Uriel-238 's Techdirt Comments

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• On the post: Trump Pretends Crime Rates Are Up To Justify Sending Troops To DC Streets. Too Many Americans Believe Him.

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 12 Aug, 2025 @ 12:38pm

  True Crime

  There was a discussion of Murder in the You're Wrong About podcast, a sudden rise in the rate of uncleared intentional homicide cases in the 1960s and 1970s. In fact the intentional rate was going down as battered wives shelters provided an alternative to letting fights escalate, and then eventually women had their own credit cards, and could spend a night or three at a Motel 6. Similarly in the 1970s it was reported serial killers claimed about 5000 victims a year. Later we'd find this (published as non-fiction) report was entirely made up, that actual serial killers are extremely rare, and the scariest ones are the ones that successfully can cloak their victims' deaths in another color, such as nurses of mercy and police officers who are a bit quick on escalating to violence. But we love to read about extreme criminal violence, and collect cards with famous killers and make inspired-by-true-stories cinema and television based on them, and that gives the illusion that there's a Jeffry Dahmer, or even a Jason Voorhees in every neighborhood.

• On the post: Trump Pretends Crime Rates Are Up To Justify Sending Troops To DC Streets. Too Many Americans Believe Him.

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 11 Aug, 2025 @ 06:44pm

  ETA

  I wonder if we could influence the DC political sector to adapt white and cream suits as 2025+ fashion.

• On the post: Trump Pretends Crime Rates Are Up To Justify Sending Troops To DC Streets. Too Many Americans Believe Him.

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 11 Aug, 2025 @ 06:42pm

  I've made this point before.

  I've been in some of the most famous crime zones of the US, specifically the ones in California, not only walked around, took busses, engaged in commerce and went about my life. There were street gangs. They offered to sell me weed (ganja). Since I wasn't from another gang, I wasn't a threat. There were belligerents, occasionally. Some of the saltier folk liked to get roaring drunk and look for a fight. It was very easy to get out of their way until a friend (or friendly neighborhood watch guy) guided them home. In Oakland, the gang was more of a neighborhood watch, since the police patrols didn't actually care about citizen safety, rather wanted to harry people for paraphernalia. I thought it was funny, that in a single Payday 2 mission, I killed more DC police and SWAT than ever died in the line of duty through DC history. Checking the BJS I'm...having trouble finding a rate for DC for all violent crime (including simple assault). The intentional homicide rate is 23 per 100,000 per year. Yes, that's high even for a municipal area, but that's also low risk for day-to-day living.

• On the post: Trump Pretends Crime Rates Are Up To Justify Sending Troops To DC Streets. Too Many Americans Believe Him.

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 11 Aug, 2025 @ 06:28pm

  The ballroom...

  ...kinda looks... French 🪟🔪

• On the post: DOGE’s “Efficiency” Theater: Wasted $21.7 Billion While Destroying Life-Saving Programs Based On Conspiracy Theories

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 08 Aug, 2025 @ 12:04pm

  To bring back a tired old conservative question...

  So who's going to pay for all the damages caused by the DOGE rampage?

• On the post: Courts Start Asking About The ICE Arrest Quota The Administration Is Now Pretending Isn’t A Quota

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 08 Aug, 2025 @ 12:02pm

  The fascist doesn't argue in good faith EVER

  This is an established understanding of fascist movements (also of cults, according to Knitting Cult Lady, which may have fascist movements as a subset of cults) members of the movement train themselves to treat communication in mixed company as publicity and manipulation, and speak candidly only with their intimates. (They still have to signal loyalty to other less-familiar members, such as political officers; in the case of MAGA, expressing some of the statements of faith such as The 2020 election was stolen from Trump.) We saw a prior example of this when the White House made it super clear that Musk ran DOGE, but once it fell to the courts, to protect Musk from liability, they first equivocated and then appointed the official leadership position to Amy Gleason, an public official regarded as expendable to the current regime. So a court that is interested in justice is going to recognize what is happening, and seek to turn inconsistent statements from regime spokespeople and counsel into an act of perjury -- or at least force the regime to be crystal clear about its actual position. we've learned that, much like a bored toddler, if not monitored and held to account, the Trump regime will continue to engage in destructive mischief.

• On the post: Credit Card Companies Fielding A Ton Of Complaints Over NSFW Games Disappearing On Platforms

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 07 Aug, 2025 @ 02:14pm

  Imagine my surprise

  Evidently, there are several cases which each nibbled away at regulatory statutes, so that Christian business owners get to assert their companies are strictly religious and can violate accommodations regulations (such as mandates to serve gays, or allowing work-provided insurance to pay for contraception), on the notion that a business can be religious, rather than their individual officials or stockholders. But this came from Federalist-Society SCOTUS judges and federal appointees, who were placed in position to subvert rule of law and equal protections enough that literal books are written and published (and on tour!) about how bad it is. I suspect there aren't many counter examples in which non- Christian faiths or the Satanist org have been able to get religious exceptions to law

• On the post: Credit Card Companies Fielding A Ton Of Complaints Over NSFW Games Disappearing On Platforms

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 07 Aug, 2025 @ 02:06pm

  All the transaction processing providers

  Borrowing from the logic of Extremely Decent (and their cable company commercial -- on YouTube They are what's called an oligopoly, which is like a monopoly but legal. If they want to force you to capitulate to their unreasonable demands, well you can oligobble their balls.

• On the post: ‘Hail Satan’ But For Break Rooms, As Trump Issues Guidance For Religious Freedom In Workplaces

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 06 Aug, 2025 @ 12:16am

  Show-and-tell

  Dan McClellan has a YouTube channel and is a biblical scholar who looks into common passages-of-interest of the bible (often swapping out versions to highlight contrasts, and why they are different). He explains why those passages say what they say, and what they (likely) meant in the era they were written, often in conflict with common interpretations today. And sadly, sometimes the modern interpretation is nicer and more wholesome than its contemporary meaning. So there's lots of public easily available material to explain why a specific modern day interpretation by a given ministry is wrong or derived from post-biblical philosophy. Nihilism is not for everyone. Consult with your doctor if confronting oblivion is right for you.

• On the post: President Of ‘Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings’ Party Fires Statistician For Reporting Facts That Hurt His Feelings

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 04 Aug, 2025 @ 12:21pm

  I deliberated and voted defensively.

  Much as in 2016, I knew we had a better chance of petitioning queen log to move left and rescue some of the frogs getting forgotten in the post recovery / bailout economy. Technically, Queen Log won the popular vote the first time, but the elections are stacked in favor of Heron's party, what has been a known problem for over a century. This time there were just too many forgotten frogs and they voted for Heron, hoping they wouldn't be the first frogs to be eaten. Some were mistaken in that assessment. (According to Richard J Murphy, in late 2024 Neoliberal parties were losing to far right parties a lot in other developed countries, including Labor to the Tories. There has been a revival, possibly due to the rest of the world looking at Trump and what he's doing, and deciding they don't want that) The other major factor is the billion-dollar far-right propaganda machine, which is drawing the most viewership and pushes false narratives in favor of Heron and against Log. It's really difficult to blame the voters, who did what they did by the millions. We have to treat low-information voting, or voting against self-interest as an epidemic affected by circumstances, not as an individual personal choice. Okay, they were stupid, but why, and how do we make voters less stupid; okay, some voters were apathetic. How do we make them less apathetic? I don't have answers, but we can find them. Democracy won't work without a deliberative electorate who votes according to self-interest. And it really doesn't work with only two major parties. So there are fixes that can reduce election fraud that is widespread. In the meantime until we fix democracy, we don't have democracy. We have a pageant of politics in the color of democracy. (Clarification: The US has very little voter fraud, but we have a lot of manipulation and voter suppression, like gerrymandering and disincentivizing voters, which also qualify as election fraud.) Joanne Freeman observes that the OBBBA budget reconciliation law is actually on brand for the republican party since the Reagan era. It is not especially Trumpy, even if it might go further than prior tax-lowering efforts. The GOP depends on suppressing Democrat votes and convincing independent voters that they're not going to do the same thing this time. I thought it might be too late before November 2024. It may be even more too late. I hope not.

• On the post: Credit Card Companies Fielding A Ton Of Complaints Over NSFW Games Disappearing On Platforms

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 04 Aug, 2025 @ 10:54am

  Also of interest [to me]...

  ...is that our transaction-processing oligopolistic masters deny porn for moralistic reasons, but still process fossil fuel product sales, beef sales, gun sales, etc. even though these do way more damage to society than content of sexy times. Their behavior isn't policy-consistent. This may be done in the color of moralizing or preserving brand safety, but it's not about actual morality.

• On the post: Don’t Vibe Check Me, Bro; Or How To Deal With Comments In An Era Filled With Post-Factual Nazis

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 03 Aug, 2025 @ 01:13pm

  Not our first surveilance / censorship rodeo

  AI is still not very smart. Even if a small percentage of people engage in means to create mass false positives, it'll gum up the system and make it problematic. And when we find ways to produce false negatives, that'll travel through porn-share channels faster than bad news. Observe the war between spammers and social media platforms continuing to go on. (I'm not ruling out AI will get smarter, but given enough eyes, all exploits are something something)

• On the post: Credit Card Companies Fielding A Ton Of Complaints Over NSFW Games Disappearing On Platforms

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 03 Aug, 2025 @ 01:04pm

  Refusal to serve

  I believe there are (or should be) equal accommodations statutes that cover that, even when we have situations like the Masterpiece Cakes ruling (which was complex and narrow, but set the general public notion that queers can be denied service by dickwads) But no-one stopped the payment processors from denying transactions to Wikileaks and Julian Assange. (Git or no, he did provide the service of publishing whistleblower material which embarrassed US administrators doing naughty things.) Since the camel got his nose in the tent, head, neck and shoulders were bound to follow.

• On the post: Credit Card Companies Fielding A Ton Of Complaints Over NSFW Games Disappearing On Platforms

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 01 Aug, 2025 @ 02:00pm

  Puritans

  In the case of Collective Shout their internal chat appears to imply they see gamers in general as perverts and child predators. It's not a good look when they want to be regarded as having reason and legitimacy on their side.

• On the post: Credit Card Companies Fielding A Ton Of Complaints Over NSFW Games Disappearing On Platforms

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 01 Aug, 2025 @ 01:57pm

  The camel's nose

  < rant > If you give an inch, they'll take a mile is the western version of a Arabian fable of the camel's nose, If you allow the camel's nose into the tent, soon the whole camel will be inside, and refuse to leave. We've seen this multiple times with companies who have tried to appease the Trump regime by capitulating tribute and obedience, only to have more demanded of them. I felt alarm when Julian Assange and Wikileaks were blocked by VISA and Mastercard in the 2010s after it published the Chelsea Manning files. This was a plot point of Ransom (the 1996 Mel Gibson vehicle), because the airline mogul paid to hush a company scandal, the smart goon saw he was a mark. The Manning revelations were claimed to be a matter of US national security, but more so they were embarrassing to specific politicians who were abusing their power. The files belied misuse of US national security resources, exactly the sort of thing that needs to be made public. It's also the sort of thing that pisses off the ownership class. (Yes, I know Assange is a git and is -- or at least has been -- a Russian asset, but the service he provided was useful. Incidentally, the ACLU got a lot of early support from USSR because they caused the US state trouble, even though in retrospect the public might approve of that trouble.) The rhetoric from both parties was not that the revealed behaviors and indulgences themselves jeopardized national security, but the publication that they occurred. It's a running theme in Washington since Reagan: Snitches are worse than the fraudsters, the extortionists, the insider traders. The ownership class does like making use of its privilege. Obama wanted to be whistleblower friendly until the wrongdoings of his own administration were getting published. Wikileaks survived the VISA and Mastercard sanctions, but it informed how payment processing, when not obligated by common service accommodations mandates, can be used as a commerce pinch to block any kind of disliked transactions. I'm sure Collective Shout noticed this based on the Assange embargo. Or they might have noticed VISA and Mastercard already have objections to some kinds of porn purchases already. VISA and MasterCard has already dipped its nose into censoring porn, as observed by Sex Positive Gaming. Porn vendors who support these cards are restricted from peddling in certain themes, including incest, lolicon / developmental sex (so about 6% of explicit manga), LGBT+ themes and furry themes. Some games get rather comical in their disclaimers, that, for example, your twin sister is a step-sister because cat-magic! Our shadowy plutocratic masters are already asserting their own opinions should be used to shape the world. ...It's my own design. It's my own remorse... (I remain confounded that furry porn / erotica featuring species-correct genitals -- a feature of some content since the 1990s -- is a separate controversy than furry porn itself. But then MLP content, pornographic or otherwise, is yet another controversy. Maybe we shouldn't be censoring porn based on personal tastes, or personal moral objections?) We've seen how this plays out, from citizens of Napoleonic France shouting erotica aloud in the streets to passages of literary sex scenes added to email sig-files in defiance of the CDA. From publicly known bypasses of secret CD and DVD codecs to sophisticated malware escaping intact into the open internet, thanks to FBI sloppily using it to crack a CSAM exchange ring... ...to kids learning out to obtusely describe sexual acts, nudity and poses to LLMs (and learning how to format LORAs) to train public generative AI to crank out droves of sex scenes (in-between the eldritch horrors). We humans, history shows us, really like our smut. Our moral guardians are obsessed at protecting us from our baser natures (and allegedly protect our kids, but not from greater harms like hunger and homelessness). So shielded from the offenses of human sexy times, and content that celebrates it, We the People will seek it out. We'll detect censorship as damage and reroute around it. And if we have to, we'll deal with shadier merchants in shadier markets. The Anarchists, Lunatics and Terrorists have been waiting nearby for a long time to hook us into the dark markets to gain access to all that is verboten by the state, whether that's exciting content, exciting chemistries or exciting political ideas. Come for the gooning material. Stay for the drugs. While you're here, maybe take interest in [intelligence techniques, sabotage techniques,] and high explosives... ...top it off, maybe, with some communist theory, so that when we finally topple the ownership class and our alleged moral guardians, the new boss isn't Same As The Old Boss. < /rant >

• On the post: Don’t Vibe Check Me, Bro; Or How To Deal With Comments In An Era Filled With Post-Factual Nazis

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 01 Aug, 2025 @ 12:35pm

  We have children in concentration camps without due process

  The US is not just a under regime... The US is not even a banana republic under a tin-potted dictator... The US is under a regime regime that tin-potted dictators ruling banana republics can point to to say they're legit. At least we're not as bad as America. Our political prisoners get a semi-decannual case-review!

• On the post: ICE Is Spending More Time Targeting The Least Dangerous People In America

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 31 Jul, 2025 @ 09:59pm

  "South Chicago or Memphis"

  Dude, I lived in the grisly parts of Oakland when the city was a murder capital and allegedly gangland. Our local theater showed second-week movies with pizza and beer. It was a mostly black community. I was one of the critically white dudes there. Never got shit from anyone. Helped neighbors get their computers going for cookies. As a teen I lived in the Pasadena region (where the recent fires were) but went into East LA for summer college courses. I wasn't even tall yet. In that area, the tokens for the coin-op arcades were 15/$1 whereas on my home streets they were $5 (and were cross compatible even though doing so was very naughty.) I'm not afraid of urban crime zones in the US. On the other hand, there are some rural areas where they don't like that I talk funny. Prior to the MAGA era, I'd pay them no mind.

• On the post: ICE Is Spending More Time Targeting The Least Dangerous People In America

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 31 Jul, 2025 @ 05:10pm

  "legally defined term"

  It is? I mean Indian still is used for first nations folk, and of course in the BIA department. Maybe you can point to a statute where it is defined?

• On the post: ICE Is Spending More Time Targeting The Least Dangerous People In America

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 31 Jul, 2025 @ 03:41pm

  Laughed out of the room

  Could we retroactively laugh them out of the room twenty five years ago? I'm pretty sure we established even then that only rich people, white geniuses and refugees who win the lottery get to come in, and everyone else has to wait like twenty-years plus. We need to have laughed harder.

• On the post: ICE Is Spending More Time Targeting The Least Dangerous People In America

  

  Uriel-238 ( profile ), 31 Jul, 2025 @ 02:33pm

  This is consistent with law enforcement in the US for the past 20+ years

  Police officers, we've observed countless times, really don't like being shot at, and so even though they'd like to get the collar on whoever the current Al Capone / Bugs Moran-type boss guys are about running dark-business syndicates, they don't actually want to be on the receiving end of standard NATO or Warsaw Pact rifle bullets by people who actually train to hit their mark with them. (Those dudes exist. Since freight of questionable legality cannot be insured and contracts are not enforced by the justice system, they have to be guarded, and these disputes can get violent and messy.) It's much easier to cruise around low-income neighborhoods, decide that some innocuous behavior (e.g. smoking a cigarillo) is suspicious and rough the victim up. When they fight back or run, or request to be left alone, they can be booked for resisting. Here on TD, this kind of police action is called low hanging fruit. It's not the collar of a mob boss, but it is a collar. I bet it's even easy to decide that their baseball cap with a regional team indicates gang association, and now you have an arrest that looks legitimate on paper. I suspect the prison industrial complex that Reagan invested tax dollars into as a part of Reaganomics. Warm bodies in prison indicates crime is down, much the way Bear Patrol vehicles cruising Springfield indicates fewer bears. And you don't see any tigers around the tiger repellent rock, do you? Folks like Miller actually are glad to evacuate the nonwhites, but for the common MAGA, the high rate of extrajudicial abductions and renditions deportation indicates fewer criminals they imagine wear masks, carry AKs, sell drugs to kids and rape every white woman they meet. (Such people don't exist even in Miami Vice)

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