ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
No bio...
User ID: 822
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
1yr ago
Last I was aware, Kiwifarms is still operational, using a protocol and software created and funded by the US Government with this use-case as one of its objectives. It ain't exactly normie-compatible since the URL is some long base-64 abomination only a Linux user would think was acceptable, but you can still talk there with sufficient motivation.
The problem with subversivity is that you can't be subversive without a value-add (something that gender politics mirrors very well with respect to men). As far as I'm aware, Kiwifarms doesn't actually have a value-add; it's just a place to sneer at people. Twitter, and those who would like to be employed there, are interested in socio-regulatory capture to enforce its monopoly on being the place you go to sneer at people (with "the only acceptable sneering is leftist sneering" being the subtext).
Contrast SomethingAwful, being the place a few cornerstones of current Internet culture had their beginnings (most notably, the entire concept of the "Let's play", being a multi-billion dollar industry today), or 4chan, whose unique mode of operation enabled its users to be the leaders in meme-creation for many years, spawned a few games, and whose stream-of-consciousness format lends itself to a wide variety of topics and subtopics not properly serviceable by any other forum. They don't exist solely to sneer, whether by happy accident (4chan sucked up all the non-sneering SomethingAwful users; if they hadn't been so Mean Girls, 4chan wouldn't exist in the first place!), or they only had the sneering take over after the fact (SA and Twitter).
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
1yr ago
Sticking point: do these observations hold across the entire US in aggregate? It seems like they do in other countries, which I find interesting for other reasons, but I think the assumption that the US is a monolith rather than focusing on its trouble spots may be a mistake.
Take Baltimore, for example- population 600,000ish, with 4000ish police, so a rate of 600 police per 100,000 people (disclaimer: I'm assuming the homicide and police population only for the official city itself, not its metro area). That's 3 times the national average of police to population... with a homicide rate that's consistently 7 to 10 times the national average.
Detroit, by contrast, happens to have the same murder rate, but with only 380 police to 100,000 people, so merely twice the stated national average.
So if the places that have most of the homicides also have more police than average, why do they also have murder rates (and infamy for police brutality) far in excess of the trend instead of the opposite like we'd expect? It'd be interesting to see an intra-state comparison as well as the national trend, and based on the above I'm not convinced it'd support the conclusions as strongly.
That said, adding 500,000 people to government payroll (in other words, making 1 in roughly 300 US workforce participants a cop) might arguably be intensive enough of a welfare program to have a non-trivial effect in crime reduction by itself (i.e. they do nothing but eat donuts all day)...
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
1yr ago
What's the appropriate mistake-theory response to strategic abuses of language?
Assume Prisoner's Dilemma rules where you saw the other player pushed the "defect" button right in front of you?
But really, they only have two options, and one of them is praising murderism (i.e. it's blatantly sexual, but that's fine). And sure, you can punish them for being part of the tribe that poisoned the well with safetyism for everything that isn't their pet project, but they have the power and incentive to deflect and deflect they shall.
That said, the mistake-theory approach to drag kids, and its ultimate steelman, is "safetyism isn't all it's cracked up to be, take risks once in a while", which is why I (and I suspect this is probably close to the political center) actually have a difficult time outright condemning it under those rules. Put another way, I have legitimately no idea how "It's not going to lick itself" is supposed to seduce anyone capable of understanding what that phrase means.
If grooming is the intent, it's clearly not particularly effective, and isn't going to work on a straight viewer regardless. In fact, the Junior Anti-Sex League is incapable of grooming straight kids, and even gay kids should be beyond their reach for the same reasons; that would require attractive teenage same-sex participants, and as far as I'm aware, Pride has a shortage of them. (Nudists are basically never the people anyone actually wants to see nude.)
often by putting inappropriate pressure on them to participate
Every Boomer that I know talks about their parents sending them to music lessons where the teacher would whack your hands if you did it wrong. Now their children are doing the same thing to their grandchildren, except this time they leer at you and grab your ass instead. And while I would prefer this not happen to anyone, I can accept it not being anything more than surface-level harmful, and it's better for kids that suffer this to recognize that their authority figures put them into an uncomfortable situation for political reasons and update how much they trust authority accordingly.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
1yr ago
SocJus left do police their own.
Trivially, no, they don't. Policing your own isn't something you have to do when you have power- that's what "power" means. Power means that even when a member of your group is credibly accused of actual grooming, you can simply erase the people who call you that (this is described downthread) regardless of whether or not it's true.
socially acceptable age gaps have only been shrinking in the SocJus left-dominated society
This is only really true for older man-younger woman relationships, though. Laws accounting for "underage sex" tend to be very barely liberalizing; where there are exceptions for straight relationships across or under the boundary they're slowly being expanded to cover gay ones as well (California is a recent example of this)- you'd expect these things to be equally criminalized if the laws were tightening rather than the reverse, though the movement is barely significant.
Revealed preferences of SocJus (or more properly, third-wave feminism in general) are that the movement is primarily concerned with looting men for the benefit of women, so you'd expect them to become a sort of Junior Anti-Sex League. Men want younger women, older women want (older) men to be restricted to picking amongst them instead of being able to use their resources to impress the young women, and will leverage their political power to that end.
As far as men fucking men goes... well, gay men are a fargroup of women, and a minority of the population, so it makes logical sense for feminist women's anti-sex objectives to be couched using its former underdog-coded pro-sex views as a skinsuit. And sure, maybe it does mean an increase in men having sex with boys, but boys are just future men, so any collateral damage that arises from that is acceptable.
The Right is absolutely correct to pounce on this, even though it probably only arises as a natural consequence, and their blind spot (being that they don't actually consider anyone failing a paper bag test, in this case 'being 18', to be a human being) prevents them from mounting a proper defense. So, "groomer" it is...
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
1yr ago
but leeching off the attention directed at their daughters rather than at themselves.
This is actually kind of odd to me; I thought that the entire point of Pride was to go around dressed in some horrifically-ugly fashion and get attention that way. After all, everyone else there is doing that (the ones that are attractive, by contrast, were too busy actually having sex to attend).
Seems like a lot of work to get your kid to do that, who (if they aren't naturally on board with it) will probably at least temporarily resent you for parading them around for a day through the freak show where people say uncomfortable things to you while you wear an uncomfortable, poorly-fitting outfit (drag expression is not generally satisfied with "go to the clothes store and choose the distaff/spear counterpart of what you're currently wearing" and is generally as flamboyant as possible on purpose). Bonus points for boys made to sit still while you paint their faces far past the point of female sexual superstimulus (at least, I'm pretty sure that's why the stereotypical drag outfit has eye shadow rings the size of shiners and lips that make intentionally racist caricatures seem modest by comparison).
That's a lot of effort, cajoling, complaining, and whining to deal with just to get one's rocks off for a day per year; as such, while I'm sure there are some people that are into that simply because that's a constant to anything, the people who are taking their kids like that are likely doing it as a political statement in the same way taking your kids to abortion protests is.
The mandatory masking for children in schools and daycare -- while adults were free to go to work and bars maskless -- was a major black-pill on how society is treating children.
Children, and especially teenagers, are the most discriminated-against group in society today; a utilitarian approach to anti-racism would start with them.
If we believe that parents want to give their children the same kinds of opportunities they grew up with, and literally every parent says this, the generation who needs to decide whether they're having kids right now (1980/1990s-born) grew up after the point where child rights were completely and utterly decimated. No wonder nobody wants to have them! If you have to have them on a leash, and they'll never mature under your watch beyond obeying simple commands... well, you're describing a dog, and dogs are cheaper. And better, because they're physically incapable of saying "no" and even more disposable than even kids in the 1930s were: can't afford them, drop them off at the shelter, and if they were still there you could pick them back up afterwards.
It's literally 2010s-era "I'm not having children because I'm saving the climate" except this time it's "I'm not having children because they'd have to suffer through 25 years of modern society". Same thing in Asian countries (it will eventually become a thing in India for the same reasons)- sure, you can have a kid, but if you do that you've signed your future human being up for 15 years of slavery your neighbors have cargo-culted their way into for no socioeconomic benefit whatsoever. It's honestly surprising to me that reproduction in Japan even exists; I don't think it's a coincidence that a culture with an absolute hellscape with respect to healthy family life also produces the highest-quality pornography in the world.
The only "freedom" these human beings have these days is to stay inside and play video games; forced to exist as 2 arms and a head is enough for a reasonable adult to seek death instead, and as such it's not a surprise that suicide is usually more deadly to the under-18 set than accidents. Which should be the first indication that that demographic really isn't "living" so much as "existing", but that's OK because they haven't lived long enough to know better.
Your right to enjoyment of your own property is non-existent; with CPS being abused by concern trolls to the point where they'll arrest you if you so much dare to play in the front yard. Freedom of movement doesn't exist either; god forbid you walk or bike to your friend's house or the corner store because the State can just show up and arrest you for no reason. Want to go home for lunch? Same deal.
[By contrast, elementary-aged children in the 1920s were more than capable of doing all of these things, in working conditions far worse than school, and far more dangerous than modern life in general, tends to impose. The claim that they're not capable of getting from Point A to Point B just doesn't wash.]
Your right to bear arms is limited so hard that if you exercise it and are caught you'll never be able to do so legally again. Kyle Rittenhouse was put on trial in part for, functionally, being subhuman (edit: temperature) while armed; the emphasis on "but 17, therefore he's not a human, and should be charged for daring to act as if he was" was everywhere.
[Contrast Boomers that grew up in rural areas, who have formative experiences hunting rabbits in the woods at 10 with a rifle, and teenagers with gun racks in their trucks to go hunting after school let out. Sure, you had to store your guns in the office, but you can at least argue that's reasonable to reduce theft.]
Taxation without representation; income tax applies to them but voting doesn't.
I could go on. The only justification for this shit is "it's fine, because they're subhuman" (who hold that pop-psych belief that you don't pass the paper-bag test until 25 specifically for that reason), and while we can certainly argue about to what we should take away from subhumans to the extent that we're right about their tendencies for violence, nonsense, and disorder, my argument against this is the Progressive one: offer these people reasons not to do these things and you'll see better results. It's so bad that even the teenagers themselves will accept the rest of society's behavior as justified for this reason, though humorously you might argue that's just a logical consequence of subhumanity.
And I'm still not entirely sure where it came from.
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Was it really the Satanic Panic, where Karen lost her mind because "muh D&D and pedos around every corner"?
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State agencies adopting extreme aversion to risk allowing themselves to become weapons of the bored housewife concern troll?
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Was it the cratering of the laber pool in the 1980s that solidified the segregation of the youth from the general public?
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Was it the dramatic increase in crime because the CIA was selling crack on the streets?
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The 24-hour news cycle and the Amber Alert (where 99.99% of its uses are custody disputes)?
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Teenagers running amok killing their classmates because they correctly assessed that their life didn't matter to anyone and had no social buy-in (which is itself likely an emergent phenomenon; spree shooters in 1998 would have been born in 1980 and thus grew up post-enclosure)?
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All of the above?
Even better is that, because abolition and miscegenation are (at least popularly) linked for what should be obvious reasons, anyone who dares attempt improve the standards of the under-18 set in society is clearly doing it just because they secretly want to normalize sex with them or otherwise expose them to danger for selfish reasons rather than actually wanting this class of people to have a life worth living for once.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
1yr ago
I don't think it needs to be quite that drastic (also, working youth not making enough to afford their own apartment tends to be a moral hazard, contributes to a 3.7-income trap, and as such needs barriers).
Anyway, there are ultimately 3 problems that stand in the way: infrastructure (transport required for even trivial tasks), safetyism (State abusable by concern trolls), and moral hazard (the people who create these problems are not the ones that will ultimately pay the price for them).
Some things (from "already done in some places" to "is politically very difficult") in the North American context:
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Take steps like Utah has to limit the ability for concern trolls to use the State as a weapon against children walking down the street or playing in the yard. This should ease pressure on parents who do live in areas that have parks available but don't dispatch their children to them for fear of CPS. Dispatching your kid to run the odd errand now also becomes feasible, depending on location.
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Fix the parks so that kids actually want to go to them and ensure technology is there to encourage meetups. Structures there don't have to actually be dangerous, but they do have to seem like it to be fun. Might require cleaning up tents.
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Subsidize and improve medium-speed personal transport options (which should counter the suburb problem somewhat). The powered bikes that you can ditch at mass transit stops are a good start, but if you managed to issue every kid in a school district one (they're about as costly as a cheap laptop, and would cost about as much as a comparable technology deployment) you can dilute the inherent theft problem (not that technology doesn't already exist to just key students to their own bikes) and don't have to constantly re-buy them as they get taller. Traffic accidents will probably go up as a consequence of more bikes on the road, though, so it'll require a body politic that doesn't (for lack of a more polite term) instantly wuss out at the first couple of injuries with the new tech, and it's currently illegal in most polities.
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Fix the education-social pipeline so people who've lost patience for school closer to when their biological need to belong to a society develops (about 16) can leave it and do something else that pays better than minimum wage, and harmonize training requirements for jobs with reality. If the best solution to crime reduction is "just give them a future; show them that participating will get them The Good Life(tm) in a reasonable timeframe", well, that would probably do it.
Re-creating the initial conditions for the "good life, back when kids were competent to do things we pretend they can't do now and didn't need to be hand-held through everything" isn't a panacea, but it's probably a good start. If the conditions are allowed to persist for long enough, and those conditions really were the cause of the former, then that emergent behavior should come back and we won't have to deal with so many nervous wrecks who "mysteriously" never developed the ability to do things on their own.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
1yr ago
The AR platform is only customizable to the degree it is in a post-GWOT, post-M4 carbine world.
Well, it always was capable of that.
The trick about the AR-15 is that it's trivial for anyone with a CNC mill and a couple of aluminum billets to churn out the entire gun. Older designs rely on stamping and welding (or casting and milling), and newer ones require plastic and/or aluminum extruding machinery. Startup costs are correspondingly high- Tommybuilt has to charge over 3 times the amount for a G36 clone as Aero Precision does (who aren't even natively a firearms manufacturer to begin with), and the Aero is lighter and more accurate to boot.
Hence the market for attachments- it's legitimately the only gun that can take anywhere near that kind of modification, and those OEMs need parts other than what they can machine on the router.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
1yr ago
At the same time, it's apparently totally acceptable to run around this forum screeching DEMOCRATS ARE GROOMERS
You... do know this is primarily a reactionary forum and is consequentially going to have a right-wing skew (thus be a bit more concerned about traditional purity, per Haidt's Moral Foundations) to it no matter the actual leaning of the participants, right?
The problem is that "anyone interested in teaching sex stuff to the under[age] demographic implies they're [at least not dis-interested in or concerned with] potentially increasing the number of under-[age]s having sex in the world" is... well, it's more trivial than it really should be to find edge cases where this is actually true.
But it's trivial to argue the opposite from a purity standpoint- average age of virginity loss is at all-time highs and Gen Z/A are on average more sexually conservative than their Gen X/Y teachers. So the progressive argument that more sex ed is having a cooling effect on under[age] sex is actually valid, but you actually have to make that argument in the first place, and it's confounded by the rise in transgenderism (though you could just point out the increased emphasis on it in schools lags its rise).
Of course, that's still not going to be enough to justify the abuse of State power to abduct children from families, but in fairness nobody tried to justify that one.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
1yr ago
Slashdot's voting system generally solves this problem, which is understandable given it was designed in the late 90s; you have a limited number of adjectives with which to flavor feedback (which can be used either positively or negatively), post voting is capped at 5 points, and users chosen at random only have 5 votes to bestow.
Importantly, there's no button that directly maps to "you're wrong/I don't like your argument/fuck you(r account's posting history)"- the only way to do that is to make a counterargument- and if you really feel the need to downvote something, and you have the random power to do so, you're burning an uncommon resource to do it.
It doesn't fully eliminate low-effort sniping (but even removing votes entirely doesn't do that; Tumblr and Twitter arguably have it as a design goal... as does 4chan, in its own way), but that's the cost of being able to distill community sentiment into a simple number-adjective pair (to help outside observers pick up the high points of the conversation and to be able to digest it quickly through auto-hiding the less well-rated posts).
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
1yr ago
but it's certainly a very right-coded space in terms of the culture war.
Well, the original poster is the one who inherently gets to set the framing of the argument. So, if the post is reacting to some event, it's more likely this framing is closer to the [assumed median of opinions considered right-wing]. And it's easy to see why- people just don't post "well, they're trying to take your kids away for XYZ" yet frame the argument as something they agree with when they actually don't, revealed by how they subsequently reply.
And it's certainly not impossible to argue against framing, but it's more work (and you get boo-lighted anyway); so even if we assume that "people who put in the work to justify their arguments" is equally distributed between [people more likely to post opinions considered left-wing] and [people more likely to post opinions considered right-wing] it's going to be [opinions considered left-wing] on the back foot of the debate most of the time.
Perhaps "high-decouplers exist on both sides of the aisle; the ones on the left are just more likely to lurk" is what the poll tends to be getting at more? (Remember, the general rule for Internet communities is that 90% lurk, 9% comment, 1% post; something that held true for the old subreddit, too.) People who understand that certain [left] framings probably describe real things, but are used in exactly the opposite ways they claim they are (for example, "intersectionality describes something real, but women were never, in aggregate, the oppressed gender") is not actually something that defines one as right-wing (unless it's being described by the left-wing).
I think part of what makes it seem more leftist in polls than it actually is is the fact that there are quite a few older former leftists who believe in things like socialised healthcare, a cradle-to-grave welfare state, etc, etc, but have cultural views formed in the 90s or 00s and consequently oppose modern identitarianism very, very strongly.
So they're not right-wing, but they are conservatives. Which is... well, kind of what the median conservative looks like ("liberals driving the speed limit" and all that), but it also betrays the fact that neither of these words are actually clear descriptors of what they're typically used to describe and almost by definition come with value judgment baggage. Avoiding that is generally why people hang out here, though, since if you're going to post what is functionally "leftists, reeeeee" you at least have to put in the effort; this isn't /r/CultureWarRoundup.
The goal is to teach that gay and trans people aren't perverted freaks and you should accept them.
And if their parents don't agree, and do anything but toe the Progressive line about it, we're going to send gunmen to kidnap their kids so they can be parented properly.
That is the argument to which you were originally responding, and if it's "right wing" to think this is an uncharitable characterization... well, no, it's just a fact.
The goal is not to alter the gender identities, sexuality, or anything else about children's identity.
But it's important that the people with the most power to alter that need to not know about how we teach, so they have less chance of countering if they don't like it. Of course, if they counter, see above.
So yeah- whether or not this is grooming is irrelevant because these actions are far more serious. It's cultural genocide, with the same arguments, the same justification, and the same mechanism of action that it was in the '60s against literal tribes (coincidentally, red in color). I'm sure this will only be applied in the most egregious of circumstances and not just in response to other Red Tribe behaviors that offend Blues but can't yet be similarly litigated, though- besides, they already have other laws to use in this way. I'm sure that, say, exercise of 2A rights as written has no bearing on deciding if a couple gets to adopt or not.
The continously applied, wholly uncharitible assumption, that trans people are a collective of AGP freaks trying to fuck minors
Is it unfair? Probably, yes, but the boundary-blindness of ex-men in particular really doesn't help the appraisal given that breaking one boundary implies breaking others; one would assume that Bs and capris would be sufficient to assuage the psychological requirement to feel like a woman, not side-cut skirts and fake tits large enough to require reduction surgery were they real. The fact that this is usually dismissed as "merely bad fashion sense, Stop Oppressing Women(tm)" does not help- I just can't form a mental model where "I need to take it to parody levels" isn't AGP- so, please, indulge me.
As far as fucking minors goes... I've yet to come across any evidence supports they're more predatorially-successful than average, so I'm not really worried about that (if they were, and it was substantial, we'd have a 12/52-style meme for it). Sure, it would be nice to make sure that a particular predator doesn't get away with it merely because they're society's chosen morality pet (in much the same way that flat abortion bans mean 10 year olds are forced to carry to term, which already happened), but this doesn't seem to be happening in outsized proportion for LGB so I'm not convinced it's happening with T either.
and that's the only reason why anybody would ever want to teach about gender identity in school
Do they teach about racial identity in school? If not, why not? It's clearly much more relevant as to how the world treats you, so teachers should obviously treat black students differently just because they are black. Imagine if you're a teacher talking to Jamal's parents and you're very concerned if they'll have a problem with him "acting white", so you ask ham-fisted questions about how they'd feel if they knew he was turning assignments in on time and scoring well on tests since, because he's black, his parents obviously expect Cs.
So I have a similarly hard time with teaching gender identity in school, aside from enforcing that students treat each other with the same lack of one the State does- a "your [protected characteristic] doesn't make you any less or more of a person" is sufficient to ensure classmates don't treat [minority] like freaks, and has been for the last 40 years. And I expect what in that light is "some people like pants, some people like skirts" to be treated the same way; and I want someone who constantly inserts their pet religion into everything to be treated just like someone who inserts their pet sexuality into everything regardless of whether or not it's shared by any student- not employed by the State.
Most of the anatomy stuff is probably OK; puberty comes earlier than ever before these days thanks to better nutrition, and stressful home situations reportedly make it occur even faster (probably an evolutionary response), so lessons before that are probably fine.
But whether or not it's grooming is ultimately secondary- because given this law passes, whatever is happening (or changes afterwards) will become physically dangerous to oneself and one's family to campaign against. They want this enforced at gunpoint, and to the extent that people voting for politicians that introduce these laws do not change their vote in response, I'm having a hard time assuming they're not at least sympathetic to the idea.
Nobody would do that here
Sure they would- California has lots of guns, but that didn't stop the early 90s race riots; $major_US_city metropolis has lots of guns, but that didn't stop the peaceful but fiery protests from consuming them. Rittenhouse was the end of it, but they certainly gave him hell for it and his friend was convicted anyway.
The problem is that you actually need a legal leg to stand on, and the Canadian right gave no reason beyond what is typical for protests for the citizens of Ottawa to start sniping from their expensive apartment balconies. Not that they even had any guns, given they're the ones begging the government to act aggressively against the people that do, but still.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
1yr ago
simply using UBlock, or Brave, or any one of the dozens of other ways to block Youtube ads is a really easy way to upgrade your quality of life to a surprising degree.
iOS has no on-device ability to block ads. Yes, you can do it if you set up a custom VPN, but that's work and added expense.
Android has several, including NewPipe and the fact that Firefox actually runs natively there (and as such uBlock works), but their devices are twice as expensive, get vanishingly few updates, and their top-end processors are 4 years behind what is available in an iPhone for half the price.
So you're stuck with an expensive boat-anchor or a nice device with ads; I don't begrudge the latter their choice.
Frequent updates, too, you're just wrong about that one.
No, not really. iPhones tend to enjoy 6-7 years of major updates; the next runner up is 3-4 for Google (and to an extent, Samsung), and shorter than that for everyone else (almost like they're optimizing for the case where you to buy a new phone when your term is up). And since the phones themselves are significantly more powerful, they remain more useful over that time.
Also, for 200 bucks, I can get a second-gen SE, which will be supported for longer than the Pixel 6A, and it's still faster (being an iPhone 11 inside). Apart from Apple mobile CPU design is still lacking; too bad there was only one PA Semi to buy out.
Sure, you have support after the fact provided you have an unlocked bootloader, where you just don't with iOS devices, but that's still more work and far from guaranteed anyone will bother (though I suppose if you buy a Pixel it's less of a concern than it is if you buy something from, well, Samsung, since community support is better on devices that aren't actively hostile to developers getting other things to work on them). Maybe they've improved over the years, though.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
1yr ago
You get better battery life from the same size of device and pages/apps are, all else being equal, going to render faster (especially if they're using a JS framework adapted to mobile to cut development costs). iOS has always had the edge on Android in terms of UI responsiveness, too; managed languages are a bit of a handicap right out of the gate, and Google has never really been one to emphasize UI polish (much like post-2012 Microsoft, for that matter).
Really, though, iPhones aren't necessarily the most advanced in terms of specific features- it's true that Android has some real interesting things going on with its support for foldable screens (2 apps at the same time with a screen that folds up actually is a big deal- make it 250 dollars so I don't have to worry about it inevitably breaking, and I'll probably buy one). But it works pretty damn well, and you can walk into any repair shop in the world and get parts for it.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
1yr ago
But my theory is that when the official policy is silence, in the era of social media, that’s effectively handing a megaphone to the fringe.
Yes, "silence is violence" has been the Progressive party line for a long time.
The trick is that, frequently, the yeschad.jpg response is the correct one; violence upon people who falsely accuse others of crimes for political gain rather than following the established law and procedure for that (on both sides) is generally called "justice".
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
1yr ago
looting as reparations is on solid logical grounds
Yes, but there's established procedure to do that.
The fact that a partisan can't convince most of the country's power brokers to impose them is not an excuse to go levy that tax anyway; the concept that at the end of the day, that partisan is not allowed to deny you the ability to defend yourself against them if they try to do it anyway... is what the term "bearing arms" means.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
1yr ago
pretty much everything of note policy-wise is decided at the provincial level
Criminal code, environmental regulations, and border control (import/export) are all federal. Those are really powerful policy levers, especially because the former and latter effectively dictate how provinces run their economies; inter-provincial trade is not a driver of provincial economies to the same magnitude Canada-US trade is.
Anyway, since the current balance of political power in Canada tends to favor the economically-unproductive resource-poor parts of the country (as in, every province east of Ontario, though Quebec is a special case), the economically-productive ones tend to get real pissed off when they start going to culture war.
Like imposing that border restriction was- if the US border control had the same functional effect (and I agree that it did- most truckers were vaccinated anyway), then imposing a symmetric one was unequivocally "because fuck you". And in this light, it's also noteworthy that the places the protestors overwhelmingly came from have had effectively zero political representation in the Federal government since 2019 (the Liberal party has approximately zero seats west of Toronto, and because there are no votes but party line votes in Canada when it comes to anything of real consequence, this functionally equates to "entirely shut out of government").
As such, I believe that the fixation on the Federal government for political ills (and the protests worked against Provincial governments anyway- AB and SK lifted their restrictions more or less as the protest began) was and continues to be the correct choice.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
1yr ago
I chose a new username, mostly to remind myself that every letter I write here is ultimately a waste of time better spent either directly fixing the problems I observe or acquiring more resources to act in that way.
It's... not as effective as I'd like to pretend it is, but baby steps.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
1yr ago
how do they deal with rolling blackouts?
The same way they do right now: the price goes up, and the people who can't afford it (either on their own, or because the resulting economic downturn by not being able to make goods when power is nonexistent or not at competitive rates resulted in them losing their jobs) are simply left to freeze.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
1yr ago
The right against self-incrimination is set forth in the Constitution of Canada
And it's overridden by s. 1 of the Charter, which states "this is all null and void if we feel like it".
I am much less likely to have those rights violated by the government when in Canada
I routinely have my property rights violated by the government of Toronto and Ottawa Canada. Of course, property rights don't exist in Canada (and if they did they'd be worthless so long as s. 1 exists), but still.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
1yr ago
My thoughts: It's sad that some progressive organizations might be reluctant to bring positive attention to the rebels or the tools they use because it arguably hurts their cause or something.
I mean, it actually can hurt their cause- if a man knows he can just magic up himself a gun, he has a stronger position from which to re-negotiate or enforce a social contract (and fighting against government forces is fundamentally a re-negotiation attempt, as is most targeted violence). For people who have, or aspire to have, the power to unilaterally impose such a contract, this is a problem.
So the establishment needs to show "that protest and resistance works and is good" per their internal narrative, but if they also anticipate (rightly or wrongly) being resisted in the same way (for any reason- human beings generally don't like being forced to do things at gunpoint), it's important not to go into too much detail.
"the most important thing to me is getting these files somewhere where they can't be taken down and where they can be accessed by anyone, because that's the only way for me to help rebels like these. I care about the downsides of making these guns available, but I've calculated things and it is greatly overshadowed by the upside."
This is the same argument pro-gun people use in the US as well- they just believe in arming said rebels up front rather than trying to fix it after the hypothetical dictatorship is imposed in an attempt to make it more difficult to create. Whether or not that's worth the price is... ultimately where the debate lies.
ThisIsSin
Personal corporatehood
1yr ago
What's stopping people from publishing digital, open source schematics for using more traditional metalworking to make firearms?
Because the people doing the publishing generally rent apartments or reside in condos without garages. Autistic single nerds in their 20s and 30s don't generally own homes.
It's hard to make schematics when you don't have the tools to test them with; by contrast, even a shoebox apartment can accommodate a 3D printer, a vise block, a bucket for EDM rifling, and some hand tools.
Simple economics!
Women achieved productive parity with men somewhere around 1900 due to the near-total mechanization of society at that time. The means of producing food and primary goods (mining) was, for the first time in human history, automated to the extent that physical strength (the primary advantage of men as a class) was rendered mostly to completely irrelevant for the average profession of the time. The impact of mechanization was so great that even elementary-age children could drive a combine, thread an industrial loom, or press a switch as well as a grown woman or man, which is the reason even they were part of the labor force at that time.
With productive parity comes economic parity, and with economic parity comes social parity, hence suffrage in every industrialized nation before the 1920s were over.
(And then, after those nations became great or bombed themselves/each other back into the Stone Age, the bottom fell out/was removed from the labor pool; child labor was the first to go for specialization reasons, and then most unskilled/nominally-lower-class labor got shipped to Asian countries for the same reason. The effect is the same- sociopolitical [and to a lesser extent, economic] consequences for these two groups have been substantial.)
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