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govtrack.us

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 7, 2024

A) the disparate treatment is all feels. Here's a list of government misconduct, and I'm seeing lots of Ds. And I haven't personally witnessed Democrats attempt to protect other Democrats accused to crime.

B) The government is not all Democrats. Republicans had effective control of the federal government from 2016-2020. They also have the power to go after Democrats. You might say, "Well, Republicans are nicer and wouldn't do that!" I don't buy that. Trump literally campaigned on going after Hillary. If he didn't do that that sounds like he squandered a prime opportunity and you should judge him and other Republicans for that accordingly.

C) "The legal system pays disproportionate attention to criminals as opposed to non-criminals" also explains the phenomenon you are seeing, and is literally how the justice system is supposed to work. Doubly true if the criminals leave obvious evidence.

D) The "obvious" part of your "obvious legal mistakes" is evidence against it being a political gesture. If you make an argument that turns out to be false, it hurts your credibility, both legally and publicly. Therefore, it makes sense to at least be clever in telling lies, especially since the legal system is designed to be adversarial and thus sniff out falsehoods.

E) Let's say you are given the task to scan thousands of pages of documents, and put them back exactly as they were. How do you do that? If it were me, I would have some sort of separator to remind me where everything was. Like a cover sheet. And since the contents are believed to be confidential, I would put "confidential" on those separators. Then due to some mistake or miscommunication between multiple people, they either don't get removed at the end or aren't disclosed when meant to be disclosed.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

Is GovTrack an actual reliable source? I saw an article about how six democrats voted with the GOP to condemn Kamala Harris as the Border Czar so I looked up these six democrats (and to no surprise ideologically they're in the middle). So I just clicked around, and their political stance becomes obvious with a page like this:

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/ted_cruz/412573

The "Elections must be decided by counting votes" specifically, that's apparent if you select the page for numerous Republican senators. Factor in the fact that they removed the scorecard page labeling her as the most liberal senator and their bias is clear, but I did find utility in their Ideology–Leadership Chart as well-being able to view their voting records and bills.

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

Perhaps my conception of "real person" exists far out on the tails of reality, and people acting like ActBlue or MAGA surrogate shills online is a totally normal behavior for an average person to engage in.

I think it's even worse than that. It'd be one thing is this was just social media getting to a mechanic that thinks a 'clever' Dem-politician pencil-holder is funny, or a moron with a podcast that can't read.

This is the official GovTrack mastodon account, a site that people here use, myself included. Axios just revised a three-year-old story today to remove 'border czar' from Harris' list of accomplishments. Elon Musk put tens of billions of dollars into twitter to shitpost, and does it badly. I've worked on open-source code with someone who was really proud of having physically attacked Brandon Eich, and that's far from the worst I've seen there; my boss and a coworker have a conspiracy theory about the FBI and the Trump assassination that would be fascinating if they weren't doing it in a business meeting; a forum that once was a mainstay for me blocked discussion of the Trump assassination attempt as a thread the day of (literally as the second post) and never discovered one made the day after. KelseyTUoC spent the better part of a decade as part of the EA community, earned Scott Alexander's respect, and then got to work at Vox... except it was a problem before then, too.

These aren't astroturf, or rando nutjobs who have nothing to their name but politics, or AI, or rats following the Pied Piper, or nineteen-year-olds fresh-faced to the internet, or whatever. This is what they are under the mask.

Beneath that, Trace and Its_Not_Real have been having a twitter debate over The Machine and its output, and I think it's bad enough that Trace's defense is literally pointing to "Hanania/Karlin", but the more critical problem is that even were it true (which I'm far from sold on), The Machine has lost any capability to credibly present the truth, and very few people care.

I wrote, three and a half years ago, about how I didn't see a path back to trust in academia. But why would they care? In many ways, things have gotten worse for the academics, but academi_a_ has been doing fine. Even individual schools and journals with massive scandals have quite happily shaken them off and gone right back to it. Sometimes bad actors manage to get fired, but sometimes they get a TV show. In some cases, and I'll point to Wansink again, the policy proposals and even individual papers don't suffer much even after everyone discovers they were always made up from whole cloth.

Why would anyone expect that to stay to one poorly-demarcated field?

Culture War Roundup for the week of July 22, 2024

In addition to the Axios one zataomm linked, there is this one that govtrack deleted from its own website: https://web.archive.org/web/20200816001336/https://www.govtrack.us/congress/members/kamala_harris/412678/report-card/2019

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 18, 2024

The bill said "owned or controlled, directly or indirectly". That seems incredibly broad to be honest.

Here's the whole of the relevant section of the law, so people can judge for themselves how broad it is:

(g) Definitions

In this section:

(1) Controlled by a foreign adversary

The term controlled by a foreign adversary means, with respect to a covered company or other entity, that such company or other entity is—

(A) a foreign person that is domiciled in, is headquartered in, has its principal place of business in, or is organized under the laws of a foreign adversary country;

(B) an entity with respect to which a foreign person or combination of foreign persons described in subparagraph (A) directly or indirectly own at least a 20 percent stake; or

(C) a person subject to the direction or control of a foreign person or entity described in subparagraph (A) or (B).

(2) Covered company

(A) In general

The term covered company means an entity that operates, directly or indirectly (including through a parent company, subsidiary, or affiliate), a website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application that—

 (i) permits a user to create an account or profile to generate, share, and view text, images, videos, real-time communications, or similar content;

 (ii) has more than 1,000,000 monthly active users with respect to at least 2 of the 3 months preceding the date on which a relevant determination of the President is made pursuant to paragraph (3)(B);

 (iii) enables 1 or more users to generate or distribute content that can be viewed by other users of the website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application; and

 (iv) enables 1 or more users to view content generated by other users of the website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application.

(B) Exclusion

The term covered company does not include an entity that operates a website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application whose primary purpose is to allow users to post product reviews, business reviews, or travel information and reviews.

(3) Foreign adversary controlled application

The term foreign adversary controlled application means a website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application that is operated, directly or indirectly (including through a parent company, subsidiary, or affiliate), by—

(A) any of—

 (i) ByteDance, Ltd.;

 (ii) TikTok;

 (iii) a subsidiary of or a successor to an entity identified in clause (i) or (ii) that is controlled by a foreign adversary; or

 (iv) an entity owned or controlled, directly or indirectly, by an entity identified in clause (i), (ii), or (iii); or

(B) a covered company that—

 (i) is controlled by a foreign adversary; and

 (ii) that is determined by the President to present a significant threat to the national security of the United States following the issuance of—

   (I) a public notice proposing such determination; and

   (II) a public report to Congress, submitted not less than 30 days before such determination, describing the specific national security concern involved and containing a classified annex and a description of what assets would need to be divested to execute a qualified divestiture.

(4) Foreign adversary country

The term foreign adversary country means a country specified in section 4872(d)(2) of title 10, United States Code.

And here's the relevant, referenced section from subsection 4 above:

section 4872(d)(2):

(2) Covered nation.—The term “covered nation” means—

(A) the Democratic People’s Republic of North Korea;

(B) the People’s Republic of China;

(C) the Russian Federation; and

(D) the Islamic Republic of Iran.

It's all honestly really quite narrow. It could not be applied to Twitter because Elon isn't 'domiciled in, is headquartered in, has its principal place of business in, or is organized under the laws of' 'the Democratic People's Republic of North Korea...the People's Republic of China...the Russian Federation...[or] the Islamic Republic of Iran', nor is Twitter 'directly or indirectly own[ed]' by someone with 'at least a 20 percent stake' who is domiciled, headquartered, doing business in, or organized under the laws of the preceding four countries.

If, someday, we added Saudi Arabia to that list (not something I would put past the left of the Democratic party, a portion of which will never get over Khashoggi), Twitter might be in trouble. Until then, this law would not apply.

The law is quite short. It's also pretty free of the kind of cross-references and surgical edits that make reading many other bills so confusing. Just make sure to understand that most things in the law are defined somewhere.

The Anarchonomicon REAL Banned Book List

I don't really post here much (or even browse, so I guess it's a fortunate coincidence that I happened to click this particular thread and scroll down today as I wasn't even logged in to see any notifications), but since you've shown me the respect of specifically invoking me as someone of interest on this subject, I will respond as best I can.

To be clear, I am by no means an expert in 60s/70s experimentation in "free love" pedophilia, though I am certainly aware that it existed and was reasonably prominent at times in Germany in particular I believe (as though I don't recall the source, I do remember reading about various "free love"-inspired orphanages and nurseries there in which children were encouraged to engage in sexual conduct both with each other and present adults). This is because any sort of "free love" leftism is of course wholly opposed to my genuine ideology which is the full and absolute restoration of masculine dominion over the feminine, and therefore I do vehemently disagree with any variety of left-wing egalitarianism even if it should have a pedophilic bent. Sex of a pedophilic nature is permissible (according to my worldview of course) because of and in circumstances of masculine domination over feminine persons, not because of any hippy dippy free use reduction of sex to mere casual child's play.

But if you want to talk about modern authors being put under pressure, consider the case of Bruce Rind, who, for writing "A Meta-Analytic Examination of Assumed Properties of Child Sexual Abuse Using College Samples" (known most commonly as "Rind et al.") (linked from the official site of Ipce, which describes itself as "a forum for people who are engaged in scholarly discussion about the understanding and emancipation of mutual relationships between children or adolescents and adults.", and thus likely has much other information you are seeking), which simply collated evidence from other studies that significantly contradicts the "lifelong trauma" myth, had his article condemned in a concurrent resolution by the Congress of the United States itself (in a 355-0-13-66 (yea/nay/present/no vote) vote in the House (which is a somewhat rare occasion in a house of Congress I imagine, to have zero nay votes against something more substantive than naming a Post Office) and unanimous consent (which means that nobody asked to take a tally of votes for or against, presumably because the measure was considered so unfit to contest, not the same as an explicit unanimous vote) in the Senate). As suppressed as HBD often is, I don't think a single HBD advocate can claim that distinction. (Though Congress's resolution in particular doesn't attempt to allege any actual methodological flaws in the meta-analysis itself, one of the funniest criticisms of it that's been thrown around is that Rind was deceptively trying to bias the results away from finding harm and towards positive life outcomes by basing his analysis on... as the title mentions, College Samples.)

In any case, I will update this post in a bit with some sources that were sent to me by another individual at some point.

Edit: Okay, here they are. The following is a collection of mostly PDFs (along with some EPUBs and other random file formats) sent to me in the past by a self-identified gay pedophile communist. I cannot attest to the intellectual value of them as I haven't actually looked through all of them and felt some of the ones I did look at seemed a bit frivolous given how they don't reflect any perspective I personally subscribe to at all (being left-wing as they are), but as far being uncommon information goes they may certainly fit the bill.

https://a.cockfile.com/QNvaER.7z

https://web.archive.org/web/20240109085205/https://a.cockfile.com/QNvaER.7z

PW: motte