banned
Primaprimaprima
Bigfoot is an interdimensional being
23d ago
No one who is suffering politically likes to be told "actually you have no enemies, it's all an illusion, move along nothing to see here". It's natural to want someone to blame. (And frequently, there is someone who can be blamed to at least some degree.)
When you look at:
- The mass exodus of porn from tumblr
- Patreon instituting overtly political/moralistic guidelines for what content is allowed on the platform (they went out of their way to say hypnosis porn is banned, what the fuck)
- Total porn ban on all the biggest social media sites, facebook, instagram, tiktok, youtube
- The extreme difficulty of getting adult content published on major distribution channels like Steam or the Apple/Google app stores
- The desexualization of media in general due to the rise of wokeism, particularly the sorts of casual non-explicit sexualization that would be appealing to a straight male audience
- Japanese adult game developers increasingly ditching porn altogether to comply with regulations on mobile app stores and to gain access to the Chinese market, which also has its own strict regulations
you start to get the impression that a lot of people really don't like porn. It's not an isolated incident. And this is all before we even get into the laws against loli manga in many countries, people literally going to jail for lines on paper that clearly depict fictional characters.
Some of these have nothing to do with payment processors either. I receive no payment for putting up free porn on tumblr or youtube, but I'm still not allowed to do it.
The porn artists might be more inclined to believe the "it's just a totally random confluence of business factors" theory if they felt that public sentiment was on their side. If they felt that people really did believe in a principle of free artistic expression, and it really was just the credit card companies who couldn't get on board for some reason. But you ask people about these porn bans and the typical response you get is something along the lines of "of course, this content is totally perverse and obscene, and probably harmful to children and society too, and no one in their right minds would actually want to be caught paying for or even looking at this stuff, and certainly no one will miss it if it's gone... but it's not being banned because people don't like it, don't be silly, it's really just those pesky chargebacks, sorry kid it's just business..."
Do you see why porn artists might get suspicious? Where are their allies? Who is actually willing to support them?
Granted, blaming it on Evangelicals is also wrong. But the basic impulse to see it as a political issue rather than a purely economic one is, I think, quite correct.
Antisemitism is definitely increasing in the US on the left and right. But I don’t see it becoming central to politics for a few reasons.
The first is that the last time there was major antisemitism in European countries (including the US) Jews were the most ‘visible minority’ with any political power. Blacks in the US had no political power and this was in any case before the majority of the great migration to the northern cities had occurred. Today whites are far more likely to have issues with other minorities than Jews.
The second issue is that the right and left approach antisemitism from completely different angles. As the speech you quoted from the AmRen conference down thread suggests, the problem the hard left has with Jews is that they’re too white, and that this quality is what makes Israel an ‘apartheid state’ and ‘white supremacist’. The problem the hard right has with Jews (if they have a problem with them) is that they’re not white enough, that they advocate against ‘white interests’, undermining European civilization from within.
These views are fundamentally opposed; black nationalists and white ones can agree on their contempt for Jews but will quickly disagree on what is owed to black people. Islamists and white nationalists can agree on hostility toward Jews but will quickly disagree on the status of brown and black migrants from Islamic countries in the West. And white nationalists and some far leftists may agree that some wealthy or influential Jews support progressive policies in America but ethnonationalist ones in Israel, but their desired resolutions to this hypocrisy are literally diametrically opposite to each other.
The only theory that makes sense is the argument, advanced in some white nationalist circles, that without the leadership and financial contributions of Jewish people the organized left and center-left would crumble. I don’t find this persuasive; progressivism in the West was a powerful force long before the large scale involvement of Jews in politics and many European countries with very few Jewish people involved in political life still have large, influential, gentile left-leaning political factions that also support all the stuff that angers reactionaries.
What’s the point of the weird opinion canvassing you do here? You’ve been banned like ten times for hmmposting as @sarker said yesterday. I don’t even mind your presence because I think you post some interesting discussion points, but I wish you’d be honest about why you’re doing it.
some
11d ago
Another aspect of Australian life in which feminist ideology is given an outsized influence is this list of video games banned there, which doesn't cover even all cases of questionable Australian censorship authorities decisions. Atelier Totori was in other jurisdictions given at most a T rating, was in Australia rated as 18+, with the justification famously being "High Impact Sexual Violence". Some are RC'd due Australia's drug prohibition extending to fiction, but others for depiction of apperence of minor sexuality. Determination of who "appears to be, a child under 18" is subjective and fraught with many issues including racial bias, as a 25 old Anglo is on average more visually and vocally distinct from a 15 year old Anglo, than a 25 year old East Asian is from a 15 year old East Asian. Anime artstyle compounds this problem as it has less age indicators than a realistic one, meaning that if one determined to get a game or anime banned, it is harder to find evidence characters are of age.
Hilariously there have even been cases of works of art intended to viewed by women, such as "otome" games, deemed to be offensive to what is thought to be an interest of women as a class, Refused Classification and thus banned.
Further evidence of its feminist alignment is the censorship of materials of adult materials, featuring confirmed adults, if by some arbitrary criterion they are deemed to look too young. Why is this evidence? Because men do but women do not place a premium on youthful features.
As for the alleged mass murder of women epidemic in Australia: in 2022 and 2023 (ignore the irrelevant graph which depicts only a subset of homicides, look at the table) 168 men and 72 women were murdered there. "World Ends, Women Most Affected" doesn't capture the extent of pro-women bias in what is deemed relevant by the media, at least this (obviously ficticious) headline implies both men and women were harmed in equal measure, the present scare takes the less victimized gender and makes it the primary victim.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1d ago
The problem with this formulation is that Y isn't banned unless done as part of X. In this case, what's illegal is not the wearing of a mask, it's wearing a mask to conceal one's identity. People may do Y, but they can't do Y in furtherance of X. To concretize other possible examples:
-
There is a law against loitering in front of the mall, unless you're wearing a funny hat. The exemption for funny hats is set to be removed. Are funny hats banned?
-
You may not drink alcoholic beverages at the park, with the exception of beer. The beer exception is removed. Is beer banned?
-
Carrying a firearm to intimidate others is illegal, but firearms in holsters are exempted. The exemption is removed. Are firearms or holsters banned?
jeroboam
17d ago
because manipulation implies an outcome the target isn't desiring to happen.
This is a good point. In the past, both left-wing groups and right-wing groups sought to manipulate Reddit. Both were successful. Back in 2016, many posts from /r/thedonald reached the front page. Then their subreddit was banned.
Now only left wing groups are allowed to manipulate Reddit. It's anarchotyranny.
MartianNight
14d ago
by which I mean things like jelly beans - highly processed food with paragraphs of exotic-sounding ingredients
So when is Florida banning jelly beans? And calorie-rich sodas sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup? And sugary breakfast cereals? And cancer-inducing smoked meats? Tobacco? Alcohol?
Why should all those foods that we know are unhealthy and that consumers actually do overindulge in to the detriment of their health be allowed, but a meat substitute that is likely to be much healthier and is not even widely available needs to be banned?
We probably couldn't tell if the synthetic meat was bogus in some subtle way. Maybe it has the wrong hormones, or the wrong mix of hormones or an absence of certain kinds of proteins.
I don't think “probably” is right; which nutrients and vitamins are essential is pretty well known, so the chance that lab-grown meat is unhealthy in some unpredictable way is pretty low. Especially since nobody suggests you switch to a meat-only diet; the idea is that you eat this in moderation, along with fresh fruits, nuts, and vegetables, just like the recommendation is for real meat.
Still, if you personally don't want to take the risk, you would still be welcome to stuff your face with jellybeans, vodka and tobacco because you believe that's the healthier alternative. That's hardly an argument for a ban.
ResoluteRaven
14d ago
Lab-grown meat has made it surprisingly far given how many people hate it for different reasons: Cattle farmers and the meat industry want to kneecap their economic competition, conservatives dread a future where steak is banned and scientists in white coats force feed them pink slime, hardcore vegans think that true commitment to their cause should require sacrifices and this sort of moral shortcut would undermine the whole puritan thing they have going on, economists hate it because it's currently expensive as hell, non-Westerners laugh at the whole enterprise, and environmentalists who can do math insist on switching to insect, soy, or mushroom protein instead.
Really the only groups rooting for its success at the moment are biotech investors hoping to get in on the ground floor of the next big thing, biologists who are overconfident in their ability to pull it off, and the aforementioned liberals and environmentalists who haven't crunched the numbers.
To add to The_Nybbler's point, oral arguments in Rahimi were November 2023, a case where an incredibly unsympathetic defendant (alleged multiple shooter, drug dealer, and girlfriend beater) was indicted for possessing a firearm while subject to a domestic restraining order. We won't know for certain how the court rules until the opinion drops, and that probably won't happen for a month (or up to three).
But it's extremely unlikely that this will result in a significantly broadened understanding of the Second Amendment. The most optimistic takes in the gunnie world hope that the Court will allow Rahimi's conviction and just require a finding of 'dangerousness'. Most expect that they'll overturn the lower court, or leave only the most narrow process grounds to protect Rahimi.
And there are reasons beyond oral argument tea-leaf reading for that. It's already happened before in Gary/Greer, where unsympathetic plaintiffs made it easy for the court to decide that for process reasons a prohibited person didn't need to be proven to know they were prohibited.
But even more broadly, there's just not that much of the court touching this right to protect all but the most aggressive infringements in the cleanest-cut cases across the wide scope of all people in a jurisdiction, and sometimes not even that, even as case after case was teed up.
If the Court wanted to protect the rights of people who hadn't been violent, they had a case where a man was banned from possessing guns because he was convicted of counterfeiting cassette tapes in 1987. And they punted. If the Court wanted to protect the rights of people who had suffered mental illness long ago and recovered, they had a case where a man was banned from possessing guns because he had a depressive episode in 1999. And they punted. States requiring guns to have technologies that don't exist? Taking private property without warrant or compensation or grandfathering? License denials for driving while black a police encounter that did not result in an arrest or any evidence of wrongdoing? Punt punt punt.
The best result the gunnie sphere other than Bruen was Caetano v. Massachusetts (2016! and see the massive resistance in O'Neil v Neronha, only finished in 2022). After that, there's maybe the GVR on Duncan v Bonta... except they GVR'd it to the Ninth Circuit, which even at the time had literally never allowed the Second Amendment to do anything, and since broke rules to slow Duncan down further. It's not like Bruen is even the only example: Caniglia v. Strom, was more a Fourth Amendment case, but see the later punts on the massive resistance it has faced by lower courts.
Maybe I get surprised here, or VanDerStok is where (... in 2026? assuming it doesn't get punted then?). But despite an environment with a massive variety of low-hanging fruit, these are the only things the Court cared about, and that's not random.
...because anyone who doesn't publically "support diversity" is shamed, made a pariah and possibly fired.
Observe the posts in subreddits for individual cities, inquiring about neighborhoods to live in. Every one is looking for a "diverse" area.
Try posting that you want to live in a white neighborhood, and see how quickly you get banned for "bigotry" or "hate speech", with a mod note referring to you as "scum" or some similar endearment.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
19d ago
No one is telling you how to feel your feelings. You know that having feelings and how you express them are two different things.
You get cut more slack than you know because people (including me) actually like you quite a lot, despite your inability to control your feelings and your tendency to respond to even the least little bit of poking with explosions. So be assured that the contempt you are showing me now and have shown me in the past is not taken personally.
That said: replying to a mod telling you directly to stop doing something with a foot-stamping "No, not gonna, you can't make me, you're not the boss of me" temper tantrum is an escalation with a response that you clearly chose. So yes, banned.
I don't need or want to deal with this nonsense right now, so I will let the other mods decide when or if to end your ban.
Whatever you guys might claim to be, this seems to be a place where it's ok to call an immigrant group an infestation but not to say that the antebellum south was an execrable culture.
You have either fundamentally misunderstood or are fundamentally misrepresenting the thread you linked. You are in fact allowed to say that the antebellum south was an execrable culture, and many people have said here it many times before. You can in fact argue that Confederate statues should be torn down, and you can even argue that people who think otherwise are bad; many people have argued that here many times before. You do in fact have to be careful about how you talk about any group here, and quite a few anti-woke people have in fact been banned for failing to do so properly. The objection in that thread, as described to you repeatedly at the time, was that you were conflating people to object to the destruction of Confederate memorials with slave owners.
I think the antebellum south was an execrable culture, and holding the history constant to the start of the Civil War, I prefer our actual history where their society was destroyed through mass violence to counterfactuals where it might have been allowed to fade away peacefully, continuing to perpetrate evil throughout its decline. Further, I think that destroying Confederate monuments is both stupid and evil here and now. I'd be happy to discuss either opinion with you as time permits, as either side of either opinion fit comfortably within the rules here.
Amadan
"I would put a screwdriver through your eyeballs if I could"
7d ago
If you don't like the commentary, yes, go do something else. And I did not read the OP as suggesting or advocating for assassination, which makes your pot-shot seem disingenuous and contrived.
Your constant low-effort sneers and pointless posts (and self-admitted drunkposting) are becoming very annoying, and if you don't stop, you're going to get banned.
Corvos
15d ago
I think it means, as you say, specific, personal drama from other forums. If I recall correctly, someone got tempbanned a few years ago for making a top-level post that was just a blow-by-blow of drama they'd had on a different site. I would guess the intent is to prevent the Motte being recruited for internet raids and turf wars. Probably less relevant now we aren't on reddit.
johnfabian
16d ago
This is just the substack equivalent of the more deranged branches of critical theory. They posit that because they are against the people who claim all media is actually engaged in fighting a war for the fate of the soul of society and YOU need to pick a side, that in fact all media is actually engaged in fighting a war for the fate of the soul of society (but different). I'm fond of reading tea leaves but I think one loses the point (and fun) of it when you start smashing your head into your cup.
I was reflecting upon this earlier today when I saw on Reddit that the children's show Bluey had uploaded to youtube an episode that had been "banned" in the US. It wasn't actually banned, but Disney decided not to include it in the show's episodes for American subscribers. You can watch it here and take a guess as to why that might be. If you haven't heard of Bluey, it was the second-most watched television show (in total minutes) in America last year in spite of its short format. It's a charming show and is much more tolerable to adults than much of contemporary children's programming, most of which seems like the virtual equivalent of crack cocaine. It's been in the news recently because it may or may not have ended (?) despite being massively successful and profitable. I took a gander at some of the culture warring over it and it's invariably idiotic. The lunatic left see its messages of friendship and inclusion as proof it is secretly Marxist; the retarded right see a wholesome nuclear family with nary a Pride flag in sight and think it's hiding its power level. This kind of reading-into-things seems to me little different than the kind in the linked article.
Any time I see stuff like this my eyes protectively glaze over and my curiosity is ended. All of this kind of culture war obsession just strikes me as so incredibly infantile.
Shrike
23d ago
As far as I can tell, this absolutely depends on where in the West, and in what aspect you choose to exercise your individual self-determination. If what you want to do is to criticize Vladimir Putin (something that is important, and something I think everyone should be able to do without fear), the West will almost certainly be freer than Russia every time.
If you want to speak your mind on one side of certain other sensitive culture war issues, Russia is freer than England. If you want to go through life wearing religious apparel, Russia is most likely freer than France. If you want to create and run a hyper-nationalist right-wing party concerned with ethnic unity, Russia may be freer than Germany. If you want to display Soviet iconography, Russia is freer than Latvia. If you want to vote for the Communist Party, Russia is freer than Ukraine (not merely because Ukraine has suspended elections, but also because the Communist Party is banned by law in that country.)
Of note in this discussion, Russia has a conscription system, but so to do several Western states, including several in Europe.
My point here isn't "Russia Good Actually" but that Western states very often are extraordinarily repressive, at least by the standards of the United States (but not so much by the standards of the world as a whole). There's an idea that because Western nations generally have some form of democratic government they don't repress minority groups, and I don't think that's true at all.
Trump banned diversity training in the goverment in his first administration. https://eu.usatoday.com/story/money/2020/09/25/trump-executive-order-diversity-training-race-gender/3537241001/
In contrast Biden administration was super woke. Trump and people like Rufo will work together anyhow. I wouldn't have too high expectations, but there is going to be considerable difference even from a mostly ineffective Trump who pushes right a bit, versus a Biden administration pushing quite far left.
There are those who want a neutered right, and frame the alternative with negative exaggerations and fearmongering. The reality is like Democrat administrations purged a lot of people in the goverment to put their own loyalists in charge, it isn't only fair for the right to do this to govern in a different manner than that, but also the only way to change things.
Wanting a neutered right, is not the agenda of genuine moderates but people who are on the same side as Biden.
How we got here was through Republicans like Romney called moderate but who supported BLM. And through liberals, framed as more moderate than they are, but who actually are quite far left culturally and implemented those changes. Only a political coalition that genuinely opposes the intersectional agenda can genuinely push it back.
The right is the only coalition push back these things. Can the center do this? Well, some of the people called far right, or considered part of the right if one tries to objectively judge how much they pander to different identity groups, ironically people like Trump are closer to the center than many other people (falsely) labeled moderate like Mitt Romney.
Those usually carrying the moderate or liberal labels, are insufficiently against the whole woke agenda, and too much for it. So they won't push back and can't put it away. What some of them seem to be doing is to sometimes try to pretend they are already doing this. So there isn't going to be a genuine attempt by liberals and people like Romeny to put the woke away, but there might be attempts to define wokeness narrowly, and still support the same agenda. The limited hangout maneuver.
In my opinion, the most likely path for making idpol unfashionable is a foreign-policy presidency. Doesn’t really matter who. We’re not getting a “fresh prince” decade by cranking up the domestic outrage.
Yes, but that will solidify idpol and it will still be fashionable but not dominating the national conversation, until the focus passes and a new Floyd hysteria emerges. That something isn't as discussed as much as previously, does not stop it from being a problem. Moreover, it can coexist just as it continues to coexist with covid focus or the Israel conflict with Palestinians. Moreover, foreign policy presidencies tend to be presidencies engaging in idiotic destabilizing expensive wars that make the MIC richer, but are actually damaging towards their country and the world. Which isn't to say extreme isolationism is the solution.
Identity politics are always here to stay, the question is if we got a sane and fair arrangement, or one that gives valid reason for people to oppose and incentivizes political conflict. Which doesn't change unless the ideology of modern new left liberals and even those in the establishment conservative parties who aren't actually conservative who agree with them stops being influential. Because it is an agenda that does try to screw over, and increasingly at that, the progressive intersectional coalition outgroups, such as white Christian men. The way to have peace, and to relax culture war intensity is to enforce something better and more even handed. Which as is the case always with even handed policies, sharing elements with other groups, shares in a vein diagram ground with the genuine far right. Additionally, it is itself definitely seen by those with the new left liberal agenda as far right, and labeled at such. Although, that isn't actually accurate, and has to do with the strategy of the far left to label everyone other than them with pejoratives.
What is important to understand is that we are never going to get a fair arrangement that reduces culture war intensity, under the hysteric paranoia of the far right, that leads people to oppose reasonable positions because they associate them with the far right. In fact there are issues where even the most hardcore people on the far right have legitimate grievances about their favorite groups being mistreated. And it is in fact possible and preferable to the current situation to share grounds with anyone on issues they have a point, and refuse to share ground with them where they are wrong.
From liberal-ish space, what would aid to relax tensions, is an attitude of compromise and understanding that there has been a real problem of cultural/identitarian progressive overreach. That overreach and progressive extremism also relates to the neutering of the right.
naraburns
nihil supernum
16d ago
you're either a coward or a dullard
This is not allowed. Banned for three days.
FistfullOfCrows
10d ago
While we're dreaming can we get omnibus bills to be banned? Also make a law where anyone in congress/the house can put anyone else present on the spot for knowing the bill's text from memory. If he doesn't know it verbatim then the bill is delayed until everyone involved( yes every single one) learns what it says.
Further make it so you can't add random bullshit to a bill in an amendment.
plural
11d ago
It absolutely is a leftist demand, but it only applies to things that aren't western. Anime style can only be attractive to people who are pedophiles. Therefore anyone attempting to be attractive in anime style is appealing to pedophiles. When I think back 10-20-30 years nobody would give a shit about this at all. Sailor Moon would be re-edited for American audiences now with more modest clothing and all sexual innuendo changed to say "pickles... .. ... farthead" or whatever they change many modern japanese translations to say.
Because it doesn't matter it's just a videogame or an anime and only children watch those and if you watch or play them you're a child and probably a pedophile if you enjoy anything not western.
This is a huge vibe I get from literally anyone trying to crusade against "underaged girls" being exploited in the videogames. Of course they'd never say that but every other aspect of their political and cultural bent is left, they just happen to also think that underage anime girls presents some kind of major moral issue because they're fighting pedophiles.
Not many people gave a shit about trying to censor American Beauty and those that did certainly aren't the same people that give a shit about a 100% more tame anime visual novel coming out now that will get rejected from steam while "Hitler rapes all the milfs" will be sold without problem. A japanese visual novel will get rejected from steam for an underage girl wearing a towel for a scene but a western visual novel about underage siblings engaging in incest and cannibalism, that's fine, the art style isn't even anime. Or even outside of mainly sexual content something like the Witcher or Cyberpunk is fine for twitch but I can guarantee if the characters were anime-looking it would be banned, or maybe if they were simply produced outside of the western-okay-to-be-sexual sphere and anime-looking is just a happenstance.
Sure there are some hardliners that don't want any sexuality in anything and will side with the crusaders but the crusaders are faux fighting pedophilia and they're almost entirely left wing. Why? I don't know in either case but the only people that I've encountered that care and are happy when steam bans a visual novel that has like a two second scene of an "underage" girl in her underwear are all left wing, to the point that it's most of their commentary on reddit dedicated to it.
Blueberry
16d ago
Btw: it was the right decision to flee reddit. Before their IPO recently they banned a few inconvenient subreddits. The specific case I know was that a country had two subs, a bigger progressive one and a smaller right wing one, and the latter was heavily brigaded and any small infraction was reported. It was then closed by the admins as causing too much work and being badly moderated (which it wasn’t).
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1d ago
I'm not sure how to bridge our different reading of the statute, but I don't agree with that summary at all. The text there [emphasis mine]:
§ 14‑12.7. Wearing of masks, hoods, etc., on public ways. No person or persons at least 16 years of age shall, while wearing any mask, hood or device whereby the person, face or voice is disguised so as to conceal the identity of the wearer, enter, be or appear upon any lane, walkway, alley, street, road, highway or other public way in this State. (1953, c. 1193, s. 6; 1983, c. 175, ss. 1, 10; c. 720, s. 4.)
This seems really clear to me that intent aside, the effect needs to be concealing the identity of the wearer. For example, the proverbial immunocompromised patient going to a hospital - we know they're not concealing their identity because their actions require the people they're interacting with to know who they are! It's true that determining whether someone's "face is disguised so as to conceal the identity of the wearer" requires some degree of interpretation on the part of police and prosecutors, but I think that's just an unavoidable part of criminal law. The change here isn't actually a change to the need for contextual interpretation, it's just removing health as a fully general exception.
If someone wanted to take the principled stance that you should just be allowed to conceal your identity, I think they could probably make a pretty reasonable case for that, but it would be a pretty different argument than what we see the legislators and newspapers running with.
I would agree that in my example that funny hats at the mall are now banned. What I wouldn't say is that funny hats were generally banned. You can wear your funny hat to a lot of places! You just can't do it at the mall anymore. In the mask case, people that have some actual medical reason and aren't concealing their identity shouldn't really bump into much of a problem. The one area of overlap that I could see this actually being a thing is someone that insists it's medical getting into a conflict with a business-owner that just hates masks and wants them to take their stupid mask off. In the hat analogy, I would think it was weird if someone was super pissed about the funny hat change when what they really don't like is the loitering rule at the mall.
The_Nybbler
Does not have a yacht
10d ago
Unfortunately, if manufacturers of self-driving cars can be sued for all accidents in which self-driving cars are involved (the "caused" part doesn't come into play until the lawsuit is underway), self-driving cars are essentially banned. The cost of covering that liability is staggering.
gattsuru
11d ago
It's... had a lot of governance Issues for a long time, and there's the normal coastal politics (did you know NixCon had Anduril sponsorships, the sridhar ban). I don't grok the entire point of the Nix project, but from what I've seen via shlevy on twitter, the NixOS governance has been kinda the center of a turf war since ~2021 (with the first community team rfc, not enacted).
A lot of recent heat seems to be downstream of Eelco, the original dev, officially stepping down and handing control over to the Foundation Board. He's not been active much for a while, but the community was largely willing to overlook a lot of moderation and management decisions running very much by the seat of everyone's pants, under the auspices that he'd be kinda overlooking things. In theory, there's supposed to be constitutional convention and a foundation board meeting and a whole bunch of stuff about distribution of power and oversight, but in practice, there's not really much clear way for anything to happen beyond the Foundation writing whatever policies it thinks will be popular in California -- see the sponsorship policy snafu, and specifically how the forum auto-locked the discussion and moderators forbid opening new threads on it (and the thread OP was tempbanned for being a putz).
But the recent snafu is about more generally around the ethos that:
There's a code of conduct in place, people want it expanded significantly, and that people are allowed to question it are evidence that it should have been expanded years ago, if not evidence of governance failures or destructive to the reputation of the community; sprinkle in some mentions of sealioning and concern trolling, and you're done.
functor
12d ago
Why would conservatives ally with people who have a culture fundamentally opposed to European/western values whose lobbying groups have been solidly against the interests of western conservatism? The natural relation between western conservatives and jews is one of antagonism and it has been the case for 2000 years. Israel is a massive waste of tax money and AIPAC is a major foreign influence on politics.
The ADL got conservatives banned off twitter and now they are supposed to suck up to them?
The Brooklyn District Attorney's website reports:
Taylor, also known as CarbonMike, was both a CTRL-Pew 3d printing enthusiast and a New Yorker, a combination that Didn't Go Well.
The specific charges and sentencing are complex, but if I'm reading matters correctly, almost all sentences run concurrently, so the headline charge about ghost guns, like the charges about possession of pistol ammunition and so on, are kinda swamped by a ten-year sentence for 'assault weapons' and for 'owning five firearms'. There are a few border issues on the text of the statutes, but there's not a ton to argue on whether Taylor complied with these statutes.
((Not least of all because many are vague or broad enough that it's very much up to the local DA to make the decision anyway.))
There's a lot to be debated about whether the laws are constitutional, but not much chance that it matters. The New York Assault Weapons Ban has been the target of prolonged lawfare since before Bruen, with the FPC currently supporting Lane after the state was getting good enough reception in Vanchoff v James about lacking credible threats of prosecution, and that's the case with the stance furthest along. Other statutes, like possession of ammunition or "ammunition feeding devices" without a matching pistol permit, are difficult to write cases to challenge before enforcement at all. Even if the statutes for each of the longer sentences are overturned, bail pending appeal is extremely unlikely. Taylor will have served most if not all of his sentence first, especially given the glacial pace that courts have set for these matters (cfe Duncan).
Taylor also makes the argument that he did not have a fair day in court, and while almost every defendant does that to some extent, his argument is unusually compelling. No few gunnies finding a pull quote from the judge allegedly claiming that "Do not bring the Second Amendment into this courtroom. It doesn’t exist here. So you can’t argue Second Amendment. This is New York." but the gameplay about objections, if honestly stated, is as bad or worse. (I'm unable to find a direct trial transcript.).
Also doesn't matter. There is a right to an impartial judge, but this mostly covers matters like giant campaign donations or hating an entire nationality or literally copying text from a party's submissions, rather than just figuratively being on the prosecutor's side. Even assuming Taylor's (and his lawyer's) summary is accurate and complete, the appeals courts don't care that lower courts hate people accused of making guns.
In some ways, Taylor might be the ideal test case: nothing in the visible court records or DA chest-beating show nefarious intent like violent personal history or planned mass shooting or intent to resell (and New York law places a presumption on multiple possession as for sale), he (was) traditionally employed, he credibly claims that he's never fired a single one of the guns, and at 52, he's aged out of the various high-criminal-risk age brackets. To beat the HBDers to the punch, he's even visibly a minority.
((To beat the HBDers with a stick, if we're framing absolutely everything as part of the progressive stack, I think there's strong evidence that the real top of the stack is whatever matches the politics today in a far more direct manner than mere race.))
Of course, the Brooklyn DA brought the case, knowing that. The judge acted like this, in this case, knowing that. And no matter how dim you might think they are, they're winning, and this know what it takes to win. Whether that's because the courts punt on serious cases because defendants fail to present long evidence of futile requests, because they credibly believe that Taylor's not Perfect Enough for the courts to actually handle or for various gun rights orgs to fund, or because even if they're wrong they'll never suffer for it, doesn't really matter. It's possible that Brooklyn DA took the case because Taylor's social media made it easier to prove, it might be that we're only gonna hear about this case out of many because of said social media, and it doesn't really matter.
There's a lot of ways to snark, in "What's the penalty for being late?" fashion, about how Taylor's non-violent noncompliance with a law has gotten a much longer sentence than nutjobs who were separately violent, or a comparable sentence to a man who literally burned another man to death on the pyre of an Approved Cause. And that's not entirely fair, because the federal system doesn't have parole and New York does, and anyway there's a million different squiggly little variables about the crimes and sentences, and there's nowhere near enough cases to make a deep statistical analysis even if I wanted to try. Gun control advocates will certainly quibble, at the edges, about whether this is really 'non-violent non-violent', since there's always the possibility of later bad acts or theft or loss or mental break.
And Taylor ain't dead yet, despite an (alleged) no-knock raid. The actuarials put decent odds on him even seeing the light of day as a free man again, parole or no. Unlike Mr. Lee, had Taylor expressed his dislike of current law enforcement with a bit what the ATF calls a destructive device through a bit of what I call a broken window, the odds would not be looking so good. But there's no magic court case, here, and no golden BB. This isn't even the strawman of a scifi writer drawing up villains who just want their laws as threats to hang over innocent men. If you are ruled by people who hate you, giving puppy-dog eyes and saying this is just a paperwork crime and no one was hurt won't buy you a cup of coffee before you get absolutely reamed in all the least fun ways, and contra a once-prolific-now-banned poster here, everyone who cares about this stuff is ruled by men who hate them.
This is what table stakes looks like.
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