Frezik

This is a very common hypocrisy among first gen US immigrants. I’m a good Irish, not like those dirty ones coming over now; we should keep them out.

See also: Ayn Rand

I’m guessing Roberts Rules stuff.

As a quick and dirty thing, you can call a voice vote of ayes and nays. If it’s not particularly close, it’ll be obvious what the outcome is, the Chair will call the result, and everyone moves on. However, any member can call bullshit on the Chair, and then it goes to a more formal process.

So without watching the whole damn video, it’s probably that the voice vote went one way, the Chair said it was the other, got called on it, and the roll call vote went against him.

They ate their Wheaties this morning. Tomorrow, back to Cinnamon Toast Crunch.

I once saw Obama having a covfefe.

You know you’re in the right communities when Hulk Hogan dies and everyone says “fuck that guy”.

That whole war was a setup to take land from Mexico. We do not need to remember it with fondness any better than Vietnam or Iraq.

They could. It would toss nitroglycerin onto the fracturing maga base, but they could. Almost anything they do will backfire.

Obviously, we don’t really care about Bill Clinton, but I would like to bring up someone a lot of us will care about, and should still treat the same way.

Marvin Minsky was a pioneer in the AI field. He also had ties to Epstein. Now, you may not care about Minsky or AI (though I’ll point out that the research field and what capitalism is doing with that research are very different things). But you might care about Richard Stallman, and he comes into this, too:

https://www.npr.org/2019/09/17/761718975/free-software-pioneer-quits-mit-over-his-comments-on-epstein-sex-trafficking-cas

The controversy swirling around him now stems from a series of emails from a CSAIL group email list–made public by Selam Jie Gano–in which Stallman said that a 17-year-old girl who allegedly was instructed by Epstein to have sex with AI pioneer Marvin Minsky likely seemed “entirely willing” to engage in the illegal act. He also argued it is unfair to call such an incident “sexual assault”.

Stallman dropped out as president of the Free Software Foundation because of this.

Minsky himself died in 2016, but as far as I’m concerned, Stallman got exactly what he deserved. There’s no evidence he was directly involved as far as I’m aware, but those are not acceptable comments to make, and he shows some deep misunderstandings of consent here.

You’re doing the FSM’s work.

Yes, that explains very neatly why authoritarians want to get rid of it.

Sometimes, there are downsides to being on an instance that disables downvotes.

I don’t think OnlyFans had to do much of anything in the end. There was just enough media stink about it to make it go away.

Credit card companies don’t have to make a consistently applied set of rules the way a government of laws does. They can make it all up for each individual site if they wish. Capitalism can create a censorship regime that’s stronger than nominally democratic governments are willing to do.

Capitalism is creating a level of censorship that exceeded what the US government was ever able to do after the Warren court. Parts of this have been there for a long time. You can drop f-bombs on cable TV all you like; the FCC can’t do anything about it since it’s not over public airwaves. They generally don’t do that, because advertisers don’t like it. Capitalism set the rule, not the government.

YouTube has put this idea into overdrive. You can’t make a straightforward, monetized video about the Holocaust anymore, because the language you would have to use would violate YouTube’s written and unwritten rules. Meanwhile, actual fucking Nazis have had little issue using YouTube to spread their bullshit.

Credit card companies have had issues with porn sites in terms of fraud reporting. Not necessarily because of actual fraud–if the site you use is under CCbill, it’s fine–but because some guy’s spouse sees the card transactions, asks what this particular line is for, and he lies and says it’s probably fraud and he’ll call it in. Get more than a few of those, and the processor will always be flagged for review.

They do outright stop some of the more fringe porn. Bree Mills (of Adulttime) has said that they get limited by the credit card industry far more than the government. All the faux-incest videos go out of their way to mention in dialog that everyone is a step family and over 18. You won’t find scat on Kink.com, again because their payment processor won’t allow it.

That’s been the situation for a few decades, but it has gone beyond that in the last few years. They tried it on OnlyFans, and the company maneuvered things to show why that’s an incredibly bad idea, and then the card companies backed down. But they’re trying again elsewhere, and they’re starting to be successful. I severely doubt they had any significant fraud issues on Steam or itch.io, NSFW items or otherwise.

Ultimately, this stuff is a tiny slice of their revenue. If they want to shut it all down on a moral crusade, they will barely notice the hit to their numbers.

On a side note, I’d like the advocate that you should pay for porn if it’s within your means. You’ll often find better quality stuff at sites that properly run their sets with consent. If you like queer porn or unconventional body types, there are a lot of sites for that which just don’t show up on PornHub.

Good idea!

Hey, Canada, we need all your dirt.

If JD manages to become President, it’ll be two weeks before an intern finds him sobbing in a closet.

I checked, and Alex Jones has brought her up. Yes, she is on their radar.

His sycophants are not capable of taking over from him. That’s not how these things ever work.

They won’t because there are almost certainly big Democratic donors on that list. And Bill. Both parties slow walked this whole thing for decades.

The AOC and Bernie types don’t care about that, but they don’t serve on the Oversight Committee. Still, just getting Maxwell there should stoke the fires.

I mean, they could try. It would toss nitroglycerin into the MAGA rage that’s already forming. So yeah, go right ahead.

She could still be subpoena’d by Congress–House Oversight Committee already has–and I don’t think she could plead the fifth on anything if she’s already pardoned. So yeah, go ahead and do that.

Try reading again. I didn’t say he was smart. I said he was the smartest in the room. Which he is. It’s not that hard to be the smartest when you’re surrounded by idiots.