domain:nfinf.substack.com
When Obama was elected I met an older white woman who wept tears of joy and said he'd come to do the work of Christ.
BurdensomeCount
—Your em dash is showing...
8hr ago
Yes, but it is necessary if you ever want to drive the car. A compromise here could be that yes you can keep the gun reversibly modified so that it can never shoot (to look scary or whatever) but if you were to ever attempt to remove the modification to use it without a proper licence the law will come down upon you like a ton of bricks, just like how with driving (but much more severely).
In the UK we have the exact same problem. Still no gun necessary.
Pepper spray though is a good alternative (and honestly needs to be more widely available here).
Or equally you can have some sort of emergency gun licencing scheme where you get to have your gun early provided you can prove you have committed to taking lessons and passing your test and there is a genuine need like the case you mention, with a large and serious penalty if then you abandon your lessons without passing but don't hand the gun in.
BreakerofHorsesandMen
Sweet Sejenus
8hr ago
It seems fairly effective in East Asia, France, and Sweden.
It’s not perfectly effective, as it is fighting significant headwinds, but it is effective.
Hadad
9hr ago
As for the "political dynasty" stuff, what makes Trumpism so unique is the cultism,
The cultism, indeed. Imagine thinking a President was practically the Second Coming, and deifying him in art, or admitting that you wept with joy when he was elected. That'd be crazy.
Well, okay, so that was Obama, not Trump, but still. Pretty crazy! Or do you perhaps mean something different by 'cultism'?
gattsuru
9hr ago
[disclaimer: IANAL]
The rule is that all administrative remedies must be exhausted before a lawsuit can be filed (successfully).
This has actually historically had some awkward results. For the VA example below, there was a VA-internal administrative appeals system required by the NIAA, but it would routinely sit on appeals for years. NICS itself has an ATF Relief From Disability program authorized by statute that has been defunded since 1993 and wasn't fast before that. Sometimes this precluded judicial review entirely, other times required demonstrating constructive denial.
That said, this court case here is the lawsuit after exhaustion of administrative appeals. You aren't required to (and are actively discouraged from) bring each matter individually. There's actually a bunch of really complex res judicata rules about bringing a lawsuit over the same legal matter without having a different underlying act, though I don't know them well enough to be absolutely confident that they'd preclude a second lawsuit here.
That said, there's basically zero chance of a successful Second Amendment lawsuit on this matter. SCOTUS has already had fairly sympathetic plaintiffs available, such as Mai v. United States; they've punted. Most successful lawsuits have depended entirely on process or statutory definitions regarding who counts as disqualified to start with. The one exception is the Sixth Circuit, notably distant from New Jersey, and that case depended on the government completely disavowing any current finding of dangerousness or similarity to currently-mentally-ill people.
The_Nybbler
In the game of roller derby, women aren't just the opposing team; they're the ball.
9hr ago
In NJ, any commitment or mental health diagnosis is grounds for denial of a gun permit, and once you've been diagnosed the burden of proof is on you to show it's not unsafe for you to own a gun.
(and a 302 or equivalent is a nonjudicial process, which means you get to lose your gun rights forever nationwide on the word of a cop and a doctor)
Society doesn't back up men who are so lacking in confidence, so why should it back up women? They are supposedly our equals. Why can't they be expected to stand up for themselves or suffer the consequences the way we are?
EDIT: Grammar.
HereAndGone
9hr ago
I think that's what the Bud Light attempt to link up with the influencer Dylan Mulvaney got wrong.
Who exactly is this supposed to appeal to? They wanted to move on from the old, fratty, stale male customer base, to younger generation of drinkers (or would-be drinkers). Great, but is this for girls? Because women aren't beer drinkers. I'm a woman, I'm not a beer drinker, and this would not only not get me drinking beer, it gets me riled-up over 'is this what we are supposed to accept as representing women, now? a novelty drag act?' (see the one in the bathtub for International Women's Day). Gen Z men? Are they drinkers either, because the demographics say not. It's perfectly alienating to your existing customers but I don't see what new market is supposed to come flooding (or trickling) in to replace them.
WandererintheWilderness
9hr ago
But realistically we shouldn't weigh it against the total suffering that obesity creates; we should weigh it against the amount of obesity-caused suffering that shaming can alleviate. Shaming isn't completely ineffective, but it's not very effective.
Mma is very stale, boring and not worth watching now.
then
As a long time fan, I hope you folks tune in, buy, pirate, watch it at a bar, whatever.
Getting some mixed messages man.
Anyhow, I will be watching it at a bar with a bunch of guy friends, as much an excuse to be social as anything.
Have to agree with the general assessment of UFC logic. At best, I'm ambivalent on Dana White, he's clearly done a lot to get the sport mainstreamed but so many of his basic tactical decisions with regard to the business are hare-brained from my perspective. The commentary on the fights tends to be ass, the officiating has been questionable (a bit better of late?), they won't adopt new gloves to prevent eye pokes, and it is really unclear if they want to market as a brand of semi-family-friendly entertainment (they're on ESPN now, after all) or keep things 'gritty' and amp the bro-ish, violent and unapologetically masculine nature of it. They still have Octagon girls in skimpy outfits, the fighters curse regularly in ring interviews, most of their sponsors are likewise still aimed at the Titties 'n' Beer crowd.
Like, you ask me, the entire point of UFC is to set up the most interesting fights/matchups possible and encourage the top contenders to fight as hard as possible for a win, and generally avoid safe, riskless approaches. Big purses and other monetary incentives are a good method. Bring in the best talent from across the globe and get them to give their best performance.
Yet they sideline or outright oust their most effective, driven fighters half the time. Thinking specifically of Mighty Mouse and Ngannou.
Maybe there is some logic to mitigating the chances of a fighter reaching superstar status, once they're popular and wealthy enough they tend to dictate their own terms on when/if they fight. Like McGregor. If the UFC can keep them on a tighter leash then in theory that means they can arrange and actually deliver good matchups consistently, if the talent is there.
But also the actual fighting is getting to a point where the 'optimal' style is somewhat predetermined. Unless you're a talented kickbox-wrestle-jitsu practitioner, you're going to get stomped by someone who is more well rounded than you, no matter how good you are at your particular niche. Maybe that's how it should be, but its just a fact now that "MMA" is not literally "mixed martial arts" but really it is a style unto itself, it isn't really about pitting different styles against each other anymore.
I wonder if they should start introducing different obstacles to the octagon, or adding in strange conditions. "In round 1 they're covered in cooking grease. In round 2 they'll have an eyepatch over one eye. In round 3, their legs will be tied together with a two foot rope to limit movement and kicks. Round 4, they fight while each gripping a Bandana as hard as they can.
Or just go full Super Smash Bros. and let them opt to have Tasers, baseball bats, and small incendiary devices dropped into the octagon if a fight goes past 3 rounds. Or is that WWE's shtick?
I kid, but if you want to break out of the current local maxima for the current dominant fighting styles, you will have to adjust the parameters somewhere to force new optimizations.
TheAntipopulist
Formerly Ben___Garrison
9hr ago
You can just post the archive link for people who don't want to pay. I don't know why more news sites haven't cracked down on it yet, but it's a trivially easy way to pirate most articles still.
I don't see what's particularly interesting about the article. The family is obviously directly profiting from the presidency, and here Eric gives non-arguments that the family would be richer if it didn't get into politics (perhaps true, but not a germane rebuttal). As for the "political dynasty" stuff, what makes Trumpism so unique is the cultism, and that almost certainly dies with Donald. Maybe Eric could scratch out a future riding on daddy's coattails like a populist version of Jeb Bush, but people like JD Vance and even still Ron Desantis are more well positioned to lead that movement.
Tractatus
9hr ago
"This is a just so story." It isn't, and I propose a moratorium on this type of argumentation. The community loves replying to complicated arguments by pointing at a handy buzzword* and dismissing them accordingly, and it obstructs good-faith debate. Note how the poster actually references how societies gave concrete examples of why their strictures were necessary, yet you reply with dismissive references to superstition, as though you didn't even read the post you're replying to deep enough to see that societies provided concrete arguments for sexual control, not myths.
*see also the love of "informal" fallacies, a categorically invalid concept, created entirely because "I respectfully disagree" doesn't carry as much weight as getting to claim an argument is logically flawed.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9hr ago
I mean in the most technical of senses, sure. The problem being that the “cheats” rely on leverage which really only works when you do the technique exactly right and the opponent has not trained a counter. For almost all real world, this doesn’t work as well as advertised. As such, even in competition of these arts that supposedly have these types of techniques, you still have weight classes. MMA has submissions and chokes and so on, but you still have weight class divisions.
In reality, a woman would have to train her art to near professional levels to get to the point of being able to take down a median male even if that male had never learned to fight at all. It’s why I laugh at the concept of “women’s self defense” classes. It’s not only useless, but unfortunately gives the woman a false sense of security where she ends up doing risky things she shouldn’t be doing because the mcdojo she trained at taught her a few moves (but didn’t tell her she has to be in great shape and practice daily to pull them off) and never had her try to fight off a man fighting at full strength. She goes out to sketchy places and stays out too late at night where she’s putting herself at risk of attack and does so thinking that whatever techniques she learned but doesn’t actually practice more than once a week means she can take down a rapey man who goes to the gym once a week. Good luck.
HereAndGone
9hr ago
Hence a workable solution was that the woman could go to her parents and get the necessary guidance and confidence to steel herself to stand her ground and demand marriage
Yeah, but society backed that up. Today, social attitudes are "waiting for sex until after marriage? what kind of sex-negative repressed loser weirdo are you?"
Rov_Scam
9hr ago
See my comment above, but voluntarily interacting with the mental health system isn't what gets you barred from owning a gun; it's avoiding the mental health system until things get so bad you're forced into it.
Rov_Scam
9hr ago
This only applies to involuntary commitments. If you're feeling suicidal and check yourself into a mental hospital for treatment, it's not going to affect your ability to buy a gun. On the other hand, if you attempt suicide and get 302'd (in PA), it will. The way the law is set up now actually encourages people to seek voluntary treatment before it becomes enough of a problem that the state has to intervene.
Primaprimaprima
...something all admit only "TRUMP", and the Trump Administration, can do.
9hr ago
I obviously don't know my own level of testosterone or how that compares to other men.
A shy, quiet, intellectually-inclined friend of mine got his T levels checked and he was dead center average (by male standards).
Obviously there's something important going on with sex hormones and how they affect cognitive and personality traits, but it's not as simple as "number go up = big manly man, number go down = beta nerd".
Yes, but Catherine was obviously lying
Why do you believe Henry over Catherine? I have a lot more reason to trust her word than his, and that of Anne Boleyn whose own ambition and that of her family had led her to work towards this marriage over a long period.
Arthur, heir to the throne, Henry's elder brother and Catherine's husband, was married at the age of fifteen and died six months later of (presumed to be) the sweating sickness. There are allegations that he had been growing weaker and more sickly since the wedding in the period leading up to his death. Doubts about the consummation of the marriage are therefore not unreasonable. Evidence as to its being consummated relied on third-party hearsay by those highly incentivised to please the king in his trial over "I'm right and this bitch is wrong, force her to do what I say":
Although in the morning following his wedding, Arthur had claimed that he was thirsty "for I have been in the midst of Spain last night" and that "having a wife is a good pastime", these claims are generally dismissed by modern historians as mere boasts of a boy who did not want others to know of his failure to perform. Until the day she died, Catherine maintained that she had married Henry while still a virgin.
So an attempt at consummation, ending in premature ejaculation but no full penetration, on the part of inexperienced and over-excited teenagers is entirely possible.
Remember, they were both only fifteen. Catherine certainly would have been raised strictly and come to the marriage a virgin, and it is unlikely (though not impossible) that Arthur had much if any opportunity for sexual experimentation before his marriage. Henry VII's household seems to have been run strictly and on moral lines, and besides that, the risk of bastards or entanglements with prior claims for marriage by the daughters of noble houses on the grounds of "your son had sex with me" were way too much of a risk for the very shaky House of Tudor whose grasp on the throne had not been well-established and was, even in the times of Henry VIII, vulnerable to rival counter-claims by the likes of the Pole family whose own ancestry was every bit as royal or even better. Henry VIII was, in the wake of his brother's early death, very closely monitored, even smothered, by his father who oversaw his upbringing.
Henry VII did not want to lose the alliance he had worked for so hard, nor the dowry he had been promised (his frugal, not to say penny-pinching, attitude to the royal finances enabled him to leave behind at his death a full treasury, massive public resentment at the tax regime he had inflicted on them, very unpopular scapegoats in the form of his tax collectors who were then promptly executed by his son in order to placate the public, and that same full treasury was then blown through by Henry VIII who lived extravagantly beyond the means of the English economy of the time).
Henry wasn't about to lose that Spanish princess nor pay back what dowry he had received, so he put pressure on to have the marriage annulled in order to enable his second son, and now only male heir, to marry her when he came of age. It was Henry VIII who later had the scruples about "oh I must have inadvertently married my brother's widow, which is incest, and the Old Testament says God punishes that, this is why I have no living male heirs and must annul this illegal marriage so I can marry my current mistress", and put the pressure on the pope of the time to do so.
I agree about the political and military reasons for the pope to reject this (who wants to offend the Holy Roman Emperor?) but it also put him in the difficult position of countermanding the dispensation provided by a previous pope, just on the whims of English kings: "yeah we know we previously asked your predecessor to grant us a dispensation to say this marriage was valid and licit, now we want you to grant a dispensation to say it's invalid and illicit". This wasn't just a matter of a legal quibble or overturning a previous court decision, this touches on the Power of the Keys. If we're talking about "why get canon lawyers involved?", the King's Great Matter involved Henry sending scholars all over Europe to get canon law and theological opinions in his favour, a resounding lack of same, leading to him having to heavily rely on his pet theologians in the universities at home, and even the likes of Luther going "well uh no he's properly married, just copy the Biblical patriarchs and take a second wife you muppet". The failure to push through the divorce caused the downfall of Cardinal Wolsey, up till then the most powerful man in England next to the king, and later on that of St Thomas More for his efforts to avoid being pressured into "hey, everyone in Europe respects Tom and he agrees with me, so this new marriage must be kosher, yeah?"
Catherine was a devout Catholic (not in the modern term of the phrase which seems to just mean "Catholic who agrees with the Democratic party agenda on everything") and would have been very aware of the moral implications of committing perjury. It would have been a lot easier for her to go along with Henry's demands (as Anne of Cleves did in her own situation at a later time) and would have made her daughter, Mary's, position more secure - but she did not.
You can believe she was lying because she was a jealous, spiteful woman - or you can believe she was telling the truth and an impatient king brought pressure to bear in order to get his own way at the behest of an ambitious woman who, ironically, then failed to provide the son she had promised Henry, a promise which had strung him along for years and kept his wandering attention fixed on her, and then boomeranged when this same spiteful man had her trial brought forward for displeasing and embarrassing him. Catherine was left to die of cancer, Anne got a public execution and her replacement installed as wife and queen on the very same day.
I know who I find more credible, and it ain't Henry, the guy who had mistresses throughout his marriages, over his faithful wife.
MaiqTheTrue
Renrijra Krin
9hr ago
I’m in total agreement here. There’s almost no upside to going into the medical mental health system, which doesn’t even work that well anyway, and is pretty much used by the state to keep people from exercising their rights.
Throwaway05
9hr ago
It's usually more like "do you have any medical problems" "no" "any history of heart disease, high blood pressure, diabetes?" "no" "what are these scars for" "Oh I had a triple bypass in 2003 and I'm on 8 medications for all that."
birb_cromble
9hr ago
A while back I played a parlor game where you had to look at a name and decide if it was a medication, a Chinese drop-shipper on Amazon, or a character in a fantasy novel.
The average score was not very high.
The obvious move is senator, here- is there a safe red state senate seat opening up? Eric can presumably establish residency wherever he wants and most people are voting for a replacement level party-line voter for senate.
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