gattsuru
1yr ago
It'd be a remarkable bill to pass in any circumstance. I don't see a rule against it, even for the light value of rules that could be nuked a la filibuster.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Okay, so what would happen? Unfortunately, we don't actually have a draft bill on hand.
There's a bill from Whitehouse here; while it's unlikely to pass (albeit more because of the House than the Senate) , or even be attempted to pass before the election, it's got some interesting specifics.
- (Non-original jurisdiction) cases are heard by the nine newest justices. Older justices don't retire, they just get 'senior' status, ie fade away and hear state-on-state cases.
- Presidents get one nominee during the first 120 days at the first year of their Presidency, and a second in the third, unless there are already 18 justices total.
- If a nominee is withdrawn or disapproved by the Senate, that 120 day counter restarts for a new one.
- If there are less than 9 total justices, President gets to fill in new ones, regardless of the above.
- This starts the Presidential term after the law goes in place. Lots of reasons to push it before Jan 20th.
- Quorum is set, by statute, to 6.
- ((There's some messiness with the office of the Chief Justice; that role only falls off when a current Chief Justice dies or resigns, even if they no longer are seeing most cases.))
If passed in the lame duck session before a Harris administration came in, Harris would have one nominee in 2025 (booting Thomas) and a second in 2027 (booting Roberts). Slower packing, but a Dem-appointed majority in three years. There's some efforts to counter the obvious counteractions -- a Republican Senate can't wait out a nominee -- but it's almost hilariously under-Black-Hatted in ways. A lot of those, there's a lot I'm not going to discuss publicly, but the trivial question of what happens with gaming recusal is the obvious and low-end side of the problem.
gattsuru
1yr ago
That depends very heavily on the law not getting passed before January 20th, 2025:
This Act, and the amendments made by this Act, shall apply beginning on the date on which the first full term of a President commences pursuant to section 101 of title 3, United States Code, after the date of enactment of this Act.
Or, if passed in the new session, not being modified.
gattsuru
1yr ago
For another example that's going around, Steven Fulop is the current mayor of Jersey City, New Jersey. Jonathan Gomez-Noriega was a mayoral aide, who previously was part of the Jersey City LGTBQ+ Task Force. Emphasis on was:
Background on what Valencia Gomez said as reported by LGBT media groups, originals here. (cw: it's exactly the Olympics Discourse you'd expect).
And while he was told to give a heartfelt public apology and did, it doesn't look like that matters; he’s fired.
In some ways, this is more 'clear'. Gomez-Noriega donated 1250 USD, not a tenner, with the most recent donation just under a month ago, and while Gomez is an unlikely and not especially competent candidate (in an 8-way race for the primary), she's undeniably a politician and she's made very clear that She's Not A Fan Of the Gays
(... enough that I was tempted to spam a Femboys and Firearms (cw: exactly what it sounds like) cover or Cathode_G link on twitter, though I recognize That Wouldn't Help).
In other ways, it runs into Problems, and not just in the optimistic sense that we might not want to punish people for political donations where the recipient acts poorly afterward; or demand employees disavow family; or look as more of a shrieking harpy as the shrieking harpy. New Jersey does not have unusual protections for the speech rights of rando employees, and it definitely doesn't have some equivalent to California's charlie foxtrot of a situation. There's a judicial construct that kinda gets twisted into protecting speech when judges want it to, but it's not gonna count here, and even were there strong and directly relevant statutes, as California demonstrates, an employer's interest in countering disfavored enough speech will get remarkable amounts of deference.
But Gomez-Noriega was a city employee; Steven Fulop is the mayor. Unlike us private-sector peons, that implicates state power directly. While rare, cases have rarely even survived both motion to dismiss and inevitable attempts to moot them where a state could have threatened or retaliated directly over private speech on matters of public concern.
Of course, as the ACLU (caveat: New York ACLU) helpfully points out, there's a broad exception where the speech "disrupted its work or have the potential to disrupt its work, including by affecting public perception of your employer if you frequently interact with members of the public in your job", and while the specific examples of exceptions reflect places where the speaker directly "targets individuals or communities because of their racial, ethnic, or religious identity", I wouldn't want to try to talk an employment lawyer into taking the case on contingency on the basis of that distinction.
gattsuru
1yr ago
As an example, I'd point to City of Heroes as kinda a best-case scenario: an employee of the studio operators for an MMO leaked pretty much everything (source code, development tools, even player data!), the code ended up being relatively drag-and-drop for standard off-the-shelf desktop machines (modulo a pretty steep RAM cost even by the standards of 2020), and the dependency list wasn't that bad while the paid dependencies were scaling up their free versions rapidly.
((And, bluntly, NCSoft pissed off almost every single person at Paragon Studios, in ways that they were quite willing to hurt NCSoft for so long as they couldn't get sued over it.))
But it still had people working on it had to do a ton of tweaking work, either to get it to run even moderately stably without dedicated staff, to update the client to handle arbitrary server addresses, and a decent amount of other black magic that SCORE wasn't talking about publicly. And it is a best-case scenario, without much in the way of middleware, jealously protected internal code for other competing products, or obnoxious infrastructure asks. If rather than free(ish) MS-SQLExpress it'd been some weird solidDB bullshit, or if the instances required some goofy mess of microservices as a minisharding behavior? What if some code dependency had license that couldn't be passed to users or resold?
By contrast, take Glitch. Not only were its assets in a much more complicated state given the development of the game, it depended on Adobe Flash. Some of it was open-sourced, surprisingly, but even before the death of Flash and ActionScript it wasn't anywhere near usable; now, much if it's barely useful. Even had every single part of the game leaked, it'd be a significant project to convert. ((And then OddGiants moved to Unity, right before the license rework.))
In practice, this puts really strong pressures toward either leaving MMOs in maintenance mode forever, breaking them off into other companies that go completely can't-punish-us bankrupt, or not releasing anything but what their investors are absolutely sure will be a forever hit. Maybe that's worth it, or there are ways to reduce these pressures by careful framing of the regulation.
But I'm not optimistic, and too many responses just feel like kicking the can down the road under the assumption someone will fix them, or make them not count.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I would caution against taking community notes at face value without checking their underlying reference. The relevant underlying quote is :
Mr Gilbert Felli, Sports Director, had a number of proposals to present to the Board which were agreed to and thus will now be put to the IOC members for approval at the next Session... On the other hand, the mixed trap and skeet shooting events are to be deleted in favour of separate events for men and women. The addition of two events requested by the UIT, double trap for men and women, was accepted, as was the quota reduction from 440 to 430.
That is, the proposal was accepted for later IOC approval in December 1991. Since the IOC's 84th session had been in September of 1991, this means that final approval must have been in the 85th or 86th session, the earliest of which was in May, three months after the 1992 Winter Olympics.
It's not clear where the note is getting "women requesting the IOC to do so" from. UIT was the (French) name for the shooting organization that eventually became the ISSF, but pretty much every group of every Olympic sport launders their calls to action through the international sporting org, so that's not proof against. But the UIT wasn't (and the ISSF isn't) exactly a knitting club when it comes to demographics, and their contemporaneous claim was that they couldn't support the matter as "only a handful of women shooters are able to qualify against men for major competitions."
((There's also a longer history; as the underlying link points out, separation of men and women's shooting sports had begun in 1984, well before 1991, with trap and skeet being the last to swap. More broadly, women were arguing in favor of discrete Women's events for new sports, an argument they had mostly won in 1990, but existing sports were as often recast as 'mixed', some of that persists to this day. There was also a contemporaneous movement, mostly from eastern europe, in favor of gender segregated sports over mixed ones, not because but because of social/religious norms.))
And sure maybe there's some element of that but you can directly point out that in most cases women are very much allowed to compete against men if they want. But they choose not to and usually they don't place well when they do.
I'm very skeptical of the harassment explanation, especially for the shooting sports, but women do compete, albeit rarely, in non-Olympic shooting sports. Some have gender-segregated roles, some have mixed-gender competitions, some do both. Handgun work generally favors men slightly,
Bigger issue is that there's just not as many women interested. USPSA tends to have had the best luck getting interest from the fairer sex, both due to match style and for historic reasons, despite the best efforts of IDPA to try and poach. But while you have women like Justine Williams and Jessie Harrison that are absolute terrors, you don't have anywhere near the number of 'almosts'.
Probably a reference to Andreas Krieger, though that was shotput rather than weightlifting (and East Germany, rather than Eastern Europe).
That said, the East German stuff, specifically, was often done without the consent or knowledge of the doped athlete, so while it says a lot about what governments will do for an Olympic Gold, it's less helpful for talking about individual people.
I had an account on LW-sphere discourse at the time (2012-2015ish? imo), if not particularly active on LW-proper.
I don't know where you're getting TracingWoodgrains into the Dark Arts stuff. He started his current display name in 2018 in a mix of /r/slatestarcodex and SSC-open-thread proper education-posting. He's mentioned having read LessWrong in the 2010ish space, and it's possible that he commented to some degree, but he hasn't publicized any username he had at the time, and his writing style is vastly different from any Dark Art advocates like fual_sname or 08res (or even adjacent people like nydrawku).
((I've got my complaints about both his position and his tactics, but they're a lot more prosaic.))
Yglesias is absolutely following in that approach, often to the point that's less 'parallel evolution' and more 'who stole whose homework', but I don't think anyone has accused him of being on LessWrong. Contrapoints is less Dark Arts and more Sneer, which is maybe closer to what you're motioning around, but again more someone people in the ratsphere talk about than someone who argued for the legitimacy of the Dark Arts (or Sneer) themselves on LW.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Yeah, specifically the pattern of events was that Paul Abbate, the FBI deputy director, testified to the Judiciary Committee that:
Something just very recently uncovered that I want to share is a social media account, which is believed to be associated with the shooter in the 2019-2020 time frame. There were over 700 comments posted from this account. Some of these comments, if ultimately attributable to the shooter, appear to reflect anti-semitic and anti-immigration themes, to espouse political violence and are described as extreme in nature. While the investigation team is still working to verify this account, to determine if it did in fact belong to the shooter, we believe it important to share and not it today, particularly given the general absence of other information to date from social media and other sources of information that reflect on the shooter's potential motive and mindset. [emphasis added]
The interesting bit from Torba is not so much that the content of the linked social media account is particularly extremist, but that the EDR less than a week before thought the account was specifically "associated with" the shooter. Allegedly, neither account has been confirmed as the attempted assassins, nor to my knowledge has the FBI said that the Gab account has since been found not to be the shooter's (or proven to be that of an associate of the shooter).
But it makes it quite hard to argue that the federal investigation representative in charge of this wasn't lying before Congress in order to present a more politically useful scenario.
gattsuru
1yr ago
The comms situation sounds more and more like an absolute shitshow. Podunk or small-time operators underestimating how much impact even a small surge crowd can have on cell reliability is a pretty common sort of mistake to make -- even local femtocells/microcells often struggle badly, and you aren't going to get them in place for a one-off -- but the flip side is that it's so common that the USSS should not only consider it in planning but also have some (if jank) solution, here.
That doesn't necessarily mean indoctrinating every police officer near a USSS operation into Slack (b/c there's a few CJIS-compat other tools), but ... 900 feet is the sort of distance you can close with 150 USD in 2.4ghz links for data, and almost any radio for voice. Frequency deconflict (and since Butler County does seem to have used encryption, getting signed into the right trunk) is not trivial, but it's a minutes thing, not an hours one. There are arguments against introducing new technology in mission-critical situations, but 'train a handful of people to use new comms' is literally someone in that room's job.
All of that said, that this a) supposedly including transcripts and b) almost all of the local police leaves me more than a little skeptical its origin came from a pure-hearted interest in solving problems. There's been a lot of effort on the feds side to not-so-subtly point at the local cops, and this sorta release, especially with the pointed gaps for any comms to the USSS depot, would fit in that category very readily. Some of this is genuinely bad comm discipline -- the report's trying to highlight the Sheetz misdirection, but "we got him" is the sort of thing that should never be going over a voice channel in this sort of circumstance -- but they're the sort of problems that pop up when your swiss cheese model is down to the last bit of wax paper.
I don't know how much to trust Grassley (politician, mouth moving), but he's been claiming that the local police had a meeting that morning at 9AM, including specifically passing radios to sniper teams, which is what I'd expect, and that the feds didn't attend.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Can't meaningfully sign, since not a Euro, but good luck. The collapse of online-dependent software has a lot of legal stuff that makes it understandable, but it's absolutely wrecked a lot of archivist spheres, and in many cases even when stuff leaks, it's still impossible to go home again.
I've not followed it much, but Fallen Earth's apparently still online somehow, though the servers and maintainers have been replaced a few times and spent a few years dead. Was an interesting idea when it came out, but trying to straddle survival gaming on one side and the time-gates of Runecrafts on the other was more compelling as a sell than it was to play in early release.
((I'm still amazed that Tabula Rasa is the deadest MMO I've ever played, given some of the absolute stinkers, but given the circumstances, maybe that's not that much of a surprise. And Glitch and Skysaga only avoid giving Tabula Rasa a run for its money only because of weird fan projects that aren't likely to go anywhere productive anytime soon.))
gattsuru
1yr ago
gattsuru
1yr ago
Enough B'rer Rabbit stories start with him escaping capture that you sometimes see it separated from the Tar Baby story, and it's probably a little more famous because it's been transposed to so many other settings and works where the tar-mix wouldn't. But at least in the Uncle Remus stories version, yeah, it's very explicitly two separate halves of the same incident (cw: it's... a 1880s Southern work).
gattsuru
1yr ago
(come to think of it, are there any non-Christian socons?)
I think so, although it probably requires a broader definition of socon than Christians would often use. There's a lot of Indian conservative culture that, while not perfectly overlapping for what it things the Golden Path is, still shares a large agreement on what the common 'degenerate' forms are. Sikh religious doctrine actually have more overlap than most people expect, modulo the underpants, to the point where a lot of Westerners flinch pretty hard when finding out. And Islam and Mormon (though Mormons consider themselves Christian) groups have their own versions.
Socon texts... tend to be pretty clear that most deviant sexual behavior is both "natural" and more attractive than non-deviant behavior on its face, to the point where it's more strict on restricting what everyone else considers non-deviant behavior (i.e. Catholics and contraception). If it wasn't, not only would there not be warnings about it, but nobody would do anything else.
This varies a bit depending on who you're talking with and what 'deviant' behavior. Monogamy (and avoiding sex before marriage) is one thing that clearly follows the path you line out. On the other hand, condoms are, rather infamously, something very few people develop kinks for (and when they do, it's often in contexts Catholics wouldn't want anyway) or enjoy. No matter how the longer-term personal benefits, there's a lot of reason that there's so much 'wrap it up' encouragement. Religious takes on male homosexuality are closer to your position, but Borderer views often devolve into it being at best easy (uh, for the top), but not particularly attractive or desirable except in the no-other-port-in-a-storm-but-a-goat sorta way, and there's a small faction of often-agnostic or atheist socons that give very sad tales about how porn caused them to downslide from vanilla straight sex into a series of perversion they'd never had even glimpsed at years before. And very few people get accidentally slide into a dress, makeup, and set of high heels without some external examples beforehand, or into a fursuit.
But I do admit these are just difference in framing: the line between superstimulus and temptation is a matter of view. Nobody likes condoms, but they like being pregnant or paying child support even less; as a bi furry I'll absolutely say that there's a lot of surprisingly benefits to both.
To be fair, Song of the South is really vague about its time; the Hays Code reviewers supposedly asked for explicit statement in-film that it was set post-Civil War, but in the released work you end up having to read tea leaves and styles of clothing to nail it down. Yes, Remus's family are clearly sharecroppers rather than slaves, but Georgia did have a (tiny, heavily exploited) number of free African-Americans pre-Civil War (though almost all closer to cities); Johnny's family's behavior toward the African-Americans is way too familiar to have been acceptable in antebellum Georgia, but sanitizing treatment of 'the help' in media was absolutely common to antebellum writing and post-Reconstruction writing about pre-war behaviors.
Supposedly one of the scriptwriters wanted to make it more explicit, and there's probably something interesting to say about what a film closer to his version would have looked like, but given that one of the other guys wrote stuff such that the Hayes Code thought it was too racist for the time, and he's the one with more obvious fingerprints on the final work, I don't think it's an unreasonable complaint.
gattsuru
1yr ago
For those who haven't seen it, "When I See An Elephant Fly" and, while not as well-remembered or about the African-American men in it, "Song of the Roustabouts". The original released in 1941, and while I don't remember if it explicitly writes out the time of the setting, it's clearly post-1920 (there are prominent electrical lights in a non-urban area, airplane are drawn with metal, not cloth).
The dumb critique (eg, the version you get if you try to watch the show in Disney+) is that the crows are minstrel show references. And while they're not Sambo-level stereotypes, even giving the worst interpretation of their beaks, minstrel shows did have African-American characters with spats and pronounced AVEE, giving Life Lessons in with overstated emotion. I don't think that is my problem with minstrel shows, but for some people the cooties are enough (when they want them to be; the same people will carefully ignore much more overt connection when it's costly).
The steelman is that the work as a whole tried to say something, but to do so in 1941 meant compromises with evil that are no longer necessary in 2024. The African-American characters in "Roustabouts" are explicitly compared (and arguably drawn like, though Dumbo's animation in general was a little rough) to apes, are gleefully happy in their work, can't read or write, blow all their pay the day they get paid -- because their cash pay is so little that sending their kids to the circus they work at consumes it all, their room and board is a windowless carriage car, and do I need to spell out Segregation-era education? While I'll admit it's neither the only possible interpretation or intent, I think it's a very plausible read they are dehumanized in the sense that this is showing that they are treated like animals, in-setting, but they're more human and dedicated than the (implicitly and paintedly white) actors who make up the clown posse.
The treatment of the Crows in "When I See an Elephant Fly" is a continuation of that theme: they're not especially smart or formal, but they're clever, reasonably skeptical, and extremely sympathetic. They are, along with Timothy the Mouse (and Dumbo's mother), the only people to care about Dumbo, and they have less cause to do so. This is a more subtle critique, but I think it was still a critique; at a time where segregationists thought whites and African-Americans were the same species only as a fault (Loving v. Virginia wasn't until 1967!), this was to say even if African-Americans were different species, even if all the stereotypes of behavior and mannerism were true, that wouldn't be what mattered compared to what sort of people they were.
But in doing so, it had to play along with those stereotypes. That probably made it a lot more internalized at the time! (And a lot less likely to be protested or banned, though see Song of the South for where playing too far into the stereotypes got a protest movement in turn.) Aaand it meant today, there's not much there but the stereotypes. "Judge people by the content of their character, not the color of their feathers skin" was a meaningful slogan when Martin Luther King said it, and now it comes on ice cream wrappers; it's room temperature to say an African-American (-coded) character could be a hard worker or insightful. All that's left is the compromise.
I think it's still worth recognizing that, but I'm an outlier.
((That said, the crows were highlighted as a Good Example that should be brought forward into new pieces as recently as 2017, in no small part highlighting this perspective... and then infamously weren't, and by 2020 were taboo to mention.))
gattsuru
1yr ago
At least in this case, I did not get a notification.
The code gives a default MENTION_LIMIT of 100, and that could have been set lower in config file, but I'm not sure if that's a limit after which it would block the post entirely, or if it just stops mentions from notifying people. If that's not it, it's probably something goofier, maybe downstream of the loop messiness in sanitize.py.
gattsuru
1yr ago
While it's possible to present trans-related issues in a mature-as-in-serious rather than mature-as-in-adult or mature-as-in-Garth-Ennis sense, it's really hard to do so with enough detail to be a meaningful discussion instead of a handful of fuzzy buzzwords.
People like LoTT focus on pieces where there's explicit sex- or sex-like stuff (eg masturbation, performing oral sex on a dildo/prothesis), generally because they are more immediately uncomfortable to viewers, and less charitably in the hope they'll get censored to demonstrate how prurient such pieces are. But it's pretty common to see works that, if not quite so explicit, still delve deep into matters of sex and sexuality, even if they're aimed at early- or mid-teens audiences, or feature primary characters well under 18.
I've pointed to Venus Envy before, as one of the few insights to the trans-internal view of things in 2004-ish, but it's also a webcomic that opens with a 16-year-old's 'tuck' failure, and goes on to upskirt a (cis male) crossdresser of mumblemumble age to point out that he wasn't getting aroused. Serano's Excluded is a well-regarded feminist work in progressive circles, and it also spends a pretty sizable period of time on the "penis issue" of Michigan's Womyn Festival.
That's not a problem specific to trans stuff: I've mentioned Blue Is The Warmest Color before as a work that seems well-regarded and also starts with a 15-year-old lesbian's first sexual relationships, and I've named a few writers before who do excellent furry gay-themed works that are also difficult to discuss publicly because they also include outright porn, come from authors who've written outright porn in the same series, or just involve a lot of sex-related stuff. But despite the gay-themed literature being more fundamentally tied to attraction, it's as common in trans-focused stuff.
The counterargument is that, icky as it might be to adults, (most) teenagers run into this stuff themselves, and in other non-LGBT fiction. Media joking about awkward boners or weird sex toys exist, Catcher in the Rye has a lengthy section with a teenager trying to solicit a prostitute, Pern has its dragon-orgies (and we don't talk about the It novel). "What's the age of the main character in this coming-of-age-story" happens so much because most people don't wait til 18, and while not all of that story has to be about sex, a lot of people for a lot of cultures it is.
The counter-counterargument is that a lot of the socialcons aren't happy to expose younger teens to those works (and don't think it's healthy), either. They did protest American Pie and the entire sex comedy genre, did want steep age requirements for it, and don't particularly like the inclusion of Catcher in the Rye, either. To the extent that they don't care about Pern, it's because they weren't aware of it. They believe, with reason, that even if they try to keep their kids from exposure to this stuff, it is very likely individuals outside of their control will.
((Harder social-cons will argue that trans discussions are necessarily tied to sexual behaviors, either as an axiom or as a way to distinguish from 'simple' crossdress, where LGB works can conceivably treat romance as nothing more than kissing on the cheek (though they often don't like any of those either).))
The underlying theories are more esoteric, and I'm not sure I can give them a full explanation, but:
- They believe that some amount of exposure at certain ages are traumatizing.
- They believe that sexual interests, and especially male sexual interests, can sometimes be modified during young adulthood. This isn't so simple as believing that just browsing XChange makes you into an AGP stereotype, or getting tricked by femboy porn will turn you gay, or that porn drives people to cuckold kinks, but it's... not that far from that.
- They believe that that either there is a natural path of development or there is a path of development that requires indoctrination. There's a fraction where this expands to 'everyone would be focused on monogamous (het) healthy relationships if only Trained Properly', but even well short of that, there's an expectation that even if these materials don't encourage readers toward them, they at least push people from 'normal' behavior.
- They believe that it normalizes a lot of things, and that even if they are normal-in-the-statistics-sense, turning that into common knowledge is a Bad Thing. This is what a lot of grooming revolves around.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Yes, don't trust Wikipedia summaries. From the source:
"As indicated in Exhibit 1, three million persons applied for legalization. The applicants represented most legalization eligible aliens given an estimated illegal immigrant population of 3-5 million in 1986 (Hoefer, 1991). The approval rates for temporary and permanent residence were fairly high among both legalization (pre-1982 applicants) and SAW applicants. Nearly 2.7 million persons--nearly nine in ten applicants for temporary residence--were ultimately approved for permanent residence" ...
The impact of IRCA was much more concentrated with respect to legal immigration than naturalization (see Exhibit 2 and Exhibit 3). IRCA LPRs represented more than 40% of all immigrants in fiscal years 1989-1991 but never accounted for more than 23% of naturalizations in any one year. The peak in IRCA naturalizations probably occurred in 1996 when one-quarter million became citizens. By then, the entire cohort had become eligible to naturalize.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I'd be interested to see court documents to understand exactly what "no additional elements of coercion" means. Depending on context that can mean anything from 'didn't drug or threaten her life' to 'was completely unconscious at the time of the incident', and usually law and judicial contexts care about where it's enough to count as aggravating convictions. The Times summary, for however much you trust it, looks closer to the former than I'd like, especially with the "They also drank Baileys Irish Cream Liqueur together and slept on a cardboard box under a hotel stairway when they couldn’t get a room".
His defenders argue that because he was not convicted of grooming, he didn't do that, but even in the highly unlikely situation he didn't groom her in the colloquial sense, it seems very likely he fit in the text of the statute, so it's hard to pull too much data out of it. I've got... less than favorable feelings about the 'it's-ephebophilia' side of libertarian thought, but depending on the behavior this could well have flunked even that.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Even beyond the faults in the AI voicegen, "I'm a deep state puppet" is a pretty overt 'parody'.
gattsuru
1yr ago
It's kinda interesting that both Haaretz and ALJ describe the victim in this case as "he" -- were it one, I might think translation issues, and that's still possible, but it's a lot less likely. There's a lot of demographic reasons for a lot of violence against prisoners to target men, and I've seen 'gang-rape' used to describe the situation, but doesn't exclude the Abu Ghraib or Oncale-style sexualized-violence-as-humiliation option. Which is still bad!
At least from the public reporting, the accused soldiers were arrested. While some (and/or some other soldiers stationed at the facility?) resisted, they didn't do so very long or very successfully. A separate problem came about when external protestors, including some Israeli politicians, started protesting outside the base and then pushed their way inside, before being redirected back out. This is absolutely embarrassing for a military power, but it's more shoving contests gone dumber than a serious riot.
I think some of the right-wing protest comes about because there have been a number of high-profile exaggerated examples of IDF abuse, but a lot of the criticisms of treatment in other cases do have real foundation. Whether the underlying allegations here are Oncale-style abuse or more conventional gang-rape of a prisoner, they're going to need serious investigation to prove whether they happened or not.
It also just seem woefully prone to the triumph of ideology over pragmatics.
I'm absolutely pro-trans in the sense that I think trans men shouldn't have to duck into women's rooms to get tampons. I'm also familiar enough with how teenage boys work to realize that it would take minutes for men's room tampons to end up up someone's nose. Yes, having tampons at the nurse's office will be ever so slightly more uncomfortable and awkward. But it's an answer that doesn't sound like it was thrown out of an ivory tower.
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