/townhall/ - Townhall

>>11753
There's a lot of things that are nonlethal.
Nonetheless, they follow the same rules.
I don't see why that ought change.

>>11754
Excellent.  I think our opinions are similar.  Now I guess we wait for representatives of the conventional opinion.

>>11754
I think what I really want to argue is that police should not have special privilege to cause harm at their prerogative, in ways that would put someone in prison for a long time if the roles of police officer and non-police officer were reversed.  For hypothetical example it being legal (or not a crime, not punishable -- something like that) for police to denote a stun grenade in a residence that causes serious harm to an infant, or to beat an old man and cause a concussion and loss of hearing in one ear.  I feel that the standards should be symmetric, I guess.

Is there some significant amount of takedowns going around?  In any case, new horse designs shouldn't be a major hurdle.  Plenty of horse out there.

>>11746
>Is there some significant amount of takedowns going around?
I don't know.  Most of what I've seen lately is YouTube taking down videos because they can't determine if they are kid friendly or not.  But it's dangerous for some pony fans and they want to be careful.

Am I the only one who finds it sus as hell that some IRA looking motherfucker forces the vehicle carrying the infant son of the richest man on earth to a halt, jumps on the bonnet of the car, and all he gets is a camera shoved in his face and a "do you know this man?" on Twitter? The more I think about this the more everything feels off. Our PLA friend should be a statistic smeared thin across downtown LA, not a footnote in a story about flight trackers.

I know LA is such a safe city that nobody would ever consider something bad might happen, and Mr Elon comes from the kind of country where things like that just don't happen, and that he's always gone through pains to have a minimal public profile so he wouldn't have a reason to feel any sort of vulnerability, but it still seems rational to have some security present while his two year old goes out on the town alone, if he can afford it.

>>11702
Oh, I see.  Protecting personal information a person considers confidential seems....good?  Presumably the rules are consistently applied.

That Elon Musk and those who follow him define the term 'free speech' as 'what I personally dislike should be censored and what I personally like should be celebrated' with no higher ethical principles involved whatsoever is really useful information, honestly.

If you're a sincere and informed observer of the world, it's going to be pretty clear in the U.S. context by now (in 2022) that neither the activist political right nor the related left counterpart believes in 'free speech' either in the legal sense (as in 'governments shouldn't censor except when there's no other option') or the moral sense (as in 'authoritative actors outside the state should be the same, maximum space being allowed for expression').

And businesses certainly don't care either, given that obviously they just want to enhance their bottom lines.

>>11705
That sounds like a maximum of passive misanthropy.

>>11580
I think I understand how this works.

>Hot takes!
It should be OK to not go to college and still do important...even, dare I say, academical or smart...things in life.

<spoiler>
Or college should be more accessible, affordable, and not give me a feeling of having something to do with class division (although I'm sure people will tell me how wrong that feeling is, I still feel it.)
</spoiler>

My hottest take might be that we need full blown anarchy, which I wonder about sometimes.

Not just the elimination of government but the destruction of every form of interpersonal authority by which one person enslaves another. No organized religion. No business structures that aren't flatly democratic. No military or paramilitary groups. No parental """"rights"""" on determining the beliefs and identities of their children. No... nothing.

People are just people. Everything is open. Everything is free. Everyone is free.

>>11561
>Does it make a difference if your master wears a state uniform or a business suit?

My opinion is, yes.  I grant it might not in material effect, but much of life is in our heads, and it's easier to mentally resist private tyranny than official tyranny.  Clerical robes are more complicated, if you believe in the associated deity.  And science has no theory of domination, you must add something to it, in my view, to create oppression.

I guess it's the bigger question, do ideas matter?  Or just material condition?

>>11561
Indeed. Not having any state power is terribly dangerous. But having too much is equally so.

My preference is a severely limited state whose primary purpose is to limit the accumulation and abuse of power, including its own.

>>11586
This is key, I think. Power corrupts, and whether that power is corporate, government, or some other form is largely meaningless, with the same result. The key is to minimize the accumulation of power as much as possible. It is in the nature of power to both accumulate and corrupt, and the only thing that can meaningfully respond to power is power. That's the paradox we find ourselves in.

>>11617
Police activism?

I generally take that no state owes their subjects/citizens consistency.  But if states did, I would be mostly against police taking the liberty of deciding things without overt consent of the governed.

>>11684
Thinking about it more, I suppose you could assert police need only be loyal to the government when properly in line with the constitution, therefore they have the right to not enforce unconstitutional laws.  Government is only legitimate when appropriately upholding the formational social contract citizens consented to.

But I gather the actual role of the state is to apply correcting force to subjects who might follow such logic toward dissidence.

I feel like the idea that cops can choose which laws to enforce is fundamentally contradictory to the idea that judges shouldn't legislate from the bench.

>>11645
I can dislike the generalizations, sure. But fundamentally that's not all that different from certain types of BDSM lifestyles.

If the investigations turn up enough evidence to bring Tate to trial and convict him, that's kind of another matter. Him engaging in explicitly illegal activity is still different than if he were engaging in consensual relationships. He could have easily been doing both.

He's still pushing misogynistic ideas, absolutely. However if there are women who want to engage with him even knowing that, I can't really justify wanting to interfere in that. It's their business at that point and all I can really do is dislike that as a dynamic. If it does slip into outright abuse the authorities can get involved as they seem to be with the investigation. Before that threshold though, it's not really anyone else's business.

This shit is just what happens when we lack cultural scripts. For a long time, the script was parable for most. Men spent time, money, and resources courting women, training them to be breadwinners, which allowed them freedom in choosing who they wanted, and a certain degree of power and influence over women in a general sense. Women spent time, money, and effort making themselves appealing, learning how to apply makeup and act in a demure way to prepare to be housewives, which allowed them to largely set the rules and pace of the courtship. That system has it's flaws, but it was functional. It's largely been abolished now, which is only good or bad in the context of what replaces it, which right now seems to be essentially pimping cabals. Match group as a whole, onlyfans, traditional pimps, Andrew Tate and loverboy stuff, it's all fundamentally the same. It operates by perpetuating, exploiting, and profiting off a general confusion and discomfort around dating now that there are no rules.

The fact that women largely set the rules without overtly declaring what the rules are doesn't help. Not that it's really their fault, it's just cultural baggage from generations of expected demureness, but it leaves a power vacuum for how courtship should be done, and naturally, there are those that would exploit it. It doesn't help that, naturally, women don't all agree about how they'd like to be courted; Some, for example, use an initial rejection as a "shit test", various soft or hard rejections they expect men to ignore and push past to see if a man wants her enough, while other women see a man continuing to push after a no has been given as a consent violation. They will not communicate these in any reasonable way, and even if women in general had the inclination communicate, which they generally do not, there is no socially smooth way to accomplish this.

Essentially, when it comes to courtship, women aren't typically attracted to most men, while most men are attracted to most women, leaving women as, essentially, the game designers, and men, essentially, as the players, funnily enough. Women dictate the rules and structure of the process, and men do their best to pair-bond, or simply have sex with, the women they're attracted to under these circumstances.

A good step would be picking one of these to be the social standard and then to very harshly punish those who go against it. I would choose the pro-consent camp myself, seems to be a Post too long. Click here to view the full text.

I honestly feel like what we see culturally as the super masculine kind of 'jock' aggressive 'type A personality' and rationalize as just being a relationship driven thing is just a paper thin mask over the real problem. We're talking about sadism, socipathy, and narcissism. That what it boils down to. People with severe mental illnesses they refuse to see as an issue to work on at all let alone treat.

And this isn't really a gender identity thing or a sexual orientation thing. The Karen calling the police because a black teenager is feeding the ducks on a park bench in what she believes is 'her park' in order to 'ruin her day' is ethically exactly the same as the Chadbro at a club mouthing off homophobic and transphobic slurs as he attempts to psychologically manipulate a stranger with the aims of using her as a nonhuman pleasure object with no actual emotion involved whatsoever. It's the same mentality. The sadist one. The sociopathic one. The narcissistic one. Viewing your fellow human beings as mere resources to benefit yourself (comedian Lewis Black aptly called this belief seeing others as "meat with eyes").

I wish I had a clearer idea of what to do other than just pleading that Americans in general become nicer and happier. But that seems to be that. Just be better.

People have the God-given right of not being murdered, and as a part of that they've got the innate right to adequate shelter.

If the argument is made that this mindset is supposedly wrong because it is claimed positive rights for goods and services doesn't exist, which is a take I don't agree with inherently because homelessness exists due to state violence interpreting property rules and the state otherwise organizing wealth distrubution in an oppressive way, then therefore people in the process of being murdered through lack of shelter should be able to exercise the right of self-defense and claim currently existing shelter. Taking over state controlled property or property otherwise maintained by the business interests tied to the state.

Communist oppression in which the many are forced into homelessness is ethically identical to corporatist oppression in which the many are forced into homelessness. Fight the power. Fight for the people.

The premise ignores the real issue, I think, which is just a severe lack of affordable new housing, and really, a lack of new housing in general. Piece of shit ""people"" in HOAs and special interest groups prevent this from happening, for greedy, evil, ignorant, self-serving reasons.

Credit scores would be a moot point of supply was allowed to match demand.

Of course they do.

I wonder what position Rand Paul still has in regards to libertarianism.

In regards to the political discourse of late, he does seem from a cursory glance to lean heavily into the MAGA crowd.

Maybe he's fallen from grace in the last few years, though.

>>11627
Rand is a politician and made clear he'd sell ideals for convenience and efficacy.
It's why I didn't vote for him.
He is not his father.

I always vote strategically so I don't think I'd ever vote for the spoiler candidate if I were in the US, unless it were as a protest vote. Except I guess if I lived in an IRV state like Alaska. Then sure, my first choice would probably always go to a third party. I don't expect that system to spread over the rest of the States though. The people who have the power to change the voting system away from first-past-the-post are the very same people who benefit from keeping it in place. And by that I don't mean The Bad Party (whichever you think that is), but both of the big ones.

...it's true. do you really think poland will invoke article 5?

it could happen... the United States certainly wouldn't be happy with that, but it would not be in a position to reject an invocation of article 5. :c

>>11564
>Yeah. Though there is a difference between no privacy at work and "we can post employees faces and names on social media and in marketing materials". Though any company that would do the latter usually has you sign a waver for it.

Ok.  So it's perfectly fine to say -- "here's a picture of our employees."  Maybe even to put the names, but it seems gray area.

You need permission to say "Here's John Doe, who is never without our ABC brand Whatzit."

https://www.nolo.com/legal-encyclopedia/question-unauthorized-use-of-photo-28285.html

>>11577
But if permission is boilerplate for every employment contract, then it's all effectively moot for employees.

>>11577
Well yeah I assumed you need permission for either one.

>>11546
Certainly possible.
I will say there's a lot of naivety involved in regards to why someone would pay for something they know is real, or something they know suffered.
But outside of that, the industry wouldn't have, let's say, outsiders if this was how it was done.

This said, though, I'm not sure how much of the lot is outsiders to begin with.

>>11546
I think the question ends up being if the increased supply fulfilling the demand ends up reducing harm, or if bringing it to the mainstream just brings more people into it. Personally, I'm pessimistic about the potential results.

The argument is that simulated sexual material of children functions as a kind of promotional advertisement that normalizes and strengthens the underlying attitudes.

So, watching a Honda commercial with animated guys driving an animated sedan has nothing specifically to do with actual cars. Watching it doesn't magically give you a car. It doesn't feel the same as driving one. However, the advertisement is designed inherently to make you want to be associated with something in real-life. Most won't watch it and buy a Honda. Some will.

That's the argument to why lolicon and other such media should be banned, even if it not only doesn't hurt actual people but helps to an extent significantly by channeling what could otherwise develop into real habits into fantasy.

I don't buy the argument personally because I believe it's factually wrong. Being saturated with violent video games, movies, television shows, and more haven't been shown like ever to make anybody more actually violent. Fantasy material that's divorced from reality... it's a difference that's simple to get. This is true in general and true in this case. Objectively speaking, evidence doesn't seem to exist that the audience who seeks out lolicon or whatever else are any more likely to be criminals than the general population. It doesn't work as advertisment.

Still, the opposing argument ought to be considered seriously.

I present a heartfelt congratulations to the lettuce.

Ya know?
I feel like society's polarized enough that politics is getting hard.

We're gonna see this impasse happen way more often in the coming years.

There needs to be a way to fundamentally change American politics so that if a national leader is widely despised and is actively hurting the citizens then they can just be kicked out.

Instead of the American people suffering under four whole years of pain, hatred, and misery just because the design of federal government demands it.