naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
19hr ago
My apologies. I'm sure if you have the ability to improve the codebase, you'd be welcome on the development Discord.
As for the post, looks like they've deleted it, so, I guess it's a moot point.
naraburns
nihil supernum
19hr ago
...did you have a point you wanted to make?
Your post seems to be a stream-of-consciousness panic dump, ticking off a laundry list of fears of varying degrees of plausibility, rhetorical questions and sweeping pronouncements without the slightest effort toward evidence or even argument, to say nothing of focus.
Donald Trump will not be the President of the United States for another 105 minutes, at this writing. Pick an issue, make an argument. Trying to fit everything you're scared of (or every news media talking point) into one post is not really conducive to productive discussion.
naraburns
nihil supernum
19hr ago
Are "Darryl" and "Darrell" Chambers the same person? Five minutes on Google has not cleared this up for me in any way.
President Biden has "pre-emptively" pardoned
General Mark A. Milley, Dr. Anthony S. Fauci, the Members of Congress and staff who served on the Select Committee, and the U.S. Capitol and D.C. Metropolitan police officers who testified before the Select Committee
Or at least, he has made a statement to that effect; compare the Hunter pardon, which was fairly detailed, complete with dates. The "pre-emptive" pardon announcement has no details. What are they pardoned for? During what time periods? This appears to be a blanket memo to the future: "these people are immune from prosecution, for whatever, because fuck you that's why." It's not quite at the gobsmackingly presumptuous level of inventing fake Constitutional Amendments, but it seems like yet another example of the Biden administration (and its propaganda arm, the mainstream press) being everything it ever accused Trump of potentially being someday.
I admit: I do not have high hopes for the Trump administration. Mostly I'm hoping that Justices Alito and Thomas have the good sense to step down from SCOTUS before the Democrats are able to take back the Senate. Perhaps I will be pleasantly surprised? But the outgoing administration is acting like it has been dipping into the till and never expected it might actually be held accountable for that. In particular, the possibility that the January 6th riots were fomented by justice department lackeys, whether as a conspiracy or a prospiracy, is something the Biden administration absolutely does not want anyone looking into.
Biden insists:
The issuance of these pardons should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that any individual engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense.
Historically unprecedented, although the Hunter Biden pardon definitely moved things in this direction. Malicious prosecution of political enemies has long been a standard play for Democratic politicians and bureaucrats--the failed prosecution of Trump himself, of course, but also the well known IRS prosecution of conservatives, throwing the book at local conservative officials who defy federal law while winking at local progressive officials who defy federal law, et cetera.
Of course, the famous MAGA "lock her up" chant should not be forgotten, and Trump has indeed suggested on many occasions that certain people should probably be investigated for wrongdoing. But the presumptions on display--"Trump (who has never actually carried through on these threats) is just doing this illegitimately for political gain, but Democrats doing the same thing (and actually doing it) to their political enemies are just rooting out corruption, which is totally legitimate"--seem clear. I don't doubt that corruption is fairly rampant in DC, on both sides of the aisle. Politicians in general make my skin crawl. But I feel like the Democratic Party's catchphrase has very thoroughly become: "It's Different When We Do It."
If Trump doesn't blanket pardon everyone convicted of an offense on January 6, 2021, I will be disappointed in him. And if he does, the propagandists in the news media will cry bloody murder about it. I wish I was in a position to extract shame or embarrassment from them for this, because I feel like the world would be a better place if more journalists paid a heavier price for pretending to be "neutral" when they are actually functioning as shills.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3d ago
Just last month, 120 Democrats in the House and 46 in the Senate signed letters asking Biden to take this step, since, in their view, the amendment was already validly approved.
I have a hard time believing that attitude is anything but kayfabe. If it wasn't an amendment they liked, I don't think they would have the same view on the ratification process.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3d ago
He will not be president long enough to be impeached.
Correct. Which is why he's doing this now.
In practice, the Supreme Court needs to be convinced that that bureaucrat had grounds to publicize it. They won’t be. This is extremely silly.
This is an attempt, effectively, to fork the Constitution. This creates and purports to legitimize a blue-tribe consensus that there is a 28th Amendment and that it is the ERA, while the red tribe continues to operate under the view that there isn't such an Amendment.
Will it work? I don't know, but someone clearly thinks it has a chance of working. How many people have to act as if something is the case, before it becomes the case? Might this go nowhere? Sure, it might. But all by itself, Biden's and Harris's willingness to try it is shocking and disturbing.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3d ago
It's meaningless until some left wing judge acts on it. It's meaningless until some bureaucrat can be pressured to publicize it.
It's literally legal disinformation being promulgated by the President and Vice President of the United States. It is a naked power grab. Presidents have been impeached for less.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3d ago
No, this is disinformation coming from the President and Vice President. At least stupid executive orders are president-things that presidents do.
Officially declaring the existence of a fake Constitutional Amendment based on the dubious theorizing of an advocacy group is exactly the kind of oligarchy-style nonsense the President of the United States just warned us about.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3d ago
Biden wants a constitutional crisis, apparently.
Well, that's editorializing, but like, seriously--WTF?
Biden says Equal Rights Amendment is ratified, kicking off expected legal battle as he pushes through final executive actions
He's got chutzpah, I guess (or, realistically, one of his staffers does). Never have I seen such a nakedly partisan attempt to create mass confusion concerning American constitutional law, nor such an inducement for left wing justices to defect from the rule of law. It is perhaps the single least professional, most embarrassing thing a sitting President has done in, like, six or seven weeks.
Just to get this out up front: no. The Equal Rights Amendment has not been ratified, and is not the law of the land. When asked for comment by CNN, the U.S. archives referred the station to previous statements from the U.S. archivist that
the amendment “cannot be certified as part of the Constitution due to established legal, judicial, and procedural decisions,” pointing to a pair of conclusions in 2020 and 2022 from the Office of Legal Counsel at the US Department of Justice that affirmed that ratification deadlines were enforceable.
The President has no particular role in the ratification process anyway, so his opinion is legally meaningless. Certainly his appeal to the "American Bar Association" (an especially left wing advocacy group) is meaningless. But it's a signal, and the message is clear: time to ignore the law, precedent, history, and any possible position of compromise and coexistence. Watching the outgoing administration slap the "defect" button as rapidly as possible does not bode well for the next four years. At best, it's an inducement for the Trump administration to play tit-for-tat. At worst, I don't know--civil war?
The fact that the CNN article is still pushing this wild "pre-emptive pardons" stuff is also concerning, but illegitimately announcing an Amendment to the Constitution has surely got to be the most brazen lame duck move in American history. This is banana republic levels of absurdity.
naraburns
nihil supernum
3d ago
Several times per day, a new account gets created and posts a variation of this post. Sometimes in Russian. "Where are the admins? I want to talk about advertising. It's important!" And so on. We have mostly just removed them, as with all spam, but this one had been quite persistent, rolling IPs and browsers and so on, posting and posting. After a while we tried responding, but it became clear that there was not a human at the tiller--actually saying "yes this is the admin" did not generate any results.
Actually approving this post may have been the thing that broke the bot's loop, as after it was approved, an actual spam post got made (advertising a Russian sex chat site), which I removed, and so far we've not received further spam of this variety. Time will tell. We do deal with a fair bit of spam, but nothing quite so automated and persistent before this.
naraburns
nihil supernum
5d ago
It's not just you.
I heard a right-coded radio host mention the New Orleans attack somewhat recently, but it was only a passing reference in connection with a Biden gaffe.
I don't know that "marital rape" only happens when a soon-to-be-ex assaults his wife.
I mean, presumably there are other cases--that's just the one that I've actually seen in court, and the one I've heard used to justify the changes. I don't make a habit of following criminal prosecutions meticulously, but the rate of "marital rape" proceedings that are either preceded or followed by "divorce" proceedings surely approaches 100%, whatever the gory details.
But what about unhealthy ones, where the wife is never in the mood and the husband decides he's sick of taking no for an answer? If there is no such thing as marital rape, then all she can do is divorce him, I guess? (Which most tradcons who oppose marital rape laws also tend to think should not be an option.)
I don't feel like I know any tradcons who would reject "physical abuse" as possible grounds for separation, but I suppose they're probably out there. But really--someone who puts their spouse in prison for marital rape must surely understand that it is tantamount to a divorce anyway? This seems quite analogous to "battered woman syndrome" to me--the law has rarely faced any shortage of ways to answer domestic violence of various kinds; rather, a host of influences (love, material need, desperation, actual insanity, you name it) bring women back to their abusers under a wide variety of circumstances. Whether that's a "systemic" problem or a psychological problem or whatever, revamping central tenets of the ancient institution of marriage to better serve outrageous edge-cases does not seem to have especially helped matters improve.
This is a pattern I see repeated endlessly in conversations about "moral progress." I could hand you a dozen different papers purporting to explain how we can reduce violence against women through various social engineering programs, but none of them really explains the evidence for their own effectiveness. As far as I have been able to determine, the biggest progress in reducing violence against women has been made through IQ gains resulting from the near eradication of malnutrition, combined with an overall increase in the absolute wealth of the average American. Outside of America and Europe, "intimate partner violence" remains stubbornly unaffected by cultural interventions (though that hasn't stopped anyone from insisting their programs just need more money).
Cases like Gaiman's are special. He obviously isn't an impoverished blue collar laborer, lashing out at his long-suffering wife due to poor executive functioning. He's damaged in a different way: he's a wealthy, powerful man living in a world where sex and marriage have been decoupled, to the primary detriment of the very women the sexual revolution so often purported to advantage.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6d ago
"What counts as consent" is exactly what is at issue; if you think marriage counts as permanent and irrevocable consent (as various human cultures have held), then "marital rape" is analytically impossible.
Sure, we could redefine words so that you couldn't call women being physically forced to have sex with their husbands against their will victims of "rape", but I'm not sure what the value of that is.
No one is proposing to do that.
But when you take that away from marriage, it becomes rather less clear both what the point of marriage really is,
Do you mean that the point of marriage is that the man can have sex with his wife whenever he wants?
No; kindly stow the strawmen, please. Sex is, however, central to the concept of marriage, historically.
I would imagine the most common application of marital rape laws is invisible, i.e. deterring husbands from forcing themselves on their wives against their will.
You don't have to answer this, of course, as it is a somewhat personal question, but... are you currently a member of a marriage in which the higher-libido spouse refrains from forcible intercourse partially or primarily because it is against the law? Because, like, if you are, my condolences? But if you aren't, then where in the world would you pick up such a bizarre model of marital relations?
In fact I already briefly mentioned the (true, historical) primary driver of "marital rape" laws, which basically never apply to functional marriages. There were actual cases of H and W getting divorced. Enraged, H stalks W, rapes her, and then law enforcement responds "nothing we can do, sorry, it's not illegal to have sex with your spouse." This seems like a genuine problem! But there are many possible solutions, some of which do not have the same cultural drawbacks as introducing the "enthusiastic and continuing" consent model of sexual intercourse into private marital relationships, which should be mature and caring enough to negotiate such things without the assistance of a government cudgel.
No, half-hearted maintenance sex isn't rape. There's a healthy compromise position between "Everything is rape" and "nothing in marriage is rape".
Yes, that's true. The "enthusiastic and continuing" consent model isn't it, though.
I don't hold traditional ways of doing things as sacrosanct. I think it's entirely worth knocking down the Chesterton's fence of forcing women (and probably some men) to stay in relationships they don't want to and to submit to sex against their will. This doesn't mean I want to end marriage as an institution, rather that I think there are things from the past worth keeping and things worth discarding.
Again--I am broadly in agreement. What you don't seem to want to discuss in a careful or nuanced way is the idea that maybe there are times when people should be socially pressured to stay in relationships they don't want to, and submit to sex they aren't enthusiastically interested in having. I can only imagine why this might be; I do think Western attitudes toward increasingly absolute "bodily autonomy" have generated some peculiar attitudes toward sex, for example. The treatment of marriage as purely a matter of romance, rather than a union that can sometimes be practical or beneficial in other ways, may also play a role. I'm not exactly opposed to everything the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s has introduced into our culture.
I just think we're being deliberately obtuse if we try to pretend that Neil Gaiman, and others like him, are not also the fruit of that tree.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6d ago
Vanishingly few cultures genuinely held that husbands had unlimited physical dominion over their spouse, with no concept of consent possible.
Yes--of course. There are many different legal traditions that parse things out differently. A common Western one is that because husband and wife are "one flesh," and one cannot commit an offense against oneself, many interpersonal crimes are impossible between man and wife. However, one could still do morally atrocious things which were against the law--so for example, adultery was illegal, even though under the doctrine of coverture adultery was not strictly an offense against one's spouse. Rather, it was an offense against God and the State (which approved the marriage).
Except that, unlike the terribly old-fashioned practice of "celibacy when single, monogamy when married," the clarity of consent seems to break down in the absence of clearly-delineated relationship boundaries.
Unless you don't believe in the idea of marital rape, consent issues don't disappear in monogamous marriages.
@quiet_NaN also raised this point below, but I think it begs the question. "What counts as consent" is exactly what is at issue; if you think marriage counts as permanent and irrevocable consent (as various human cultures have held), then "marital rape" is analytically impossible. I think most Westerners today do not think of marriage that way! But when you take that away from marriage, it becomes rather less clear both what the point of marriage really is, and what else can/should constitute "consent."
Somewhat recently, a pre-2020 essay on "maintenance sex" popped up in my social feeds, and I found it faintly amusing. The "expert" being interviewed clearly wanted to say "it's normal and healthy to have sex when you don't want to, simply because your partner wants to and you care about giving them what they want." But he kept having to dance around it, resulting in amusing elocution seeming to simultaneously suggest that the indulging partner was both willing and not-willing. It included bad advice like "make sure both partners climax," instead of acknowledging that--particularly as people age--orgasm can sometimes become exhausting to pursue, or even totally unreachable, and this doesn't necessarily make sexual activity undesirable.
As I read, I reflected somewhat on the model sometimes taught to college students today, that "consent is voluntary, informed, and enthusiastic," and should be re-affirmed periodically throughout every sexual encounter. I perceive a very strong likelihood that this can, will, and probably already has led to some serious sexual dysfunction in Western relationships. Many people find themselves psychologically unable to express sexual desire in an overt and expressive manner; this is one reason why people sometimes consume alcohol with the intention of getting laid. People enjoy being swept away in emotion and sensation, becoming inarticulate with desire, etc.
Put all this into the context of a marriage, and the idea of "marital rape" becomes incredibly fraught. Realistically, the most common application of "marital rape" laws is to prosecute men who, prior to the finalization of a divorce, force themselves on their soon-to-be-exes. I'm sympathetic to the idea that the law should be able to react to such a development--and besides, I find it difficult to imagine anyone in a healthy and functioning marriage prosecuting their spouse for anything. That seems like a clear commitment to the immediate or eventual termination of the relationship. But since the advent of "marital rape" laws, I have seen a gradually increasing number of people (usually, women) wield the concept of consent as a form of control: by default, sexual activity becomes locked to the mood of the lower-libido spouse, with no compromise (or "maintenance sex") possible. After all--wouldn't that be rape? But it seems clearly absurd that the definition of "rape" should become "any sex you don't enthusiastically desire," much less "sex you later decide you wish you hadn't had."
So when you say "consent issues don't disappear in monogamous marriages," my inclination is to respond, sure, not necessarily--but they can, and ideally probably should, and the evolution of "sexual consent" as a concept in premarital and extramarital contexts is in this way directly corrosive to marriage as traditionally practiced. This is what people actually mean, I think, when they say that no fault divorce erodes the concept of traditional marriage. After all, someone else's divorce isn't going to change my marriage, right? Shouldn't I just let others do what they want, while I do what I want? But here we are talking about importing "consent" into marriage, as if it is a separate thing--when traditionally, marriage was how you consented.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6d ago
Have I just blocked out or forgotten the deviancy?
Bilquis?
naraburns
nihil supernum
6d ago
I agree with your final conclusion but that's why I don't see how small-l liberalism necessitates - even reading on the surface - the elimination of social opprobrium? In fact, that is clearly not what's happened and it's not what anyone actually wants to happen.
So first let me say that I do not believe that small-l liberalism necessarily aims toward the elimination of social opprobium; most people do not chase the idea of liberty all the way to Ancapistan. But "not what anyone actually wants to happen" is probably asserting too much. I don't think it's a coincidence that the essay where the term "anarchocapitalism" was coined was first printed in Playboy in 1969; perhaps most notoriously, it was Playboy Press that published nude glamour photos of a certain 10-year-old celebrity in 1975. This was one year after the initial publication of Richard Farson's Birthrights, which contains the following passage (page 147-148 in the hardback I just pulled from my shelf)--
The most ruinous situations are usually not the sexual activities involved in the act of molestation, but the community's response to the act when it has been discovered. The guilt and fear that are induced can be worse than the experience of the act itself.
This is typical of bleeding-edge conversations surrounding sex and gender in the 1960s and 1970s. Nudity and sexual activity, being "natural," could not be bad; any shame or embarrassment or reticence felt in connection with one's body and its functions was a social construction in need of deconstruction. Meaningful harms were not the result of human activity, but of systemic oppression. Practical considerations like "bear[ing] the costs of enforcing violations of a notoriously hard to prove nature" scarcely entered into the conversation, except perhaps with hidebound conservatives whose opprobrium could be safely dismissed as mere patriarchy.
In hopes of maybe steelmanning American counterculture circa 1960, it's probably worth observing that there were (and arguably are) indeed many oppressive aspects to American culture! But people fighting for "freedom" do not typically concern themselves with the nuances of application, as we see even today with the "burn it to the ground" mentality of various anti-capitalist, "woke," or otherwise revolutionary types. These often find themselves hoist from their own petard, as it is not the elimination of social opprobrium they crave, but rather it is control of social opprobrium they crave, and when this becomes evident, many of their "anti-authoritarian" views turn out to just be different authoritarian views, and they lose their punk cred.
But there are purists out there, whether by naiveté or aspiration, who either believe or at least aspire to believe that what would really be best, is total independence from the all the pressures imposed by society. I think it is an unrealistic attitude. But I can grasp the appeal, the dream, of simply doing as I please, all the time. For the wealthy and powerful, it is more often a live option, and their revealed preferences routinely paint a startling portrait.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6d ago
No, that was me failing to open the italics properly, sorry.
Infidelity is wrong, but discreetly (discretely?) having a mistress is not the same as carelessly sleeping around, which itself is not the same as whatever degenerate stuff this guy was doing...
I agree with you to this point.
If "consent" and "fidelity" are your only measures of correctness, and only on a "yes/no" basis, you're bound to end up with a Puritan <-> Borderline Sex Criminal barbell.
This doesn't seem quite right, however. While I'm not sure where it takes the argument, exactly, I feel it necessary to point out that both adultery and fornication have been, and in many places still are, sex crimes. They are not prosecuted in the same way as groping, which is not prosecuted in the same way as rape, so it does seem like societies are capable of recognizing gradations while still maintaining a clear line (essentially: formal social approval in the form of a marriage certificate) between "yes" and "no."
In the 1960s/1970s, feminism and the hippie movement decoupled sex from marriage on the view that this was liberating individuals from the shackles of social opprobrium. That doesn't seem to be wrong, prima facie; the idea that my community should have any say in my sex life seems like a pretty obvious violation of liberal (and libertarian) thinking. "Behind closed doors" wasn't even part of the equation--the sex and nudity of that era was often quite public!
But to whatever extent society is going to punish sexual deviance--every consequence from ostracism through to actual legal penalties--should be attached to reasonably clear expectations. A marriage certificate says, presumably among other things, that "society approves of sex between these people." This was the substance of the Obergefell case--that society should formally approve homosexual relations as socially legitimate. One of the most interesting arguments I ever heard against gay marriage was from a young gay man whose reaction to this was that this was a total abandonment of the "queer" ethos; that the point was not to become accepted by society, but to break down its oppressive norms.
I do not know, but strongly suspect, that this is the mindset of people like Gaiman. "Look, I'm a brilliant, caring, utterly free individual who has transcended the boring, tradition-bound nonsense against which you youngsters rail. Behold my boundless freedom! Partake in it yourself by gnawing upon my engorged genitals, you free, sexy rebel, you." And of course, his critics can be easily dismissed as uptight religious whackjobs, or uptight feminists.
I also don't know what the answer is. My own inclination is toward freedom! I have always enjoyed Gaiman's writing, for whatever that's worth. I am inclined toward smaller government, however, which Gaiman generally was not. I don't want to make marriage a legal requirement for sex; I don't want us to prosecute fornication and adultery as a matter of law. But I'm increasingly concerned that we haven't really come up with a good alternative. The "consent model" seems like a failure and a burden. My instinct is that it would be best to have strong cultural norms in favor of traditional monogamous marriage, without legal requirements. But in the absence of those cultural norms, it seems like we as a culture are asking for the return of legal norms along those lines. This puts me in mind of Ben Franklin's (somewhat ironic) proclamation:
Only a virtuous people are capable of freedom. As nations become corrupt and vicious, they have more need of masters.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6d ago
I've never read Sandman, could you expand on this please?
It was a late 1980s/early 1990s comic that touched on transsexuality, homosexuality, BDSM, child abuse, and rape, just off the top of my head.
There was also a lot of nudity, which was arguably "artistic" but was not usual for mainstream comics at the time. My personal experience of the 1990s was that I often encountered neo-hippie arguments about nudity being "not inherently sexual," which in retrospect seems like a pretty obvious motte-and-bailey approach to the matter.
(The ninth episode of the second season of The Simpsons, "Itchy & Scratchy & Marge," which first aired in 1990, ends with Marge conceding that it is hypocritical to censor a children's cartoon but not a field trip in which children see Michaelangelo's David. The episodes remains culturally relevant to this day.)
naraburns
nihil supernum
6d ago
I'm not sure being married to palmer would have helped
...well, yes, but they are married, have been married for 14 years, and are going through a divorce.
naraburns
nihil supernum
7d ago
I mean, maybe Gaiman is a creepy sexpest, assuming the truth of the allegations. Certainly the evidence seems to be that he is quite promiscuous, like so many other men of similar repute.
Will he be cancelled entirely? Is this evidence against the plausibility of "open marriage?" Should we accept the article's allegations at face value, or question the veracity of the claims, victim-blaming style? What is "consent," really?
There seemed to me to be a plethora of culture war angles--that's all.
Thanks for digging those up!
Have you got any tips for finding such things? I feel like it should be a lot easier, in the 21st century, for me to find such documents. Most news outlets don't even link to the White House announcement page, much less original documents. SCOTUS makes it pretty easy to see their official opinions; Congress is a bit more complicated, especially with bills that aren't yet laws, but usually I can manage there. The White House seems much less interested in even a hint of transparency.
More options
Context Copy link