gattsuru
1yr ago
The Colorado Supreme Court holds:
A majority of the court holds that President Trump is disqualified from holding the office of President under Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Because he is disqualified, it would be a wrongful act under the Election Code for the Colorado Secretary of State to list him as a candidate on the presidential primary ballot. The court stays its ruling until January 4, 2024, subject to any further appellate proceedings.
[recent related discussion, slightly older]
The Colorado Presidential Primary is scheduled for March 5th, for both parties. As the decision notes, January 4, 2024 is "the day before the Secretary’s deadline to certify the content of the presidential primary ballot)"; while the matter is open to further stay should federal courts intervene, such an intervention would itself determine at least the state presidential primary.
How are the procedural protections? From the dissent:
As President Trump, argues and the Electors do not contest, section 1-1-113’s procedures do not provide common tools for complex fact-finding: preliminary evidentiary or pre-trial motions hearings, subpoena powers, basic discovery, depositions, and time for disclosure of witnesses and exhibits. This same concern was raised in Frazier; the then-Secretary argued that “it is impossible to fully litigate a complex constitutional issue within days or weeks, as is typical of a section 1-1-113 proceeding.”...
Despite clear requirements, the district court did not follow section 1-4-1204’s statutory timeline for section 1-1-113 claims. The proceeding below involved two delays that, respectively, violated (1) the requirement that the merits hearing be held within five days of the challenge being lodged, and (2) the requirement that the district court issue its order within forty-eight hours of the merits hearing.
And the other dissent:
Thus, based on its interpretation of Section Three, our court sanctions these makeshift proceedings employed by the district court below—which lacked basic discovery, the ability to subpoena documents and compel witnesses, workable timeframes to adequately investigate and develop defenses, and the opportunity for a fair trial—to adjudicate a federal constitutional claim (a complicated one at that) masquerading as a run-of-the-mill state Election Code claim...
and
Even with the unauthorized statutory alterations made by the district court, the aggressive deadlines and procedures used nevertheless stripped the proceedings of many basic protections that normally accompany a civil trial, never mind a criminal trial. There was no basic discovery, no ability to subpoena documents and compel witnesses, no workable timeframes to adequately investigate and develop defenses, and no final resolution of many legal issues affecting the court’s power to decide the Electors’ claim before the hearing on the merits.
There was no fair trial either: President Trump was not offered the opportunity to request a jury of his peers; experts opined about some of the facts surrounding the January 6 incident and theorized about the law, including as it relates to the interpretation and application of the Fourteenth Amendment generally and Section Three specifically; and the court received and considered a partial congressional report, the admissibility of which is not beyond reproach.
Did the Colorado Supreme Court provide a more serious and deep analysis of the First Amendment jurisprudence, at least?
The district court also credited the testimony of Professor Peter Simi, a professor of sociology at Chapman University, whom it had “qualified . . . as an expert in political extremism, including how extremists communicate, and how the events leading up to and including the January 6 attack relate to longstanding patterns of behavior and communication by political extremists.”
He testified, according to the court’s summary, that (1) “violent far-right extremists understood that [President] Trump’s calls to ‘fight,’ which most politicians would mean only symbolically, were, when spoken by [President] Trump, literal calls to violence by these groups, while [President] Trump’s statements negating that sentiment were insincere and existed to obfuscate and create plausible deniability,”
There are interpretations here other than that of the Russell Conjugation: that stochastic terrorism is limited to this tiny portion of space, or perhaps that shucks there just hasn't ever been some opportunity to worry about it ever before and they're tots going to consistently apply this across the political spectrum in the future. They are not particularly persuasive to me, from this expert.
Perhaps more damning, this is what the majority found a useful one to highlight : a sociology professor who has been playing this tune since 2017.
If you put a gun to my head, I'd bet that this is overturned, or stayed until moot. But that's not a metaphor I pick from dissimilarity.
gattsuru
1yr ago
... I've tried to draft a post touching on the specific examples I think break those settings, a couple times, but I keep coming up with lists that are different from past ones only in size and count, or seeing comments about 'concentration camps' or 'deprived of civil rights' or this post and having trouble keeping my temper or thinking such a discussion would be helpful.
Available if you'd think they'd help, but I think the genuine disagreement is deeper than that.
First, I think the delineations of 'novel' are vulnerable to salami-slicing and the garden of forking paths. Are politicians putting the names and employers of donors to their political opponents kinda like McCarthyism, or are they new? Offering cash rewards for the names of non-violent protesters like the Pinkerton's, or unprecedented? That dilemma is more obvious when technology comes to play: domain name services cutting off random web fora with no notice wasn't even on people's threat model five years ago (and wasn't even possible before the invention of DNS), but it's kinda like 1930s era postal regulations, kinda. And some objections would be reasonable: there's lots of novelty to the extent modern social justice has begun destroying symbols of past ('enemy') leadership and reconciliation... that almost certainly would not have been on my top ten list of concerns, and which are hard to separate from past iconoclasm in intent even if the process and impact was different now.
That's especially true if there are other implied constraints -- if the problems on social media are excluded, or if COVID-specific rules can't count, or if it doesn't count when someone tries to do something unprecedented and fails, or if the complaints are First World Problems.
Secondly, I don't think these (and especially A(4)) are that great as arguments against a Great Divorce or, more morbidly, worries that interparty politics has devolved into a "massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble" where attempting to avoid playing the game maybe -- only maybe! -- means you get eaten later.
Trivially, the literal American Civil War came at tremendous cost of blood, tears, lives, and livelihoods. That could be a justifiable and reasonable response to literally millions of people being in some of the worst forms of slavery that have existed. There's a lot of arguments that none of the current snafus are on that level, and you'd have to put effort in to get one that wasn't right! But that's a lot more persuasive as an argument that we shouldn't keep escalating to maintain federal power over whatever minor culture war of the day is getting people frothing over, or that if we absolutely had to pay a ton of blood and treasure to maintain federal power we have done so once in the past. Less so about whether we can avoid it.
Ok, the literal Civil War is just the extreme end of problems that could not be "resolved calmly". So, for that matter, is the mass internment of large populations, where we 'just' had to bomb and then militarily control entire island chains. We're not at those levels, and in the case of Korematsu you quite accurately (and repeatedly) pointed out that concentration camps aren't on the menu right now.
Why should that matter? I've been trying not to hammer too hard on the "Here's a wager. Obviously if I'm wrong, you'll never be able to collect, but anyway." comment, since it was(? might have been?) joking, and you've apologized to someone else for tone in a kinda related way, but it's kinda relevant if your claim actually is that we can't highlight this problem until and unless there are people literally getting marched into concentration camps. (Or worse than concentration camps, since again, Korematsu). I don't want to go full Godwin with The Attic Test, but I'm absolutely not waiting until resistance is completely doomed just for the moral high ground.
What's the comparison we should be using? You don't like FCFromSSC's point about charcoal briquettes, and there's a good number of reasons to not like it. I don't like it! But that post was about a couple major oversteps -- one on the right and one on the left -- that 'only' were solved after small lakes of blood, and the best you can say is that they didn't involve oceans. Yes, we 'solved', at least for a short time, and for a low definition of solved, the policy disagreements in question. Even if we suppose that matters will never go worse than that, it's still pretty bad, and I don't really trust that will. What, if anything, is this supposed to tell us about policy disagreements that seem to be barrelling down that slope while maniacs are spreading grease on the brakes?
((Yes, there are possibilities that escalating violence won't lead to such extremely high fatality rates, in that we aren't as likely to have cholera epidemics in our prisons, or that the FBI is a little more careful with pyrogenic tools. But there's a lot of possibilities going the other direction, and there are reasons that discussion is one I'm not going to describe in all but the vaguest detail in public spaces without good cause. And as far as I can tell, you've not been making those arguments, and they'd mostly fall under B and C above.))
Worse than that, it's not clear that the deescalation is anywhere people want to go, especially the sort of people who get political power. An early question of political representation leading to a rebellion and attacks on prominent federal officials, which in turn was called treason and men sentenced to hang... and which they were pardoned.
Is that anywhere on the table today? Forget J6 or literal rebellion, is there any serious group on the left calling Obama or Biden to provide clemency for someone on the level of the Bundys? When Trump pardoned the sympathetic guys that the Bundys were protesting for, that turned into a fishing expedition for bribery, and their grazing permit was revoked. Forget major political victories, or even the Constitution just applying in California (last update) or New Mexico. Is there any chance someone in New Jersey is going to stop harassing some schmuck in Texas if he posts a CAD file?
It's not like this is going to only go one way, or even that it only goes one way on each topics, as the wide array of CRT/DEI or credit card processing or trans books or a thousand other types of bullshit demonstrate. Do you think any set of activists here think of each other as anything but moral mutants?
gattsuru
1yr ago
There's a lot of background to Zhao Gao (see the Chinese-language equivalent in China, in similar ways to Nobunaga in Japan, Napoleon in Europe, or Benedict Arnold in the United States. Whether because of their coincidental presence at a significant turning point in history or because of their outsized personal impact, there's a lot of connotations to any story including them that are not obvious from the immediate reading.
This is especially complicated in Zhao Gao's case because of the more clearly mixed results of the Qin Dynasty as a whole: the same group that made the Great Wall of China and formalized China as a country (Chin derives from romantization of Qin!) was also a corrupt tyrant, and the very policies that drove the Qin's success also lead to its collapse. Zhao Gao is sometimes upheld as the embodiment of that duality, as a remnant of a past dynasty able to exploiting the strict doctrines of the current one and to drive the first emperor's son to suicide as 'his fathers' (forged) command.
The strict google translation is correct, and useful on its own, but it's often used and useful where the loyalty test isn't simultaneously linked to shittest-giver trying to overthrow a country, or where whatever loyalty test component is far subordinate to the evil machinations.
Am I overreacting? Does the piece come off as more sane and level-headed than I'm presenting it?
I don't think your reaction is unreasonable.
The biggest caution I have to give is that there's a certain class of deranged writing -- whether genuine DSM-IV-grade mental illness, Unknown Armies-grade nutjobbery, or sufficient low-level crankery -- that attracts widespread attention, regardless of the true skill or merits of the writer. A sober-tongued Planet of Cops would not have been anywhere as successful, whether or not its claims were correct. No one cared who Andrea James was until she put on the mask started captioning photos of her enemy's minor children.
And once a writer has tapped into that field, there's a temptation to do so again. Even when you're not driven to it be mania or depression or organic issues so far that you can't imagine doing anything else.
That... limits the extent pointing to some bizarre public speech can be useful as a tool for diagnosing this class of issues.
Of course, the really morbid thought is that just because it's schizophrenic doesn't mean it's wrong -- I'd argue that it is, but most of the arguments don't rest on de Boer at all. Or even that it's so stigmatized only a schizophrenic (or maniac) would write it publicly under their own name. Which doesn't make it any saner or more level-headed! Just more accepted.
gattsuru
1yr ago
This varies a lot. Sometimes the generic brands are the same material rebadged. Sometimes they are better! But they're seldom going through the same production plants and distribution processes. Even when the materials are the same -- milk is milk! -- this can lead to dramatically different spoilage times. For stuff with widely varying recipes, like bread, the differences can be visible from a distance.
Store brands are definitely worth a shot, but it's worth being aware of their limitations.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Huh. I'd expect it to be the sort of thing that's a 'fantasy' more in the porno sense than the 'would actually do personally if the opportunity knocked' one. Leaving aside longer-term issues like sticking your dick in crazy, and assuming that it's the woman's knees that are going to suffer from tile, there's a lot of pragmatic arguments for the discerning exhibitionist casual-sex seeker to head almost anywhere else (up to and including the proverbial Volkswagen Bug from Clerks).
gattsuru
1yr ago
Most straight people (and lesbians) have never had sex in a bathroom stall with someone they met ten minutes earlier and whose name they don't know - but if you were a gay man and you said you'd never done that, in my experience most gay men would look at you like you'd two heads.
Uh... it's definitely something that exists among gay men and is more common, but there's a sizable portion of gay (and bisexual) men who are don't do it, or are even grossed out by it. Even among the casual gay sex set, there's a lot who are just fucking around with their entire distributed friend (and friend-of-friends) group, as often as there's people who devote themselves to making Number Goes Up.
((That's especially true for the sort of behavior in the film. Even among sadomasochists, fisting is not an entry-level behavior.))
That tendency to conflate a tail of the demographic with the whole demographic with little but a disclaimer on the front side was not the only contemporaneous frustration with Cruising -- the film's conclusion is open-ended, but a pretty common read is that the exposure to gay clubbing has turned the viewpoint character, for example.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Instead I think there's an experiential gap. Gay male culture is simply accepting of things within itself(very public displays of sexuality, harassment-ish behavior, teen sex, extreme promiscuity, etc) which are controversial to verboten among straight people.
I think that's part of the story -- there are very few equivalents as extreme as the Folsom Street Fair in het worlds, and those that exist aren't as well-known.
On top of that there's further complications because a lot of gay-specific interests are different than het-specific ones. I'm hoping the gay male interest in exhibitionism is at least partly an artifact of having to hide more modest and SFW sexuality, but it's absolutely more common as a gay male interest. While exhibitionism might be unusually vulnerable to causing undesirable results for passerbies due to its own nature, a good number of others are just weird. Pup play ends up in a similar boat. They're weirder because they're things that are less common (or nearly unheard of, for pup play) in het circles. But there are kinks that go the other direction.
On the gripping hand, I'm not convinced that in a world where camera phones were invented a decade earlier, we would have avoided sex tapes of Bill Clinton ruining a cigar. A lot of the late-80s early-90s Civil Rights Act feminism, for all I complain about its more recent excesses, was in response to employers forcing employees into (het) sex and other sexual behaviors in public. For a less disquieting example, simulated sex in public actually does show up in a lot of adjacent straight contexts -- Mardi Gras may have less literal fucking in the streets than the Folsom Street Fair, but it still has a lot of public grinding, as do certain dance clubs. That exhibitionism is a more common kink among gay men doesn't make it nearly-unheard of among straights or women.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I'm not sure how much of this is specific to post-FTX behavior -- there were a good few explosions in the rat-tumblr sphere during its height, and even when (probably) correct, there was very little interest or ability to consider how one knows a thing from knowing the thing, or to separate halo-and-horns for one demonstrated bad act to every alleged one. The community often doesn't have the tools to do serious first-party investigation, evaluate conflicting claims, nor the dedication to track them down. The final collapse of su3su2u1 sticks with me for the extent people turned SHLevy (and Scott)'s reveal of the sock-puppeting into 'doxxing', but it's relatively light-weight in terms of spreading around the shit.
For a more serious one, I'm still not sure where to place the numbers any one specific allegation about Vassar, and that's as someone that considered conversation somewhere nonproductive back in the Gold Age of LessWrong.
((On the flip side, I've not been impressed by the guardrails in general society, not least of all because many of the people and methods were the same.))
gattsuru
1yr ago
I'm... uh... not sure the best way to demonstrate this, especially if you're a straight man or a gay woman, but there's absolutely a lot to be looking at, from either front or back, when there's a guy in tighter clothing squatting.
gattsuru
1yr ago
That's fair, although I'd caution in turn that people in the past could point the same way to the democratization of technology in our youth, or even in the past, as having had a massive impact on socialization of sex and sexuality (caveat: I'm not sure how much I trust the academic summaries).
gattsuru
1yr ago
I'm hesitant to go that far, since there's a bit of a Russel's Conjugation where my kinks are quirky, my interlocutor's kinks are extreme, those people over there have kinks that are problematic and harmful. And I'm in the furry fandom, so my ideas of what's weird are gonna be a little distorted. And there's definitely extant stuff like the emoji streams that creep me the fuck out.
But I think that, outside of certain specialized focuses, economic and social (and biological) pressures have largely pressed a lot of normie internet-visible adult content into certain extremes of either minimally-deniable-underwear-models at one and then gonzo-money-shots at the other. Yet for all the feminist complaints about mainstream porn as 'sex without being sexy', but there's a lot of space where you can have sexiness without being about sex. That doesn't necessarily mean weirder and kinkier (I'll again bring up casual nudism), nor does it necessarily mean calmer and fuzzier (the non-furry version of Changed's latex fetishism might already exist and might even squeak under Twitch's rules).
I'd like to make some high-minded argument about healthier sexuality rather than things going straight to 11, or a low-minded one about it being my kink, but it's mostly just an under-explored space I find fascinating.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Tbf, I’ve used Twitch for non-gaming purposes (FIRST uses it for kickoff), and I still think of it as a gaming service.
AI-gen fake nudes of actual (non-consenting) people are a problem and probably the first to bubble up to Twitch's lawyers, but they're just one particularly palatable problem of many:
-
What about consenting people, even consenting not-nude-in-original people? There's a hard rule against Img2Img using a real person as the base, especially of yourself in the Furry Diffusion Discord, and it exists for a reason.
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Do we care how heavily the ML-gen dataset has been curated, even if the output doesn't look like anyone specific? Is there enough of the essence of any input training image to count for copyright/legal problem causes, even if the outputs look nothing like it?
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Do we care about possible highly-realistic outputs, even if they clearly can't be real-world?
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Do we need to treat the people under an underlay like porn actors (which has significant overhead!), even if not a single pixel of their original real-world body goes through? Does this concern limit itself to AI redraws, or does it include photogrammatry? Do VR actors count, where the in-stream body might not even correspond to the positions of their real-world? What about voice-alone? What about only people who do tech side work, or art-side?
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How all of this interact with much of Twitch's ouvre (game and otherwise) having a multiplayer or social component? There's people with a kink for using certain classes of toys while trying to achieve certain challenging tasks -- I can name some good gay fictional examples! -- but the real-world can into awkward questions of consent when a game might match-make you with randos. Same for someone being highlighted, even with good intent, by a nude presenter (of any gender) or in-series with artistic nudes.
gattsuru
1yr ago
like I told you in that thread
I'll repeat the arguments from there, then: you can't proclaim law-and-order credentials if you don't care about the law, you can't claim public order as a priority if some disruptions of public order can go unpunished for years lest orderly-but-not-state response squick someone out, and you can't claim anti-violence as a principle if you're willing to excuse it at the drop of a hat when the state wants to use it.
Your standard for sinister behaviour is frighteningly low.
I don't think there's anything sinister, unless you're making a left/right pun -- and even then, Aussie politics doesn't break down into the right/left divide.
But if in one case, people honking horns and blocking traffic are so bad that they justify suspension of civil rights and all the normal protections of democratic processes, and in the other case, riots that burn down buildings with people in them are nothing special and should be resolved through democratic means. Some riots, and some terrorism, it turns out, are special.
What consensus is he building, all alone and despised?
... the sentence structure for consensus-building is around the right-wing posts you (and I) are bitching about.
And the good thing about evidence-free claims is that one can refute them with evidence. There really is no reason to write everything in blue.
And part of the warning I got was that I'm not allowed to do so. So there's a bit of an eyeroll, here.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Some of the controversy was essentially around twitch thots, who weren't necessarily bad at gaming but probably weren't attracting viewers for that purpose: Morgpie, the streamer that Ars Technica highlights, is also pornhub porn star, and her ouvre is... pretty clearly about her changing between various bikini-levels sets of clothes, interspersed with gatcha-level artwork.
((That's not to diss her on it. I'm kinda impressed, tbh. Five hours is a long fucking stream for everyone involved doing that. And I can empathize more with a casual nudity kink that a lot of others, even if her version's not my thing in a few different ways.))
Male versions exist, enough that /r/gaymers occasionally has people asking for recs. That said, the male streamers can and did get banned for doing 'the same thing': male nip slips or topless shots are prohibited. It's not clear how uniformly that's enforced, but they're also such a small minority that uniform enforcement would still be a vastly larger impact for direct numbers on women.
That said:
I guess someone realized that if you allow streamers to turn your site into OnlyFans with Vidya, then the women are going to drop their tops and the men are going to just... use filters?
I think the AI concerns weren't just about v-tubers using filters over their own actions to make nude- or nude-adjacent personas, but also about material unrelated to the streamer themselves, especially as photo-realistic portrayals get more achievable. It's probably not as good money as going after the parasocial paraphilias, but it's a lot lower-cost.
((I think there's also something going on with AI art at the Operation Choke Point level where the Ashcroft dissent and ML-gen specific concerns about data-as-'collage' are backstage threats, but I can't prove it and it's probably undisprovable.))
I was kinda hoping to see the Fisherian runaway of increasingly bizarre nude-but-not-sex-itself stuff, since the 'artistic' nudity policy still prohibited sexual content, even for in-game or illustrated. the average version would probably still be pretty boring -- teenage-presenting (cat)girls -- but the tails could go some interesting places pretty quickly (eg, there are some fantastic FFXIV mods that this margin is too narrow to contain). There's a limited extent of that already present on YouTube, since stuff like transformation [cw: no nudity, but you probably don't want it in your YT algorithm], macro, and vore kink can be so far from normal that it's just confusing to the uninitiated, but there's also probably a pretty wide space of simple casual kink that's getting underserved just because it's 'boring' by standard search term meanings.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I didn't downvote here, and don't downvote for disagreement in the general case, but I've personally called out and gotten warned for calling out AshLael's bizarre and uneven behavior on this topic.
This post might not have gotten as much downvote-spam as its Red Tribe equivalent, but that's more a fault for the people overlooking the consensus-building and evidence-free claims when their team makes them.
gattsuru
1yr ago
... other than the part where they didn't have the guns in their pocket, and didn't have the money given to them?
The guys were dumbasses in a lot of ways, but you're not doing a great job with the metaphors.
gattsuru
1yr ago
That's fair. Most recent cases usually just go after airman's certs or private pilot's licenses; criminal cases tend to only get involved when there's risk to passengers or to people on the ground, and even those are pretty rare.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Beyond the other objections, incest kink has had a pretty sizable and long-present popularity in fandom spaces where the drivers and funders are more transparent, or where ... reproduction wasn't a particular risk, or both.
Which doesn't prevent your hypothesis, but it'd be funny to have a complex conspiracy for things people already were gonna do.
gattsuru
1yr ago
But I think it's reasonable to call that a "cofactor", if you miraculously managed to keep a person with AIDS in a perfectly sterile environment and scrubbed their microbiome, I'd expect them to live a lot longer (not that deleting a microbiome is a good idea in the least).
There's an increased rate of certain wasting cancers that start to occur after certain thresholds of HIV infection hit, but that wasn't recognized until the late 80s, but the theory I'm motioning around was a little different.
The (later disproved) hypothesis was not that HIV alone couldn't directly kill you short of other external factors, but that it would not progress to immune deficiency in a large portion (usually 50-95%) of those who carried the virus: either their immune systems would fight it off, or it would only have some marginal impact that would never progress to recognizable symptoms. Usually the claim was that full-blown AIDs was limited to those who abused certain hard drugs or had diseases like hepatitis, though more rarely they'd point to a genetic or full-body health version.
This wasn't as crazy at is seems at first glance -- some healthier people, and those with lower initial viral exposures, often did have much longer incubation periods, at a time where all of the virologist modelling expected an incubation time in the area of months or a year. And some of the craziness that did come about wasn't just limited to the self-motivated gays, as even before HIV was isolated or AIDS formalized, the NIH spent as much time seriously entertaining theories about poppers or sperm causing the immune deficiencies due to their chemical makeup, rather than a viral contagion. Shilts has a section where one of the early gay activists does a statistical analysis for the known cases among the (wildly) sexual active men, their expected number of sexual partners, and claimed times of original infections a year earlier, and then comes up with some astronomically low odds ratio (billions-to-one?) for the then-current number of cases.
But then it turned out the disease couldn't be transmitted casually, and almost all of the healthy people in that analysis ended up just being in the incubation stage, probably had reduced T-cells even at the time, and eventually developed symptomatic AIDS, and a large portion (around two-thirds?) died before protease inhibitors were on the market.
Of course, I am not necessarily opposed to mandatory testing, for human beings who have any reason to interact with anyone else, which is just about all of them. I've browsed enough /r/Grindr to know that while some of the more fastidious ones can make a song and dance about using condoms, getting tested and PREP, if the bussy is tight enough they'll usually relent.
That's part of it, but there were also expectations that the tests could and would be used as a proxy -- both to blacklist HIV-positive men from places and activities where they would not be at unusual risk of transmitting the virus, and to Notice men who got tested repeatedly (even if they tested negative) as gay and having gay sex at a time where this was often illegal.
But putting myself in the shoes of the FDA/CDC in the 70s? I can't see myself doing better really.
Dunno. It's easier, looking back that far, to see what of our vision is hindsight, but there's also a lot more fog between the mistakes of that era and today. Shilts focuses a lot on the homophobia -- and while he exaggerates the sense that the CDC didn't care about gay men dying, he isn't totally unfounded -- but there was a lot of fatheaded provincialism and simple status quo bias, too.
gattsuru
1yr ago
(the entire sequence where Nala discovers adult Simba - a pivotal, very important moment in the film's narrative - is egregious in all of these, including setting the song Can You Feel The Love Tonight during the day)
I've been ignoring the Disney Death Spiral, but how do you screw that up that badly? There are furries who would kill (figuratively, right?) to be involved in the storyboarding for that particular scene. I can get why they'd skip out on the bedroom eyes, but I hope whoever was in charge of that scene isn't getting fursuit heads in their bed.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I'm not sure. The rule that states may not add additional qualifiers for federal office has some loopholes but some well-established precedent.
However, there's also been serious sets of legal challenges and a well-promoted campaign to argue that the 14th Amendment automatically disqualifies from the ballot anyone who 'participated in insurrection', by a vague and broad definition that includes whatever they think Trump has done.
I'd argue that they're wrong to do so, but I'm not sure what I think matters.
To be fair to Shilts, he does highlight some people where the line between ignorance and confusion to at least motivated ignorance was blurry at best. One repeat character early in the book is Bobbi Campbell, and Shilts claims that he continued to go to bathhouses (allegedly, though to Shilts' skepticism, not for sex) even well after he'd started plastering posters of sarcomas outside of the baths.
Dugas (aka "Patient Zero", though this is a bit of a myth) plays a more plainly villainous role in the telling, and while some of that is Shilts exaggerating matters at his editor's prodding -- there's a rather infamous bedroom conversation that portrayed Dugas as intentionally spreading the disease, "I've got gay cancer. I'm gonna die, and so are you", that doesn't really make sense given Dugas' public positions at the time and may never have happened -- but him going to bars for casual sex while AIDS Vancouver was telling him to knock it off was pretty well-supported.
And this sort of thinking didn't die with him, or with the availability of blood tests; Shilts points to the theory that HIV required some other cofactor to progress into symptomatic AIDs. This form remained common among a weird baptist-and-bootleggers alliance of gay men and religious types if publicly marginalized into the early-00s! It was wrong as a behavior even by its own merits -- asymptomatic transmission was well-established by '85 -- but as incubation times became well-established the bootlegger side of this theory became more and more obviously self-delusion. I think the author oversells this, while downplaying other plausible arguments that were reasonably-but-wrongly held. For a lot of his focus time period, the effective advise was not to simply wrap it up or abstain from casual sex, but that far broader lifestyle (during the "GRID" days) or casual contact (until mid-1983, a lot of medical professionals believed touch or even indirect contact played a significant transmission method!) changes.
There's some other later bits about gay activists putting often-steep political demands to insure that new anti-HIV efforts would not become anti-gay efforts, most impactfully around the dawn of testing.
On the other side, Shilts' narrative is far more aggressive about the failures of virology and medical research as a class. There's some Goldilocking here: the NCI (and the original sarcomas fell under cancer) research too slow-paced, NIID research underfunded, the NIH uninterested except in the broadest health impacts, the FDA (which controls blood products) unwilling to piece together disparate symptoms to the specific disease, NIH funding too broad, statutory funding too over-specified. But the full combination did lead to a painfully slow understanding of the disease, and release and delayed adoption of blood tests, often marred by politics. These are villains in the more Brazil sense, but they're still villains by Shilts' version of events.
If I'm reading the Colorado Secretary of State rules correctly, he would have to file a Notice of Intent for Write-in, which the Secretary of State must evaluate and can only list as an eligible write-in candidate if the submitting agent is truely eligible. The opinion and a few dissents both make clear that these rules apply to Presidential elections, with at most some quibbling about how much of the terms for qualifications apply to non-write-in candidates :
The majority opinion's logic would hold that Secretary of State should (and must!) refuse to list Trump as a write-in candidate; votes for an ineligible write-in "will not be counted".
It's... not clear when the Notice of Intent must be filed. The Colorado Secretary of State page says 67 days before the date of the election (December 30th?), but the statute says 85, which would be... December 17ish. I'm not sure if the difference arises because the law has changed since 2022, or what.
How much that matters varies. The actual selection of a candidate doesn't have statutory (well, technically, the state law requires "Each political party shall use the results of the election to allocate national delegate votes in accordance with the party's state and national rules.") or Constitutional procedures, and Colorado's GOP have long been ground zero for fuckery on those matters.
The state's GOP have 37 (out of 3,469) delegates, but even before this opinion, the state GOP was threatening to move to a caucus system. It'll be an absolute clusterfuck, though, especially given the already-fraught results after 2016.
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