Hamas, specifically, I'd have to go back a year ago for something explicit, though the famous Tufts one is kinda telling on itself when the protestors start to insult the Palestinian peace advocate. More broadly, I can show anti-Israeli/pro-Palestine protests in March, anti-anti-anti-Semites in April, commencement speakers in May, so on.
Sometimes this got to equivalent extremes: SJP affiliates promoting literal spree-shooters was a January-this-year-thing.
That's also... notably not what I asked. Maybe there genuinely was a pro-Hamas protest named referencing a thousand-plus fatality attack on civilians, shortly after a separate pro-Hamas protest by the same group has some protestors turn violent in September I and the rest of the internet missed. I can't prove a negative, after all.
But it's a data point that hints and waggles its eyebrows, and I don't think it's the only one.
gattsuru
1yr ago
The trilogy was published between 1992 and 1996; KSR likely would not have understood the concept of "changing gender". Despite the near-infinite possibilities of changing one's physical form that is offered, no one seeks to transform themselves; no woman decides to father children, no man bears a child... The simplest answer is that the notion that people would want to change their sex simply did not occur to him, and this is remarkable in the context of the books trying to imagine all the possible physical and societal limits that humans could push.
That's possible -- I learned about trans-* stuff pretty early, chronologically, due to the overlap in some fandom spaces, and I still didn't learn a lot of the more practical details for trans men until ~2003-05ish -- but I'm not sure it's obviously true. People have already brought up Heinlein, but scifi and general literary fiction already had some heavy genderfuckery already; while not all of it would fit the modern-day understanding of transgender (Woolf's 1928 Orlando: butch woman or nonbinary, greatest thread ever, locked by moderators after 10000 pages), or be particularly palatable to the modern-day trans movement (When Gravity Falls postulates a Muslim-dominant future where the protagonist's girlfriend is a trans woman prostitute, 1987).
More broadly, Ranma 1/2 had its American debut in 1993. In comics, Alan Moore's Promethea (with a very explicit contrast between gender-stuff and homosexuality) wasn't at that part of the plot until 2001 or so, but Camelot 3000 had a person reincarnated into the opposite gender in 1982. Neil Gaiman had Wanda Mann, who outside of the unfortunate name, was otherwise handled pretty well in 1991 (and probably a response to an earlier Sandman series only mentioning trans women as a serial killer's victims. Grant Morrison wrote Lord Fanny in 1994, who... was about as poorly written as you'd expect given the name or Morrison being involved. There were a handful, and of course outsider pieces tended to be even more esoteric.
Transmale characters were much less common, but they did exist.
This isn't to say Robinson had to know of any of these, but neither was it that far off from the opportunity. (Including physically; Davis California isn't San Francisco, but it was only an hour or hour-and-a-half drive, and the DSA circles there in the 1990s had a lot weird people of all kinds.)
((And, on the other direction, I'm pretty sure your point would apply to Woolf; the mechanics and philosophy for gender stuff in that era existed, up to and including Hirschfeld giving out 'gender passes', but was different enough from modern understandings that even had the notorious recluse learned of them they wouldn't have been very predictive for the future.))
An alternative explanation is that regardless of what Robinson could have imagined, he was writing for his audience, and while trans stuff wasn't well-known in that era, The Silence of the Lambs was 1991. I (and the film) would argue Buffalo Bill is not trans so much as just hates himself, but the film had to argue that in part because trans_vestitism_ at least was well-enough known for at least part of the audience to react to that. A careful author can avoid issues, but a careful author can also avoid problems by not stepping on landmines.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Stronger evidence than his guilty plea?
AFAICT, his plea was solely to pulling an alarm without a fire, probably this law. His position remains that he pulled the alarm to get to a vote faster, insisting that he did not intend to cause a disruption of government functioning. Which is... really hard to match up with the video. Maybe he was running back into the building to find someone to report the alarm-pull, after he'd non-chalantly taken down signs and carefully pulled the fire alarm?
It didn’t work in undergrad, and it didn’t work here…right?
Dunno. The Dem side of the House had been asking for additional time to review the then-pending budget/continuing resolution proposal, and the fire alarm did get a number of House offices locked down. Doesn't prove that it changed the timeline for the next vote, but then again the law "corruptly interfering with" isn't limited to just votes themselves, or even just to Congress itself.
Honestly, the shame's probably a more effective ramification than a criminal trial that'd go nowhere, to the extent any politician can still feel shame; I didn't expect him to even get this slap on the wrist. But there's a lot of people who are going to point to this (and to the increasingly-common disruption of Republican state congresses, or federal judicial hearings) when they do something stupid, and sooner or later the escalation's going to get bad.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I'd be interested to hear about how many New York protests between January and September of this year named themselves with a reference to a terror attack killing over a thousand civilians. I get that plural of anecdote isn't data, but I'd have estimated it at pretty close to zero.
gattsuru
1yr ago
The ADL being Quislings (Czerniakóws?) is a bad thing, but if you make enemies of an entire demographic due to the bad acts of one particularly high-profile activist organization being suicidally leftist, you're going to run out of demographic groups real quick.
gattsuru
1yr ago
The main legal challenges at SCOTUS level are O’Connor v. Donaldson (must be a danger to self or others, or incapable of surviving outside of institutionalization, not just mentally ill) and Addington v. Texas (must be 'clear and convincing' proof), both in the 1970s.
There's some internal discussion from ACLU-driven lawsuits, especially at lower courts, where this was meant to add so much paperwork as to make commitment impractical (see Scott's My Brother Ron summary), but while I can't speak of how serious their strict ramifications are for this case, in general a lot of the central examples in favor of institutionalization would still be readily and easily proven under these standards. The bigger issue's just that institutionalization and longer-term involuntary commitment became culturally untouchable.
Short-term holds are wildly available and, thanks to the Scylla and Charbydis of standing and mootness doctrine, especially difficult to challenge even when due process is missing entirely. My go-to example is Pennsylvania's Section 302 commitments, which can hold people for up to 5 days based on a petitioner's statement and a single doctor's signature. This tends to be the biggest issue for gun ownership, since some police use it as a glorified drunk tank and it counts for Pennsylvania law if you try to buy a gun, but there's been other abuses, and it's basically impossible to challenge.
But most psych offices and legal spheres will avoid calling for long-term commitment without a criminal conviction, even in cases where dangerousness is pretty obvious.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Conservative normies doing conservative normie things don’t get debanked. Right wing edgelords do, but that’s not the same thing.
There's been a pretty serious wave of debanking, specifically, aimed at the right wing gun culture world, well short of Defense Distributed-level weirdos. While not specifically a bank, GiveSendGo lost Discover as a payment option back in the Rittenhouse era.
Which isn't different from what you said, in some perspectives, but the line where 'edgelord' get drawn controls quite a lot. There might have once been enough institutional trust to think that this could stop at just the KF-grade assholes in the same way that I once believed 'punch a Nazi' could actually mean just punching actual nazis; in practice the leftist doxxing leagues get support from Harvard University and credit card companies get Blue Tribe calls to drop Red Tribe sales as a category.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Yeah, this is kinda 'funny' as a joke, but if applied seriously it's the sort of logic that would downgrade kidnapping if the victim ever went on business trips, or stabbings if the victim donated blood.
gattsuru
1yr ago
At least in the survey, incest has an escalating rate of expected disapproval as age gaps and reproductive risks start getting involved, starting with sister-sister as the least taboo (presumably het guys with twin threesome fantasies?), with an exception for brother-brother and father-son incest being considered more taboo (... presumably because there's a lot of het guys in the sample).
There's also a lot of items that weren't included in the final v3 graph or v3 taboo survey which were in the v2 taboo survey, and were probably more heavily focused on disgust or norm violations than such severe norm violations that they were clear violations of law. Not sure if they were dropped do to low interest or expected overlap with other statements, or just to streamline the survey.
That said, the survey asked about what you expected social ramifications would be, were you revealed to be interested in the topic to family or strangers, which is probably going to different results than whether something is tame or weird. The central case of parental incest in the real world and especially real-world awareness is incredibly abusive, and that's likely to drive how people expect social response to be, even if a lot of the people who fantasize usually have a wildly different focus.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Very high-variance. There's a lot of people who are 'mall ninjas', who buy a ton of tacticool crap without much serious training or skill with any of it, for whom guns and equipment are probably better modeled as a status or investment thing. On the other hand, there's also a lot of training-as-hobby that goes to pretty high extremes, ranging from cowboy action shooting at the LARPy end, multigun in the middle, and score-based SWAT training at the other end.
There's part of the latter groups who I would rather have than police or even some military people.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Among the diaspora, Randy Barnett has been hammering that argument at length, and has been arguing it for a while; the JPFO have unsurprisingly had a field day, for whatever they're worth now.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Yeah, it's more explicit on her site. The taboo survey had many fewer responses (around 1300 to the around 30,000 of the kink survey as of Aug 2023) and looks like it was collected more heavily from Aella's readership until later in the process (where she started to sell through Positly). She assumes that a lot of the taboo stuff will converge quickly with fewer data points because it's such a social thing, and that's probably not wrong, and keeping the surveys separate probably does help avoid lower kinks scores because of people feeling shamed about kinks.
[cw: links are all login-walled, but still porn]
"Disinterested sex" or "distracted sex" are some other kinks that probably get lumped into the same category: for some furry examples see SamurShalem (gay, straight with open relationship content), Jishinu (straight) or Braeburned (gay). This can sometimes be femdomish or about embarrassing the top, but it's often as much someone being accommodating or challenging the top to impress them, or a kinder and gentler (and less stranger-focused) freeuse sorta thing.
gattsuru
1yr ago
The taboo survey doesn't emphasize fantasy the way the kink survey does, which probably has some impact.
At least from the survey format, I also wouldn't have associated oviposition with giant (non-sapient) insects, tbh. I've probably been spoiled because of the furry fandom having a lot of dragons or eggs sometimes just happening, but even for non-furs I would associate it more with stuff like silicone eggs or aliens/monsters, especially post-Alien, or (more rarely) as a sanitized pregnancy/birth kink first. There was another question that was more focused on infestation sorta stuff that seems a closer fit to the often-degradation-focused insect egg kink, though no guarantee that the average survey-taker would get the questions in the same order.
Oviposition's still weird, but it's not the sorta thing you'd get taken to court or jail over the way abusing an animal can.
One side's that the Likert Scale has some really awkward ramifications, and while it's well-accepted as a scientific tool (so I can't blame individual researchers for using it), I'm not convinced it should be. It's notoriously prone to anchoring problems, but worse than that it tends to give a very constrained summary of its results. An average score of 1 can reflect either reflect all of your participants saying that they find it only the slightest bit arousing, or ~15% finding it the most arousing thing ever and everyone else hating it, or anywhere in-between.
In practice, this kinda averages out for all but the most polarizing interests (eg, "gay men" has 15,878 zero scores to the 34,977 "brosis" does in the raw data despite 'only' having a 1.5ish score), but it still means 25% report at least "somewhat arousing" to brother/sister.
Which is only part of the explanation; I don't know non-fur stuff that well, but from your reaction it sounds like 25% would be a low estimate for the front page of pornhub (and I don't think my checks would be representative).
The other side's kinda boring. At least for video, 'incest' as a kink is cheap and easy to advertise for how taboo it is. Trivially, a lot of it's just random videos uploaded with an eye-catching title, but even a video leaning very heavily into the genre only needs two porn actors/actresses and a video camera. Ideally somewhat similar-looking actors and actresses, but honestly when you strap 'step' onto the front they don't even necessarily have to be the same race. That makes it a lot easier to produce content (and with clear weightings for recently uploaded content, that matters), and for that content to get enough interest to be promoted to the front page. (To be unreasonably charitable, it also means that people really squicked by incest can avoid the stuff easily, rather than getting a money shot and then faked moans of "hey bro".)
gattsuru
1yr ago
((Apologies if I've missed sarcasm or Bee Movie joke.))
I think "insects" is short for "sexual scenarios involving creepy crawlies, like rodents, insects, etc.", so contextually probably more along the lines of live vermin touching you than "I will not eat the bugs/I will not live in the pod" or anthro bug material. I'm personally surprised it's not further to the right (perhaps because it's less likely to result in criminal charges?), but I'm pretty sure it's a fairly rare kink even in complete fantasy form.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Apparently some of the softer or more romantic 'kinks' were added because "iirc Tailcalled was like “you seem to be weak in items around romance/gentle/sweet stuff”".
"Tabooness" is specifically "how much would society judge you" in the taboo survey, specifically:
To calibrate, you can ask How bad would it be if you: told your grandmother you have this fetish, [or] announced to a crowd of strangers you have this fetish [or] had search history for this fetish leaked.
Notably, it does not have the disclaimer about fantasy that the kink survey did. So it's got a lot of overloading, somewhat at cross purposes. Most stuff on the >80% is the sort of conduct that gets you jailed and/or disowned, while most of the <40% is stuff that at most would be awkward.
gattsuru
1yr ago
The funny thing's that if you really want to go nuts HBD-wise, there's a reasonable argument women have an advantage for some shooting sports and styles, famously including a couple Olympic-level matters.
Whether that extrapolates to combat is a separate matter -- not just for aggression reasons, but because combined small-arms armor and ammo is a lot of weight, which has to be fairly high on the body -- and there are some obvious issues with additional war crimes risks, but it's a funny aspect.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Depending on how much you want The Best Performance possible, you may be able to go significantly under your budget target. This isn't a great machine performance-wise, but it'll hit most of your targets (albeit a little slow for video editing).
For your requirements list and current equipment costs, buying new I would recommend starting by looking for 16-32GB RAM and an nvidia 1650 or better. The ideal storage situation would be 512GB+ nvme boot drive and a 2TB SATA SSD storage drive for video editing, but that can be hard to find in compact or ultracompact laptops; if you have to compromise, 1TB or greater NVME boot drives are table stakes at the price range you're looking at. Video editing takes an obscene amount of storage, and games have started to get pretty bloated, and having to fuck around with a USB drive is bad enough before dealing with UK prices.
For used or refurbished machines, you can probably get away with 8GB RAM if the computer is otherwise a steal, but RAM's cheap and it's better to have more. That's doubly true for ultracompact and compact laptops, where getting access to memory to upgrade it may be difficult or near-impossible. The gaming list you have can go back a few generations if you're buying used, but I wouldn't go lower on this chart than an nVidia 1650 or so; the games only 'need' an nVidia 970 or so to run with decent settings, but any GPU that old will be inviting reliability problems down the road. For CPU, you'll probably want to stick to an Intel i5-84xx or higher on this chart. The Ryzen numbers are... complicated in a way that just adding price doesn't necessarily get you much performance, but that chart's not the worst way to look at them so long as you don't pay a bunch of extra money for a tiny boost.
If you want a mobile machine, I'd caution to watch out for any laptops with very exposed hinges -- see this for an example of a reasonable deal except the first time you drop it on a corner one of the hinges will bust. Similarly, watch out for compact or ultracompacts with very few USB connections (or where the only connections are USB-C); at best this will require you to get a dock, and often it's a sign the machine is meant as a very light use device and will burn the hell out of you.
Unless you absolutely need video editing or gaming on the go, I wouldn't exclude small (~cfe Lian Li Air at 384 x 288 x 400 mm) compact desktop PCs or a laptop with an eGPU. These are a little more annoying to assemble, but they vastly improve usability and can be meaningfully upgraded at very little floor space cost (though some fan noise), and they're much less likely to be damaged or stolen than something you can take around the world with you. In most cases, they'll cost so much less you can get a gaming desktop and a lightweight mid-performance laptop, though in turn expect to spend some time fucking with cable management. While most gaming laptops will have okay integrated sound, there's very few that are anything outstanding, while desktop machines will have a lot more options there.
((Contra ToaKraka, I don't recommend NUCs or NUC-likes. There are some with the performance you need, if not necessarily the price range, but getting the performance and significant storage for fast video editing will bust your budget, and they're prone to fan failures. They have great uses cases, but this isn't one of them unless you're willing to jettison gaming and accept a USB storage drive.))
The only meaningfully upgradable laptop is the Framework, and it will bust your budget in the performance range you're aiming for, and has very long wait times. For other laptops, you basically will only be able to upgrade RAM a little (usually no more than 2x) and you can replace or add one disk drive, and some won't let you do that (either soldered to the motherboard, or with a sealed frame).
gattsuru
1yr ago
Yeah, this could stand to be more clearly described. The underlying kink survey specifically says:
Reminder: this test assumes ALL THINGS ARE BY DEFAULT, FANTASIES. It is possible to ethically fantasize about a scenario that would not be ethical if done in real life. This test is asking about what would be hypothetically erotic, NOT about what you would act on.
And it's not really clear if the political survey is aiming the same direction.
ven within that there's going to be a lot of variation depending on how central an example of the class you want. The body horror question expands to "I find sexual scenarios involving body horror to be: such as mutations, bodyswap, malicious surgery, infestations", and there's going to be a very big disparity between "you're being Alien facehuggered", "The Thing thinks you're cute", "frankenstein'd heads" and this (cw: featureless nudity), but while it's the most overt variation it's far from the only one.
I'm guessing bestiality (survey question "meaning sexual interaction with at least one non-human animals/amphibians/insects/birds/etc. This is not being an animal") is more about non-sapient and non-talking critters, and that's something that I'm pretty uncomfortable in that 'bad for your soul' way even if it's 'just' a fantasy. But the strict definition includes even the standard furry anthros, and there's a reason that the Harkness Test is a thing in the furry fandom.
gattsuru
1yr ago
That's fair, but despite the objections of a lot of soccons, I don't think AOC is in the White House.
This is interesting, and it's nice to have confirmation (?kinda? I'm not sure how much to trust this guy) of some suspected details, or at least someone else suspecting them, but a lot of these raise further questions than they answer.
The author loves the KISS principle, and he's not wrong, but the details he's proposing are less descriptions of a complex system falling so much as a fragile system failing unnoticed. I really hope that the IDF's tower comms were not solely 'cellular', but even if he's using that as a shorthand for a combination of cellular, microwave point-to-point, and packet radio (LoRA's cheap!) that I'd consider the bare minimum for a short-term deployment, this stuff's been deployed for close to a decade and there's really no excuse to not have physical ground links and conventional radio installations. The threat of drone-delivered explosives has been present in the public info since 2017, and commercially-available data links are notoriously fragile not just to attacks but even to stuff like nearby lightning strikes.
You can't harden these things against every possible attack, but you can have enough physically separate systems that anything breaking too many of them is an obvious attack, and at least some of these tools can treat an unnatural down state from a natural one, (and some, like flares, can be a signal only available when nothing is an option). Which sounds like ass-covering, but the counterfactual environment where you had a hundred IDF soldiers on a wall against a thousand-plus Hamas soldiers with a lot of explosives still sounds like an environment where you need to call for backup, and cellular is the obvious and simple and wrong answer there, too.
Which doesn't speak to the broader point, but leaves me concerned about how precise the rest of the analysis is.
My understanding is that the Hoovers B section was sometimes thinner than initially promoted, sometimes down to 50m, and there's some amount of mumbling for how deep the underground anti-tunnel wall components of the barrier was, but otherwise the implementation was largely as described.
No land mines or electrified fence.
Both Kerem Shalom and Erez crossings were taken early, but so there were also breaks at least five other fence locations that did not have crossings, many of which were at parts of the border that matched the specifications exactly, along with limited aerial and boat forces.
I haven't seen a complete tactical breakdown of the initial attack, and some of it probably will never be released to the public, but my impression's that Hamas (and other related groups) overwhelmed or misdirected the immediately available response capabilities, then struck the observation and command posts before either a general alarm or backup response troops could be mustered. Some of that reflects reduced staffing because of a religious holiday, but more generally I don't think the IDF expected that Hamas could achieve this degree of coordination nor the simple amount of weapons and manpower without clear intel piling up for the IDF, nor that Hamas could accurately identify the observation control centers for the sort of strike blinding the surveillance side.
I'm sorry, is it "obviously" true or not that "Flood" is a clear reference to the Hamas-run terrorist attack?
As far as I can tell, all of the examples I linked were in the sort of category Certain People would shrug off as a couple nutty kids on a college campus, sometimes with obnoxiously tolerant administration from the college campus. The last post-attack protest brought an estimated 5k people and turned violent, and... well, I'll comment back here tomorrow when we have estimated headcounts (and hopefully just that), but I'm skeptical that it's going to be a Couple Nutty Kids off a college campus.
My objection isn't your position on Israel/Palestine directly; I don't have a very clear idea of what the moral or pragmatic solutions are, or if there even are any.
My objection is that you've responded to an (admittedly under-evidenced!) claim by demanding not just some evidence, but by trying to establish insurmountable and impossible standards of proof. What if, hypothetically, I found a pro-Hamas protest on October 5th with only four people being reported in the news? That doesn't prove that bigger protests had to be reported! What if, less hypothetically, I could point to some of the more aggressively Hamas-friendly protests being planned before the Israeli forces had even finished retaking their own settlements, and had not started any bombing strikes yet? I can't prove that they'd have had similar attendance without the IDF's bombing campaign, limited as it was at the time, and of course even if some of the protests had actual in-person gatherings before that bombing campaign took off, anyone paying attention knew it would be coming down the road sooner or later.
Is there any possible evidence that would even lower your confidence in your position? If not, that's... not actually a strong point in favor for it.
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