gattsuru
1yr ago
Never heard of the dude, but the reason the reaction to Trump's conviction might be worse than Steven's case, is because the knives were out for Trump for 8 years straight, to an absurd degree.
It's a story; the full investigation report is a wordy read, but it's hard to overemphasize how fucked up that case was. Looking at blogosphere discussions of the incident from before (2008) and after (mid-2009) the real revelations give a good look at the extent that early FBI leaks had managed to poison much of conservatives (even media-skeptical-by-those-times) against him, until the other shoe dropped.
That still gives an (age-adjusted) rate of 12.0 per 100k in 1985, which exceed all but 1993 (11.9 per 100k) and 2002-2013 (at minimum, 10.2 per 100k in 2006). That's better than it sounds -- the 'real' suicide rate is probably lower now than in 1985, despite the official numbers, due to improved data collection and reduced stigma -- but it's still a lot weaker and a lot less directly connected a signal than you're suggesting, especially given the nature of Australian suicides (and especially demographic concentration) and how the numbers have been measured.
You can smuggle some sort of causation out: perhaps it took seven years for the law to be implemented to some important threshold, and then there was some external economic pressure that fucked over a lot of people for the next decade after that or revision in the data-gathering. Or that it rode an already-decreasing rate from the more-suicidal early 80s, in ways that should have us comparing not pre/post Port Arthur or its laws but some other years. That might even not be wrong! But it's still mixed.
I know the theoretical fundamentals, but they seem insufficiently precise and a bit of a just-so story. There's no small number of other mechanisms with similar irreversibility and speed, some more available in Australia.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Gun ownership impacts firearm suicide rates; skip past that particular bait-and-switch and the evidence is mixed at best, with massive substitution effects.
Firearm suicides do tend to be messier and the not-immediately-fatal modes worse than almost anything short of the more aggressive overdoses, though.
Adding to Nybbler's comments, the 2nd Circuit (which includes New York) just recently decided Antonyuk's preliminary injunction stage. It's a long fucking decision, but the tl;dr accepts and allows to go into force everything but mandatory social media disclosures, a 'vampire' rule requiring carry permitees to get explicit permission before entering private property -- that is, the most aggressive of restrictions, and all only added after Bruen -- and blocked a complete ban on carry even with the permission of owners in houses of worship only as applied to the specific appellants and no one else.
By contrast, the "good character" requirement that was just a rewording of the Bruen-overturned "proper cause" rule survived. Even the disclosure of cohabitants can go into play, somehow! The case defies Bruen in every way but flicking it the bird -- and it gets pretty close, there.
Meanwhile, fewer people are getting permits now than before Bruen.
Now, that's 'just' the preliminary injunction stage, and 'just' decided on December 8th. It's possible that SCOTUS will allow an interlocutory appeal, grant a more serious injunction, and rap the 2nd Circuit's knuckles. It's possible that the 2nd Circuit will actually do a serious analysis that wasn't just padding the word and page count. But we haven't seen that in any other case of massive resistance, yet.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Was there supposed to be additional text between these two paragraphs or was the first incomplete?
Thanks, fixed.
Also, general question, how do people go about archiving posts here with many reference links that risk bitrot? Recursive wget into an mht?
I've been fighting a few different options. Recursive wget is the 'easiest', but I've had to screw around with whitelist/blacklisting to avoid getting random junk even at even mid-level recursion depth, and low recursion depth loses a lot of useful data to redirect spam. Gwern has a few good tools listed, but you still have to mix-and-match -- a proxy archiver is great for sites you visit but useless for links you don't click, while linkchecker is great for following every part of a conventional website or mapping out an individual page's links but can spider out of control for larger ones.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I've seen a few successful approaches:
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Keep the time pressure high, and leave few clear authorities to call. See Knives Out, where police are brought in early and can't solve the crime (and aren't even sure there is a crime). For a lighter-hearted take, see Zootopia, where the convention is so transparent most people don't notice it, even to the point where they added the carrot recorder joke. Or see BNA : Brand New Animal, where anyone beastman the protagonists could call has been transformed into ravening beasts. It's not uncommon for these stories to have the interconnectivity be a major part of the solution -- the climax is the reveal and disclosure of the villain (and in BNA, that there are connected beliefs that still hold people together, transmitted from cell phone recording to mass media), rather than a physical tussle.
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Make your story about that technology. Ghost In The Shell presumes its main characters will be constantly tied to the internet at every moment -- the one guy without a cyberbrain is the runt of the team -- and it's a whole thing if any ever have to go dark. Paranoia Agent takes this in more supernatural ends, and it does work best if it's weakly-speculative, but the same principles can apply for traditional thrillers.
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Decrease your scope and scale. You can write thrillers that aren't about murderers: there's a wide variety of financial or social crime where calling the police will range from getting nothing to getting written up yourself. It's harder to write these lower stakes as interesting to readers, but it can still be very interesting once you've grabbed them.
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Drastically reduce the time pressure. If you're trying to solve a homicide from the 1920s in 2020, it doesn't matter what tech you can bring to hand. Arguably, this is a major focus for a lot of older true crime.
I think Shilts puts his thumb on the scales a bit for that evaluation, especially for bathhouses.
He makes a big deal out of them as a "100-million dollar industry" and charging 5/10 dollars a head person, and that is an investment: the Club Baths would have definitely gone (and did eventually go under!) when closed. Totally fair point! But the other side of that's the extent the Club Baths founder had been a gay activist over a decade before opening his first bathhouse, and went into that field knowing it'd blacklist him from most normal ventures. When it comes to revenue and ideals, there's really little in And the Band Played On that really excludes the option 'both'; just what Shilts wants to portray.
More significantly, while Shilts mentions the long incubation time for HIV, the work as a whole kinda glosses over the extent that drove so many other problems. There was no blood test until 1985; understandings of the high real transmission rate and true number of cases were projections and guess-work, and often wrong (as you mention Fauci and the spit-take). He mentions as an aside different times where the expected incubation period increased -- ten months, a year, two years, five years -- but he only really talks about minimizing estimates of incidence to show obviously misguided activists. But they were only obviously wrong in retrospect: in many cases, they were doing the math and statistical analysis correctly, just with garbage numbers coming in.
I think there's a stronger argument for blood banks (though the strongest arguments come well after the 1980-85 block that Shilts focuses on), but even that has to trade off against the often-serious risks low available blood would involve.
gattsuru
1yr ago
That's fair.
I think there's been a bigger impact than might seem at first glance even removing the places where 'tech' and 'culture' feed each other. You mention sex toys, and everything from batteries to silicone mixes to improved 3d modeling software to better vacuum pumps have helped them, but there are similar changes in digital inking and scanner technology, fursuit build and comfort stuff, and 'normie' sex stuff like condoms.
I've got complicated feelings about Discord (or even less-culturally-awkward tech like Murmur/etc) and VRChat, but as much as online dating has fucked over the straight dating world, they've done a lot of good things for the gay ones, and that's even recognizing the nuclear wasteland that is grindr-likes.
NRA + ACLU
The ACLU reports:
We’re representing the NRA at the Supreme Court in their case against New York’s Department of Financial Services for abusing its regulatory power to violate the NRA’s First Amendment rights.
For a tl;dr of the background: the New York Department of Financial Services pressured several licensed insurance agencies in the state of New York from working with the NRA, citing new interpretations of rules regarding affinity programs, and allegedly while promising during backroom meetings that the DFS would allow quiet and easy remediation programs if the companies would assist. Companies that didn't jump onboard quickly received steep fines; those that showed hesitation felt fear for their license to operate as insurers. The NRA sued, and lower courts have largely allowed all responsible parties to claim various immunity, or argued that the behavior even if true would not be unlawful.
While that twitter thread doesn't go into much of the minutiae, and there's nothing I can find on the ACLU's website, the NRA's lawyers report that the ACLU will be acting as co-counsel. This has not been without controversy just from other CLUs; the third-party complaints tend toward the hilarious. So in that sense, it's a costly signal in a way that weak-kneed amici are not -- and while I'm not optimistic about this case, it's not in that ugly spot where the ACLU's presence has no chance of impact, either.
That said, it's not clear how much this case will matter for its specific actors, even if the NRA wins at SCOTUS. Vullo and New York State and all the king's horses won't be able to put the NRA's finances back together again. It's been self-insured in an increasingly lawsuit-optimized world for years already, and that's not gonna change even if Vullo takes a hit for the team. While Cuomo takes too much credit given the internal problems already plaguing the gun group, this is exactly the type of lawsuit where 'victory' means legal fees, a token financial punishment, and a promise that the bad actors won't commit the same mistakes where they could be caught. It won't even touch the current efforts to go after bank and merchant services (also, coincidentally, a group that falls under NYDFS purview!). A victory before SCOTUS might help reduce the risk of the organization's other New York and DC lawsuits from hollowing out the leadership and wearing the infrastructure like a skin suit, but we won't see the NRA be a cultural or legal force worth mentioning again in the next decade, if not my lifetime.
But a more general precedent might matter, if it could stick. For example:
FCC v. Starlink
FCC commissioner Brendan Carr writes:
Instead of applying the traditional FCC standard to the record evidence, which would have compelled the agency to confirm Starlink’s $885 million award, the FCC denied it on the grounds that Starlink is not providing high-speed Internet service to all of those locations today. What? FCC law does not require Starlink to provide high-speed Internet service to even a single location today. As noted above, the first FCC milestone does not kick in until the end of 2025. Indeed, the FCC did not require— and has never required—any other award winner to show that it met its service obligation years ahead of time.
SpaceX and its subsidiaries have received a lot of unusual scrutiny in recent years, but most of it could at least motion around textual (if not necessarily even-handed or reasonable) interpretation of well-established regulation. Contract challenges aren't unusual, sometimes even not wrong.
Here, there seems to be little, if any, fig leaf: the king is just naked.
It's not absolutely certain that SpaceX will be able to achieve the RDOF grant requirements, and indeed the average StarLink connection today is closer to 80/10 than the 100/20 for the target (though I don't know if RDOF grantees might be focused toward the higher end of the scale). But it's far from "not reasonably capable", not least of all because the company already supports 1.3 million customers at those rates, rather than the 650k in the RDOF grant. While total capacity doesn't reallocate cleanly, the company is clearly capable of achieving scale, and on schedule to continue doing so. And Carr's complaint that this evaluation is not standard rings a sharper tone. Even after a grant is completed it's not unusual for grantees to sputter without so much as an FCC complaint. Completely revoking a grant partway-through, without much clearer evidence of non-performance or outright fraud, is an entirely different matter entirely.
I've mixed feelings about the rural internet upgrade programs and grants, even as an (indirect, non-Starlink) beneficiary, but Simington's dissental is damning in a different way : "What good is an agreement to build out service by 2025 if the FCC can, on a whim, hold you to it in 2022 instead?" Simington does not give the same focus on political bias that Carr does, but in many ways the problem is more damning when considered in that frame. Starlink has committed to massive infrastructure build-out and contracted with hundreds of thousands of consumers on the basis of doing a job, and consumers have worked with the company under market conditions of doing that job.
If you genuinely believed that the FCC was just being arbitrary to the scale of almost a billion dollars, rather than 'just' trying to hammer a political dissident at the President's not-very-indirect orders, that's actually pretty bad too! I just don't see many plausible ways for that to be the case.
New Mexico Carry Bans
Ping pong, hope no one ends up with an arrest record because the courts are fucking around. The public park carry isn't as extreme as the original county-wide ban, but it's still a clear violation of the dicta in Bruen, especially in a state like New Mexico. Doesn't really matter much if you can play with the court system long enough to fuck over anyone who wants to challenge a bad regulation, though.
More deeply, there's been no serious repercussions for it. During the warm-up for the upcoming legislative session, there's been more progress on an assault weapons ban than any serious rejoinder to Grisham's adventurism. The federal censure went nowhere. Citizen grand juries ditto.
Illinois v. Due Process
Speaking of the force of law being applied in random ways, Illinois just had a hearing on its Assault Weapon law. This law requires all guns in certain classes owned by certain people to be registered with the state, deadline January 1st, after which the registry closes. New ownership, or possession of an unregistered assault weapon, after that point will be a serious felony. What does it ban?
Interested parties have until Nov. 20 to submit written comments on the proposed rules... JCAR cochair Sen. Bill Cunningham, D-Chicago, told reporters after the meeting that he understands some of the technical confusion over which items must be registered, but he said the law gives ISP authority to adapt its rules as time goes on.
“The existing statute does contemplate the state police dealing with this problem and allows them to amend rules on an ongoing basis. They have that authority in the statute,” he said. “So I think that problem was anticipated. And that's how the law intends to deal with that problem.”
That is, not only is the rule arbitrary and vague, it's intended to be arbitrary and vague, able to change with little notice or opportunity to register newly-banned guns. And, indeed, the current rules are in limbo and will not be finalized before January 16th at their earliest.
There's at least some comedy in the court filings (do you know what a grenade launcher is? Because the state of Illinois doesn't think you do). But while the state managed to get a unlucky draw at the district level, this didn't last very long after appeal. And the basic problem that "When dealing with guns, the citizen acts at his peril" remains, with little recognition or response from the normal set, and a long and successful campaign to splinter the groups devoted to this topic.
There was a separate and more specific hearing on vagueness yesterday, after the 'new' rules failed their last chance to get passed before Jan 16th, and perhaps we'll get an answer there before January 1st, but it didn't sound during arguments like a pause was likely. And, of course, some people will register between now and the decision's release.
How many? Uhhhh.
Maybe this would be a good reinforcement of @HlynkaCG and "refuse to be ruled", but at the risk of paraphrasing a bad Dilbert strip, perhaps for your first felony you should pick something that hasn't given the police your home address and a reason to think you specifically dangerous. Illinois' various laws don't quite amount to sending the state the exact make and model of every gun purchase (though they do for recent 'private' transactions), but it's mostly just a matter of convenience at this time.
gattsuru
1yr ago
... I came of age before the time period you're discussing, and ended up a bi furry in a state that had a (admittedly rarely-enforced at the time) ban on sodomy. The sexuality-related tech of the time isn't the only or top-five biggest issues of that time, but there's a sizable portion of the populace for whom it didn't work out well for.
While I'm not happy about the extent traditional retail has gone tango uniform in the last two decades, it's also a place where advances are vast. Comparing DigiKey today to the DigiKey of 2004 is a tremendous change, and the Radio Shack of 1998-2004 was nowhere near able to contain a lot of the space it missed.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Chu rather famously wrote a couple Facebook posts back in the early gamergate / late rationalist diaspora days where, as while mockingly taking the terms from LW discussion of the time, produced this copypasta. I don't know if it got archived fully in context at any point.
"Snap caps" are recommended for rimfire guns of any kind, and older guns; what extent they matter for modern semiautomatics is somewhat controversial. It's plausible that even new centerfire gun designs will still have increased forces on the firing pin or its surrounding structure when used with an empty chamber but attempts to experimentally demonstrate the matter haven't been able to show clear and obvious results, and modern firing pins are also cheap to replace.
For rimfires, the tip of the firing pin can hit steel on the breach face, as part of the design, and the difference between steel-on-steel and steel-on-compressable-brass is huge: people have experimentally demonstrated damage in <100 uses. There's a small number of rimfire revolvers that avoid this failure mode through some really clever design, though. Some rimfire rifles (such as the popular 10/22) claim that they've eliminated the problem with a firing pin stop, but that's only really true for relatively small counts, and heavy dry fire practicers have found out the hard way that this just moved the problem to a bent firing pin stop.
Older centerfire guns sometimes had similar issues, mostly pre-1970. GLOCK still recommends snap caps for very heavy dry fire use, and people have very rarely shown breach-face problems when not using snap caps, but they almost always are also the sort of people sending hundreds of rounds of very sketchy ammo through their guns.
You can get cheap all-plastic or plastic-rubber snap caps for common calibers at most reputable gun shops, but they're usually specced for 500-1000 uses, so if you're really into dry-fire drills, splurging for spring-based ones can be worthwhile.
Snap caps are also useful for ammo failure and clearing drills.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I get what you're motioning around, but that's what it felt like for a lot of other people a lot earlier. Any opposition to the Affordable Care Act deriving solely from the President's race was a mainstay from 2009-2012. The only possible motivation for a specific anti-gay policy being thoughtless homophobia is gold-standard SCOTUS law, recognized at three different major cases, and with far broader academic and institutional support. Gun owners as wanting more Trayvon Martin shootings was absolutely a thing.
Journolist was revealed in 2010: it wasn't just that it happened, but even the why and how was common knowledge for a set.
It matters that a bunch of people suddenly got to see it first-hand! But it's why I'm skeptical of it as a starting point.
gattsuru
1yr ago
While I like (and sometimes exploit!) this trait, a lot of settings on both generation and upscaling (especially with latent upscalers) will result in visual clutter that a normal artist would not use.
This is most noticable and obvious on the PMC brutalist logo: the scattered white pixels around the 'shoulder' and well outside of the logo's boundaries are just not what you'd expect to see. Maybe as some sort of deep-fried jpg artifact, were the rest of the image busier? But they're not actually those things, or even human interpretations of those things.
The wave-face image is the one where clear errors are most human-like -- anatomy and cloth flow mistakes, overpronounced foreshortening, slightly jank perspective are all totally things even good artists do, sometimes intentionally! -- but separately it's also got some weird distractions. Why are there blue highlights on his abs? If the flow of the image is supposed to be toward his face, why are so many lines going to his shoulders?
The ARMA one is the closest to human-like (there's a few physics/layout errors, but they're absolutely ones humans would make), though the genre it's coming from tends to be cluttered and intentionally disorienting to start with.
You can work around and stop these sort of issues, but you have to really heavily ride and push it toward specific low-clutter styles, and even then it takes some futzing with SD parameters to avoid the image coming out overdone or undercooked.
/images/17023968095808215.webp is prompted by meta at the FurryDiffusion discord, but outside of the hands/paws (and... subject matter), it's as close to human-created art as you'll get.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I don't think that's a terribly good model -- McCarthyism's weapons were put down in the late-1950s/early-1960s, which is not exactly where I'd say conservatives felt unthreatened by communists -- but even supposing it's true, what does the equivalent look like today? When, if ever, does the modern social justice movement not feel threatened? When will they feel as their dominion over the culture is unquestioned?
McCarthyism took ground, but that's the other reason I'm using it as an example. I'm neither expecting nor asking 2rafa to come up with hypotheticals where 'racist' or 'sexist' stops being an insult in 90% of contexts and clear examples are tolerated anywhere near positions of real power, where the assumptions of social justice aren't treated as a fundamental facet of reality, or where the US stops being explicitly hostile towards racist and formerly-racist regimes.
((Hell, I don't even want a lot of that by its strict definition. And, of course, 'racist' is only useful as a description for what the SJW movement targets as a caconym, in the triple sense that the net is wider to catch entire other 'sins', that it's narrower in excluding a lot of SJW racism, and that it's fine-enough mesh to catch a lot of things that aren't actually in any of those categories by any reasonable definition.))
I'm just wondering when people stop getting fired for minor acts, or being to slow to report those suspected; where we don't see criminal investigation or massive civil liability coincidentally pointed at the politically unacceptable; where the FBI does not take con membership as cause for investigation. Where one-in-two people don't undergo loyalty review 'sensitivity training', where we don't see weaponization of the IRS, of the Veteran's Affairs office, of Social Security benefits, where no rando is highlighted by national politicians by name and by photograph for public humiliation.
((And, again, a lot of what's targeted today has less in common with actual-racism or sexism or homophobia or whatever as McCarthy's Army hearings did with communism.))
These aren't goals, they're just weapons, and they're weapons that were placed fully out of McCarthyist hands by people who told us they were too dangerous for anyone to access.
Win/lose might be meaningful for discussing movements in terms of their longer-term impact, and far more important than who's remembered as a jerk, but it doesn't really say as much for the conditions of the war itself. Yet those conditions matter in their own rights: a recurring claim is that since we've seen those weapons set down in the past, they'll be set down here.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I agree that it's crucial and maybe a turning point (though I'm not sure that, in a world where Gjoni got distracted before posting, some other thing wouldn't have taken the same role). I just don't think it makes sense as a starting point.
My post to FCfromSSC goes over the left side, but while I think the impact was bigger on the right, I think you're overlooking the extent a lot of pre-Gamergate groups were less 'apolitical' or not 'interested in politics', and more just hadn't yet been shoved out of mainstream groups.
In 2009, I could write at length on rpgnet on political topics, if at the risk of (even boring) threads getting locked. A couple years before gamergate, conservative-leaning positions had stopped being zebras and started being understood as unacceptable on their own premises; by the Trump era support of a Republican President was verborten; today, "support or apologism for the use of AI generation in commercial projects" is outside of the bounds of acceptable discussion. My politics didn't change, but the extent I would be visible from the outside and especially the extent I could be seen-as-a-state-sees did, and while my pathway was unusual, I don't think the direction was.
A lot of those groups that these people motions around collapsed, either when the broader Tea Party movement did or with the collapse of web culture into social media and doxxing, and they were never as large, but they existed and in many ways were the very things that the early SJW movement were reacting to.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I think this is a bad model of what modern religion is or will aim to be. Which isn't to say it's better or even good, nor that Christians will be coming back to the forefront, but it's a recognizable pattern.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I could see it as a point of heightened visibility or 'crucial', but it feels too much like calling the start of McCarthyism at the Communist Control Act in '54. Dickwolves was 2010, and it wasn't like that was a battle specific to the people pissed off at Penny Arcade. RailFail '09 wasn't just about writing native voices, but heavily balanced around the extent the wrong people got to talk at all, or that tone mattered.
Even other contemporaneous-feeling things end up coming first, like Brendan Eich (April 2014) and arguably TeamHarpy (first posts in May 2014, lawsuit filed in July 2014). NotAllMen and YesAllWomen were promoted and popularized through the first half of 2014, too.
That's not to call it any less of a turning point, but it's hard to call a starting point.
gattsuru
1yr ago
August 2014 is a weird starting point, even from the progressive view. That post-dates Atheism +, Racefail, Zimmerman, It Gets Better, the first and second Scott Walker John Doe investigations, so on. In particular, discussing the modern social justice movement without the Affordable Care Act -- both its effects, and also the discussions it depended on to get public legitimacy -- is missing a lot.
gattsuru
1yr ago
... I'd be interested to see what sort of 'wane' would fit your expectations, even if the culture war would still remain in a form, that's anywhere short of modern conservativism (and anything drawn as close to it) being smothered out completely.
One of my big frustrations is that for all people might say that this stuff isn't as bad or is 'only' as bad as McCarthyism, McCarthyism lasted less than a decade, and it very much had the seeds of its own destruction within it. We're coming up on fifteen for the most obvious start date of this particular cycle.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I'm skeptical. Favorito has had access to (low-quality) scans for some time even before the case was first mooted and not been able to present any convincing evidence that direction that could persuade me, and on the other side I don't think there's much he could present that would persuade the typical public.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I’m convinced the stolen election narrative was profoundly damaging to the Trumpist right and GOP more generally in the US. What is more demoralizing than suggesting that ‘they’ will win even if you come out to vote?
I think you have a bad model of the American conservative view of electron fraud, or how long it's been a concern. "Margin of fraud" and "margin of cheating" were recognizable slogans in 2002-2006, and they weren't new then. Regardless of the merits of those arguments either then or now, they were successfully used at length as an voter motivation tool before 2021.
To be specific, at the time the process to get permission to enter the Capital SFRA involved a pretty lengthy flight planning session going over nearly every component of the flight path, and required certain telemetry types not present in most (maybe not allowed in?) ultralights; the White House and Capitol Hill (and a few surrounding areas) remain prohibited even if you do that. They've since added an online course. Non-standard (eg not straight-line direct-to) flight plans can get more complicated than even that -- I've heard joking-not-joking stories about aerial imaging groups having to bring a police officer on the flight with them.
To be 'fair', the FAA is a petty bitch. They're still the Powers That Be when it comes to aviation, but they're willing to be petty in other environments as well: there's a decent number of 2008-2013 enforcement against 'fat' ultralights. The FAA didn't do hangar-level inspections without a serious complaint first, but if an FSDO gets a complaint, or a FBO knew you weren't behaving well, those complaints and photographic evidence could come in pretty quick.
((This was somewhat complicated by a lot of two-seat light-weight aircraft going around in that timeframe, which were in a weird state until 2008ish.))
This isn't even always wrong: see the Trevor Jacobs thing for a situation where the FAA absolutely came down on him like a sack of bricks (including prison time!) because it was embarrassing for them, but he also could have done a hell of a lot of mischief.
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