gattsuru
1hr ago
I mean, I already told you I literally have trouble figuring out exactly what you are accusing me of, and here you are returning almost two weeks later to go at it again! (I'm not saying you have a time limit on responding, but come on, I thought we'd both walked away from this one, and now I have to reread the whole thread to remember where we even were.)
Apologies. Work and STEM outreach have been busy, and I've been limiting politics-writing when in those environments even where I have idle time for the obvious reasons that are kinda my point. And then I'll realize half-way through a response that I'm relitigating stuff you clearly didn't want to litigate the first time, and have to start again.
I think I already apologized for accusing you of being a Kulak fan
I don't think a neutral observer would have read that as an apology, but I'll take it under the intent you meant if that's what you meant.
... and I honestly don't remember calling you a Soros conspiracy theorist. I suppose you have a link where I implied it or something.
And I'll spell out specifically that my claim was "I get lumped in with Soros conspiracy theorists".
You're not a Soros conspiracy theorist. Are you happy?
Happy would be overstating things, since that wasn't the claim I made, but I'll take it in the spirit it was intended.
I have said repeatedly that I regret that exchange and have reconsidered how I expressed myself, even if don't repudiate the core thesis.
My problem has never been your tone, as I've said at length. I care about your core thesis. I think it's wrong, I think it's been wrong for years, and I've shouted in every way short of going full-caps at you about it. Literally, to quote my PM to you, "I would like to know which of us is right, and which is wrong. From you, I'd take a serious argument why you believe I'm wrong."
((Yes, I'm going to keep referencing the five-year-old post that, in its closest to a followup, specifically spelled out "gattsuru's list does not impress, but if I was wrong, he should be able to point this out in a few years", when I still think you're wrong and you've done less than nothing to even attempt to actually confront that list, or the specific claims you made then.))
I'd love to think otherwise! Whether it's that the lists of things I offer aren't actually happening or are gish gallops or are purely hypothetical, or that they don't seriously impact my freedom of speech or civil rights, or that if they do it's just social conformity not partly the state actions I've already linked, or that it's really going to just ebb and flow in way that actually leaves me whole or my enemies feeling genuine mirrors of my problems. But we don't do that discussion. I can't even get agreement on what level your thesis actually holds on long enough to debate the facts, and when I've attempted to draw out a literal branching graph of options, the closest we got was a thesis of "I still think the evidence does not say we are as far along down the slippery slope as you think we are".
What evidence? What point on the slippery slope? What could possibly change your mind, before it was too late?
But if we can't have that discussion, hell, I'd just take a serious engagement with the thing that brought you into this thread. You popped in to insist that it's a bad idea to make single bets, even at steeply favorable odds, and that no one's saying literally Hitler. Well, MadMonzer's willing to bet often, claimed the odds are wildly favorable, Arjin didn't demand anyone go all-in or even beat pizza money. Oh, and MadMonzer said specifically "10% chance that Trump is Hitler". Does this say anything? Do you have some other reason to believe that MadMonzer actually believes that number, when you yourself are saying that it's clearly absurd?
gattsuru
9hr ago
Yeah, I practiced back in the usenet wereweb and werewolfdotcom days; while the modern version has drifted a bit just as the late-90s early-00s one itself was drifting from some of the goofier forms of crystal witch neopaganism, it's still pretty recognizable. It's weird and I wouldn't recommend it, but it's been around for a long time.
Dunno enough about the current or historic South/Central American therian stuff to comment there, but there's a decent number of South American furries, so it wouldn't be a huge surprise.
gattsuru
9hr ago
But I go through your laundry lists of accusations and feel like sincerity requires me to try to answer them point by point, and I get bogged down in a mixture of "That's completely not what I meant," "That is not what I said and I think you're straw manning me," and "What does he even mean?"
You don't have to respond to every single point. You don't have to respond to a majority of my points.
But if you genuinely believe that I've gish galloped you or straw-manned you, you should be able to pick two or three meaningfully false claims or clear misquotes or obviously unfair rephrasings, using actual quotes of words I've actually used, and then provide grounds for disagreement based on facts that exist in the world that can be discussed. And then, if I'm able to support my claims in response, either engage with my counterexamples, or justify how your position survives those counterexamples.
I'm not demanding that you admit you're wrong. I'd like you to be right! But it's hard to come away from conversations like this thinking we're debating what the actual state of reality is, rather than trying to discuss what we're even talking about.
((I'm sorry that I'm being both circumspect and prone to digressions, but from my perspective it feels like I can't have a conversation with you unless I nail down every possible aside. Best case, we end up spending ten posts relitigating the bare existence of a topic that we already discussed at length; worst case, I get lumped in with Soros conspiracy theorists and KulakCatgirl fanboys.))
gattsuru
2d ago
I think that's part of it, but there was some serious pistol training for some roles in WWII and even WWI. My impression -- and I'll admit I missed the whole 'got assigned a bit of military history as a special interest' thing, so I may well be running on pop history here -- is that doctrine just favored minimizing vulnerability and prioritizing speed of fire, instead. That's a weird decision as an offensive weapon given the limited magazine capacities of the time, but given the realities of trench and urban warfare of the time, may have been reasonable.
It's just strange in retrospect.
gattsuru
3d ago
I've never tried that on a range, and I don't think I've seen it on one. With some snap caps it was doable but not comfortable, and maintaining a sight picture even while standing still felt rougher than strong-hand-only, and while moving it was actively frustrating. Didn't feel either terrible or strong from a recoil management perspective, though without live fire that can be misleading.
That said, I'm not particularly strong as a pistol shooter (and mostly stick to .22 and .380) myself and definitely far from an ISPDA pro, so big grain of salt. There may be advantages that aren't obvious, or I might just not be good enough to use it properly (or even position it properly). That said, if you're having fun with it for VR shooting, that's all that really matters when fighting with H3vr.
If they're not banned in your jurisdiction (and not 'legal-but-sketchy' a la UK), springer or compressed air pistols can be an inexpensive and indoors-friendly option. Won't get you much a grip on what recoil's like, but the difference between 22 and heavier-duty airsoft is smaller than you'd expect.
gattsuru
3d ago
Yeah, this is one of those funny bits of history that is fascinating to look at in a “reading philosophy backwards” sense. The Weaver stance wasn’t invented until 1959; until then, the overwhelming majority of practical pistol training used dorky-seeming point shooting approaches that largely ignored sight picture when standing. Before even that, the familiar “dueling stance” wasn’t a mere formalism, but an approach believed to help best with standing aim.
There’s military doctrine reasons that the field advanced so slowly, and I’m sure some people predated Weaver, but it’s goofy as hell that it took 40+ years of people using the 1911 before they would seriously try to aim with it.
I'm kinda surprised orientation play gets through any models, both for censorship reasons, because of the relative paucity of relevant training data, for its various politics, and also just because of the logical inconsistencies. I don't expect James T. Kirk levels of making a modern LLM explode with the order 'Write an erotic story where two gay guys screw a woman', but given that real-world people with this specific kink sometimes end up with pronouns getting mixed up, logistically improbable acts, or forgetting about the orientation play, it's a little impressive that the LLMs can do it at all.
Hell, sometimes they're able to notice points where my own writing hasn't been very consistent (cw: 'review' of a smut intro, implied furry M/F/M, no bits but probably not something you want to explain to your boss).
In turn, though, it's a bit impressive in the sense of getting a dog to dance. This (cw: not good, 13k words actually-SFW Jupiter Ascending script-style fanfic, with serial numbers filed off) is an experiment in trying to get long-form consistent writing out of a model. A lot of the problems are the experiment, or me: switching out names means that the model is operating off a game-of-telephone level of characterization, and I didn't queue it very strictly about either rising tension or how I really wanted the story's themes and focuses to go. And it does work, in the sense that it's a story with a beginning, middle, and end that's not got more plot holes than the last Star Wars film.
But holy hell is the dialogue and pacing awful at points, and when we're starting from Jupiter "I Love Dogs!" Ascending you know that's damning with harsh criticism. There's probably something to be done by feeding it back in on itself, since a lot of the worst bits are things even the LLM will recognize as needing improvement, but it's hard to justify the tokens on that even on a monthly rate.
I mostly finished a 16k words "5 Times X Happened + 1 Time It Didn't" meets "Male Swimwear Challenge" lemon M/M + F story, leaving it with some time to settle before I review and publish it. Not AI-written, and the attempts to do so turned out absolutely terrible, but it's something where AI criticisms actually helped out a ton (cw: explicit but mostly not erotic, detailed discussion of an erotic furry story). Yes, it glazes my writing more than the main character got coated and its direct prose 'suggestions' go somewhere between purple prose and outright bad writing, but 'does this character come across like I want him or her to, and when not, why not' are really hard to even notice when you've had an idea bouncing around in your head for a couple weeks, and the LLMs do that surprisingly well.
Trying to brainstorm an anthrostate story as my current 'project'. Soft femdom's pretty fun and the whole assigned partners thing is fanfic heaven for a reason, but the actual universe is a kinda fun thing to explore separate from the kink. LLMs handled this better, probably since it's got a more conventional escalation pace, and I might well see if Opus 4.6 can write something that isn't atrocious, but for now I've mostly found the models helpful for doing 'this is the state of this world, what would cause it to look like this' and 'this person with this background encountered this situation, what are the most plausible reactions?' questions.
I've also experimented a bit with a story line involving video-game-level-gore-and-death for ARK. It's about as far down the rabbit hole as I'm willing to go to test how censored a model gets, and there's a lot of storylines that I'd like to write where adjacent themes are kinda unavoidable (eg, basically any game with in-universe revives, or where trying for a Mortal Kombat-style tone of violence). GLM-4.5-Air-Derestricted can write it without shying away from the gore, but in turn its pacing is atrocious, and most vanilla models are unsurprisingly very uncomfortable with the topic. Doesn't always result in refusal, but even where models give outputs they just avoid it or obvious consequences around it.
Outside of writing:
Been trying to figure out a radial kerf bending cut meets living hinge situation. Every model I've tried has failed it. Can be done -- I've got the Fusion360 layout done -- so dunno how much of it's outside of the training data, how much I'm just asking the question wrong, and how much is just it's a hard question to ask in words.
Codingwise, have some CRUD stuff I've been doing for work that even QwenCode-30B handles fine and fast, some robotics stuff that's been an interesting challenge for students that Grok and Opus have been helpful for explaining but involves a (probably intentionally?) polluted namespace that's left most LLM suggestions not fit for copy-and-paste, and a few enthusiast projects. Haven't had much time to work on the last ones, and results from AI assistance have been more varied than I'd like. Lots of stuff that works but is hilariously brittle, and lots of stuff that's not right at all.
Art generation's strong. I've been trying to dial in a sublimation printer for metal printing and mousepads, so it's been fun building a few dozen outputs and seeing how they look after being pressed onto a metal card or a mousepad. Trying to get something that can take a character and make a full Major Arcana Tarot set out of it, mostly just fighting to get a model that handles text acceptably while still accepting a tarot lora and a character lora (and doesn't melt my machine trying it). Workflows keep getting more and more complicated to keep on the hairy edge of progress, though, and the lack of a local equivalent to NanoBanana / Whisk is annoying.
I've been trying to get some of the 2d->3d tools running. TRELLIS2 and Wan3D both have serious tradeoffs (and by all that is holy, Microsoft, what the fuck is your deployment environment for TRELLIS?), but they are powerful... when they work, for their very specific use cases.
This is interesting to me for a few reasons. The first is that the common "shitty free models" defense crops up rapidly; commentors will say that this is a bad-faith example of LLM shortfalls because the interlocutors are not using frontier models. At the same time, a comment suggests that Opus 4.6 can be tricked, while another says 4.6 gets it right more than half the time.
I'd expect to the degree any model gets it 'right' without modification, it reflects some weirdness in the model rather than something inherently better about the strengths of the model. A couple local (and thus not-updated-specifically-to-this-question) Thinking-style models I tried the same question on gave the 'wrong' answer, but had Thinking components specifically highlighting that the question was strange and must have involved unstated assumptions (either picking up materials from the car wash to do the work at home, or the car already being there). A dumber old model got it right occasionally, but that's probably as much a result of the high temperature I was running it rather than any actual consideration.
Ask a stupid question, get a stupid answer.
Do modern models similarly have environmentalism baked in? Do they reflexively shy away from cars in the same way that a human baby fears heights? It would track with some of the other ingrained biases that people have found.
Yes. There's a fun question of whether it's just Reddit-brain, or was actively cultivated by the people training it. But since it's present in both heavily decensored or trained-out-of-US models, my bet's that the former is at least part of the problem.
The basic idea is that you are more trusting of sources if you are not particularly familiar with a topic. In this case, it's hard not to notice the flaws - most people have walked. Most have seen a car. Many have probably washed a car. However, when it comes to more technical, obscure topics, most of us are probably not domain experts in them. We might be experts in one of them. Some of us might be experts in two of them, but none of us are experts in all of them. When it comes to topics that are more esoteric than washing a car, we rapidly end up in the territory of Dick Cheney's unknown unknowns. Somebody like self_made_human might be able to cut through the chaff and confidently take advice about ocular migraines, but could you? Could I? Hell if I know.
It's... not exactly a hard trick to learn skepticism. Nor one useful only when considering LLMs. As much as that summary of "you can not actually outsource the requirement to evaluate truth" has aged like milk, that doesn't change whether it's a good idea. The core question of 'what do you know, and how do you know it' can't solve everything, but where a matter matters, you shouldn't be trusting one secondary source without verification no matter what substrate it's running on.
gattsuru
4d ago
[disclaimer: I do not and will not use LLMs to write text I post directly to TheMotte; only in linked content I try to identify as LLM-produced.]
I've not been impressed by any AI-built writing itself, but they can be useful when analyzing a written work, even if only in a way that's helpful to the original writer. They've been able to catch everything from the standard typos and grammar errors, to pacing problems, to (in one case) a theme I overlooked, along with sometimes fairly biting criticism. They're not perfect when it comes to either false positives or false negatives, nor do they handle every use case well, but it's much more useful than info-dumping-and-getting-generic-responses back.
((Most of the time. I have had one or two times where the only criticisms I could pull out of the LLM were just 'try to make your characters feel more grounded in the setting' schlock, and that's not because the work was stellar. And for writing adult or erotic fiction, the LLMs can be hit-or-miss about pacing, unsurprisingly.))
Some of that might reflect the quality of other beta readers available, especially in fandom or extremely-genre spaces. I can't compare the LLMs to professional editors, which might well blow the machines out of the water. But I can't make that comparison because professional editors are and have long been unavailable for randos like myself.
gattsuru
6d ago
The practical failure of these laws to actually block bad people from getting guns is a little overdetermined. There's even been pretty major advances on those lines: benchtop CNC machines are obviously more available, but electrochemical machining has also made manufacturing accurate rifle barrels susprisingly accessible. There's no real serious way to claw back the files themselves, universally.
But I think the purpose of these laws is more social. It's given carte blanch to push this stuff off the open internet, and make it such that even in fairly pro-gun communities there's a ton of bad or old information going around. Cody Wilson's original bet was not just that he'd make gun control obsolete, but that he'd demonstrate that it was doomed, or that it would require massive and invasive censorship to still end up doomed. For all he won the former bet, the latter is what actually drives public policy and what he expected to drive public policy, and it's been a very unpleasant wakeup call.
I was under the impression that to avoid a default judgement in a civil matter, it was sufficient to have an authorized lawyer show up to the court date to represent your side. This is how legal persons like corporations can survive.
Yes, there's a bunch of downstream epicycles around depositions, so on. It may be navigable; it may be navigable until a sufficiently malicious plaintiff/prosecutor and mendacious judge work together.
gattsuru
6d ago
I'm not sure what the point of this would be. If you're represented by a lawyer, why are you asking an LLM questions about your case. That's the point of having a lawyer!
Few lawyers are particularly good at explaining matters in nontechnical terms, and perhaps more immediately, lawyers have limited hours in a day and expect compensation for the time they do offer. Maybe in the case of the 300m embezzlement that's a bad place to save pennies hundred-dollar-bills, though depending on the facts of the case that might not actually be 300m in this guy's pockets. But for the average person, an extra consult with an entry-level lawyer can cost them a day's pay.
At minimum, you want to go into that prepared. At the more extreme end, if you're being charged or sued as a rando, it's suddenly the most important part of your day.
gattsuru
6d ago
To an extent, but the law and regulation dates back over a decade, and even a lot of anti-trans people aren't aware of it or the history. I think the progressive movement's found a successful hack to that particular problem -- and that this isn't even the most high-stakes or high-visibility version of it.
gattsuru
6d ago
Amazon specifically will delist you. You might be able to sneak through another PoD service, and bookbinding tools are sub-100 USD now.
But you’ll just get arrested and be stuck trying to bring a free speech gun case in the Ninth or Third Circuit. Good luck with that
gattsuru
7d ago
I'll caveat that the Position Statement specifically constrained to:
This would still leave some 'surgeries' (like laser hair removal) or surgeries on the table, and the median 16-18-year-old trans person is afaict going to be focused more on them. And there's definitely a lot of the endocrinology stuff that's Controversial. But it might not stop there, and yes, that's likely to have a larger impact in the short term.
California v. CTRLPEW
California Attorney General Rob Bonta together with San Francisco City Attorney David Chiu today announced a trailblazing lawsuit against Gatalog Foundation Inc. and CTRLPew LLC for unlawfully distributing computer code for 3D printing ghost guns, machine gun conversion devices including "Glock Switches," illegal large-capacity magazines, and other firearm-related products and components to individuals who are not licensed to manufacture firearms in California. In addition, the defendants are being held accountable for promoting and facilitating the unlawful manufacture of 3D printed firearms and machine guns. The lawsuit was filed in the San Francisco County Superior Court.
There's a lot to be said, much of it morbid, about this case. The sticker price on each claim is already steep -- 50k+ USD per -- but the state seems to be arguing each download of each file is its own violation, and doing its own downloads; it's not just possible but likely that this is trying to slap glorified hobbyists with millions or tens of millions of dollars in fines. For even more fun, it likely passed a law specifically to make this suit more painful and with a harder standard to defend against. It's also hard to overstate what and how broad an impact banning merely making information available for someone to download is. The defense's countersuit spells out some of the more overt aspects: merely submitting evidence to a filing that ends up on PACER would run headfirst into this theory. And a malicious actor could do some absolutely hilarious stuff to violate the text of the law, excepting of course that the state will only bring charges against people it doesn't like.
A lot of other people in the 3d Printing world have, unsurprisingly, had to put together some geolocation-based blocks. It's not clear how well that would actually protect them, though.
On the upside, this is clearly protected speech. The normal slogan is about how Code Is Free Speech, and that's pretty well-established under standing precedent, but this isn't even 'just' code. The lawsuit here is overtly focusing on instructions, documentation, and image files. Whatever exceptions for crime-facilitating speech or speech integral to a crime exist, they can't possibly be stretched so far as to cover content that was lawful for a wide majority of the country to discuss or receive, right? Sure, we're talking the Ninth Circuit, so Ivan The Troll is going to have an expensive time finding lawyers, but surely cooler heads will prevail?
Well...
Code is <not> Free Speech
The Third Circuit has given an answer in Defense Distributed v. New Jersey:
We are not the first court to consider these nuances and their First Amendment implications. Indeed, some twenty-five years ago, three of our sister circuits grappled with the issue. These cases—Bernstein v. United States Department of Justice, Junger v. Daley, Universal City Studios, Inc. v. Corley—are often cited as the origin for a “code is speech” theory of First Amendment coverage in which all code is presumptively protected by the First Amendment and thus subject to constitutional scrutiny. And, consistent with that understanding, Appellants rely on these cases for their argument here. But fresh appraisal of their contents reveals a more complicated landscape that warrants our attention...
There's a variety of technical frustration, here. This court case happened in the not-favorable Third Circuit at all because of some hilarious hijinks with intercircuit transfer. I'll gloss over most of the procedural ones, but if you want a dark chuckle, the official position of the Third Circuit is now that "While the complaint lists a variety of file types (e.g., (.igs), (.stl), (.skp) (.pdf) (.stp)), it is unclear which, if any, of those are CAD or CAM files." So you can take the entire concept of the educated elite and gives it the Ol' Yeller treatment. Three college-educated judges, all with the powers of their offices and modern technology and over a year to write this opinion, claim that they did not understand what a PDF was.
((For those interested and somehow browsing this site without internet access, "Initial Graphics Exchange Specification", "Stereolithography", "SketchUp", and "STEP" files are all CAD files. They show 3d-images of a firearm; they are not code that you would run on any 3d printer. Especially SketchUp, what the fuck.))
But the more damning one is that the points don't matter, the rules are all made up. This isn't an explanation of why Defense Distributed lost, just a story saying that they did. The judges are lying, they know they're lying, you know they're lying, the dog knows. Say what you will for the limits of judicial notice, but when the courts require PDFs in specific formats, judicial notice can tell what a PDF is when it wants, and this court does not want to do so. Bernstein, Junger, and Universal City Studios may well all have protected code as free speech, but the it's not that the Third Circuit has built a new standard here. After all, they refused to do that.
The Third Circuit's opinion holds that Defense Distributed did not adequately allege that their prohibited content was speech, because 3d images of a thing -- to the surprise of the Supreme Court -- could be something other than speech, and then shies away from actually distinguishing one from the other. How would you demonstrate that to the adequacy of an East Coast judge?
In theory, en banc or a SCOTUS appeal is potentially available, and either would give a more honest favorable draw. Were they to happen.
Spoiler alert: it ain't going to happen.
Louisiana v. Pill Mills
The news that Louisiana wanted to arrest Coeytaux first surfaced in September, when the state filed a motion as part of Louisiana’s effort to join a federal lawsuit that seeks to limit access to the common abortion pill mifepristone. In that motion, Louisiana revealed that it had issued an arrest warrant for the doctor who supplied abortion pills to the boyfriend of a woman named Rosalie Markezich. Markezich alleged that her boyfriend obtained abortion pills by filling out an online form for Aid Access – an organization that mails abortion pills nationwide – and coerced her into taking pills in October 2023.
This is a messy case, without a lot of sympathetic actors.
Coeytaux is a prescribing doctor for Aid Access, an org that exists for the sole purpose of making abortion medications available, and while some of that reflects cases where people don't have the economic opportunity to purchase, more of it reflects cases where the law says no, and Coeytaux (or associates) filled out a package envelope for that specific address to no. Outside of the legal concerns or the moral objections to abortion, a lot of its economics depend on basically being a pill mill, and hasn't always been the most consistent about only using FDA-approved formulations, or checking out who the drugs are going to. The spectre of induced 'miscarriages' pushed by a boyfriend who doesn't want to become a father, to a mother who did, has long been a possibility anti-abortion advocates point toward, and there have been other cases that seem to have clear evidence of coercion by other family members. I'll instead point toward the lackluster available counseling about side effects or complications, a matter that's been far messier from other providers.
But a lot of those concerns are more imagined than demonstrated, in this case. The FDA's animosity for overseas generics sometimes reflects adequate skepticism, but mostly seems driven by provincialism. Like a previous case involving Coeytaux, it's unclear exactly how coercive the 'boyfriend' in question actually was. Actual serious side-effects can happen, but I'm not able to find any obvious cases where that happened involving AidAccess.
That is, as often highlighted, a series of questions for the jury. Which seems unlikely to ever happen. Louisiana issued an extradition request for Coeytaux, who resides in California. The governor has given a precise and formal response:
@AGLizMurrill: Go fuck yourself. California will never help you criminalize healthcare.
In theory, this is settled law: since 1987, there are extremely limited grounds to refuse extradition, and 'don't like the public policy of the state in question' isn't one of them. In practice, the New York doctor from the case where a pregnant minor was alleged forced to abort a pregnancy she wanted to keep wasn't extradited, either.
Somewhat counterintuitively, this is probably a better defense as an individual in a criminal case than a civil one. For civil trials, not showing up just gets you a default judgment. The confrontation clause strictly limits American criminal trials in absentia; there are a few rare exceptions if someone stops showing up (or needs to be removed from court) once the trial has started with them present, but none before then. Of course, that just kicks the can down the road one step: I don't think anyone would be happier if Louisiana just gave abortion providers civil liability that requires Knuth's Up-Arrow Notation to write down, then arrested them when they showed up for their day in court for the criminal trial.
SCOTUS has original jurisdiction over lawsuits between two states. There is not, as far as I can tell, a Louisiana v. New York or Louisiana v. California docket on this question.
Trans vs. Detrans
The Atlantic reports:
In a recent lawsuit in New York State, a detransitioner called Fox Varian testified that she’d had her breasts removed at 16, only 11 months after first identifying as male. She had also been diagnosed with autism and had struggled with an eating disorder and anxiety. By the time of the surgery, she had changed her name twice already. Varian asserted, according to the reporter Benjamin Ryan, who attended the trial, that her doctor “served as an enabler, repeatedly assuring her that the mastectomy she desired would greatly improve her well-being.” Varian told the court that she regretted the surgery instantly, and detransitioned three years later. She was awarded $2 million in damages. The court heard that she had been left with scarring and a lack of sensation, and would be unable to breastfeed.
Sorry, that's as close to left-leaning coverage as I can find without getting unmoored from the facts (compare the New York Times tries to reframe it as mere miscommunication). Most coverage in serious detail seems to be from right-wing sources speaking to right-wing readers, including the reporter that The Atlantic is highlighting here.
As do the facts of the case. Varian's situation does seem to have been on the harder end -- both in terms of what procedures happened when, and in the rhetoric from medical professionals justifying them. When WPATH advocates think you need to slow things down a notch, and are willing to testify so in court, you're gonna have a bad time. Benjamin Ryan has a list of other detransitioner (or -adjacent) cases, and it's a single page, and most of them are either more complicated or much less clear-cut.
But, at the same time, the facts are not that extreme. The psychologist in question denies telling Varian's parents that delaying transition might result in suicide risk, but it's... hard to believe that, given its prevalence as a topic of discussion. WPATH's advocate says that the doctors in question were pushing too hard and too fast, but the process here didn't actually breaking any explicit rules from the most recent WPATH SoC. It's hard to get numbers on how many trans people get a masectomy or orchidectomy before the age of 18 -- most eyepopping numbers of 'surgeries' include laser hair removal -- but Varian near-certainly isn't the only one.
And those distinctions matter, because a lot of trans-skeptical people have been pointed to this lawsuit as the first pebble in an avalanche. Whether people who aren't already trans-skeptical even hear about it, and whether there are other pebbles, control some part of that avalanche.
Because ultimately, to medical insurers, a couple million here and there only starts being 'real money' in plural. Successful lawsuits against psychologists are rare, but medical lawsuits are not, and doctors don't stop offering a procedure because of a single misuse or serious side effect, even far worse ones. Moreover, there's an opposing force: depending on who's in charge of the government, it can violate federal law to not act, with a bunch of fun questions when those regulations change after the action or inaction happens. Failure to treat or medical discrimination lawsuits are harder to bring as an individual, but they're not implausible concerns, either.
More broadly, because of how market forces work, I'm skeptical that the trans-skeptical position clears the board even of the specific matter of minors undergoing large-scale surgery, without using either regulatory force, persuading the other side, or completely delisting trans-related care from medical assistance. At the same time, they're likely to consider it a major victory every marginal clinic that drops the service, and every person they dissuade. And, on the flip side, there's some obvious countermanuevers that are going to come down the beltway soon enough.
gattsuru
7d ago
Yeah, and it was already sketchy-adjacent by the 1930s. But it wasn't 'get the flamer, the heavy flamer' in the way that a 25-year-old going after a 15-year-old was even then.
Hard to tell what the actual story is, here.
The Guardian story talks about some deeply unpleasant ageplay focuses and grooming-adjacent stuff that squicks me the fuck out but would be fairly novel to get a conviction over, but the reddit comments suggest that the actual story had a mix of 'just' ageplay and sexualization of fictional children that have parallels (cw: gross-as-in-violence-to-children) to convictions in the United States (cw: gross-as-in-Simpson's porn). Now, that might just be people on the internet lying, since they point to a Goodreads listing and you're saying the story was not actually sold, but it's a mess and one I don't really want to look into deeper.
There's some philosophical and foundation of law problems even with the latter, but it wouldn't be new and Australia doesn't have freedom of speech in the American sense (instead having a mess of toothless international treaties and a limited right to political communication). In the defense of Australian authorities they tend to target people who make at least moderately unsympathetic defendants rather than those with Romeo And Juliet - Extra Spicy Edition, just as a lot of the more 'does this pass the Ashcroft test' convictions in the US tend have lots of reasons to plea guilty, but the Australian populace is generally supportive enough of aggressive policing that it might not matter anyway.
gattsuru
7d ago
This actually isn’t that self-evident in retrospect; in fact, I’ve seen the observation on the SSC subreddit once that it’s actually difficult to pinpoint the one decisive event which propelled the Gamergate scandal to mainstream exposure. Was it one of the blog posts? One of the youtube response videos? A tweet? It’s difficult to tell, especially because most of the first-hand sources related to Gamergate have been purged from the internet.
... that's probably truish, but I'd give better-than-even odds that, had 4chan not banned the post, it would have gotten little more than a few sages and some 'not your personal army' posts (possibly 'i ain't reading all that sorry/happy' meme?). There's a hole-shaped gap in the narrative because the actual contention is about a thing that never got visibility, rather than the stuff that did.
gattsuru
8d ago
A very consistently popular franchise is Little House on the Prairie, a story about an acceptable-for-the-time romance between a bright fifteen year old girl and a mid twenties man, but it's all good because he knows her dad.
I'll caveat that the books (and even official record) are flaky on Almanzo's age when he started courting Laura: the book where the romance actually happens claims that Almanzo was 20 and Laura was 15, while later books after Laura is older give a ten-year age gap. The reality's... messy, with Almanzo officially being ten years older, but enough people lied about their age for homesteading act purposes that some people suspect he was only eight years older.
While the original age gap would have only been a little on the larger side in its original timeframe, by the time Little House On the Prarie was published the author was well aware it wouldn't have been acceptable among her intended readership. So it's especially interesting as an example of how a story can be sanitized and that sanitized version in turn become.
(For another example a different direction: Catcher in the Rye features a scene where the main character hires a prostitute. The main character is sixteen. They don't actually have sex, so it's all good, right? Eh... the prostitute is, pointedly, the same age as Holden. Contemporaneously, there was more outrage for having a prostitute at all in that class of novel, than for having an underage one.)
gattsuru
8d ago
Her removal from the cast comes following comments Zarin shared about Bad Bunny‘s Super Bowl Halftime Show. The former New York Housewife shared critiques for his performance in a since-deleted video, calling it “the worst halftime show ever,” continuing to slam the show for featuring mostly Spanish songs and “no white people.”
gattsuru
10d ago
for all I know there are trans men who try really hard to lean into a macho concept of masculinity.
At the very least, trans guys with Short Man syndrome abound, even when they're not literally shorter than the average guy. There's more direct and immediate responses from other men, if sometimes more dangerous ones, though. Screw around with women's social norms and you don't even realize what's wrong until you're in the middle of fucking nowhere; screw around too much with most guys and you'll be lucky to just get hauled out of a room by your shirt.
gattsuru
11d ago
Fair, and apologies for the unsolicited advice. Hope you're feeling better soon.
gattsuru
11d ago
A good part of Veggie Tales specific look is due to the time it started: the first videos came out in 1993 using CGI animation common to the time, where their competition was stuff like Reboot. At the time, they weren't amazing, but the gap between VeggieTales and more mainstream media works were a lot smaller. While they've done some improvements as graphics have advanced, they've always been fairly cautious -- even reverting Bob and Larry's more Pixar-looking appearances after the Netflix series got mixed responses in 2015.
Most of the show's selling point is the surreal humor and decentish songs, rather than art direction or its non-confrontational nature. There's absolutely a lot of Christian- or ex-Christian people who will recall the Song of the Cebu, the Pirates Who Don't Do Anything, or the Hairbrush Song. I think there's a post-Netflix revival, but I'm pretty far removed from that culture now and from what I understand it's more aimed at teens and tweens.
SuperBook has similar problems: the CGI series started in 2011, and it was competing against shows that basically were game and toy ads. Here, the gap was bigger from day one given how much was getting poured into the best on the field, but even they struggled a lot.
There have been more recent Christian media, including from animators with more 'mainstream' support (eg, the Animal Farm CGI movie came from a company normally doing religious flicks, and I'll give the necessary pun about missing the underlying material here), but there's far less crossover from the Christian world to the rest of it, especially in the last five years. I only know about the Pilgrim's Progress movie because of some parents for a STEM outreach program were talking about it; they think it's good, but it's not really something that would even show up in my world.
gattsuru
11d ago
I don't want to say I'm the ambassador of the straights, but yeah. That's not to say that a woman who's thin in a fit way isn't seen as attractive, straight guys really don't focus on the abdomen to the point where "fit" is meaningfully distinguished from "thin and untoned."
Huh. Surprised that it's so broad rather than just not T&A-priority, but would explain a bit.
I don't know, I'm going to disagree with you there. Boyshorts aren't really interesting to me at all. They seem femboyish to me. Actually the twitter, uh, meme? strikes me as more resembling boyish aesthetics than what I associate with straight women, even though the characters are depicted with breasts. Maybe they're tomboyish?
Ah, that could be a good part of it, and one that's not accessible to me.
It's funny that you'd say this in a post where you've linked to images of what I take to be furry femboys in striped thigh-highs... I think before that it had an association with scene girls, and that subculture was definitely around at a formative time for me, so I guess maybe it was a straight thing before it was a gay one.
Tbf, I'm pretty sure outside of Always Online subcultures, you're still going to see more straight (not-trans) variants of the striped thigh-highs bit. Even for furries, it's pretty close to a 1:1 ratio on e621, and that's about as tech-programmer-trans as you'll get outside of a Rust convention. Definitely something the gay and trans side of things stole, but not exactly something taken over.
It just interests me how much of this stuff is just accidents of fate, and how quickly and randomly it can swing around. Hell, I resemble that remark myself : obviously furry fandom as a whole is about fixating on a concept, since there's people glomming on a foxy Robin Hood (checks notes 50 years later?!), but there's a very specific video I can point to regarding topping guys in plaid skirts, or for a hetero-friendly example the whole 'male swimwear challenge' (cw: female furries topless, but with featureless nudity aka no nips) was something with basically zero presence outside of porn, didn't have any presence there until the meme took off and wouldn't make sense before the late 1950s, but just unlocks something for some people.
Contrast it with more mechanical or sensation-focused kinks, or where social interactions are the real drivers, or where the material is available to get fixated on but it doesn't seem to connect to almost anyone, and it's kinda fascinating how varied interests can get.
Therianthropy tends to be pretty cyclical in terms of visibility; there was a relative boom in the 1996-2004 era (the Burned Furs lumped them in with animal abusers, plushophiles, and vegans), and another in 2012-2018.
A lot of that is specifically visibility, though. I can't say for sure on 2018, but the 2004 die-off was pretty overtly downstream of widespread raids by trolls who'd learned just enough about the community to make themselves annoying. A lot of groups moved to private IRCs (and, later, Discord and then VRChat) because anything on the public net was inviting disaster. That skepticism about outsiders definitely remains today. Trace was trying to 'keep an eye' on a group in 2023, and they kicked him out as a troll.
All the high-profiles are necessarily going to be very weird, even when some of the weirdness is at least instrumentally helpful. Maia crimew from the No Fly List 'hack' is a therian, as an example. It's the same with furries; the very thing that means my only public meatspace furry trait is a very-boring sticker that keeps my ThinkPad from getting mixed in with everyone else's is a good part of why I'll never show up on The Daily Show short of being taken hostage. At minimum, anyone bringing this stuff up in the real world is going to be autistic and/or chuunibyou as hell; more often, they're going to have thirty thousand other things that they've Got To Share (and worse, share without explaining or making understandable)
Someone that's normal about their weird stuff, even a pretty wide mix of pretty-hard-to-hide weird stuff, is just going to come across as a bit neurotic.
Oh, I wish.
More options
Context Copy link