[cw: exactly what you think from the block quote]
I suppose training an adolescent dog to be the one penetrating is possible but it seems extremely difficult; aren’t dog members not nearly as stiff as humans?
I'm... aware enough of certain scandals to suspect that at least some dogs could be trained to mount a specific person without a massive level of other infrastructure, but I'm skeptical it could be done at the scale, organization, and direction claimed here. And then you need the motives on top of that.
gattsuru
8hr ago
That's definitely a model and it does explain an anti-gun court that doesn't just grant-and-eviscerate all the time, but I'm kinda filing it under 'Thomas is writing a dissent', and there's still not enough there to explain the relist count. Thomas can write very long dissents, but especially if the other eight (or even seven) justices were never going to take Bruen seriously, he has all the more recent to write that long dissent as soon as Snope dropped last year. If he's not and knows he's not persuading them, the relists do nothing.
Conversely, if Thomas is getting something non-obvious out of it, why wouldn't the majority just GVR, per curium, or give a long angels-on-pin-head meaningless opinion? Roberts never has to assign the opinion to Thomas against post-Bruen, and even if he did, it clearly didn't do anything.
Counting To Four In Duncan
[tl;dr: woolgathering that's likely to be outdated in seven weeks. tl;dr, shit's fucked, shit's weird, and it's actually weirder than it looks at first glance even from a specifically pessimistic view.]
Five major cases involving magazine capacity restrictions, assault weapon bans, or a combination thereof, are waiting on SCOTUS. This class of restrictions has been a major focus on the national stage since 1994, and while the federal ban has sunset, many state bans remain and have grown. They've become more common, have banned wider or more arbitrary classes of guns, have invoked lower capacity limits, and have provided fewer and fewer procedural protections to previous gun-owners, such that several jurisdictions now offer no grandfather clause at all. As since those procedural protections included the phrase "When dealing with guns, the citizen acts at his peril" since 1994, it's not been a space of light disagreement.
Duncan, Viramontes, Lamont, Gator's Custom Guns, and Grant are all requesting certiorari before the Supreme Court, covering bans on firearm magazines or various rifles. Gators, Duncan, and Viramontes are at 13+ relists (aka from December 5th). Lamont and Grant are at 8+ (aka from February 20th). I'll be using Duncan as a shorthand, here, as while it's always possible that one of the other cases will end up The Important One, it's at least recognizable name. The current SCOTUS session will continue with seven more conferences, ending at the tail of June.
It takes four votes at SCOTUS to grant certiorari. A grant is by no means a win on the merits. It's not even a guarantee of a decision on the merits: cases can have certiorari granted only for an immediate remand, or later dismissal as improvidently granted. It's just the most basic opportunity.
And a request for certiorari is a process. A large portion of requests aren't granted or denied at their first hearing. Instead, the interesting cases are relisted, reviewed for a week or two, and then either granted or denied. Classically, a few relists are a good sign for a case's odds.
But there's a limit, there. The case with the single greatest number of previous relists before a certiorari grant and full merits review is Masterpiece Cakeshop at, depending on how you count, 12-14. It was a pretty extreme outlier in many ways, quite a large number of which don't make the comparison happy for gun rights proponents. Bostock had 10 or 11 at grant, depending on how you count it: less than Duncan, and with clearer alternative cases. Otherwise the normal course, to borrow from SCOTUSblog, "[l]ess is more with relists". Snope got 15, and then denied. This session's highest-relist case, Smith v. Scott, received an extremely unusual 17 relists... to be granted, vacated, and remanded, not reviewed on the merits. That's an avenue that is useless for Duncan specifically, where a past GVR just resulted in the 9th Circuit rubberstamping their original logic (along with some procedural gimmicks), and where none of the hardware cases have an obvious vehicle to justify further review. That gets even worse for a cluster of cases like this, where granting one and denying others means that whatever merits decision SCOTUS gives will be quickly cabined to only that specific case's bounds.
Normally, talking about requests for certiorari runs into problems because there are just so damn many options. SCOTUS only has mandatory jurisdiction over a tiny number of cases, grants optional cert to only a similarly tiny number of others, and can choose to grant or deny certiorari for any reason or no reason at all. Some cases with minor disagreements and esoteric scope get immediate grants, others with massive breadth and serious disconnects get juggled and dropped or just dropped, and when death penalty or habeas corpus cases are involved the rules easily exceed the scope of this conversation. Everything from whether a response is requested to how quickly the first conference is scheduled can mean something or nothing. There's a small industry of tea-leaf readers who really like being humiliated, because it's not a job with great success rates on those predictions.
Here, though, a wide breadth of the normal options are overdetermined away:
- SCOTUS refuses cases where four justices can't agree to hear on the merits. That's what the certiorari vote is. Here, though, we know four justices have declared that this is a matter that SCOTUS should hear soon: the three dissenters (Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch) in Snope did so by dissenting, and Kavanaugh specifically claimed "this Court should and presumably will address the AR–15 issue soon, in the next Term or two". Kavanaugh listed Lamont and Viramontes as two specific examples: it makes no sense to point to them, and then not know if they're worth granting or denying cert. And it's not like he can be waiting on the other three in his list:ANJRPC is waiting on SCOTUS to deliver Wolford and Hemani, Capen is three or four years away from getting to SCOTUS, and Miller is stayed until Duncan finishes.
- SCOTUS (sometimes) refuses cases where lower courts are 'percolating'. That was a thin fig leaf in Snope, and it's since become transparent. Even if Kavanaugh's list was only of court cases that would inform SCOTUS, rather than specific ones to grant cert, Viramontes, Capen, Lamont_, and Miller have all resulted in court opinions turning Bruen into a dead letter.
- SCOTUS (sometimes) refuses cases where the lower court action is appealable, but not final. For Gators, Duncan, and Viramontes this is the last opportunity. If denied, they're not coming back. Grant and Lamont are decisions on a preliminary injunction, but if denied these cases won't make it back to SCOTUS return for three or more years. And if interlocutory appeals were a genuine problem Kavanaugh wouldn't have highlighted Lamont or Capen by name: they were preliminary injunction cases years from their final judgement.
- SCOTUS (sometimes) refuses cases even where the legal question is important, but where some specific detail of the case's factual history makes it awkward, inopportune, or ugly, especially where a better alternative vehicle is coming up. Here, we have a wide variety of options, and while no case is ever genuinely simple, there's enough variety that the court can easily pick one as multifaceted or straightforward as it wants. Meanwhile, of Kavanaugh's list in Snope, only ANJRPC v. Platkin will be up for certiorari on final judgement next session, and has wide overlap with existing options. The only other new serious challenge is Benson v. US, and that overlaps almost entirely with existing cases.
- SCOTUS (sometimes) relists cases where another case on the same topic is being actively decided, to later grant-vacate-remand the case. In theory, this saves judicial resources, so that SCOTUS does not have to give the same decision in multiple sequential cases. But the only relevant Second Amendment cases are Hemani (prohibited person) and Wolford (sensitive places), neither of which are related to the topic of firearms hardware bans. Worse, Duncan in particular has been GVR'd before, after Bruen, which did have significant topic overlap and wrote the specific framework Duncan was supposed to use... and just resulted in procedural hijinks and a near-identical decision from the lower courts. No plausible dicta in a prohibited person or sensitive places case (or combination of the above) will change the 9th Circuit's behavior.
- SCOTUS (sometimes) refuses or relists cases where lower courts are deciding a substantially similar question and likely to release a decision very soon. The only remaining relevant court case here is ANJRPC. It's near-certainly not going to issue before both Hemani and Wolford drop, though, and SCOTUS knows it, and SCOTUS controls when those two cases were heard and when their opinions will release (very late May, June, or July). These cases can't have gotten relisted since December for a lower-court opinion that wouldn't come for months, and may not come before the last conference of the session. SCOTUS doesn't have to keep relisting a case if it's waiting on some external information; it clearly didn't do so here.
- SCOTUS (sometimes) relists cases when deciding a topically similar case. But Wolford was argued January 20th, Hemani was argued March 2nd. Still not compatible with the relist scheduling.
- SCOTUS (sometimes) relists cases when trying to select which one of a cluster to make the lead case, or which to grant and which to deny. But these cases have been and on the radar for over a year, and their traits aren't changing by the week: the constant relists don't fit that model.
Worse still, many of the 'alternative' explanations -- the ones that don't match to 'justice is blind', but everyone accepts happens -- don't fit, either:
- Justices don't want to grant cert in big cases that they know they'll lose big (aka 'big defensive denial'). This has been the perennial
excuseexplanation since well before Heller: a premature case can leave residue that would destroy entire movements. But there's little, if any, chance of that here. Forget the question of adherence to the Second Amendment: a reversal of Heller or Bruen would require Roberts and one other judge to explicitly overturn a recent major case they signed on. If he's in the majority, Roberts would have to specifically assign the opinion to the judge writing that. He'd rather eat glass. - Justices may not want to grant cert in cases where they know they'll get a small loss, or a half-assed and incomplete victory (aka 'little defensive denial'). This is the Rahimi problem, where the case doesn't overturn precedent, but it does entrench new exceptions to the Second Amendment. Roberts did exactly that in Rahimi. But Rahimi did get certiorari, it didn't change the cert vote for Hemani, and the results of a Duncan decision along similar lines are already baked-in: every circuit likely to see a hardware ban already has standing precedent neutering Bruen. The worst-case plausible scenario for rolling the dice is the same as not rolling the dice at all. More confusing still, if Roberts and Barrett were willing to do that, there's strong support from the progressive wing of SCOTUS to trim back Bruen and/or Heller, and that's not happening either.
- One proposed explanation is that the Snope three and Kavanaugh want to avoid granting certiorari to a case that would neuter other upcoming cases. But that doesn't work, either. If five justices are willing to sign onto a decision in Duncan that will neuter any upcoming pro-gun decision, the same five are willing to grant certiorari and overturn those upcoming pro-gun decisions whenever they actually happen.
- Delaying doesn't even save the opinions from any relevant lower-court case: Duncan will not be getting oral arguments before ANJRPC's en banc opinion issues; even assuming that opinion is pro-gun, a grant today only determines whether SCOTUS is deciding Duncan informed by that opinion, or ANJRPC to overturn it directly. And, of course, ANJRPC may well get an anti-gun ruling, anyway, at which point there's nothing for an anti-gun Duncan to disturb.
- Justices may want to delay until a better court composition is available. But there's little, if any, chance that will happen here: the two oldest members of the court are on the dissent from denial of Snope, and Alito in particular is already getting calls to retire because of it.
- Justices may want to delay until a less politically sensitive environment is available. But a grant now means a case being held in early 2027. The environment isn't getting any less sensitive in 2028 or 2029.
- Justices may want to delay until a less politically charged environment is available, in what I've criticized as "look, we didn't vindicate their fake rights or your real ones". But the cases lining up for 2028 and 2029, don't look great here, either, and it's far from clear the court's ever going to have a quiet season.
- Justices may want to delay to firm up their own positions, or persuade colleagues to shared positions, or to gather information. But this is a case that's been explicitly on their radar for a year now, been to SCOTUS once before in 2022, on a topic that's had national relevance since 1994. There's nothing happening now that didn't happen when talking Snope. The typical proposal is Kavanaugh or Thomas trying to persuade Barrett, here, but that only works if there's something they can only persuade her while relisting and not between grant and decision, and that if they fail to persuade her there's something they're protecting by waiting. Neither applies here: the justices aren't kept isolated between conferences or court sessions, and Bruen is a dead letter without further SCOTUS intervention.
- Justices may relist a case repeatedly when writing a dissent from denial of certiorari. Morbid thought if you own a Freedom Week gun and live in California, but worth spelling out. Yet I'm pretty skeptical that it would take Justice Thomas six months to finish figuratively tearing apart the court's center or trying to build new frameworks, and in a world where Bruen is a dead letter, it's not clear anything he'd write here could matter, and he has to know that. Worse yet, if he knew he was going to be Snoped again, he could and would have started writing the broad strokes a year ago. Any justice writing today is writing in the shadow of Snope, and if the vote breakdown is remotely similar, then the every justice knew something like this was coming and had time to prepare.
- A specific justice might have changed their mind. Kavanaugh said the court should grant certiorari for a case like this, in this time period, but he said that a year ago. Yet that's hard to believe. Kavanaugh has said assault weapon bans were unconstitutional and should be reviewed by SCOTUS since Heller II in 2011, and again in his statement regarding Snope just last year. What would change his mind in 11 months? What would change Alito, or Thomas, or Gorsuch?
Some writers have also proposed a model of SCOTUS relisting to consider the very short-lived circuit split in Benson. But that decision came on March 5th, Washington DC filed a motion to "Suspend Precedential Status of Opinion Pending Petition for Rehearing En Banc" the very next day, and the court granted a petition for rehearing en banc on April 22nd. There was no change to the relist cadence, and now that en banc appeal is schedule the circuit split no longer exists, it's near-certain that en banc court will overturn the lower court decision. It's also just a messy case for a bunch of more pragmatic reasons, not least of all that it only applies in Washington DC, and only for a law that the feds are saying that don't plan to enforce.
There aren't many options left.
Politics and optics are the simple and ugly explanation. It's also one hard to square with individual decisions. It's trivial to explain why SCOTUS as a whole, or Roberts, might want to punt a case as long as possible. It's hard to understand why a 1-2-3-4 count ending in Kavanaugh or Gorsuch or even Barretts makes a decision on optics, and decides that decision results in a weekly announcement such that they're not moving yet.
To spell it out, the court can't relist indefinitely. Whatever political cost is coming from grant or denial will happen no matter how many times the cases are relisted. Each relist makes the cases more noteworthy, and if any one gets held over a session, it becomes even more noteworthy. Meanwhile, a denial or grant happens once. Certiorari votes are anonymous and aren't even recorded publicly. Neither grant, nor denial, nor GVR, are written down by name and voting record. There's no way to treat one choice as distributed and one as personal. The impacts are the same: the relists just add to the impact.
Snope was not the first hardware case to request certiorari from SCOTUS. Harrel v. Raoul was 2024, and Friedman v. City of Highland Park was 2015. The 15 relists are no small part of why Snope is radioactive and Raoul was just annoying. The wait doesn't look good, and it doesn't make the eventual grant or denial look better.
A long dissent from denial is still possible: Justice Thomas can write some shelf-busting pieces when he wants, or Kavanaugh could be trying to baffle with volume where he couldn't dazzle with brilliance in Snope. Not encouraging to have a member of SCOTUS just outright bullshit in a Statement Regarding Denial of Certiorari, but if the line between politicians and judges gets fuzzier, it shouldn't be a surprise.
Stable equilibrium is the weirdest one. It takes four to grant certiorari. Six, in effect, thus can deny it, though there's a little weirdness on that since one justice can hold or reschedule a request. It takes five to win a case. This leads to the somewhat bizarre scenario where there may be enough justices available to grant and win a case in one direction, but not enough to deny certiorari the other. Another not-fun thought for gun advocates, since in this scenario it implies that there could be five justices waiting to neuter a theoretical pro-gun ANJRPC even if they can't actually refuse Duncan, but it has an unpleasant amount of explanatory power.
Unknown/Other is, unfortunately, the last refuge of scoundrels. There's some internal process we can't know about, there's some special case, there's some unusual deal-making happening, or some other invisible and/or novel process. This could, by definition, mean anything, and could just as easily resolve at any time, or never.
It's also, in a morbid sense, the most damning. These cases hold the rights of tens of millions of people in balance. That's just a fermi estimate of the people in those areas with lawful-but-now-banned guns. For California alone, hundreds of thousands of people will become felons overnight for the bare ownership of simple magazines that they purchased lawfully while relying on the protection of a federal court order, and there is no grandfather clause, and it's not the only example. And for each and every one, the process has devolved to a question mark, and has been for over a decade.
There's an old saying that a right delayed is a right denied, but you don't need to rely on aphorisms, here: in a majority of the United States, the Second Amendment is a dead or near-dead letter. That's not just relevant for assault weapons or big magazines: it's let the Second Circuit ban stun guns and undermine the Fourth Amendment. Dexter Taylor is still in prison. Heller still can't register the firearm from Heller I, and all Benson demonstrates is that to have a chance he'd need to break the law, be arrested, and imprisoned first. Percolation has come at the cost of long-standing and irreparable harm. There's longstanding precedent that the court recognizes infringement of rights themselves as irreparable harm, and the reality is that they don't, here.
I don't want to overstate my pessimism, here. In the immediate aftermath of Snope, I'd said "To be blunt: this SCOTUS will not be address the AR-15 issue in 'the next Term or two'", but 0 isn't a probability. If you absolutely forced me, I'd still put a 20% chance of a grant on one of these five cases, either this session or by holding them over to the next session (though the holdover itself would be a further unusual step). That's a lot lower than the professional tea-leaf readers. Doesn't make their models wrong, even if I get (unlucky). Doesn't help that they've either overlooked, or not included, much of this analysis.
gattsuru
14hr ago
Hadn't tried it when I posted that. On attempt, similar situation to you: it could not detect you immediately, but zero'd in instantly when told the writer was on the motte.
gattsuru
1d ago
I actually would say that the signs of the growth of this genre don't come from fantasy-focused sites -- they come from traditionally-vanilla sites where these kinks are gaining significant ground... When I say "influencers" I mean something more like "onlyfans creators" and "pornstars"; a growing genre of pornography, even softcore, is "woman berates you on camera for your inability to have sex with women," which as a sign of the times is something along the lines of the rivers turning to blood.
That's fair, though in turn it's harder to get serious numbers. PornHub-Straight has a cuckold category, and it does beat VR porn... but it's a third the size transgender stuff, a fifth the size of public sex or squirting, and half the size as explicit watersports. And that still has a bunch of stuff that's not actually excluding the male sub from having sex with his wife, nevermind berating it.
It's also hard to separate popularity from prominence. I don't know much about the het side of OF, but last I looked one of the biggest personalities on the gay side was feederist kink. This is a weird, (literally and physically!) unhealthy redirection, to the extent I can understand it... and it's also incredibly rare as something people actually want, and afaict isn't something you can get trained into. It just naturally favors concentration, both because feedes are rare, and because the nature of the kink favors multiple feeders. That's still bad, but it's bad in the way Jackass is bad, rather than because it's trying to hypnotize people. If it weren't for the inevitable anorexia or bulimia, it'd just be dumb.
Unfortunately, I can't find even bad numbers on OF kink breakdowns, so I can't really speak to or against it in deeper detail.
I'm not so vanilla as to be totally prudish, but I admit that reading this part made my skin crawl.
That's fair. They are weird kinks, and I tried to pick ones that were weird in the specific way you're motioning around, rather than, say, omorashi.
Do these things strike you as wrong because of their motives, because of the degree of possessiveness, or because the actions don't fit your sexual register? Most women I've met into this sort of marking aren't especially possessive (for women, damning with faint praise as that might be by gay standards). Male impregnation kink (uh, straight or gay) can focus around the exact same 'we're together forever' now thing, as can just the 'fingernails down back' kink, or even people who get really worked up over giving hickies. Are couple's tattoos or piercings bad because they're Szasz-adjacent, or just because they're trash?
I also think #3 is much sadder than you're giving it credit -- it's not about "wanting oral sex and demanding it," but genuinely sad stuff, like a woman whose reddit post I once saw talked about how her husband calls her ugly and she was looking for "male submissives whose task it would be to praise me highly", which is all kinds of fucked up no matter where someone lands on kink.
Those sort of situations exist, and they are sad, and there's a lot of variants on it. I just don't see the recovery as the sad bit, necessarily. The initial abuse is sad. Maladaptive coping mechanisms do happen, and they are bad as a tautology, and those are sad.
Getting off on a merely weird coping mechanism feels more... nonoptimal? Inefficient? Getting into relationships where 'value my appearance' or even 'don't call me ugly' is a sexual ritual rather than just room temperature is a limiting factor because a lot of guys will genuinely find that goofy, but it doesn't mean you can't also have it as the room temperature outside of the bedroom (or the scene), either. But the asshole ex-husband caused the damage; this is just the repair work.
If you have this coping mechanism, it's worth admitting and spelling it out, both to yourself and to potential partners. It is a limitation. Even small stuff can be enough of an ask, and some forms are a lot more invasive. That's true of a million things, though.
In general, I find desires for domination to be deeply uncomfortable, and again I just can't differentiate them from predation. I can understand the masochism-pleasure-pain thing, and I can understand the "obedience as permission" thing, but what I find incredibly hard to understand is sadism. I hope I never understand it.
That comes into a difficult spot, because there are some useful notes to show ways domination can be different from predation, or how healthier (or at least more sub-friendly) forms of sadism look, if sometimes weird ones that are far away from what you see as sex (or far away from what is sex, thank you fucking machines), but I don't want to throw them out if they're going to be actively harmful for you.
I do resent to an extent the fact that women I've dated have pushed me to accept those kinds of kinks, and it's a consistent thing for me that romantic, slow, intimate sex is what I enjoy and is memorable to me. Rough sex just doesn't even feel like sex to me, in a way that's hard to describe.
I can empathize with the division: even as someone that likes subbing, it doesn't take much that doesn't fit the scene to break the mood, and I've experienced it. Dunno if it's as rough for me as for you, but it's definitely a difficult situation, and actually pushing back can be uncomfortable.
Not wanting a single drop of it's absolutely fair, and honest, and something you can and should draw a thick red line around. Just because someone has these kinks doesn't obligate you to try them out, and even if someone has these kinks for sympathetic reasons, that doesn't mean anyone has to try them out.
[disclaimer: I might be reading past you, given some other discussions you put forward separating this-category-objection from stuff like hotwifing or stag-and-vixen or other sub/dom-themed-but-not-matching kinks. I've tried to trim this down so it isn't a tl;dr of completely missing your point if so, but I apologize if I did in fact just miss your point.]
If you're just saying the physics, biology, and psychology aren't friendly to it, I'll agree with and go further than that. Even if you go looking for a power bottom, male or female, the relevant mucus membranes in question get tired out a lot faster than a top will get chaffed; if you go looking to get pegged, the artificiality of a sex toy is practically small fries compared to how quickly even fit women tire of thrusting; if you want to get beaten black-and-blue, it's actually a pretty big psychological ask for the person with the flogger. For some stuff, there's not even the potential for direct interplay: there are definitely women pegging tops who match pretty well philosophically with male subs, but a male foot fetish sub and a female foot domme are usually looking for entirely different things.
But I don't think "a sublimation of the sexual into the enjoyment of denial" is the only, or even most common, response.
((Hell, I'm not convinced it's even the most common source of denial fetish, though it probably is top for heterosexual men.))
That class does exists: the whole self-flaggelating 'hit me because my boner is evil' thing does happen sometimes, the human pet who's about getting stuffed into a cage and ignored, the guys who are into chastity not because the denial or test makes the sex hotter but because it's about being desexualized or unmanned, the cuckolds that are only visible in the scene to make sure they're not getting off or pathetic for getting off, so on. There's some finesse about whether the influencers are 'deliberately' inflaming the kink, rather inflaming the treatment of heterosexual male desire as fundamentally unhealthy, but to be fair that's somewhere between asking about how many angels dance on the head of a pin and tomato-tomatoe sorta difference.
So I'm definitely not debating whether it's present or got that directionality, or that (most) of it is unhealthy.
I'm skeptical that it's massive, growing, or that common. I can understand why it feels that way, given the tendency for media involving this genre to end up shoved into random unrelated spaces, to be extremely off-putting, and to be hard to avoid without getting exposed to the off-putting parts.
The numbers are a good deal more complicated. That's with the caveat that statistics aren't very available or reliable, as evidenced by anyone taking Aella seriously, and what statistics are available merge stuff that's clearly inside the category as from outside. But we don't see cuckolding or male humiliation overtaking a lot of more mainstream kinks, or even weirder kinks that act as sublimation of prohibited desire for sex, on sites specifically focused around fantasy.
Most of your proposed male sub kinks speak to that -- even the woman training the man with a clicker, or whatever, subsequently gets ravished. To correctly obey a woman's sexual desires is to dominate in the bedroom.
That's not quite the fantasy. There's a fair argument that this is incredibly 'safe horny' - it's not quite 'step on me' bad, but it's still pretty intentionally portrayed so that the man's sexuality is 'blameless' or 'victimized' - but it's still recognizing the male as an object of desire, if sometimes a lopsided or goofy one. This is not a video written from any perspective but androphilia and value-of-men, even if it's also very much not going to have the man top afterward.
That's not common, from either side. It can still be psychosexually weird: the full service sub wants to prove himself 'worthy of sex' by doing chores, human pets want to prove themselves a good boy (and get weird about those literal words) as a way of replacing or burying inhibitions, the guys who need to be bound so their second thoughts don't fuck over their boner. Hell, there's a not-undeserved reputation for het male subs as selfish because they have a sexual script centering around them and their orgasm even as they're 'worshipping' a woman in ways that require her to bend over backwards.
((Not always literally, but the figurative parts can be worse. Yoga has nothing on what a foot fetishist demands of their 'tops', and asking a loved one of any gender to hit you hard is a psychologically big ask!))
On #1... I believe the majority of self-initiated female dominants are psychopaths, extreme narcissists, or in general people with serious mental disorders who see sexual domination as a power trip.
This class exists, but I'd caution that they're going to be overrepresented in both the literature and in the markets (for lemon reasons).
There's a lot of psychosexually weird stuff that favors femdom. A bound sub is 'unthreatening', and there's a lot of reasons women find that a lot easier to get or stay in the mood. Bruises and cuts and piercings are a way of making a male sub 'yours, irrecoverably', and women don't have to be so possesive as to be mentally ill to want that. Chastity can be a way of making sure everything he does, he does for you, and then after-orgasm overstimulation can get a guy to do the funnest and most attractive motions imaginable. Pretty much every pegging top I've run into frames it as a trust and vulnerability thing. A guy in an uncomfortable pose that needs you to make control the situation... needs you, that's not rocket science. A leash is a fulcrum, a blindfold is a way to drive focus.
There's a mismatch even when this comes up - just like the foot kink, these aren't mirrors of their sub variants and especially not of their male sub variants - but it's more subtle than the numbers alone.
- doing it because their male partner got them into it, and his enjoyment of it positively reinforced it or 3) into it because they actually want something else and they've sublimated that desire into dominance.
You offer some degenerate forms of these motivations, and I recognize they exist and happen, but this is also... just kinda how relationships work?
I don't want to overstate that. Presumably someone on this planet has encountered a perfect mirror to their own desires and interests in every way. But for everyone else, a good relationship necessarily means growing to work with your partner, and making compromises to meet their needs, and spelling out compromises so they know how to meet yours.
There's a significant discrepancy in what gender prefers sex in the morning or evening. If you're in a het relationship you're more likely than not going to end up not matching on that. It's nothing that gets spelled out on online hookups, or tested by matchmakers, or shows up on people's bumper stickers, or in Seinfield. Often it's not even something that's an explicit discussion. It's just something that's gotta be handled.
Kink mismatches don't have to turn into something broken. The median form of #2 probably doesn't look like a big heart-to-heart conversation filled with therapy speak, but the boring 'hey, could we try X', 'doesn't tickle my pickle, but seeing what it does to you is kinda fun' is actually pretty enjoyable from the latter perspective, and while it doesn't necessarily turn into liking the kink on its own, for some people it can. The median form of #3 might not be 'real' domination in the same sense as someone that someone who had Feelings from the first time they saw a cartoon character tied to a railroad, but there's a lot of male subs for whom 'I order you to go down on me' is a not-that-briar-patch moment and it's a perfectly reasonable exchange for them.
That's not just or even primarily a sex thing. What's the Proper way to load a dishwasher? Because if you live with someone long enough, you'll pretty quickly find that there's a million ways to do it wrong. Does the responsibility for cleaning out the laundry lint trap fall on the person removing the clean clothes, or the one putting in dry ones? I'd never have tried FFXIV if my SO didn't get me into it and probably never would have liked it without that had anyone else tried; that doesn't make it bad. (The same SO also liked Alien: Prometheus, so we can definitely declare that Pavlov is definitely not mind-control here.)
I personally believe a big part of the large numbers of female submissives has to do with women genuinely desiring hot sex, but feeling ashamed of this, for traditional ('sex is sinful'), status ('don't be a slut'), and feminist ('male sexuality objectifies women') reasons.
Yeah, especially the central cases, will agree here. It's not the only motivation for kink, but it's definitely a major part and probably in the top three for femsubs (and I could believe it beats masochism-as-learnt-response and submission-as-permission-structure).
It's also not hard to find women whose three extreme kink interests are exactly the same: "free use", breeding, and CNC. In other words, sexual instrumentalization, impregnation, and rape. What are women desperately afraid of? What are the complaints we hear from women about their fears of men?... IMO, I think this is another form of painful (and not always true) schemas about the world being sublimated into a kind of resigned acceptance, and therefore made in some way pleasurable or sought-out.
I'll quibble that most 'breeding' as a kink is more about primal and unprotected sex (to the point where 'no pregnant, only breed' is a snowclone). 'Free use' is typically more about sublimating the need for explicitly saying 'yes', but they're desperately afraid of that for traditionalist, status, and feminist reasons, too. There's a literal women-as-livestock version, but it's not particularly common.
((I think pregnancy kink and 'stuck' kink are probably overrepresented as a woman's extreme kink? But they're pretty far from top-ten as extreme women's kinks go.))
But my bigger objection is that I don't think it's fully about fear, or at least fear alone. There's a lot of people who have complicated feelings about motherhood and have a impregnation kink, but it seems like the overwhelming do need to have at least a complicated feeling on the matter; with fear and some other consideration, even if not a consideration you'd ever want to go with. If you just hate it, even the more fatalistic women just have backup plans.
I guess you can say I have ethical and psychological critiques of the kink community. I don't believe they're in general bad people (although predators love to wear the language of kink like sheep's clothing), but I do think there are unexamined psychological problems, pain, and mental illnesses that seriously affect the community and those deserve to be interrogated.
Yeah, that's reasonable, and I agree. You don't get vore fantasies from a healthy perspective about what sex should be, or need to tie down your romantic partner to sate your anxiety from a centered and stable mindset, (or, to self-criticize like orientation play if you have a healthy relationship with your own identity). There's a lot of kinksters that are coming to kink from a fucked up place, or get there and find that they're among mad people now and have been for years.
I just don't think they're necessarily a self-abnegating or sexuality-abnegating fucked up place.
gattsuru
2d ago
Can you say what the CAD program is? SolidWorks has drastically greater requirements than FreeCAD which has greater requirements than OnShape, and the closer you get to (or above) the first side of things, the more it's going to control your requirements.
For RAM, I'd suggest a minimum of 16GB and ideally 32GB for your use case, with a minimum of two sticks (because of how DDR works, there's a significant performance penalty to 1x32GB vs 2x16GB). Given current RAM prices, I'd personally want to wait for later and upgrade when RAM prices drop - it is the single easiest component to upgrade - but I recognize that may not be possible for your use case. Still, be aware of things like how many slots your motherboard has and what max memory the CPU supports: a motherboard with support for four sticks of RAM gives you a lot more options even if you think your starting value is good.
I'd recommend the desktop-and-disposable-laptop combo, unless you have strong business requirements for CAD-on-the-go. You can get a well-refurbed ThinkPad T480 or E15 around 300 USD; getting a powerful desktop's equivalent specs on a laptop will cost you much than that, and will be a much worse use experience at the desktop, and be harder to maintain.
I'd also consider whether you want a pre-build, or want to build your own. Most prebuilt gaming machines are going to optimize for a use case that isn't yours: gaming generally favors more GPU and less RAM than even the SolidWorks use case will want, and many CAD programs are (still) extremely single-thread-heavy in ways that gaming has largely moved away from. That said, there's not a massive price penalty compared to the same CAD performance in new workstation machines. Building your own can save more money (though it will probably take some careful looking at mobo-cpu-ram combos right now), but it does mean following the instructions or video guides carefully, and using a tool like PCPartPicker to keep an eye on compatibility problems.
I'll... also caution that trying to future-proof for five years is doable and probably easy, ten years is plausible, and fifteen years is an exercise in frustration. The Computer Of The Future in 2011 would have involved a 80GB-256GB SSD for your operating system drive, a first-generation Core i7, and 8-16GB RAM. I actually managed a handful of these for office work, and even without the CAD requirements, they bogged down bad by 2020, and that's with repasting, cleaning, dusting, drive upgrades, and psu replacements.
Have to spoiler-tag each paragraph individually. Dunno why it's better-behaved in the preview than in post. Use escaped control characters or periods to keep the paragraphs separate after.
gattsuru
4d ago
Huh. That's a little frustrating because I can spell out, if not necessarily in complex or deep or particularly informed, how Mignola's art works at fundamental Technical and Arc points, in ways I can't gather from Klee's; I can show how several other artists, especially in the comic world, either descended from Mignola or evolved in parallel, in ways that I can't from Klee's work, or even (what seems to me like) Klee's better work.
But that may be, and may probably be, a limitation in myself. I don't have the abilities even basic artists develop breaking the composition into its underlying shapes and motions of lines.
I guess I'd have to ask whether that power is relevant because Klee achieved it in his works, or because he influenced it such that others could fulfill it later?
gattsuru
4d ago
Fair, and advised. That skeleton had seemed like a good idea at the time, but it's gone well past its best-buy date.
gattsuru
4d ago
I've got a piece I keep meaning to polish for Clockwork Thought, about the Five Qualities. It's meaningful to note where a work excels at one quality and not others, or where it intentionally sacrifices one or more quality to augment others.
- The Technical: does this writing have complete sentences, are the lines drawn right, does the music actually sound like music, can I believe this lube works
- The Arc: does this story have a plot, do the lines turn into a complete whole, does the music have proper rising and falling action, does the erotic pacing feel like or work with arousal
- The World: does this story say anything about its own characters, does the art tell us anything about what's outside of the frame, does the music leave any stanzas unsaid but implied, do the character feel like they'd boink off-screen
- The Themes: does this story say anything about the human condition, does the art point to or highlight contrast in non-obvious behaviors, does the music bring a listener to an emotional poise, does the sex actually feel hot rather than just clinical
- The Message: does this piece say anything about the outside world, and if so, does it say it successfully (and, to many reviewers in at least some contexts, do I agree with it). Note that a message doesn't have to be deep - most porn's message is just X Action or Y Person Is Hot - but if you've ever seen smut without that, the importance is pretty overt.
... but the flip side is that these don't really apply, here, even if I think they're more interesting questions.
I mean, prove me wrong, but to my eyes, Angelus Novus's defense is what it says, but what it says isn't in the actual artwork. There's more Theme or World in the smoke on the paper than in the ink. The technical, arcs, and the world on paper just don't have anything going on.
Suppose you go into a museum and you see a Renaissance-style sculpture. It fills you with awe, and you feel changed by what it tells you about the vitality and divinity of the human form... Now suppose you read the placard, and it says “made c. 1995 by a Boomer from Ohio, who mass-manufactured it and sold copies to rich dentists to put in their McMansions.”
Because stripped from the tonal whiplash, this seems like it's less hypothetical, and more like it's just how many people see the world. I've spoken about Johnny Cash's Hurt and Air Traffic Controller's Blame, and I'll spell out that the latter has literally moved me to tears... when I first saw it tied to a bunch of badly animated scenes from a glurgy kid's book. The Sacred Chord is now as closely tied to Shrek as Smashmouth's All-Star. FLCL had burnt into the way I see the world, and the show-runners spent over a decade working their way up to a cockblocking joke, and compared to what some specialized therianthropy writings have done that's not even the worst option.
I woke up the next morning, and I was still the man who cared about those things. There's other options available, but all of them are worse.
But once you bite that bullet, the treatment of artwork as transformative or transformation as artwork doesn't actually save you from the underlying problem and disagreement about recognizing the value of it and individual pieces within that framework.
gattsuru
4d ago
It's not so much that I'm taking it at face value because I feel like it, but because the prosecution has to run with this theory. Okay, they don't have to, but if they don't they run into evidentiary concerns... If they want to run with a different theory, they aren't going to be able to introduce the confession.
? Do you have a name for this rule? Because while the prosecutors would have to supplement the confession, but it's still very good evidence for many of the prongs of their theory (and various rules re: completeness/prejudicial effect yada yada not relevant here). I -- and three different LLMs -- can't find a principle where they aren't able to introduce the confession just because they disagree with the defense.
I wouldn't think the prosecutor would find that to be a worthwhile tradeoff.
The prosecutor has objected to this indicated sentence, and did not plea bargain to it himself before this point, and had charged and continued to chase the enhancements.
And maybe a jury will buy them. But we're not talking about a conviction here, we're only talking about sentencing, and all it really means is that the judge is permitted to take them into consideration.
It also means that the judge has the media circus, all the reported testimony, and oh, somebody who's really familiar with courtroom and judicial politics just said something about "a lot fewer people are following the case now than would be if it goes to trial, and advocates for the prosecution have to deal with the elation of the guilty verdict followed by the disappointment of the sentence."
I think this actually gets to the heart of your complaint, namely that you don't think the penalties are severe enough.
No.
I'd be prefer a system where justice is resilient, reliable, speedy, and punishment is light for all but those rare offenses with the clearest intent and surest evil. I'd also, alternatively, be fine with one where we accept that justice is slow, and imperfect, and tries to compensate by throwing the book at those few caught. We don't have either of those systems.
Instead, we have one where the penalties are severe and the process itself is severe... sometimes. And then other times the penalties are far lighter, and the process involves a judge bending over backwards to accept a defense's not-very-plausible claims and bend them til culpability disappears like a stage magician's worst trick. And while the disparity isn't solely explained by political considerations, they align better than the severity of the offense, or the culpability of the attacker, or the innocence of the victim, or any of those things that makes for a sympathetic-if-not-quite-ideal blindness of the judicial system.
That's an issue for politicians, not judges.
Porque no los dos? It can not simultaneously be true that the judge has widespread and unquestionable authority to give a wide variety of sentences ranging from the abominably low to the egregiously high, and that they have zero responsibility for a sentence they unilaterally presented a not!pleabargain. It also speaks poorly of California politicians that this is happening, and they do nothing, or make the problem worse. I will note and comment that California partisans are partisans, and if you want me to give a nice big rant about places where I think California politicians have shown illegitimate prioritization of harsh sentencing in the justice system, we're gonna need a bigger character limit.
More critically, it's a problem for the system as a whole, no matter where you decide to place the fault.
I don't know what the typical sentence for this kind of thing would be in California, but unless you can show me examples of similar cases that ended in higher sentences
I don't think this is a useful exercise. One of the most similar cases was high-profile as a moral abomination for going straight to probation... on an eight-year sentence, after credit for five years time served. Less meaningful because it did not have even the possibility of political aggression first? More meaningful because it had no use of a weapon? There were rumors he had juvie history, but at least publicly he's supposed to have no prior criminal history. What about eight years prison for a deadly punch? Does it say more because he was drunk, or less because he was an asshole and tried to hide his culpability?
I think part of the difference might be downstream of charging 12022.7(b), not (a) in those cases, and there's a reasonable argument that distinction is especially bullshit in cases like this, but if the expected difference-in-sentencing was two years rather than more than four or five I'd not be complaining as loud (and not be nearly so focused on the judge).
Those were the first two remotely relevant ones I could find (after several not-involuntary manslaughter cases, a bunch of car crashes, a couple illegal silicone injections gone bad), but you'll have to take my word that I didn't put a monstrous amount of selection bias behind them. Even if you believe me, there's near-certainty that the ones getting reported on have some selection bias going on. Those two examples did go to trial, but then again, we're supposed to believe that this indicated sentence is what the judge believes is the correct sentence had the guy here gone to trial!
And I’m still not convinced that this is the central example of involuntary manslaughter such that the average sentence should be predictive here; I stumbled across cases in Pennsylvania with longer sentences than your proposed guidelines example and similar factual scenarios and no criminal history.
And I don't know the point of bringing up Rittenhouse... Unless you want to eliminate pretrial detention entirely, it's just part of the system.
How many days was Mr. Alnaji in pre-trial detention? What was his bond set at? Was either number one-third, or one-fifth, or a one-tenth, of Mr. Rittenhouse's?
I'm bringing it forward as one of many examples of a widespread tendency across a broad set of interrelated systems. I can repeat the comparisons to the Hammonds, Adamiak, Dexter Taylor, and countless others for other parts of the process. But it matters that it's not just sentencing, even though the sentencing difference is one of the most harmful. Not just because it's so difficult to present varied examples with any level of comparison, or even because a problem or the appearance of a problem only limited to one judge or one step of the criminal justice process it would be a smaller problem.
Because I'll point again to "Justice is not, under present conditions, the presumed outcome of a process." It's important that the criminal justice system not only be just, but be clearly just. That's not happening when judges sneak plea bargains indicated sentences out of the eye of the victim's family and media, where there are so many degrees of freedom than the outcome of a case can fall entirely to how an individual judge or prosecutor felt that morning, and when we're stuck trying to pull together phantasmal statistics about similar cases or salami-slice away how all those other inconsistencies don't count, and that's just the obvious problems here.
gattsuru
5d ago
No, apologies. I've used it as an example because I was under the impression Rov_Scam was operating as a lawyer in Pennsylvania.
gattsuru
5d ago
If I'm reading correctly, California allows cohabiting spouses two years after the date of birth to dispute paternity. I think Indiana, too? I'm not sure of anywhere with a statutory block, but paternity-by-estoppel states can supposedly get really messy even with clear genetic evidence.
... uh, hilariously, Pennsylvania does actually have case law blocking genetic testing for paternity in some cases and seems to have a paternity-by-estoppel statute.
gattsuru
5d ago
I think Rov_Scam's focusing on the 'legally' part of 'legally disestablishing paternity'. Because the legal effort to disestablishment paternity is seeking a court order, it's not special because of the genetic testing providing stronger technology, but because of the formal environment on the legal system providing 'proof' from a seeing-as-a-state perspective. Even if you're divorcing the person for unrelated reasons and then want to make sure that the kid is yours, you'll want to file for divorce immediately because of associated delays rather than figure out paternity; if you're filing divorce because the kid isn't yours, you need to know that before any legal filings because a false claim will probably have your wife divorcing you.
((I'm not convinced it's always useless to go with an at-fault divorce, but it's definitely one of those things that's iffy : infidelity can impact alimony, but it's ultimately up to the judge making it up weighing competing factors, and outside of very high-income relationships, it's quite possible that any difference will get swallowed by the increased legal costs, risks of proof being insufficient, and counterclaims (either reciprocal infidelity, or acknowledgement).
That said, it can speed up the divorce. I think it matters less in PA most of the time, since it has a 90-day no-fault if both partners agree and that's faster than you can get on a court docket, but either a unilateral divorce or in states that require 1-year separate for all no-fault divorces, that can be value of its own.))
Caveat: I'll make the cuck argument here, and it's not the kid's fault their mom failed to either keep it in her pants or have the balls to request an open marriage. But I get that matters a lot more for het people.
The underlying battery was trying to knock the phone out of the guy's hand, which is about as minor as it can get. The blow that proved fatal was the result of inadvertent contact, the defendant had no criminal history, and he apparently cooperated with the police afterward.
With a hand holding a megaphone, aka a heavy rigid object. Beyond that, you seems to be taking the defendant's theory of the case entirely at face value, and then giving them a little bit of grace on top of that. That's maybe relevant as an understanding of what the defense might want, but it's not the only plausible or even likely read on the story.
... unless, to spell it out, the judge has taken the defense's theory of the case at face value, before the trial has begun.
I'm neither a criminal lawyer nor barred in California, but from reading the relevant statutes it looks like confinement to state prison was never on the table.
If I'm reading it correctly, California Penal Code Section 1170(h)(3) says that a "has a prior or current felony conviction for a serious felony described in subdivision (c) of Section 1192.7" shall be served in prison. 1192.7(c)(8) specifically includes "any felony in which the defendant personally inflicts great bodily injury on any person, other than an accomplice," -- that's the specific enhancement on the case page twice.
If I were the judge in this case I'd seriously consider excluding any evidence regarding the subject matter of the confrontation because I wouldn't want jurors deciding the outcome based on where they stand on the Israel-Palestine issue.
Yes, the propensity for progressive groups to successfully argue that any politically-charged actions involving a Blue Tribe are just confusing the matter or an outright alleviating factor, while any politically-charged actions involving a Red Tribe matter are evidence of clear ill intent, is well-perceived, thank you for spelling it out.
Personally inflicted great bodily injury True, but this is an element of the involuntary manslaughter charge; in any event, it's hard to imagine a case of involuntary manslaughter that wouldn't involve severe bodily injury.
Personally inflicts great bodily injury is the enhancement. It's specifically to separate where the accused did the thing themselves, rather than caused it to happen through an intermediary. (this gets goofy for duty-of-care or group-assault scenarios, but neither are relevant here.) For an example, there's a ripped from the headlines case that clearly couldn't have involved the defendant.
Defendant armed with and used a weapon Possible, but would require the jury to find that the defendant used the megaphone as a weapon, i.e. he intentionally struck Kessler with it.
The enhancement is armed with or used a weapon, but more critically, Alnaji already admitted to the very requirements. The defense's theory of the case is that "Alnaji accidentally struck Kessler when he swatted away Kessler’s phone". But that "accident" in the defense's claim is only trying to separate the injury to Kessler's face; swatting at Kessler's phone does not make the megaphone phase through Kessler's hands.
That is the enhancement most likely to run into trouble with a jury, but it's still not very weak.
Victim was particularly vulnerable I'm not sure what evidence the prosecution planned to present that would suggest Kessler was unusually vulnerable.
Kessler was an elderly and fairly frail man. Age alone can't support that enhancement if it's an element of the crime, but it's not, and Kessler is in the 65+ range where it's a common enhancement and readily supported.
California doesn't offer any real guidelines, but when searching for the statutory text I came across a California defense attorney's website that says a conviction can mean: Probation possible — up to 1 year county jail — common in lower-end cases where the court finds incarceration unnecessary... You'd struggle to find a state where it's typical for someone with no priors to get four years in the state pen for involuntary manslaughter.
Yes, lower-end cases end up at the lower end of the sentencing range. That's kinda begging the question. Involuntary manslaughter's lower-end includes some pretty far-reaching stuff! In this case, it's "hit a guy, didn't expect to kill him". That's not exactly some unpredictable consequence, even if it's an uncommon one, nor is it a low-culpability situation. And while it's not the definition of enhancement to be non-typical, it's pretty standard for a case involving several enhancements to be nontypical.
And, of course, this just ropes back to the broader point about inconsistency of the law, where you can just go and crack a man's head open, it result in his death, say oops, and then get a shorter sentence than if you had done something really evil, like attach a shoulder stock to an antique gun or buy an unlicensed barrel.
Whether this is an illegal judicial plea offer or not, I don't know. What I will say is that in the case you cited the judge knocked out enhancing factors before making the offer while in the present case the defendant pleaded guilty to all the counts in the indictment, but there could be other deficiencies I'm not aware of.
In this case, the problem I'm motioning toward is more "... whether the sentence proposed by the trial court reflected what it believed was the appropriate punishment for this defendant and these offenses, regardless of whether defendant was convicted by plea or following trial, or instead reflected what it believed was necessary to induce defendant to enter a plea."
The article says there were several meetings with the judge, and assuming these were similar to civil mediations, here's my theory on what transpired...
That seems like a really detailed description to say 'the judge didn't want to sentence the guy hard, and wanted less publicity when doing it'. Which, to be fair, would make it a genuine indicated sentence rather than a judicial plea bargain!
EDIT: okay, that was unfair snark.
But it depends on some pretty strict assumptions to get to the indicated sentence, and they're pretty unfalsifiable. We can't, by tautology, know what the judge would do at the end of a trial that isn't going to happen. He doesn't know, and doesn't have the evidence! (And some of that evidence, like the relative credibility of witnesses talking about who initiated the verbal confrontation or started touching the other, probably should matter.) The evidence you're using like the multiple conferences is just, or more, compatible with a judge really not wanting a media circus in a controversial case, and slowly shaping what he indicates as an appropriate sentence to something he knows the defendant will want to take, or even outright updating his model of an appropriate sentence until the defendant takes it. There's very little chance we'd be able to prove if the judge did outright offer a bargain, not least of all because the sudden change in judge and sudden (and media-free) hearing and various procedural annoyances mean we don't know even what other judges that were on this same case would have offered, or if they did offer anything. I don't have infinite free time to figure out if this particular judge has weighed this particular way in other high-profile cases, and it's quite possible that there haven't been enough to do any serious statistics on, or even any comparable cases.
The strongest testable evidence I can motion toward is whether the judge her takes any umbrage at being misquoted to the public in a way that minimizes the guilt of a man supposedly pleading guilty -- but while that happens in some politically-charged cases, you can reasonably object that there's a million reasons it might not happen in this case or publicly.
So whether or not this is a judicial plea bargain, it doesn't matter in any realistic sense. It's not getting overturned if it can't even be conclusively demonstrated.
Which would be one thing were this is just some Pepe Silvia-style theory-from-nowhere, but we do have the stuff that would push the sentence up, and the evidence to support it, and a lot of the defense's past arguments either falling or only admitting to the elements of the charge, and then months after much of the information has been formalized -- months after the trial was first scheduled! -- then the judge announces what an appropriate sentence would be?
And, even if it gets to the presumption of an indicated sentence, it still doesn't actually provide persuasive evidence that it's just or reasonable. If the final story is that the judge just wanted to get this out of his court house, and a short sentence was the sort of appropriate that he could live with, that's kinda a problem all of its own in the "Justice is not, under present conditions, the presumed outcome of a process" sense. Again, Rittenhouse's pretrial jail time was a quarter of this guy's maximum theoretical sentence, that maximum just isn't happening, and Rittenhouse was innocent (and had a vastly higher bond). People regularly receive greater sentences for paperwork crimes.
gattsuru
6d ago
This... get complicated, and I don't think "obligate straight male sub" is a sufficiently precise category. Some central and common parts of that category, both by self-identity and popular culture, include:
- guy who only screws his wife when she 'orders' him to, and only after he performs sufficient oral sex
- guy who likes getting slapped, cut, zapped, or bitten before or while screwing his wife
- guy who wants to be tied down and gagged when screwing his wife.
- guy who likes getting dressed up and made fun of before screwing his wife.
- guy who likes getting clicker-trained, before he and his wife break the bedframe.
- guy who 'brats' (committing an obvious and typically trivial misbehavior) to justify his wife 'forcing' him to do any of the above.
- guy who wants to get pegged.
I think urquan's motioning toward stuff like cuckolding, extreme chastity play, and redirections 'away' from actual sex. But while cuckolding exists, even there, a lot of stuff you or I would call cuckolding doesn't slide into the same psychological space. The broader other-men-fucking-your-wife-fandom includes:
- stag-and-vixen, where the kink is about someone else fucking a guy's wife, and then him 'reclaiming' her by proving he can do it better,
- hotwifing, which tries to exclude any of the humiliation aspects, and they argue (sometimes credibly!) that it's an mdom thing,
- not-very-subtly-sublimated arousal caused by other men,
- partner-swapping, which gets closer to a normal open relationship and some people just get nerves,
- 'open relationships' where the guy just doesn't have that high or wide-looking a sex drive,
- workarounds for genuine relationship friction, either physiological, psychological, or just distance.
That doesn't necessarily make them healthy or any less indica of psychosexual weirdness. Some of the simple boring stuff can be a sign of unmanaged anxiety: some bondage subs are all about not being able to make a 'wrong' move, or being forced to make one of two wrong moves and being rewarded for it in predicament bondage. Being 'ordered' is a really convenient way to disclaim responsibility for noticing your partner's interests, and no small number of subs do actively abuse it. While some of the 'oh don't make me clean off my wife's partner's dick' people are in it for orientation play or humiliation there's definitely some self-closeted-in-unhealthy ways going on.
Even where it's just sensation-focus, there's probably something behind it, in the sense that normal people don't like getting zapped or forced to hold their bladder or shoved into a frilly skirt. Some of them are just outright worse than just hating their sexuality: I'll point to findom, again, as something that's handling a normal desire ('show I value this person I'm having sex with') in an exceptionally unhealthy way even when the actual expression is just 'oh love of my life let me show you how much I like your pussy'.
But it does make them hard to fit into "if your schema of the world tells you that you're unlovable and unfuckable, sexually worthless". Even a lot of redirection of sex or chastity or cuckolding that eliminates the sub's ability to fuck is more about the prohibition than sub's self-perception or external valuation.
gattsuru
6d ago
Yeah. I wish he was wrong, but I think the most the coda can say is ‘insufficiently pessimistic’
gattsuru
6d ago
In theory, yes. There is no constitutional protection against being tried and even punished for the same crime in both state and federal courts.
In practice, no. The relevant district attorney (kinda) is a Red partisan, but he couldn’t get indictments in several other cases and his position is in weird near-limbo. The feds have a presumption against retrial in this sort of case called the Petite Policy, and while it can be overridden, this isn’t the same category as anti-abortion protesters trespassing. Ventura Count is Blue, if not as Blue as California gets. And the federal nexus would be genuinely weak.
Loay Alnaji Will Not Be Going To Prison
He might go to jail. VCStar reports:
Paul Kessler, a 69-year-old Thousand Oaks resident and pro-Israel protester, died less than a day after he was injured in a Nov. 5, 2023 confrontation with Loay Alnaji, a 54-year-old Moorpark resident.
On May 5, however, Ventura County Superior Court Judge Derek Malan offered the defendant probation if he changed his plea. Alnaji now faces a maximum sentence of one year in jail followed by three years on probation. Defense attorney Ron Bamieh said the offer came after several meetings with Malan and recalled that the judge determined “two old guys had a dispute and and [sic] an accident happened.”
This isn't quite the standard plea deal, because the prosecutor's office doesn't want it, either. It's an indicated sentence or judicial plea bargain, depending on how cynical you are, but don't take that court case saying 'judicial incentives for plea are unlawful' to mean judicial incentives for a plea actually get the judge in any hot water, or likely result in the plea bargainer getting screwed. There is, as far as I can tell, nearly zero information on how prevalent indicated sentences are, in California, nor how typical this case is, nor what the normal outcome would be in a comparable case, or even if indicated sentences have been used ever in a comparable case. There's even less information on how fucked up one has to be to actually get sent back for another try, and spoiler alert: this ain't it.
So it's probably weird, you can't prove how weird, and gfl for caring about it.
The reporting says up to a year in jail, but that's phantasmal. There's only a moderate chance Alnaji will receive the maximum end of that probation offer, only slightly better chance he'll end up toward the top of that scale, and if I'm understanding the (admittedly convoluted) good conduct credit rules he's very likely to only serve half of whatever sentence he does get. Alternate custody arrangements are on the table for this class of sentence, such as work release or partial home confinement, though I've got no idea what the chances of it getting granted here are. Do the math, and there's nontrivial chance he'll spend less time in jail than Kyle Rittenhouse did.
So on one hand, Alnaji is pleaing guilty to everything in the case; on the other, he's getting a massive discount, quite plausibly a ten-fold reduction in custodial sentencing (again, dependent on me understanding California's fucked up good behavior credit system, but I think the plea keeps his charge as a 50:50 good credit where a prison sentence would be 85:15).
It's also worth spelling something out :
Defense attorney Ron Bamieh said the offer came after several meetings with Malan and recalled that the judge determined “two old guys had a dispute and and [sic] an accident happened.”
That's a defense attorney, and not the judge, saying that, to be crystal clear. And he's talking to a reporter, so there's a minimum of two professional liars involved. Even if it's not made up wholesale, there's a lot of ways this could have been taken out of context, or misrepresented, or had some other reasonable explanation.
I would be very fascinated to know if the judge pushes back against a defense attorney, if that defense attorney is aggressively mischaracterizing the judge's on-the-stands statements about the merits of an existing case to the public. Because if not, there's a very fascinating problem here.
There are two theories of the case. The prosecutor theory is that Kessler stood near Alnaji, Alnaji hit Kessler in the head, and Kessler died. There is pretty strong evidence, here: Alnaji's megaphone has blood matching Kessler's on it, and injuries to the front of the face inconsistent with the fall. The defense's theory, and I quote the reporting: "Bamieh [defense lawyer] said that during the protest, Kessler aggressively put his cell phone in Alnaji’s face and when Alnaji swatted the phone away, he unintentionally hit Kessler’s face with a megaphone. Bamieh said Kessler had a brain tumor, which exacerbated the injuries when he fell." Alnaji's lawyer also claims that Kessler fell down eight feet away from where Alnaji unintentionally hit Kessler's face, or perhaps the tumor caused the fall. The gymnastics involved I will leave as an exercise for the reader.
Unfortunately, there is no video of the strike or fall itself. It's not even clear, from public information, if Kessler approached Alnaji or Alnaji approached Kessler, first.
Note, however, that there is also no theory of the case where Alnaji did not commit every necessary component to the charges. As a matter of law, in California, if someone runs into your personal space waving a camera, you can't lawfully smack it out of their hands. If you try, and in doing so you wave a heavy rigid object near their head, hit them unintentionally, you are committing an unlawful and negligent act. If you do so, and they turn out to have a skull made of eggshells, you have committed manslaughter. There is no theory of the case where Kessler committed to mutual combat, or put hands on Alnaji; there's no exception for oopsies. Had this case gone to trial, the defense would have rested on nothing deeper than playing to the jury's sympathies and confusions.
"[A]n accident happened" is, in this framework, a very specific unusual claim for a judge to be making, if a judge made it. It's simultaneously disavowing specific responsibility and minimizing any conduct. I mean, yes, there's also a justice matter about whether judges can or should be accepting pleas where there's signs that the plea is insincere, but that's not going to matter in a case where the judge is presenting the not-a-plea-deal.
Sentencing is at the end of June, assuming it doesn't get delayed. I'll leave spelling out the various comparisons to other high-profile cases for then, but this is a pre-registration that the comparison does matter, whether my predictions are correct or wrong. Even had this case gone to trial and he received a maximum sentence, Alnaji would never face a sentence as long as Adamiak, or Dexter Taylor will have spent in prison before they got their fair day in court. I'd be willing to bet cash at very steep odds that Alnaji will not spend as long in jail as the Hammond's did in federal prison before they got a pardon, at steep odds that Alnaji's sentence will not be as long as the year-and-a-day that Steven Hammond's original pre-bonus sentence, before Alnaji doesn't have to serve all of it.
And none of them killed anybody!
There's a morbid post, here, but it's all the more morbid where the original advice was "For Reds specifically". Kessler was not a Red. As I said two years ago, "It's not about X as a principle goes to this."
gattsuru
7d ago
One of the frustrating things about sex ed discourse is the extent that controls things. 'Perfect use' (using it every time, correctly) rates of effectiveness for condoms are great! The actual realistic use numbers are comparable to the withdrawal method. Some of that's mechanical failure (either the condom breaking, or not pulling out before erection fades), but a lot of it's just that condoms suck a lot, even for a straight people. There's a demographic of men that can't reach orgasm (or keep it up) with one on, and for various political reasons the mainstream sexology side likes to draw this up as a personal failure of the man involved.
Diaphragms aren't quite as bad for the guy, but I've heard them called less comfortable than a tampon, and some women have reactions to the spermicide. The pill less frustrating in the moment, but actual-use about 7% still get pregnant over a year of normal intercourse.
IUDs and implants avoid that problem, but the former are extremely painful during insertion (especially for people who haven't been pregnant), and about one-in-six women dislike the implant's side effects enough to have it removed early.
I have a funny story for you.
If Gardner had gotten review, I'd care less. If Adamiak wasn't a felon praying for a pardon, I'd care less. If Dexter Taylor wasn't in prison -- and going to be in prison longer than a man who beat someone to death with a megaphone, or that guy who shot at police, or both of them combined -- I'd care less.
[edit: correction, Gardner is a misdemeanant]
SCOTUS has defied all its normal rules about procedural posture to protect the rights of an illegal immigrant in six hours on a holiday weekend. There's a world where that says something about rights, and another world where it says something about illegal immigrants.
More options
Context Copy link