I will caveat that while the Shepard murder is definitely murkier than the mainstream sanitized version of events, the Jimenez version has its own limitations.
gattsuru
1yr ago
In the American context, the search terms you're looking for are the "information blocking rule" (which prohibits some restrictions and disincentives to accessing records) and its "preventing harms exception"; afaict, a lot of the discussion mirrors EU and UK matters.
The steelman is that there are a number of records that are messy:
- Initial test records can be noisy or prone to false positives. A first-trial blood test with a high false positive rate, followed by confirming the analysis using a more precise second-level test is common problem, and delaying the announcement until the confirmation is a common practice.
- Some patients with certain mental health disorders will fixate on subclinical details, often falling to unhealthy or dangerous practices to solve problems that weren't really problems to start with, or react with accurate diagnosis with denials and refusal to work with a doctor. Where a patient has already been diagnosed under such conditions, reducing specificity when presenting information to such patients is a rare but accepted practice.
- There's a lot of controversy about genetic testing for certain conditions that have no cure or preventative treatment, and where the risk for a specific patient developing the disease is elevated but not certain, and what extent it is necessary to provide counseling before releasing that information. There have been documented cases of people committing suicide over a prospective neurodegenerative disorder.
- The US version of the rule also allows some protections for second parties, generally under pretty outlier circumstances like a domestic violence abuser finding out that 'their' kid doesn't share their genes. I don't think the EU or UK variants have such an explicit exception, though.
But the potential problems and abuses are vast, and even these steelman cases are paternalistic.
While discussions of the rule and its exceptions in each context revolve around delays to accessing data, the strict text of the rule is not so limited: it allows doctors to fully withhold data, and when pressed about sufficiently iffy edge cases, there are outspoken doctors defending permanent withholding. To be fair, ethics groups like the AMA have pushed back against this view in recent years.
gattsuru
1yr ago
In the absence of other remarks on those Twitter accounts...
Uh:
gattsuru
1yr ago
Yeah, the solo and story mode of the game were... pretty uninspired. There's probably some important role they played in building toward the modern action adventure RPG (and maybe even a bit of modern MMOs) as a step away from Diablo-likes, but at best it's extremely dated, and more often it's reason to get pushed to other better games of the same era.
Multiplayer was fun back at the time. I wouldn't exactly write a big paper drooling over it, because it did develop a lot of jank pretty quickly (and then EA killed the servers), but you could tell that it was actually trying for some level of good multiplayer play (contrast eg: Mechwarrior 3's PPC meta).
gattsuru
1yr ago
The theory here is more along the lines that every major political figure is guilty of something, especially in a city like New York. The feds can pick and choose prosecutions if someone is perceived as worth targeting.
But the flip side is that this particular stuff Adams is alleged to have done is hilariously bad. Now, so is what a lot of the other politicians in New York have done, and at least Adams (probably?) didn't kill hundreds or thousands and try to cover it up afterwards.
((But the Adams admin has what looks to be especially damning records and attempts to destroy those records, with unusually clear theory of law. But we wouldn't know, since we don't have access to the internals of investigations against these politicians, and especially don't have access to the internal records from a complete investigation.))
On the gripping hand, the theory is unfalsifiable in the derogatory sense.
gattsuru
1yr ago
It's also just kinda goofy because New York mayors have been so hilariously corrupt for so long it's hard to even distinguish what counts as penne-ante anymore. Taking 10 million in matching public funds would normally be a huge deal on its own (compare the Catherine Pugh scandal, which earned her three years over smaller numbers). But deBlasio's wife lost track of 850 million, and no one cares.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Some of this is just a tendency to throw everything at the wall and see what sticks. There just aren't that many death penalty cases to start with, and something like a third of them are in states that basically never will actually execute them (California and Pennsylvania haven't executed any inmates in over a decade, and Pennsylvania in this millennium), and some of the absolute worst ones get cleared up relatively 'quickly'.
If you go to the Innocence Project's death penalty page right now, the first three examples I get are :
- Clemente Aguirre-Jarquin, where there's an absolute mess of evidence, but some of it points to an alternative killer... but a lot of the stuff that strongly points to the alternative killer either has an alternative credible explanation (the alternative killer being a descendant and sometimes-resident of the victim's house explains a lot of possible DNA) or only were produced long after it became a cause celebre (the alternative killer's then-boyfriend's now-wife). There's probably an ineffective assistance of council argument here, and I could believe that the alternative killer was the real one, but this is the stuff of reasonable doubt or True Crime Podcasts, not claims of obvious true innocence.
- Kirk Bloodsworth, pretty clearly innocent, and they found the guy who actually did it, complete with DNA evidence. A little soap opera, but there's not really any question.
- Kennedy Brewer, same deal, slightly less soap opera, slightly more bad CSI ("bite mark analysis").
And the top-line changed while I read these cases, moving from Williams to a Robert Roberson shaken baby case that's... uh, at best a 'raises some doubts'.
Which makes it really weird mix ... if you thought people were reading the Innocence Project page to find examples of clearly innocent people on death row.
But the Innocence Project's point is a broader-spectrum criticism of punishment and criminal justice in general. Something merely being controversial or having even the slightest doubts do that, and that's a much wider field.
I'm generally pretty skeptical of jailhouse commentary. On the other hand, the case doesn't really rest on it: the possession of stolen goods and knowledge of undisclosed facts is pretty clear and, in this case, difficult to come up with an alternative explanation. You end up needing Asaro, Wiliams ex-girlfriend, or some unknown third party working with both Asaro and Williams, to have been the real murderer, or you need a pretty wide breadth of police conspiracy, or both. There's ways to stitch these possibilities together, but they depend on incredibly complex chains of counterfactuals.
((And the media coverage is absolutely awful; it's not surprising that the Innocence Project is just outright wishcasting, but a lot of other shops are repeating that version without any mention of the official trial records contradicting them over and over.))
On the gripping hand, the standard isn't Ace Attorney Find The Real Murder, or even innocence, just to find reasonable doubt. But... this is still pretty weak sauce to find doubt in, and low enough a bar to sound like 'any imaginable alternative'. Especially when fresh appeals are being furnished decades later, there's always going to be some new technology not used, or tangentially-related person having second thoughts, or new angle to approach, or snafu to be highlighted.
((And way too many of these cases are like this. Every death penalty case not involving a spree shooter gets a fandom -- I've seen people defend killers who literally asked for the death penalty -- and even the most highly promoted ones Don't Look Great Bob. Actual plausible cases of actually sketchy convictions exist, and boy does Scalia's corpse spin like a motor when you point it out, but the degree of difference is vast.))
Maybe there's an argument for such higher standards that are not just a generic argument against the death penalty, but in many ways that's scarier: the increasing political battle against life without parole, sentencing with parole, mandatory minima, and of crushing sentences for particularly egregious crimes have a pretty obvious end result if the argument generalizes.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I haven't tracked down the underlying filing yet, but the Washington Post reports:
But hours before an evidentiary hearing on the evidence, Bell and Williams’s team learned the DNA that excluded Williams belonged to former St. Louis prosecutor Keith Larner and an investigator who, years earlier, contaminated the murder weapon by handling it without gloves, according to court filings.
gattsuru
1yr ago
For those interested, we now have images and documentation on the other attempted assassin's rifle. It's... uh, a thing.
gattsuru
1yr ago
To be fair, there actually are some gay guys who kink on gloryholes-qua-non, where it's about the informality and casual nature rather than either the anonymity or grossness/degradation. (Though the resulting kink is still very casual-sex-with-longer-term-acquaintances). Braeburned's probably one of the better-known artists in the furry fandom really focusing on it, but there's a decent amount both inside and outside of the fandom.
But it still wouldn't be especially effective at reducing COVID transmission even in that 'ideal' case, for pretty obvious reasons, and it still has other issues re: both COVID and STD transmission.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Yeah, as before I'll caveat that this alpha top stuff, while a common kink, is far from a universal one. Even for people who do appreciate it, it's not always something you're gonna be feeling up for. Things like frotting, mutual masturbation, or some forms of oral don't really have top/bottom in the same sense, and there's a lot of times where providing oral to someone is fun because it's fun, not because you're submitting to them, especially with that whole oversensitivity deal you can kinda play with.
There is a lot of mechanical vulnerability to bottoming, even to women (arguably, because strapons give less feedback, more vulnerability), but being physically vulnerable isn't the same as being emotionally vulnerable, and it doesn't have to be tied into this framework of submitting to someone Better than you.
That said, I think there is a risk of romanticizing the unknown. There can be a lot of asymmetry in a lot of gay relationships: while there's less difference in sex drive on average, there's a lot more mechanical preparation to bottoming; where there's a lot fewer of the big gendered differences in expectations or interests, a lot of things that look gendered in het relationships are cultural or upraising in gay ones.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Previous thread here.
Given the extent that the Pennsylvania Supreme Court is political and has made political decisions, this is a pretty surprising result to me, if for more cynical causes. Binding parties that were not part of a court procedure is bad, but courts have been pretty willing to put a procedural thumb on the scale toward more votes being counted above all. Whether this ends up the last word, or we have a process change a couple days before the election when all the is are cross and ts dotted, though...
gattsuru
1yr ago
Disney, for example, has gone back and created origin stories for two of their outright evil villains, Cruella De Ville and Maleficent, and from what I gather (I haven't watched the films) they do manage to 'humanize' them and even maybe vindicate them?
Maleficent pretty heavily vindicates The Wicked Witch. She's reimagined as a dark fairy who protected the forest from aggression by a nearby king, made friends and fell in love with a poor commoner from that kingdom, and then was betrayed by that commoner, who takes drugs her and takes her wings for the bounty. The whole curse on Sleeping Beauty is a fit of rage and misguided revenge against that once-commoner-now-king that is Sleeping Beauty's father, but she regrets it near-instantly and spends the next two decades trying to help protect and raise Sleeping Beauty, eventually lifting the curse. This version isn't a perfect hero, but she's at worst a hero with flaws, and while it's definitely a different take on her from the original version, it's at least recognizable from the original story.
Cruella, not so much. The attempts to tie the any dalmatians in are both perfunctory (they killed her mom! kinda; she ends up taking them in from their previous owner) and not really relevant. It'd probably have worked out okay as an entirely unrelated movie -- she's turned into a headstrong artist wanting revenge on the psychotic baroness who twice orphaned her, and there's a certain Beetlejuice-the-TV-show vibe going on that kinda works -- but it's so little connection to the motivations of the original work that she doesn't really say anything about the original 101 Dalmatians character.
Wicked kinda runs in between those two. There's a bunch of new motivations -- Elphaba's reacting to psuedoracism against her and actual-racism against talking animals, the Wizard is a not-very-subtle fascist -- are not only invisible in the original works, but pretty much incompatible with a lot of them, and even with some higher cause Elphaba's still a murderer in the books. But she's somewhat humanized in motive, even if still doing the wrong things and regretting them.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Final Fantasy XIV: Dawntrail has some interesting, if spoileriffic counterexamples. For those who aren't interested in the game or spending a couple hundred hours to get to the endgame:
There is some mind (or more specifically memory) control, but ultimately it's a bit of a distraction: there are fundamental disagreements, and while they might have been solvable by looking for some third option, neither society was interested in it.
gattsuru
1yr ago
At least from the complaint, Bierly's work history only included :
Mr. Bierly worked as an intern with the U.S. Cybercommand for a summer internship from June 15, 2020 through July 17, 2020. During the summer internship with JWAC, Mr. Bierly worked from May 24, 2021 through August 13, 2021. Lastly, On November 18, 2022, after working in his position with the Air Force from August 15, 2022, Mr. Bierly was issued a Statement of Reasons (SOR) from DCSA notifying him of the DCSA’s intent to revoke Mr. Bierly’s eligibility for access to classified information.
Most of the time during his probationary period he worked at a university tech support field, according to his LinkedIn, and for the internships or three months at the job there's a lot of restrictions about what new hires get. There's a fair argument that the DoD needs to figure out how to handle the broader class of stuff at a more reasonable rate -- taking three+ years to onboard new people is a problem! -- but this sorta one-hand-can't-find-the-other is why those prolonged probationary periods exist.
On the other side, in the SOR letter the investigator claims to have understood this to include continued and recent viewing of porn involving 16-year-old characters as recently as a month before the polygraph (page 147 here, cw: more details about a dude jerking it than I wanted to know). Bierly's complaint alleges that the polygraphers inserted that age as an assumption for everything but his admission while 15-years-old, though, and his more recent viewings had been focused on 18+ characters.
There are even some technical reasons with how e621's tag and blacklist system worked at the time where that confusion might be reasonable! Or the investigators could have gotten a face full of prohibited content when checking the normie keywords Bierly provided, had to soak their computers in bleach, and either not believed or wanted to take it out on him.
gattsuru
1yr ago
There were a pretty sizable number of Sipple-like people, who were pretty quiet about things and did not openly go nuclear warfare, but were also still out of the closet and did not believe it was good policy at the time.
That's been more common later, but Watkins first was drafted in the late 1960s, and while a bit of a progressive putz by military standards, was pretty much a poster child for don't-start-nothing-won't-be-nothing.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Yeah, there's a long line of recent caselaw holding some medical care is constitutionally required, under the 8th Amendment for convicted prisoners and under the 14th for pretrial jailed people. Was one of several matters of controversy back in the early Sovaldi days, among others. Unlike the NYT's panicked reporting then, the legal standard isn't 'standard of care', but it is pretty messy and vague.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Even where not botted, they're... running into problems.
I'm sure some amount of /r/ffxiv is software talking to itself, but a wide variety of information has just moved elsewhere for other reasons -- if you want DPS guides, the Balance is better formatted than anything you can do in reddit; if you want raid strats, either youtube or thepfstrats are the only real options; if you want crafting stuff there's TeamCraft; if you're trying to learn about Baldesion Arsenal or Bozja you're pretty much stuck in Discords. Only some of it's explicitly censored (eg game modding for FFXIV is in a gray area, and corresponding has moved almost entirely to Discord and carrds), but a far greater part just found it better to use the reddit as a recruiting nexus and nothing more.
Similarly, there's a couple central FIRST reddits (/r/ftc and /r/frc), and they sometimes have news or useful questions, especially during their respective seasons proper. But almost every serious discussion happens in Discords or a classical forum (chiefdelphi) or a team-specific website.
I think some or all of the underage content would be covered and illegal under federal obscenity law, if in the same marijuana sense. There probably is a Stanley v. Georgia right to receive non-obscene furry porn, though I wouldn't want to wager that much on any one piece as passing that test and I wouldn't be absolutely confident in Stanley surviving modern review.
I too have questions about "intent to continue doing so" - who actually tells the humorless polygrapher who's about to torpedo your career, "Yes, I totally intend to keep doing this"?
I tracked down the full complaint and security background paperwork (attachment 2, relevant page 147) on the FOIA project. 'Intent to continue' seems attached only to the supercategory of 'these types of images', even by the government's telling. Especially if Bierly didn't realize how deep shit he was in, not completely disavowing future consumption of above-age furry porn and/or insufficiently distinguishing between it is... plausible. And it's kinda clearance investigator's jobs to not let people they're investigat_ing_ realize the shit is neck-high.
((Hell, there are some internal parts of how tags/blacklisting worked at e621 at the time where that might have augmented that confusion even had Bierly been very aggressive about blocking underage content, though I expect no one wants to hear about those details.))
But short of his account getting linked to his real name, and maybe not even then, we're probably never gonna know with more certainty than just what he wants us to think the story is.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Yeah, and it's not necessarily a completely overlapping set of circles -- there's a lot more security clearance red flags in totally-legal levels of financial mismanagement than in getting in an ill-advised fistfight. A clearance isn't an official designation that you're a good person, or even a completely trustworthy one, so much as trying to hedge off certain security risks. As I said, I'm not sure the clearance determination here is wrong.
But the heuristics are wonky, here. I'm sure mine aren't representative, but it's hard to name ones that are compatible with what we do.
Furries heavvvvily predate SomethingAwful: for adult content focuses VCL dates back to something like 1995, PureYiff and YiffStar to 2002. For SFW content, Werewolf(.)com was not solely furry but had more furry and therian content than SA, was on its second or third software iteration by the time 4chan launched; WereWeb had been launched, had its height, and died before 4chan launched. And that's ignoring IRC or UseNet communities.
The entire original Burned Furs mess happened before 4Chan existed, and started before SomethingAwful was founded. (Thankfully.)
gattsuru
1yr ago
It'd be funny if it were just the they/them Marx fandom furries -- hell, it wouldn't even be the most defamatory thing from DogPatch Press, somehow. But I think that the problems the furry fandom fight with are just particularly prominent, because the most arguable border cases and the central version of the prohibited content are visible without the FBI getting involved or having to read three hundred pages of crappy Harry Potter AU fanfic for context, and the resulting internal discourse has given some of the witchiest and witch-hunterist people a lot of ammo to work with.
There's been similar problems throughout the various writing spheres, Archive Of Our Own gets regular attacks over it, it's one of the main Tumblr Discourse platter options. And the New Right has its own versions. I think there's a broader matter where it's become the new room temperature.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Oof. That's a mess.
While it (and even the publicity) might not completely kill this guy's career, it definitely chops a lot of potential off it. There's some civilian uses for the sorta skills the software parts of that career field do, and some cybersecurity shops won't really care, but quite a lot of them either depend on background checks or lower levels of clearance that are gonna red flag this. Even if he didn't plan on staying in the DoD, having a security clearance before leaving can be worth a lot of salary.
(LinkedIn points to a higher education nonprofit, which... works, I guess, though depending on exactly where it falls in 'higher ed' would raise different concerns if he really were a threat. Dunno if it's more or less of a Google Problem than having your real name tied to the other sort of 1000-year-old dragon.)
And while not the most central case of where these definitions break down, and squicks me a bit (especially "intent to continue doing so" as he stops being a teenager, though not being able to read the complaint leaves me some concern for how accurately that's being repeated), it's still the sort of thing that also gets played at Cannes or put into a school library when there's a sufficient bow slapped on top. Law is filled with these sorta graduations, but if you wanted a similar level of 'officially banned, unofficially tolerated or sometimes feted' the first place to come to mind would be marijuana legalization, which... hasn't worked out great.
It's not clear whether it's illegal in the strict formalist sense. Ashcroft v Free Speech is usually what people point to as suggesting that obviously fictional works can't be generally prohibited, but that opinion allowed such speech to be restricted under the rules around obscenity, and Congress did do that. While that definition is vague (imo badly so) and counterproductive (imo badly so), modern technical advances have made Rehnquist's dissent much more persuasive at the same time that SCOTUS's makeup is more skeptical of the ACLU takes. From a legal realist perspective? It's a clusterfuck to determine if any one piece has 'redeeming value' (though a majority of furry porn is straight-up porn that would directly fail by honest tests, and others by close-enough checks), whether it offends community sensibilities, whether the ways it does offend community sensibilities are actually the sort the courts unofficially overlook because it's a proxy for 'animus', what the age of characters even are (is this goat the probably-older-than-universe-but-woefully-immature Asriel from Undertale, the unknown-aged-but-probably-late-high-schoolish Ralsei from Deltarune, an aged-down version of either, an aged up version of either, or an Original Character Donut Steel?), yada yada. Prosecutors generally don't want to deal with it, but they have on rare occasions with especially clear cases.
On the other hand, this isn't criminal prosecution: especially this level of higher-tier security clearance. There's a reason you can tell who's been through that level of interview from those who've just heard about it by the extent they flinch at certain questions. For all the official guidelines are about really overt behavior showing sympathy to foreign governments, illegal behaviors, or blackmailable targets, the practical guidelines are looking for broader understandings of strong impulse control and good judgement, pretty vaguely defined. If playing War Thunder is an unacceptable security risk -- and I think it's pretty persuasive that it is -- it's not like this is that unreasonable.
On the gripping hand, the extent the underlying laws and definitions are a mess and largely unconfrontable is gonna keep making the paradoxes more present, both here and in cases with more serious consequences. I get that critics of the law are (understandably!) looking for cases with perfectly sympathetic defendants and especially clear legal processes, both for normal legal tactics and because a decent number of the 'it's ephibophilia' people end up taking off the mask, but in practice there's been thirty years of establishing a pretty harsh new social norm.
((On the other gripping hand, it's quite possible we'll seriously confront those central cases where the definitions completely break down and decide that's because we do need to crank up enforcement of stricter social and legal norms. Totally fictional porn by people who are just working through their own missed opportunities in their youth still have the Kabier problem, and there's a lot more evidence in favor of even sometimes-above-age-of-consent sexualization being either risky or prone to abuse.))
At the encouragement of a different ProPublica writer, I've sent an e-mail into the author of the story (and now realize that I've made a typo in said e-mail, dammit). Will comment further if I get a response.
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