here’s your fun fact of the day: the hierarchy of how unchecked your law enforcement is basically goes something like federal police > city police departments > rural police departments > sheriffs of any kind. apparently, while regular police are at least nominally accountable to someone higher up than them, we basically let sheriffs do whatever the fuck they want

whatever recourse you think you have against a PD usually and very explicitly will not exist against a sheriff, even if your governor is sympathetic–most states devolve an incredible amount of power to sheriffs while demanding basically no qualifications or oversight of them. also, most outspoken police you will ever hear are probably sheriffs in specific–they are hugely over-represented in politics because there’s nothing stopping them from opining on politics even where ordinary police chiefs and the like are inhibited. (also their positions are usually elected and partisan, so they are politicians)

naturally, the mixture of election and targeting by the far-right over the past 50ish years means like 85% of these guys are just total cranks now too, because almost all of them represent Republican-leaning counties

currently reading:

in terms of notes usually i just do unrefined, copypasted highlights into Obsidian to start and then synthesize my notes into prose later; for most books i also tend to export my highlights into their own markdown document so i always have the initial highlights even after the prose

on and off for about two years in varying forms, but i’m still in the process of putting my archive up

Obsidian.md; for fun, although i do tend to write blog posts about the things i read

the only reason this is being kept up and locked and not deleted is to make it clear where Beehaw stands on Richard Stallman, which is: stop defending him, he is an awful person and he completely deserves to be put over the fire for his words and actions.

Aside for all his pedophile view points, he is correct about infantilizing 12-17 year olds.

…you’re just repeating my point back to me, and why Stallman is the worst mouthpiece for this position.

It kind of reminds me of ASD symptoms, not reading social cues properly, etc.

i know you mean well but, respectfully: having autism or another disorder (if Stallman even does) is probably not the reason why Richard Stallman has historically defended what amounts to pedophilia; why he continues to defend bestiality and necrophilia; and why he has extremely malformed opinions on what constitutes sexual harassment and sexual assault. and even if it is, that’s an explanation and nothing more. it does not excuse or make acceptable his behavior or the consistency with which it has skeeved other people out. he deserves to be strongly rebuked, as anyone else would, for his refusal to take accountability in this situation.

i mean, whom among us has not said such things, without retraction, as:

Cody Wilson [who at the time of his charging was 30] has been charged with “sexual assault” on a “child” after a session with a sex worker of age 16. […] The article refers to the sex worker as a “child”, but that is not so. Elsewhere it has been published that she is 16 years old. That is late adolescence, not childhood. Calling teenagers “children” encourages treating teenagers as children, a harmful practice which retards their development into capable adults.

Mere possession of child pornography should not be a crime at all. To prosecute people for possessing something published, no matter what it may be, is a big threat to human rights.

A national campaign seeks to make all US states prohibit sex between humans and nonhuman animals. This campaign seems to be sheer bull-headed prudery, using the perverse assumption that sex between a human and an animal hurts the animal. That’s true for some ways of having sex, and false for others. For instance, I’ve heard that some women get dogs to lick them off. That doesn’t hurt the dog at all. Why should it be prohibited?

and whom among us has not had to retract such positions as:

There is little evidence to justify the widespread assumption that willing participation in pedophilia hurts children.

these are obviously positions that everyone would take the fall for if they had a blog.

Not defending pedophiles, but

you are about to defend pedophilia. rethink this and stop talking.

there was a time when 13 was considered adult.

and? Stallman is not talking about a previous time at any point here. also: that previous time was bad anyways. why would we want to–especially with respect to age of consent–go back to considering 13-year olds and younger to be adults? they cannot meaningfully consent to sexual relations with adults; it’s just child abuse. all of this is why Stallman’s words are abhorrent.

It’s still legal for teenagers to marry in most countries.

Stallman is not talking about teenagers. he explicitly distinguishes children (again, people <13 for him) from teenagers (people 13-17).

An anonymous hit job

it’s literally his own words all the way down here. if it’s a “hit job” it’s entirely Stallman’s own fault for being a freak with morally abhorrent takes. one of the first things mentioned here is that he had to retract the position that “voluntarily pedophilia” doesn’t harm children (a category of person he defines as anyone under about 13)! any reasonable person would find this abhorrent and Stallman a horrible person for ever having defended said position in the first place, because it is genuinely abhorrent to defend something like that. that’s just child abuse.

I am not understanding what you want from me

i think the basic confusion people are having is that, when you phrase it like “I use it/its in spaces where I do not plan on engaging with people as individuals” and “This space is not a chat room and there is no reason to treat it as such. It is a forum.”, how that comes off to some people is you are kind of treating this place like a dumping ground for what you want to talk about and then ignoring other people jumping off of your posts. that may or may not be what you intend to do; so that’s why people are trying to clarify the intent of your posts.

i’ve been a little busy and by the time i noticed i’d missed the date again i was like “it just makes more sense to wait until Monday to keep the thread on schedule and useful”–not much sense in having one up for three days tbh

yeah the difficulty here really is: even if we wanted to stick around (i think the consensus is not especially) and even if we did get the mod tools we think are needed (no reason to believe this will happen), the bridge here is burned pretty definitively. i don’t personally see the sense in sticking around on a place where the people stewarding the software have an actively adversarial relationship with us

whenever my dad gets to shopping (not for lack of pestering on my part), most likely the first solution will be chemical–but in the interim i’m just trapping them and drowning them as they appear, which has worked well enough because i only see one or two a day and they really stick out against our walls. helpfully they also don’t seem to have gotten into any furniture or other places it’d be hard to root them out from, and we vacuumed the area they originated in which i suspect got a lot of them early

Ugh, bedbugs. I hope that situation resolves quickly for you, preferably as a false alarm.

unfortunately not a false alarm but luckily it seems they’re contained to one area we don’t really use anyways for now, and i’ve been picking off the ones i encounter; they seem to be very few and far between right now so i’m cautiously optimistic that management of the affected area will keep them from taking root elsewhere. more than anything it’s just brought attention to areas of our living space that weren’t previously getting much attention which has been good

pretty quiet week so far, i think it’s supposed to snow later which will be moderately annoying because i’ll have to shut my window for awhile if so

if the social prescription to harassment of moderators is “quit because you’re a baby” then you’re going to have many fewer pleasant spaces on the Fediverse in which to exist—because yeah, a lot of people will just quit. i am agnostic on the public modlog overall, but this is an obvious concern with it that i’m not convinced can just be dismissed idly. i obviously have better things to do than a thankless, payless job in which harassment would be dismissed like that.

for what it’s worth we have quite a few communities in dire need of some love and posters willing to give them some life–betterment and praxis was a good idea for example that’s unfortunately not been able to sustain itself recently