magicalkittycat
3hr ago
According to pew research, Men do feel the pressures of masculinity as mentioned, and they are punished more by society for stepping out the gender expectations
Funny enough, that's just the concept of "toxic masculinity". It's a stupid name but it's literally just about masculine gender roles and how they lock men into having to always play the hero and hide their human vulnerability and complaints.
I'd just like to see more personal consequences for abuse of power. If someone hits you on accident with their car and you end up in the hospital, you can sue them (and their insurance) for damages. If someone hits you on purpose then that happens + they can go to jail.
Now I get that proving a judge or prosecutor was acting with explicit foul intent will be difficult and maybe nothing would happen in this case, but I also wouldn't be surprised that if you subpoenad their communications you might find something rather usable considering how brazen this was!
I have also very little sympathy for the taxpayer here. At the end of the day, the buck stops with them -- they elected the sheriff, possibly the judge, or other officials who employed the perpetrators. As a German, let me tell you that "we made a bad decision in the voting booth and now a few years later our county is bankrupt" is far from the worst of what bad electoral decisions can cost an electorate.
I get the logic here, the issue is that because politicians and cops and etc don't really view it as their money (like even in this settlement would the Perry County police budget or prosecutors officer or whatever actually be lowered by the amount in response or would it just get diverted from something else? Likely the latter), something like this ain't really viewed too much as their punishment. The only thing that they might suffer is that they might lose office, and maybe they'll have to divert some funds away from another government program. Most likely something they don't even like with the excuse of triaging. Or of course a classic, just have the city borrow more money and make future citizens pay for it all. Oh whoops, looks like we had to divert money from that infrastructure project in order to pay for the corrupt cop, guess we'll do more bonds.
magicalkittycat
6hr ago
You're in the minority view even among just republicans there.
Also consider that it's not just state charges, but also federal charges he was found guilty for. He went through two different juries and appeals processes (including the US supreme court with its 6-3 conservative majority denying the appeal), so your confidence that there's no basically no chance of him even being charged yet alone convicted in a red state seems inaccurate.
magicalkittycat
6hr ago
I somewhat agree. But do governors routinely pardon normal cases that fail to get into the news cycle
Yeah, it's not too often but lots of pardons can happen this way. You don't have to get into the news cycle, you can literally file an application with the governors office/state clemency board/etc.
Now it might take a few years, they don't really prioritize that often (in part because most applications are bullshit and they are truly guilty and don't have a good case!) but it happens.
because there is a scissor statement involved?
Wouldn't controversy increase the chance of a news cycle?
Political cases which I would consider Chauvin the gold standard literally have different results depending on what state it occurs in. In Texas I would say with 80% probability he would not have been charged. Likely another 80% if he was charged he would win at trial. And probably a 100% chance the go vet or would pardon him. Obviously different results in Minnesota.
I'm not sure "my imaginary probabilities" is a good source for this sort of topic.
"the worst first amendment case I've ever seen" just had a good ending! You can read his summary (CEO of FIRE who lead the case) or mine.
A while back, a retired police officer Larry Bushart posted a political meme on Facebook mocking conservatives over the concept of not caring about kids who get shot in schools while cancelling people for not caring about Charlie Kirk's death.
In response, Perry County officials where he lived had him arrested and held in jail for 37 days, setting his bond at 2 million dollars. He lost his job from this disruption and missed his granddaughter's birth and his wedding anniversary.
This arrest was obvious bullshit, another case where corrupt abusive officials utilize the legal system itself as punishment. No one would have seriously expected this case to go through, but the process itself is often meant as the attack.
It ends with good news though, as part of the settlement Bushart is getting almost a million dollars. Bad news, like most abuse by officials it gets paid for by the taxpayers and nothing is likely to happen to the corrupt scumbags who were in charge.
But this is a great lesson at least. In the US, you can just be a random guy, upset the most powerful government organizations and draw their ire, and win against them. America is a country where David can take down Goliath, whether it be your local officials or federal ones. Bushart refused to accept the abuse, he stood up to the bullies, and he won.
Put it one way, this is MAGNITUDES more efficient than human drivers! Put it another way, "Waymo cannot operate without human intervention."
Humans can also not operate without human intervention, and unlike us, these machines are only getting better and better. What will self driving navigation be like in five years? Ten years? Twenty? Fifty? Maybe with very very minimal human input, one guy whose job is to sit in a room and two times a day he has to look up cause the screens beep at him that one in the millions (or billions?) of cars can't tell if that weird fuzzy light in the sky is a red light. Not that it really matters too much anyway, making a trivial mistake like that doesn't cause anyone to die, traffic accidents are just a vague memory. It just gives the dude in the car a minor annouance cause his trip is 9.5 minutes instead of 9.3. Except of course it might not be one guy, it might just be Claude.
I am trying to tell you that we have had automated weaponry for decades. Automated weaponry is not ground-breaking technology. The ability to develop, field, and use automated weaponry does not mean that the technology stack to replace infantry exists at all, let alone at an acceptable price-point.
And we've never had it like we do today. And we've never had it like we will in the upcoming decades.
Rather, self-driving cars are "human in the loop" technology that operate with the aid of human guidance. You should think of this less as replacing humans directly and more pushing them into a different, ideally more efficient line of work
It's for backup. Even in the article's first paragraphs it says this
WASHINGTON, Feb 17 (Reuters) - Alphabet (GOOGL.O), opens new tab self-driving unit Waymo on Tuesday defended its use of remote assistance personnel in the face of questions from Congress and said they have never been used to move robotaxis in U.S. on-road operations.
Waymo told Democratic Senator Ed Markey in a letter that it has not used remote driving or “tele-operations” to perform driving tasks. In rare circumstances, some U.S.-based personnel could prompt a stopped AV to move forward at 2 mph (3 kph) for a short distance to exit the travel lane but that has not happened outside of training.
So not used often and when it is used it's been for very tiny things instead of needing constant human attention like driving normally does.
So yeah autonomous drones will hopefully have some human oversight still. I don't want kill bots without any way to overrule them. But yes self driving cars are replacing the need for humans to drive.
We are not at Killbots yet, but we are approaching. Don't have to believe me, just look at the Anthropic/Hegseth spat recently where they clearly seem to believe automated AI weaponry is something to be worried about in the near future.
When the US and our military contractors are already having major discussions about fully autonomous no humans involved military technology, we should at least entertain the possibility that it's coming.
Consider for a moment that Jury's aren't random samplings.
They aren't completely random but they are essentially random off voter lists/licensed drivers/etc. Like yes there's some homeless guy without a car or other form of state ID that will never get called, but they're few and far between.
Both sides have a limited number of peremptory challenges to remove jurors they see as more subtly problematic. If they're too biased (in a way not reflective of the general population) then it's either just because of pure chance or because one side fucked up.
magicalkittycat
8hr ago
It's also not just the juries either that decide your fate. If you're clearly innocent you have the prosecutors who probably aren't going to charge you to begin with (most don't want to risk ruining their record and triage stronger cases), the grand jury (which while normally considered easy to get past, we've seen that success rates fall dramatically with explicit weaponization), then the jury and judge, and then the whole appeals process.
And even if that all goes wrong, you can appeal to the president/governor. And even if that goes wrong, you might still be able to appeal to public opinion and put enough pressure on the rest of the system that they drop your case.
If you can't win despite all that, it's probably because you're either truly guilty or because you got insanely unlucky and are practically indistinguishable from truly guilty.
Ok let's say you have two countries.
Techieland and Manistan.
Techieland has drones and automated weapons and stealth bombers and tanks and turrets and mines and all sorts of neat stuff like that.
Manistan has men. They're big and full of muscles and super manly, they're all capable of lifting 5x their bodyweight. They run in with what evolution gave them, their fists and wherever big rocks and sticks they can find nearby.
Who wins?
Techieland obviously.
As technology advances human differences start mattering less and less because humans matter less in general even at our peak. The same way like I said with the ant, the strongest ant and the weakest ant make no difference when stepped on by your boot, you don't even notice.
Even now in more personal level encounters using older technology, it is still a major equalizer! Would you rather be an unarmed man or a woman with a loaded rifle and marksman training when facing a lion?
Even Israel doesn't generally allow women in to frontline combat duty. Women simply do not fight well unless defending young- Mulan was a folk tale and not someone who actually existed, and the Trang sisters had a baby strapped to their back, and Joan of Arc didn't personally fight, she used psychic powers to make command decisions- and we're definitely not going to have a kindergarten class hanging out in trenches.
Of course, psychic powers aren't real so women aren't beating men with them.
Instead, in real life, a woman can kill you from thousands of miles away using technology.
magicalkittycat
10hr ago
But that's the thing, noncombat roles have become increasingly more important and likely at some point soon will be the only thing important when attempts to use armies of humans just swarmed by autonomous drones. Human soldier morale is going to plummet even harder and they'll fight back conscription more too when using them becomes even more guaranteed death compared to just making another bot.
While not as many, a lot of women (hundreds of thousands) were still conscripted by the soviets https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_the_Soviet_Union
By the end of the war, the air defence force was more than 1/4 female, with 300,000 women, both volunteers and conscripts serving as communicators, machine gunners, pilots and medical personnel. Most female conscripts served behind the front lines in secondary positions and roles in an attempt to free up more men for front line duty. However it is believed that many women also served in combat positions, such as in tank regiments or along the front line.
Likewise the Nazis while against conscripting women for their idealogical beliefs, also turned to drafting a lot of women at the end
Women also fought in the Volkssturm near the end of World War Two. Girls as young as 14 years were trained in the use of small arms, panzerfaust, machine guns, and hand grenades from December 1944 through May 1945.
And both sides still had women doing other military related jobs https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/women-in-the-third-reich
By war’s end, the number of female auxiliaries in the German armed forces approached 500,000, including some 3,700 women who served as guards in the Nazi camp system.
So yeah, when push came to shove even the Nazis were like "fuck it, teenage girls take these guns and fight"
Maybe one day manpower will be fully replaceable with metal, but as of now that's not the case. Men are indispensable to manning frontlines even as (man-controlled) drones do most of the killing.
Yep, but that day is getting closer and closer. Might even be within a decade from now if AGI predictions pan out and we have another tech explosion from them.
magicalkittycat
12hr ago
Sorry, I was under the impression you were making the argument that women can contribute to warfare nearly equally to men, not that Skynet will eat us for breakfast.
Well those are the same thing. Man or woman, they both will die to a drone coming for them. Just like how it makes no difference if the ant you squash under your foot is the strongest ant alive. It's dead anyway, and you didn't even notice.
magicalkittycat
12hr ago
Ukraine is lucky to benefit from modern tech--which they emphatically did not invent--in the sense that modern maneuver warfare became nigh-impossible.
Ukranian tech is so good that the US is going to them for it. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2026-05-19/ukraine-sees-us-looking-for-technology-transfers-in-drone-deal
They also benefit from press-ganging their male population into vans and sending them to die on the frontlines, which Russia doesn't want to do.
Over a million Russian casualties for basically no gain, yeah sure dude they totally care.
Russia has been far more innovative (Geran, fiber optic FPVs, Oreshnik, bla bla).
Yeah, they've been so great at innovation that they're currently losing ground (after drawing it out for years without much advancement) in a war that was expected to be an easy operation that would only take a few days. The underdog is becoming the winner, Moscow is even facing major strikes now something considered pretty unimaginable back in 2022.
magicalkittycat
12hr ago
AI systems are going to make riflemen into effective anti-drone marksmen much faster than they are going to equalize the differences between men and women in combat.
Your argument is that warfare descending into AI machines vs AI machines doesn't help to equalize biological differences?
And since AI systems are easily fooled by anyone who has played Metal Gear, we won't be getting rid of the infantrymen any time soon, either.
They aren't perfect absolutely not, but these types of arguments are increasingly looking like the ones used against self driving cars where someone will say "But look, it accidently hit a cat this one time!" while ignoring the many many many other areas, and the general statistics where technology has matched or even improved over humans.
We saw this in practice already, a real life position was just taken from boots on the ground by machines. And again remember it's gonna keep getting better.
Update on this, some of the police officers who were violently attacked during the events of Jan 6th are suing to block the settlement https://www.cnbc.com/amp/2026/05/20/trump-fund-lawsuit-capitol-riot-irs.html
One of their argument is that there's a real possibility the money will go to rewarding the cop beaters and other violent thugs who went after them.
Their suit also says the new fund endangers their lives and safety by encouraging "those who enacted violence in the President's name to continue to do so."
"Dunn and Hodges already face credible threats of death and violence on regular basis; the Fund substantially increases the danger," the suit says. "Second, if allowed to begin making payments, the Fund will directly finance the violent operations of rioters, paramilitaries, and their supporters who threatened Plaintiffs' lives that day, and continue to do so."
Letting violent criminals off for attacking cops was already despicable, it'll be downright subsidizing it if they start getting paid for it too. Paying people who attacked police could encourage other attacks in the future.
Women also get btfo'd in hand-eye coordination contests, which doesn't bode well for female drone pilots,
Oh don't worry about that, way things are going it seems that drone pilots won't be nearly as good as the automated AI systems in the near future either. They're already better at driving (most relevant given it's direct proof that automated systems are better at controlling machines already and they're just gonna need to figure out the proper parameters for war), at diagnosing people, and apparently even at appearing to be human. Human operated full drone warfare will be a really short part of history.
Evolution has made men into warriors and women into childbearers. You can try to push against that but you'll always come up against biological realities.
Evolution makes everyone into a warrior. Males may be generally better, but one glance at the dangerous wild and how basically all other species operates tells us that females will fight too when needed.. The world was and is not kind enough to let anyone coast through so easily.
But even more importantly, modern warfare just doesnt really care as much about your physical capabilities as nature did, what wins war isn't manly men with thick abs swinging their muscular fists at each other anymore. Instead what truly wins modern wars (if things are even "winnable" traditionally now) is the logistics and science, even Rambo has no defense against a drone swarm.
Ukraine hasn't turned the tides on Russia because they sent ther men to the gym, but because they've engineered incredible new advancements in weapons systems and made tons of logistical optimizations. Just recently they even took over a Russian position without a single boot on the ground. And it's only going to get more and more common.
It's obviously a double standard: Conscription affects men, there no corresponding duty for women, despite equality under the law being considered very important in other circumstances.
Congrats, you've recreated the mainstream liberal feminist stance on it. The "women should register" crowd is one branch, and the "no draft should exist to begin with" crowd is another pretty loud. Here's the ACLU as well if you question it being mainstream. They've sued over the gendered draft on several occasions.
Funny enough this was debated even back when the equal rights amendment was being seriously considered, with opponents to the ERA saying that ending sex discrimination could one day lead to women in the military and the draft. One of the reasons it has stayed as just a proposal.
That conservatives who complain about immigrants taking jobs are concerned about sharing a fixed pie with more people rather than with immigrants who will do jobs for less money forcing the price of labour down.
Those are literally the same thing. If you believe immigrants working jobs will drive down prices like that then you believe the pie share of pay shrinks faster than the pie size grows when you add more people in. And this of course also is accompanied with the belief that the pie share shrinking on the employee end doesn't have a positive impact on the emplouee and consumer ends whose pie would grow from paying lower prices. Now the former can be true of specific industries if immigrants are more likely to work those but the corollary to that is that there are industries they're less likely to work in so society wise it should balance out unless you generally don't think the overall society pie scales to match additional labor.
Which of course is also another part of how nativism thinks the exact same way as the unionists where they don't understand, or just don't care, that rent seeking from workers has a negative impact on everyone else in the country. Although saying they "think the same way" is improper, greedy unionists and nativists are often the same exact group to begin with!
This is what you say when you’ve failed to model someone’s views correctly.
Well what did Massie do wrong with the GOP besides go against Trump on Epstein and Israel? It sure does seem like when it comes to exposing elite pedophiles vs doing what Trump says, the GOP primary voters value the latter more. And if that's the case then "they only care about Trump" is the answer, because what else could their concern be if pedophile rings aren't enough??
Massie making Trump an enemy is the most obvious explanation for Trump working against Massie. That’s as basic as the friend enemy distinction gets.
And why would that matter if I modeled it wrong and "what Trump wants" isn't clearly the main thing that appeals to the GOP primary voter now?
So there's a legitimate question: if the threat is not immediate, at what point are you actually justified in pressing women into service? How dire must things appear? How much foresight are you allowed to use?
As I pointed out with my comment, there's also a big question of convincing people the threat even exists to begin with. Right now more Americans believe the opposite is true and that overpopulation is a larger threat than low birth rates. Large amounts of people fundamentally believe in a limited amount of wealth and resources in society and that having more people just cuts into their own share. Even conservatives (who are more sided towards birth rates being an issue but still 40% believe in overpopulation more) do it when they complain about immigrants "taking jobs", so I'm pretty sure this divide is just because birth rates has become memetic among parts of the online right and not reflecting a deeper view about growing the pie.
Meaning even if you convince society to press women into some sort of top down birthing related authoritarianism, it's likely going to be getting them into having even less kids.
The GOP primary voter doesn't really have any meaningful beliefs beyond "whatever Trump wants" anymore. This is partly because Trump himself turned many people into cultist followers, but also partly because Trump specifically activated and changed the very demographics involved in politics, like for example Trump appeals heavily to the lower/middle income white demographic and pushes away the higher earning ones whereas Republicans before him were the upper class doctors and lawyers type. These poor folk are people who were brought in because Trump. And that's why someone like Massie loses. He did the crime of opposing Trump in trying to expose the elite pedophile ring that Epstein ran, that meant opposing Trump and that meant he committed an unforgivable sin among the hardliners. Also of course he went after Israel, which sealed his doom even harder.
It's a big issue with the primary system in general, it pushes candidates towards the extremist and personality cults of their party and away from moderate centrist beliefs. But parties aren't gonna change it because the individual politicians in power don't care about if their party wins, they care about if they the individual wins.
Marginally, and even a lot of those are from new technology
That's true, but it's still just because of technology and has nothing to do with "evolutionary warrior ability" or whatever. This is even true of older tech that has been around for a long while. Like I've said elsewhere if you're up against a lion would you rather be an unarmed man or a woman with a loaded full auto rifle and firearms training? It's already been equalizing to some degree thanks to tech.
And then on top of that, would you rather go up against the lion with a rifle or with a tank? How about with a fighter jet? Or a drone thousands of miles away? The lion is an even more "evolved to be a warrior" physical fighter than us humans, and yet it doesn't even have a chance. Technology does not just equalize our biology, it has already surpassed it decades if not centuries ago.
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