talk about but which must have been really bad since women don't usually lose custody. He married my aunt and they raised my cousin together since she was three. My cousin therefore has a bio-mom who isn't involved, an adoptive mom who she has occasional contact with, and a step-mom who has been her full time care-giver since age three. We can talk about the metaphysics of motherhood in circles but I can tell you which one she calls 'mom' and who gets the flowers on mother's day.
Trump's conduct here is bizarre, what is the upside of retaining these documents? Why consent to being recorded and then say "hey rando, check out these top secret invasion plans I definitely didn't declassify." Why lie to your lawyers about moving the documents? If you're willing to not just "accidentally" misplace some classified documents, but defy a subpoena to return them why be so sloppy? Why not have Nauta photocopy them and return the originals?
I can buy that Alvin Bragg's indictment was a politically motivated hit job advancing a novel legal theory, but I just can't see that with this. They gave him an out when they asked him to return the documents and he lied to his lawyers about returning them all. This isn't the clever deep state ensnaring Trump, this is him agreeing to be recorded showing classified military plans to some writer. It's either idiocy or some genuine belief that he's above document retention law.
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