But the article linked in the post you linked mentions that 4% of the female population had a sexual experience with an animal, with much higher rates among certain sub-populations (particularly farmers).
Unfortunately, a lot of Kinsey's data and his redefinitions -- note that the writer says sexual experience rather than anything specific -- got blurred aggressively, in no small part by Kinsey himself. His actual data for women was far more restricted, with literally only one actual adult woman in thousands who had full coitus with an animal (a dog) in the sample for Sexual Behavior in the Human Female, with paeans to a few more who might not have been included to protect them legally, and a more significant but still sub-0.05% who'd 'received' oral.
The 4% number comes from rounding up his 3.6% for his "accumulated incidence" of all sexual contact, which explicitly included women who did not report any arousal from the contact. Of those, the overwhelming majority consisted of poking at an animal's genitals, or having ever had sexual fantasies or dreams about the topic; most only reported this happening once or twice in their lives.
any nitpicks are unlikely to remove the emotional damage of "there are attractive women who have fucked dogs but wouldn't touch you with a 10-foot-pole."
That's fair.
gattsuru
2yr ago
Until recently, Chinese mainland silicon was limited to much less precise fabrication approaches (eg, 50+nm) or limited to certain non-CPU/GPU products (Innotron's 19nm plant made RAM, period) or both (19nm isn't 7nm). Or they tried, and didn't work. Node size doesn't mean anything specific, but it's more predictive of power consumption and waste heat generation per op than it is of actual gate size, so it's very hard to get a certain amount of compute power in a given package without matching or exceeding a certain node threshold.
Because so much of modern industry and especially China's economic and surveillance engines were built around highly-efficient tech, this was presented a dilemma for any military (and some diplomatic) activities. If China did something other countries didn't like enough, they could cut off exports, and a lot of Chinese manufacturing and industry would be stuck tightening belts hard. In particular, this meant that a Chinese effort to take Taiwan faced a problem: the prize was getting TMSC's sub-5nm manufacturing capabilities, but even if China took the facilities intact -- a very hard thing to do -- they depend on a cross-world supply chain to keep running. If TMSC going down for a period means everybody-but-China is without new <7nm chips, that's a lot less concerning.
((Though the calculus still isn't obvious. There's a Wages of Destruction argument that even if your country's leadership was as ideologically blinkered as literally-Hitler, the country still goes to war on logistics, and China is not that ideologically blinkered and its logistics point to nearby oceans and the middle east and gfl on that last one. But I don't buy the Wages of Destruction argument completely.))
I don't think AI (or even chips in general) are the sole determining factor, but the manpower requirements for military adventurism or maintaining an occupation are dramatically lower with drone swarms and omnipresent facial recognition.
Zoophilia is not that common a paraphilia, practicing zoophilia even less, removed from contexts like degradation or zoosadism yet rarer still, and female non-degradation-focused zoophiles even more uncommon.
((I don't recommend using Bad Dragon as a metric, since regardless of Varka's issues the median Bad Dragon sale or advertisement revolves around the fantasy of a sapient and often bipedal partner, but a) the median customer has or had a dick, and b) an overwhelmingly male ratio applies to self-reports among actual-bestialists, too.))
It's just more visible, in the sense that someone getting arrested and/or publicly shamed for animal abuse (whether in any remotely less-violent way, or as the degradation or animal-sadism sense that very few incels would want) shows up in the news for incels to talk about, where "woman with kink for ugly/submissive/pathetic men" doesn't in any visible or identifiable way. But the later is more common than you'd think; if more generally spaced among written fiction than visual pornography.
And, of course, the broader "average-looking beta provider" is far better off, even before considering all of the ethical and pragmatic problems with actual animal abuse.
((Peter Singer's impact on the Wider EA Community isn't the worst thing that hit the tumblr ratsphere, but that I know this stuff is definitely not a benefit.))
gattsuru
2yr ago
Unfortunately, that "senior officer" is category is far less restrictive than it sounds from the name:
The term “senior officer” means any individual holding the position or exercising the authority of a president, chief financial officer, general counsel, chief executive officer, chief operating officer, or any other officer, regardless of official title, who performs a similar function.
And the rule makes clear that this is intentional:
The final rule adopts the proposed 31 CFR 1010.380(d)(4)(iii) with minor clarifications to minimize the potential confusion noted by commenters. The CTA makes clear that individuals who benefit from this exception must be acting “solely as an employee” and derive control or economic benefits “solely from the[ir] employment status.”
And :
FinCEN notes that the title of the officer ultimately is not dispositive, as the definition of “senior officer” and other indicators of substantial control make clear. Rather, the underlying question is whether the individual is exercising the authority or performing the functions of a senior officer, or otherwise has authority indicative of substantial control.
This is not something limited to just the ultra-wealthy or clear shell corporations; there are absolutely a number of small businesses where the capabilities attached to these titles in larger corporations instead are devolved to individual employees (some, like accountants and chief marketing staff, not even full-time!). There's a fair argument that FinCen won't enforce the rule this way, but it's ironed out in the rule.
gattsuru
2yr ago
This rule could only plausibly apply to the ultra wealthy. Non-ultra-wealthy people don't own nominee shell companies.
The rule does not impact just conventional "shell" companies, by its plain text: the definition of 'substantial control' is broad enough to plausibly cover a lot of managers and administrators in small businesses. It might not get enforced that way immediately, and maybe (if not plausibly) even without a ton of middle management getting voluntarily identified to the federal government, but it's definitely nowhere near as clear as you're claiming.
gattsuru
2yr ago
The FinCen summary kinda glosses over how broadly applicable this rule will be. It requires reporting within 30 days for identifying information related to any beneficial owner, where one category considered "beneficial owners" are anyone with "substantial control" over the company, which in turn is defined as :
Proposed 31 CFR 1010.380(d)(1) set forth three specific indicators of ‘‘substantial control’’: service as a senior officer of a reporting company; authority over the appointment or removal of any senior officer or a majority or dominant minority of the board of directors (or similar body) of a reporting company; and direction, determination, or decision of, or substantial influence over, important matters affecting a reporting company. The proposed rule also included a catch-all provision to ensure consideration of any other forms that substantial control might take beyond the criteria specifically listed.
Emphasis added. In theory this is just one prong of the calculation, but it's also explicitly meant to cover anything that FinCen wants. I'd expect that it doesn't get applied at a broad scale by its strict terms, but it's the sorta thing that makes an excellent 'throw the book at them' tool, or to motivate on unrelated matters.
At least in the immediate term, in addition to the privacy concerns there are some serious criminal penalties attached to potentially trivial faults.
gattsuru
2yr ago
Gattsuru righteously pointed out that this did not happen; the trial continued and all defendants were found guilty.
I didn't mean that post as a gotcha: it surprised me as well, and I was genuinely interested if you had any deeper insight as to what happened, or even if you could find any more details on the judge's response to the motion. There are potentially valid reasons the FBI's behaviors might not have mattered at all, and some invalid-but-unexciting ones (at least for me, "they're fucking over J6 defendants" isn't that interesting or unsympathetic), but I'm as concerned if your broader thesis was correct, and even post-Ted Stevens the FBI's just treating Jencks as a way to fill the time card and judges are fine with that so long as it doesn't hit another federal senator.
gattsuru
2yr ago
Has modern Windows really gotten worse?
Yes, badly. Win11 tries for require an online Microsoft login, and Win10 will push it regularly if you refuse -- and worse, the transfer process from a local account to a Microsoft Account is very buggy, with ~10% of situations leaving data in the old (now-hidden!) local user account. The Notifications system actively invites adware from browsers. More and more common functions, such as network address configuration, are harder and harder to get to or obfuscated behind dumber and dumber interfaces. OneDrive is obnoxious, and more Microsoft Software will try to save to OneDrive by default. Both default start search to look at the internet first, before displaying local files or even shortcuts. So on.
Nothing individually is critical for most people, but it's just a cavalcade of bad decisions, with very few good ones.
gattsuru
2yr ago
ZorbaTHut's rant was accurate the day it was written, and an excellent read. I'd argue Godot is getting closer to usability, and Unreal remains The Default Engine Of Choice for a normal team with any serious programming chops unless they have a very unusual use case of very specific philosophy they need to bring.
gattsuru
2yr ago
To be fair, the New Mexico Attorney General says he will not defend the law in court, which is a bigger surprise to me. I don't think it'll turn tomorrow hearing into an effective ex parte one unless Grisham decides against sending anyone, but it's not something he had to do, either.
gattsuru
2yr ago
There were actually a pretty big moral uproar about video games modding post-Columbine -- one of the shooters allegedly modded Doom! and this drove a whole bunch of activism -- though it's (thankfully) been mostly forgotten since.
gattsuru
2yr ago
ZorbaTHut has a bunch of great rants about Unity, but this one is usually what I link to, because I think the Tide has gotten a lot closer very quickly. GameMaker's a lot more attractive now for simple games doing exactly what the engine wants, and Godot's gotten much better just since he wrote that rant.
gattsuru
2yr ago
From a non-culture-war perspective, there are a number of places that are still stilted, messy, or misleading. This piece is written from a progressive perspective, but it highlights a couple "little goofs", and the game has no small number of them. To be fair, P5R's translation is a vast improvement over the original P5 translation, which had a variety of plain errors almost everywhere, either words being untranslated or entirely incorrectly translated, sometimes to random unrelated words or even opposites of their original meanings. And there's still some janky stuff that's more under the broader problem of localization, like being quizzed on shogi rules in ways that would be hard to English-speakers to even Google.
From a culture war one, P5R is a heavily political piece even compared to the typical Persona game, and a lot of those politics are complex when anyone tries to handle them in other cultures. Previous Persona games have sometimes had this issue: is Naoto Shirogane a trans male or tomboy, greatest thread ever, locked by moderators after a thousand pages -- under Japanese cultural assumptions it's a lot easier to see her pronoun troubles are tied closer to how the often-serious problems Japanese authorities have taking women seriously, while under American (even pre-current trans snafu) this screams gender identity stuff.
((For a more consistently translated (albeit easier) example from the same game, P4's Kanji reads pretty similar, as far as I can tell, from either Japanese or American culture assumptions. His Shadow's very clearly gay, but the Jungian shadow is what a person represses, rather than the whole of what they are; Kanji might be gay or bisexual, but that's just a small portion of his fear of being seen as unmanly for his interests.))
But where P4 is more focused on finding the truth, P5 is about corruption, and aggressively about the interfaces of power between adults and minors, including related to suicide, parenting, and sexuality. So this meant that it touched on things that were far redder-hot. One particularly controversial scene occurs when the protagonist Joker and Ryuji running into and being hit on by a pair of gay guys, first when they visit a local gay district for unrelated reasons and then later at a normal beach.
This is incredibly creepy from a Western perspective, partly because the first scene depends on a lot of context that might not even be obvious to native Japanese speakers (the two are basically sneaking into the Folsom Street Fair for unrelated reasons) and partly because of different social norms and expectations about personal space. It's still meant to be weird in the original, but it's not an actual assault and that's kinda important: part of Ryuji's character arc is explicitly about separating attacks from self-defense from fair punishment and so on, in both directions. These guys are doing something that's outside of the normal and Ryuji doesn't want, but the real answer's that he needs to say no and Ryuji hasn't internalized that -- something that impacts everything from his backstory to some of his behaviors very late in the game.
But it came across as homophobic because these were the only 'real' clearly gay guys you run into through the whole game and they're trying to get into a high schooler's pants so it ... instead had the pair trying to give Ryuji a makeover? Which... doesn't really solve the problem either direction.
There's also a minor character that's probably intended as a transwoman in both translations, and probably was originally a crossdresser (or more accurately something like a Molly) by Western standards, but I don't know that the sorta people that use Based everywhere noticed that one.
gattsuru
2yr ago
FFXIV's modding world is interesting in a lot of ways, starting with any mod usage technically being an account-bannable offense, and then a broadly progressive-leaning playerbase on top of that. As a result, there's a couple major redistribution sites (NexusMods, xivmodarchive, heliosphere) and then a ton of people who've moved into Discords. And then the more lasse faire mod redistribution sites, in addition the normal array of free speech witches, also had a bunch of things show up that I'm >95% sure were intentionally troll uploads made to highlight contradictions.
To some extent FFXIV Discord's started a philosophy similar to webrings, but it's gotten more of the bad drama parts (up to and including creepy bot-programming stalkers) than the nice community ones, so not impressed.
Vintage Story's modding community seems reasonably laid-back, but then again I just ran into the first furry drifter porn yesterday, so who knows if it'll mostly appeal to that sort of ethos or just be a matter of time before something stupid explodes. One would hope that Seraphs (or kobolds) being clay-colored would avoid some problems; I'm not optimistic.
On the flip side, BasedMods kinda looks pretty pathetic. Yes, it avoids the 'anatomically correct fat cat' problem, but whites-only Rimworld? "Sensible Demographics" for the X series doesn't look like it's even be banned from Steam yet, and it looks like it's just tweaking autogen npc race/genders with some fault lore assumptions (not that anyone /should/ read X-universe lore; it's a mess). Making Fallout New Vegas's two factions literal nazis is so on the nose it's funny, but it's also still the sorta thing that would be derided, rightfully, as shovelware asset flips.
There's some stuff with effort or some grander philosophy, here, but it's a small minority: Fire Emblem and Persona's respective translation controversies (and maybe Atomic Heart? for whatever Russian blackface cartoons count) are presumably the touchstone, perhaps followed by Minecraft's textures, but they're both pretty weak central examples. So ultimately it's kinda hard to make a serious assessment of whether these style of mods are getting ignored in mainstream discussion because they're being censored, or if it's just that no one outside of a few engagement bait farmers (and yes, the don't-force-me-to-pick-pronouns guy couldn't have targeted engagement bait better if he's spelled "morans"). I'd bet both, but I'd not be able to give hugely persuasive arguments.
There's a fairer counterargument that the same standard doesn't get turned the other direction, or even to internal development. P5R's original translation was genuinely garbage, and Spiderman doing the no-pride-flags bit on its for UAE own says a lot; that extra-Prideful Spider-man Remastered Mods don't even bother with the figleaf of the Real World Issues tag that was used to justify banning the no-pride mod is kinda overkill. Most of NexusMods isn't shovelware, but not a small amount is.
On the other hand, even if they're trying to make a political point, they're not exactly needing to do so, or talking to any but the already-converted.
gattsuru
2yr ago
... so, there's a funny thing that happened today:
Handguns, assault rifles and even a few muskets were fully on display on Sunday in Old Town Albuquerque by about 150 or so people defying the recent New Mexico public health order issued late Friday by Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham banning the carrying of firearms in public spaces.
What wasn’t obvious, was an attempt at enforcement. Police were not present, save for an Albuquerque Police Department surveillance device parked at the corner of Old Town Plaza that is often there during weekend events. It’s unclear if any plain clothes officers were in attendance. No police in uniforms were seen throughout the event.
Even without that physical presence, the governor’s office intends to act.
“The order is being enforced, and citations will be forthcoming from the State Police,” said Caroline Sweeny, a spokesperson for Lujan Grisham’s office. ”To ensure officer safety, we will not be providing additional details at this time.”
I don't expect this will stick -- if actually sent, and not sent pretextually, if anything this makes the standing argument easier -- but at this point I could see something stupid like arbitrarily pulling CHL permits without stating the cause.
Separately, there was a hearing scheduling on one court case for a temporary restraining order for early on 9/12; it has since been canceled. Presumably it or another companion will be rescheduled at some point.
gattsuru
2yr ago
I don't see any serious approach where it could. There's already a lot of normally law-abiding citizens who are going to go far out of their way to break this particular order, and the order was issued with far too little notice for law-abiding normies to obey it if they wanted. And the punishments are trivial compared to traditional criminal law.
Perhaps more damning, I'm not sure why anyone would issue this order for that purpose, as opposed to simply directing her branch of the government to do it directly. There's some fun constitutional questions for whether drug users or sellers can possess firearms legally, but they're less constitutionally dubious than this. And the simple bit of "actually just go after drug dealers and violent criminals" is right there waiting for someone to pick it up.
There's a (very limited) steelman where this becomes a police tool, as a fig leaf for a broader stop-and-frisk; even if no one's ever prosecuted for breaking the order, it gives a lot of space for police to do random searches for weapons (and thus drugs and contraband and fleeing-from-police and not having a license for a gun and not having a gun that's not the one listed on your CHL and whatever). But even that doesn't really do a great job of actually focusing police power on violent criminals; it's one of the major flaws with actual stop-and-frisk. And it of course only augments the constitutional issues.
gattsuru
2yr ago
I am genuinely glad to see you post this.
I'm not sure what options are available other than impeachment, but if I were a republican office holder in NM I'd be exploring them.
Unfortunately, most of them find the same problem. New Mexico's abuses of emergency health orders during COVID weren't as severe as California or Michigan, but they were still pretty severe, and legislative attempts to limit them stalled in committee on a party-line vote. The legislature does not even convene until January 16th (for 30 days on even-numbered years), so unless this order is extended for nearly four months it would take a special session to even start any legislative response, which can only be convened by a 2/3rd majority. And Grishman can veto or pocket veto legislation, which again requires a 2/3rds majority to pass.
The New Mexico GOP has claimed to pursue a federal lawsuit, though I'm skeptical that they'd have any better standing or argument than the individual cases. There's... not much hope of a state lawsuit going anywhere.
gattsuru
2yr ago
Charitably, people who don't care about guns or are anti-gun to start with sometimes might have seen a recent few high-profile incidents that Hit Close To Home and suddenly justified everything. This model's kinda the dark mirror to the "conservative is a liberal who's been mugged" deal: there's a lot of people who were once willing to live-and-let-live (or at least had better places to spend their political capital) who become true believers over some incident that made things too salient for them. The resulting policy proposals aren't always this hairbrained, but you're picking from a group that's by definition not considered the space at length in the past nor been heavily exposed to other people who have. Some people are people do really believe what they're doing.
But Grisham has been in this game for a while. The more cynical analysis is that she's term-limited (New Mexico governors can only serve two terms; her second ends in 2027) in a pretty Blue and increasingly blueing state (between Californian exodus, and the aftermath of the last decade worth of redistricting), and she's been working in (otherwise unemployable parts of) the .gov since 1992. There's three major career paths available where this sorta trial balloon is a major resume-burnisher even and maybe especially if it flops: either moving to federal politics, managing state-level politics, or going into the bureaucratic activism or non-technically-state-just-state-funded activist groups.
It's possible she's gunning for Lujan's seat -- he had a stroke last year, and while he's recovered might take it as a sign to retire -- or perhaps the VP slot for 2028. But more likely I'm thinking the last option. This is the sorta thing that absolutely blocks any chance of a cabinet-level position or other place requiring a senate confirmation, short of a wildly stacked Dem Senate, but it's an excellent advertisement for Acting whatevers or bigger names at think tanks or commentary positions, where this hugely visible commitment is useful to know who's likely to stay bought.
gattsuru
2yr ago
Technically both, since she claimed the persecution was in the form of prosecutions, but yeah, that's more correct. Thanks.
New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham on Friday issued an emergency order suspending the right to carry firearms in public across Albuquerque and the surrounding county for at least 30 days in response to a spate of gun violence.
The firearms suspension, classified as an emergency public health order, applies to open and concealed carry in most public places, from city sidewalks to urban recreational parks. The restriction is tied to a threshold for violent crime rates currently only met by the metropolitan Albuquerque. Police and licensed security guards are exempt from the temporary ban.
Violators could face civil penalties and a fine of up to $5,000, gubernatorial spokeswoman Caroline Sweeney said.
The summary, if anything, understates the brazenness. There's a delightful video of the release press conference that starts out with Grisham highlighting the emergency order as a state-wide message to "start arresting people", and "just arrest everyone", and goes downhill from there to outright state intent to violate her oath of office! For an order she does not expect criminals to obey. The order declares the city off-limits for public carry, nearly exactly mirroring a specific hypothetical from Bruen.
I went to bed on this last night after trying to find a way to discuss it at a deeper level than 'boo, outgroup', and I'm still hard-pressed this morning. It's not like this is some unique and novel approach: I've written before on the prolonged efforts to provide massive resistance to Breun, or to otherwise violate the law, exploiting the nuances of standing and court timelines. Federal administrations have played footsie with overtly unconstitutional or illegal actions at length as delaying tactics over any coherent principle for matters as serious as the rental economy and as trivial as cancelling Easter. There were even a few efforts from the Red Tribe in early COVID days.
There's some tactical and logistic discussions that can be had, here. Most obvious, there's a ton of fun questions involved when the state can throw around multi-thousand dollar fines against people with no more warning or notice than a press conference late Friday night, should it ever come to that, though it's not clear that the specific stated punishment here matters. There's no evidence that the shooters in any recent murders motivating this order were carrying lawfully. There will almost certainly be open carry protests by mid-week, a completely foreseeable result that someone who actually worried about bunches of lawful gun carry causing violence would at least have planned around; the people going should plan around what happens if and when they're arrested and cited, but it's not clear that will actually happen.
The Bernalillo County police have already stated that they have not been charged with enforcing this: a sufficiently cynical reader should expect that the state police may not consistently 'enforce' the order either rather than tots-unrelatedly harassing the hell out of anyone who disobeys it.
Grisham signed a law abolished qualified immunity in some cases, but the precise text of that law and the New Mexico constitution make this unlikely to apply in the specific nexus of carry. The 11th Amendment makes federal 1983 lawsuits particularly complex, and unlikely to be renumerative or punishing.
They're also pretty boring. So I'm going to make a few predictions. Maybe I'll be wrong! Hopefully!
Grisham will not be impeached for a very simple reason. She will not be indicted, and I think it's more likely than not she never pays in her personal capacity. There will be no grand jury leaking embarrassing details, or FBI investigations doing the same, whether honestly or fraudulently established. New Mexico allows citizen grand juries, and it won’t matter Grisham will not be frog-marched before a tipped-off news media for a predawn raid, nor will we have arrest mugshots on national or local news. There won't be a long series of supposedly-unbiased news programs calling her a fascist, no baldly coordinated smear campaign to distract from someone else's failures, nor will some random employee become a minor celebrity by breaking the law to embarrass her and then claiming prosecution persecution. There will not be a New York Times article or The View segue fearful about how this undermines reasonable public health policy, nor will Lawrence Tribe be writing a characteristically incoherent argument about how this disqualifies her from any future elected office.
We will not have an injunction today, or a temporary restraining order the same day as a complaint was filed, to mirror the DeWine overreach linked above. The courts will not make a final determination before the order expires, even if the order extends beyond the thirty-day window. If the courts issue a TRO or preliminary injunction before the policy expires, people will still be harassed for carry, and no one will find themselves in jail for contempt of the court's order, even and especially if they Tried To Make A Message out of their disobedience. There will be a perfunctory mootness analysis when asking whether the state will do the same thing again, and in the unlikely even that threshold and standing can be achieved, the courts will instead notice that no colorable relief can be granted.
We will instead have taught a city's portion of gun owners that they can and should violate the supposed law, at length; that the government will quite cheerfully do the same and get away with it; and that the courts will shrug their shoulders and ponder what can you do thirty days later. And that is what happens if they are lucky.
Trivially, many of the cases I've highlighted were prosecuted by the federal government in federal courts by groups prosecutors that they were enforcing the law to the hilt -- at least until they developed sudden sympathies for arsonists and firebombers and people breaking up government meetings who Cared About The Community -- or had a clear federal nexus that could have been. This is most overt with the arson (in addition to the massive risk to life and limb) since the ATF claims jurisdiction over anything even slightly flammable where any component went through interstate commerce, and it's part of why I keep harping on the dramatically different focuses from 'good' causes to 'bad' ones, but it's not solely limited there.
Trivially, the cases I've highlighted tend to revolve around attacks against a person because those seem the only things that got prosecuted seriously at all; threatening or dangerous political protests riots stunts that interact with big-name politicians more often result in little more than an arrest, if even that.
Trivially, because we're supposed to not treat politicians as if they were humans++ who's least insult Matters while someone else's house or business getting burned down around them doesn't. Relatedly, because whatever extent interfering with legislative or other government processes might serve to close the gap in theory, in practice they're normally been allowed or even applauded by people who have since done a ton of very cautious line-drawing over severity (they didn't bypass metal detectors that didn't exist!) that fails to grapple with the absence of any serious punishment or even serious attempt to prevent repetition.
More seriously, paeans to a personally threatened bureaucracy on one side and an actively hostile one on the other are... kinda my point. A cross-country movement of bureaucrats across different entire levels of government running interference as their (often armed!) thugs intimidate political opponents, achieve unlawful ends, and are using that violence as justification for political demands and to limit their opponent's access to the public square kinda matters! A lot!
And for some strange reason all of these only come up in response. You hope that CHAZ/CHOP people got punished, but not enough to check before posting or even to have a good understanding of the depth of the problem for that one single case or why people might consider it relevant as a comparison for (stupid, ineffective, and dangerous) actions to overthrow the United States. It's not even limited to Trump or Trump-related, or BLM politics: I've pointed out (and been modhatted for pointing out!) when posters here went from considering mostly-peaceful-but-the-arsons-and-murders riots "not special" to literally supporting the declaration of martial fucking law over truck horns.
Now, because of that, I'm not allowed to go posting examples through your comment history, and hey, it's not like you had a just-before-exodus post talking about how this comparison only ever comes up as a gotcha from righties to lefties. Maybe I've missed something. But it becomes more than a little uncompelling when you yourself bring it up as your best, strongest example.
Why should we expect similar charges and sentences in these two scenarios?
I mean, you're the one that brought up CHAZ/CHOP.
I don't! Indeed, I've repeatedly predicted that some criminals will get the book thrown at them, and others will get sudden bursts of prosecutor sympathy, and while I've not always been correct -- I'm still surprised Kyle Rittenhouse didn't end up with further gun-related charges, and while Dominick Black did, that they didn't result in direct jail time -- it's been surprisingly accurate as an indicator. I'm not surprised that no one knows what exactly happened with Grosskuetz's CCW permit, and I'd wager cash money the only thing we find out before the statute of limitations passes is the one situation where the ALCU will commit to defending a gun owner.
Or, for a different direction, I'll point to the Hammond case. To save you a click, the Hammonds were accused of starting a fire on the other BLM's land, under the auspices of clearing brush but possibly to cover up poaching of deer. It grew out of hand, someone could have gotten hurt, yada yada. The Hammonds were, by all reports, stellar defendants, accepting both guilt and responsibility early on to simplify the case at the earliest moment; as a result, they received a sentence of a couple months for a federal arson case, even if one that didn't burn down a police car, part of a historic chapel, or a police district office.
That'd be a wonderful counterexample, except the sentence was found appalling and appealed by the DoJ, which found that case -- not the Molotov Lawyers actively encouraging people to take further weapons and burn the system down, as soon as Trump got distracted, not any person convicted for burning the 3rd Precinct in Minneapolis, often while also stealing body armor, weapons, and ammunition -- required a terrorism enhancement with a mandatory minimum sentence of five years.
This was not a case that threatened the DoJ bureaucrats, nor had long-term broad ramifications: it simply was convenient. And the others weren't. Even and especially from your theory that one side faced a unified front from the Department of Justice to enforce the law to the hilt, while the other had a bunch of bureaucrats running interference, what it says is worrying.
((And then the people who protested that in a stupid way, without any serious threats to the important bureaucrats... well, they didn't all get serious sentences, but that's because one of them got fatally shot, and the prosecution of some of the ringleaders was so hilariously and incompetently aggressive in pursuit of a long-ass sentence that it managed to hinge of a fat fucking fib it actively hid from the defense and court. Most of them 'only' got a year or two, tots normal stuff the DoJ must be trumpeting everywhere after every dumbass leftist occupation interferes with federal employees.))
Instead, when I talk about this stuff, I get requests to do statistical analysis on unavailable data to Prove Mathematically that this is real bias and not just the selection that no one seems willing to even try to find counterexamples.
I don’t believe for a minute that Trump supporters would be satisfied with 13-year sentences for the ringleaders. There is no line. Only the belief that there was an injustice, and a search for the facts which will best support it.
Beyond my normal frustration with the impressive tolerance for sudden claims your entire political opposition is both unpersuadable and has no line...
Thankfully, in addition to Trump supporters, we also have parts of the population with both working eyeballs and working brain cells, who can also notice that one group of rioters with empty-headed slogans about overthrowing the United States government wasn't that big a deal short of actual literal murder (and even that received a significant downward deviation from the sentencing guidelines at the request of prosecutors), and one of them was so dangerous that they needed almost twice the guidelines sentence for the crime.
They might find a lot of arguments much less persuasive were they not being inundated with evidence against them.
... I realize that this was meant as an off-the-cuff response, but can you provide a single example of a statue-toppling or courthouse-torching person receiving a 15+ year sentence?
Actual burned-down cars or buildings arsonists, even when doing so killed people while trying to conceal /other/ crimes, aren't getting that sort of sentence. As far as I know, even where statute-toppling nearly killed someone, as far as I know no one was convicted and the people who were charged and assisted got a sizable settlement from a local government that fired the police chief that charged them before any serious attempt at trial. Actually literally-directly-murdering a teenager in cold blood at CHOP/CHAZ? 14 years
In theory, the guy who plotted to kill Kavanaugh could by statute get sentenced to literally anything, if the court case ever starts, but if I'm reading the sentencing guidelines probably maybe he'd get 14 years at the high end?
Obviously it's easy to draw a thousand lines such that each reference case is a class of one, and there's a million ways you can talk about how all those other protests that interfere with various proceedings are totally separate such that it's absolutely reasonable for them to end with an arrest and no charges ever being brought. But it's kinda hard to draw lines without making the Texas Sharpshooter's Fallacy obvious.
And that's... kinda the issue. You can well say how much you hope that anything near this gets smacked down with a sledgehammer no matter who does it, but if you want to actually have a norm what matters is what people actually see happening, and the last time a progressive-themed group got hit hard for anything on this class involved a literal bombing, and even that ended up becoming a cause celebre.
Yeah, there's been a lot of small-scale stuff like this recently that's been very disheartening, across a variety of communities. I've pointed to the End Of Forge in the MineCraft community for a nonviolent version, but funhouse mirror insinuations and games of telephone have reached to broken communities or actual physical fights in more than a few cases.
On the flip side, it's not exactly new, so much as seeming to occur at smaller scales. I've worked at length with a MineCraft server operator who later pointed out how proud they were for punching Brendan Eich, from context probably somewhere in the 2007-2009 period. Dogpatch Press has been pretty hard on considering "fraudulent ideas" that need be ejected from the marketplace of ideas like... libertarianism -- and that 2018 tweet is not exactly some massive change in perspective. Part of the 2 the Gryphon cancellation (2017) involved a not-exactly-subtle campaign smearing him as a nazi, including r/drama-heads assisting it. There's been efforts to cancel a fur for a fetishized drawings of World War One German outfits that I've been aware of as early as 2014, and I'd be surprised if there weren't closed-door discussions far earlier.
Nor is it specific to Too Online communities like: I've had to handle a lot of drama from supposed adults over politics in STEM outreach work that near-instantly escalated to claimed fear to life. As much as RPGnet is a telling story on the political axis, as specifically for failures to keep 'fuck nazis' as a bound applied to actual nazis, a lot of the political mess over there post-Morke since has only be adjacent to politics. And while Trump was a convenient excuse for many, it really just was an excuse and not just one aimed one direction.
What's particularly frustrating is that this happens even when there is something there. That Skaard tweet from March 2022 you screencapped was in response to this dogpatch.press article, and it's an absolutely fascinating piece even and especially from an anti-fascist perspective. There's certainly actual smoke and probably fire for a few people, there... and it was so heavily mixed in with random things that weren't smoke that they eventually revised the article to at least remove bits where the sole evidence against someone was 'drew Italian Futurism' or 'drew pithy conservative comics' or whatever this is, and the revised version still has crap like 'hawaiian shirt' or 'NFTs' or 'Pine Tree Flag' as if they were anywhere comparable to 'glorified a real-world spree shooter' or 'thinks "miscegenation is worst thing you can do in the world"'.
Yes, to some extent even weak information should be evaluated, but there's a very fine line between trying to pick out from a weak signal and going full Pepe Silvia. And while it's more frustrating to see when it distracts from serious criticism of actual bad actors, it's more worrying when it's aimed as a seque at rando edgelords or actual innocents who get wedged between unrelated bad actors.
[caveat: my impression's that Skaard's still a bit of an edgelording twerp, though I've not interacted directly it probably impacts my interpretation. But it's also probably why the edgelording teen disclaimer doesn't impress a lot of others.]
gattsuru
2yr ago
Old power supplies can still be useful as spare benchtop equipment, if you do any electrical engineering or 3d printing. They can't be trusted for their rated amperage at that age, but there's a lot of applications where you just need 10~20 amps at 12v and don't really care if it's a little noisy. To turn on without a motherboard, simply disconnect the power wire, short the 24-pin green wire to any black wire, and check that no other wires are shorted, and reconnect power.
That said, it's competing against a 20-buck Amazon buy, so if you don't have a use case, probably not worth your time to sell.
Masnick's a two-faced prick on this particular topic among no shortage of others, and that post there could not be more of a strawman were the characters named Simplicio and Sagredo, but to engage with this far more seriously than it deserves:
The ADL is Musk's current focus, simply because (he alleges) that they've directly contacted his advertising partners before he even took ownership and a lot of what he's described (if true!) is very close to playing bingo with tortuous interference with contract. But it's not like the SPLC is any less "shared ideological capture", and was heavily involved in moderation decisions at length, including far away from SPLC's supposed domain expertise.
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