Edit- look, we’re missing each other because I am arguing a larger cultural issue, you are arguing specific laws

That was the only thing I was actually asking about. I especially agree with your points about our government/politicians. It appears that the main disagreement we might have is if rape culture is the normalization/glorification of sexual assault specifically or a wider classification of power dynamics in any form.

I think anyone who commits the crime of rape is a rapist and rightly so, but am just leery about watering down the definition of rape.

I do not care how legal this might have been

I want to be clear that it wasn’t legal. Gaetz 100% committed statutory rape under current criminal law. It’s a strict accountability law, you don’t have to knowingly do it to commit the crime.

The only reason I posted at all was that after reading the article I didn’t think the persons comment you replied to was necessarily a great example of rape culture.

My point was that at one time separate but equal was considered enlightened by a majority of the population. I agree that short societal memory is a curse we have to work around.

The Constitution is not permanent and unchangeable, it is a living document that can and has been amended to suit new or changing needs. That’s why they are called Amendments in the first place. It is by design a lot more difficult to change than other laws, and this is a good thing, but the Founders knew they couldn’t get everything right for all time.

The 40 year old ID-ing the women he has sex with at a party is icky for sleeping with someone half his age (double so if he is specifically looking for 18 year olds), but that is not illegal. Should that be lumped under rape culture though? Should sex work in general be lumped under rape culture?

If she was not 18, regardless of if she had a fake ID, it is still statutory. There is no mens rea required for statutory. It is however harder in such a case to secure prosecution and conviction.

He may very well have known his friend brought an underage girl to sleep with him, or asked him to find probable underage girls advertising as 18 for plausible deniability. He also may have paid his friend to pay for prostitutes for the party. I won’t give Gaetz the benefit of the doubt on anything, but the article doesn’t indicate any of those things happened.

At least we got a conviction for the person with the least plausible deniability, because we rarely get that unfortunately.

While it doesn’t make Gaetz not a shitbag, unless the article is wrong he wasn’t the person who solicited her, set it up, or paid her. It’s also still statutory even if she lied about her age and had a false ID (and we don’t know if Gaetz was actually lied to and checked her ID), but I am not sure if this is a good example of rape culture.

100% unequal power dynamics being a rich politician sleeping with an 18 year old escort at a party, but in the case all parties are 18 or older is it sex work or rape?

Joel Greenberg, the one who actually met her and did the soliciting and paid her, was charged and convicted for child sex trafficking and ID fraud/identity theft for this. I am pleasantly surprised he was both charged and convicted given track records on both of those things. If 11 years is a sufficient sentence is another story.

The problem with being unable to change or supercede laws is the hubris to assume the laws passed are perfect for all time. We have all of human history to prove we are not the peak of civilization.

Getting bribery out of politics by removing lobbying and campaign finance is probably the best thing we can do. Having every politician run with the same amount of money and banning retired politicians from working as lobbiests or board members after office would do the most for eliminating corruption.

Even if you make laws unrepealable or changable, if the government won’t enforce it then it solves nothing. We have no higher entity to complain to and get enforcement or satisfaction. And if there is some higher entity empowered and capable, we then put all trust that whatever is enforcing law can never be corrupted or coerced or have its own adjenda.

I don’t mind that ICE is detaining legal immigrants and citizens in violent raids. It’s the people overstaying their visas and jumping the border that I’m more concerned about.

Both things can be true, this is not a zero sum between open borders and masked ICE agents abducting people.

I sincerely wish all the white collar crime and shit would get more press, especially since wage theft surpasses property crime every year. I won’t stop caring about property crime because there are bigger fish out there.

I heartily disagree with how ICE is currently operating and how legal status is being removed from people to get more “low hanging fruit” to inflate numbers. Obama managed to deport millions of illegal immigrants without the theatrics, or destruction of reputation for the department so we know it can be done.

This doesn’t mean that I cannot or should not also be concerned about illegal immigration or that I should support jumping the border or overstaying visas.

Ah yes, if one side is violating the rule of law then we can just throw laws out the window and do whatever we want. Always bring yourself down to their level, that’s how you win.

“But the alcoholic neighbor’s kids down the street are allowed to smoke and skip middle school, so why can’t I mom?”.

Who cares how they get here? They came seeking a better life. I would rather have more people like that, than elitist pigs who feel entitled to America, and we should all get their permission to live our lives.

No one is entitled to go anywhere they want whenever they want, anywhere on earth. Why would or should the United States be any different? The only people entitled to any country are the citizens of that country.

The reason someone would care about this is because society is maintained by rule of law.

Another reason is that we do not live in a post scarcity utopia, and resources are not unlimited.

I know it’s not the same, but do you support China sending immigrants to Tibet and annexing the country? How about the rest of their neighbors and the South China Sea? What about Russia doing the same in Eastern Ukraine and Crimea?

If national autonomy is something to be respected then border laws and immigration laws have to be as well. If you only agree with those things only for non-wealthy countries like the US and EU members, which I suspect might be the case, I would call that biased and hypocritical.

That’s my point, there never was anything to fear for the rich. They don’t fear guns in the hands of the people because they know that they’re safe. They know a few AR-15s are not a threat to them.

Looking at the difference in how the police handled peaceful protests when the protesters were openly and obviously armed compared to when they weren’t, the boots on the ground doing the enforcement are the ones who care.

It’s not the rich who will be breaking into your house in the middle of the night to disappear you.

Plus, as we’ve seen recently, even when there’s a actual fascist taking power and trampling on people’s civil liberties, people aren’t actually going to use their guns.

Do not trust that the amount Americans will bend in the face of tyranny is infinite. They colonists attempted years of bargaining and peaceful solutions before the revolution. Only 20-30% of the population at the max think Trump is an actual fascist who will seize power and overthrow the democracy, and that group is both the least armed and most violence averse. It will take something completely overt and undeniable to get people to throw what comfort they have in life away to initiate armed rebellion.

This doesn’t mean the right move is to give up that option completely and hope that capitulation isn’t too bad.

I will preface this by saying I do not agree with how this administration is enforcing immigration law, and triple disagree with how they are removing legal status from people to get easy deportations. It is being done both stupidly and cruelly. ICE should be uniformed and identifiable, and all law enforcement should be held to the highest standards.

That said, an asylum seeker is just that, an asylum seeker and not an illegal immigrant. Lumping them in with illegal immigrants to help whitewash illegal immigration is, in my opinion, as much a contributor to the problem as those claiming asylum seekers are lying. Both sides of this argument keep shoving the asylum seekers into the illegal immigrant bucket to serve their narratives and it pisses me off.

Obviously every person who illegally immigrates is doing so trying to feed themselves and/or their family better than they can in their own country, basically no one wakes up and decides to throw away their entire lives and legal status to go to another country. That does not mean laws don’t apply to them. No one on earth has a right to go to another country except through the established legal means of that country, which is why statelessness is such a terrible crime against the people who are rendered such.

Lumping in illegal immigration with things like race and slurs and calling it racist waters down racist. Basic human dignity and respect for things that are intrinsic qualities like race, gender, sexuality, etc is not the same thing as someone’s legal status. This doesn’t stop the racists, doesn’t help anyone, and weakens actual narrative.

Somewhat true, though the US loosing for 30 years to peasant armies in the Middle East proves military technology hasn’t changed as much as you might feel it has, but that wasn’t my point. Disarming and giving all power to the elite is still neither preferable nor a good idea.

Labor gave up their economic weapons (unions) because times were peaceful and prosperous and their overlords promised they’d be safe, and now they are debt slaves working gig jobs with shit or no benefits. The monopoly of economic violence belongs to the FAANGs and Walmarts.

Doing the same for guns and the government is rolling out the red carpet for the jackboots to break in because there is nothing to fear. Giving up freedom for safety means you will get neither still holds. A government that doesn’t righteously fear (as in healthy respect) it’s governed is not of and for the people, but over and above the people.

Human nature and society hasn’t changed since then. Hell, it hasn’t changed since wide spread written history. Go read ancient Greco-Roman graffiti. We are not fundamentally different than our ancestors, and it is the height of arrogance to pretend we are the enlightened peak so far above them.

The reasons for Marx’s statements and the reasons the founders wrote the 2nd amendment have not changed, and technology has not changed sufficiently to invalidate that.

My issue with that is putting permit requirements on constitutional rights is a bad idea. We are sliding closer and closer to needing permits for free speech world wide, and I can see this administration giving out 4th and 5th amendment permits if you submit to pre-screening by ICE and the police.

Gun safety and training should be free and part of our mandatory education system to ensure what you want, rather than gate kept by certifications and permits. The administrative bureaucracy will find a way to be discriminatory with any steps in a shall issue chain.

Lawful evil with utrawides.

I would have initially put money on it being an Onion article, but no, it’s sadly real.

Like Henrietta Lacks, who I mention in another reply, who had her cells harvested from a cervical cancer treatment and propagated indefinitely to be used as human medical specimens. Pharmaceutical companies have already attempted patenting portions of the human genome, so having them take sections of your personal genome if you have an allele mutation they find profitable is a concern. Using your genetic code like an advertising fingerprint to sell you treatments or services. Selling that data to third parties. Making registries of people with specific genetics for use by Governments to regulate or oppress, either eugenically or ethnically.

There are multiple movies where instead of growing individual organs they clone people for harvest, which I would hope is just too far beyond the pale to ever leave Hollywood but, then I remember shit like Unit 731 and Josef Mengele. That last one isn’t really a real fear, but had to mention it.

Now I voted (not that it would have mattered as Kamala was going to win my state regardless), but for the sake of argument I also didn’t see minorities NOT being brutalized and killed under Biden or Obama. Or Clinton for that matter.

Exactly what I am talking about along with the immortalized cell lines stolen from minorities. I have no problems with people donating themselves to science or being appropriately compensated with thoroughly informed consent, the advances to science are critical. I just don’t want the biomedical equivalent of OpenAI stealing IP happening to make the 0.1% even richer.

The main concerns I see are if it is actually only individual organs, and things like your rights to your own genetic code/cell lines.

It’s time for Voodoo to make a triumphant return!