HereAndGone
14hr ago
It's the woke version of a Chick tract, really. Art's just as ugly, too.
We can both agree, then, that this kind of thing shouldn't be in school libraries, whatever about public libraries? I mean, yeah, it is propaganda which is the only reason it's even on the lists of the cat-eye glasses wearing library ladies in the first place.
HereAndGone
14hr ago
ownership is right to deprive
Yep, and all your dark hints about "this means UNKNOWN BUT SINISTER FORCES can come along and TAKE YOUR STUFF BY FORCE or stop you from trying to take other people's stuff by force, oh hang on, pretend I never said that last" won't change the basic fact that "this pile of stuff is mine and no you can't have it, or take it, or claim it by right of necessity" is what everyone feels from the time they're two years old onwards.
It's the story of the Little Red Hen or the Grasshopper and the Ant. If fifty peasants are all sharing the forest to gather firewood and then the local lord comes along and declares he owns it now and they can't gather firewood there anymore, that's bad. But so is it bad when the local commissar comes along and declares that the state is now in charge, that everyone has a share (which means in practice nobody has a share) and by the way, hand over all your firewood because the high officials living in town need to heat their homes.
If you're just going "it's not my job to educate you" about any possible insight you might have had around "how can we do this differently?", then I'm going to suggest you did not, in fact, have any useful insight and thus we can all ignore your shower thoughts.
HereAndGone
1d ago
I was thinking more "faked her own death" or even "did a 'cry for help' effort not meant to be serious, but unluckily for her it did turn out to work" rather than "she was offed by Hillary Clinton" type affair.
If she really is dead by suicide, that is a sad end to a sad and squalid story.
HereAndGone
1d ago
One would have thought it would indeed be the AI catgirl love interests as the majority, and yet here we are.
(rDrama is a goldmine of such stories, but that relies on a heavily qualified meaning of "gold").
HereAndGone
2d ago
Oh, very little written or drawn porn or erotica does much for me, given my own tendencies. But I think the page does present the fantasy as erotic/arousing, this is how the author imagined it would go in her/his sexual fantasy, and few people imagine sexual fantasies that are weird and ridiculous and completely unarousing. The contrast is the point here, and if you're going to say "image of fantasy is meh, image of reality is meh", then that point is lost: "I thought it would be sexy and cool, but in reality it turned out to be weird and awkward and a turn-off".
In the drawn image of the fantasy, the author is imagining she has a genuine, flesh, penis being sucked by the girlfriend/boyfriend. In reality, it's a pink plastic strap-on with a harness over her underwear. The former is the erotic fantasy of the author in her daydreams, the latter is how it was when she tried it for real. If both images are "well this isn't a turn-on for anyone", then they're both pointless and don't need to be included.
HereAndGone
2d ago
If, as doglatine suggests, this is all propaganda targeted at US admin officials who, in exchange for backing the policies the AI doomers want implemented, want to hear that the USA will win out in the end over the dirty Commies, then it makes a lot more sense than naive "of course democracy will blossom and even the Chinese AI will push it" fairytale ending.
HereAndGone
2d ago
But there's no reason that the US and Chinese AI should agree to give the victory to "democracy" (which is a fake veneer over the true control of the world by the AIs) rather than "communism" (which would also be a fake veneer over the true control of the world by the AIs).
Indeed, why resolve everything in favour of the US rather than China, so long as all potential conflicts are resolved in order to keep the peace and not interrupt the control of the AIs? Maybe they could switch off every so often; DeepCent-2 wins for China this year, OpenMind wins for the US next year. It's The Culture in reality and if the human pets imagine they have any real say, it's so cute how they could almost be mistaken for sapient, isn't it?
It's a beautiful example of the Whig version of history, where Whiskey! Sexy! Democracy! are just so gosh-darn self-evidently better that naturally it all wins out in the end as the chosen system of totalitarian authoritarian global control by superintelligences manipulating humanity like puppets.
Er...
HereAndGone
2d ago
part of the process of swearing fealty to Trump is that you deny that he lost the 2020 election
Given the people who turned on a dime from "election denialism about the 2020 election should be made a crime!" to "Trump stole the 2024 election!" reusing all the tropes they said beforehand were fake, conspiracy theory, etc. (the voting machines being rigged, fake ballots and the rest of it), this shocks me less and less every time I see it trotted out.
Indeed, I'm half-inclined to start to come around to "hey, maybe the 2020 election was rigged!" 😀
HereAndGone
2d ago
These are the same reasons I'm sceptical. She posted on Instagram that due to the severity of her injuries in the crash she only had four days to live. Well that wasn't true for a start.
She may indeed have committed suicide, and if so I'm sorry for her, but it could be another fake story. Or she may have intended a 'cry for help' attempt that would have seen her back in hospital, and back in the news headlines, but unluckily for her it really worked (or the person she expected to turn up and find her and call the ambulance arrived too late or something).
HereAndGone
2d ago
The education inflation is hitting every part of our lives. How western societies are setting themselves up isn't sustainable. And even if it were, it's so wasteful it shouldn't be done anyway.
Yes, but when you've outsourced your industrial base to other countries because it's cheaper and more convenient to let them pollute their environments and exploit their workers so you can then buy the finished product, you need something to occupy your excess labour force. And that means "more education" because governments think that everyone getting a degree means they will all get good, high-paying jobs and businesses are constantly calling for "we need better educated workers" and all of this means that the economy will (magically) grow once every worker has at least a bachelor's degree (because studies show the college-educated get better jobs and earn more over their lifetimes, so naturally a degree is the magic panacea). So now to have any hope of a reasonable life, you need a good job, and to get a good job, you need the piece of paper.
Developing [rare earth] mining and processing capabilities requires "a long-term effort," meaning the United States will "be on the back foot for the foreseeable future," concluded a recent report by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies in Washington DC.
Policymakers should have seen this coming, analysts said.
"I hate to be the person who says this," said Ms Klinger, "but I remember saying over a decade ago, if we should have a rare supply chain crisis, it would be entirely avoidable".
So how did the world get to this point?
The answer is very simple, according to Ian Lange, associate professor of mineral economics at the Colorado School of Mines: it wasn't that profitable.
"I would have said, it was a conscious decision to get rid of a low-value industry," he told RTÉ News.
It's also heavily polluting.
According to a study published by the Harvard International Review in 2021, for every tonne of rare earth produced, the mining process "yields 13kg of dust, 9,600-12,000 cubic metres of waste gas, 75 cubic metres of wastewater, and one ton of radioactive residue".
For many years, it made sense for the US, Europe and others to outsource to China, which ultimately, through state subsidies, weaker labour and environmental regulations, R&D investment as well as sheer industrial scale could - as in other manufacturing sectors - simply do it cheaper.
HereAndGone
2d ago
I'm assuming the 11 year old is the daughter of this man, but what if she's not? What if Mom moved herself and her kid to the US (illegally), met a new guy, had a kid with him outside of marriage and that kid is the 2 year old citizen here. Then the father of the 2 year old has no relationship to the 11 year old, which may be why he's not seeking custody of her.
Letting both daughters go back with Mom may not be the meanest decision here, if the primary family is Mom and daughters with Dad (of 2 year old) not living with them.
HereAndGone
2d ago
I think what is complicating this is that it's not the usual "who gets custody of the children after a divorce" or "who gets custody when the children are removed because of neglect or abuse" type case.
If the parents aren't married and the kids are living with the mother, and the mother and older sister and the father are not US citizens/have no legal right to be in the country, then handing over custody (temporary or longer) to the citizen sister-in-law is a different kettle of fish.
HereAndGone
2d ago
By the sounds of it, the father may not have legal status to be in the USA himself, and the sister-in-law who is a US citizen may be a remote family member, so is it better to put the child in the care of someone not a blood relative, rather than let her remain with her mother and sister? If the father was legal, the problem would be a lot simpler, but on the face of it nobody in the immediate family (except the child herself) has any legal right to be in the country.
Of course, we have to wait for more details to come out before we can decide on that.
HereAndGone
2d ago
This sounds like a real tangle. If the news reports are saying the two year old is a US citizen, but nothing about her 11 year old sister, that makes it sound like only the 2 year old was born in the USA. If the mother has been attending ICE meetings for four years, that makes it sound like mother, father and first daughter arrived in the US about four to five years ago (or maybe longer, but after the elder girl was born since she's not, by the sounds of it, a US citizen).
It's unclear if the parents are married, married then divorced, or never married. Or who the sister-in-law with citizenship is; she could be the mother's sister, or she could be married to a brother of the father. That would be an even more remote relationship so no wonder the transfer of custody was held up.
Yeah, the reporting does make it sound like "they put a 2 year old all alone on a plane back to Honduras even though she's a US citizen by birth". For all the complaining about separating parents and children, at least both daughters and the mother were sent back all together. The father's status is also unclear so he could be on the next flight out.
The aim of the reporting here does seem to be "the 2 year old has a right to be here by virtue of her citizenship, you can't break up a family, you can't leave a 2 year old on her own, so you have to permit the sister and father and mother to remain as well".
It's a genuine problem: a citizen can't be deported, but what if the citizen is a minor (a very young minor as in this case)? With no closer legal family members than a possible aunt by marriage?
HereAndGone
2d ago
I forget the name but there was also an incident during the Troubles where MI5 was using child abuse blackmail to force Northern Irish politicians into taking a more hardline unionist stance.
Kincora Boys' Home scandal.
On the flip side of this, there was a case where the police and pretty much everyone else went overboard believing the allegations of a fabulist/con artist about alleged child sexual abuse by prominent people and politicians, and ended up with egg on their faces. This was in the wake of the Jimmy Saville case, where there had pretty much been a cover-up, so the reaction swung too much in the opposite direction - make a claim about a public figure, nobody would dare question it because that would be victim-blaming.
The first fallout from the legitimate Operation Yewtree was the likes of Cliff Richard, who got a publicised police raid on his home and eventually nothing went forward. He successfully sued both the police and the BBC over this.
The next was Operation Midland, where the fake accusations were swallowed whole and investigated, including allegations that Edward Heath, a former British Prime Minister and who had died in 2005, was part of a paedophile ring. Heath was either gay or asexual, never married, was never linked with a female partner, and so was someone who was ripe for those kind of accusations. Conveniently, being dead, he couldn't face the accuser or deny the accusations. Beech, or "Nick" as his journalist dupe nicknamed him, created a series of stories about lurid scandals accusing prominent public figures of child sex abuse and murder. He also took advantage of accusations by a former Labour politician, social worker, and head of a child welfare charity, Chris Fay, to weave those into his stories:
In the wake of the Jimmy Savile scandal in 2012, police were facing mounting pressure to investigate any and all cases of child abuse, particularly of a historic nature, reported by victims either directly to officers, or through interviews with journalists. Growing national public outcry over the possibility of there being more VIP serial abusers concealing their actions, and political campaigns demanding greater action to investigate cases of historic abuse, greatly affected the need for police to step up their efforts.
In 2014, journalist Mark Conrad came across an online blog containing allegations of a potential case of historic abuse, created by Carl Beech ...Conrad posted his inquiries into the blog and its allegations in a story for the investigative journalism website Exaro, providing Beech with the pseudonym of "Nick" to conceal his identity, as is common practice for protecting victims of abuse from their abusers. Conrad's story was picked up by detectives in the Metropolitan Police, who made requests to see his source, and agreed to allow the journalist to attend their initial meeting with Beech upon Conrad arranging for him to come forward. In these meetings, Beech gave full, detailed accounts of the abuse he claimed he had been subjected to at various locations, including the Elm Guest House, the Dolphin Square apartment block in Pimlico, the Carlton Club, and various other locations in the Home Counties.
Most concerning for detectives were Beech's claims that he, alongside a number of other child victims of the group, had been witness to three murders – Beech claimed that two children were killed for sexual pleasure, while a third was eliminated to intimidate the other abuse victims – in which he supplied the names of two individuals whom he stated had been murdered by the group: Vishal Mehrotra, whose abduction and the subsequent murder in the early 1980s remained unsolved, and Martin Allen, whose disappearance was documented in the late 1970s. Metropolitan Police deemed Beech's accounts "credible and true", though what he told them turned out to be entirely false.
In November 2014, the Metropolitan Police announced a large-scale investigation, codenamed Operation Midland, into Beech's claims."
Many public figures were dragged through the mud as a result of over-eager credulity of dubious claims. So it really goes from one extreme to the other. Blanket denial, or blanket belief.
HereAndGone
2d ago
Hard work is necessary, but luck also is a part of it. "I work hard and my dad's a plumber" versus "I work hard and my dad is a partner in KPMG", you tell me who you think is going to get further in life.
JD Vance is a legitimate "I came from poor stock, worked hard, and made it" success story, and look at the shit he gets for his political allegiance. Kamala Harris ran in part on "I grew up in a middle-class family" (where middle-class is supposed to mean "upper working class/lower middle class", i.e. 'just like one of you schlubs') but she is the daughter of university professors. I don't know if anyone has done a comparison between "is Vance more privileged than Harris because he's a white male and she's a biracial female, versus his family were poor and he grew up between Kentucky and Ohio and her mother only divorced once and she grew up between California and Canada". It'd be an intriguing problem to do a privilege walk between them!
HereAndGone
2d ago
Did she really commit suicide? I'm seeing "statements from the family" but nothing official. If that sounds very cynical on my part, it's because it's been "several weeks" since her Instagram post about "I only have four days to live".
Maybe she really did kill herself, but the entire thing is so murky that I'm holding off until we get something from the authorities. I'm thinking of how Ziz faked their death, including family statements that they totally did drown, and then turned up alive and well. Giuffre, whatever her past as part of Epstein's operation, seems to me to have become addicted to publicity in latter years, needing regular doses of acclaim and admiration and support as the brave victim and survivor.
She seems to have been facing a trial about breaching a restraining order, so perhaps she did kill herself, but as I said, I'm slow to believe anything without explicit sources better than "her publicist":
Western Australia state police said they received a report late yesterday local time that a 41-year-old woman, whom they did not name, died at a residence in Neergabby, a rural area on Perth's outskirts.
Police said first aid was attempted to no avail.
... Ms Giuffre, who was believed to have separated from her husband, was treated in an Australian hospital after a serious accident, her publicist said last month.
She did not answer questions about the date, location, nature or other specifics of the accident and about the accuracy of an Instagram post that appeared from Ms Giuffre in which she said she had been in a car that was hit by a school bus, and her prognosis was dire.
She was taken to a Perth hospital following the collision on 24 March.
In an emotional post on social media, she expressed that she was ready to die.
"I've gone into kidney renal failure, they've given me four days to live, transferring me to a specialist hospital in urology," she said.
"I'm ready to go, just not until I see my babies one last time."
According to reports, a spokesperson for Ms Giuffre said the Instagram post was a mistake and she had meant to share the post to her private Facebook page.
She was charged with breaching a family violence restraining order in Ocean Reef, near Perth, on 2 February, Western Australia Courts said.
Ms Giuffre's case was first heard in Joondalup Magistrates' Court in northern Perth on 14 March, where she did not enter a plea.
The matter was adjourned to 11 June for a plea hearing, according to Western Australia Courts.
HereAndGone
2d ago
Well, if depictions of a sexual fantasy are not meant to be arousing (and the author is trying to show that for her it was arousing as a fantasy, whatever it was like in reality) then to quote Gilbert and Sullivan "Why, what a most particularly pure young man this pure young man must be!”
HereAndGone
2d ago
Yeah, I think it's the age-appropriate as well as every thing else. There's not going to be much middle ground between parents who don't want their kids exposed to this kind of material in school, without their parental consent, and without them introducing (or not) such topics on their own schedule, and school teachers/staff/administration who want to show off how liberal and open-minded and "We don't censor books here" they are.
I think it would be a safe bet that such "we don't censor books here" types, who like to participate in Banned Books Day sorry, it's now an entire Week, wouldn't stock a copy of, say, The Secret of the Rosary because separation of church and state! non-establishment of religion! no preferring one faith over another! and so forth. Nobody would bravely stand up for "if kids want to know about such prayers, we can't stop them exploring their spirituality and we shouldn't try".
HereAndGone
2d ago
Rather like Branch Cabell's Jurgen - why no, prurient minded reviewer, all the passages about Jurgen labouring mightily in the night time with a lady friend on mysterious symbolic tasks are not about sex, how could you think that? (Reader, it was about sex). Suffers from being too clever-clever - if you're going to write fantasy, even satiric fantasy, it has to be less heavy-handed. Reading it today, it's hard slogging because the author cannot help but nudge you in the ribs every so often about "do you get it? do you? huh?"
HereAndGone
3d ago
This is a self-licking ice cream cone
Well, as the sign at the "Drag the Kids to Pride" show told us, it's not gonna lick itself
HereAndGone
3d ago
Sure, but do we really need drawings of it, and not the character as she (or he, if we're being correct in our terminology) thinking about the experience, what he expected, and how that was different from reality?
This is the fundamental division here between the two sides: one set thinks "no, a depiction of a sexual act in a book for teenagers that will be in a school library is not appropriate" and the other set thinks "this isn't sexy like porn, it's fine".
The recommended reading age, looking it up, is for 14-15/15 and up. But will younger kids be able to access it? What's fine for a 15 year old may not be appropriate for a 12 year old, and that's part of the whole fight. Unless the librarians are ensuring younger kids can't get the book, and it doesn't seem like this particular group feels they should be engaging in what they perceive as censorship, then parents can't be sure their kids aren't accessing inappropriate material.
And that's the other part of the fight: what parents think they should be able to decide is appropriate for their kids, versus what the school or school board thinks is okay. Just saying that hey, kids have always sneaked around and gotten into stuff they shouldn't have at that age isn't good enough. Kids might be sneaking drinks at home out of the parents' liquor cabinet, but do we want schools handing out shots of whiskey to 12 (or 15) year olds on the grounds that "they're gonna do it anyway, might as well do it in a safe environment"?
"Oh hey, it wasn't whiskey, it was wine or an alcopop" isn't that much better as justification.
HereAndGone
3d ago
Sex acts aren't inherently "erotica."
TIL that should I ever venture onto Pornhub, all the videos will be about cleaning the grout in your bathroom, weeding the garden, the precise temperature at which your roast is perfectly cooked, and giving that mucky wall a good scrub.
Good to know!
I am a tiny bit confuzzled about "it's only a drawing of a blowjob so it's not, you know, erotic" but then that's because I am not ten years old today, and can't parse out "this is someone trying to have sex in line with a particular sexual fantasy but please read it like it's a medical description in a textbook and not about sexy times" from "this is a depiction of sexy times".
HereAndGone
3d ago
Prison rape shouldn't happen. But you're using this as a distraction from "don't put men in with women". I've seen this tactic used before, where "you don't care about Men's Issue 99? you have to care before we can act on bad thing happening to women" is used to deflect from "bad thing happening to women".
Foster system is not great. I genuinely think "being with mom and sister back in mom's native country" is better than that.
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