Hm. I don't have time to touch on the deeper matters tonight -- and there's a lot to be explored in "sex makes everyone see like an artist does"! -- but the example of Zootopia porn is kinda interesting. There's definitely a lot of stuff in that genre that's either only 'fulfilling' in the sense of needing to wash your hands afterwards, or somewhere between junk food or lead paint chips, but there's also stories and artwork that are decently emotionally impactful, either to strong ends (eg RobCiveCat's work) or at least traumatic ones (eg Amadose's Cucking Comic).
I don't want to overstate that. The_Weaver's Pack Street series is a great example of Zootopia work, if not specifically Hopps-focused, and one that players heavily on tension (if more in the social or hubris senses than conventional horror), but is less masterpiece and more 'pretty decent fable under the porn'. For non-Zootopia works, Meesh's Little Buddy, Rund and McKinley's Associated Student Bodies, and a lot of Kyell Gold's work is porn, sometimes even to its detriment (ie a college gym shower scene that's just gratuitous), but also was helpful for a lot of people trying to get a grasp on their own interests and how they wanted to relate to others. I think I've mentioned tatsuchan18's S4S here before, but I still think it's one of the better illustrations of what certain types of submission are about, wedged into a bunch of incredibly unrealistic full-time-slave fantasy.
It's not some uranium-level enrichment, but neither is it just holes-and-poles. Won’t be something that's going to be impactful and resonant for everyone, but having the filters baked in on that isn't exactly a bad thing: contrast Catcher In The Rye for a mainstream and mostly-school-appropriate work that falters because it isn't 'for' most of its typical audience.
((M/m or f/f incest remains with some level of taboo, if you want to near-completely remove genetic health concerns, even in the furry fandom... though there's also a lot of people still focusing on it prominently. Not my kink, but no few of them are writers or artists I otherwise like. Which at first sounds like it would not be denying the 'fails to enrich culture' bit, but I'm... not sure that's true, even there, at least universally: ItTastesLikeGreen's non-incest works are unusually people-focused in a way that makes me expect at least some of his incest ones are, too.))
There's a tension where, sure, human-lead artwork can have these deeper themes and meanings, but MLgen does not. That's... mostly true, at least for now; there's only a tiny handful of AI-assisted works with prolonged content and context, rather than just pinup, and much of that content is added by humans in post. It can, contra greyenlightenment, exist for shock value as much or more than gratification, sometimes relatively subtle and non-pornographic shock value, or to communicate other messages, but a lot of it's just pinup level. I'm not sure that reflects an innate incapability, though, so much as limitations of the tools and most people just not wanting to say that much that deep.
There's the escape clause where at least some prurient content is detracting from human culture, and that's probably true under most definitions of the common good -- I don't trust most arguments about fantasy kink tricking or forcing people into real-world bad action, but there's at least some media both pornographic and otherwise that's simply filled with "hey kids try this at home"-level bad advice, and some ugly even more complicated cases. But in turn that's true about wide swathes of content, to such an extent that it provides little meaningful guidance. It's not like the contentless wolfman pinups are less related to some attempts are more engaging adult works than the contentless still lifes are from engaging conventional paintings.
The New York Times reports:
Investigators responding to arson fires at two ballot boxes in the Pacific Northwest this week found devices at both scenes marked with the words “Free Gaza,” according to two law enforcement officials. Investigators are trying to determine if the perpetrator was actually a pro-Palestinian activist or someone using that prominent cause to sow discord, one of the officials said, speaking on condition of anonymity because the investigation was ongoing. But the message has added a heightened layer of political sensitivity to a closely watched investigation in the final days of a tense presidential election.
The “Free Gaza” message appeared not only on the two devices, which were discovered on Monday, but also on a device found at a third ballot box this month in Vancouver, according to the law enforcement officials. That device also had the words “Free Palestine” on it. Officials said at a news conference that they believed all three events were linked. They later released surveillance images of a suspect vehicle, asking for the public’s help in identifying the person driving a dark, early 2000s Volvo.
I think he's a public education/special education careerist with a public outreach focus, though I've not been able to track it down much further than that (who names a company EDU_?).
That's an interesting and complex question.
The big problem is that as the government funding -- and other government capabilities -- take over larger and larger portions of the economy, that line becomes more and more complicated to hold. It's long been policy that "separation of church and state" (technically, the establishment clause: socas is just Jefferson's take) doesn't prohibit the government from paving a road or cleaning up a sidewalk just because a church might use it. Otherwise, you're discriminating against religious organizations as compared to everyone else. When government-granted services and opportunities were not omnipresent, that was not especially hard to handle, because no one (... except... ) cares about a road being paved.
In the modern era, everything from roof repairs to STEM programs to YMCAs to battered women's shelters to horses-for-healing to opera houses to, yes, schools, get cash money. And that's just the Ohio One Time Strategic Community Investment Fund! In the whole-scale situation, the government gets involved everywhere from permitting to insurance to background checks and so on.
To say these things can't draw on government funds is not to avoid government entanglement; it's to provide massive additional constraints specific only to religious projects.
Wise To The World
Ohio Capital Journal reports:
Westerville City Schools Board of Education voted 4-0 last week to end a religious release time policy that allowed LifeWise Academy to take public school students out of class to conduct Bible instruction during school hours. [...]
In Ohio, school districts may choose to allow students to earn up to two high school credits, during non-'core' education school hours, subject to a number of limitations such as on funding (solely private) and parental consent (written).
Why are they popular? My impression from what I've been able to gather of their curricula -- admittedly, the full contents of which they play pretty close to the chest -- is more Lutheran Sunday School than anything Hellfire Baptist. I'm not hugely tied into the fundie religious parents, but what contacts I do have, these programs are seen as offering a good compromise. Unlike homeschooling, the student is still getting core curricula and socialization with the general public (uh, for better or worse). Unlike the school's non-core programs, there's some integration with religious processes. Why not just do those things outside of school hours? The growth of after-school extracurriculars and increased reliance on those successes for college acceptance or scholarships have made 'traditional' afternoon or weekends religious programs harder and harder to maintain, while the reduced presence of religious programs elsewhere has made transportation overhead more costly.
What were the big arguments against these policies? Parents Against LifeWise has a more varied set of issues on their web page, for those who want a (very) deep dive. At least from my read, the vast majority of concerns are hypotheticals and/or trivialities, but perhaps a more critical eye will pick up something I've missed. OCJ offers:
“I was raised to know that religious teaching belongs in the home, at the church, with your friends, with your family, and those various people that believe the way you do,” said Dr. Allison Baer, an Associate Professor at the University of Findlay, and mother of Center for Christian Virtue President Aaron Baer. “If this program, and this teaching, is so vital to their Christian life, why isn’t it offered after school, which would help working parents with free after school child care?”
“Westerville City Schools preaches diversity, equity and inclusion. But diversity, equity, and inclusion does not call for every human being to be a Christian,” said Luke Bauman, a Westerville resident. “It is the goal of LifeWise, tied closely with Project 2025, to dismantle public education from the inside out.” [...]
LifeWise is a gold level sponsor of the Essential Summit, a two-day conference organized by religious lobbying organization the Center for Christian Virtue, who’ve helped craft school choice laws and anti-trans bills in Ohio. CCV is listed as a hate group, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center [ed: good luck figuring out why?]. The keynote speaker of the CCV summit was Project 2025 architect Kevin Roberts.
Which... seems more to cut to the quick, here. Opponents are not driven by the terror of a slightly disrupted school schedule, or a flyer mentioning a religious organization being printed on a school printer. They're appalled that broad-scale religious organizations exist in the public square, and have defenders. And a purple town in a purple-leaning-red state agreed.
Well, is this just a one-off? Each school board covers a relatively small area, so it's not that weird if some random people did something kinda meh.
The Huron City School Board decided in a majority vote to end their released time policy on Aug. 20 this year. Prior to them, the Vermillion Board of Education also voted on June 29 against starting their own program. Bowling Green City Schools, Johnson-Monroe City Schools, Gahanna-Jefferson City Schools, and Sylvania City Schools have also come out against the released time policy.
There's some !!fun!! legal discussion about how this sort of policy change based on a fig leaf of organizational difficulty on top of overt disquiet with religious belief -- there's a certain comparison to the animus in Cleburne that I don't think either side of this debate would find particularly complimentary. But in practice school boards outside of Florida have pretty free reign to pick and choose supported programs, and courts can and will treat that fig leaf as if it were substantial when they want.
There's a bill in the state house requiring schools to permit released time programs, but it's unlikely to go anywhere and poorly written enough that it has no enforcement mechanism against school boards that defy it or find 'secular' cause to ignore it. And, again, courts can and will treat that fig leaf as if it were substantial when they want.
What sorta solutions might come up, instead?
ProPublica [bleh] reports:
Following Hurricane Katrina and the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, some federal taxpayer dollars went toward repairing and improving private K-12 schools in multiple states. Churches that operate schools often receive government funding for the social services that they offer; some orthodox Jewish schools in New York have relied on significant financial support from the city, The New York Times has found. But national experts on education funding emphasized that what Ohio is doing is categorically different.
“This is new, dangerous ground, funding new voucher schools,” said Josh Cowen, a senior fellow at the Education Law Center and the author of a new book on the history of billionaire-led voucher efforts. For decades, churches have relied on conservative philanthropy to be able to build their schools, Cowen said, or they’ve held fundraising drives or asked their diocese for help.)
The Ohio One-Time Strategic Community Investment Fund, a widely available fund of the type that Trinity Lutheran expressly prohibits governments from blocking out religious organizations. You might make one of many arguments that this is a graft (why is the dayton airshow getting state grants?). Opponents might argue that puts an increasing wide and variety of education funding outside of the domain of electoral control (uh, admittedly with a little bit of hypocrisy).
What did you think "teacher's unions are unambiguously and emphatically against the Republican Party" meant? Vibes? Papers?
I Told You Those Stories, So I Could Tell This One
[way more]
Come for the Gender Unicorn; stay for the hilarious claim that Donald Trump would simultaneously call all undocumented immigrants animals but not use the word 'illegal immigrant'. Okay, that's trite, and there are some distinctions, here. Lifewise operated in school hours with solely private funding; the New Haven Social Justice Academy program operated during the summer with at least some of public funding. Lifewise is a religious organization, the Social Justice Academy is... well some of these programs get a little on the nose with the extent that they're replacements for religion, but afaict the New Haven Program here avoids direct reference to the topic except to call George Floyd an austere religious scholar mentor.
There's a lot of snark to be made, here, but there's also a more serious point.
A complete rando talking about Lifewise offers :
"Whether Lifewise is a good program or a secretly evil program with a long term goal of eroding the public school system and the separation of church and state, the way that it has emboldened the Christofascists in my town to speak without a hint of self awareness makes me extremely wary of my neighbors (and one of them... lives on my street.)"
The DailyWire's piece quotes a complete rando "Director of Outreach" from an aligned political group :
“This summer program should have been advertised as an indoctrination camp where ideologues who spell the word ‘women’ with an x feed students propaganda about defunding the police, transgenderism, and oppression."
These programs all say a lot about fragmentation. I'm writing about them -- I'm reading about them -- because people want each and every one from the other team removed. Deleted. Unalived in minecraft lava, if you will. The possibility that someone might take the wrong choice, or defend the possibility of taking the wrong choice, is enough.
Happy Halloween, everyone!
Yeah, and I think conservatives are underestimating how hard even that limited approach is going to be -- there's a lot of people who know about past TPS rollbacks getting APA'd, but there's fewer who know about states just banning use of eVerify or firing people for their immigration status, or the extent that a lot of funding to support immigrants is laundered through various indirect grants or other organizations to make it hard to trim.
Trump taking whatever attempt, successful or not, and calling it is definitely plausible.
A lot of this, as with every Republican nominee since 1932, is just that Everything I Don't Like Is Fascist Hitlerisms.
The steelman is that anti-immigration is a major component of Trump's interests, that the necessary steps for achieving those interests will involve putting a ton of people in extremely bad circumstances, and that when things get fucked up in the process quite a lot of people would die unintentionally or 'unintentionally'.
- Exact numbers are messy, but when we're talking immigration we're necessarily talking about a lot of people. The official numbers for illegal undocumented immigrants (eg, not TPS enrollees) are only 11-12m, but this is broadly believed to be an undercount, with more skeptical takes being closer to 20m. There are around 800k TPS enrollees almost all of which are past the point where it's temporary, a larger-but-unknown number of refugee-applicants of varying levels of honesty, and a tiny number of really sketchy green card or naturalization or refugee cases (probably <10k?).
- A large portion of Trump's claim is 'sending them back': charitably, to reenter a line or waiting list for lawful immigration that will be made moderately more accessible after enforcement of immigrant law returns to any level of credible effort; less charitably, by flipping the bird after.
- Rounding them up is, alone, a big issue. TPS enrollees and refugees officially are supposed to keep their location on file, but enforcement is kinda lax and they definitely aren't going to have a lot of incentives if there's broad-scale deportation going on using that file. By definition, undocumented immigrants don't. There's a lot of trouble any time law enforcement gets involved in anything, but it scales up real quick.
- Some number will 'self-deport', but this is likely to be a pretty small fraction. A more sizable group might take the L after getting caught -- trade a flight and a cleanish record for not kicking up a fuss -- but at best they'll be a minority, and more likely there will be direct efforts to jam up the system as much as possible.
- Which matters because the system isn't built for high throughput, and several portions have Constitutional guarantees. Even if you avoid the question of whether non-citizens have certain relevant due process protections (which is itself a big question), you at least have to separate citizens from non-citizens with enough accuracy and due process. Some of them will have minor citizen children, so that's even more fun.
- And even when you're absolutely sure you want to deport them, and you have all the physical infrastructure to actually bus or fly them out, you actually need a place to put them. In many cases, we're talking whole percents of country populations, often from countries that don't necessarily want or have the infrastructure to take them back.
- So now you've got 5m-25m people that you're trying to kick out or are attached to people you're trying to kick out. You probably don't want to just have them wandering the streets after you catch them, but this is larger than the entire existing American prison system, possibly by an order of magnitude.
- Well, we actually do know how to hold a whole bunch of not-especially-violent people without having to imprison them: set specific geographic areas aside for them with fences and limited in-and-out. It's not pretty, though.
- Except, uh, we don't know how to do that well or safely. WWII Internment had no small number of rough edges, and it was much smaller, even after adjustment for general population size. We don't have good numbers for what sorta fatalities are happening in Uyghur 'reeducation' camps in China are, but I think a lowest plausible estimate is in the hundreds, and while I'd like to think that American open-air prisons would do better, I'm not hugely optimistic on them being perfect.
- And, uh, we'll also have a large number of people newly removed from the mainstream population, not especially liked even by their home countries, and definitely not liked by the US government's leadership. Shame if something were to... happen to them.
This doesn't work, in a wide variety of ways. We've seen that it doesn't work, and at step one Trump gets slapped with APA problems, and it's going to keep going that way. Everything after step six or so just rolls around on the assumption that the Evil People are Going To Do The Most Evil Thing Possible, because mumble mumble someone said bad genes somewhere. In the actual real-world, in the incredibly unlikely chance that a Trump administration manages to get any of the big TPS status revoked, it'll be disruptive, but in the slow trickling sense.
But it's not incoherent or made up. It's just wrong. Probably with a bit of hyperbole because they see the plausible cases as Bad Enough. And those probably aren't really 'wrong'. You can do the QALY assessments, but napkin math puts 10-50m QALY on the table, sometimes pretty luridly.
((Though they may not be honest.))
You may recognize that this makes any effort to enforce immigration law Nazi-level, not just despite but because of Democratic efforts to make even trivial efforts to enforce the law so costly and disruptive. If so, congratulations, here's your Encyclopedia Brown merit badge.
I'm gonna suggest that it's probably not a great idea to come up with long and seriously-considered lists of ways to upset civil society, especially those that could be planned and executed in less than a week.
I don't have great connections to trans women spaces, but that seems pretty on the higher side of the typical range of pain most I've talked to have reported. It's probably worth emphasizing exactly how painful you find it to the technician; in other contexts I've definitely seen doctors overlook pretty clear pain from a patient because they didn't want to highlight it (even as a necessary step to bring up options) until the patient did, and this does seem like some matter where people have wildly varying responses.
From the literature, 'spot size' is adjustable, and smaller spot sizes seem consistently less painful than larger ones regardless of laser type. Still some tradeoff in effectiveness, and since I think this involves swapping the heads it may not be something that this particular office is set up to do. Some people I've talked to found alexandrite much less painful than diode, but it's not clear how much of that difference reflects the swap also coming at the same time that they went from debulking to fine cleanup work.
You can get 10% lidocaine cream, and I'd consider that. The FDA doesn't like it and I definitely wouldn't use them regularly or outside of this procedure, but the bigger concern about higher OTC concentrations are less likely to be relevant for well-spaced intervals with entirely topical uses on unbroken skin. You may be able to get a script from the tech, though it's also just the sort of 'illegal' that's on Amazon.
I'd reiterate the concerns about general anesthetics: acetaminophen is a helluva drug, and not really good for skin pain regardless of dose, and doesn't mix well.
At least on the fantasy side, it's worth spelling out how different even consensual stuff is in practice rather than theory. There's a lot of people who have fantasies about being woken up by oral (or... other forms of somnophilia, even if they get kinda borderline on consent from a currency matter), very carefully set up clear consent ahead of time, and then find out the hard way how active their startle response can be. Some of it's not realizing the line between a) letting someone else access to you, and b) giving up control, but some of it's also just more direct and instinctual.
And for genuine clear nonconsent, there's obviously many more issues -- you mention violence and attraction, but disease and (for women being raped by men) pregnancy risk are significant, and rapists are (unsurprisingly) not likely to be considerate of their victims in other ways, and there's no shortage of other more subtle problems. A lot of rape fantasies also revolve around things that aren't really possible or even safe as part of negating the fetishist's 'responsibility' in the act: in fandom spaces, this can be as blaise as sex pollen or hypnosis, to full-time slavery or pet play, to as extreme as abduction or worse.
There's probably some interesting things to be said about the extent that formalizing grief and harm can really augment or concretize it, but it's not clear how much that happens in the general case, nevermind how much it applies here. Rape fetishists know it's wrong, and that's part of the point.
That said, the bigger reason for the taboo on conversation about the topic, even (arguably especially) in sex-positive spaces, reflects more concern about how potential rapists would react to prolonged discussion. A lot of academic literature and criminology on the subject points to rapists excusing or justifying their bad acts, and while a formal belief that their victim 'deserves' or 'wants' it isn't the only method (social pressure is a big popular target), it's a pretty common one. There's some debate about how accurate these models are, but there's no small amount of evidence in favor. Given that, by definition, we're not exactly talking people who make good evaluations of other's interests, putting an asterisk saying it's only a tiny percentage wouldn't really defuse this concern.
Twilight is very much about the drama of having to pick, and that's common but not universal to paranormal romance of that era. For a not-awful version, see the first three books of the Mercy Thompson series by Patricia Briggs (though in turn the main character of that series has already dated and implied to have hooked up with one of the two-or-three suitors, so I guess it depends on 'promiscuity').
That said, it's very far from universal. Anita Blake is the most infamous for having the heroine pick up every non-villainous character to get within arm's reach, since it's set in a universe where fucking solves everything, but Jemesin does has a couple love triangles resolve themselves into polyamoryish in The Broken Earth series. In online spaces, it's often a pretense for the readers to get some M/M in their het romance. Rare to see that published, though. Some of the less... bizarre parts of the Omegaverse and paranormal erotica spaces tend to revolve around "Why Choose" or reverse harem solutions, though I doubt most non-furry guys want to know much about it and it's not really fuzzy enough for my tastes.
I'm curious if it's genuinely a matter of price. The Harris campaign is rolling in dough, and spending it in much worse ways. If it were worries about getting tied to a sinking ship, the endorsement is enough of an albatross.
My first thought is that there's some process limitations that make it hard to get done so quickly. There's reasons charity concerts after disasters often take the better part of a month if not months to assemble: planning properly for a 10k+ person assembly is a nightmare, and converting one type of assembly into another doesn't buy anywhere near the sort of stability you'd hope for.
But I have seen that sorta thing move faster before, and Harris (surrogates) have been motioning around it as long as there's been a Harris campaign. So I dunno.
Huh. I don't like how little citation there is for that being sufficient brightness -- all the cites are just to people using 3 lux as a baseline measurement, and that for instrument sensitivity reasons -- but I guess I don't really have the numbers to say that they're wrong, either.
Yeah, that's fair. There's been some work done for automotive HUDs, but there's (not-unreasonable!) concern about anything more serious than simple fixed-location infographics being distracting or vision-obscuring -- bizarrely, meaning that the display tech once existed and now doesn't -- and as a result things like blind spot detection or collision avoidance systems tend to rely on other inputs that tend to fall into the meaningless alert problem or at best just push sensor data directly to the instrument cluster.
5 lux isn't much, and it's mostly relevant in the sense of highlighting retroreflectors (either tape, or animal eyes). If you're really darkness-adapted and under 40 or so, you'll be able to see fuzzy outlines, but not much more: it's not unreasonable as a metric for 'minimum to see an object', but a little optimistic.
At 65 MPH, 100 meters is just over three seconds to react; 70 meters is just over two seconds. How much that matters depends heavily on what you're doing with that time. Two seconds to swerve is pretty generous. Three seconds to brake is not, especially in larger cars: modeling these things is tough and depends on a lot of specifics to the situation, but at best it's the difference between stopping just before impact versus barrelling through at 20+ MPH, and more likely the difference between 10 MPH and 35 MPH at time of impact.
The feds have also been allegedly derping around with providing states immigration status for alternative methods for enforcing laws against noncitizen voting.
I'm in a pretty similar boat of "how much worse can our political candidates get (vivek and warren poke their heads out)", and I'll applaud putting any words on that marker. I think from a conservative dimension it gets frustrating that people tend to stop at her 'just' being a liar and a fool, without mention of the many many many other ways that Harris is also a mirror to Trump's other failings than being a liar or a moron, but it's not an election that's left me happy.
Some morons tried to fake a video of one of his past students alleging abuse, though it was even less credible than the "Trump grope Time Paradox" story. Even in the unlikely event a real one did come forward, at this point there would be genuine skepticism.
Most of it's just pointing to some goofy mannerisms, or needing not!IVF to have a kid. The latter is not how being gay works, or how getting a woman pregnant works, though.
There's a certain power that comes from knowing how everyone will react, and this drives a lot of things.
I keep coming back to the David Cameron PigGate scandal; there's a high chance it never happened to start with, the actual claimed behavior was little more than goofy fratboy jokes, but the initial book ran on a legal hack (Ashcroft reported only being told of the story) making it dangerous to contest under UK defamation law, while literally everybody up to the BBC could euphemistically reframe it to something far more serious, and everyone under that illustrious bar could reduce it to "Cameron fucked a pig".
It's establishing the room temperature.
See also the breathlessly-reported Epstein Connection (with a time paradox in the allegations) or a Trump Hates Vets (anonymously sourced, disputed by the family of the deceased vet in question).
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Facial hair (esp mustache) on natal women is not a rare area of focus, though one where there’s likely the biggest difference in require laser application between amab and afab.
Underarm hair is extremely common, and supposedly worse for pain than face or even nether regions, though.
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