Olives @olives@qoto.org

https://reason.com/2024/05/29/this-journalist-was-arrested-strip-searched-and-jailed-for-filming-police-will-he-get-justice/
"Prosecutors in #Texas last week dismissed the criminal case against a journalist who, in 2021, was arrested, strip-searched, and jailed for filming police. But his lengthy legal battle is in some sense just beginning and once again demands we probe the idea that real journalists are entitled to a different set of rights than the public."

"Last June, Judge David Hittner of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas allowed Pulliam's federal lawsuit to proceed, declining to award the defendants qualified immunity"
#FirstAmendment #FreeSpeech

https://reason.com/2024/05/30/a-missouri-police-officer-shot-a-blind-and-deaf-dog-now-hes-being-sued/
"In a federal lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Western District of #Missouri, Nicholas Hunter alleges that Officer Myron Woodson and the city of Sturgeon violated his #FourthAmendment rights when Woodson killed Teddy, his 13-pound blind and deaf Shih Tzu, shortly after finding the dog wandering in a neighbor's yard on May 19."

"Sandy Meadows, had been fired from her job at a Baton Rogue grocery store when state inspectors discovered she had been arranging flowers without the proper license. She tragically died, unemployed and in poverty, before the case could be heard."
Wait, what.

Well, this sounds like an issue for #HumanRights.

https://reason.com/2024/05/30/louisiana-finally-fixes-americas-dumbest-licensing-requirement/
"Louisiana is the only state in the country that requires florists to be licensed by the government. A bill that is now on the way to Gov. Jeff Landry's desk sadly won't change that fact, but it will eliminate the mandatory test that prospective florists in Louisiana must pass before being allowed to earn a living by placing different types of flowers together in an arrangement. Going forward, obtaining a florist license will require only the payment of a fee to the state."

It's probably easier to get a company to adopt end-to-end encryption than it is to otherwise get them to stop spying on people.

I was looking into takes in this area (as a form of impromptu research), and many are better, but oh boy, there are a couple like this which come from someone who doesn't seem to have a brain.

Reading a stupid take from 2016 which talks about porn solely through the lens of being a medicine to prescribe to criminals to prevent them from committing crimes (while censoring / oppressing everyone else). From that, you should understand part of why I never really lean on that particular argument.

Also, as a rule of thumb, blanket prohibitions tend to feed black markets which are probably worse.

I remember when an AI ethicist stared down (metaphorically speaking) like a dozen Czech psychologists or something who rebutted the notion, even suggesting they might reduce crime.

Then, he invoked "think of the children" and nit-picked some little details.

I should probably write something about this too but I already have far too many things to write about.

Oh, are there more bad sex doll / robot takes? That's funny considering that paper after paper came out over the past few years debunking the idea that it drives crime.

Someone told me it wouldn't be a Biden and Trump rematch. Turns out I was right... Unless, there's a grand twist we're all not expecting.

Mind you, I don't really like being right here.

I'm taking the opportunity to think about what new porn citations I could add to the new post. Do you have any good ideas?

I'm actually intending to write a post about how the "realism" of some taboo doesn't matter in porn, only the "real"*, but I never get around to it, because there is too much nonsense to deal with.

* In a nutshell, by arguing about "realism this or realism that", it shifts attention towards arbitrary boundaries of realism, and discourse along those lines, rather than actual ethics. That is what makes it garbage. There is more to it though.

On second thought, I'm gonna delete that post, as that was a bit too speculative, but I think that rather than wondering whether porn actually decreases crime, it is worth thinking about how it is abundantly clear that it doesn't increase it.

It also appears that Milton Diamond is dead. He died a few months ago, that is very unfortunate.

With the understanding that it can take years for something to get published, I'm okay with a preprint (and I did that with Von Andrian-Werburg's study until that got published last year, or rather, I noticed it had been), I just don't want the whole thing to be preprints.

Castleman referenced it at one point in his article, but if I'm going to cite it in the experimental post, I'm going to have to know what it's doi is (or other details).

I'm trying to locate a doi for "Diamond & Kontula".

"Diamond, M., & Kontula, O. (2010). Pornography and sex crimes in
Finland."

Even if you didn't make the first Australian consultation, you can still respond to the second broader one with the same points as it also touches on content (among other things).