“Hey, how’s it going?”
<Grins ear-to-ear.>
<Rotates head 720 degrees.>
And that's what people miss when quoting sports statistics. They confuse culture with biology. We live in a society that imparts certain roles based on gender. Men are encouraged to exercise and run more from a young age than women are. In an egalitarian society, that disparity wouldn't exist. We really can't say how things would play out. That's why studies of paleolithic skeletons are a much better tool than just navel-gazing based on modern sports. Those statistics cannot be separated from our current society. Instead of just speculating, we can look at the actual skeletons of paleolithic people, which this article discusses. These skeletons record a record of the kinds of lives these people lived. There's no need to speculate; we can ask these people directly how they lived.
I had an account of similar magnitude banned. Why? Because on January 6th, on the very day, I wondered aloud why there weren't soldiers repelling the crowd of insurrectionists trying to overthrow our democracy with machine gun fire. I'm sorry, but if a crowd of thousands of people shows up with the intent of hanging the vice president and overthrowing the government? Well, you made your choice if you're in that group. The correct response to a group like that is to first give them plenty of warning. But if they persist, use whatever force is necessary to repel them.
Other things I've been banned for:
- Telling an overt bigot posting in an LGBT sub to go kindly "go die in a fire."
- Suggesting, before the ruling, that if SCOTUS ruled that the president was completely above the law that he should simply drone strike Supreme Court justices to produce a majority on the court that would repeal his new powers.
- Evading bogus bans.
At this point I've got a lifetime ban from there. And you know what? I'm fine with it. The policies on reddit remind me of the blind "zero tolerance" policies that have screwed over so many in American high schools. When I was in high school years ago, the standard was "zero tolerance" for violence of any kind. If a bully attacked a victim, they would both get in trouble. Being the victim was no defense. It was zero tolerance, zero thought. And that is the standard that is now used on reddit. They'll still allow racist dogwhistles and entire subreddits run by hate groups, but as long as you don't cross a handful of explicit lines, you're fine. You can openly celebrate the deaths of tens of thousands of people in Gaza, but tell one bigot to go die in a fire, and suddenly you're banned.
I don't buy that. I think it's fraud. Yeah, the victims of the fraud are not nice people, but the law is supposed to protect all, not just the nice people. This isn't "gaming the system," it's fraud. Uploading the AI-generated songs is fine. The problem was the fake listeners. That's where the real fraud is.
My city has a modest bus service they contract out to a private company to operate. At the front of the buses, there are scanners that count the number of people that enter the bus. These passenger counts are then baked in to what the company is paid for their services to operate the city's bus system.
In theory, the contractor company could park a bus somewhere, set up a conga line of people, and just have thousands of phantom passengers board a bus, and then try to bill the city based on these inflated statistics. If they did that, I would absolutely hope they would be charged with fraud.
The law isn't stupid. There's a reason laws are enforced by judges, not algorithms. What this person did was little different than hacking a bank account and just stealing money from it. Yes, you could say, "they didn't do anything wrong, they're just gaming the system!" You could just as well call guessing someone's password and stealing their money "gaming the system." After all, is there anything on the bank's login page that explicitly tells you not to enter someone else's account and transfer their money to yours? No judge in a million years would buy that.
This was effectively just a hack. This guy had to create thousands of phantom people to pretend to listen to songs. He was clearly not making any good-faith attempt at making music and was just trying to exploit a weakness in their system design to extract money from them that he didn't earn. The law thankfully doesn't work on a standard of "well, they never told me I couldn't." Cases like this take into consideration the totality of the circumstances and weigh whether it is fraud or not. And this? This wasn't some clever technicality a legit artist used to boost their earnings. This was unambiguous fraud.
I really don't see how this is any different from pretending to be someone else to access their bank info, conning someone out of money by pretending to be a person in need, deep-faking someone's voice to get their relatives to send money to you, or a hundred other scams involving fake identities. Yes, the victim in this case is a villain themselves, but that doesn't make it any less a crime.
If this shocks you as an expert, you have no business calling yourself an expert.
This list of serial killers is incomplete. You can help by expanding it.
Damn it Biff, you beat me to it!
I only recently discovered the Chris and Jack channel. It's great. Their George Lucas and genie wish sketches are also amazing.
This is just a slippery slope fallacy. We can agree to not condone literal Nazis without degenerating into calling vast swathes of the political landscape Nazis. Certain ideas simply do not deserve respect or consideration. If you want to have an "honest debate" about race science, I would rather have an "honest debate" about you jumping off a cliff.
My guess is you're one of those anti-Semite Zionist types. You hate Jewish people, but you love Israel because you want a place to send them.
Tolerance is a peace treaty. You do not give tolerance to intolerance. If your core ideology is the rejection, dehumanization, or destruction of other groups of human beings, then your group does not deserve respect or consideration.
Seriously. Might as well quote a professional phrenologist.
Security has a place. But even at schools, really all it can do is prevent a handful of deaths from turning into dozens or hundreds. You can have someone manning a metal detector at the front door. But a gunman can just walk in, shoot that person first, and walk right through the security checkpoint. Lockdowns and secure classrooms help, but they can still shoot plenty of people as they're running for the exits or running to the secure classrooms. If a gunman comes to a high school during their passing period, there really just isn't anything that can be done to prevent them from taking a handful of lives at a minimum. Even having armed swat teams available within minutes just reduces the final body count; it doesn't eliminate it. When you can just walk into a crowded building and start spraying gunfire, security really just can't prevent that, just ameliorate it.
You know, that's something I'm actually curious about. Is there any data on shooting rates at public vs. private schools? The private schools I've seen don't seem to have any better security than public schools. Though private schools do have the benefit of being able to just easily expel the more troubled students.
I just wish we lived in a world where the nutjobs went after politicians that opposed gun control, firearms manufacturers, or gun nut gatherings. In the immortal words of Futurama, "smite someone who deserves it, for once!"