gattsuru
1d ago
It might work for the ICE attacks, where we have a clear policy, perpetrators in custody, and alignment with other groups. I’ll say that Democrats could and probably should do that.
I think Democrats should do that. I don't think they can, and I'm pretty willing to bet that they won't.
Trivially, there's not been an outpouring of support for ICE being attacked by a literal roving mob. Bringing in the national guard to fix the problem resulted in a minor constitutional standoff rather than an embarassed looking-the-other-way. Newsom, widely suspected as the frontrunner for the next Dem presidential primary season, is in the middle of fighting ICE on several fronts, a good number of them ranging from mildly to hilariously unlawful, nearly all of them bad ideas, along with his more general accelerationist behaviors. A judge is on trial for concealing an illegal immigrant, and the state governor opposes it. The new Texas candidate for AG is on news today talking about how ICE invited this attack.
There's been no willingness to budge on sanctuary cities, even in the most egregious cases that everyone with the slightest clue knows is going to blow up in pro-immigration faces. There's no triangulation, no Sister Souljah from a Dem going onto ABC and smacking someone for saying gestapo. On this very forum, we have dishonest partisans who can't go further than promoting the Lankford bill, even this week, without ever confronting the serious flaws in their claims.
Not so much for the assassins. No surviving perpetrators.
Of the 'successful' ones, we have Kirk's killer sitting in a jail today. Utah's asking for the death penalty; tell me if you can find a Dem partisan who wants the murderer to fry and doesn't call the shooter a groyper.
One attempted assassin was on trial literally yesterday, tried (poorly) to kill himself with a pen after being found guilty. Another went trans and has sentencing coming up soon. Supposedly well-respected people aren't sure if the Zizian attacks 'count' as left-wing (later deciding no!). How has the coverage on the left side of that aisle looked, to you?
And, yes, if we include Luigi fandom, he just got murder one dropped down to murder two for his trial, and even if you think that's a necessary conclusion from NY's esoteric statutes, we have wide evidence of what happens in other legal cases where prosecutors or the Democratic party don't agree with a specific statutory interpretation, and this ain't it.
No comparable groups to discredit,
Several anti-immigration and anti-abortion groups were discredited for merely having similar-sounding names.. I don't think that's healthy, but we have Options, here. People in the 80s and 90s who were too happy to bring down the hammer on organizations that merely echoed the language or defended killers or violent protesters on the right, and we now have a surfeit of test cases. We'll see how it looks in a week!
no social networks to ban,
Funny to mention that!. ARFCOM had its registrar boot them based on rhetoric that merely looked like that of violent protesters; YouTube booted gun owners for things that they merely thought might ever look illegal. We'll see how this looks in a week.
no pet issues to excise from the party planks.
I mean, 90s Republicans didn't abandon anti-abortion or anti-immigration or pro-guns positions entirely. They just made massive and often-painful compromises until they could rebuild political capital. Do you think that's going to happen, here?
And widening them enough to punish all of antifa, the Democratic Party, or “the left”…that’s going too far. I understand that it feels natural for an average Republican to make that equivalence, but I believe it’s wrong.
I'd love to agree with you. The trouble is that I can absolutely agree with you, and also have nothing incompatible with :
It seems to me that not only does the left have a very serious violence problem, but that there is no one on the left capable of engaging with that problem in anything approaching a constructive way. Simply put, the American left has invested too much and too broadly into creating this problem to ever seriously attempt to resolve it. There is no way for them to disengage from the one-two punch of "The right are all Nazis/Nazis should be gotten rid of by any means necessary"; too much of what they have built over the last decade is predicated on this syllogism for their movement to survive even attempting to walk it back. The vast majority on the left cannot even bring themselves to admit the nature of the problem. But at the same time, at least some of them do seem to recognize that this is getting out of hand in a way that may not be survivable.
gattsuru
1d ago
Futzing around with force myography for gesture recognition. I'm not convinced it's better (or even 'good enough') compared to electromyography, but if I can get anything workable, it seems likely to be a lot more comfortable for prolonged wear.
gattsuru
1d ago
There is currently no Hi Point firearm that it is lawful to sell new in California. Hasn't been since January 2024.
gattsuru
1d ago
That's an unpleasant problem, but it's also a fully generalized one.
gattsuru
1d ago
gattsuru
1d ago
This is, of course, why no one ever compared Mitt Romney or George Bush to Nazis.
gattsuru
2d ago
What constitutes a “serious attempt to resolve” this situation? Does it involve public disavowals by the leadership? Cancelling any streamer stupid enough to say something edgy? The DNC taking responsibility for a terrorist act like it’s al-Qaeda? Maybe some time in the stockades, or a few televised executions? What would it take for you to feel like “the left” was making a good-faith effort?
... we kinda have examples, here.
To go to the Charcoal Briquettes Rant, the aftermath of the Oklahoma City Bombing had a wide variety of 'compromises' lean heavily to the progressive, specific legislation to make that form of murder or its advocacy more difficult, and while the execution of the bomber (under Bush!) wasn't televised, it's one of the very few times that the Left and Right agreed on just straight up killing a dude. The aftermath of anti-abortion murderers resulted in near-total ostracization of anyone promoting violence as a means to end or reduce abortion, long serenades from both political and spiritual leaders, the 'compromise' of the FACE Act, and several executions (at least one under a different Bush). Even minimally-violent disruptive protests that are wildly tolerated in other contexts are given a long standoff from mainstream Republicans and antiabortion advocates, today. Only two out of three people in the Flores murderers got a life sentence, but it also lead to widespread delegitimization of even unrelated border groups, in some cases treating them like terrorist organizations.
I'm not going to demand anything that strong, but I made a long list of things that would have surprised me had they happened, and of them, the closest to a 'success' story also has someone saying "But I will not reflect on our shared humanity, nor will I mourn his passing."
Your argument ab adsurduem has been table stakes.
I wrote this and a few other pieces in parallel, with a lot of overlap; I'll leave it here as reinforcement of the take, and also to highlight some of the actions that are not already in FCFromSSC's first glance.
A Sniper In Dallas
Shortly before 7AM, a shooter fired multiple times on an unmarked van entering an ICE facility in Dallas, Texas. At least three people were struck, with current reporting saying two of those have died and the other is in serious condition, before the shooter took his own life.
All of the victims were detainees. There was a short period this morning where people pondered the possibilities, and there were multiple, from every side of the political aisle to matters like drug traffickers or the schizophrenics.
Well, the shooter is reported to have etched an anti-ICE message on at least one cartridge. And I don't mean 'owo notices ur bulge', but literally "anti-ICE". The usual suspects are taking this about as well as you'd expect: we may never know the real motivations. But while it's hard to completely eliminate possible confusion or false flag or schizophrenic break, there's not much actual evidence here to really suspect it. The combination of poor aim, bad light conditions, and a long distance shot leaves little reason to need wonder why or how someone who was against ICE might have hit people ICE was detaining instead.
There are still unanswered questions: if the shooter gargled his gun under incoming police or police fire, or for some other reason; what, if any, connections to a broader political allegiance or perspective he might have had; what extent the shooter may have been motivated or radicalized by the litany of exaggerated or outright false stories about ICE.
Ultimately, they're only interesting in an academic sense, at this point. There is demonstrably no level of scrutiny that will cause major media sources to take poorly-sourced reports of hilarious malfeasance any more credibly, nor anyone to actually make the decision even if the incentives left them to want it. There's very little about this style of attack that has not been wargamed to death in security circles, there's never been a good solution proposed to it, highlighting this vulnerability at length risks raising awareness of other even broader attack vectors that haven't yet been opened up, and the people who should recognize that You've Got Offices don't act like it and haven't acted like it for half a decade, now.
A Shooting in Sacramento
There's an unpleasant detail, here:
The Sacramento Police Department initially arrested Hernandez Santana on Friday night, but he was released on bail the next day. The FBI arrested him hours later.
The federal charges are not the strongest: "possession of a firearm within a school zone and discharge of a firearm within a school zone, in addition to interference with a radio communication station". On the other hand, with the accused having a list of political targets marked "they're next", it leaves more than a little room to question why he was out of custody for the feds to arrest.
Sinclair later scrapped a proposed Kirk memorial, citing threats to ABC affiliates.
(EDIT: moved one section, since FCFromSSC beat me to it.)
California Closes In On A Glock Ban
AB 1127 has passed the state legislature and is going to Newsom's desk, where he's expected to sign it. While labelled as an anti-machine-gun-switch law, in practice this bans the sale or transfer of all extant Glock pistols. There's some extra irony, here, since this is the gun that Kamala Harris famously toted as evidence of her moderate bonafides, but the law still has an exemption she'd fit in, so that and a dollar won't buy you a cup of coffee these days. It's not even, alone, the broadest-impact gun ban of its kind, even if the contradiction to Heller is especially overt.
But there's an interesting background detail to the motivations background history of its advocates:
Moros Kostas brings a pretty damning set of receipts, for those interested in the fine details, but to cut to the chase, the bill's advocates specifically pointed to a mass shooting as motivating their ban, where the only person using a modified semiautomatic had been sentenced to ten years imprisonment for serious domestic violence in 2018... only to be let out in 2022, despite further violence committed in prison. The only way California seems capable of solving this problem was a side effect of giving the man methodone; tbf, faster than California's statutory death penalty, but at the same time unlikely to be very even-handed in its application and a little too late for the victims.
That shooting, coincidentally, also occurred in Sacramento.
Yukutake and the End of Hope
In March of this year, two years after oral arguments, two judges on the Ninth Circuit held in favor of the plaintiffs in a case where :
First, plaintiffs challenged the constitutionality of Hawaii Revised Statutes § 134-2(e), which provides a narrow time window (originally 10 days, and now 30 days) within which to acquire a handgun after obtaining the requisite permit. The permit application process includes a background check. Second, plaintiffs challenged § 134-3 to the extent that, as part of Hawaii’s firearms registration process, it requires a gun owner, within five days of acquiring a firearm, to physically bring the gun to a police station for inspection.
The Ninth Circuit couldn't stand for that. It's going en banc.
In theory, the increasing number of Trump appointees on the Ninth makes this a riskier bet, especially for such a pointless law. In practice, it there's been far more gun-control-friendly en banc makeups than raw statistics would consider likely, the Ninth has repeatedly flouted or outright broken its own rules in past cases, and SCOTUS has tolerated or overlooked it.
There's a fun side effect, here. Stephen Stamboulieh reports :
That's not a hypothetical, and it's coming from a man who's bet and lost 400k USD on the question of whether even the 9th Circuit could manage to be this shameless. Spoiler:
We're a decade and a half post-Heller, and there has been one single Second Amendment win in the 9th Circuit not overturned by an en banc panel, and that's single clear victory was against a one gun a month law that only landed that far because the state's attempt to tactically moot the case took too long. And while the 9th Circuit is the worst about this, it's far from the only one.
Giambalvo Has Dropped
[T]he “Applicants” challenge the constitutionality of the following license requirements in the CCIA: (1) the “good moral character” requirement, (2) the requirement that an applicant meet with an officer in-person for an interview and submit certain information, including the identity of other adult household members, whether minor children live in their home, character references, a list of social media accounts, and other information determined to be reasonably necessary,; and (3) the requirement that an applicant complete eighteen hours of firearms training, including two hours of live-fire instruction. In addition, the Applicants and McGregor challenge the SCPD’s alleged practice of taking more than 30 days—sometimes as long as two to three years—to process the license applications. Finally, the Applicants, along with Melloni and RFI (together, the “Instructors”), challenge the SCPD’s alleged policy of arresting individuals handling firearms during the CCIA’s mandated live firearm training[...]
[W]e affirm the district court’s decision because the Applicants cannot show that they are likely to succeed on the merits of their facial Second Amendment challenges to any of the CCIA provisions, with the exception of the social media disclosure requirement[...] As to that provision, we conclude that the preliminary injunction motion is moot[...]
This is, to be fair, review of a request for a preliminary injunction. To be less charitable, it's also the most naked Bruen tantrum law on its coast, and places the entire state of New York under a regime where Bruen is a dead letter. I try to avoid using 'Kafka-esque' to describe this sorta thing, but when the police are offering that they'll arrest anyone without a carry permit while trying to get the training necessary for that permit, despite state law specifically not applying to those training environments, I've lost any better descriptor. And it's won at appeal. There's a lot of the specific logic of the decision to criticize, but it's chopping down trees and missing the forest; the Second Circuit is no more likely to find even the most expansive, pointless, and illegitimate gun control unlawful than the Ninth.
Perhaps SCOTUS will intervene, or perhaps the lower courts will take a more serious analysis of historical tradition at trial. But I wouldn't hold my breath.
Koons Has Dropped
After 22 months since oral arguments, the Third Circuit has finally filed an opinion in Koons v. Platkin:
Today, we must decide a question of immense public importance: whether it is likely that provisions of New Jersey Public Law 2022, Chapter 131, which impose certain firearms-permitting requirements and prohibit the carrying of firearms in certain “sensitive places,” passes constitutional muster...
For the most part, we agree with New Jersey and join our sister circuits that have upheld similar sensitive-places laws.
Quel surprise: New Jersey's Bruen tantrum response bill can ban carry by anyone, almost everywhere. While the court leaves a fig leaf of some small number of constraints the lower court had given -- blocking a blanket ban on carry in private vehicles, an insurance mandate, and a 'vampire rule' that required explicit permission to carry on any private property -- the overwhelming majority of the lower court's opinion is now overturned, and was never allowed to apply. For the purpose of this case, a requirement for four 'reputable' sponsors for a carry permit and a ban on carry in parks are likely to have the biggest immediate impact, but the dissent spells out exactly how broad the majority's logic goes beyond this case:
Taken together, these broad principles allow New Jersey to prohibit one from exercising the Second Amendment’s central component nearly everywhere that ordinary human action occurs, and wherever “people typically congregate.” Virtually the only places that are not “sensitive” are locations where people don’t care about assembling with others, eating and drinking, commerce, divisive opinions, amusement, recreation, education, worship, public travel, leisure, community, and where children or vulnerable people are not normally present. In such wastelands, the majority grudgingly allows, one may carry a firearm for self-defense — if he has first secured the subjective endorsement of at least four “reputable” persons.
In theory, because this is about a preliminary injunction and the appeals court put much of its emphasis on the likelihood of harm (and then declared only the most extreme types of irreparable harm would count), later hearings on the merits could focus more on whether the laws are constitutional... but the court also quite happily dove into constitutional analysis with such wonders as "some railroad banned firearms, and some states banned shooting at railroads, so the state can ban carry on all public transport".
If anything, it's as likely for future hearings by this court to only widen what New Jersey may prohibit, rather than this preliminary injunction acting as the first restriction to tighten down over time. Suffice it to say, a strong victory for @The_Nybbler's "dead on arrival".
gattsuru
3d ago
Where the hell did that line even come from? It feels like an excuse to have a ton of sex before you get married. If you hadn't had any sex before getting married, wouldn't you both just figure it out with each other and there wouldn't be such a thing as compatibility?
There's forms of incompatibility that are just 'figure it out' and whatever you get, you get and that becomes your expectations. There's also forms of incompatibility that have massive mismatches in desire that don't care what each partner's expectations are, or where one partner has such limited desire that it's obvious to anyone who can look at other families and do math, so on. And then there's forms where a couple literally can't have penetrative sex to completion, either because the guy's pushing rope the entire time, the woman's gone to such an extreme level of vaginismus that no level of stretching is going to solve the problem without blood, or one person's only comfortable position is another person's snapped frenulum (you don't want to know).
Worse, there's a reason deadbedrooms is such a horror show, and it's not because I think anyone's going to die from blue balls (blue ovaries?). Even the traditional right-hand rule solution to the biological problem can leave the other partner wildly demoralized, and the bonding that most people get from sexual behavior papers over a lot of things that would be extremely frustrating in a roommate or a long-term guess.
There probably are alternative solutions to this problem, but very few of them are compatible with social conservative interests (even those used historically!), and many of them have other downsides.
For completeness, TheSchism has managed a post on it, the day after I wrote the above and two days after my original "in a week" deadline. I'll leave as an exercise to the viewer where to place it
But if they're not debating whether the shooter was a groyper, still, I suppose they're ahead of the curve.
gattsuru
4d ago
For icks, I share celluloid_dream's loathing of the rictus-grin-faced youtube promoter. It's not that they're always bad people! But the entire thing looks entirely less human than Reboot-era CGI.
For the other direction... I don't have the same variation-desire most people seem to have, especially around food. Every time I run into someone that makes a decision around not wanting to repeat something they did the day before and liked, it's a bit of a non-sequitur.
gattsuru
6d ago
Steamrolled Fixfox, a moderately clever take on the standard adventure game. A little less on the endless pixel-bitching, a bit more puzzler. Downside's that your AI helper makes Navi look like a latchkey parent, the pacing's a little slower than it needs to be, and the writing aimed for cozy and hit twee-as-fuck instead. I kinda wish it had leaned into the main gimmick a little harder -- there's a real strong theme about "you can just do things" that the game just barely grazes before swerving into You Must Identify This Toothbrush Before Use -- but it was still decently fun.
gattsuru
6d ago
H1bs are simultaneously undercutting wages but also not actually a replacement for domestic equivalents?
The simple existence of InfoSys is a strong argument against the efficient market hypothesis, the legitimacy of whatever contracting process got them involved, and a kind and loving God. The expectations for that class of ‘IT’ shop are low, but it is very, very hard to understate their competence. They’re banned from contracting with the Indian government. Cognizant and Tara are only a little better, and that’s in the sense that they’ve been caught benching (rather than replacing) employees that were such a liability as to be actively dangerous.
It’s most obvious in IT: a bad employee can absolutely wreck your entire business at the outlier, and cost you five or six times their annual salary at the more common end (go go gadget AWS). But there’s a lot of areas with the tail end risk are extreme.
gattsuru
7d ago
You do realize exactly how persuasive this attempt to wash your alliance's hands of even the possibility of responsibility looks, right?
gattsuru
7d ago
Weird possibility is EMI on the speakers turning the cables into wire antenna. Can eliminate it as an option by playing something normal at a very low volume; if the problem persists even when other things are driving the speakers, it's either not EMI or you're in the path of an active radar system.
Software-wise, I'd also spin up a Linux Mint LiveUSB, make sure the same issue happens from a completely different environment. There are non-malware Weird Driver Problems that can happen, including sporadically.
But the most likely problem's just the mainboard fan bearing. They're supposed to be good for five years MTBF, but especially in dirty environments they can get pretty bad pretty quick, and you'll hear a very characteristic buzzing sound. You can replace the bearing itself for about five bucks, but it's really annoying to do, so I'd just grab a spare fan module off amazon. Should have options under 20 USD. It's a pretty straightforward replacement once you pop the bottom shell off, though would recommend picking up a couple guitar picks to more cleanly pry the shell. Do be careful when unplugging or plugging anything in -- these tiny cable connectors will break off hilariously easy.
If you want to completely be sure that it's the fan module that's the problem, pry the bottom shell off, power up the laptop (on a clean, non-conductive surface), and then gently press down on the top of the fan's middle. A small amount of pressure will usually cause the noise to go away temporarily, and pressing down hard enough to make the fan stop entirely should definitely cause the noise to stop. Obviously not a fix, but great way to be sure before putting in an amazon order.
The sha256 above was calculated from this. I'll skip over a couple inside baseball ones because Amadan has convinced me that they're pretty, but they don't really break the specific metrics and they're easy for anyone who wants to call me out to check themselves:
Not a single person from that RPGNet thread is getting a ban or a warning for it: this is what their definition of A+ means.
Not a huge surprise, here; zero infractions for this entire thread. There's been one person slapped in their Infractions forum in the last week (for fighting over the Superman movie). Trouble Tickets has a thread asking about boycotting people for supporting Kirk; the mods haven't condoned it (though it's happening anyway without their intervention)... because they're worried about brigading and user safety. Today, there's a new thread terrified of the fascism going after Jimmy Kimmell, by an entire forum that's incapable of even noticing what Kimmel said or what the murderer did or was.
To be explicit, that means that there's a mainstream part of the web where "Do not feel sorry for this piece of shit. He, in an absolute sense, got what he wanted. He succeeded. And so laughter, sneers, and a desire to piss on his grave are much more appropriate reactions than grief or empathy. In a real sense, the world has been made better by his death. His killer committed a just act. There will be less tragedy on this Earth because he is underground and cannot commit further harm. And therefore my only reaction is 'good!'." and "I am grateful that his evil influence has been removed." is acceptable and 'Dobbs was correctly decided' is a dire attack.
And, unsurprisingly, they have not gotten the ARFCOM treatment from their DNS registrar. There's no boycott of their advertisers, or panicked newscasters diving into their politics, or anti-hate-groups supported by Harvard hacking in to call anyone's employers.
Not a single one of the Discords I've seen tolerate or blast out this sort of advocacy are going to get banned.
The same, and as far as I can tell, not a single one has. Most of them haven't even updated to reality as-is -- the best I can offer is the FFXIV FC that's at least struggling to recognize the obvious.
Julia Ioffe won't be blackballed from every publishing outfit right of TNR.
Ditto.
Neither Megan McArdle nor Conor Friedersdorf will have called out Matt Yglesias on an X page, and I've give 60% odds that they don't have three specific bad actors at all that they've called out.
Obviously on Yglesias, harder to prove for calling out specific bad actors. McArdle has two pieces at WaPo, pretty clearly all without specifics (albeit some humor when she 100%'s her cohost warning about "Democrats are so feckless as an opposition party, more disgruntled young men (and women) will give up on the political process"). Friedersdorf's only post-assassination article is a short piece blasting... Bondi, which fair and technically a name and also a got a fascinating case of dancing around the elephant in the room. Neither look better from their twitter feeds, but I'm open to correction if I missed something.
Nope. He's also promoting a conspiracy theory about some other schmuck's suicide as a racially-motivated lynching, not that anyone cares about disinformation anymore.
The SPLC isn't going to trim back its "hate map" to only focus on actualfa; it's not even going to public recognize that TPUSA didn't fit...
Duh. Also promoting the same conspiracy theories, coincidentally, as the only post on their Apathy Isn't An Option-branded website.
... and none of CNN/NBC/CBS/New York Times will go the full Palin.
Hahahahaha. CNN, NBC, CBS, even now seem to be trying to push hard on the We'll Never Know The True Motive. NYT finally got there despite their own best efforts. I missed them in my list, but ABC had a reporter give the shooter a loving and entirely hallucinated tongue-bath of his own. And that's just for the killer, specifically.
No left-wing or 'centrist' media is diving into rhetorical motivations, and you'd think Trump had banned the word stochastic.
We're not going to get the name of the guy who yelled "Hell No" at the federal house of representatives...
I'm open to correction, here, but as far as I can tell, no.
Pritzker isn't any more likely to get censured than Lujan Grisham was.
Okay, that's less of a prediction than 2+2 = 4. He's in the news now for asking everybody else ratchet down the rhetoric, while (falsely) denying that he called Republicans Nazis. Someone filed a bill of impeachment, and it's going nowhere, and everybody with an IQ above the single digits knows it. (also for taking a photo-op with a different murderer.)
I made some other predictions, in the last week, in PM. On Friday:
Will the DNC censure Ilhan Omar before the Republican Congress does (or will neither)?
The answer is neither; not a single Democratic congresscritter voted in favor of censuring Omar, and four people with Rs after their names refused to as well. I would like to make a contrast.
Will news organization slap down reporters publicly before the
Eye of SauronLibsOfTikTok brings it forward?
Today's conversation is about the government pressuring ABC over a 'comedian' making pretty overt lies, and the only thing remotely funny about it is that it'll end up with ABC's entertainment section having higher standards than their newscorps by a significant amount, and only thanks to harsh pressure. I haven't been able to find a single example of someone coming out of the blue and say they were fired before publication or the conservative outrage; I'm certainly open to correction.
Will any college treat a professor endorsing murder more harshly than they do a prospective student that said the n word, without the threat of conservative oversight?
Hah. There's been firings, but even the most overt calls to evil action by professors has taken direct threat from conservative lawmakers to get anywhere.
Will twitch and youtube start purging Hassan-likes before subpeonas start flying, where they already booted guntubers for such crimes as 'lawfully firing a machine gun'?
No. Hassan specifically got an NYT opinion slot to promote his positions about increasingly punitive rhetoric, and no one on the Grey Lady of Bullshit Record has felt it worth mentioning his less-than-one-month-old call to literally disembowel his political opponents. There is a post of Destiny getting banned from Twitch floating around... and it's from 2020.
Will the people -- even now! -- trying to confidently paint the murderer as some Groyper get banned from reddit for disinformation posting?
somethingiswrong2024's still there, and still apparently huffing whippits as hard as possible. Open to having missed anything, here.
gattsuru
8d ago
You mean that became more right after cancelation?
No, I said, specifically:
- "progressive targets of cancel culture" who
- "after getting any support from conservatives"
- "haven't turned around and bit back".
That is, they stayed progressive, and didn't promote censorship against conservatives. I'm sure they exist, somewhere! Maybe, from your list, Williams, albeit not very consistently. But if your defense is that people thrown down the hole with the rest of us (sometimes) don't punch us or call for others to punch us, that's great, but it's not very compelling as an argument.
gattsuru
9d ago
I'd be surprised if the porn and ERP were particularly useful for that. I won't say those spaces keep their jorking material and their political advocacy separate, because they don't (cw: fully clothed trans / hyena fem wearing tight pants from behind), but there's enough difference that a prosecutor is going to have a lot of work to do in order to get a judge to sign off on presenting the smut as evidence rather than the political discussions. Again, not a lawyer, not legal advice, and the rules are pretty open-ended, but this is pretty common a problem.
gattsuru
9d ago
I mean, how do you surprise your live in romantic partner with a political assassination?
The same way you surprise everybody else: keep your mouth shut and your material hidden? We are here on the Devil Sacrament three principled libertarians and a zillion witches website; I know some people here share everything with their SO, but we do realize that it's not the only option, right?
gattsuru
10d ago
I'm very skeptical about re: RICO. The number of predicate offenses isn't that broad, either for the federal or Utah-specific one, it's hard to prove the other traits.
I'd expect the administration to do a scattershot attempt to undermine various pro-trans groups based on proximity, but I'm also skeptical that they actually get anything bigger than Armed Queers SLC, and most of the others will end up benefiting from the attempt.
(which presumably you trust as a fair source since you used it)
remzem
gattsuru
?
I've got an icon on my posts for a reason! And on that specific matter, I specifically and try to caveat YouGov almost anytime I do reference them.
EDIT: I'm also extremely skeptical of YouGov's specific poll question here given the combined use of the Likert scale and literally never showing its breakdown.
gattsuru
10d ago
And then people on this forum will say: but think of all the people killed in BLM, it’s an isolated demand for rigor… and this is chaos speaking through them.
Behold, the rapid ease with which the descendant of Darwin manages to produce certainty that his enemies will act as conveniently as possible.
Most of the better-publicized examples tend to be culture-warry and tied to emergency response stuff that's hard to measure directly, but there's a lot of stuff in this class, too. For a well-documented-if-poorly-known one, I'd point to checkrides.
Pilots are required to pass a checkride for their pilot's certificate and for a variety of add-ons after that point. These exams are lengthy processes that can only be provided by FAA examiners directly, or by FAA-approved examiners called Designated Pilot Examiners (DPEs). FAA Examiners offer the service for free*, but have become increasingly unavailable over the last twenty years; in the modern era, >95% of exams are operated by DPEs, amounting to tens of thousands of exams per year. Because of the exam's complexity, it's very rare for a DPE to do more than one exam per day, there are a wide variety of practical constraints due to weather and other environmental conditions, and there are less than a thousand DPEs in the entire US. That was in an awkward but plausible equilibrium for most of the 2010s, but post-COVID, there was both a glut of new pilots and a lot of DPEs who had drastically reduced availability (it's very difficult to make a full-time job, so you get a mix of retirees and weekend warriors), along with other constraints getting baked into the system that made it hard for remaining DPEs to maintain the same velocity as before.
As a result, if your flight school did not have a staff DPE (technically against the rules, but largely tolerated), it could take months and cost over a thousand dollars to run the test for your initial pilot certificate, and if you failed -- or even if you had to cancel because of weather! -- you'd have to pay it a second time later. Most students also had a maximum time between graduation from their flight school's internal tests and when they even attempt a checkride, so other delays could lead to even more costs. This was a very well-known problem in pilot communities to the point I'd heard about it by March 2022. By 2024, a law passed with a specific requirement to start an office specifically monitoring the problem and by 2024 Congress had sent the FAA a further letter asking what the fuck was going on. Complete mess, entirely an infrastructure and coordination problem, zero culture war politics...
And a lot of internal political problems. Flight Standards District Offices (FSDOs) manage DPEs in their geographic area, and while there's been a long waiting list for DPE applicants, FSDOs don't like actually certifying them or managing a large number, both because of the recurrent inspection overhead and for more interpersonal reasons. (I dunno if the DAR/DER stuff is any less bad, but I've heard stories.) And once you became a DPE, the gig was extremely renumerative while their shortage existed, and coincidentally the people who did get to become DPEs inevitably were or became well-known by the FSDO. Fixing this was, inevitably, going to ruffle feathers.
But allowing a snowjob of a biannual report to float through with a general Solving Inefficiencies was easy. Guess what we got? The first biannual report revealed that the FAA, six months in, still wasn't trying to collect data on how much DPEs were charging. Almost zero information about why FSDOs had so low a pass rate for DPE applicants, or why wait lists to apply as a DPE were so long. They did switch around a lot of individual DPE in and out in the local area (sometimes without even telling ex-DPEs why!), as if they only problem was the physical offices of those DPEs, and for a good year it actually got worse in our area. Modernized the search tool, and it's almost impressive how bad it is. Absolute epitome of following the streetlamp effect off a cliff.
Tbf, it's still early game for the current admin; I don't have great hopes.
More options
Context Copy link