gattsuru
6d ago
Old Man's War is a better Scalzi work than most, but it makes it there by being a knockoff of the far-better execution of the same concept in Haldeman's The Forever War -- if you haven't read it, I far recommend it. I don't think Scalzi was intentionally ripping that earlier story off, but I'm also exceptionally skeptical that he was unaware of the earlier story or never read it.
gattsuru
6d ago
... I don't think this is a good model. Even if you absolutely must frame it to sneer...
So, there's a joke that goes around in immigration contexts, where the CATO set think nationality is magic dirt, and national culture is food. And that's not a steelman, but it's not exactly an unfair criticism, either; there's a ton of long-built stuff just from one part of the US to another. If Alex Nowrasteh ended up in a SAW movie trap, you'd maybe get him to admit that cultural norms vary from one country to another rather than gnaw his own foot off, but I wouldn't bet on it. The idea that cultures tied to location of origin isn't just taboo, it's either unimaginable or a taboo behind a taboo. Nationality becomes what someone wants to do, in its most visible and immediate form.
What's that look like for gender, if a characteristic is only what the person wants to do? Well, what you were born with is a lot less actively chosen than what you carry in your pants, which is still a lot less actively chosen than what your call yourself. And that's clearly meaningless.
... but if you poke at it, that's not that incoherent. Yes, there are some obvious political compromise at the absolute edges (why is this butch a cis woman and this bitch trans male? why is that a femboy and that a transwoman?). But there's actually a lot of characteristics and terms we use like that: I use my current job title to describe my area of expertise, not the one I went to college over, and you'd probably be kinda weirded out if I used the field I started out with or what my family has historically done.
It's just not something you care about, and you see this as replacing a much more important term and concept. And it’s pretty reasonable to care more about what someone’s got in their pants than whether it’s wrapped in boxers or panties, and whether they want sir or ma’am even less. But that frame or most of the downstream characteristics are no more inaccessible to them than it is to you; the existence of "cis woman" as a term is a recognition of it.
Now, switching out 'trans woman' for 'lifestyle crossdresser' and 'trans man' for 'tomboy' isn't something the trans side is willing to offer for historical reasons even if soccons would accept it (and soccons wouldn't accept it, if they did). Perhaps even more critically, it won't solve the problems you or most soccons actually have, here. There are serious and difficult questions about how much we're willing to tradeoff opportunity costs for one group against another group's ability to reinvent themselves (am I talking about 'ban the box' or anti-college-diploma efforts?), of how welfare and entitlements need prioritize things that are actively undesirable to the wild majority of voters, of freedom of self-expression against social and regulatory norms, so on and so forth.
Everything before those questions is just disputing definitions.
gattsuru
6d ago
CSB reports are pretty fun, if morbid reads, especially since they're a lot more willing to point fingers (contrast NTSB).
I will caution that they tend to put a pretty heavy thumb on the scales to favor as wide-ranging a possible conclusion as available from the evidence: even their own videos make it sound more like BP (or Amaco's) process engineering played a much bigger role than the page count would. The report notes that there were previous incidents involving the blowdown system, but most of these were from before the 2004 budget cuts, and some were from before the merger. Counterfactuals are hard, but with that bad a process design, and that level of normalization of deviance, I'm not sure better trained or less tired staff would have done much more than changed the body count for whatever inevitable incident happened.
gattsuru
9d ago
I dunno if there was a single crystalizing incident for TTRPG fandom as a whole, or even for individual forums.
RPGnet has a date that the moderators themselves advertise as turning from "the wild west" to intersectionality uber allies (usually mid-2004/2005ish), but there wasn't some big incident motivating that, just a more formalized ruleset that wasn't even especially biased, outside Darren McLennan, Curt, and a few other moderators having unofficial exceptions.
Same for conventions: things like banning people over pepes and ok symbols are pretty far downstream of everything else at GenCon, just like the White Male Terrorist writeups were downstream of far broader definitions of harassment becoming standardized or the nuTSR thing was very much a reaction to progressive politics becoming cost-of-entry. There's a lot of stuff that was the topic de jour in the early days: D&D's Oriental Adventures controversy in early D&D 4 days (probably 2007-2009ish?), various convention kerfluffles, CthulhuTech controversies...
That said, I'd largely left the fandom except to keep up with Morancy by the worst of it, so I may just have missed some.
gattsuru
10d ago
I'm kinda curious whether this reflects a difference in internal experience, or a difference in what you've experienced. A number of things I'd rate worse than a hard unprotected nutshot are fairly uncommon, but I would be surprised if something like a major bone breaking were outside of your imagination.
gattsuru
10d ago
Some updates:
- The Trump administration has announced that, in addition to bringing federal charges against the perpetrator, they have taken into custody and are considering deporting six members of his immediate family who have also illegally immigrated.
- USA Today quickly brought the sob story of one of those family members. And there is, after all, a fair complaint: we do not, generally, permit the sins of the father to flow to the
sondaughter. Even assuming a duty to report that pierces the family and that shirtless flamethrower guy was spitting a lot of cause for suspicion around his wife and kids (tbf...), it'd be worthwhile to at least specifically say some specific thing they should have done. - But it's not clear if there's reason they would not be deportable even without the whole 'family member tried to burn a dozen people alive'. They overstayed a tourist visa issued in 2022 and filed for asylum in that same year, from a country that most of the actual statutory grounds for asylum are pretty hard to hit (uh, especially for a guy with a wife).
- And federal law specifically requires DHS to find inadmissable any spouse or children of anyone who has committed a "terrorist attack" in the previous five years. This doesn't exactly cover asylum hearings, but it's going to weigh pretty heavily on any that happen.
- Except a judge has already issued a TRO for the next week. Anyone want to bet whether that gets extended by or on the 11th?
- Notice some interesting parts to that? Ex parte, not sure if service had even been issued to the United States government, and... uh, that's not Soliman on the name plate. Nor even an organization any of the family belongs to. Instead, it turns out to be an immigration lawyer with a messy background herself. I haven't been able to find exactly what that immigration misconduct was, and it could be a minor thing, but it takes a lot to get actually suspended from the practice of law in an immigration context.
- Because the family have been moved to Texas, it's not clear what, exactly, is going on between the lawyer and the family. It's very unclear how Gallager, a federal judge in Colorado, has jurisdiction.
gattsuru
11d ago
If you want to take the chemistry metaphor further, and you don't mind a little bit of absolute horror, I'll point to the concept of disappearing polymorphs:
That is, they are metastable forms that have been replaced by more stable forms.
It is hypothesized that contact with a single microscopic seed crystal of the new polymorph can be enough to start a chain reaction causing the transformation of a much larger mass of material. Widespread contamination with such microscopic seed crystals may lead to the impression that the original polymorph has "disappeared". In a few cases such as progesterone and paroxetine hydrochloride, the disappearance gradually spread across the world, and it is suspected that it is because earth's atmosphere has over time become permeated with tiny seed crystals. It is believed that seeds as small as a few million molecules (about 10 − 15 {\displaystyle 10^{-15}} grams) is sufficient for converting one morph to another, making unwanted disappearance of morphs particularly difficult to prevent. It is hypothesized that "unintentional seeding" may also be responsible for a related phenomenon, where a previously difficult-to-crystallize compound becomes easier to crystallize over time.
gattsuru
11d ago
I would check if it's been installed -- snap list will either return file not found if you've avoided it or a list of snap installs if you haven't. Most post-14.x Ubuntu installs will include it, excluding a few server options, and will hook it into the apt-get behaviors.
That doesn't necessarily make it a huge deal -- if you aren't finding any performance issues, and you're not using the Snap Store to install random things, and you don't care much about (tbf, pretty trivial) telemetry, there's no reason to panic or do a fresh install. But it's good to be aware.
The big one was embedded amazon web search in the start-menu equivalent from 2013-2016; Cortana is obnoxious enough that I don't think anyone wants a Linux version. Not an issue in modern versions. Ubuntu OS itself now is just limited to an on-install and on-wakeup 'here's my system specs' sorta stuff, which I agree basically rounds to not mattering, but I will caveat that the Snap Store is more aggressive (sending on-program-start info, at minimum) that it may have additional concerns.
The good news is that the Snap Store is so badly maintained and especially filtered that you should basically never use it -- Snaps are slow to launch, they're often out-of-date (even by downstream standards), they're bloated even compared to flatpak, and Ubuntu has been extremely willing to let outright obvious malware into the store. The downside is that Canonical really wants everything moved to Snap, and unless you uninstall snapd you can get surprised to find things like your web browser or IDE can 'upgrade' to their Snap version.
((This is not an advocacy of flatpak. Just damning Snap with faint praise.))
That said, you can remove Snap, and I think it stays gone, so still better than Windows. Just a lot of footgun opportunity compared to something like Mint.
gattsuru
11d ago
Any sort of commentary on political violence in a timely manner will summon erstwhile mod Numbers to put an end to the discussion. His suggestion of when it would have been allowed does not escape notice.
Yes. Doubly so that it wasn't happening during the quiet Biden weeks, either, at a time that 'punch a nazi'-style discourse was pretty endemic.
As well, what would there be to say? We know how such conversations would go. There's all of, what, 10 active participants in the forum? Even that might be a mild exaggeration. There are things I might learn or things I might try to convince, but I think a conversation there on the assassination attempts would bear even less fruit than most.
It would be nice to have an explicit 'political assassination is wrong, even when it's someone we think is really bad'. Because we don't really have that, and I don't know that the conversation would go that way. I was optimistic, once, when I brought Lackey's cancellation up over there. I didn't have high expectations. I don't anymore.
While I don't particularly feel like digging for it, my memory is that /r/BlockedAndReported was better on that front.
Hm. Not been a huge fan of them in the past, but will take a look. Thanks.
That probably doesn't meet a satisfying standard of improved conversation, but the bar is set so low!
Yes. A good part of the frustration, for me, is that I don't think I'm asking the world and the seven seas.
gattsuru
11d ago
I'd argue that there's also the possibility that it becomes common knowledge that courts don't provide any level of fair trial or value even in victory, and the Red Tribe and Blue Tribe both simply ignore their outputs. Yes, then the Red Tribe gets to ignore due process for immigrants and the Blue Tribe gets to keep Heller from registering his gun, but if that's the BATNA it looks very much to the Red Tribe like an active improvement to negotiating.
That'd actually suck for me personally -- I moved to a Red Tribe space to avoid a lot of the worst of Blue Tribe excesses, but I've got a number of traits that the Red Tribe doesn't like, too, and those are at least getting some protection today -- but the nice terrible thing about national politics is that it doesnt care what is convenient for persons.
FCfromSSC has been promoting a national divorce, which would look somewhat like a slightly more official version of that. I'm not as optimistic it will be allowed; if we can't get an informal version that works, there's no way formal admission of the problem will leave anywhere near enough systems interface to not collapse in contradictions.
It's not a stable equilibrium. At some point, someone will find A Just Cause that demands rolling out the military door-to-door again; I wouldn't be surprised if it happens in my lifetime, and I wouldn't be that surprised if it happens in the next twenty years.
But nothing ever really ends. You don't have to think that hard, for that long, for it to still be one of the least bad options.
gattsuru
11d ago
To be very explicit:
Barring a tiny number of exceptions not relevant here and not demonstrated in past attacks of this class, the moral value of a person who is in the process of attempting to kill or cause permanent injury to innocents rounds to zero, from the negative side. Any considerations regarding their lives either need to actually challenge that belief in a deeper way than ispe dixit, or rely on tactical, strategic, or legal grounds.
Near-universally, those tactical matters overwhelmingly favor firearms, and lethal force with firearms, over less-lethal tools. They provide range, they provide greater accuracy, and they can respond to many more attackers, so on. Less-lethal tools can and maybe should supplement firearms; they can not replace them. The only times a less-lethal tool can not be replaced by a firearm, conversely, reflect either legal or moral constraints.
And those tactical matters weight extremely heavily. I am not going to encourage people take a 10% risk to life or limb or concussion in exchange for even completely removed risk of legal or social attack. I'm not I'm willing to demand at a 1% chance. People should be aware of, and responsive to, the legal constraints for their jurisdictions, but they have no moral obligation to commit suicide over them.
And I don't think that offer is seriously on the table, either. The courts and news media are, in fact, willing to make national news and a jail sentence out of someone leaving a tire skidmark on a crosswalk; the theory that prosecutors and activists will say 'all good' after a taser strike under all but the clearest examples is far from clearly-supported, and most of these future attacks will not be clearly documented. Again, that Dolloff is not just a free man, but one that leftists and media are quite willing to describe as innocent, tells us exactly how much sticking solely to pepper spray buys you. That Hayes is on trial in a week tells us how much it matters if your 'victim' survives; I will bet you cash money he does not get a prosecutor giving him the last-minute Dolloff treatment.
Yes, on net, this leaves a number of circumstances where someone defending themselves, legally and morally, may 'cause' greater total deaths, and not just in the sense of shooting someone that might have been possible to just pepper spray. It's imaginable that an alternative-universe Rittenhouse (or Gardner) situation could result in prolonged violent protests aimed at other people who are not able to defend themselves. I'm not willing to demand Gardner shoot himself in the head lest Omaha burn down.
That's because I don't accept that 'cause' as true, honest, or a norm applied across all political valiances. The people burning down a city over a morally correct self-defense shooting are not the fault of someone defending themselves: they are the fault of people burning down the city. In many cases, they are intentionally cultivated, by centralized organizations justifying their violence and providing false information encouraging them.
gattsuru
11d ago
... a more charitable option is that Musk doesn't believe that entitlement cuts are possible while (even if relatively small) discretionary wasteful spending is highly visible.
Gabby Giffords has never been President.
...
[emphasis added]
The only person to use the President in this conversation, so far, has been me: to highlight that Kamala Harris laughed at the idea of the Second Amendment meaning anything, and to point to Harry Reid burning Romney.
EDIT: To be clear, the Harris cackle.
gattsuru
11d ago
You're going to need to need to circumscribe that "try" a bit more.
gattsuru
11d ago
However, I think the point remains that less-lethal weapons address the problems you wrote about
No, I don't think they do. I linked the Dolloff case for a few different reasons, here, both that pepper spray did not work there, and that quite a lot of the left that even heard of this case thought it justified the shooting, including the prosecutor.
and that a firearm may have been a good defense weapon against this specific attacker is not a good reason to opt for firearms over less-lethal weapons.
Continuity of force has a lot of utility in self-defense considerations. When someone has pointed a flamethrower, or thrown a molotov at an elderly innocent and is carrying two more, these considerations become 'what part of my continuity of force is best or most ethical', not 'what part of my continuity of force did I not leave at hom- and I got beaten to death'.
How do you know?
... because I've written at length about a number of Molotov-launchers over the last five years, as well as followed both the court cases and a number of self-defense experts specifically highlighting the threat model they and similar groups represent.
... it's difficult to overstate a problem that is literally deathly serious.
Yes. Yes it is. I would prefer that to be a problem that the defender has to consider than the attacker or attackers gets to exploit.
gattsuru
11d ago
But no Blue government actually passed a federal ban on firearms.
The Assault Weapons Ban of 1994 is within living memory. The last Blue Presidential nominee laughed at the idea that the Second Amendment would protect against outright confiscation of firearms from their current owners. There are several federal bans on firearms, and not a single one has been successfully challenged at SCOTUS. The only federal gun control law that has ever been successfully challenged was the Gun Free School Zones Act, under the Commerce Clause, and which immediately was reenacted with the court pretending it was all okay. Nor is that because the statute-writers carefully wrote around the borders of the Second Amendment, or even believed it could cover anything.
If you mean to say that the Blue government have not passed a federal ban on all firearms, granted. But this does not reflect the Constitution coming out of its glass case.
I guarantee you that in a world where everybody ignored the Constitution without a second thought, they would have tried at some point.
They did, in fact, try. They have, in fact, tried repeatedly, both at local and federal levels. The 1938 Gun Control Act started out specifically as a complete registry of every semiautomatic, under a theory that this could make a future nation-wide Sullivan Act possible! Lujan Grisham was not stopped by a preliminary injunction (it got stayed), or a citizen grand jury (New Mexico has them in theory but defanged them against politicians) or civil suit (New Mexico's overturned qualified immunity with a but, and that butt is Grisham's face) or impeachment (nope) or federal or state censure (double nope, didn't even get a single Dem vote); she was stopped by actors holding politically-responsive offices knowing that knew they would face a serious cost at the next poll.
The only thing that has stopped several very broad gun control laws has been serious, prolonged, and coordinated political and structural force from the Red Tribe against its own politicians, well away from the courthouse.
Some of those came at massive political cost! The NRA tanked several Red Tribe politicians to protect Harry Reid, in exchange for Reid blocking gun control efforts, right before Reid infamously burned the next Red Tribe presidential nominee with malicious slander from the House floor. Even smaller stuff, like increasing efforts to curate Blue Dog Democrats and trim anti-gun Republicans, cost no small amount of political capital and literal money, and was one of many factors that lead to the ACA passing.
The way I see it, your choice is between selective application of the second amendment, and it simply being torn down.
There is no application of the 2nd Amendment, today. There are only fancy papers talking about it.
Heller can not register (lol) his gun from Heller I, he's brought a handful of other cases that SCOTUS punted on every single one, in Heller II a goofball wrote a dissent from the appeals court case specifically calling for SCOTUS to decide on the question of 'assault' weapons bans, and yesterday the guy who wrote that dissent in Heller II put out a statement in Snope deciding nope not gonna. From the last available numbers, the NYPD have issued fewer CCW permits per-annum post-Bruen than before it, those lucky few can carry fewer places at greater legal threat, and they may not be able to carry at all anyway. Other courts have simply read Bruen's rule against banning carry across an entire island and deciding that five sounded better, and SCOTUS punted. Lower courts have simply defied SCOTUS opinions that covered other rights too, and SCOTUS punted; others outright deny that the 2nd Amendment exists in their courtroom.
I can keep doing this.
gattsuru
11d ago
Cutberto Viramontes and Christopher Khaya, together with the Firearms Policy Coalition and the Second Amendment Foundation, appeal the dismissal of their constitutional challenge to Cook County’s assault weapons ban. Relying on District of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570 (2008), and New York State Rifle & Pistol Association, Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U.S. 1 (2022), they argue that the ordinance is facially invalid under the Second Amendment.
We addressed a similar challenge to the ordinance in a case that was before us on appeal from the denial of a preliminary injunction. Bevis v. City of Naperville, We rejected the challenge based on the record the plaintiffs had compiled at that early stage of the litigation. Id. at 1197. The challengers here have failed to develop a record sufficient to justify a different result. We therefore affirm.
It's a three-page read, but to summarize: Viramontes has not demonstrated sufficiently that an AR15 is different than an M16. What could prove such a thing? What is required to prove such a thing? The court does not feel it necessary to even hint. Why did it take three grown adults several months to write three pages? Also a mystery.
Yes, Bruen explicitly said that the burden was on the government, that "The burden then falls on respondents to show that New York’s proper-cause requirement is consistent with this Nation’s historical tradition of firearm regulation." Yes, it's so obvious it should be in judicial notice. Yes, the plaintiffs explicitly argued "The banned semiautomatic rifles, like all other semiautomatic firearms, fire only one round for each pull of the trigger. They are not machine guns." among a variety of other significant distinctions.
Doesn't matter.
That was one of the possible ones, except nope. Hope Kavanaugh finds it really illuminating.
gattsuru
11d ago
... it's funny seeing the well-funded national org use worse surveys than I, a rando, threw at amadan offhandedly; it's funnier that they can't spend five minutes on tumblr to actually get a good summary of what Luigi fandom looks like.
(tbf, we are talking tumblr or instagram or tiktok or discord or a punk meatspace group)
The cynical answer is that the NCRI, specifically, is not some neutral true-seeking organization anymore than the Princeton Gerrymandering Project was. They were founded in 2018 as part of an effort to fight the alt-right, and came to national attention after a series of reports in that started with Boogaloo panicking ("this, like turning off the transponders on 9/11, enables the extremists to hide in plain sight, disappearing into the clutter of innocent messages, other data points"). The org pulls in increasing amounts per year (1.45m in 2023) and lists its address as an office park that (at ~5k/year rent) is probably little more than a PO box -- I can't say for sure that they're a cutout for another org to whitewash funding the group, because they fall under the threshold that breaks down how their income works, but there's not-subtle hints pointing that direction.
Yes, they're also probably just left-leaners given that they're pulled from the left side (Princeton, Rutgers) of academia to start with, but they're were built from the ground up to find specific enemies. It's certainly possible that they're trying to pander to Trump, or suddenly reveling in their newfound freedom to see the nose in front of their face, but there's a bit of a blander option: they think these specific groups are in their list of enemies to be targeted, too, and they want to shape how that discussion goes so the people they don't consider enemies are well outside of it. Beware outgroup homogenity bias.
That's why they're not doing a retrospective and suddenly finding any of the literally years of punch nazi discourse, that's why there's no comment on a Certain Topic That's Supported In Princeton, that's why their list of incidents is so short and circumscribed, that's why they can only model left-wing violence as authoritarianism, that's why their 'left-wing' authoritarianism is so obviously post-hoc and cumbersome (antihierarchical aggression, anticonventionalism, top-down censorship aren't just awkward mirrors to their 'right-wing' counterparts, they're not even accurate names to their own descriptions).
Compare ProPublica writing a big story on H1-B abuse without using the word 'fraud' a single time.
gattsuru
12d ago
I'd argue that if you're writing a substack that pushes entirely based on your career as a SCOTUS-barred lawyer, and you talk about success in one situation, and personal interpretations in the other situation, even if you're being absolutely honest, if you make absolutely zero distinction in writing, there's absolutely zero reason to care what you say, or take it seriously as anything but a way to talk other people into believing something you'd never do.
gattsuru
12d ago
As Trump's efforts to follow court orders to get people deported in such a way were sadly unsuccessful, it seems reasonable to treat these deportations as a permanent harm and prioritize these cases accordingly.
Okay. If that's the new rule, what day of this week do you think Dexter Taylor gets his day before SCOTUS? The courts don't have a time machine; the half-decade he's going to be stuck in jail isn't going to get undone. Will Malinowski get the other half of his skull back, or his next of kin get due compensation for watching her husband die? Or will both of these cases never get close to SCOTUS?
Ah, but those have different likelihood of success, or we think they're different types of permanent, post-hoc. Which is... at best an entirely different question from prioritization and permanence. And even many of those claims are not particularly believable. AARP didn't get punted because eh, those asylum claims are probably bunk anyway.
I think the problem with the 2nd amendment is that the text allows for a wide range of interpretations.
This has not, bluntly, stopped any Blue Tribe-favored defenses or constitutional protections, many of which have not only as much or more range in interpretation, but in many cases has been completely dependent on the most expansive interpretation to even exist in a meaningful form.
they gave Trump immunity for basically anything he did as a president.
I'd quibble with that description, but beyond that "we didn't get to try your Presidential candidate in federal court too much" is not especially compelling, and he's not 'my' guy.
I can assure you, the disappointment the gun nuts feel with the SCOTUS for not affirming the legality of semi-automatic AR15s is tiny compared to the disappointment the liberals feel over Dobbs.
That's nice, and all, but even assuming it's true, the ability of people to hack their own brains to be super-duper-ultra-disappointed doesn't actually give me any reason to care that they 'only' got fifty years of a made-up right blowing out not just laws across every state in the country, but even the interfaces of actual rights.
Fair, and maybe a decade or two ago a different focus on the side of trans advocates would have avoided some controversial landmines had they made that decision then. But path dependence is a nightmare; at this point, even assuming that committed (left-?) civil-left-libertarians exist in enough numbers to be a meaningful political force, I don't think this battle of terminology makes the top-ten list, and maybe even not the top-twenty list, of most alienating things.
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