gattsuru
8hr ago
There are only 5k full-time ATF employees. This will do you very little good if they shoot you and your little dog, too.
Perhaps more critically, there is a much broader number of people who aren't full-time ATF employees but will quite happily shoot you and your little dog, too, on the ATF's say-so, and an even broader number who will complain heartily about the ATF misbehavior but give information to them because their jobs and livelihoods (and lives, see above) all depend on it.
The DEA might have lost the war when they didn't have enough people to handle fifty million potheads, but they didn't get to that point because of their headcount, but because state after state and organization after organization decided to stop playing along. Meanwhile, if you care about ATF leaving their body cameras at home before shooting Malinowski in the head, you're some wacko.
What's really awful is what happens when people realize this at scale. Like TraceWoodgrains' notice that Republicans have no white-collar institutional power transforming into an idea that those white-collar institutions will march triumphant, quite a lot of people assume that this means there is no option in defiance but to just keep trying these routines, harder.
Whether or not alternatives exist, there are dozens of far messier options to try.
Namely I thought it was a little weird how focused Hanania was on making sure workplaces be more conducive to finding sexual partners...
While I expect the answer for Hanania specifically is that he's reaching for whatever weapons are available, there are some very serious problems, here:
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Full-time workers are spending about a third of their waking lives at their workplaces, a sizable portion of their Dunbar-sphere will be made of coworkers, and under current law employers can be liable even for after-hours and off-campus behavior by employees. In many career fields, it's common to spend months with little chance for a social life outside of the office at all. Maybe the 20% of couples just meet up right outside of work, but I'd expect that we're not so lucky, and at least some aren't getting BATNAs.
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Worse, the modern rule isn't just 'don't fuck your employees/coworkers', but against wide breadths of discussion and behavior adjacent to sex or gender stuff. Enforcement is hilariously inconsistent even in places where employers care (and the number of bullshit lawsuits are Known enough that normal people are often hesitant to bring genuine ones), so people can act as though a lot of this stuff is still allowed, but once you get above a certain size of company you start getting insurers/lawyers/politicians peering in and insisting that your workplace complies so that enforcement Won't Be Necessary. As a result, a lot of spaces for vertical transmission of knowledge about matters of sex and romance no longer exist, or have been thoroughly commandeered into a state-favored presentation.
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Avoiding the appearance -- or possibility -- of impropriety has serious and significant costs. I'm not sure how much I trust the specific numbers for 'MeToo made men afraid to mentor women', but the end result of that policy ends up meaning I've got a Fun Ethics Question when my workplace has me share a hotel room with a (afaik straight, not my type) guy. This isn't taking all the fun out of workplace socialization, but it's a big and vast set of constraints, often ones heavily dependent on local social norms.
The end result of a sexless public space for men... well, we have examples from other spheres that had to move sex to fully private spaces, and the alternatives that they've developed kinda work, but they come at tremendous cost. Online dating started out rough, and it's since vanished up its own backside in a mix of borderline fraud and unrealistic standards. Bars and mixers have come coincidentally along with a hefty incidence of alcoholism and other abuses.
For Scott:
When I think of wokeness, I think of the great cultural turn around 2010 - 2015... Hanania has no explanation for this. He talks about civil rights laws that have been in place since 1964 (he does say that maybe the new civil rights bill signed in 1991 inspired that decade’s interest in “political correctness”, but The Closing Of The American Mind, generally considered the opening shot in that debate, was published in 1987). Why would 1964 and 1991 laws turn wokeness into a huge deal in 2015? Hanania has no answer.
Again, Hanania might not have an answer because he doesn't care enough to think one necessary, but there's a pretty easy and obvious one.
The Civil Rights Act was intended as written under a hilariously narrow scope for all of its wide claims. That lead to hard cases, and even as late at the 1980s the courts were struggling with matters like whether it was discriminatory if an employer (allegedly) raped an employee, and into the late-90s if it would be discriminatory even if the victim was male. There weren't just hard cases in that they involved sympathetic victims and extremely bad behavior, or even whether they could be arguably within the intent or text of the Civil Rights Act, but because they were also near-universally around things that were separately violations of common state laws that had existed for quite some time, at a time where and when the public was unwilling to allow businesses to wash hands of bad acts by their employees. Government advocates and private lawyers had a pick of both clear violations of the text of this law, or arguable cases for this law that shocked the conscience.
((Scalia delivered Oncale, for example.))
But to do so, the CRA1964 had to establish an industry around fighting racism. The EEOC isn't not five commissioners at a table; it had around 350 employees in the 1960s, which grew into the thousands by the late 1990s. Nor was it alone; other offices downstream of or expanded by the CRA include the Commission on Civil Rights, the (various) Office for Civil Rights, the Office for Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity, DOE Civil Rights Division, so on. And then around that, built up an industry around selecting and prosecuting private lawsuits, and training people to do this, and training people to train. Now, when the law and interpretation was constrained, and overt discrimination (or bad-for-other-reasons-argued-as-discrimination) cases had the pick of both plaintiff and employer, most cases kept close to the core.
That changed. Some legislation made it easier (eg, the 1991 revision allowed some vaguely-defined set of suits with a theory of discrimination that could not identify specifically discriminatory policies or actions, or to get attorney's fees and thus cases on contingency without proving damages), but the grander problem is that you now had thousands of people who's job was to find discriminatory actors, who were trained to notice the most subtle hints of it, and in no small part who believed in the mission. An increasing number, by the close of the 1990s, had literally never known a world without an EEOC and the norms it wanted to apply across the country; many had been trained by those who worked up through the EEOC's wishcasting of policies it wanted.
That's how you get a lawsuit with an appeal's court opinion released in 2010, about a complaint first pushed in 2006, revolving around the sort of "general civility code" that Oncale specifically disavowed. It's how you get related cases that similarly emphasis a general theory of Bad Person. And it matches the timeline far closer than the standard motions around college campuses or SomethingAwful refuges.
That doesn't make Hanania right -- there's a lot of other stuff in the history, if you poke at it, and that's not to mention that just for this there's a pile of executive orders and regulatory notices and all the social junk around the 2008/2006 elections -- but there's a lot more to this stuff than just looking at the dates laws were implemented.
gattsuru
3d ago
That letter and five bucks won't buy you a cup of coffee, these days.
I'm very far from sure what Abbott intends for the Texas Education Agency to do/not do, but one important thing to remember is that, for states and federales, the law saying "shall" means absolutely squat without a directly connected enforcement mechanism and someone who can actually press the button on it. This letter might trigger ESEA compliance review stuff, since ESEA state plans have to comply with federal law in general (though it might not trigger until the next review?), but that ends up with a bunch of meetings before the feds can refuse to provide state funding. Title IX proper is supposed to depend on complaints filed regarding specific acts of discrimination (within 180 days of the act, not adjudicated by other bodies, yada), after which the DoE meets with, which (excluding criminal cases not relevant here) if refused can result in "initiate proceedings to suspend, terminate, or refuse to grant or continue Federal financial assistance to the recipient".
I expect Abbott's more relying on unrelated stays slowing any enforcement -- which seems a mediocre bet, since on one hand you've got the Fifth Circuit, but on the other it's this has been the writing on the wall since Bostock -- but barring that he's playing chicken.
(no, blue states have not denied federal forces the ability to operate, their examples of arguable nullification are more noncooperation than open defiance and resistance)
The line gets murky: refusing to honor an ICE detainer is probably noncooperation from a non-commandeering sense, but literally sneaking an illegal immigrant out the back door to help evade an ICE officer... well, there's a lot of metaphors where the Little People doing unfavored things would be sitting in jail.
gattsuru
19hr ago
They will absolutely wreck you in Vintage Story, to the point where they're more feared than most of the not!zombie enemies. Only the Bells, as mob-summoners, are really worse; even the T3 and T4 drifters can do comparable damage, but they're much slower, where your best hope when being chased by a brown bear before getting iron or steel armor involves trying to pit trap or outswim them.
Thems Fighting Herds has Huggles, who acts as the final boss for each arcade mode run, and is frankly unfairly hard. There's a bonus mode version you can play as that's even more overpowered, though it's intended for the rest of a multiplayer fight to team up against whoever gets to play the bear.
The Elder Scrolls have pretty consistently had bears as some of the most dangerous enemies, to the point where they could out-match some lesser dragons in Skyrim.
I've had Tribal runs in Rimworld wrecked by an early-game bear manhunter, though I dunno if that was vanilla or a mod. The Long Dark has some dangerous bears, though once you've got a good rifle setup and prep they're kinda loot pinatas.
I guess maybe Five Nights at Freddies, for a loose enough definition?
But yeah, they're definitely often treated as far less threatening or dangerous than they should be, even in some survival-themed games.
gattsuru
1d ago
I'm not sure whether it's better to respond with a furry fandom joke, a Baldur's Gate joke, or with a Vintage Story joke.
gattsuru
2d ago
I would... not be so sure the administration can avoid it if Biden wanted. See the Kincaid v. Williams denial of cert (starts at page 39) from last year as an example of what's going to start coming down the pike in earnest: a very broad law with expansive reads of standing, on a matter extremely sympathetic to progressive-leaning and left-leaning judges, and where individual private actors can bring a private right of action with staggeringly high penalties, and a ton of opportunity to forum shop.
Philosophically, there's a fun question about the difference between sending in the troops and charging 150k for each violation, but there's a point where the practical difference gets pretty small, and it happens pretty quick when the target's main assets will also be the tools necessary to not comply.
A Linux Cancellation
Vaxry, the creator and maintainer of hyprland, has been banned from FreeDesktop.Org and its member projects.
Background and Dramatis Personae
The Linux pipeline to an actual desktop is complicated and made of a bunch of moving parts, buried under the actual GUI itself, following the dual Linux philosophies of having everything do one task well(ish), and filling technical discussion with as many three-letter acronyms as possible. A historically important one is the X Window System, also known as X11 or xorg, but is both long in the tooth, covers an unusually wide area of ground for a Linux component, and is incredibly janky. While incredibly important for normal desktop users, the system has a long and bizarre history, with long periods of strife or minimal development: the current FreeDesktop space is technically just an independent github competitor for Linux desktop-specific development, but in practice there's a lot of RedHat Linux people in high places, in no small part because RHEL is the biggest way to be a linux dev and actually make money from it.
In recent years, many X11 developers have moved over to create a new version that better separates responsibility between the display protocol and everything else, along with covering a number of places that X11 just made bad mistakes in 1990 has been stuck with since, and this has turned into Wayland (and some related libraries like wl-roots), developed on the FreeDesktop.org gitlab. It's not quite ready for prime-time, especially for tasks like gaming with a nVidia card, but it's getting pretty close, and there are already some capabilities (eg, multiple displays with different refresh rates) that are a single text-file mod away in Wayland and you'd have an inconsistent time with in X11.
While some existing desktop environments, such as KDE, have worked to directly port over from X11 to Wayland, many Linux devs have taken the opportunity to try Weird and New things, instead, either because the need to develop several components previously internal to X11 seems like the best opportunity for such novel task, or because they're Linux devs. One branch consists of tiling window managers: while not new to Linux (or even Windows, they've taken some increasing popularity in the Wayland environment. Two of the most popular current ones are Hyprland and Sway. Though I'll caveat that popular here means you can find people using it: there's reason it's hard to find packages for them outside, and even harder to find prebuilt distros with it enabled. (Manjaro has a Sway community iso, in case you want to make three bad decisions at once.) Both are independently developed from FreeDesktop, though dependent on the Freedesktop-built wl-roots library.
Hyprland was founded by the psuedoanon Vaxry. I've described it in other contexts as catgirl thighhigh, and even the official github glamour shots are very clearly within that ethos, with many of the community themes being even more so. You could force it to look Professional, but the defaults provide a bizarre combination of mouseless window management, varied and sometimes obnoxious keyboard combinations, a fully text-based and live-updated config system, strong support for transparency and multiple desktops virtual or otherwise, and highly performant and kinda goofy animations (and fucking default-on rounded window corners, wtf). You don't have to own a Blahaj to like the theme, but there's a cluster of personality types that it seems to appeal toward, and the other half of them involve the sorta person that can leave leekspin on repeat for five hours on a second monitor and find it keeps getting funnier every single time they see it. Sway is intended as a drop-in-replacement for the much-older (x11) i3, and [a little more professional/grognardy in its base form, for better (hypr considered a license switch in a PR without having consulted a lawyer first) and worse (manual tiling).
Like a lot of Linux desktop environments (begun, the why-is-gnome-pronounced-that-way wars have), they Don't Like Each Other. Hyprland gives Sway special thanks "For showing how 2 do stuff the overkill way", Sway's original author has written multiple blogposts over the last six months with names like "Hyprland is a toxic community". This mostly didn't matter for Freedesktop.Org, though, since it's the sorta linux space where things like an official irc server would be a little too newfangled and a little out-of-scope.
And They Kept Using Discord
Which means most of the drama happens in weakly-affiliated channels. Hyprland has a Discord server, and while its membership is a mix of Blahaj and leekspinners, its ethos is very much toward the latter. In addition to mainstay stuff like a server ruleset that might as well be summarized as "don't make me come over there", right under announcements channel is the #days-since-vaxry-was-an-idiot, and not far under that is the official list of all accepted fanart of hyprchan, the hyprland mascot. (I didn't say the leekspin side was never trans, anymore than the blahaj side solely trans.) But while the server and Vaxry were willing to tolerate and use what could charitably be called 4chan humor and more accurately be called rude and bad jokes, they do keep to the rule poc||gtfo.
In early March, a Red Hat employee operating under the auspices of FreeDesktop contacted Vaxry about things he, and moderators of his Discord, had done. And to be fair, there's some pretty embarrassingly childish behavior, there: a couple years ago Vaxry joked with wanting to get AIDs as a the same as identifying as gay, and separately a moderator screwed around with a user's public profile (then at the time, the only way to put pronouns up) for yucks. However, toward the end, that employee spelled out that that "... if more bad and more recent behavior ends up coming to our attention - it can be damaging to freedesktop's reputation as well, and we would have to consider steps to protect our community's reputation". Vaxry took this as a threat, and this escalated, first with the Red Hat employee highlighting that "The code of conduct team absolutely has the right to remove you from Freedesktop.org and ban you from the gitlab instance", and then when, when Vaxry said "further emails from the freedesktop.org's Code of Conduct team will now be ignored unless You, as a team, decide to change Your attitude wrt. the issue at hand", the freedesktop Code of Conduct team pulling that trigger, Vaxry put various comments on his blog, yada yada.
Bang-Bang! Maxwell's silver hammer came down upon his head.
Both Vaxry and the unnamed RedHat employee come across as prats in the e-mail chain. It's very easy to read that chain as RedHat wanting on paper an official "It won't happen again" commitment and show of contrition, especially as hypr has become a bigger part of the wayland world (there's no serious census, but hypr's userbase seems the biggest among novel Wayland compositors; hyprcursor is genuinely a major improvement over the fucked-up xcursor, and has no serious competitors). It's also very easy to see this e-mail exchange as somewhere between requiring hypr spaces to act fully under RedHat corporate norms, and more cynically hanging up a Sword of Damocles for later -- even assuming arguendo that Vaxry's behavior retroactively justified the threat in the first e-mail, it made it very clear it was a threat.
((And for various reasons it's a little concerning to have two desktop environment developers that aren't quite clear on how capitalization works.))
There's a certain irony in the stolid and more formal Sway being the Blue-Tribe-themed one, and the purple-and-pink-and-blue-everywhere unprofessional hypr-active world being the not-Blue-Tribe-themed one, but there's another sense where it's not a huge surprise.
Ostensibly, this shouldn't matter much. Yes, hyprland and wayland and wl-roots are still buggy messes. But to the extent hyprland might be more vulnerable now to Wayland or wl-roots bugs, if Vaxry can't supply PRs or even bug reports to wl-roots, it'll drive the fixes to hypr, to the broader Wayland ecosystems' detriment. There are other people using hypr that could still report it up (and Vaxry has already forked wl-roots). In practice, any dev taking hypr-like conventions, especially newer devs, can and should be a little cautious in freedesktop environments, and there's already been a slow siddle away from hypr among the influencer set. There's been calls in some package managers to pull the project after some early posts from DeVault, which to be fair have been mostly rejected; we'll see if that changes. Which still doesn't matter.
But there's a tendency among a Certain Set to talk about how cancel culture has peaked, or how it doesn't impact 'normal' people, or how it's just a fiction, and I think it's worth mentioning the examples that don't show up in google news or conventional culture war channels.
gattsuru
8d ago
Texas' law was somewhat unusual in that it had originally had prohibited heterosexual sodomy, but had been revamped, possibly by accident, such that only same-sex sodomy was actually punishable. Anal sex, among other things, was defined as "deviate sexual intercourse" regardless of who did it with whom, but it was only an offense if done with "another individual of the same sex".
((It also restricted homosexual oral sex, and possibly using a dildo or a sounding rod on someone else, though I've not seen any evidence of it actually being used in this way.))
And O'Connor's concurrence pushed on this hard: she held that it mattered that the state was expressed moral disapproval not of an act, but of an act being done by a group:
This case raises a different issue than Bowers: whether, under the Equal Protection Clause, moral disapproval is a legitimate state interest to justify by itself a statute that bans homosexual sodomy, but not heterosexual sodomy. It is not. Moral disapproval of this group, like a bare desire to harm the group, is an interest that is insufficient to satisfy rational basis review under the Equal Protection Clause. See, e. g., Department of Agriculture v. Moreno, 413 U. S., at 534; Romer v. Evans, 517 U. S., at 634-635. Indeed, we have never held that moral disapproval, without any other asserted state interest, is a sufficient rationale under the Equal Protection Clause to justify a law that discriminates among groups of persons.
(emphasis added)
But only O'Connor signed onto that concurrence, which even at the time came across as a nitpick. The majority opinion, which received five votes but not O'Connors, didn't rest on it being a status-based offense, in no small part because the courts were still trying avoid committing to treating homosexuality as a special status, with even status-based SCOTUS matters like Romer hiding behind rational basis. Lawrence argued certain types of 'intimate contact' outside the scope of the general police power, so it invalidated not just bans on (consensual private non-commercial adult) sodomy, but also a wide variety of other private behaviors.
The laws involved in Bowers and here are, to be sure, statutes that purport to do no more than prohibit a particular sexual act. Their penalties and purposes, though, have more far-reaching consequences, touching upon the most private human conduct, sexual behavior, and in the most private of places, the home. The statutes do seek to control a personal relationship that, whether or not entitled to formal recognition in the law, is within the liberty of persons to choose without being punished as criminals.
This, as a general rule, should counsel against attempts by the State, or a court, to define the meaning of the relationship or to set its boundaries absent injury to a person or abuse of an institution the law protects. It suffices for us to acknowledge that adults may choose to enter upon this relationship in the confines of their homes and their own private lives and still retain their dignity as free persons.
In theory. Like a lot of that era of SCOTUS jurisprudence, there's a decent chance that these lofty principles get smothered under balancing tests. It's not clear how this applies to situations like extreme BDSM; so far, the only relevant cases have generally alleged consent violations, sometimes pretty credibly. But where courts have had cause to evaluate restrictions under the assumption they would be applied in a consenting framework, they often do so by reframing Lawrence post-hoc, generally by promoting the O'Connor concurrence:
Under the Lawrence methodology, history and tradition continue to inform the analysis. See id. at 2598 (“History and tradition guide and discipline [the implied fundamental liberty interests] inquiry but do not set its outer boundaries.”). Yet, courts must consider not only the history and tradition of freedom to engage in certain conduct, but also any history and tradition of impermissible animus that motivates the legislative restriction on the freedom in order to weigh with appropriate rigor whether the government's interest in limiting some liberty is a justifiable use of state power or an arbitrary abuse of that power. In this respect, the conclusion reached here under the Glucksberg line of reasoning that there is no deeply rooted history or tradition of BDSM sexual activity remains relevant and important to the analysis. Also relevant and important to the analysis is the absence of a history of impermissible animus as the basis for the restriction at issue here. Sexual activity that involves binding and gagging or the use of physical force such as spanking or choking poses certain inherent risks to personal safety not present in more traditional types of sexual activity. Thus, as in Cruzan and Glucksberg, a legislative restriction on BDSM activity is justifiable by reference to the state's interest in the protection of vulnerable persons, i.e. sexual partners placed in situations with an elevated risk of physical harm. Accordingly, consistent with the logic of Lawrence, plaintiff has no constitutionally protected and judicially enforceable fundamental liberty interest under the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to engage in BDSM sexual activity.
((Probably not helped by the guy in that case probably being a douchebag.))
gattsuru
8d ago
If you're just trying to receive e-mails, Mail in a Box works pretty well 99% of the time. If you're largely just sending yourself notifications, with an account that's not used anywhere else of significance, it works 98%ish of the time. ((And even that's overkill; a basic postfix relay works.))
If you're trying to send e-mail, it can be messy, and worse unpredictably messy. Mailinabox tries to solve the absolute horror story that mail config turned into, and to be fair a lot of the tedious config-twisting stuff is no longer as frustrating as it once was. You can do it... for a while.
The issue is not that you might send enough e-mail to hit an automated spam filter yourself, or even the risk that you might misconfigure things in a way that a bad actor can abuse -- that's a concern with near-any server, and there's a lot of things like a SIP PBX where you just recognize and mitigate it. With e-mail, however, your domain and/or IP address can end up on sizable DNSBLs because some IP address half an octet away fucked up, or because some sysadmin in Europe had a stick up their ass that day. Surprisingly big-name people can misconfigure their own stuff, and break because you're not big enough to have been made an exception, and not even have reporting turned on: it's happened to me.
E-mail can be done fine for a toy project, or where you're measuring reliability by licking your finger and sticking it in the air rather than by count of nines. If you're going to move the system you use to handle your bank account's verification to it, or how you send bills to customers, you gotta be willing to put a lot of effort in and realize it may not work.
gattsuru
9d ago
There's been a number of other things going on in this space, either from financial drivers or more straightforward legal ones. You've already gotten a post on gumroad, but itch.io has been doing a slow-march version where they don't block adult content sales as a category, just individual pieces of adult content, which has kept going apace.
I've not found good proof that there's something Operation Chokepoint-like going on, but with the timing and the variety in impacted content, it's increasingly hard to believe that this is all occurring randomly.
On the direct legal attacks, in the furry sphere, some places have complied with local bans (eg, e621 blocks North Carolina, while others have largely ignored them and hoped they don't get made examples. There's good reason that they're rather paranoid about having to keep name-identifying records, since people have blown zero-days on FurAffinity.
gattsuru
10d ago
That seems a near-universal recipe to surrender any and every public to whatever jackass is willing to occupy it first, and then insist that they feel unsafe because The Wrong Person walked close to them or took pictures of their public protest. Dissolving 'starting a confrontation' at all makes the fundamental flaws of this framework, if anything, more apparent.
gattsuru
10d ago
Students for Justice in Palestine and Jewish Voice for Peace, along with a couple other umbrella groups, have jointly claimed credit for both the Columbia-specific protest and the follow-on encampments at a number of other schools. There's a fair criticism that there's at least a few rando Garbage People in the hradzka sense running around, or even agent provacateurs, but this isn't some Stand Alone Complex where the simulacrum had no real original version.
((The less charitable take on 'umbrella group' is that they're both just front groups for the actual coordinating organizations, but by definition I can only point to the subchapters and related organizations giving extremely similar messaging on short notice, or other more subtle signs that they've got intercampus communication going on that doesn't match the paper or training from the public faces.))
gattsuru
7d ago
Yeah, that's absolutely fair, and 'constructive possession' is in many ways just the tip of the iceberg, as bad as the shoestring machine is. Stuff like autokeycard, the various recent regulatory changes, Abramski, so on, very much show the limits of textual formalism as a control protecting the actually disfavored, even to the point of blocking defendants from raising the text.
gattsuru
9d ago
Visa and MasterCard see pornography as high risk because they get a lot of chargebacks, so they charge adult services producers a much higher rate for payment processing.
I think this would be plausible for a wide-spectrum ban on porn, if still uncertain since these companies have little trouble working with businesses that have increased chargeback risks otherwise and just slamming on fees.
I don't think it's remotely plausible for the common levels of specificity involved, here. There may well be higher (or lower) rates of chargeback for incest porn, or hypnosis or forced TF kink, or dragon dongs with too much red dye, but I'm incredibly skeptical that a) card companies have the data to actually know that, b) that these rates are so much higher that they can't be resolved by fees, and c) that there's no more immediate and less-financially-direct motivation.
gattsuru
8d ago
MindGeek claims to have the tech fully ready to go for a UK-standards version (and that's the subtext behind PornHub, a MindGeek subsidiary, not complying with the American age verification versions), and MindGeek says that it's actually in use in Germany since 2015. It's definitely the political economy of things.
There's some legal messiness about the standard of causation, but in an environment with any serious level of social trust, the Crumbley's would fall fast into the sphere where no one looks that closely at it, even had they just fallen down the stairs. Even gunnies whose literal jobs involve poking at the law agree with the moral question for this specific case. I'd be interested to know how consistently parents of teenagers who drive drunk are held criminally responsible, but I dunno that the data is really available in meaningful detail, and guns are different enough, and it'd still be a good arg in favor of tightening up the law then.
Part of that fall-through-cracks is because Michigan's statutes were pretty wonky: conviction for improper storage of firearm w/ a minor would have been far more clear-cut, but they didn't really clearly exist in 2021.
The court of appeals did, in fact try to spell this one out as good-for-this-ride-or-worse-only:
Finally, we share defendants’ concern about the potential for this decision to be applied in the future to parents whose situation viz-a-viz their child’s intentional conduct is not as closely tied together, and/or the warning signs and evidence were not as substantial as they are here. But those concerns are significantly diminished by several well-established principles. First, the principle that grossly negligent or intentional acts are generally superseding causes remains intact. We simply hold that with these unique facts, and in this procedural posture and applicable standard of review, this case falls outside the general rule regarding intentional acts because EC’s acts were reasonably foreseeable, and that is the ultimate test that must be applied.13 Second, our decision is based solely on the record evidence, and the actions and inactions taken by defendants despite the uniquely troubling facts of which they were fully aware. And this point is important, as although the judiciary typically recognizes that a decision’s precedent is limited by the facts at issue, it is particularly true when the court expresses that limitation.
The trouble's that there's not much social trust. The Crumbley's are going to prison for a decade because their kid had a hallucinations and intrusive thoughts that the parents blew off, and that's extremely bad. What if he'd just written a lot about depression, and they'd ignored that? If he'd had the same problems, but not gotten sent to the principal's office the same day? He was a 15-year-old they allowed to have effective control of a handgun, would that change if he was over 18? 21? 25? They didn't lock (or 'locked' with 0-0-0) firearms. If they used a cheap 20-USD trigger lock that doesn't actually work, would that have broken the chain of causation?
These are problems for any serious statute with where the caselaw involves a ton of phrases like 'reasonably foreseeable', but most serious statutes don't have a sizable lobby pushing for (and often getting!) laws enforcing blanket criminal consqeuences in related context. The parade-of-horribles where someone is criminally liable because 'obviously' the seller knew this guy shouldn't have a gun, he shot people is an implicit goal for the Brady Bunch. I'll give Rov_Scam props for stating outright "a number of requirements that seem onerous but that's the point", but that only makes Rov honest; it doesn't help with the general problem.
I can't find any records involving either person in the Pennsylvania court system, though given how crappy most court records are, that doesn't mean much.
The underlying complaint is here, and seems to be resting heavily on past adjudications by the State Board in 2010 (for Herr) and 2018 (for Wentworth). Like most state licensing laws, the definition of veterinary practice in Pennsylvania is very broad :
"Practice of veterinary medicine" includes, but is not limited to, the practice by any person who (i) diagnoses, treats, corrects, changes, relieves or prevents animal disease, deformity, injury or other physical, mental or dental conditions by any method or mode, including the prescription or administration of any drug, medicine, biologic, apparatus, application, anesthetic or other therapeutic or diagnostic substance or technique, (ii) performs a surgical operation, including cosmetic surgery, upon any animal, (iii) performs any manual procedure upon an animal for the diagnosis or treatment of sterility or infertility of animals, (iv) represents himself as engaged in the practice of veterinary medicine, (v) offers, undertakes, or holds himself out as being able to diagnose, treat, operate, vaccinate, or prescribe for any animal disease, pain, injury, deformity, or physical condition...
It's not obvious that ultrasounds (or possibly(?) selling bull semen?) are covered, and there's not a ton of great pragmatic arguments for it, but the courts have given near-complete carte blanche to regulatory agencies to anything even remotely near the borders. And for a wide variety of reasons this sorta thing is near-impossible to practically challenge even were courts willing to push back on it.
Given some of the coverage, though ("both men were advised by their former attorneys not to pay the fines or appear in court"), I'm not sure what happened was completely without any court behavior -- this may be referring to the 'court' of the board licensing group, which is more court in the kangaroo sense, but it also could be about enforcement summons for a conventional court. An actually fake arrest warrant wouldn't be unprecedented, but it's left me noticing I'm confused.
That said:
Rusty Herr was arrested the very next morning, April 11, at 6:30 a.m. at his home in Christiana.
gattsuru
7d ago
There's a lot of hilarious edge cases that proposal invokes -- could a gay man defend his partner's honour by claiming he just sucked at topping, missed the button every time? Was too short, just let the tip in? The Texas law in question prohibited stimulation with a sex toy (by a same-sex partner), but I've never seen evidence it was enforced; are we just giving up on that here? What happens with a penis sheathe? Strap-on over chastity cage (50+ images on e621)?
gattsuru
9d ago
That’s a moderate argument in favor of unsanctioned protest, if somewhat marred by one of its (first!) prongs turning into whether people like the protest goals or not.
But I don’t need an argument in favor of unsanctioned protest: my metrics there are far simpler. My problem here is not the presence of a protest, but your advocacy of a norm where whatever protest group that takes a public forum first gets to exclude people who disagree with their message.
There might be some edge cases where that’s an unfortunate compromise we have to take, but under vague concerns about ‘confrontation’ are little more than carte blanche
gattsuru
9d ago
32GB was possible on Sandy Bridge processors (technically 2011), but mid-range Westmere and Nehalim processors only supported 16GB(ish) for most of the consumer market, and even the high-end Bloomfield capped at 24GB. I'm not saying you didn't do it -- I've got a couple Xeon systems from that era floating around that could have -- but it was absolutely not a standard use case.
A more normal midrange system would be closer to 4GB, with 8GB as the splurge. You'd probably end up spending over 400 USD in RAM alone, plus needing to spec up your motherboard to support it (thanks, Intel for the fucky memory controller decision).
gattsuru
9d ago
There is something distinctly humorous about the CUNY machete lady being at the Columbia protest, at least, but a lot of what we do see is a mix of local students and professional activists.
gattsuru
9d ago
This is already the norm for legally-sanctioned protests, though, right? As I mentioned in other replies, it is common for police to prevent counter protestors from intruding on the space of protestors and vice versa.
That's actually a fun question! The rules for how police can separate protestors and counterprotestors are complex. And this clearly flops many important prongs of that test.
The video looks like it is taken at a courtyard, one of a dozen around the University. They aren’t holding captive the main amphitheater at Columbia or something, where yeah there would be a concern regarding the reasonable use of university amenities.
This thread is south of this video, which was from Yale, about access to a building. And I buy people being blocked from just a few public fora about as much as I buy someone being a 'little bit pregnant'.
Ironically, you could even argue that the courtyard is seeing greater facility during this protest, given the population density from the looks of it.
It was great, for the one side able to use it, isn't the most compelling argument for neutral access to public fora.
gattsuru
10d ago
Are we gonna get body-cam footage and be able to come to an independent judgment on the conduct of the government in the course of the raid?
No.
The Department of Justice confirmed to me and @JohnBoozman last night that the ATF agents involved in the execution of a search warrant of the home of Bryan Malinowski weren’t wearing body cameras. We will continue to press the Department to explain how this violation of its own policy could’ve happened and to disclose the full circumstances of this tragedy. Mr. Malinowski’s family and the public have a right to a full accounting of the facts.
gattsuru
14d ago
it took urban liberal Jewish/* lawyers to deploy it in practice?
I think urban liberal would have stood stronger on its own.
There's a few vendors that passed USDA clearance last year, though they've had production and funding problems that have kept its products from having too much of an impact on the store shelves, and it's not clear the tech is going to get there very soon.
On the other hand, when or if the tech does get there, there's not much trust that it's gonna be left for people to choose. Whether for environmental, animal suffering, or macroeconomic reasons, there's going to be a massive push to 'regulate the unpriced externalities' of conventional meat, and many routes for that, like restricting grazing permits, will be near-invisible to normal people.
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