there is a comment on the article to this effect, for what that's worth:

Angel

Hello Kris,

A lovely idea, but I won’t be visiting any public bathhouse any time soon. For many of us, the pandemic isn’t over. It’s contagious, airborne, and still killing and disabling people (including healthy people who have previously been infected and been ok) every day. Some ways to address the transmission of covid in bath houses can include rigorous HEPA filtration; required testing (using LAMP tests, for example, which are €10/test once you have the machine to read the results (another few hundred euro), and you can pool several people in one test); and maybe masks (I’ve read that they don’t work if they get wet, but I also read an article where someone tested several and went swimming with them. From memory, a regular Aura (~€1) worked nearly as long as an intentionally waterproof model). None of these are cheap by my standards. Not sure what you do about warts, foot fungus, and many other common bath house diseases.

Thanks, Angel

yeah, chiming in to say i think this is an acceptable case of US news in the World News section. obviously don't go overboard with edge cases, but there's really no dilution of World News from stories like this which do have some multinational significance.

this thread is a disaster from front to back, so it's being locked.

this appears to be the first time anything like this has happened or been tried; unsurprisingly, students have been mobilizing against it and it's been condemned by dozens of student groups. it's also probably union busting, as Taal is a member of the Cornell Graduate Student Union and they have a memorandum with Cornell that any suspensions like this have to be mediated with the union--which of course was not done here.

It would have been much wiser of him to support his cause elsewhere instead of at and against the institution that he relies on for his degree and visa.

personally i think people should be allowed to exercise basic freedom of speech (especially for unambiguously morally correct causes) without being violently deported over it, but you have what i would consider consistently bad takes on this subject so i'm not surprised you've taken another bad line here.

In Riley v. California, the Supreme Court unanimously held that police need a warrant to search through cell phones, even during otherwise lawful arrests. But if you hand over your unlocked phone to a police officer and offer to show them something, “it becomes this complicated factual question about what consent you’ve granted for a search and what the limits of that are,” Brett Max Kaufman, a senior staff attorney in the ACLU’s Center for Democracy, told The Verge. “There have been cases where people give consent to do one thing, the cops then take the whole phone, copy the whole phone, find other evidence on the phone, and the legal question that comes up in court is: did that violate the scope of consent?”

If police do have a warrant to search your phone, numerous courts have said they can require you to provide biometric login access via your face or finger. (It’s still an unsettled legal question since other courts have ruled they can’t.) The Fifth Amendment typically protects giving up passcodes as a form of self-incrimination, but logging in with biometrics often isn’t considered protected “testimonial” evidence. In the words of one federal appeals court decision, it requires “no cognitive exertion, placing it firmly in the same category as a blood draw or fingerprint taken at booking.”

it's unbelievable that there is a distinction in US caselaw between giving up your biometrics and giving up your password, and your essentially unchangeable biometrics are somehow the one you're probably obliged to give to the cops if they ask. just an incredibly goofy system

The MyColorado FAQ explicitly states that an officer cannot take your phone, even if they think your digital ID is fraudulent. This whole article is a ton of fear mongering.

no offense but: even if you were to grant the notion that this is an exaggerated problem--cops are not well known for their rigorous adherence to the law or proper legal procedure. they routinely fuck up and violate civil liberties, up to and including murdering people for arbitrary reasons. and unless police are held accountable (which they almost never are for a variety of systemic reasons), what a state says they cannot do is effectively meaningless. it's just words on a screen, really.

If you’re feeling that announced regret while reading this tame banter, then I apologize - but I would loved to have seen you in some of the larger forums I’ve moderated in the past - and they weren’t even about politics. The users there would have eaten you alive on the first day.

i'm... sorry that we generally like to treat our userbase as adults capable of basic introspection when they do something wrong or sanctionable, instead of immediately telling them to fuck off? but again this is way besides the point--which is, don't relitigate this, and stop going into every thread even remotely adjacent to Israel/Palestine and causing problems. your opinions are simply not important enough (or, in my opinion, well reasoned enough) to hear them out for an additional ten months beyond the ten months you've already been an issue.

i'm very uninterested in relitigating your temporary silencing for getting into aimless slapfights with people on here on this subject. don't bother bringing it up again. strictly speaking the silencing should probably also apply to this thread and just result in me deleting your comments without even responding to them like i am now--but i'm being generous in not doing that here and just calling them a cringe opinion you have the right to express. please do not make me regret that and start enforcing your temporary silencing elsewhere too.

one that very much isn’t as unambiguous as you’re trying to portray it as or have been led to believe through your little filter bubble (at least according to my little filter bubble - opinions, opinions, opinions).

no, it's pretty unambiguous both internationally (where Israel has been rebuked time and time again for its apartheid system and systemic discrimination and abuse against Palestinians) and morally (Israel's current conduct toward people in the West Bank in Gaza is almost one-to-one analogous to Jim Crow and apartheid, even ignoring Zionism and its contribution to the subject)--most people just don't care that much about a foreign conflict that doesn't affect them and a foreign ethnic group they can't directly do much to alleviate the plight of.

fundamentally, though, this is an "i can see discrimination with my own eyes, and settlers from Israel will literally admit to doing the discrimination in casual interviews" and an "i don't think 40,000 Palestinians[^1] are all Hamas militants who should be annihilated with indiscriminate bombing that has leveled the vast majority of Gaza's already crippled infrastructure, i think that is very obviously morally wrong" thing.

[^1]: or many more. some of the more extreme estimates now have the death toll potentially as high as 300,000

These first serious restrictions on men have come as a surprise to many in Afghanistan, according to a range of Afghans, including Taliban opponents, wavering supporters and even members of the Taliban regime, who spoke in phone interviews over the past two weeks. In a society where a man's voice is often perceived as far more powerful than a woman's, some men now wonder whether they should have spoken up sooner to defend the freedoms of their wives and daughters.

"If men had raised their voices, we might also be in a different situation now," said a male resident of the capital, Kabul, who like others interviewed for this story spoke on the condition of anonymity or that only their first names be used due to fears of drawing unwanted scrutiny from the regime. "Now, everyone is growing a beard because we don't want to be questioned, humiliated," he said.

A 36-year old male driver in Kabul said the new restrictions feel "enormous" and pose a growing hardship for his work. His revenue has declined by 70 percent since late August, he said, partly because the Taliban has begun enforcing a rule that bans women from traveling alone in taxis.

Even in some government offices, a new sense of dread has set in. A former Taliban supporter recalled how a friend, who still works for the regime, recently had his salary withheld because his beard wasn't sufficiently long.

"We are hearing that some of the civil servants, whose beards were shorter than the required length, were barred from entering their departments," said a government employee, speaking on the condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to journalists.

But if we’re talking about a law that actually says the cop cannot take your phone no matter what, and they do, then any public defender would be able to point it out and the judge would certainly have to enforce it. I can’t think of a way the cop would abuse their power because, in this case they don’t have it.

they can abuse their power because they're a cop, with a badge and gun, and the right to maim or literally kill you with it (and probably get away with it even if it's not strictly legal) if you don't comply with their demands in the moment. again: cops consistently do not care about or follow legal procedures they're supposed to, frequently fuck up those procedures even when they do, and most cops probably don't even think of it as their job to secure some airtight case that stands up to legal scrutiny. it's not a profession that lend itself to the kind of charitability that's being given here, and the record of the profession makes it even less deserving of that charitability.

basically, put it this way: if a cop stops you and asks you for your phone--what are you realistically going to do in that situation the moment they don't respect your "no" and begin to pressure you, threaten you, and decide to throw the legal book at you (however dubious) for saying no? for most people, the answer is going to be "just give up the phone and start complying with the cop" even though that is not something the cop should be able to do. because at the end of the day they have a gun, and can put you in jail (or at least make your day hellish) more-or-less unilaterally, with very little recourse for you unless you want to do expensive litigation.

something worth remembering: even limited examinations of who is responsible for complaints about books show that the vast majority of them are made by a handful of people. while there is often a "broad" base of passive support for this stuff in the Republican Party due to partisanship, the actual crusaders are few and far between because most people don't actually want to be that person.

it's literally Facebook. i think we've heard and seen more than enough to from Mark Zuckerberg and the platform which actively continues to be one of the worst vectors of online harm, misinformation, and advocacy for social and political violence (among many, many other ills). particularly with respect to our instance: their project can get fucked as far as i'm concerned.

a core issue for moving wikis is that Fandom refuses to delete the old wiki so you 1) have to fight an SEO war against them; and 2) have to contend with directing everyone to the right place or else you have two competing wikis (one of which will gradually lapse out of date). it's very irritating.

the weirdest thing to me is these guys always ignore that banning the freaks worked on Reddit--which is stereotypically the most cringe techno-libertarian platform of the lot--without ruining the right to say goofy shit on the platform. they banned a bunch of the reactionary subs and, spoiler, issues with those communities have been much lessened since that happened while still allowing for people to say patently wild, unpopular shit

Six months later, we can see that the effects of leaving Twitter have been negligible. A memo circulated to NPR staff says traffic has dropped by only a single percentage point as a result of leaving Twitter, now officially renamed X, though traffic from the platform was small already and accounted for just under two percent of traffic before the posting stopped. (NPR declined an interview request but shared the memo and other information). While NPR’s main account had 8.7 million followers and the politics account had just under three million, “the platform’s algorithm updates made it increasingly challenging to reach active users; you often saw a near-immediate drop-off in engagement after tweeting and users rarely left the platform,” the memo says.

this is clearly not true, Portal literally just got a huge fangame with a Steam release. the issue is entirely that it uses Nintendo stuff and the guy even says as much

quick vibe check: i am extremely not interested in you trying to debate me on whether content like lolicon and shotacon is or is not legally dubious--even if i somehow ceded this point to you, it's not going to change our judgement because it's at best incredibly fucking weird and we want nothing to do with it. please read the room here.

the primary reason Hamas has political power and the political support to attack Israel in this manner is because Israel:

• treats all Palestinians as second-class citizens and subjects them to a system of political, social, and economic apartheid
• holds millions of Palestinians in squalid and inhuman conditions, and seizes the territory of millions more in the name of a violent settler project
• subjects the vast majority of Palestinians to state-sponsored discrimination, terror, indiscriminate bombing, and political violence
• leaves Palestinians no feasible democratic path to the rights they should have in their current state or the state of Israel, making armed struggle inevitable

you can and should condemn Hamas, but it is inarguable that Israel routinely does worse—overwhelmingly to people just as innocent as the ones Hamas is murdering—which is what makes attacks like this inevitable. you cannot do what Israel does and not expect the outcome to be violence, and it is incumbent on Israel, who holds all the actual power in this dynamic, to break the cycle and stop using every terrorist attack perpetuated against it as an excuse to roll innocent heads.

This decision was about users from other instances coming here and causing trouble, not beehaw users going elsewhere. The intent isn’t to keep users siloed in here.

yeah to be clear: we don't want this either! it sucks! but that's how it is and we're willing to ultimately bite that bullet and any potential consequences.

there's a neverending sea of guys like you who personify this panel, huh

i fail to see why one being legal and one being illegal[^1] should have any bearing on the response or treating the people with basic human dignity. committing a crime also does not make one worthy of death--and especially not when that crime is one without a victim like illegal immigration.

[^1]: and i don't think the latter should be illegal (certainly not meaningfully so), to be clear. i am morally opposed to the idea of hard borders.

just to add to the plethora of responses: it rather defies belief that he's purely "joking" when, among other things, he's taken photos with anti-trans legislators like Lauren Boebert and let them frame those photos in this manner:

i can only presume the remaining 5% is owned by NFTs Georg, who lives on the blockchain and is an outlier who should not have been counted

techno-libertarianism strikes again! it's every few years with these guys where they have to learn the same lesson over again that letting the worst scum in politics make use of your website will just ensure all the cool people evaporate off your website--and Substack really does not have that many cool people or that good of a reputation to begin with.

counterpoint:

1. we don't like Meta
2. we have very specific goals on this instance that Meta is totally antithetical to
3. we're quite open about not being open-fed with everyone and this is not out of character nor a contradiction of previous blocks we've made
4. our priorities are not "fediverse first" or "ActivityPub first", they're Beehaw first. the fediverse and ActivityPub are mostly tools for us to an end, and we don't accept some obligation to prioritize the greater health of those over our own thing.
5. even if you don't care about the rest of that simple logistics prevail here--we absolutely don't want to be responsible for potentially tens or hundreds of millions of additional users. that is not a thing we can ever commit to, and we will almost certainly sooner shut down the instance or completely defederate than eat that influx (particularly with Lemmy's limitations right now).

overall, i would say this falls into the camp of "not a thing we're realistically going to reconsider".

this is only your third comment on our site and you are not making a good impression by immediately getting offended by a pretty banal ask.

past four months of data, for anyone wondering. a wiki page for this should be forthcoming in the days to come

doing some housekeeping this afternoon and yes we have already decided to do this. (if it hasn't been done yet it will shortly, but someone besides me is going to be doing it)

in general, there's a lack of media coverage of comments like this outside of the partisan blogs--which is absurd to me, since this is the most explicitly fascist Trump has been. the debate over whether he is one is basically over in my view.

"in New Hampshire" is the important caveat here, and this is an outlier-low for Trump poll too. nationally she continues to poll anywhere from 30 to 50 points behind him, and in any case it's not a given that "winning New Hampshire" is capable of catapulting her to victory with a Republican electorate that clearly likes Trump a lot

when they bought out Mediatonic they acquired the publishing rights, which is allegedly when he stopped getting royalty payments here. it also changed what platforms you can get the game on--previously it was available on a few other platforms--but these days you can only get the game on Epic or Steam

Part of me thinks this site is just as cucked and left wing as reddit.

you're already banned for being a dipshit but: i cannot think of a better endorsement for this site than free speech losers like you describing it this way. if we had a wall for endorsement quotes i'd make this our first one

FYI replace “blacklist” with “deny list” and “whitelist” with “allow list”.

this is the verbiage used by Lemmy which is why it's used here but also, speaking as a black person: i really don't care at all about the terminology used for this. it's like 2,000th on the list of important things that affect my life. even granting that it was more important: i certainly do not care about the "correct" term to use in this context, where it is a completely irrelevant and unimportant detail and talking about it in any way detracts from actually important conversations. please don't do this, thanks.

Texas republican voters getting exactly what they voted for.

unfortunately, what they voted for also hurt (and in this case killed) a ton of people, who now have no recourse and get completely fucked. not great!

in my mind voting in our current system is just pretty straightforward utilitarian calculus (and can't be anything else): you should vote for the option which will do the least harm and has the highest probability of winning. even if you, say, accept that Biden and Trump are equal on I/P, that just means you should look to other issues on which they are distinct--and they are distinct on basically every other issue in a way that clearly suggests Biden to be the best choice you can make here.

take just the Autocracy Tracker, which makes it unambiguous that Trump, if he wins, is planning a sweeping authoritarian wave of deportations, purges, restrictions of civil rights, and repression of minority groups and ideological groups he disagrees with. much of this is, in a sense, already happening here and already a form of genocide against some groups (trans people most prominently--it is now de facto illegal to be trans and legal to bring harm to trans people in large portions of the US). a Trump win will probably ensure there is no safe place for such groups in this country anymore.

on a moral level: i am just not sympathetic to the idea that voting for Biden constitutes blood on your hands in a meaningful way. i think if you accept this line of argumentation, you would ultimately have to bite the bullet that this could also be said of paying taxes[^1]--and i certainly don't begrudge people for paying their taxes even as this lines the pocket of the war machine, so then why should judge them for voting? in general: by virtue of existing within a state, you will always be complicit to some degree in the crimes of that state, regardless of what you do to extricate yourself from supporting them. so i just don't think that abstention from voting or voting for a more morally defensible alternative actually cleans your hands of the blood being perceived here.

separately, and more pragmatically: there is no compelling third party with anywhere near a possibility of winning or even scoring a "symbolic victory." a vote for a leftist third party right now is, in a real sense, a vote wasted--because these parties are incompetent, fractured, and full of people who are not serious candidates. even with the Green Party (by far the most electorally advanced of them) nobody has ever trembled at their influence and in practice they mostly seem to exist to waste a lot of the money given to them on quixotic presidential candidates. imo: any actual movement challenging the power--your DSAs, for example--is going to be built from the ground up and not imposed through the presidency, and is only going to use electoralism as one of its several political arms.

[^1]: arguably, it's even more true of paying taxes than of voting: votes may make no difference in whether something happens or not, but taxes actively make them possible

i think it's very clear now that the lack of unionization in the gaming industry will need to change, or every year or two or whatever arbitrary interval we'll see an astronomical number of people losing their jobs all at once in this way.

this is the latest in a series of abrasive, unproductive, and generally uninteresting driveby comments from you--i think it's time for a week off.

What is your intent with a comment like this?

they were being quite literal [i got their donation email :)]