ShellMonkey

ShellMonkey , 15 days ago

So a technicality, lack of standing rather than rejecting it on merit. Hard to call it a resounding win, but it's something.

ShellMonkey , 29 days ago

We must respect the territorial integrity and sovereignty of Russia by all means, they have been the victims of a brutal invasion by the Ukrainian empire and... oh shit nevermind, had the propaganda leaflet upside down.

ShellMonkey , 1 month ago

Somewhere in that wall there's talk of 'the current Bush administration's which puts it at a minimum 16 years old, yet here's a question asking if there's a future to it today.

ShellMonkey , 1 month ago

So I'll prefix with a certain level of TLDR since that's a big wall of text that online forms like this aren't particularly conducive to.

As a broad take though, I see two frameworks for men's 'rights' though.

There are the sorts clamoring for a reversion to old ways of patriarchal orders, who look to see things in this working man supporting a household and holding a veto-wielding authority over social and domestic order as a golden era perfection. This form is dead, regressive, and a vestige of an imagined past that will not come back.

There's another side though that fights against the still common perceptions that men must adhere to certain standards of behavior. The self-reliant, stoic, resilient sort that if they ask for help are considered failed in some fundamental way. This is speaking from an American standpoint since I have little context for other places cultural norms, but despite being publicly said (and in many places honestly held) that these norms are not the case there's still an underlying current that reinforces these standards. These challenges are quite relevant and alive today.

It's something of a multi-generational battle to alter what's expected of men in the modern world. That's the kind of men's rights that we shouldn't be so quick to dismiss as an irrelevant.

ShellMonkey , 2 months ago

People not thinking critically is the goal not the problem...

ShellMonkey , 3 months ago

I’ve heard it referred to as the ‘I-Pad generation’, kids who are given unfettered access to a mobile device to placate them while Mom & Dad live their lives without all that obnoxious responsibility.

ShellMonkey , 3 months ago

Your comparison won’t work here. One involves someone physically walking into a place to purchase a physical good. The check is as simple as to look at a valid ID and comfirm that the person in front of you matches. Yes, fake IDs are a thing, but they’re the exception and pretty hard to be convincing with.

Online this is significantly more difficult to handle without some heavy surveillance. How many times have you confirmed you read something when you didn’t, or that you where allowed to access something when you where not? A simple checkbox isn’t going to stop anyone from lying. For things like tobacco purchased over the internet there’s at least the protection that short of fraud if someone had a credit card it can be validated that they’re of age.

The law is performative at best. Even if you got every major US site to comply, new ones out of the reach of TX are all over the globe, not to mention avenues like BitTorrent.

ShellMonkey , 3 months ago

That’d be cute to try and enforce on any self built system, general purpose laptop, Linux distro, used devices, mobile hotspots.

ISPs want to get into that game? No NAT allowable, VPNs, proxies.

Global interconnected networks cannot be dictated by a single jurisdiction. The number of variables involved are simply beyond any given entity to enforce.

ShellMonkey , 7 months ago

Isn’t that the sort of thing a tyrannical government would do that these conservatives are always throwing out as the justification for unfettered 2A?

ShellMonkey , 7 months ago

I have to wonder howuch the popularity of all the digital ways to pay is to blame for this. Way back people would leave a few actual bills on the table, it was presumed that the server would get them and all was well.

Now people routinely use debit cards, phones, telepathic toadstool fund deposits, etc to pay for everything. You can use a credit card to buy a soda from a vending machine FFS. As a result it’s simpler to just add it to a single transaction and so everyone wants their token.

I’m always wary of paying a tip at the till though, part of me suspects the staff will never see that, or the owner will claim a portion for just being a swell person, which is not the point of the tip.

ShellMonkey , 8 months ago

Hell of a lot better than TX or FL where they give some false promise and then force them all off to somewhere they don’t like with a big fuck-off attached. At least it gives people a choice of destination, maybe they have someone they know elsewhere to live with but can’t get there otherwise.

ShellMonkey , 8 months ago

Same kind of deal with most any refuge situation though. Country gets into a war for whatever reason, some crazy person gets in power and decides X group is undesirable, natural disaster levels a town, someone has to foot the bill but just passing it off to whatever location they land at won’t work. Within the USA we have things like FEMA that could help out by pooling resources from multiple places to support an affected region, but that becomes a lot more difficult when you’re talking international. We can’t exactly demand taxes from someplace else entirely to fix the issue, and even if we have local resources it’s going to detract from supporting the local people that already need help.

It’s stupid and largely the fault of a profit driven mindset by society. We have housing in abundance that nobody can afford and piles of food thrown out at the end of the workday in restaurants and cafes because they’re not allowed to give it away (supposedly for health reasons but if it was good enough to sell before closing time it’s good enough after).

ShellMonkey , 9 months ago

Ma Bell was broken up and now we’re essentially back to two of the original ‘baby bells’ in the form of AT&T and Version after years of mergers. She deal with the Standard Oil matter. Unless something is done before hand to prevent the reformation of these behemouths it’s pretty well the inevitable result of capitalist systems. MS, Apple, and Amazon where early to their fields and took over through much the same ways. What we need is a SEC/FCC/FTC that is willing to not give approval for these big purchases as the default.

ShellMonkey , 8 months ago

Big metal pig, what else are they supposed to do with it?

ShellMonkey , 8 months ago

I wonder if there could be a way to enforce the old equal-time and fairness doctrines that where applied to public broadcast licence holders onto public libraries as well. I’m not sure it would be a good idea since someone would inevitably try and force religious texts alongside scientific journals, but it at least would preclude banning things.