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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   1055 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for October 2, 2026

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Notices Bulge, the judicial version: United States v. Bontemps, 977 F.3d 909 (2020) (google scholar link, not pdf)

From 2020, so not recent, but a fun read if you haven't seen it. Between the opinion and the dissent, they use the world "bulge" 113 times. And this is no ordinary bulge. This one is:

  • very large and obvious bulge
  • a very obvious bulge
  • a suggestive bulge
  • a distinctive bulge

I'm sure the law clerks who helped draft this one had a great time seeing how many times they could use the word. Unfortunately for Mr. Bontemps, the court holds that his bulge was suggestive of a firearm and was sufficient to create reasonable suspicion for police officers to stop him.

Original PDF

Bontemps initially argued on appeal that a bulge alone is necessarily unreliable because the bulge could be anything (his examples: candy, a gift, or a “post-mastectomy prosthetic”). But Bontemps ultimately acknowledged at oral argument what is, of course, true: that in some circumstances a bulge could be an obvious indicator of a concealed firearm—for example, a bulge underneath a tight-fitting shirt that clearly reflects the distinct outline of a large gun.

Cases involving “drug bulges” present somewhat different considerations than “gun bulges” under the fact-based Terry inquiry. While guns are made of rigid materials (such as metal or hard plastics) and possess a relatively distinctive shape, drugs or packages of drugs come in different shapes and sizes, some quite small, soft, and nondescript. See Eustaquio (explaining that a bulge perceived to be drugs could indicate “any number of non-contraband items”).

In my view, seeing a non-descript bulge without more should not allow police officers to stop and frisk citizens. And the majority’s holding gives license to stop and frisk any citizen based upon nothing more than officer testimony that the officer had seen a bulge.

Note a very significant difference from a Pennsylvania case that I posted recently.

Under California law, which Bontemps does not challenge here, it is generally illegal to carry a concealed firearm in public. In Foster, we held that “[g]iven the insignificant number of concealed carry permits issued in California, a reasonable officer could conclude that there is a high probability that a person identified in a 911 call as carrying a concealed handgun is violating California’s gun laws”. We concluded the officer in Foster could therefore reasonably make a Terry stop based on this information. We held similarly in another more recent case. See United States v. Vandergroen (holding that officers had reasonable suspicion to justify a stop based on a 911 call reporting that the defendant had a gun “on him” because “possessing a concealed weapon” is “presumptively unlawful in California”).

Some fun bulge-related LLM prompts:

  • Write a nonsupernatural erotic horror story with the following premise: A young, skinny, female college student generally is uncomfortable interacting with men, because she knows that they probably are constantly thinking about having sex with her. During a college break, she is relaxing at home, with none of her horny male classmates around. But her middle-schooler brother seems less innocent than he used to be. The bulge of his penis looms menacingly.

  • Write an erotic story with the following premise: A skinny, female high-school student generally is uncomfortable interacting with boys, because she knows that they probably are constantly thinking about having sex with her. Her gym class has a multi-week dance unit, and she is paired up with a skinny boy. The bulge of his penis traumatizes her.

First: sex and sexuality topics are quintessential CW material and therefore banned from the Friday Fun Thread. This includes but is by no means limited to discussion of sexual assault both real and imagined, discussion on the sexualization of minors, erotic AI prompts, and so forth. This is a final mod warning.

Second: Someone reading this warning will probably wonder whether this means that gooning material is fair game for the CW thread. It is not. This is a discussion forum for testing shady thinking, not for sharing gooning material. You can talk about the CW, but not wage CW; you can talk about the sociocultural development of gooning (ugh, if you must) but this is not the place to goon. We understand that there are communities which focus on sharing smut and smut accessories. We are not, and do not intend to become, one of those communities. This is a mod comment.

Third: We will be employing the Supreme Court's own standard in enforcing this rule. You have demonstrated that your intuition does not always line up with the users' or the mods'. If you are unsure about a particular topic, ask in modmail first. This is a mod suggestion in hopes of avoiding further mod warnings.

Second: Someone reading this warning will probably wonder whether this means that gooning material is fair game for the CW thread. It is not. This is a discussion forum for testing shady thinking, not for sharing gooning material. You can talk about the CW, but not wage CW; you can talk about the sociocultural development of gooning (ugh, if you must) but this is not the place to goon.

Third: We will be employing the Supreme Court's own standard in enforcing this rule.

As in, the one about "lack of redeeming value", or just the one about "I know it when I see it"?

Essentially, I'm asking whether you're declaring this to be the kiddy pool (I was kinda under the impression it wasn't, given the 18+ tag exists), or just forbidding random horny drops. ('Cause, y'know, people's sexual preferences do get questioned occasionally in CW-relevant contexts.)

As in, the one about "lack of redeeming value", or just the one about "I know it when I see it"?

In the moderator discussion on this, I leaned toward "I know it when I see it" but probably "lack of redeeming value" is not a bad question to bear in mind, either. Netstack actually got input from several mods on this and, as usual, there was not total agreement on how to handle things, but there was relatively broad accord.

Essentially, I'm asking whether you're declaring this to be the kiddy pool (I was kinda under the impression it wasn't, given the 18+ tag exists), or just forbidding random horny drops. ('Cause, y'know, people's sexual preferences do get questioned occasionally in CW-relevant contexts.)

I guess this depends on what you mean by "kiddy pool"--but I as far as I know we did not implement the 18+ tag, it's just part of the codebase we inherited. Rather, the examples you cite are fine, discussions about e.g. the appropriate age of consent fall squarely within the ambit of the foundation. Actually, in moderator discussion @netstack made another point that isn't in the modpost, that there is a something akin to the "use/reference" distinction here, maybe we can call it the "discussion/exhibition" distinction. We don't ban users for referencing racial slurs, but we will certainly ban users for using them, i.e. for calling one another names (though a lot of unnecessary "referencing" would quickly become obnoxious). Likewise it is permissible to discuss adult topics, certainly. Sex and sexuality are big culture war items! But (say) posting your AI-generated erotica seems more like exhibitionism. It's not the sort of engagement the foundation exists to facilitate.

And really, I wouldn't worry too much about it. As far as I can recall, ToaKraka is literally the only (non-spambot) user who has been a problem in this regard. There is one user (many accounts) who runs afoul of the single-issue posting rule on age-of-consent discussion but it's ToaKraka--who seems to for the most part be a good and even valuable poster--who has been testing boundaries in the Friday Fun thread for a while. People should understand that of course a thread on Culture War is going to sometimes contain discussions of sex and sexuality, including sexual violence, because those are extremely common CW issues. But the Friday Fun thread explicitly forbids those.

I was not actively involved in the discussion the last time this came up, and I think there was some confusion because people were arguing about whether e.g. topics of sexual violence belonged in a "fun" thread, even tangentially, and it became a whole de gustibus non est disputandum thing. But this is actually beside the point. What I want to avoid here is either the substance or appearance of banning topics because some people find them (for want of a better word here...) "triggering." We aren't explicitly kicking this out of the Fun Thread because it's creepy or disturbing or of questionable legality in some jurisdictions. We're kicking it out of the Fun Thread because it's CW.

(But also, yeah, even in the CW thread, a random horny drop would get removed. Perhaps surprisingly, so far I don't think it has ever been tried, modulo again the occasional spambot.)

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