gattsuru
1yr ago
Hawaii v Heller
The Hawaii Firearms Coalition claims:
A recent change in Hawaii law that goes into effect in January requires instructors to be certified or verified by the county police department is being used to ignore the constitutional rights of Hawaii citizens. Despite having more than 5 months to set up a process, Honolulu and the other counties took no action until now. Due to inaction or incompetence, this lack of a process means that Hawaiian citizens could be left with no legal method to obtain firearms for weeks or months after the law goes into effect.
The recent decision by Police Chief Logan to require people to be certified by nonexistent instructors means that NO ONE can purchase a handgun or rifle until after he holds a public meeting to change his previous rules to reflect the new state law. The chief has a meeting scheduled for January 9th and then must wait for the mayor to sign his rules before they go into effect. This means that until then, he has no legal process to verify or certify instructors.
- UPDATE - Honolulu police contacted me and said that they are interpreting the new law to give them 40 days to process applications. They say that this is enough time to certify instructors and to get those instructors to teach people that have previously applied trained.
The specific statute is here, with the most relevant components being :
no permit shall be issued to an applicant earlier than fourteen calendar days after the date of the application; provided that a permit shall be issued or the application denied before the fortieth day from the date of application.
Note that this is a permit to acquire; the permit to carry involves different timelines and different requirements. There's some lack of clarity here -- where HFC claims that the police stopped accepting applications on the 18th of December, the police claim that they're accepting applications and will only require the training certification when people pick up a permit. It's possible, if not especially unlikely, that the permit training process will be resolved in a reasonable timeframe, to plausibly fair ends, but if the Honolulu Police genuinely were still accepting permit applications on the 18th, their best-case timeline to meet statutory requirements has less than a week between .
There are various other issues with this statute -- like other jursdictions, Hawaii's law defies 'complies with' Heller and Bruen by changing "good cause" requirements to a "good character" one (requiring denial of a permit "if the issuing authority determines that issuance would not be in the interest of public health, safety, or welfare because the person lacks the essential character or temperament necessary"); it demands permitee applicants provide the police open access to their mental health records; it removed external validation of training courses (before this law, the NRA could certify instructors). And there's the general dissolution of trust, when gun nuts have long cited concerns that training requirements would be used to throttle or delay lawful gun ownership, and it just so happens to not be a priority for five months after the law itself was an emergency.
But the timeline provides a clearer problem of justiciability. As Illinois and New Mexico recently demonstrated, the courts are not particularly willing to step in early, but here it's not particularly clear how the courts would do so. By leaving the "certified or verified firearms instructor" up to local police, nearly-any challenge can be instantly mooted or otherwise have its factual underpinning pulled away with no more than a minute's effort, only to be upset again later (not even necessarily by bad action by the police, if only a few trainers sign up to start with!). And a court not willing to could leave this catch-22 in place for months, if not years.
Well, at least that's a one-off, and Hawaii's long been a basket case so-
California vs. Carry Permittees
In response to Bruen, California pass SB2 on September 26th, to take force on January 1st of the new year. Among many other restrictions, the law overhauled concealed carry within the state, including where a permittee could lawfully carry. Politicians supporting the law stated, both in press conferences and during the resulting lawsuits, that about the only place permittees could lawfully carry after the law passed would be a public streets and sidewalks, and that's actually a little more broad than the actual text of the law allows. There's been a few California-side gunnies who've videoed long and non-exclusive lists of behaviors that the law bans, though unfortunately I haven't seen any set to the Animaniacs country song (yet).
On December 20th a district court judge enjoined the law's enforcement, in a biting order that focused mostly on the restrictions on the right to bear arms, but didn't stop from noticing where the law was also often just built to make compliance difficult if not impossible, for example, that:
Notably, this provision poses a practical problem since a person may not approach the business with their firearm to get close enough to see the four-by-six-inch sign Section 26230(a)(26) requires without violating the statute.
This decision was, unsurprisingly, appealed along with a request for a stay, allowing the law to go into effect. On December 30th, an administrative stay was granted, and the "stay pending appeal, and the supplements, responses and replies thereto, are otherwise referred to the panel assigned to decide the merits of these appeals".
It's not clear if a merits panel has even been assigned, as of January 4th.
What happens next will depend very heavily on that merits panel. Traditionally, the calculations for a stay pending appeal would strongly favor blocking a law that hasn't yet come into play. But a number of justices at the 9th Circuit have a long history of both antipathy toward the Second Amendment and willingness to buck SCOTUS dicta; while I'm not going to say that a sizable number would never block enforcement of a gun control law, I've already winked suggestively. There are also non-trivial reasons to suspect the odds of a favorable merits panel to not be quite as simple as a dice-roll.
And the longer the statute has been allowed to apply -- four days already! -- the easier is it to imagine this becoming the new status quo.
Well, at least it's easier to get a permit, even if you can't do anything with it-
California vs. Carry Permit
Over the holidays, California DoJ also issued a intering emergency rule-making package. Among a wide variety of other regulatory changes, the process submits a new BOF 1034 CCW Program DOJ Certifed Instructor Application, which among other requirements demands application attach a copy of a certification from :
- Bureau of Security and Investigative Services, Department of Consumer Affairs, State of California - Firearm Training Instructor
- Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, State of California - Firearm Instructor or Rangemaster
- Authorization from a State of California accredited school to teach a firearms training course
And a shooting course qualification from one of :
- Bureau of Security and Investigative Services, Department of Consumer Affairs, State of California - Firearm Training Instructor
- Federal Government, Certified Rangemaster or Firearm Instructor
- Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, Firearm Instructor Training Program or Rangemaster
- United States Military, Occupational Specialty (MOS) as marksmanship or firearms instructor
- Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, State of California - Firearm Instructor or Rangemaster
- Authorization from a State of California accredited school to teach a firearms training course
At least from a casual read, this looks to be in explicit conflict with relevant California statutes, which also include the Civilian Marksmanship Program and NRA. It's also... not especially clear if any of these programs exist and are available to normal people: of the few that aren't explicitly tied to law enforcement or military training, like the State of California accredited school firearms training course, are still mostly law-enforcement-focused. ((I also wonder how well California's administrative notice law is being served by a notice for rule-making that was only open between December 22nd and December 27th.))
At a deeper level, though, it's a near fulfillment of long-standing gunnie fears that training requirements could be leveraged into otherwise-controversial restrictions. It's hard to take the requirements as seriously focused on preventing harm. Perhaps there's some argument about applied evenly-
New Mexico
An organization known for its gun buyback events is under investigation. It comes after the group dismantled guns over the weekend. San Juan County Sheriff Shane Ferrari says he’s trying to find out whether or not the gun buyback events New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence does are legal. He said the investigation comes after community members reached out to him with that question.
“I’m still not understanding how these transactions are taking place without a background check,” San Juan County Sheriff Shane Ferrari said.
It’s all centered around a New Mexico law that says the sale of a firearm without a background check is unlawful. There are a few exceptions to the law, but Ferrari says he doesn’t know how the nonprofit falls into the mix.... New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence actually helped pass that law. The group’s co-President Miranda Viscoli explained the difference between what the group did last weekend versus what she says would be unlawful.
Further posts from the group make very clear this is almost certainly in violation of both New Mexico's new laws, but also long-present federal ones, sometimes in hilarious ways, and that the NMPGV knew those rules.
These laws often stupid, especially in this context! Officially, a local sheriff has opened an investigation, but realistically, nothing's going to happen here but some egg on some faces. Yes, it's the sort of illegal that gets federal agents to shoot your dog and son and wife if they need to pump up their rookie numbers, but not the sort of illegal that those agents treat seriously. After all, going after political allies "would not promote public safety".
gattsuru
1yr ago
I'd quibble that part of people's expectations of the legal scenario reflect the vague and oft-moving ground of the community standards component of the Miller test, with the Movie Buffs case being one of the better-known limits. Miller requires not one of these prongs to be broken, but all of them. There's definitely stuff in the modern era that would fail it, but there's also a lot of stuff that's "porn" or actual-porn by normal definitions that wouldn't.
I think that's a good argument in favor of Douglass's critic of Miller's community standards -- if to the opposite valence as his original intent -- but the problem makes the law hard to analyze. The same content could well be obscene or not just by traveling a hundred miles, or thanks to a tiny fig leaf of 'social importance'.
The only sane application of the law to me would be to streamline a system where parents can sue content distributors or individuals for serving a specific pornographic image to their specific minor without sufficient age verification. That keeps half the burden of proof on the parent to show A) their kid saw porn, B) the party being sued is responsible for the child viewing the porn and C) the party being sued did not use sufficient age verification (defined by the state.) Depending on the damages and how simple this is to file, this could have a dampening effect on even less-than-legit-venues and individual actors on Discord.
I can understand why that might look like an attractive approach at first glance, but I think it has insufficient consideration for how the legal system operates in practice.
At the simplest level, most less-than-legit venues will just been driven outside of the United States (or operate through service run in jurisdictions outside of the United States), beyond what extent they already have moved, since meaningfully collecting judgement on a civil suit across national boundaries is effectively outside of the scope of all but the largest corporations. Even within the US, there's a lot of sites and actors that are judgement proof or effectively judgement proof.
Okay, but the central example is a teenager getting caught accessing a US-bound it's-all-just-porn site, or a rando (in the US, using a US-jurisdiction service) on social media passing/spamming porn at people. Let's assume that we're able to identify the bad actor, and that there's no complications about identification or the nature of the content. What's the process like, here?
The parents bring a (likely interstate!) lawsuit for damages. That's not entirely implausible, especially since a teenager 'borrowing' a parent's credit card, even if it's more likely to revolve around emotional harm. They've got to ante a lot more in legal fees and lawyer costs than the actual damages, and courts generally don't like actually letting all that be recovered even where, such as here, the law does allow for some such recovery, but if you want to prove a point, that's an approach people do take. Might even get an injunction requiring the vendor to comply with an age verification schema. There's some fun procedural issues -- venue, for example -- but there's definitely someone that's going to hit every one.
... what happens with all the cases that don't go every bar of that? What happens for the nuisance lawsuits? Or the sincerely believed ones that are still wrong? Hell, what happens with the times people win, without any true wrongdoing by the website provider? Maybe that's a reasonable tradeoff, but unfortunately you can't really limit the law to the sane applications.
gattsuru
1yr ago
At least as I've seen it colloquially used in the ratsphere, iron is 'softer' than steel, sometimes with the implication than iron is something present in nature (if rare), while steel is mostly man-made. Might be derived from DoD framing of increasingly higher-order languages.
gattsuru
1yr ago
A lot of people don't have IDs, or don't want to give their IDs and that level of personal information to a random porn site. For more marginal or custom sites, the overhead in that sort of analysis is huge, particularly since you have to run it not just for paying customers, but pretty much anyone trying to figure out even the slightest bit of what you're doing. I dunno that I'd trust AI-style analysis anyway, but because there's not a standardized US ID layout (even for driver's licenses!), nevermind world-wide, it's a frustratingly large problem.
((There are other issues of varying stupidity. For some godawful reasons, some states allow or even default to having your SSN on them.))
Crypto can (kinda) get away with this for accounts because users are already giving away a lot of their privacy and the median account is in many ways a whale.
gattsuru
1yr ago
And call it misguided if you want, but these aren't the actions of fascist dictators or people who just want control for control's sake. They just don't want kids watching this crap.
Eh... I'm skeptical that this is the extent of the social conservative movement on this topic. Minors getting exposed to adult content is the most immediate driver (and for some things, like the problem of minors getting bullied by people flashing porn at them, I can pretty strongly agree with), but there are definitely social conservatives that think adults having reduced access to porn is a "good thing".
gattsuru
1yr ago
There's a special version of the Miller test for what is obscene to minors that sets the bar a little lower for media that is sent solely to them, though rules that can impact non-minors hits Ashcroft. The Miller test is pretty arbitrary, but even accepting its constraints, you still run into Problems with a lot of the proposed policies, here.
Most overtly, these policies are not file- or image-specific but website-wide. The North Carolina statute requires any website where "more than thirty-three and one-third percent (33 1/3%) of total material" fails the Miller test. Presumably, this is to avoid sites which only have incidental (or spam) content from being included (although it'd be a little weird if e621 uploads every frame of Steamboat Willie as a separate file to pump the numbers), but this gets complicated for sites that have both SFW and NSFW components.
A lot of furry sites, for example (2015 data, sorry, not finding up-to-date breakdowns), have a large portion or even majority of content marked as plainly safe or only moderate, and some of the content they consider as explicit would still pass the Miller text (and maybe obscene-as-to-minors test) even if it wasn't exactly high-quality deep literature. I think the North Carolina statute excludes written material, but other state laws don't, and either approach has its tradeoffs -- and there are definitely comic or media works with serious literary or artistic value (and no exposed bits).
I wouldn't want a teenager talking with people on InkBunny even if it had an ironclad SFW filter, but FurAffinity or maybe even modern SoFurry? Housepets!, Caelum Sky, read some SFW Rukis stuff, learn some art tricks and tips, join a MineCraft or Terraria server, those aren't the worst things on the planet, and there's a lot of just normalish (or at least as close as furries get to that) communication. Okay, well, furries are... weird. There are reasonable arguments even with the fandom of having even SFW spaces as off-limits to minors: I don't agree with them, but they're not crazy.
What about Discord? I dunno -- and I dunno that Discord knows -- what percentage of image and video file uploads are adult content or obscene, but there are individual discord 'servers' where the rule is always to be SFW, some (particularly common for gaming guilds) where there's one or two focused on adult content, and then some where the whole server is marked 18+ and maybe one-in-ten channels is SFW. Does the site only become liable when the porn discords are going whole hog? By month, by week?
Now, there's only a cause of action for minors accessing adult content material from sites that don't implement compliant age verification; these sites could theoretically do age verification and then just hard-force-on a SFW filter. It's not even clear what would happen for websites who don't: the NC statute and most similar laws just allow a generic "compensatory and punitive damages", "an injunction to enjoin continued violation of this section", and fees.
But in practice, only the largest websites would be able to handle this sort of lawsuit: the costs of simply showing up are tremendous, and injunctions could be absolutely damning. There is no federal anti-SLAPP law, and North Carolina doesn't have one either. Any small web host that thinks they could be even plausibly targeted just has to avoid this matter entirely.
gattsuru
1yr ago
The ironman and steelman of worst-plausible-case are bad enough I’m not willing to discuss them openly. There’s options here, even if never genuinely implemented, where simple explicit proposal by high-profile actors would at best undermine both parties’s trust in federal elections and systems as a whole, and more likely drive open attacks.
The more intermediate case ‘just’ destroys conservative trust in the judiciary. Either SCOTUS punts, lower courts defy rulings, or procedural gamesmanship drives through changes faster than they can be seriously reviewed for lawfulness. This doesn’t even necessarily require Trump be off the ballot: stupid gimmicks like prefixing his name with ‘felon’ wouldn’t even need to work to have a massive social impact
The good news is that there are off-ramps still available, some under no one’s control but fate.
gattsuru
1yr ago
How does "requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website" "put children and your privacy at risk"? Are they suggesting children are going to try and get fake ID from some crooks? Where does the risk to children come from?
MindGeek's official position is that inconsistent enforcement will drive under-18s to platforms where enforcement is lackluster or non-existent. And while that's probably motivated in part by their investment in different blocking approaches, it's not exactly an unreasonable concern, nor one that is limited to minors seeing the same porn they'd get exposed to otherwise, or some just slightly-sketchier stuff.
There's a small army of creeps, blackmailers, and unabashed pedophiles that trawl for people they can offer 'illicit' content and then use that to demand money and/or threaten their targets. While the highest-profile cases usually depend on a variant of catfishing, there's been no small number that use approaches based on outre content (whether the victim was looking for that or not) and social engineering.
gattsuru
1yr ago
That statement by itself actually boosts my opinion somewhat of Pornhub; a device level safe search would probably be the best approach to this.
PornHub (or more specifically MindGeek, the parent company) has long been maneuvering to monetize and potentially monopolize the age verification services in the UK, so their preferences for a specific framework of age verification is probably not motivated solely by principle or interest in protecting children or even themselves.
More generally, there is a tradeoff here: where server-level enforcement requires every server to behave, device-level safe searches require very strict limits on how a device can be used and how heavily it can be sandboxed. iOS 'solves' this by running nearly anything related to web functionality through Apple's browser, and the extent it doesn't or can't due to app functionality have lead to a ton of Apple's decision-making driving the rest of the world into censorship regardless of age (cfe tumblrpocalypse). This is kinda okay for phones, where most parents just want their kids using them as phones and maybe a few limited other uses. But doing the same for desktop would be a massive undertaking, and one with major repercussions and a huge lockdown on the ability to run (or write!) unvalidated code. JonSt0kes has written on the AI variant of this problem from a social conservative view, but it's far more general than MLgen.
This is further augmented because you don't just need to protect your kids' hardware. If anyone in their classes are unblocked or is able to bypass the blocks, flashing other students with stuff those other students weren't even looking for is a common attack/bullying tactic -- and that's something that seems much worse.
Parents could set the birthday of the child in question, a password locked setting, and the phone could then block access to many of these sites. There probably exists some amount of parental options like this, right? I have no knowledge of them, but I doubt they quite reach the level I'm talking about here
Kinda. iOS has an automatic birthday-based approach and a manual selection, but it's very similar in level to Google SafeSearch -- not just hard to know what will be blocked, and fairly arbitrary, but even once something is blocked it's hard to know why. Android just uses SafeSearch directly, though in turn it's less effective since Android is less locked-down by default.
More effective approaches are usually going to involve domain- or IP-level blocks enforced at a router level, along with blocking tunnel- or vpn-like connections, but that's still nowhere near perfect, and they can only cover limited areas.
If you take easy access to porn away, some kids will chase it down elsewhere.
I'd also note that they might chase something porn down: an alternative to looking for it elsewhere to look instead for something that falls through the cracks. There's a lot of people who got into vore because all of the obvious 'normal' sex stuff was the sort of thing that was unacceptable to examine or consider, and even when they escaped physically that they didn't really stop getting distracted by it, for something at the milder end of the scale. Nothing wrong with a vore kink itself, but I doubt it's better as an introduction to sexuality.
Database leaks could be a problem, depending on how that's handled.
There are problems well before leaks. I'm old enough to remember when Corbin Fisher used some pretty aggressive legal threats and threats of outing to go after people who torrented their porn -- and it made me a lot more cautious about who got my address, name, and age moving forward, since they were one of the first I ever subscribed to.
gattsuru
1yr ago
At least I don't think you'll get the same amount of trans people if it's no longer explicitly glamorized, if schools are not allowed to hide kids going trans from their parents, if doctors don't get to do "gender affirming care" by default, and threaten the family with suicide risk, if they object, etc.
That's probably true, but I'm not sure that looks much different to trans activists from the social conservative perspective just winning, and perhaps more critically I think you're still going to have a million+ trans or post-trans people going around, and unless they're sold against the concept, they're going to have alternative means for bringing matters forward socially. Whatever they do might still be such that the next generation of trans people is smaller, and maybe that loops back on itself, but you're looking at decades if not the better part of a century.
Are you coming from the transmed "body dysmorphia" approach? The "gender identity" one? Do you think transition is about relieving distress, or is it more a question of self-expression and people having the right to modify their body as they please?
My relevant underlying axiom is that it is there must be limits to what governments can do to protect people from themselves, so probably closer to self-expression or right-to-modify, though the principle applies far broader than just body modification -- it's why I'm very skeptical of vape bans, soft drink size controls, or of the Australian arguments for gun control, with the extreme being matters like 'the FDA oppressed Stalking Cat'. Many of these things might be stupid things to do (especially for Stalking Cat and the vapers), but that's their choice to make.
This principal isn't unlimited, in the sense that we reasonably restrict selling cigarettes to children or advertising ethylene glycol as a low-calorie sweetener, and there are some edges cases with trans stuff. But even to the extent I can be persuaded on the edge cases that were parallels, it's hard to present a fair or honest engagement. Bringing up false-advertising-like claims inevitably invites discussion about what extent any given procedure or policy has benefits. I've even been persuaded on a few matters! While the data for damage from short-term use of puberty blockers on bone density isn't anywhere near as strong as trans skeptics think, early-initiated long-term use of those blockers probably has some harms for sexual development in adulthood for both continuing trans and desisters that is neither being disclosed nor documented properly, for example, and in ways I'd honestly expected to have been better hammered out and wasn't.
But short of convincing evidence that adult trans people are going to keel over by the cartloads with the equivalent of the asbestos-to-mesothelioma pipeline, though, any debate on this pretty quickly turns to "sucks to be them, gotta update that documentation" or "okay, guess we should wait mid-to-late teens". Which is going to seem like a really weird goalpost-moving to someone holding this position, rather than an update-on-evidence, in addition to just coming across ghoulish when someone's just finishing talking up how a victim is now horribly dysphoric/has had their entire romantic life upended/couldn't trust that bungee jumping service.
That said, I don't think my principles are common, here. Not only are the average trans activist likely motivated by something different, in many circumstances they're actively drive toward widespread government controls (not just on this topic, such as with bans on stupid talk-only conversion therapy, but also on a wide variety of others). But if principles only mattered when they helped people you agreed with, or agreed with them, they're not principles at all.
I think that dysphoria and gender identity are more useful frameworks for understanding what motivations trans groups, rather than what would change the minds or arguments of trans activists or the median person. Indeed, I don't think they are, or should be, particularly persuasive to other people even presuming that they were true: in addition to the self-hostage-taking that social conservatives often bring up, we pretty clearly don't recognize mass suicides of other groups as cause for actions along the beliefs of those groups. But they're neither what makes the policy for within the view of trans people, nor are they what would need to be different for their advocates and activists to change their minds rather than their arguments.
gattsuru
1yr ago
It's about a fifth of the US economy, if you're insured it involves monthly payments that will make up a significant portion of your paycheck or be significant deductions from it, if you're uninsured and poor you get regular paperwork from Medicaid that you have to fill or correctly or can end up in deep shit, and the reimbursement and deduction system drives a lot of other (often dumber) behaviors.
And if you have a pregnancy, or a serious illness, or a chronic illness, it gets a lot more in-your-face.
gattsuru
1yr ago
That's one model, and it's definitely one that's correct in at least some circumstances. But it's not the only possible or relevant one.
Most people have different axioms and interests and preferences than you do, or I do, at some level. To go among others is to go among mad people. Yet most things don't devolve into a war of all against all. I'd like to wax poetic about recognizing the humanity in the other or recognizing the madness in oneself, but rather than that, or even some serious negotiated settlement, or some broader Westphalian Peace. It's not even that we don't care about these things, or that there are no weirdos that make the most trivial of these things their entire personality and want to restructure society, but it's possible to see them from the outside as something examined, and examined as a concept rather than as an enemy.
And that seems a lot more interesting for me, even if it's layered over axioms that can't be solved, even if a lot of the object-level discussions overlap.
I dunno. There are genuine pragmatic reasons that this particular issue is something people care about, and as much as I might personally want the libertarian perspective as a solution I can see why that would just make both mainstream views madder. Hell, even my "outsiders examining" goal is objectionable to a lot of people who find it dehumanizing. But I don't think it's inherent to every environment, even if it's inherent to many.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I think the "free publicity" point is no small part of things, but I think there's a lot of options that are still open, and Raskin's not stating those options outright less because they don't exist, and more because there are bigger benefits from the ambiguity and from crowdsourcing innovation.
gattsuru
1yr ago
A lot of history fades from public awareness, even if people actively try to maintain it. This guy is a grifter, but in case that isn't damning enough, the difference between his summary and a more genuine one is serious, and that's despite a small industry of people like David Hardy spending years of their lives to both uncover and publicize the fine details.
'Psychosurgery' falls into a similar boat -- it's a fun trivia topic to reveal that a famous and popular-until-his-death President of the United States had a sister who was treated for 'depression' in a way that left her with the mental capacity of a two-year-old, so it's not forgotten. But in turn there's also just not that many survivors who were in that place where significant but not incapacitating harm could make them cause celebres, especially by the time you get to the 1960s amygdalotomies, where only thousands of the procedures have been done worldwide, rather than tens of thousands just in the United States.
If we were to see a vibe-shift-fueled memory-holing of the issue, would it not happen through People of Status suddenly finding the subject “tacky”, and “played out”?
Eh, that's a possible route -- the extent people suddenly stopped caring about where and how the Chinese government might have had any involvement in early COVID stuff is an overt case -- but it's not the only one. Contrast the treatments of masks, where an initial hard press against flipped in valence toward mandates (and still floats up and down in valence by time); or with common fashion cycles among 'progressive' media where a popular culture name goes from hero to villain and sticks well past their cultural relevance. And there's a possibility it just evolves.
I'm skeptical that any of these are going to happen. There's just too many trans people already around, in ways that are too hard to extract not just from doing trans stuff, but from being in social and environmental characteristics where .
But I'm a lot more sympathetic to the trans perspective than the median American, and significantly more so than the median poster here. Which brings the more immediate issue up:
Well, I was avoiding specifics because I don't know how to even begin to pin those down, but looking at the state of the discourse on this forum, the pro-trans side seems to have officially moved from “that did not happen” to “and if it did, that's not a big deal” regarding medical interventions on minors
In addition to the obvious issue you already recognize where posters on this forum and unrelated outsiders aren't great signs of what direction Discourse is going, and especially where People of Status are going, there's the more specific problem where even for our subculture this particular topic is hard to make fun to write about.
I try to spice up matters when I can, and there's part of me that hopes this is some place where there could be a reasonable meeting of the minds if we better understood what the hell we were talking about.
But mostly, that's not the sort of thing that happens, or even has signs of happening, and it's boring. The disagreements here are axiom-level, and while there's somethings that can change people's minds on the edges of pragmatic policies, maybe, it's not what the actual disagreements are. That's not a fault specific to the Motte -- the few trans activist spaces that allow disagreement on the margins or recognition of Red Tribe disagreement still don't actually have much to say -- but it's more frustrating here because there's many better options.
gattsuru
1yr ago
A lot of enbys medicalize to a extent I expect you or the median social conservative would not be comfortable with, and have for longer than enby has been well-recognized as a term. Literally today in my tumblr feed discourse for a ratsphere example. And while it would be a 'retreat' on some matters to some extent, I'm not sure it's as big a retreat as you'd think.
There's a tendency to round the more obnoxious nonbinary people into more standardized trans categories (including legal and statistical measures!), and to round the less obnoxious trans people into the nonbinary category, but there's a lot going on in those communities that isn't obvious to outside observers.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I think this is a really bad model of what motivates a lot of transitioners, especially younger ones. You're a lot more likely to see stuff redirect into enby or dissolve-the-gender-binary, in the unlikely case 'classical' gender transition gets depopularized. Far too much of modern culture is built around telling everyone to hate masculinity and women to fear their vulnerability in their femininity.
((That said, I recognize I'm a lot more sympathetic to trans stuff than the average person.))
gattsuru
1yr ago
Supreme court justice Clarence Thomas must recuse himself from ruling on Donald Trump’s eligibility for the 2024 presidential election, a prominent Democrat said Sunday, warning that the leading Republican candidate is seeking to become a “political martyr” as he pursues a second presidency. Maryland congressman Jamie Raskin was speaking ahead of the nation’s highest court stepping in to adjudicate recent state rulings in Maine and Colorado that struck the former president from the general election primaries under the US constitution’s 14th amendment insurrection clause....
“Anybody looking at this in any kind of dispassionate, reasonable way would say if your wife was involved in the big lie in claiming that Donald Trump had actually won the presidential election, had been agitating for that and participating in the events leading up to January 6, that you shouldn’t be participating,” Raskin told CNN’s State of the Union.
“He absolutely should recuse himself. The question is, what do we do if he doesn’t recuse himself?”
gattsuru
1yr ago
One note I'd give was that Stewart claimed Crossfire was less a battle royale, but literally "pro wrestling". I can't find the original "NERF Crossfire" gag on Comedy Central's site or YouTube, and it wasn't even a full section, but the main joke was about mainstream media lobbing softball interview questions at a variety of powerful people. "Spin alley" is a dated reference now and was failing in its original sense even in the 2000s, but it had since turned into the broader field where every head-to-head discussion would get recontextualized into a victory by its partisans.
"Where's your moral outrage on this?"
And there's a steelman where this was kinda true! The formalization of interview processes meant that anyone with a reputation for crushingly hard questions would never get to interview anyone of substance again. Especially high-profile politicians would get a handful of (ingratiating) personal questions built to humanize them, and at most a couple (sometimes pre-vetted!) softball policy ones, nearly as a rule. Rarely, you'd see absolute nobodies or politicians on their way to retirement get embarrassed as a way to generate some heat, even 'hard-hitting' direct news was more interested in talking up . Outside of directly dealing with the powerful, shows like Crossfire favored a barrage of bloodless short interactions : look at this, or this, and there's a pretty constant pattern where the show was little more than point-riposte, never any serious engagement and always swaddled with cruft and removed from concrete assessments.
"The thing that I want to say is, when you have people on for just knee-jerk, reactionary talk..."
But then you look at the story closer, and Stewart was supposed to be promoting his book. Carlson and Begala looked ridiculous for a variety of reasons, but no small part of it is that they were trying to play straight man to a comedian who wasn't interested in that whole game. Asking what people's moral outrage doesn't even make sense: he was holding them to a fire that he didn't bother naming.
So you get stuff like this, instead, as the high point of The Daily Show. There's moral outrage, for sure! Absolutely the sort of political discussion that allows shots below the belt, with all that implies even for the trivial dorks, at least for the people Jon Stewart and his audience didn't like.
And yet, the exact same criticism Stewart brought against Crossfire applied to his own work, and to the not-featuring-after-crank-muppets conventional news media that increasingly aped him. Rather than dissolve the point-riposte of Crossfire, it simply let the riposte swallow all discussion -- no need to even state your own position in a way that might make a viewer uncomfortable.
gattsuru
1yr ago
A second (still uncaught and unknown!) character shot toward Rittenhouse before Rittenhouse raised his gun, and then latter Grosskruetz drew an illegally-concealed handgun and prepared to fire at Rittenhouse.
Charitably, Trace may have been examining things less in the red team exercise sense of what would have happened had he gone into the same environment and done all the same things except had the gone, and more making measures in a more frequentist analysis of what the typical counterprotester/counterrioter encountered. If you assumed only 32 deaths, a 1% fatality rate requires only 3200 confrontations.
Of course, then you dive into the actual facts on the ground, and the definition of 'confrontation' becomes very important. How many people were in a vocal disagreement that maybe involved a thrown punch? Tons. How many ended up completely alone and surrounded by a violent mob, including many who were illegally carrying concealed firearms?
And then we're back to conceding the public commons to whoever could get away with bringing the violent mob there.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I agree that they're both bad, but there's a bit of a difference between "It's actually insane to me that much of the the <X> in America thinks <Y>" and "Every degenerate tendency in US Con. politics has originated directly from <X>". And I say that as someone who thinks the Reconstruction got backstabbed, even if the real version of that is more complicated than the colloquial one.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Given the references to the schisming, probably talking about this event and this comment, referencing this post, which was about those good-faith objections.
That said, yakultbingedrinker's comment (that were also highlighted as "evil sentiment and a precursor to atrocities", and received more emphasis) were about self-defense; Tyre_Inflator may have confused you and him.
gattsuru
1yr ago
It's not even clear whatever happened to the rats was universal among rats.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Stewart's famous crossfire clip seems more a strong demonstration of the difference between statements said and points made. He made a lot of statements about 'spin alley', and 'the absurdity of the system', and lacking 'moral outrage', and he came on with the whole concept of 'nerf crossfire'. But both hosts denied them, and Stewart had no serious evidence or support for his claims beyond common knowledge; he didn't even provide serious support beyond reiterating over and over that the CNN staff can't complain about him not doing even a trivial effort.
The actual point he made was that Crossfire made a mistake: they trusted him. Which still says something interesting! But it's something rather different.
Nearer and simpler jurisdiction helps -- the US famously doesn't have interstate small claims courts -- but also the higher damages in severe cases, along with a lot of readily-available experts on best practices, and a liability insurance system that's heavily integrated (and sometimes mandatory) that makes people less judgement proof.
More options
Context Copy link