that “automakers already have the technology” to make SUVs and minivans get the mileage of passenger cars, but don’t do so because, well, because they’re mean.
This reminds me of a very popular conspiracy that somehow lingered until 2000 or so, that automakers had some sort of magical carburetor that would give really really good fuel efficiency, but wouldn't use it.
The funny thing is, some of this conspiracy was true. Not the crazy '600 miles a gallon' or even '60 miles a gallon', and it's unlikely these designs were ever made, but there were theoretical carburetors designed by start of the 90s that could get better gas mileage, supposedly up to 20% better, altering fuel-air mixture in real time depending on conditions in ways that made simple butterfly carburetors look like kid's toys.
The reason they were never used was two-fold: They were more fragile because they had a lot more moving parts (Anyone who has ever had a car with a carburetor knows they can get stuck.), using a lot more feedback and trying to alter the fuel-air mixture based on many more variables, and at that exact moment, we, uuh, invented computerized fuel injection and we just had a computer create exactly the fuel-air mixture we wanted at any give moment, based off whatever variables we wanted to use. Which worked way better than bouncing gasoline off a series of baffles in convoluted ways.
A young middle-class white cishet man running into a serious medical problem and actually discovering that existing 'free market' systems can, in fact, be unfair and knowingly cause a bunch of harm to people by design while making massive profits...and getting so outraged he shoots the people in charge...is just funny.
Like, just one form of being marginalized, just one system that is actively harming him, and the guy just _snaps_.
That's not exactly what it says. What that says is you can, in court, _disclaim_ a pardon that has been issued to you. And if you wish to use one, you have bring it up to the court, or the court can just ignore it, which I think we all assumed was true if we thought about it.
As far as I can see, nothing stops Biden from issuing Schiff or anyone a pardon, and them just...not saying anything. They don't have to say they reject or accept it. (In fact, it probably doesn't matter if they _publicly_ say anything, they'd have to do it in court.) And maybe it doesn't ever come up.
It's Schrödinger's pardon, and the box doesn't have to be opened until the person wants to open it.
Now, Republicans could try to force the issue by trying to make them testify on the grounds they were pardoned, but...that does raise an interesting question, because that's not the courts, and that's just sorta assuming they already accepted the pardon, which they didn't.
In fact, playing this out, I almost feel they could be forced in front of Congress, assert they will not be accepting the pardon and thus do not have to testify, and then, if charged, could...say, in court, they are accepting the pardon. Things they say to Congress are not part of court, they are not bound by them. (They have to tell the truth, but saying 'I plan to reject the pardon' and then later accepting it is not automatically _lying_. Maybe they just changed their mind, an entirely reasonable thing when actually faced with criminal charges.)
At which point they could get hauled back in front of Congress, but we're pretty far in now.
It is worth pointing out how that poll is _completely deranged_.
And also not measuring 'satisfaction'. It's measuring 'In general, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time?'.
And even there, it's just nonsense.
It has skyrocketing satisfaction during the 2008-2009 subprime mortgage collapse. I know Obama was a popular president, but I seriously doubt he was _that_ popular. It's almost 25% movement! Wait, is this maybe the ACA? I don't recall that being super-popular either?
It also isn't at its highest for 9/11, that was a dip...it's at it's highest for _the months after_.
I have no idea what that poll is measuring, but it not anything sane.
Yeah, but there are also 'operators' that do all kinds of tasks, or contract out tasks, for rich people while _not_ being part of an organization. They're generally called 'fixers'
Rich people know people who can 'get anything done' (Or ask their lawyer who to contact), and if they need someone killed, and don't happen to have anyone who can do that in their employ, the fixer can make it happen. Ad the rich person will play the fixer some rather large fee for something unrelated, and actual murderer will get paid somehow.
There _are_ professional contracted killing in this world.
They just exist in a way that is totally opaque to everyone else.
Meanwhile, there are a bunch of low-level criminals who will do anything if you pay them, too...including immediately flip on you if they get caught, or just be FBI agents to start with, that's pretty popular.
But it does exist. Somewhere between 2%-5% of all _solved_ killings are contract killings, usually for insurance payouts or monetary reasons like inheritance and pre-nups (You will notice these are all rich people things), and that proportion is probably higher for unsolved ones. Mostly because contract killings are automatically at least _slightly_ harder to solve, due to the fact that actual killer has no obvious motive and the person with the motive probably made sure they had an alibi. And if actual professionals are involved, it could be much MUCH harder to solve.
The popular concept of a hitman is bogus, but it isn't particularly more bogus than the popular concept of 'cat burglar' (Ironically because most theft is actually much easier than the competency porn shown in fiction) or 'car thief'. The actual problem is if you buy into the popular conception of hitmen and try to get one, you will be hiring either a cop or a complete nincompoop.
Here, let me just post the link to Blue Sky, I doubt we can actually embed that. Mods can delete the other one:
"If you're cis, one thing I'd like to impart with regards to trans people is that you are being lied to on an almost unfathomable scale, from billionaires like Musk, to religious fundamentalist groups, to print and broadcast media, to entire governments, they're committed to spreading malinformation."
I must say, it is incredibly lucky (If somewhat expected due to what side actually encourages violence) how all the recent assassins are either right-wing or just loony or incoherent politically.
Not only will it make it harder for fascists to use it as an excuse to crack down on the left, but it sorta innoculates against that possibility if eventually someone on the left also does it.
If you're cis, one thing I'd like to impart with regards to trans people is that you are being lied to on an almost unfathomable scale, from billionaires like Musk, to religious fundamentalist groups, to print and broadcast media, to entire governments, they're committed to spreading malinformation.[image or embed]— Casey S. Pumpkins (@caseyexplosion.bsky.social) December 6, 2024 at 11:03 AM
Doctors are not order takers at a McDonalds. They have a higher duty to do what is right, not whatever is demanded.
Never answered my 'Should minors be able to get birth control?' or 'Should minors boys be able to get mastectomies?'
Oh, let me guess, that is 'objectively diagnosable ', which is nonsense. Trans boys having breasts is as 'objectively diagnosable' as cis boys having them.
What you are attempting to claim is that being trans is not objectively diagnosisable, which...it is. Or, rather, having gender dysphoria is objectively diagnosable.
I could list the diagnostic requirements for gender dysphoria for you, but surely since you're in this discussion making statements about it, you know enough to be able to do that, right?
Or, alternately, have you just been subject to a constant stream of propoganda for almost a decade now from a bunch of very rich people who operate the media with absolutely no pushback?
BTW, if malpractice happened here, it happened HERE. As almost all these detrans lawsuit people have had their story fall completely apart on later examination (And it's hilarious you think this is the first one.), we shall see what happens, but if it turns out her doctors did something wrong, they will have to pay.
But the way this _actually_ works is that a bunch of allegations are made that the doctor cannot respond to (Because of HIPAA) and then once it gets into court, it turns out significant portions are not true, or were deliberately misleading. It almost always turns out, in this 'rushed transition', the person rushing them _were_ the patients.
The case goes nowhere and eventually get dropped.
Here, it's worth pointing out how _wildly insanely fast_ the stuff happened in this story. I don't just mean the treatment, but even _getting to see a doctor_. I know an adult who made an appointment at a gender clinic, and she's was handed a year-long wait...to see actually go to the clinic.
And it's also worth pointing out that there are clearly defined standards of care for trans people, and these event do not conform to them. Mastectomies are sometimes done on minors, but 14 is basically unheard of, it's more 16 and 17. Likewise, puberty blockers generally start at 13, not 12. There is absolutely no reason to start testosterone at 13, either, that's well before a lot of cis boys start showing results from testosterone!
Which makes me think there was something going on, but the thing I suspect is not something that makes Johanna Olson-Kennedy look bad, but rather the parents, who were willing to pay incredibly large amounts of money to fast-forward this because their daughter demanded it.
Why do you care about the 'healthy breasts' of 14-year olds girls? What incredibly creepy terminology.
Also, to make it clear here, you're arguing that neither the minor _nor their parent_ can consent to medical treatment.
Do you think all medical care of children done under 'person is unconscious' rules, where we are allowed to assume life-saving consent but nothing else?
If so, do you think minors should be allowed to be on birth control?
In fact, do you think 14-year old boys with gynecomastia should be able to have healthy breasts removed? Please note that gynecomastia in teen boys is almost entirely benign, to the point that most of it doesn't even require a diagnosis test, and, thus, those are also healthy breasts by any measure. But...minors cannot consent to medical treatment, according to you, so I guess the answer is no?
But, hey, congratulations on being propagandized successfully.
Professional hitmen are not a thing. They are really not a thing. Most of the ones that people hire end up being undercover cops.
No, they do. Just not in the way people think they exist.They do not call themselves hitmen or advertise or make themselves accessible to outside people. You cannot _hire_ them to kill people as some sort of one-off thing.It isn't a _gig_ thing, and it sure as hell isn't the $10k hit per-hit that people seem to think is 'realistic'.
But they do exist. They generally call themselves 'security professionals' or ' 'security consultants'. They go on the payroll, or maybe get hired to do some work. When someone needs killing, they go out to kill them.
If you want people killed, you are going to be paying six figures, and you'll be paying it _aboveboard_, with taxes, because you hired them to do some very very expensive 'security consulting'.
And as a general rule of thumb: If rich people want an illegal thing to exist, it will exist. It will just be priced appropriately, not the very small amount that people seem to think 'a hit' should cost.
For the record, I understand that the PPP was a helicopter dump of money and I have problems with it but they’re down the list.
The upper-middle class stealing will always be way down the list, second only to the upper class stealing.
Experts estimate that approximately 10% of the 800 billion given out as PPP was stolen. This is, incidentally, about the same amount as all retail theft in an entire year...done by a lot less people, aka, they each individually stole a lot more. And they're much much easier to track down, we literally have a list of them.
Trump has already abused pardons for people on h'is side', like for Roger Stone, along with pardoning Jared Kushner's father Charles Kushner, who it should be pointed out that was not even conceivably a political prosecution, happening in 2005. (He was convicted of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering about those things.)
He also has pardoned someone convicted of war crimes... And I'm not talking about things that we might differ on whether they're war crimes or not, I'm talking about actual deliberate shooting of civilians In cold blood, arrested and convicted by the US military (people forget the presidential pardon power extends not just to civilian law but the military code), but the pro-fascist far right took him up as a cause because how dare a US soldier be held accountable for violating orders and murdering civilians. I'm on my phone right now and I can't be bothered to look up his name, but that pardon really should have gotten more pushback, but 'really should have gotten more pushback' is pretty much the defining trait of the last decade.
So whatever hypothetical precedent Biden is sitting here has already happened, Trump has already done it. The pardon power is one of the powers Trump already misused. He just doesn't seem to have committed any crimes while doing it, like sold pardons, although apparently that is now legal for him to do.
The only thing that was vaguely startling is that he didn't misuse it to pardon all the January 6th people.
Heinrich Müller did not have an enemies list. HItler did. Sometimes Müller executed that list, sometimes other people did, but it was not Müller's list.
Müller is actually notable as one of the top Na.zis that does not appear to be any sort of true believer, liking neither Hilter or Na.zism particularly. He was motivated almost solely by ambition. He's basically a career police officer who ended up being promoted into the position, and was perfectly willing to go after anyone his superiors said to, in any way they said. Wikipedia has a quote:
Criminal Police Chief Inspector Heinrich Müller is not a Party member. He has also never actively worked within the Party or in one of its ancillary organisations ...
Before the seizure of power Müller was employed in the political department of the Police Headquarters. He did his duty both under the direction of the notorious Police President Koch [Julius Koch, the Munich Police President 1929–33], and under Nortz and Mantel. His sphere of activity was to supervise and deal with the left-wing movement ... [H]e fought against it very hard, sometimes in fact ignoring legal provisions and regulations ... But it is equally clear that, ... Müller would have acted against the Right in just the same way. With his enormous ambition and his marked 'pushiness' he would win the approval of his superiors ... In terms of his political opinions ... his standpoint varied between the German National People's Party and the Bavarian People's Party. But he was by no means a National Socialist. - An evaluation by the Na.zi Party's Deputy Gauleiter
This isn't to defend him, only to point out how silly the comparison is. Kash Patel is a true believer. Heinrich Müller wasn't, or at least he wasn't in Na.zism, he just did the job handed to him by the Gerrman state, whether that was normal police work or executing Jewish scientists.
I'm wondering if we're ever going to address the fact that we seemed not to care in the slightest about money fraudulently paid to business under the Paycheck Protection Program to keep them functional and employing people, with huge amount of money sent to people who just blatantly lied.
Or with the fact we probably should have structured that program completely differently. It's not like it's a _secret_ how many people that a companies employs. We could have just done: Oh, you have applied to this, our tax records show you have fifteen employees and pay them X, and you have shut down under the pandemic, we are going to transfer you 80% of this month's paycheck for all of them, you need to pay them that money. All that money must go to your employees...it can go to different employees if you have cycled employees. If you have reduced staff and that is too much, hold on to it for now and contact us. We are also giving you some additional money to cover other expenses like rent.
Just the very basic 'is this a legitimate existing businesses with actual employees?', a thing that can trivially be done by looking at tax records of the previous year, and then looking at taxes _next_ year, where employees file taxes that report that income. How many employees a business has and how much they pay employees is not some opaque thing the government doesn't know, it's literally sitting in their tax records!
Instead, we had people just making up businesses and employees and buying Porsches with it. But, of course, we don't care about that sort of fraud, because those grifters were mostly middle class...the only people we care if they are defrauding the government are the extremely poor.
'Pay to not be annoyed' is basically the only other model besides 'pay to win' for games like this, they're not fixing that, they'd make no money from it. If the game wasn't more enjoyable after you subscribed, why on earth would you subscribe?
(I do find it funny you mention you can buy random in-card perk card packs if you have Fallout 1st as some sort of very useful thing. That...is not even vaguely useful. At all. You get to choose a perk card at each level up, and by the time you reach level 70 or so you've gotten all the ones you want, and anyone over 100 or so generally has around 10 perk cards sitting there they've forgotten to even select yet. No one needs five _random_ ones, those are mostly scrapped for perk coins.)
As for the constant repair and repeatable stuff...that's literally how MMOs operate. You will eventually run out of content in the game, and start doing things again, and part of the play cycle is making you have consumables that you have to do minor things to refill before you can do some of the big stuff.
Cycle without that for top level players:
Fight biggest, most challenging enemy.
Fight biggest, most challenging enemy.
Fight biggest, most challenging enemy.
Cycle with that for top level players:
Fight biggest. most challenging enemy.
Do some farming to collect mirelurk meat because you want some boost that requires, cook that.
Repair some armor and guns.
While you're there, fix the damage to your house some idiot visitor allowed.
Sell some stuff to buy some chems, restock those.
Actually, you need money in general, so you craft some serums and sell them at the mall...
It's the exact same reason they have random things you have to do to earn S.C.O.R.E. to get seasonal stuff. It's not because it's useful, it's because interjecting randomness and small tasks (One that hopefully are not too annoying) into the play cycle keeps players from getting bored.
MMO cost money to run, and they need people to keep playing them a _lot_ longer than possible any main plot could hold their attention. They are indeed about maintenance, not finishing a story. But that's basically the premise of the genre.
And none of the 'main plots' in an MMO (Fallout 76 has half a dozen.) can to do anything to the game world at all, which makes them somewhat limited. You can't have the plot stop the scorched because you're in a game world where other players have not done that. Completing main game questions mostly just individually gives you access to things, like additional vendors or nuke launches.
Under fascism, the government, or their brown shirt proxies, do kill political rivals. Or, even better, frighten them from speaking or being in public, which removes them from politics without having to take the heat of killing them.
And, yes, there was an attempt to do that here, where the Proud Boys (One of the brown shirt armies working with Trump) attempted to kill certain members of Congress during Jan 6, along with the VP. It's unclear how serious this attempt was.
(It's also unclear how directed that was by the president, but that's exactly how brown shirt armies function. The fascist leadership merely hands them a target, without saying they want anything to happen, and the brown shirts go and destroy that target. Trump is actually notable bad at this and often says the quiet part out loud)
Anyway, I guess you've give up on actually writing down any _real_ lines, which means you conveniently get to keep saying it's not fascism no matter what happens. Cool.
No, but he might want to consider pardoning Jack Smith, who Trump has threatened to go after for running a normal DoJ investigation.
In fact, there actually is a small group of people pointing out that it might be smart to pardon all journalists for anything that they've ever run. Just issue a blanket pardon to any high-profile journalist that Trump has come after (and really any journalist) for anything that they've ever printed, which would seriously impair Trump for coming after them.
That is literally not part of fascism at all. That is, in fact, from a science fiction book. (Incidentally, being sci-fi, it also was just a _guess_, both at how political movements will evolve and how language works. It is not great at the first, and gets the second completely wrong.)
Mass censorship.
That's just authoritarianism in general. China has mass censorship, but is not fascist. I was specifically looking for fascist signifiers.
I wouldn't make a point of this except that you seem very determined to argue the exact definitions, so I feel it's important to get this exactly correct.
For the record, how do you feel about what happened in Turkey? Where the censorship, which does exist, is pretty thin and not particularly important, the control of information there is simply done by the fact that the regime and supporters completely own every media outlet. (We do all agree that what is happening in Turkey is a form of fascism, right? Let's not quibble if neo-fascism is different from fascism.)
Lawfare.
This isn't even vaguely an aspect of fascism, I have no idea where you got this from. It's not even an aspect of authoritarianism.
Debanking.
This is an oddly specific thing that might happen under authoritarianism, but it happens as a side effect of other things.
Also, by that logic, the US was a fascist state until the mid-70s when women could finally get bank accounts. Is that where you are going with that?
And some severe hardcore “othering” of people who merely have been believing the same stuff they believed a couple of decades ago.
It sure has been interesting to watch you attempt to twist this question to score political points.
Also, something like a mythical “Great Reset” movement to fundamentally change stuff.
That is literally the _opposite_ of fascism. Fascism almost always make claims of a past in which everything was better, and how some recent change has made things worse, and we should return to the imaginary past. (Both 'recent' and 'change' are, of course, very subjective and often outright lies.)
Fascism does not assert it wants to 'fundamentally change stuff', it assert it wants to 'unchange' stuff.
It really is interesting to watch you, a person who constantly complains that 'the left calls everything they don't like Hitler', to, uh, call everything you don't like fascism. Fascism is a specific, fairly well-defined political philosophy. It isn't just 'stuff you don't like', hell, it isn't even the same thing as general authoritarianism or dictatorships.
--
Also, wow, if we were to pretend this was an actual list instead of you twisting a bunch of nonsense complaints about the left, that is a really stupid list. You didn't include extremely obvious things like 'killing political rivals'. Or even 'stopping the peaceable transfer of power'. You don't think those would put us in fascist territory? You really don't have any actual lines?
To quote our future president: Sad.
Would you like to try again, listing _actual_ things Trump could do that would make you consider him a fascist (Feel free to just lookup what he's promising to do.) or should we consider this conversation over?
I think our political class lacks the language to describe what Trump really represents, which isn’t fascism so much as a combination of illiberal democracy and corruption, falling somewhere between Silvio Berlusconi and the kind of Latin American strong man that loots what he can and mismanages the finances, but lacks the ideological commitment or competence to create and empower death squads.
Why do you think that Trump will not be able to find people competent enough to create and empower death squads this time?
The only reason he failed last time is that he surrounded himself by more normal people who worked for him who were utterly horrified by what he was trying to do, and stopped him both by distracting him and doing things that, honestly, we'd call insubordination and be horrified at in any other circumstances.
That isn't going to happen again.
Incidentally, the government part of fascism doesn't start with government death squads. It starts with general propaganda and propagandist laws aimed at riling up violent mobs that oppose the 'enemies within', but whose actions can be disclaimed as brave patriotic warriors who are outraged by the situation.
And, of course, arresting the opposition and media.
I've gotten into Fallout 76 with some friends over the past month. It's actually a workable and real game now, unlike when it launched, and the community is a good deal less sucky than a lot of those types of games...it helps that the game is deliberately set up where there's no incentive to screwing other players over, and PvP is basically non-functional so no one does it.
It has recently gotten a lot of newbies thanks to the TV series (I guess I am technically one of them, I had a urge to play some Fallout and some friends started talking about Fallout 76 and I figured, why not. Although with two thousand hours in Fallout 4 alone, I'm hardly a newcomers to the series), so it's apparently a little weird right now.
So if you like Fallout, but heard bad things about 76 at launch (Which were all true, but the game has been fleshed out) or disliked the idea of online play because you worried about how other players act (Which I also did, but the community is actually really nice), give it another shot. There's a new 'season' starting Dec 2.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.
On “Thursday Throughput: RFK Jr Edition”
This reminds me of a very popular conspiracy that somehow lingered until 2000 or so, that automakers had some sort of magical carburetor that would give really really good fuel efficiency, but wouldn't use it.
The funny thing is, some of this conspiracy was true. Not the crazy '600 miles a gallon' or even '60 miles a gallon', and it's unlikely these designs were ever made, but there were theoretical carburetors designed by start of the 90s that could get better gas mileage, supposedly up to 20% better, altering fuel-air mixture in real time depending on conditions in ways that made simple butterfly carburetors look like kid's toys.
The reason they were never used was two-fold: They were more fragile because they had a lot more moving parts (Anyone who has ever had a car with a carburetor knows they can get stuck.), using a lot more feedback and trying to alter the fuel-air mixture based on many more variables, and at that exact moment, we, uuh, invented computerized fuel injection and we just had a computer create exactly the fuel-air mixture we wanted at any give moment, based off whatever variables we wanted to use. Which worked way better than bouncing gasoline off a series of baffles in convoluted ways.
On “Open Mic for the week of 12/9/2024”
A young middle-class white cishet man running into a serious medical problem and actually discovering that existing 'free market' systems can, in fact, be unfair and knowingly cause a bunch of harm to people by design while making massive profits...and getting so outraged he shoots the people in charge...is just funny.
Like, just one form of being marginalized, just one system that is actively harming him, and the guy just _snaps_.
"
That's not exactly what it says. What that says is you can, in court, _disclaim_ a pardon that has been issued to you. And if you wish to use one, you have bring it up to the court, or the court can just ignore it, which I think we all assumed was true if we thought about it.
As far as I can see, nothing stops Biden from issuing Schiff or anyone a pardon, and them just...not saying anything. They don't have to say they reject or accept it. (In fact, it probably doesn't matter if they _publicly_ say anything, they'd have to do it in court.) And maybe it doesn't ever come up.
It's Schrödinger's pardon, and the box doesn't have to be opened until the person wants to open it.
Now, Republicans could try to force the issue by trying to make them testify on the grounds they were pardoned, but...that does raise an interesting question, because that's not the courts, and that's just sorta assuming they already accepted the pardon, which they didn't.
In fact, playing this out, I almost feel they could be forced in front of Congress, assert they will not be accepting the pardon and thus do not have to testify, and then, if charged, could...say, in court, they are accepting the pardon. Things they say to Congress are not part of court, they are not bound by them. (They have to tell the truth, but saying 'I plan to reject the pardon' and then later accepting it is not automatically _lying_. Maybe they just changed their mind, an entirely reasonable thing when actually faced with criminal charges.)
At which point they could get hauled back in front of Congress, but we're pretty far in now.
"
It is worth pointing out how that poll is _completely deranged_.
And also not measuring 'satisfaction'. It's measuring 'In general, are you satisfied or dissatisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time?'.
And even there, it's just nonsense.
It has skyrocketing satisfaction during the 2008-2009 subprime mortgage collapse. I know Obama was a popular president, but I seriously doubt he was _that_ popular. It's almost 25% movement! Wait, is this maybe the ACA? I don't recall that being super-popular either?
It also isn't at its highest for 9/11, that was a dip...it's at it's highest for _the months after_.
I have no idea what that poll is measuring, but it not anything sane.
On “From the New York Post: UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson fatally shot outside Hilton hotel in Midtown in targeted attack: cops”
Yeah, but there are also 'operators' that do all kinds of tasks, or contract out tasks, for rich people while _not_ being part of an organization. They're generally called 'fixers'
Rich people know people who can 'get anything done' (Or ask their lawyer who to contact), and if they need someone killed, and don't happen to have anyone who can do that in their employ, the fixer can make it happen. Ad the rich person will play the fixer some rather large fee for something unrelated, and actual murderer will get paid somehow.
There _are_ professional contracted killing in this world.
They just exist in a way that is totally opaque to everyone else.
Meanwhile, there are a bunch of low-level criminals who will do anything if you pay them, too...including immediately flip on you if they get caught, or just be FBI agents to start with, that's pretty popular.
But it does exist. Somewhere between 2%-5% of all _solved_ killings are contract killings, usually for insurance payouts or monetary reasons like inheritance and pre-nups (You will notice these are all rich people things), and that proportion is probably higher for unsolved ones. Mostly because contract killings are automatically at least _slightly_ harder to solve, due to the fact that actual killer has no obvious motive and the person with the motive probably made sure they had an alibi. And if actual professionals are involved, it could be much MUCH harder to solve.
The popular concept of a hitman is bogus, but it isn't particularly more bogus than the popular concept of 'cat burglar' (Ironically because most theft is actually much easier than the competency porn shown in fiction) or 'car thief'. The actual problem is if you buy into the popular conception of hitmen and try to get one, you will be hiring either a cop or a complete nincompoop.
On “Open Mic for the week of 12/2/2024”
Here, let me just post the link to Blue Sky, I doubt we can actually embed that. Mods can delete the other one:
"If you're cis, one thing I'd like to impart with regards to trans people is that you are being lied to on an almost unfathomable scale, from billionaires like Musk, to religious fundamentalist groups, to print and broadcast media, to entire governments, they're committed to spreading malinformation."
https://bsky.app/profile/caseyexplosion.bsky.social/post/3lcnknt6a2s2t
Read it, there's more.
On “From the New York Post: UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson fatally shot outside Hilton hotel in Midtown in targeted attack: cops”
I must say, it is incredibly lucky (If somewhat expected due to what side actually encourages violence) how all the recent assassins are either right-wing or just loony or incoherent politically.
Not only will it make it harder for fascists to use it as an excuse to crack down on the left, but it sorta innoculates against that possibility if eventually someone on the left also does it.
On “Open Mic for the week of 12/2/2024”
Yeah.
Let's see if this Blue Sky embed works:
I doubt it will, so here's the link:
https://bsky.app/profile/caseyexplosion.bsky.social/post/3lcnknt6a2s2t
"
Never answered my 'Should minors be able to get birth control?' or 'Should minors boys be able to get mastectomies?'
Oh, let me guess, that is 'objectively diagnosable ', which is nonsense. Trans boys having breasts is as 'objectively diagnosable' as cis boys having them.
What you are attempting to claim is that being trans is not objectively diagnosisable, which...it is. Or, rather, having gender dysphoria is objectively diagnosable.
I could list the diagnostic requirements for gender dysphoria for you, but surely since you're in this discussion making statements about it, you know enough to be able to do that, right?
Or, alternately, have you just been subject to a constant stream of propoganda for almost a decade now from a bunch of very rich people who operate the media with absolutely no pushback?
"
BTW, if malpractice happened here, it happened HERE. As almost all these detrans lawsuit people have had their story fall completely apart on later examination (And it's hilarious you think this is the first one.), we shall see what happens, but if it turns out her doctors did something wrong, they will have to pay.
But the way this _actually_ works is that a bunch of allegations are made that the doctor cannot respond to (Because of HIPAA) and then once it gets into court, it turns out significant portions are not true, or were deliberately misleading. It almost always turns out, in this 'rushed transition', the person rushing them _were_ the patients.
The case goes nowhere and eventually get dropped.
Here, it's worth pointing out how _wildly insanely fast_ the stuff happened in this story. I don't just mean the treatment, but even _getting to see a doctor_. I know an adult who made an appointment at a gender clinic, and she's was handed a year-long wait...to see actually go to the clinic.
And it's also worth pointing out that there are clearly defined standards of care for trans people, and these event do not conform to them. Mastectomies are sometimes done on minors, but 14 is basically unheard of, it's more 16 and 17. Likewise, puberty blockers generally start at 13, not 12. There is absolutely no reason to start testosterone at 13, either, that's well before a lot of cis boys start showing results from testosterone!
Which makes me think there was something going on, but the thing I suspect is not something that makes Johanna Olson-Kennedy look bad, but rather the parents, who were willing to pay incredibly large amounts of money to fast-forward this because their daughter demanded it.
"
Why do you care about the 'healthy breasts' of 14-year olds girls? What incredibly creepy terminology.
Also, to make it clear here, you're arguing that neither the minor _nor their parent_ can consent to medical treatment.
Do you think all medical care of children done under 'person is unconscious' rules, where we are allowed to assume life-saving consent but nothing else?
If so, do you think minors should be allowed to be on birth control?
In fact, do you think 14-year old boys with gynecomastia should be able to have healthy breasts removed? Please note that gynecomastia in teen boys is almost entirely benign, to the point that most of it doesn't even require a diagnosis test, and, thus, those are also healthy breasts by any measure. But...minors cannot consent to medical treatment, according to you, so I guess the answer is no?
But, hey, congratulations on being propagandized successfully.
On “From the New York Post: UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson fatally shot outside Hilton hotel in Midtown in targeted attack: cops”
The lawyer didn't even do anything, IIRC.
They have the same thing happen in Jurassic World to one of the lead's assistants, who...also hadn't done anything.
"
No, they do. Just not in the way people think they exist.They do not call themselves hitmen or advertise or make themselves accessible to outside people. You cannot _hire_ them to kill people as some sort of one-off thing.It isn't a _gig_ thing, and it sure as hell isn't the $10k hit per-hit that people seem to think is 'realistic'.
But they do exist. They generally call themselves 'security professionals' or ' 'security consultants'. They go on the payroll, or maybe get hired to do some work. When someone needs killing, they go out to kill them.
If you want people killed, you are going to be paying six figures, and you'll be paying it _aboveboard_, with taxes, because you hired them to do some very very expensive 'security consulting'.
And as a general rule of thumb: If rich people want an illegal thing to exist, it will exist. It will just be priced appropriately, not the very small amount that people seem to think 'a hit' should cost.
"
My theory is that a) hitmen exist, and b) have loved ones, who c) have UHC health insurance.
It sorta becomes obvious after you realize those three things.
This is a John Wick situation, crossed a bit with Nathan Ford from Leverage. UHC killed a family member.
On “Open Mic for the week of 12/2/2024”
The upper-middle class stealing will always be way down the list, second only to the upper class stealing.
Experts estimate that approximately 10% of the 800 billion given out as PPP was stolen. This is, incidentally, about the same amount as all retail theft in an entire year...done by a lot less people, aka, they each individually stole a lot more. And they're much much easier to track down, we literally have a list of them.
On “Making Lawfare Great Again”
Trump has already abused pardons for people on h'is side', like for Roger Stone, along with pardoning Jared Kushner's father Charles Kushner, who it should be pointed out that was not even conceivably a political prosecution, happening in 2005. (He was convicted of illegal campaign contributions, tax evasion, and witness tampering about those things.)
He also has pardoned someone convicted of war crimes... And I'm not talking about things that we might differ on whether they're war crimes or not, I'm talking about actual deliberate shooting of civilians In cold blood, arrested and convicted by the US military (people forget the presidential pardon power extends not just to civilian law but the military code), but the pro-fascist far right took him up as a cause because how dare a US soldier be held accountable for violating orders and murdering civilians. I'm on my phone right now and I can't be bothered to look up his name, but that pardon really should have gotten more pushback, but 'really should have gotten more pushback' is pretty much the defining trait of the last decade.
So whatever hypothetical precedent Biden is sitting here has already happened, Trump has already done it. The pardon power is one of the powers Trump already misused. He just doesn't seem to have committed any crimes while doing it, like sold pardons, although apparently that is now legal for him to do.
The only thing that was vaguely startling is that he didn't misuse it to pardon all the January 6th people.
On “Open Mic for the week of 12/2/2024”
Heinrich Müller did not have an enemies list. HItler did. Sometimes Müller executed that list, sometimes other people did, but it was not Müller's list.
Müller is actually notable as one of the top Na.zis that does not appear to be any sort of true believer, liking neither Hilter or Na.zism particularly. He was motivated almost solely by ambition. He's basically a career police officer who ended up being promoted into the position, and was perfectly willing to go after anyone his superiors said to, in any way they said. Wikipedia has a quote:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heinrich_M%C3%BCller_(Gestapo)
This isn't to defend him, only to point out how silly the comparison is. Kash Patel is a true believer. Heinrich Müller wasn't, or at least he wasn't in Na.zism, he just did the job handed to him by the Gerrman state, whether that was normal police work or executing Jewish scientists.
"
Almost everything in the bottom half is Republican conspiracy nonsense, BTW.
#1 is especially nonsense.
"
I'm wondering if we're ever going to address the fact that we seemed not to care in the slightest about money fraudulently paid to business under the Paycheck Protection Program to keep them functional and employing people, with huge amount of money sent to people who just blatantly lied.
Or with the fact we probably should have structured that program completely differently. It's not like it's a _secret_ how many people that a companies employs. We could have just done: Oh, you have applied to this, our tax records show you have fifteen employees and pay them X, and you have shut down under the pandemic, we are going to transfer you 80% of this month's paycheck for all of them, you need to pay them that money. All that money must go to your employees...it can go to different employees if you have cycled employees. If you have reduced staff and that is too much, hold on to it for now and contact us. We are also giving you some additional money to cover other expenses like rent.
Just the very basic 'is this a legitimate existing businesses with actual employees?', a thing that can trivially be done by looking at tax records of the previous year, and then looking at taxes _next_ year, where employees file taxes that report that income. How many employees a business has and how much they pay employees is not some opaque thing the government doesn't know, it's literally sitting in their tax records!
Instead, we had people just making up businesses and employees and buying Porsches with it. But, of course, we don't care about that sort of fraud, because those grifters were mostly middle class...the only people we care if they are defrauding the government are the extremely poor.
On “Saturday Morning Gaming: The Steam Thanksgiving Sale!!!”
'Pay to not be annoyed' is basically the only other model besides 'pay to win' for games like this, they're not fixing that, they'd make no money from it. If the game wasn't more enjoyable after you subscribed, why on earth would you subscribe?
(I do find it funny you mention you can buy random in-card perk card packs if you have Fallout 1st as some sort of very useful thing. That...is not even vaguely useful. At all. You get to choose a perk card at each level up, and by the time you reach level 70 or so you've gotten all the ones you want, and anyone over 100 or so generally has around 10 perk cards sitting there they've forgotten to even select yet. No one needs five _random_ ones, those are mostly scrapped for perk coins.)
As for the constant repair and repeatable stuff...that's literally how MMOs operate. You will eventually run out of content in the game, and start doing things again, and part of the play cycle is making you have consumables that you have to do minor things to refill before you can do some of the big stuff.
Cycle without that for top level players:
Fight biggest, most challenging enemy.
Fight biggest, most challenging enemy.
Fight biggest, most challenging enemy.
Cycle with that for top level players:
Fight biggest. most challenging enemy.
Do some farming to collect mirelurk meat because you want some boost that requires, cook that.
Repair some armor and guns.
While you're there, fix the damage to your house some idiot visitor allowed.
Sell some stuff to buy some chems, restock those.
Actually, you need money in general, so you craft some serums and sell them at the mall...
It's the exact same reason they have random things you have to do to earn S.C.O.R.E. to get seasonal stuff. It's not because it's useful, it's because interjecting randomness and small tasks (One that hopefully are not too annoying) into the play cycle keeps players from getting bored.
MMO cost money to run, and they need people to keep playing them a _lot_ longer than possible any main plot could hold their attention. They are indeed about maintenance, not finishing a story. But that's basically the premise of the genre.
And none of the 'main plots' in an MMO (Fallout 76 has half a dozen.) can to do anything to the game world at all, which makes them somewhat limited. You can't have the plot stop the scorched because you're in a game world where other players have not done that. Completing main game questions mostly just individually gives you access to things, like additional vendors or nuke launches.
On “I Told You So”
Under fascism, the government, or their brown shirt proxies, do kill political rivals. Or, even better, frighten them from speaking or being in public, which removes them from politics without having to take the heat of killing them.
And, yes, there was an attempt to do that here, where the Proud Boys (One of the brown shirt armies working with Trump) attempted to kill certain members of Congress during Jan 6, along with the VP. It's unclear how serious this attempt was.
(It's also unclear how directed that was by the president, but that's exactly how brown shirt armies function. The fascist leadership merely hands them a target, without saying they want anything to happen, and the brown shirts go and destroy that target. Trump is actually notable bad at this and often says the quiet part out loud)
Anyway, I guess you've give up on actually writing down any _real_ lines, which means you conveniently get to keep saying it's not fascism no matter what happens. Cool.
On “Making Lawfare Great Again”
No, but he might want to consider pardoning Jack Smith, who Trump has threatened to go after for running a normal DoJ investigation.
In fact, there actually is a small group of people pointing out that it might be smart to pardon all journalists for anything that they've ever run. Just issue a blanket pardon to any high-profile journalist that Trump has come after (and really any journalist) for anything that they've ever printed, which would seriously impair Trump for coming after them.
On “I Told You So”
That is literally not part of fascism at all. That is, in fact, from a science fiction book. (Incidentally, being sci-fi, it also was just a _guess_, both at how political movements will evolve and how language works. It is not great at the first, and gets the second completely wrong.)
That's just authoritarianism in general. China has mass censorship, but is not fascist. I was specifically looking for fascist signifiers.
I wouldn't make a point of this except that you seem very determined to argue the exact definitions, so I feel it's important to get this exactly correct.
For the record, how do you feel about what happened in Turkey? Where the censorship, which does exist, is pretty thin and not particularly important, the control of information there is simply done by the fact that the regime and supporters completely own every media outlet. (We do all agree that what is happening in Turkey is a form of fascism, right? Let's not quibble if neo-fascism is different from fascism.)
This isn't even vaguely an aspect of fascism, I have no idea where you got this from. It's not even an aspect of authoritarianism.
This is an oddly specific thing that might happen under authoritarianism, but it happens as a side effect of other things.
Also, by that logic, the US was a fascist state until the mid-70s when women could finally get bank accounts. Is that where you are going with that?
It sure has been interesting to watch you attempt to twist this question to score political points.
That is literally the _opposite_ of fascism. Fascism almost always make claims of a past in which everything was better, and how some recent change has made things worse, and we should return to the imaginary past. (Both 'recent' and 'change' are, of course, very subjective and often outright lies.)
Fascism does not assert it wants to 'fundamentally change stuff', it assert it wants to 'unchange' stuff.
It really is interesting to watch you, a person who constantly complains that 'the left calls everything they don't like Hitler', to, uh, call everything you don't like fascism. Fascism is a specific, fairly well-defined political philosophy. It isn't just 'stuff you don't like', hell, it isn't even the same thing as general authoritarianism or dictatorships.
--
Also, wow, if we were to pretend this was an actual list instead of you twisting a bunch of nonsense complaints about the left, that is a really stupid list. You didn't include extremely obvious things like 'killing political rivals'. Or even 'stopping the peaceable transfer of power'. You don't think those would put us in fascist territory? You really don't have any actual lines?
To quote our future president: Sad.
Would you like to try again, listing _actual_ things Trump could do that would make you consider him a fascist (Feel free to just lookup what he's promising to do.) or should we consider this conversation over?
"
Why do you think that Trump will not be able to find people competent enough to create and empower death squads this time?
The only reason he failed last time is that he surrounded himself by more normal people who worked for him who were utterly horrified by what he was trying to do, and stopped him both by distracting him and doing things that, honestly, we'd call insubordination and be horrified at in any other circumstances.
That isn't going to happen again.
Incidentally, the government part of fascism doesn't start with government death squads. It starts with general propaganda and propagandist laws aimed at riling up violent mobs that oppose the 'enemies within', but whose actions can be disclaimed as brave patriotic warriors who are outraged by the situation.
And, of course, arresting the opposition and media.
Hey, for fun, google 'Kash Patel'.
On “Saturday Morning Gaming: The Steam Thanksgiving Sale!!!”
I've gotten into Fallout 76 with some friends over the past month. It's actually a workable and real game now, unlike when it launched, and the community is a good deal less sucky than a lot of those types of games...it helps that the game is deliberately set up where there's no incentive to screwing other players over, and PvP is basically non-functional so no one does it.
It has recently gotten a lot of newbies thanks to the TV series (I guess I am technically one of them, I had a urge to play some Fallout and some friends started talking about Fallout 76 and I figured, why not. Although with two thousand hours in Fallout 4 alone, I'm hardly a newcomers to the series), so it's apparently a little weird right now.
So if you like Fallout, but heard bad things about 76 at launch (Which were all true, but the game has been fleshed out) or disliked the idea of online play because you worried about how other players act (Which I also did, but the community is actually really nice), give it another shot. There's a new 'season' starting Dec 2.
*Comment archive for non-registered commenters assembled by email address as provided.