The Sexual Revolution Goes To Hell
There was a conversation a month back about the Sexual Revolution and its (Lady) Discontents, probably highlighted by this later-QC'd @WhiningCoil post:
Most people totally immersed in the mores of the sexual revolution will never be able to entertain the notion that those mores harmed them. They may look around them, at their peers, and see the damage. But their own decisions will always be above reproach, because SLAY QUEEN!!
[cw: some links NSFW, albeit more in the sense of Comedy Central late-night comedy sense. Also some media spoilers.]
Apropos of nothing, has anyone here watched Helluva Boss? 'Adult' comedy, freely available on YouTube. It stars the Immediate Murder Professionals, a trio of imps who've gained access to the living world and have offered their services to get revenge 'resolve problems' there for damned sinners who can pay. Ostensibly, the show is about the trio's new business as marginally-competent assassins, with the moral and neurotic Moxie, joyful berserker Millie, and wacky boss Blitzø ("the o is silent") going into the world and slaughtering someone. In practice, this ends up more a framing device; many episodes don't involve paid murder, and those that do it's not the actual challenge.
With a few exceptions most individual episodes instead focus more on relationships between the denizens of hell. The three main cast have that awkward mix of professional and casual common to small business (not helped by Blitz's clear desire to make a 'new family') sometimes jumping wholesale into stalking, Millie and Moxie have to juggle a marriage that's a lot more tender and reciprocal than either their parents nor Hell in general tolerates, so on.
That expands with the secondary cast. Blitz's access to the living world depends on a magical grimoire given in exchange for a transactual relationship with the demon prince Stolas, and for the first season neither are quite sure exactly how much emphasis goes on the 'relationship' in 'transactional relationship'. He also runs into a series of current or past lovers sexual partners with their complaints about him. Blitz's adopted adult daughter Loona is desperately looking for someplace to belong after a unpleasant childhood in Hell's pounds orphanages but is unwilling to risk vulnerability. Moxie has... issues with his own Family and knows that he doesn't measure up by the standards of Millie's parents. Stolas' biological daughter Octavia is desperately looking for someplace to belong while her parents go through an unusually messy divorce. Eventually a number of the Seven Deadly Sins get involved, so on.
There's a song spelling it out, diegetically as a drug trip..
As necessary disclaimer: it's gay. Really gay, even by furry-adjacent standards: there's one male/female active relationship among the main cast, and it's constantly going back to the same pegging joke. If you're a fan of the ladies, you're going to be stuck looking at fandom works or the not-on-YouTube sister show Hazbin Hotel, which does have a lesbian couple in focus. I don't know that I could call it good; while there's some decent comedic moments and fluid action scenes, there's sometimes too much emphasis on the cringe in cringe comedy, the musical numbers are hit-or-miss even if you can swing to their sometimes bizarre genre selections, and the characterization could stand to be more consistent. It's never quite Ren And Stimpy gross-out comedy, though some of the gorier fight scenes can get close, but neither is it exactly high-brow. The series as a whole has been trying to make a lot of commentary on economic and social class without serious introspection on its own assumptions, or even how that commentary it does present comes across.
((And I'm sure someone like @HlynkaCG can probably break down better about a Red Tribe take on the spirital ramifications of modern culture framing and worshipping literal demons as parallels for and paragons of modern society. Or of 'heaven' being paperwork and Minnesota Nice.))
Buuuuuuuuut because it's 'adult' and focused on relationships, a lot of it's about sex, and that part is very much written toward the id and superego of those "totally immersed in the mores of the sexual revolution". The show leads are the bisexual Vivienne Medrano and the gay Brandon Rogers, and the advertising and focus is very much down bad for exactly what you'd expect from that. That's not limited to sex -- one of the better musical numbers revolves around a two-minute long sequence of flipping the bird off to an abusive boss, culminating in a series of giant neon signs, including literal sign language for 'fuck off', the pilot has a particularly unsubtle joke about American healthcare provisioning -- but it's very much spread throughout the ethos. Of the main cast and the secondary cast, only one person (Millie) doesn't have Daddy Issues.
Helluva Boss is 'woke' in the sort of way that its authors would consider 'woke' to be a compliment. To its credit, that's at least sometimes subtle: we do some awkwardly-placed Deaf Culture-rep or a character awkwardly pointing out to his father that bisexual and gay are different things, but there's also a few trans characters (and Blitz-the-o-is-silent is probably meant as a deadnaming metaphor) or more subtle discussions about triggering trauma that you'd have to pay attention to catch. (It helps that the writers are willing to throw some on-the-nose jokes the other direction).
((It's worth spelling out that, where Hazbin Hotel discusses consent and undesired sexual violence with the characters Angel Dust and Valentino, it doesn't really feature among the reoccurring cast for Helluva Boss: the closest matters have been comedic and near-instantly resulted in violent response. Instead, the show portrays sexuality as a tool for the characters, either figuratively with many separate characters squicking out the villainous Striker to discomfort him, or in the more literal sense of skewering attackers through the skull with a motorized and pixelated dildo.))
There's actually a lot of discussion here about how modern (and thus post-sexual-revolution) norms are, in the story's setting, literally damning. "He's had four tongues inside him at once, which, like, good for him!... but he's giving off not-ok vibes" is the most clearly overt situation where the show can't quite disavow people who want to fill every hole they've got, but it can recognize that sex won't fill and often detracts from figurative ones. There's clear contradiction between more 'presentable' sexuality and less such (cw: lots of pixelated dildos, loud, se2 spoilers). STDs exist, in-universe. One of the last straws for that Two Minutes Notice song is the promotion of an entertainer as a sex object that is at best degrading and at worst invites or encourages aggressive stalkers, a topic of prolonged discourse in fandom spaces that's somewhat complicated by the number of people who literally get off from fascimiles of their body or their characters being 'used'. An early-season joke about fandom response to Loona is slightly awkward in contrast to around 15k not-always-on-model images over at e621 that I won't be linking. Though at least the character's explicitly in her twenties.
((The showrunners are probably not considering these conflicts solely as a theoretical exercise. The original voice actor for Stolas was dropped between the pilot and the first season, at the same time certain 'allegations' were going around of Totally Consensual But Also Bad things.))
A lot of the show's answer is to highlight and exaggerate the faults in 'traditional' sexual norms. Whatever sympathy the fandom came up with for Stolas' wife before her reveal -- after all, he was cheating on her! -- faltered when Stella actually appeared, less
But Helluva Boss is struggling to create and draw together a healthy sexuality after the sexual revolution, and as a response to the sexual revolution rather than just those 'traditional' norms. A good number of those criticisms are very likely inspired by personal experiences, and many viewers see and relate to the show in that framework. A bit of that is drawing very heavily from Women's Fanfic Circles of Idealized Relationships, where everybody 'really' just needs sufficient support followed by Just Admitting Their Feelings And Letting People In (something something Found Family), or is disposable and untouchably evil (and there are a lot of disposable assholes). Other parts are more serious. If relationships are increasingly likely to touch between work and play, what extent can a transactional relationship or one with disparity of power be healthy, or can such a thing ever leave those fetters behind?
That's not to say the show has answers. It's not even clear that it's entirely grappled the scope of the questions: like a lot of shows with complicated romantic relationships, there's a fan-favorite solution that's almost impressive for how much it's joked about compared to how little it's presented in any serious sense, even if only to point out where and why it wouldn't work. Some few of the protagonist's flaws are their own, but there's little space or consideration for what would be necessary to grow beyond them, or to produce a next generation that could easily exceed them.
I think it's still relevant to say that they've noticed the skulls.
gattsuru
5mo ago
Man dies after hitting head during Israel and Palestinian rallies in California, officials say. Witnesses said Paul Kessler fell and struck his head during a confrontation with protesters Sunday in Ventura County, the sheriff's department said. He died Monday.
Authorities in Ventura County, California, are investigating the death of a Jewish man who was injured during a confrontation at dueling rallies over Israel and Gaza died Monday, the sheriff’s department said. Witnesses said Paul Kessler, 69, "was in a physical altercation with counter-protestor(s)," the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department said in a statement. "During the altercation, Kessler fell backwards and struck his head on the ground,” it said.
What a horrible freak acci-
Paul Kessler, 69, died at a hospital on Monday, a day after he was struck during pro-Israel and pro-Palestinian demonstrations at an intersection in Thousand Oaks, a suburb northwest of Los Angeles, authorities said.
Witnesses said Kessler was involved in a “physical altercation” with one or more counter-protesters, fell backward and struck his head on the ground, according to a statement from the Ventura County Sheriff’s Department. An autopsy Monday said Kessler died from a blunt force head injury and it was homicide, according to the Sheriff’s Department, which said investigators hadn’t ruled out the possibility that the act was a hate crime.
Well, it's unfortunate and tragic to have a real-world example of the eggshell skull rule, but (ed: cw, video of a man dying)-
A witness to the pro-Palestine protest that led to the death of Jewish man Paul Kessler today railed against local police for not arresting the man Kessler argued with - as new video shows the protest continued on even after police arrived at the scene... Witnesses say he and an as-yet unnamed Palestine supporter started arguing, and that it led to the man hitting Kessler in the face with his megaphone.
A police officer is seen on video asking an unidentified man, who is unconfirmed if this is the suspect, 'So you tried to hit his phone?' With law enforcement in the background, protesters are heard chanting, 'You will burn in hell; Israel will burn in hell.'
Another anti-Semitic chant can be heard, 'Hitler didn't want you, Hitler didn't want you, Hitler didn't want you, Hitler should've smashed you.'
Oh.
Nor does the potential for things to get out of hand seem like it was a surprise (ed: cw, video of a man dying):
The man holding the flag in the photo above allegedly lifted up his shirt to show that he had a pistol in his waistband during the October 29 protest at the same corner (Thousand Oaks Boulevard and Westlake Boulevard, just north of the 101 Freeway). Police were called to the scene, but the man left before they arrived.
It's still possible that Kessler's death had some complications, if extraordinarily unlikely. This is Ventura County rather than LA proper, so I think there's at least a chance that genuine prosecution could happen should the death be clear manslaughter or negligent homicide. The suspect has at least been stopped and questioned and is supposedly cooperating, though the amazing lack of any video of the 'confrontation' itself seems to be a complicating factor.
There's no outrage from the conventional sources, or the Biden or White House twitter accounts. There's nothing from the various ACLUs; quite a lot of people who I respected and had strong feelings on political radicalization must not have heard of it. The communities that spent a lot of time hunting down fascists and Nazis to punch and dox don't seem particularly interested by literal invocations of Hitler. And the lack of any arrest despite a clear suspect makes a bit of a mockery of all the people who in the Rittenhouse era proclaimed that any death required a prosecution and a trial. I guess to their credit (if damning with faint praise), the ADL has posted.
I've written at length about the extent and efforts pushing speech and speakers out of the public square have gone, and it's difficult to see this outside of that context. Worse, the lack of backlash seems a justification and legitimization of that behavior.
Which seems noteworthy in a few ways. There's no shortage of right-wing or Red Tribe examples, but Kessler, notably, was not. I'm not a fan of perspectives where only the cleanest hands make acceptable figures to bring forward -- to borrow from Mencken, defending freedom sometimes means defending scoundrels -- but I'll spell out when even that does not seem to be enough. It's not about X as a principle goes to this.
And at a deeper level... @FCfromSSC did a very good tactical analysis of the situation around violence at public protests in the context of the De Oñate Statue shooting. I don't want to extrapolate too hard from this case yet because it could end in a hard conviction next month. But it's looking, if anything, too rosy.
Since my 'don't trust Science' threads were already toeing the line between 'Pepe Silvia!' and schizophrenic (fair!) (I didn't even touch the four-part follow-up), Nate Silver summarizes better than I can :
Here’s the scandal. In March 2020, a group of scientists — in particular, Kristian G. Andersen the of The Scripps Research Institute, Andrew Rambaut of The University of Edinburgh, Edward C. Holmes of the University of Sydney, and Robert F. Garry of Tulane University — published a paper in Nature Medicine that seemingly contradicted their true beliefs about COVID’s origins and which they knew to be misleading. The paper, “The proximal origin of SARS-CoV-2”, has been cited more than 5,900 times and was enormously influential in shaping the debate about the origins of COVID-19.
We know this because of a series of leaked and FOIAed emails and Slack messages that have been reported on by Public, Racket News, The Intercept and The Nation along with other small, independent media outlets. You can find a detailed summary of the claims and a copy of the emails and messages here at Public. There’s also good context around the messages here (very detailed) or here and here (more high-level).
((Silver's links carry the touchstones of conspiracy paranoia, like an emphasis on coverups and literally-by-the-minute analysis of claimed coordinated action, which would normally discourage me from pointing to them, except they also happen to be reasonable factual descriptions.))
To be clear, this isn't a case of some barely-related scientists from nearby offices in slightly-related fields being somewhat more open-minded. These documents demonstrate each and every single author of the paper held some of the exact same concerns about the proposed wet market origin as piles of shitposters and too-online dogs, often pointing to the exact same evidence... privately. In public, they named opponents giving these possibilities conspiracy theorists for naming options they were accepting privately, or drawing out a web that actually existed. Jeremy Farrar would send e-mails giving 50:50 odds on natural (and non-natural, mostly serial passage) origins at the same day he was shopping around early drafts of the paper; while he isn't on the author list, that's its own mess. To be fair, they do change positions in private, as information comes around and as debate occurred. But they remain far from as convinced as they pretended in public, not just during publication but months later, and it's exceptionally clear that the political and pragmatic ramifications drive that.
Nor was this filled with caveats and used or intended to be used solely as a small opinion piece. It contains a few limited cautions about available data's ability to discriminate from evolution at the wet market from cryptic adaptation among humans, but serial passage was actively dismissed by an incoherent mush that steps from animal models to purely in vitro considerations. The paper's authors and 'unrelated' academics (who had been heavily involved in discussions with the paper's authors behind closed doors) cited this not-a-paper at length to justify treating anyone even considering the possibility of just serial passage or an accidental lab leak to be a conspiracy theory that must be shut down, all the way from casual shitposters to federal politicians, including those who advocated specifically serial passage or a purely transport-focused accident. These private messages make clear that wasn't some unintentional side effect, but a if not the specific goal.
Nor was this limited to the broadest strokes: at best, these otherwise closely-knit scientists did mention important information not widely available to random shitposters to each other, such as the rarity of live pangolin trafficking, or the animal makeup of the wet market's official shipments, or a variety of information about possible serial passage techniques, all of which were carefully excluded from the final paper. Some writers received confidential notice of discovery of RmYNO2, and after finding that it wasn't itself more helpful to their point than other already-known genomes, decided to instead obliquely reference it as possible to make a 'prediction', because the Texas Sharpshooter's approach would have been too on the nose.
And that's the stuff that came through FOIA-able emails or broad and leakable Slack channels. The messages show many people involved transitioning to private e-mails, to phone calls, to unrecorded Zoom meetings, often dropping to very clipped wording during that transition: they knew this could eventually be public, and they knew other conversations would not.
None of this amounts, as many COVID skeptics are calling it, to research fraud; I'm not even sure it fits most definitions of academic misconduct. But that's mostly because the publication didn't have enough numbers or analysis to need to actively lie: this paper has no pixels to check for signs of photoshopping, nor specific population numbers to hit with GRIM. Silver has joined calls to retract the paper, but Nature's staff have already said that "Neither previous out-of-context remarks by the authors nor disagreements with the authors’ stated views, are, on their own, grounds for retraction." It ain't happening.
Silver proposes that the scientists were motivated by some combination of :
- Evidence of a lab leak could cause a political backlash — understandably, given that COVID has killed almost 7 million people — resulting in a reduction in funding for gain-of-function research and other virological research. That’s potentially important to the authors or the authors’ bosses — and the authors were very aware of the career implications for how the story would play out;
- Evidence of a lab leak could upset China and undermine research collaborations;
- Evidence of a lab leak could provide validation to Trump and Republicans who touted the theory — remember, all of this was taking place during an election year, and medical, epidemiological and public health experts had few reservations about weighing in on political matters.
These aren't exactly the most charitable framings for each possibility, if perhaps more charitable than focusing on Anderson's certainty this paper got him tenure. But with a more forgiving description, I get something along the lines of :
- Prohibitions on gain-of-function and other virological research could undermine pandemic responses (and we wouldn't know about past prevented pandemics, after all), or drive research to locations with worse biosecurity or oversight (than BSL2?).
- Bad relations with China could undermine future pandemic responses or escalate to a 'hot' war.
- Trump and Republicans responding to a China with marginal scientific research could result in another Korematsu, undermine future pandemic responses, or escalate to a 'hot' war.
Perhaps @Chrisprattalpharaptor can do better. But even if these somewhat earnest reasons that business or political tribe might have controlled what these scientists were willing to say publicly, or if there was some more noble cause that they held above providing an accurate model of the world, it's still something other than providing an accurate model of the world. Which is what, supposedly, was their job.
Worse, few of these matters stop here. Trivially, a lot of academics and casual observers are saying that even if the Nature op-ed authors were playing fast-and-loose with the facts at the time, we since have a ton of evidence in favor the wet market/natural origin side and very little recently published in favor of serial passage or any intentional manipulation, and normally drawing big charts claiming almost all the experts in a field were conspiracy to hide The Truth would be the sorta thing you do shortly before the nice men give you a coat with extra-long sleeves and take you to get some anti-psychotics. Except all of the above.
gattsuru
4mo ago
Hradzka has a good bit on what he expected Richard Spencer was trying to do with the term to start with, and what a lot of progressives were doing as well. Or see this New York Times piece (by Singal, of course) that separated the 'alt-right' from the 'alt-light' -- and contrast, even contemporaneously, other pieces.
There's a lot of if-by-whiskey, where sometimes the alt-right was just the nutty white nationalists when defining their ideology, others where it was people who hadn't denounced them heavily enough, and then other times the alt-right was pretty much everyone to the right of Mitt Romney. And to a lot of the progressive and leftist movements, the difference was kinda marginal : if you think Mitt Romney was a white supremacist, you're worried about all of them.
gattsuru
5mo ago
And perhaps his head just did that.
As I said in the post, which describes those details along with videos that the Forward seems to have missed, "still possible that Kessler's death had some complications, if extraordinarily unlikely". My point is a bit broader. I can remember a certain situation that was far more in favor of the homicide suspect and yet resulted in not just the suspect being arrested and jailed but having to post a multi-million-dollar bail.
gattsuru
5mo ago
I've been skeptical for a while, but to expand the reasoning:
More specifically: I, a gay, centrist Biden voter, am one of the most conservative students at my law school. The Federalist Society here is anemic and widely derided, while there's a dizzying array of progressive organizations. The professors and administrators are, if anything, even more progressive. My school is in no sense an outlier in this regard, nor is this specific to law. The same patterns are overwhelmingly visible in every group of educated, young professionals.
At the trivial level, it's worth spelling out why that is. Conservatives are a minority among the sort of identification you're talking about. But even when 'yuppie' leaned conservative, this dizzing advantage for progressive organizations still existed (it dates back to at least the Eisenhower era!), and the lean of organizations and visible political speakers today is far greater than that of their underlying demographics.
Conservatives and conservative organizations are not just uncommon but destroyed in a wide variety of professional fields, and that's a result of enemy action. Maybe that's well-intended, sometimes, but more often the good intentions or serious objections are a pretext. More often, it's not even that. Simple discrimination is common enough that it doesn't even have to pretend to hide. Demands to fire anyone to the right of the last Democratic President are common, regularly backed up by violent protest. And that persists outside of academia: state bar selections of continuing education credits have gotten hilarious recently, and one of the single most effective members of the SCOTUS bar got booted from his practice, with the threat leveled during and about an appeal. I can go into further detail if @Amadan wants to do the "you are not oppressed" deal, but it's a long list spanning decades, and I don't think you need me drop thirty examples. You have your recent tweet on Sanderson; you don't need me to spell out how suicidal trying to be a mainstream conservative culturati gets.
That doesn't necessarily make you wrong, but it does change any potential solution. A conservative -- or even anything people want to call conservative, with all that implies -- working within the system is inviting a cheesegrater to their tender bits, hopefully figuratively. Any conservative organization trying to work within the system at minimum is subject to being shut down at a moment's notice, if not subject to being hollowed out and worn like a skin suit; any effective capability itself becoming justification for such an attack.
What does change the conclusion is that Doom bit. There is not some deep physical law that educated young professionals are the source of administrative or executive power in this world. They have been favored for the last seventy years because (outside of academic-enforced Curleyism) they were competent, not just in systems that they created, but in their ability to manage and adapt to the world.
The average college graduate today struggles to use a screwdriver, and increasing numbers struggle to write or comprehend an essay; a far broader group have actively rejected even the ideals of meaningful understanding of reality. Teacher's unions have begged and striked to require increasing levels of education that you and I know does absolutely shit for their actual capability, and they're unusual for anyone studying it, rather than it being a problem. If you throw the mandate of heaven in the trash, it ends up in the trash.
That's not necessarily a good thing! Obviously there's the big grifter problem, where once you realize that the TV-show grifter and the PhD are equally unknowledgable about 1800s history, you have the problem of distinguishing what randos do have anything. There's a lot of infrastructure and cash that's hard to replicate outside of academic or industrial settings, and the resulting processes not getting done because those settings are so hostile to you they'd rather burn cash and credibility, and just no one trying, doesn't change much.
More broadly, there are still places that have keep some undercurrent of adherence to actual skill or knowledge that's hard to develop elsewhere, with some interest in actual capability, whether or not they've been skinsuited by politics. There's a far broader scope where the things they teach aren't deep knowledge or skills, but they're the teacher's passwords necessary to get anywhere today. FCFromSSC-style "iterated harm-seeking" is going to be very interesting in the !!bad!! sort of ways, when applied here.
But the resulting answer is going to look very different than Kulak, or than Theilites, for better and for worse.
gattsuru
6mo ago
Other than the BLM supporters? Even ignoring Darwin's absolutely embarrassing showing, there were more than a couple honest advocates.
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.
gattsuru
3mo ago
There have been some interesting results in relation to the Hugo Awards, and to the broader WorldCon environment. Kevin Standlee, a previous chair of the World Science Fiction Society (the WorldCon runners) posts Elections have Consequences:
Something that I think most people have forgotten is that Worldcons happen in the real world and are subject to real-world conditions. Among other things, Worldcons have to obey the laws of the place in which they are held, no matter what their governing documents say.
An overwhelming majority of the members of WSFS who voted on the site of the 2023 Worldcon (at the 2021 Worldcon in DC) selected Chengdu, China as the host of the 2023 Worldcon. That meant that the members of WSFS who expressed an opinion accepted that the convention would be held under Chinese legal conditions. Furthermore, those people (including me) who suggested that there might be election irregularities were overridden, shouted down, fired from their convention positions, and told that they were evil and probably racist for even suggesting such a thing.
The Hugo Nomination statistics were released on Friday, and unsurprisingly there are some oddities. Some of the disqualifications are likely politically charged over Chinese-specific matters, and others more universal. To be fair, the exact rules for qualification are complex, and some past nominees have been screwed over by esoterica of first publication dates; given the number of new voters, it's not too surprising that some nominated works fell outside of the eligibility timeline.
To be somewhat less charitable, I'm not familiar with too many previous times where nominees were listed as eligible by associated vendors before getting disqualified. The nominations are also bizarre in other ways, if one expected a largely Chinese fandom: there's a few Chinese-original pieces and editors, but not many.
Officially, there was absolutely no political pressure for these decisions, which have an explanation that the WorldCon Chendgu admins won't be providing.
On one hand, it's hard to be surprised if something wacky happened, and surely the people who set up WorldCon inside the CCP should have known it'd be a charlie foxtrot one way or the other. It's even part of the WorldCon bylaws that given a lot of power to the laws of the hosting nation, as Standlee points out. WorldCon locations are determined by member votes, even if this rounds out a little weird.
On the other hand, there were some fun questions about exactly how fair that vote for the 2023 WorldCon bid was well before this point -- quite a lot of ballots were allegedly filled out remotely and dropped off by a small number of visitors. Which wasn't and currently isn't against the rules, mind you! And the WSFS certainly wouldn't bring up questions of authenticity in 2021.
((On the gripping hand, unlike nearly every other vote at WorldCon, the location vote is heavily vetted internally rather than going through a member nominee process; only sufficiently prepared locales are listed. And WorldCon Chengdu advocates had been wining-and-dining hard for a while, which, given the logistical issues the convention had that included a complete rescheduling, might have been descisive.))
Schadenfruede isn't great for the soul, so to some extent I'm pretty happy to that a number of critics of modern WorldCon have had better things to do with their time, even if I personally have struggled not to snark a bit. And it's hard to expect too much to come from any retrospective at this point: because ballots and nominations, proving or disproving any tomfoolery incoherent as a position; more likely, it ends up with some minor tweaks to the location bid process, and just becomes one of those weird bits of fan lore, like when people wonder why Mercedes Lackey disappeared from SFWA conferences.
It's already too late to pass out the Asterisk Awards v2, and most of the winners weren't bad; many would have won regardless, even if the novel slot is definitely curious. ((Though I'm definitely less-than-happy that Scalzi squeaked in a nomination on another terrible work because of the DQ's)). Which brings up the culture war side. Standlee has an example :
Imagine a Worldcon held in Florida. It would be subject to US and Florida law (and any smaller government subdivision). Given legislation passed by Florida, it would not surprise me if such a hypothetical Florida Worldcon's Hugo Administration Subcommittee would disqualify any work with LGBTQ+ content, any work with an LGBTQ+ author, or any LGBTQ+ individual, because the state has declared them all illegal under things like their "Don't Say Gay or Trans" laws and related legislation.
To be fair, Standlee gets pushback, and eventually admits that no, that's not actually the existing law. I expect if pressed hard enough, he'd even admit it would surprise him were a Florida WorldCon's subcommittee willing to comply with such a law. (To be a little less charitable, he's probably going to be a go-to example for people on the left assuming conservative jurisdictions will ignore courts orders, if only because most people use video format or circumlocutions). And perhaps there are uses to bringing forward a nearby hypothetical over a distant reality (and, tbf, the at-least-up-as-a-bid-but-still-implausible WorldCon Uganda gets some attention on File 770).
But it's a slightly awkward comparison. It's not like either of these hypotheticals are really things this cohort experience personally, or even by second- or third-hand. Yet they're useful boogeymen.
gattsuru
3mo ago
Hawaii v Heller
The Hawaii Firearms Coalition claims:
A recent change in Hawaii law that goes into effect in January requires instructors to be certified or verified by the county police department is being used to ignore the constitutional rights of Hawaii citizens. Despite having more than 5 months to set up a process, Honolulu and the other counties took no action until now. Due to inaction or incompetence, this lack of a process means that Hawaiian citizens could be left with no legal method to obtain firearms for weeks or months after the law goes into effect.
The recent decision by Police Chief Logan to require people to be certified by nonexistent instructors means that NO ONE can purchase a handgun or rifle until after he holds a public meeting to change his previous rules to reflect the new state law. The chief has a meeting scheduled for January 9th and then must wait for the mayor to sign his rules before they go into effect. This means that until then, he has no legal process to verify or certify instructors.
- UPDATE - Honolulu police contacted me and said that they are interpreting the new law to give them 40 days to process applications. They say that this is enough time to certify instructors and to get those instructors to teach people that have previously applied trained.
The specific statute is here, with the most relevant components being :
no permit shall be issued to an applicant earlier than fourteen calendar days after the date of the application; provided that a permit shall be issued or the application denied before the fortieth day from the date of application.
Note that this is a permit to acquire; the permit to carry involves different timelines and different requirements. There's some lack of clarity here -- where HFC claims that the police stopped accepting applications on the 18th of December, the police claim that they're accepting applications and will only require the training certification when people pick up a permit. It's possible, if not especially unlikely, that the permit training process will be resolved in a reasonable timeframe, to plausibly fair ends, but if the Honolulu Police genuinely were still accepting permit applications on the 18th, their best-case timeline to meet statutory requirements has less than a week between .
There are various other issues with this statute -- like other jursdictions, Hawaii's law defies 'complies with' Heller and Bruen by changing "good cause" requirements to a "good character" one (requiring denial of a permit "if the issuing authority determines that issuance would not be in the interest of public health, safety, or welfare because the person lacks the essential character or temperament necessary"); it demands permitee applicants provide the police open access to their mental health records; it removed external validation of training courses (before this law, the NRA could certify instructors). And there's the general dissolution of trust, when gun nuts have long cited concerns that training requirements would be used to throttle or delay lawful gun ownership, and it just so happens to not be a priority for five months after the law itself was an emergency.
But the timeline provides a clearer problem of justiciability. As Illinois and New Mexico recently demonstrated, the courts are not particularly willing to step in early, but here it's not particularly clear how the courts would do so. By leaving the "certified or verified firearms instructor" up to local police, nearly-any challenge can be instantly mooted or otherwise have its factual underpinning pulled away with no more than a minute's effort, only to be upset again later (not even necessarily by bad action by the police, if only a few trainers sign up to start with!). And a court not willing to could leave this catch-22 in place for months, if not years.
Well, at least that's a one-off, and Hawaii's long been a basket case so-
California vs. Carry Permittees
In response to Bruen, California pass SB2 on September 26th, to take force on January 1st of the new year. Among many other restrictions, the law overhauled concealed carry within the state, including where a permittee could lawfully carry. Politicians supporting the law stated, both in press conferences and during the resulting lawsuits, that about the only place permittees could lawfully carry after the law passed would be a public streets and sidewalks, and that's actually a little more broad than the actual text of the law allows. There's been a few California-side gunnies who've videoed long and non-exclusive lists of behaviors that the law bans, though unfortunately I haven't seen any set to the Animaniacs country song (yet).
On December 20th a district court judge enjoined the law's enforcement, in a biting order that focused mostly on the restrictions on the right to bear arms, but didn't stop from noticing where the law was also often just built to make compliance difficult if not impossible, for example, that:
Notably, this provision poses a practical problem since a person may not approach the business with their firearm to get close enough to see the four-by-six-inch sign Section 26230(a)(26) requires without violating the statute.
This decision was, unsurprisingly, appealed along with a request for a stay, allowing the law to go into effect. On December 30th, an administrative stay was granted, and the "stay pending appeal, and the supplements, responses and replies thereto, are otherwise referred to the panel assigned to decide the merits of these appeals".
It's not clear if a merits panel has even been assigned, as of January 4th.
What happens next will depend very heavily on that merits panel. Traditionally, the calculations for a stay pending appeal would strongly favor blocking a law that hasn't yet come into play. But a number of justices at the 9th Circuit have a long history of both antipathy toward the Second Amendment and willingness to buck SCOTUS dicta; while I'm not going to say that a sizable number would never block enforcement of a gun control law, I've already winked suggestively. There are also non-trivial reasons to suspect the odds of a favorable merits panel to not be quite as simple as a dice-roll.
And the longer the statute has been allowed to apply -- four days already! -- the easier is it to imagine this becoming the new status quo.
Well, at least it's easier to get a permit, even if you can't do anything with it-
California vs. Carry Permit
Over the holidays, California DoJ also issued a intering emergency rule-making package. Among a wide variety of other regulatory changes, the process submits a new BOF 1034 CCW Program DOJ Certifed Instructor Application, which among other requirements demands application attach a copy of a certification from :
- Bureau of Security and Investigative Services, Department of Consumer Affairs, State of California - Firearm Training Instructor
- Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, State of California - Firearm Instructor or Rangemaster
- Authorization from a State of California accredited school to teach a firearms training course
And a shooting course qualification from one of :
- Bureau of Security and Investigative Services, Department of Consumer Affairs, State of California - Firearm Training Instructor
- Federal Government, Certified Rangemaster or Firearm Instructor
- Federal Law Enforcement Training Center, Firearm Instructor Training Program or Rangemaster
- United States Military, Occupational Specialty (MOS) as marksmanship or firearms instructor
- Commission on Peace Officer Standards and Training, State of California - Firearm Instructor or Rangemaster
- Authorization from a State of California accredited school to teach a firearms training course
At least from a casual read, this looks to be in explicit conflict with relevant California statutes, which also include the Civilian Marksmanship Program and NRA. It's also... not especially clear if any of these programs exist and are available to normal people: of the few that aren't explicitly tied to law enforcement or military training, like the State of California accredited school firearms training course, are still mostly law-enforcement-focused. ((I also wonder how well California's administrative notice law is being served by a notice for rule-making that was only open between December 22nd and December 27th.))
At a deeper level, though, it's a near fulfillment of long-standing gunnie fears that training requirements could be leveraged into otherwise-controversial restrictions. It's hard to take the requirements as seriously focused on preventing harm. Perhaps there's some argument about applied evenly-
New Mexico
An organization known for its gun buyback events is under investigation. It comes after the group dismantled guns over the weekend. San Juan County Sheriff Shane Ferrari says he’s trying to find out whether or not the gun buyback events New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence does are legal. He said the investigation comes after community members reached out to him with that question.
“I’m still not understanding how these transactions are taking place without a background check,” San Juan County Sheriff Shane Ferrari said.
It’s all centered around a New Mexico law that says the sale of a firearm without a background check is unlawful. There are a few exceptions to the law, but Ferrari says he doesn’t know how the nonprofit falls into the mix.... New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence actually helped pass that law. The group’s co-President Miranda Viscoli explained the difference between what the group did last weekend versus what she says would be unlawful.
Further posts from the group make very clear this is almost certainly in violation of both New Mexico's new laws, but also long-present federal ones, sometimes in hilarious ways, and that the NMPGV knew those rules.
These laws often stupid, especially in this context! Officially, a local sheriff has opened an investigation, but realistically, nothing's going to happen here but some egg on some faces. Yes, it's the sort of illegal that gets federal agents to shoot your dog and son and wife if they need to pump up their rookie numbers, but not the sort of illegal that those agents treat seriously. After all, going after political allies "would not promote public safety".
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
4mo ago
Newsweek reports that we have more volunteers:
Republican lawmakers in three swing states have announced their plan to remove President Joe Biden from their state ballots.
Aaron Bernstine of the Pennsylvania House of Representatives, Cory McGarr of the Arizona House of Representatives and Charlice Byrd of the Georgia House of Representatives released a joint statement on Thursday announcing their plan to remove Biden from the 2024 general election ballots in those three states.
While their letter says that they plan to or are in the process to "introduce legislation", it's not clear from a quick search if they've done so, or even what that legislation would look like, nor how it would, in their words, "allow ALL candidates to be on the ballot in all states". It's far from obvious that they could get legislation through their respective legislatures within the necessary time period before the general election, or even at all: of the three states, only Georgia has a Republican governor, and it's unlikely Kemp will jump onto this particular grenade. The trio don't even have a particularly coherent theory for why and what disqualifying specific act applies.
So this is grift, and a publicity stunt, and dumber.
On the other hand, unlike Colorado or California, all three are states that matter: there are election models that treat them as swing states, not background temperature and a joke. It's a good thing that a lot of people talking about fucking with ballots hasn't caused problems in recent years, and that there aren't far-more-dangerous attacks that these games make more prominent.
Some updates from New Mexico since two weeks ago.
Firstly, the court ruled on requests for a temporary restraining order, most pertinently that:
... Defendants New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, New Mexico Department Secretary Patrick M. Allen, New Mexico Department of Public Safety Jason R. Bowie, Chief of the New Mexico State Police and any other New Mexico officials (“Defendants”) are ENJOINED from applying, enforcing, or attempting to enforce, either criminally or civilly, Section (1) of the New Mexico Department of Health’s “Public Health Emergency Order Imposing Temporary Firearm Restrictions, Drug Monitoring and Other Public Safety Measures” (“PHO”) published on September 8, 2023, which reads:
(1) No person, other than a law enforcement officer or licensed security officer, shall possess a firearm, as defined in NMSA 1978, Section 30-7-4.1, either openly or concealed [within complex metric that means Bernallio County]...
In addition, Defendants are ENJOINED from applying, enforcing, or attempting to enforce, either criminally or civilly, Section (4) of the New Mexico Department of Health’s “Public Health Emergency Order Imposing Temporary Firearm Restrictions, Drug Monitoring and Other Public Safety Measures” to the extent it imposes additional restrictions on the carrying or possession of firearms that were not already in place prior to its issuance.
The next hearing, for a preliminary injunction, was originally scheduled for October 3rd, three days before the initial state of emergency was scheduled to end, though I'd expect that gets delayed. How did the governor respond?
It's not terribly clear how this will work, either as matter of enforcement or of law. I'd say that she's trying to maneuver for mootness and standing challenges to the lawsuit, but this is still unconstitutional under Bruen and the state constitution, the loose definition raises serious due process concerns, and it's not even very likely that the state's public emergency law permits it even outside of the right to bear arms problems. This revision to the emergency order can't or at least shouldn't avoid the TRO, and were it a right-wing effort it'd likely just get the judge mad; as it is, the Biden appointee sounded just disappointed during the initial hearing.
Nor, on the other side, have I seen any reports of the video-driven Grisham enforcement had claimed to be bringing during initial protests. On the other hand, even while enjoined anyone who wants to carry needs to evaluate whether they're willing to become a poster child for today's constitutional challenge.
What sort of fallout is Governor Grisham looking at? KOAT7 has a wonderful quote from one of the state politicians:
"People need to realize this is the first time in New Mexico history that a governor could be impeached," State Rep. John Block said.
That is somewhat undermined by reality: No, they don't, because no, she can't.
There's only been one successful legislature-initiated special session in New Mexico history, and its context (responding to a budget's veto) made it far easier to coordinate on top of the far simpler political calculus (the final budget vote passed 90%+ in both houses). The paper gives a single federal Democrat saying he'd be willing to vote yes to condemn Grisham, should it reach the floor of Congress, but the same man voted against considering the resolution, which failed without a single Dem yes, which isn't quite the same as a vote against the resolution (because it was mixed with two other process matters) but makes for awkward bedmates. The Santa Fe New Mexican reports that the state's congressional Democratic party's official position is against a special session or impeachment.
It ain't happening, bruh.
There's been a bit of embarrassment from state politicians and police pushing back -- the state AG, another Dem, did not defend the executive order -- which, fair, kudos. Not the most significant kudos, but worth mentioning.
What about that shooting that motivated this whole thing? NBC reports:
A third arrest was made Friday in connection with a shooting outside an Albuquerque baseball stadium that killed an 11-year-old boy and prompted the New Mexico governor to issue a controversial gun ban. Albuquerque police took Daniel Gomez, 26, into custody a day after two other men were identified as suspects. Police didn’t immediately release further details about Gomez’s arrest.
Romero was already wanted for failing to appear in court in connection with alleged drug dealing, Medina said. Garley happened to be in custody when he was arrested in connection with the killing. He had been stopped by state police on Sept. 13 while returning from Arizona and authorities found a gun and about 100,000 fentanyl tablets in the car, state Police Chief W. Troy Weisler said at the news conference.
Police alleged that the men, both reputed gang members, pulled up in a car and attacked the pickup truck that was leaving the minor league game at Isotopes Stadium.
I haven't been able to find any records showing their CCW permits being pulled. Or that they had CCW permits. For some reason.
Apropos of nothing, a couple other interesting notes in firearms law :
On one hand, great work if you can get it. On the other hand, Paul Clement and Erin Murphy, the men who lead Bruen, no longer can, and it's just over half of their old law firm's typical billing rate. The reasoning, such as it is:
Plaintiffs failed to show that this was “a case requiring special expertise [and] that no in-district counsel possessed such expertise,” or that local counsel “were unwilling or unable to take the case,”.. .Plaintiffs’ arguments in support of out-of-district rates are limited to pointing to Plaintiffs’ success at the Supreme Court and the conclusory statements that “few in-district attorneys regularly practice Second Amendment litigation and even fewer practice this constitutional litigation on behalf of plaintiffs against government entities; . . . even fewer in-district attorneys have briefed or argued Second Amendment cases before the Second Circuit and the Supreme Court, like the attorneys Plaintiff selected; and . . . no in-district attorneys have the experience necessary for Plaintiffs’ challenge.”
I expect Clement and Murphy won't exactly cry all the way to the bank, to whatever extent their biglaw contracts covered this sort of case, but neither will it be a big war chest for their Second-Amendment-focused law firm, to whatever extent NYSPRA wasn't forking over those fees well before this point and is down some pretty pennies. Which matters quite a bit given NYSRPA was better titled NYSRPA II, and NYSRPA I was filed in 20_13_. Nor will it serve a particularly strong disincentive to avoid losing future court cases, or, for a matter where New York state might actually be persuadable, pad future court battles with beggaring levels of necessary paperwork to beggar their challengers.
At least they won, right? Well... Back in response to the NYSPRA II decision at the old place, a couple posters had different perspectives (with some format edits for brevity) :
Yes, the jursdictions which want to ban guns will simply claim historical justification, and the lower courts all the way up to the courts of appeals will pretend to believe them ("a bee is a fish"), and nothing will change. I expect New York's list of "sensitive locations" to include : Banks including ATM lobbies, Subways and other public transportation, taxis and other licensed transportation, All public buildings, All premises licensed to serve alcohol, Maybe all public parks.
Many, and it would require a whole-of-government sort of rebellion to engage in that level of open defiance. Even if Governor Hochul attempted to enforce the law, state judges would not follow such an instruction, especially as against an explicit binding precedent. I can go through the mechanisms if you like, but the idea that NY would openly defy this ruling is an absolute pipe dream for a few radical accelerationists on either side, and will not happen.
And neither is wrong, and indeed excepting a few quibbles Huadpe's later post is a good overview of procedural protections. No one planted their feet at the door of a school house, so it's not true Massive Resistance, it's just sparking legal warfare. On the other hand, if Nybbler had a time machine or a crystal ball, his description of the Bruen response bill and its reception in the judiciary would have been broader, not more narrow. And on those broader points, the state has been playing with mootness and standing to avoid the obvious revelation that it still does exactly what Bruen says the state may not.
And that's just the explicit stuff. One thing neither Nybbler's list nor I expected:
The NYPD approved fewer new licenses to people requesting permits to carry or keep firearms in their homes or businesses in 2022 than the year prior, data obtained by THE CITY shows — despite the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that found a key provision of the state’s long-standing gun control law violated the Second Amendment right to bear arms.
In 2021, the NYPD — which vets firearm permits — received 4,663 applications and approved 2,591 of them, about 56%, all under the stricter “proper cause” standard the Supreme Court struck down last year. That standard required gun owners in New York to show “proper cause” in order to receive a permit to carry a weapon, but the court said licenses should be granted by default unless there was a specific reason to deny an applicant.
In 2022, the NYPD saw an increased number of new applications — 7,260 — but approved just 1,550, or 21%, even though applications filed in the second half of that year no longer had to meet the “proper cause” standard where applicants had to make an affirmative case for why they needed a license.
It's far from alone, here. Hawaii's response bill has repeated many of the same steps and components, California was just weird for waiting til this year before informing people that their right to carry a firearm is limited to sidewalks. Dick Heller from the 2008 Heller v. DC case is still working on being allowed to own the semiautomatic pistol and magazine he started that whole matter on. Defense Distributed is still fighting its mess of a case.
When I've made motions around this before, people have rejoined that lawsuits are a process: winning a case, no matter how big, does not mean winning everything forever and hearing the lamentations of your opponent's women. There have indeed been where state defiance has lead to significant costs. I don't mean to suggest that the court's never work.
But at the same time, it's hard to even find a pretense that this faces the same level of legal opprobrium or cynicism that favored rights get. Nor is it limited to guns. There's been a lot of Recognition that the aftermath of SFFA v. Harvard would result in a tremendous change in legal discrimination as teams of lawyers would be going through every admissions process in the country, and that's not wrong! But they've done so to hilariously transparent efforts. And there are lesser and lesser-known variants on a pretty wide variety of topics. There's no conservative equivalent that leads a country-wide and overnight shakeup, or even a state-level one, even in fairly egregious matters.
There's an argument that this shows what Really Matters is The Institutions, and while that might feel a little be retroactively defined by whatever conservatives aren't doing or by what they'd face massive discrimination should they wear their hearts on their sleeves -- can I point to Clement and Murphy again, and that even if you had their skills you'd be a fool to think you could follow in their paths -- it's not exactly wrong.
But then we're back to denouement of the post two weeks ago, but more so, and much broader.
gattsuru
6mo ago
Duncan v. Bonta drops, again:
Here, a stay is appropriate.
First, we conclude that the Attorney General is likely to succeed on the merits. In New York State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen, the Supreme Court reiterated that “[l]ike most rights, the right secured by the Second Amendment is not unlimited.” 142 S. Ct. 2111, 2128 (2022) (quoting Dist. of Columbia v. Heller, 554 U.S. 570, 626 (2008)). The Attorney General makes strong arguments that Section 32310 comports with the Second Amendment under Bruen. Notably, ten other federal district courts have considered a Second Amendment challenge to large-capacity magazine restrictions since Bruen was decided. Yet only one of those courts—the Southern District of Illinois—granted a preliminary injunction, finding that the challenge was likely to succeed on the merits.
It's not surprising to find the 9th Circuit finding in favor of a gun control law at en banc, though some people are surprised that the vote was the exact same as before SCOTUS sent it back down. No firebreathing VanDyke dissent this time, and while it's somewhat funny that I can predict exactly how well Hurwitz's 'it's just a temporary emergency stay!' aged like fine milk, it's still disappointing he couldn't be bothered to either vote differently or provide a deeper analysis of Bruen as a concurrence. There's some fun discussion from Nelson about whether the 9th circuit's newly-created comeback rule is compliant with federal law, and apparently the court claims that it'll even request briefings on the matter... but since five of the judges out of eleven in the en banc panel are those newly-senior judges that the law does not allow on en banc panels, I don't think it'll be any more compelling to them than the violation of process back in 2020 were when they were doing it explicitly.
The fun part is the explicit text of that original order: "Judgment VACATED and case REMANDED for further consideration in light of New York State Rifle & Pistol Assn., Inc. v. Bruen, 597 U. S. ___ (2022).". That quote, above? Is all that the 9th Circuit's en banc panel did, in terms of considering Bruen. As Butamay points out :
Despite this clear direction, our court once again swats down another Second Amendment challenge. On what grounds? Well, the majority largely doesn’t think it worthy of explanation. Rather than justify California’s law by looking to our historical tradition as Bruen commands, the majority resorts to simply citing various non-binding district court decisions. There’s no serious engagement with the Second Amendment’s text. No grappling with historical analogues. No putting California to its burden of proving the constitutionality of its law. All we get is a summary order, even after the Supreme Court directly ordered us to apply Bruen to this very case. The Constitution and Californians deserve better.
Does this count as massive resistance to a direct order from the Supreme Court? I'm sure someone (if not huadpe, now?) could argue otherwise: emergency stays with perfunctory logical support are not exactly unusual, and the majority do mention Bruen for almost a whole paragraph. But it's more plausible to read this the opposite direction, especially given the Court's willingness to punt on procedural issues whenever plausible (and sometimes even when not). Getting GVR'd repeatedly and with increasingly strict-yet-ignored direction is nothing to party about, but it isn't a loss, either. You can make a media spotlight out of it, if you're on the 'right' side, but that's not the real motivation.
It's another two or four years to enforce unconstitutional laws, to mark those who don't comply with an unconstitutional law as felons, to build alternative methods to harass and exclude those who comply but don't agree, to cost your opponents tremendous amounts of money (only a fraction of which they may get back), and to wait for the composition of the Supreme Court to change or be changed.
gattsuru
9mo ago
The 'social contagion' theory isn't implausible, although I think no small number of pro-trans people would frame it instead as people who were already trans but now realized that they were and that it was possible to do something about it. And they're not exactly wrong : it's rude to make guesses about people before/unless they come out, but the transhumanist philosophy (and even transhumanist aestheticists) has had no small number of people who have had decades-long fascinations with body transformation as a form of self-improvement who weren't exactly a surprise when they turned out to be trans.
((FTM examples exist, but are small-crowd enough that I'm not hugely comfortable linking them.))
There's some important philosophical and pragmatic arguments about this even within the pro-trans framework -- not everyone who thinks those thoughts actually wants them, some who want something end up in some non-binary variant, and there are a variety of tradeoffs and physical limitations of existing technology such that even people who want to transition might be better-served by using some things and not others in a way that's getting obfuscated by a lot of mainstream discourse.
However, even outside of that, both perspectives have missed that they're looking at a metric, not a measure. You don't have a magical "this many people are trans" marker any more than you have a good definition of what being "trans" even is, but under that you don't really have good measures on even specific events. "How many people are using Tavestock" isn't the same thing as even "how many people are injecting sex hormones", as anyone who's noticed bodybuilders can guess. There already was a small industry of XX-chromosone'd people injecting testosterone, going butch as hell, and wanting to be called "sir" in the late-90s; there's some fun discussions about whether they're more trans now that they've been able to get hysterectomies easier, but it's not exactly the most practical of questions.
And there's been a lot of moving these to be higher-visibility, both in the general sense (trans pride) and in the seeing-like-a-state one (required coverage for insurance providers, changing rules for various government IDs). I don't think it's enough to explain the entire change, but it makes any attempt to use the metrics without acknowledging their limitations more than a little frustrating.
gattsuru
5mo ago
I am nothing if not petty, but you invited me.
If you want me to stop, tell me to stop, and I'll stop.
Prestige Biotech
TIME reported:
Recently, many California residents were disturbed to learn that a small, privately-operated bio lab in the Central Valley town of Reedley was shut down by Fresno County Department of Public Health officials after they found that it had been improperly managing almost 1,000 laboratory mice and samples of infectious diseases including COVID-19, rubella, malaria, dengue, chlamydia, hepatitis, and HIV. The lab was registered to a company called Prestige Biotech that sold a variety of medical testing kits, including for pregnancy and COVID-19, and it was likely storing disease samples for the purpose of developing and validating its testing kits. Government authorities are still investigating the company’s history, but it appears to have previously operated a lab in Fresno under the name Universal MediTech, where city officials flagged it for investigation regarding improperly stored chemicals.
This, if anything, seems to be an understatement, since the initial federal investigation starts with:
On September 6, 2023, the Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the United States and the Chinese Communist Party (“Select Committee”) issued its first subpoena as part of its ongoing investigation into theillegal facility that local authorities uncovered in Reedley, California.The subpoena, signed by the Chairman with an on-site visit by the Select Committee’s Chief Investigative Counsel and two investigative staffers, uncovered thousands of pages of documents, hundreds of photographs, and hours of video.This evidence, alongside interviews of local officials and other investigative steps, revealed troubling gaps in federal pathogen safeguards. These gaps allowed a wanted fugitive from Canada, who is a PRC national who had previously stolen millions of dollars of American intellectual property, to operate an illegal facility that contained “thousands of vials of potentially infectious agents” in Reedley, California.
and quickly turns to :
Approximately 1,000 mice were kept in inhumane, overcrowded conditions.When local officials asked a worker who “appeared to be in control” of the mice, she replied that they were transgenic mice that simulate the human immune system that were “genetically engineered to catch and carry the COVID-19 virus.” In subsequent interviews with individuals who were at the warehouse, local officials learned that workers were tasked with caring and cleaning for the mice and, on numerous occasions, the Reedley Biolab operators had held back their pay.One of the workers who tended to the mice told Officer Harper that he and his children had become sick close in time to when he was tending the mice.The worker stated that he was instructed to discard any dead mice that he found into a dumpster...
The CDC did not note an Ebola label on the freezer in its report. When asked about the freezer labeled Ebola in a subsequent email, the CDC official noted that the CDC “would typically look for the vial to be labeled as Ebola,”that they “didn’t recall seeing a fridge labeled as Ebola,”and asked for a photograph of the freezer. A photograph was not available. The Select Committee has received written statements reporting the presence of the label.
The AP has a... more forgiving description, though that's damning with the extent it bends over backwards. Let's all get the obvious jokes out of our systems first. My personal favorite so far is "I didn't even know there was a wet market in Fresno", but if you have a particularly good one (maybe Black Dynamite?), fire away.
There's a bit of an obvious question, here, and it's "what the fuck".
And there is a plausible, charitable explanation. Looking at the current charges that fugitive from Canada is facing, it's quite possible that this lab was genuinely making lab tests, using these viral agents and lab mice to validate each batch, and just took 'move fast, break things' to an extreme level. Even the Ebola-labeled fridge, if it did have ebola samples, could maybe be about various biosensor demands that even pre-COVID were already being floated around; it's also possible that Zhu just got the thing on discount from a normal lab and didn't wipe off the marker. If that was the case, perhaps the strangest thing is here's that the scuzzy Engrish medical stuff marketed by a fraudster with a couple different IDs with different names on them, was actually trying and moderately-'real', even if it also had tremendous unnecessary risk and iffy environmental awareness. The criminal complaint even has a dedicated note for :
Despite media reports that UMI and PBI may have been manufacturing bioweapons, no evidence supporting those reports has been found to date. Any and all pathogens and toxins that have been found during the government’s investigation appear to be related to the manufacture and distribution of various IVD test kits.
... but that answer is a little complicated by rough questions about who, if anyone, has actually been looking. Beyond the CDC's apparent unwillingness or inability to test any of the samples found at the lab, it's not clear where they came from, or what Prestige would have been doing with them. Prestige mostly sold pregnancy tests, drug tests, so on.
And the charitable story has more than a few holes: none of the public documents show much evidence of Prestige BioTech's ability to manufacture the scale or variety of tests that they published, and the congressional investigation suggests that the company may have simply relabeled non-US-manufactured (and possibly non-US-certified) ones. It's illegal to import many of the found infectious agents without a license that Prestige did not have, and so the CDC may have presumed that they were provided by US companies... but it's a little worrying if some rando can order supplies of dengue or malaria without anyone caring. Compared to what happens if you try to order the wrong chemicals from a supply shop, that'd actually be worse.
... but it's not clear what, if any, alternative explanation would make more sense. Assuming for the sake of argument that Zhu is an undercover agent for the Chinese government, they don't exactly need James Bond to get Dengue fever samples. Nor would someone wanting to mix up bioweapons find it particularly useful to save on shipping by doing in-situ development. Perhaps there's something particularly funky about these particular breeds of transgenic mice, and given Zhu's previous modeus operandi of stealing biotech IP that would be in line with other practices, but there's no obvious way to get there from here, and a ton of inexplicable chaff around that. Maybe if the biological samples were meant as literal chaff and contained entirely different materials, in the sense that no sane person would test them for 'normal' corporate espionage?
That's further complicated by the federal investigation's general unwillingness to conduct the sort of testing or investigation necessary to assuage concerns; even were this particular case fully in the 'scuzzy Enrish dropshipper' category, the feds don't seem to have or be interested in getting the information necessary to demonstrate that. The charitable view, I suppose, is that the CDC runs into variations of this problem a lot (!) and doesn't think there's much to be gained from knowing the scale of the issue (!!) rather than simply spooling up the vacuum cleaners. Which... isn't especially good.
[Previous discussion here or here or here or here or here)
There's an interesting Atlantic article here. I don't particularly believe or disbelieve its central thrust -- that ice cream has a variety of possible health benefits -- for reasons I'll get into later, but one particular quote is rather startling if considered in any serious depth:
“The conclusions weren’t exactly accurately written,” acknowledged Dariush Mozaffarian, the dean of policy at Tufts’s nutrition school and a co-author of the paper, when he revisited the data with me in an interview.
St_Rev pointed out that this is actually academic misconduct, but it's worth spelling how obvious this has been for over half a decade, even as no one called a spade a spade. Mozaffarian's conclusions say, in front the paywall, that "Higher intake of yogurt is associated with a reduced risk of T2D, whereas other dairy foods and consumption of total dairy are not appreciably associated with incidence of T2D." Behind the paywall, we instead find that not only did his methods give as good a set of results for ice cream, they gave better numbers in most, on a pleasant and cheerful chart that the peer reviewers either did not read or did not find incompatible with the paper's summary. So at least one author, with no small career or current-day position considers this the sort of thing that you casually joke about to a national-tier journalist, who in turn considers it not particularly worthy of highlighting.
Surely this is some schmuck that doesn't matter, widdling away his days in a glorified broom closet, writing papers no one cares to read at all?
Well, no. PubMed shows 125 papers citing "Dairy consumption and risk of type 2 diabetes", Google Scholar gives over 400 citations. St_Rev points to his efforts on a hilariously bad and hilarious broad Food Compass proposal, though at least that proposal largely hit a dead end. But he's gotten appointed to federal boards by Presidents. That's not automatically going to make him the next Wansink, who managed to change contents of store shelves across America based on numbers he just made up -- it's not even like Mozaffarian's known misconduct is even a small fraction as bad! It's a nitpick, ultimately, and one that may eventually not even fall to Mozaffarian as opposed to some coauthor.
But it's not a nitpick anyone cares about.
Now, that's just nutrition science. Everyone knows the entire field's garbage, whether or not it drives policy; the literature is filled with hilarious stories like this, and not just starting from inside.
What about medicine and materials safety? Those who've read [Scott's recent review of Rob Knight's From Oversight to Overkill will have seen a small mention of research misconduct:
This changed in 1998. A Johns Hopkins doctor tested a new asthma treatment. A patient got sick and died. Fingers were pointed. Congress got involved. Grandstanding Congressmen competed to look Tough On Scientific Misconduct by yelling at Gary Ellis, head of the Office For Protection From Research Risks.
The full story is a little boring, so to tl;dr: Doctor Alkis Togias proposed a study where healthy volunteers would first reduce some parasympathetic nervous system response using hexamethonium bromide, then use to methacholine induce asthma attacks. By doing so, they could better understand the role the parasympathetic nervous system had on asthma.
((name recognition is !!fun!!))
While methacholine was commonly used for this purpose, hexamethonium was not; it had started out as an anti-hypertension drug and had largely fallen off the market as other, better drugs in that class arrived. This wasn't exactly a treatment, contra Scott, so much as an attempt to test specific models of asthma. In many ways that made the death of a volunteer in the trial more shocking. It's not entirely clear what exactly happened -- Ellen Roche first reported feeling ill before the hexamethonium exposure -- but it's pretty likely that the drug was a large part of why her lungs failed. What drove the sizable regulatory response, though, was that the risks of Hexamethonium Bromide exposure were Known in older literature... kinda.
Togias had four studies safe showing use of the drug, some for similar pulmonary research. Older papers pointing to some were harder to find at the time, but even if located it's not clear how relevant they'd be. The studies he did locate were small studies, totaling only 20 participants, but not only were they allowed under similar IRB reviews, they didn't describe even minor complications.
... with an emphasis on "describe":
It's not clear how robust the other three studies were, when it came to accurate description of the observed behavior, but that single study would have given 10%, alone enough reason to take a closer review. (Lest this come across as a defense of Dr. Togias, one of his own patients had this class of side effects just days before Mrs. Roche's fatal exposure; Togias did not report those complaints nor wait until the ill patient recovered.)
In the intervening decades and in response to the death of Mrs. Roche, medical studies have expanded the extent side effects are reported to review boards. If you wonder how well that would have help someone reading through the papers, who did not have access to the internal review board records of distant schools? Well...
Space is an in thing right now, so what about space? 1I/‘Oumuamua is a space thing, that got into a lot of news reports as the first interstellar object, including this paper in Nature arguing that it was an ice comet with some interesting traits. In response, Avi Loeb argues instead that the calculations used in the Nature paper are entirely incorrect. Which happens, if true. What's more interesting is how Loeb claims Nature responded, when faced with a question of fact:
By now, the Nature paper was celebrated by science journalists worldwide. When I informed one of them about the temperature miscalculation earlier today, he told me that his journal will not post a correction to its original report in order “not to confuse the readers.”
Now, Loeb is a bit of a nutjob eccentric advocate of thinking outside the box. And we only have his word that his physical models are more correct, or that Nature editors say what he claimed.
Of course, if he is a nutjob, he's a nutjob feted by a hefty list of big names and organizations, including Harvard and the President. More critically, he's got no shortage of papers in high impact journals, both conventional papers and op-eds in Nature, none with asterisks. So either Nature isn't willing to correct a paper whoopsied thermodynamics, or is willing to publish this style of author, or both.
Well, it's not like normal people do anything with space. Outside of speculative fiction and some astrophotography, few of us are ever going to need to think more than a few hundred miles away from terra firma. Even for scientists working in the field, it's not like anyone's putting Freeman Dyson's blueprints to action. So there isn't much value riding on things, really, beyond people's egos.
Speaking of egos, anyone heard of the Hirsch-Dias feud in superconductors? Jorge Hirsch is best-known for the proposing the H-index metric in academic publishing, but more charitably also for a number of models to explain high-temperature superconductivity. Ranga Dias is the leader of a team working out of the University of Rochester, doing high-temperature high-pressure superconductivity work, some of which conflicts with Hirsch's models. If you read a pop-sci article about carbons-sulfur-hydrogen superconductors, metallic hydrogen, or lutetium hydride, his lab's the actual group in question. The two don't like each other, and it's been a recursive mess of papers seeking retractions being removed. Right now it's looking mostly like Hirsch called it, though there are still some Dias defenders, in no small part because a few of the challenged works were replicated or 'replicated' by other labs collaborating with Dias. The latter option is a damning indictment of international condensed matter research.
I don't own a diamond anvil. There's only a few major labs around the world that do, and of those not all experiments are trying to replicate this stuff. Why would anyone care?
(Outside of diamond anvils being pretty expensive to use as glorified magic-8 balls, and teams of physicists not being cheap either.)
There was a snafu around a different proposed superconductor in August, with significant coverage and attention after a coffee merchant on Twitter gave pretty long (and somewhat overstated) list of possible (if not likely) benefits. Somehow, the grapevine produced a feeding frenzy as increasingly varied hobbyists tried to mix the stuff up, sometimes literally in their kitchens. It turned out to not work, to the surprise of absolutely no one who's followed superconductor revolutions in the past. Indeed, the biggest surprise is that this seemed to be an honest and weird result which simply failed to pan out, rather than the typical fraud or instrument error.
Dan Garisto criticized this while the various LK99 replication efforts were cooking, as science as a live sporting event, where hype distorts funding and attention to near-random focuses. It's a little awkward a criticism coming from Garisto, who's a 'science journalist' himself with no small impact on where people focus (and it's not clear Scientific American proper lives up to his standards, but it's not wrong: several labs looked at and spent a couple days reviewing a series of papers that otherwise would have only received minimal attention. That's why we're pretty sure the initial experiments were performed as described, but mismeasured diamagnetism and semiconductor behavior. There's still some people looking at LK99-related research, and I might even put it very slightly more likely than all of Dias' work panning out, but that's damning with faint praise.
The alternative to serious replication isn't "we saved time on something from testing something that was useless." It's not knowing, one way or the other.
Which gets me to my actual point.
EDIT: Not just that ice cream clearly harmful or healthy, or that hexamethonium bromide's harms were or weren't known, or Dr. Togias was or wasn't responsible for Mrs. Roche's death, or 1I/‘Oumuamua is or isn't a comet, or carbons-sulfur-hydrogen or LK99 superconductors work or don't work. It's not even that we don't know about these things, or would struggle harshly to find them. I can give answers, to some small extent and with little confidence.
It's that you shouldn't or can't treat these massive systems as much more earnestly engaged in finding those answers than some rando online, and you shouldn't trust that much, either.
(For the record, probably not great or bad barring diabetes and the numbers are a selection effect, dangerous but undocumented, not really but should have tried harder, it's a rock, no, no.)/EDIT.
As a concrete example, I'll point to this paper. I have absolutely no idea if it's real or not. The entire field of covetics has an absolute ton of red flags, most overt in the sheer extent and variety of claimed benefits, but also the extent some papers look like someone just shook a can of 'nano' prefixes onto the summary to spice things up. On the other hand, while Argonne National Labs does that buzzword-sprinkling too... well, Argonne doing it is a pretty strong point in favor of it not being completely made up. For whatever it's worth, there is no wikipedia page, and Dan Garisto (and Scientific American) haven't found it worth examining.
But describing it as copper++ or aluminum++ is... if a bit of a exaggeration, not much of one. For a tl;dr, the proposed material trades off some additional manufacturing complexity (and ultimate bend radius) against vastly improved hardness, flexural strength, corrosion resistance, heat- and electrical- conductivity, even some weird things like capacitance. There are few fields using these materials where this would not have significant benefits.
If real.
Even if 'real', to any meaningful extent, it may still not be useful: there's a lot of manufacturing constraints, and the very traits that make it impressive-sounding may make it too annoying to work with. Great conductivity is a lot harder to use if the material can not be reasonably drawn as wire, for example. Excellent corrosion resistance doesn't help if it's tied to vibration microfractures, as early titanium development discovered.
But even before those considerations, there's a bigger problem that I'm not sure I can trust any of this more than some random youtuber mixing up the stuff. The literature has a lot of conflicting claims, which might be a process matter and might be more serious fucking around; the real-world progress of the lab supposedly doing the most with the stuff (maybe holding the patent?) literally involves a RICO suit. Weird behaviors like that are common-place in scientific and industrial developments that end up working out! They're also a lot of skulls.
In an ideal world, I could feed the academic literature into a big spreadsheet, average things out, and get a nice number. In this one, I can get a number; I'm not sure it wouldn't look like this.
And this is a case that matters, in the way a lot of science really matters. You could, as an individual or small business -- pending licensing agreements -- make or purchase a batch of this stuff, today, and implement it, perhaps with a sizable amount of trial and error, and if it were real, find significant benefit.
Would you want to make that bet? Because in a revealed preferences sense, no one has yet. And while every business decision is a risk, there's reasons this risk seems undesirable, despite hundreds of thousands if not millions of dollars worth of past efforts supposedly promoting public understanding.
What happens if someone does? I'm not sure even successes would be well-documented, but the academic disinterest in negative replication, even from fellow researchers, is well-known. I don't expect it would be taken any better from industry randos, were tired businesses in a huge rush to document their failures. Would even moderate success be something that could be meaningfully presented through academic means? How much could any mean, if an author or publisher can choose to drop any detail they want from discussion and still be taken seriously long after?
Or is this the sorta sphere where magics, in both the optimistic and pejorative sense, just float forever slightly out-of-reach?
gattsuru
4mo 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.
(Revealing the name behind an anonymous account of public note is not “doxxing,” which is an often-gendered form of online harassment that reveals private information — like an address or phone number — about a person without consent and with malicious intent.)
gattsuru
6mo ago
There were a lot of very young children killed, along with adults, in Kibbutz Kfar Aza, including some photos that were released and I'm not linking to that were baby-sized bodies that had been both burned and their heads removed. This was initially reported as 40 babies decapitated, but it's likely that this was a conflation of different ages of children, and different causes of death; given the total population of the Kibbutz it's very unlikely that there were 40 <3-year-old infants there.
gattsuru
7mo ago
Today's scheduled drama revolves around the last-minute efforts to pass a continuing resolution funding the government for 45-days, with Congress coming in on a weekend. There's a lot of complex politics going on, between a right-wing faction that seems as interested in drama as day to day governance, Democratic interests in more expansionist efforts, the matters of Ukraine, and some politicians not being present due to COVID or death. With a bill getting through the House on widely-bipartisan efforts (with 90 Republicans and only 1 Democratic Representative voting no), some Republicans are pondering whether this will be seen as an admission of weakness. The current one's a fairly far cry from the much more significant cuts that previously faced both Democratic . That's fairly standard politics, though.
Instead, we have something hilarious:
(Bowman later voted for the bill.)
There's obvious comparisons to Other High-Profile Incidents though they're pretty inapt; as funny as Bowman photoshopped into the Lectern Thief's or Qanon Shaman's faces is, the lack of trespassing does matter. Between this, Santos pretending he's a whole lot more interesting than he was, The Squad playing with edgy racism, and Boebert giving an inexpert handjob during the showing of Beetlejuice, all we need now is a pregnancy and a Congressman buying shitty alcohol with a fake id to complete the whole high school bad decisions spread. To really complete the farce and the metaphor, Bowman's background includes some time spent as work at a school that would suspend or expel people for this. Bowman's claim to have confused an alarm system and a door release is not especially likely, but it's enough of a fig leaf that I'll be surprised if the House GOP's resolution to expel him goes anywhere, let alone the potential charges for falsely pulling a fire alarm in DC. Bowman's district is 84% Democratic, so it'd not mean anything even if he were to voluntarily resign, and it's not like he's Menendez.
Maybe he'll end up with a token fine? I'd be surprised.
Which doesn't matter, but eventually you run into the "that's how escalation works" bit.
My objection has never been your tone. And while I'll object to individual factual claims, they're things that can be discussed. My objection has long been that your oppressed means nothing and everything. So let's be very explicit:
And from my perspective, all of you saying "Yes, we are oppressed because (hypothetical, hypothetical, vaguely related anecdote)" are redefining "oppression" to mean "Elections don't always go the way I want and laws I don't like sometimes get passed."
Do you think this is the claim? Do you think that is what motivates people like FCfromSSC, or what motivates my concerns?
Like, last time I tried this you accused me of gish-galloping, so this is more for everybody else, but just to be clear exactly what the scope we're talking about:
You will still be able to proclaim your right wing views in public.
No, I can't. Trivially, we're here because the last forum started shutting down random posters, and the place before that our presence was so severe that it got someone's name in the New York Times (to everyone's surprise as a smear piece) and they had a mental breakdown. Just as trivially, Damore predated your post. FCFromSSC has mentioned getting canceled by a friend over good faith disagreements, I've talked about how I've made significant sacrifices in my career and social and romantic life to reduce the threat and still am subject to it.
My go to example right now is the guy who built Modded Minecraft's very foundations in Forge getting canceled so hard that, when he resisted, his fellow project leads had their employers invoked as part of the ultimatum. Actually true statements of law get pulled from major social media, when offered by randos with tiny followings. Rittenhouse couldn't use GoFundMe, and when people did use a different vendor to donate, that company got hacked, and some of them got fired for <30 USD donations -- the organization that doxxed them is affiliated with Harvard and no one cares. VCDL has e-mail providers and YouTube dropping them without explanation or even reference to a broken rule, ARFCOM got blammed off GoDaddy without notice, so on.
But there's not snipers waiting to make my head Just Do That should I say the wrong words, nor am I required by law to strap on a voice-activated bomb collar before going outdoors; sometimes people even resist these attacks successfully (or at least the sort of 'success' that throws away their futures in exchange for symbolic victories and the grifter circuits). Hell, it's not even as bad as that other country declaring martial law emergency powers, confiscating property, which you were "not sure I agree it's "oppression" but it's fucked."
You will not be living in a leftist authoritarian state with "struggle sessions" forcing you to say you love Big Brother.
Those DEI sessions I mentioned last time in that post you didn't find impressive? They're back! Or more accurately never really went away. And state attempts to block them have been blocked in turn. "Diversity statements" are de jour in academia. Gallup considers it a failure than 'only' 41% of managers and 42% of employees have received DEI/racial justice training. While I'm too old for it to be a concern personally, schools have not only formalized official support for protesting ("no official repercussions" if the students don't play along, just an official assignment asking them to explain why they complied).
Do you need more examples? Because it's kinda awkward to dance around the ones I've experienced directly outside of these domains without doxing myself, but I can continue.
Right wing media and right wing politicians will still have power and influence. Trump will not be the last Republican president.
yyyyaaaaayyy.
There will still be religion and people who say homosexuality is a sin and trans people bad (and teach it to their children, who are not taken away from them).
The closest thing we've had to a slowdown here is Newsom vetoing a rule requiring judges to consider it for custody hearings; it's still policy. Demkovich was overturned, but the dissent pointed out that the 9th Circuit had case law going the other direction, and it's not like it's a one-off.
It's not room temperature, fair.
The left will not be murdering political enemies with impunity...
Modulo Matthew Dolloff, sure. And there's some rough spots for people who tried and failed: we still don't even know what happened to Grosskruetz's concealed carry permit, and obviously he's never been and never going to be tried for either the unlawful carry nor threatening a teenager, in contrast to Dominick Black. And then there's the places where the shooters or the shot are a little more complicated to discuss.
But it's not that many people getting shot! Sometimes they have to post bail! Hell, Finicum wouldn't even be that sympathetic, were it not for the hilariously bad behavior of federal law enforcement and the long toleration of many occupations efforts. So it's not Oppression.
There will probably still be problems with race and crime.
... this one didn't even make sense contemporaneously. Yes, and? That the progressive tribe neither can fix these problems, and benefits from motioning around them, is one of FCFromSSC's positions.
And for bonus points:
A combination of the teacher's union and local collaborators called in the FBI over school board meetings. Individual people have called in the EEOC over a hat. The DoJ's OCR is investigating a college for using gendered bathrooms and abolishing a diversity program, feds and fed courts for mask mandates, so on. One group of teachers alleged did not report bullies to local administrators, nor punish them themselves, so that they could use the 'ignored' bad actions as part of a DoE complaint to bring the feds down harder on violations of leftist norms.
The ATF is in the middle of an aggressive crackdown on FFLs and home gunsmithing, the EPA fights over drainage ditches, the ADA has brought a small army of 'testers' that will happily demand the rebuild of services they never intend to buy, people are regularly asking the feds to treat GOP governors offering bus or plane rides to undocumented immigrants like kidnapping. And these are just the serious ones, where there's investigations and publicity and lawsuits and media coverage. It's worse in Blue Tribe areas, but you couldn't run from this stuff a decade ago (literally, in the case of Masterpiece Cakeshop).
Which, hey, these are just policy disagreements! Sometimes ones that the Blue Tribe doesn't even immediately win! No one's getting shot in the face, it's not jazzhands oppression, at least by the pre-Civil War slavery one, if less so by the modern Harvard one.
But are these things happening? Can you imagine why people might think of them as something more than just "laws I don't like sometimes get passed"? Can you imagine why, when you say:
I assert, essentially, that your Doomer "We have lost and Red Tribe will no longer have rights" is absolutely, 100% wrong and will continue to be proven wrong.
it's an absolute non sequitor from the post you were responding to, and absolutely nonsensical as a position that everyone must wait for before they are allowed to respond or complain or recognize a pattern?
... how did that post start again?
Here's a wager. Obviously if I'm wrong, you'll never be able to collect, but anyway.
Emphasis added.
You could meaningfully argue if some of these things aren't true. I'd love to hear it! As I frequently point out at the end of these rants, I'm not an accelerationist, I'd love to hear how they're wrong, and part of my frustration here is that FCFromSSC (or Hradzka on twitter) have given far better version of that than you have. You can point out that it's not as bad as prebellum era slavery or the 1940s South (correctly!), or the treatment of gay men in the 1900s, or (much more arguably) of communists in the McCarthy era.
You can not correctly argue, short of disproving them, that these are "(hypothetical, hypothetical, vaguely related anecdote)".
FOSS and The XZ Problem
A critical vulnerability (CVE-2024-3094) was discovered in the XZ Utils library on March 29th, 2024. This severe flaw allows attackers to remotely execute arbitrary code on affected systems, earning it the highest possible score (10) on both the CVSS 3.1 and CVSS 4.0 scoring systems due to its immediate impact and wide scope.
The exploit would allow remote code execution as root in a wide majority of systemd-based Linux (and Mac OSX, thanks homebrew!) machines. There's some reasonable complaints that some CVE ratings are prone to inflation, but this has absolutely earned a 10/10, would not recommend. Thankfully, this was caught before the full exploit made it to many fixed release Linux distros, and most rolling-release distros either would not have updated so quickly or would not yet be vulnerable (and, presumably, will be updating to fixed versions of XZ quickly), with the exception of a handful of rarely-used Debian options. Uh, for the stuff that's been caught so far.
Summary and FAQ, for the more technically minded reader, the NIST CVE is here, background of initial discovery at here.
Ok, most of us who'd care remember Heartbleed. What's different here?
In this case, the exploit was near-certainly introduced intentionally by a co-maintainer of the library XZ Utils, by smuggling code into a binary test file, months apart from adding calls to execute that test file from live environments, and then working to hide any evidence. The combination of complexity in the attack (requiring fairly deep knowledge of a wide variety of Linux internals) and bizarreness of exploit steps (his FOSS history is sprinkled with a replacing safe functions with their unsafe precursors, or adding loose periods in cmake files) leaves nearly zero chance that this is unintentional, and the guy has since disappeared. He was boosted into co-maintainership only recently, and only after the original maintainer was pressured to pick him up by a strangely large barrage of very picky users. The author even pushed to have these updates shoved into Fedora early.
Most mainstream technical advisories aren't outright calling this a nation-state actor, but The Grugq is pretty willing to describe whoever did it as an 'intelligence agency', whether government or private, and with cause. Both the amount of effort and time put into this attack is vast, and the scope of vulnerability it produced extreme -- though this might be the 'cope' answer, since an individual or small-private-group running this level of complex attack is even more disturbing. It's paranoid to start wondering how much of the discussion aimed encouraging XZ's maintainer to take on the bad actor here as a co-maintainer, but as people are having more and more trouble finding evidence of their existence since, it might not be paranoid enough.
There's a lot of potential takeaways:
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The Many Eyes theory of software development worked. This was an incredibly subtle attack that few developers would have been able to catch, by an adversary willing to put years into developing trust and sneaking exploit in piecemeal.
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Except it was caught because a Microsoft (Postgres!) developer, without looking at the code, noticed a performance impact. Shit.
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This attack heavily exploited access through the FOSS community: the author was able to join sight-unseen through a year of purely digital communications, and the 'business decision' of co-maintainership came through a lot of pressure from randos or anons.
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Except that's something that can happen in corporate or government environments, too. There are places where every prospective employee gets a full background check and a free prostate exam, but they're the outlier even for dotmil spheres. Many employers are having trouble verifying that prospective recruits can even code, and most tech companies openly welcome recent immigrants or international workers that would be hard to investigate at best. Maybe they would have recognized that the guy with a stereotypical Indian name didn't talk like a native Indian, but I wouldn't bet on even that. And then there's just the stupid stuff that doesn't have to involve employees at all.
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The attack space is big, and probably bigger than it needs to be. The old school of thought was that you'd only 'really' need to do a serious security audit of services actually being exposed, and perhaps some specialty stuff like firewall software, but people are going to be spending months looking for weird calls in any software run in privileged modes. One of many
boneheadedcontroversial bits of systemd was the increased reliance on outside libraries compared to precursors like SysV Init. While some people do pass tar.xz around, XZ's main use in systemd seems to be related to loading replacement keys or VMs, and it's not quite clear exactly why that's something that needs to be baked into systemd directly. -
But a compression library seems just after cryptographic libraries are a reasonable thing to not roll your own, and even if this particular use for this particular library might have been avoidable, you're probably not going to be able to trim that much out, and you might not even be able to trim this.
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There's a lot of this that seems like the chickens coming home to roost for bad practices in FOSS development: random test binary blobs ending up on user systems, build systems that either fail-silently on hard-to-notice errors or spam so much random text no one looks at it, building from tarballs, so on.
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But getting rid of bad or lazy dev practices seems one of those things that's just not gonna happen.
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The attacker was able to get a lot of trust so quickly because significant part of modern digital infrastructure depended on a library no one cared about. The various requests for XZ updates and co-maintainer permissions look so bizarre because in a library that does one small thing very well, it's quite possible only attackers cared. 7Zip is everywhere in the Windows world, but even a lot of IT people don't know who makes it (Igor Patlov?).
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But there's a lot of these dependencies, and it's not clear that level of trust was necessary -- quite a lot of maintainers wouldn't have caught this sort of indirect attack, and no small part of the exploit depended on behavior introduced to libraries that were 'well'-maintained. Detecting novel attacks at all is a messy field at best, and this sort of distributed attack might not be possible to detect at the library level even in theory.
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And there's far more varied attack spaces available than just waiting for a lead dev to burn out. I'm a big fan of pointing out how much cash Google is willing to throw around for a more visible sort of ownage of Mozilla and the Raspberry Pi Foundation, but the full breadth of the FOSS world runs on a shoestring budget for how much of the world depends on it working and working well. In theory, reputation is supposed to cover the gap, and a dev with a great GitHub commit history can name their price. In practice, the previous maintainer of XZ was working on XZ for Java, and you haven't heard of Lasse Collin (and may not even recognize xz as a file extension!).
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((For culture war bonus points, I can think of a way to excise original maintainers so hard that their co-maintainers have their employment threatened.))
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There's been calls for some sort of big-business-sponsored security audits, and as annoying as the politics of that get, there's a not-unreasonable point that they should really want to do that. This particular exploit had some code to stop it from running on Google servers (maybe to slow recognition?), but there's a ton of big businesses that would have been in deep shit had it not been recognized. "If everyone's responsible, no one is", but neither the SEC nor ransomware devs care if you're responsible.
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But the punchline to the Google's funding of various FOSS (or not-quite-F-or-O, like RaspberryPi) groups is that even the best-funded groups aren't doing that hot, for even the most trivial problem. Canonical is one of the better-funded groups, and it's gotten them into a variety of places (default for WSL!) and they can't bother to maintain manual review for new Snaps despite years of hilariously bad malware.
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But it's not clear that it's reasonable or possible to actually audit the critical stuff; it's easier to write code than to seriously audit it, and we're not just a little shy on audit capabilities, but orders of magnitude too low.
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It's unlikely this is the first time something like this has happened. TheGrugq is professionally paranoid and notes that this looks like bad luck, and that strikes me more as cautious than pessimistic.
The Colorado Supreme Court holds:
[recent related discussion, slightly older]
The Colorado Presidential Primary is scheduled for March 5th, for both parties. As the decision notes, January 4, 2024 is "the day before the Secretary’s deadline to certify the content of the presidential primary ballot)"; while the matter is open to further stay should federal courts intervene, such an intervention would itself determine at least the state presidential primary.
How are the procedural protections? From the dissent:
And the other dissent:
and
Did the Colorado Supreme Court provide a more serious and deep analysis of the First Amendment jurisprudence, at least?
There are interpretations here other than that of the Russell Conjugation: that stochastic terrorism is limited to this tiny portion of space, or perhaps that shucks there just hasn't ever been some opportunity to worry about it ever before and they're tots going to consistently apply this across the political spectrum in the future. They are not particularly persuasive to me, from this expert.
Perhaps more damning, this is what the majority found a useful one to highlight : a sociology professor who has been playing this tune since 2017.
If you put a gun to my head, I'd bet that this is overturned, or stayed until moot. But that's not a metaphor I pick from dissimilarity.
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