SJWs never learn

A certain Big Bear received this today:

Paola, Jul 15, 2020, 8:07 AM PDT:

Hi Owen,

I’m Paola with Airbnb. We’re reaching out because we have received numerous reports from concerned community members of discriminatory comments left by you in a live stream.

After a full review of the incident, we have decided to remove you from the Airbnb community. This means you can no longer access your account and cannot create a new one.

You are being removed because the language you used violated the Airbnb Nondiscrimination Policy, which can be referenced here:

airbnb.com/help/article/1405

We consider this decision final.

 These people are just astonishingly stupid. Just as Patreon’s policies didn’t give its Trust & Safety group the powers they thought it did, the Nondiscrimination Policy doesn’t have anything to do with what someone says on a live stream.

If a particular listing contains language contrary to this nondiscrimination policy, the host will be asked to remove the language and affirm his or her understanding and intent to comply with this policy and its underlying principles. Airbnb may also, in its discretion, take steps up to and including suspending the host from the Airbnb platform.

If the host improperly rejects guests on the basis of protected class, or uses language demonstrating that his or her actions were motivated by factors prohibited by this policy, Airbnb will take steps to enforce this policy, up to and including suspending the host from the platform.

It’s the same thing as the “creation” issue on Patreon. These idiots simply don’t understand what their own policies say, or recognize the specific limits on them. I can smell something… it strikes me as familiar… it smells like… like… arbitration!

Superconvergence

They’re not even interested in science fiction, let alone science, anymore:

The members of SFWA’s newly-formed Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) Committee are:

  • Alaya Dawn Johnson – traditional novelist
  • Alex Acks – traditional novelist 
  • Crystal Watanabe – freelance editor
  • James Beamon – SFWA director-at-large, short fiction writer
  • Jane Pinckard  – writer, game designer, researcher, teacher
  • Kyle Aisteach  – short fiction writer
  • Michi Trota – SFWA Editor-in-Chief, critical and creative nonfiction writer
  • Tao Roung Wong – indie novelist
  • Whitney “Strix” Beltrán – game writer

The committee is developing procedures, and setting its action and scope, and will update the membership soon.

SFWA is an excellent example of how convergence renders an organization entirely incapable of performing its core purpose. The committee would have been more accurately named if they’d called it Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity.

The net is closing in

The European Union, like California, is starting to rein in the ability of the digital platforms to do whatever they want, to whomever they want, for any reason:

New EU regulation came into play at the start of the week that applies to digital storefronts, most notably Apple and Google’s for mobile devices. With the new regulations significantly strengthen the rights of those selling through such marketplaces.

The rules, which you can see here in full if you’re happy to fight through them, or as discussed here by the EGDF’s Jari-Pekka Kaleva on GI.Biz, cover a wide range of ongoing issues that developers have with stores.

Platforms will have to provide 30 days notice to publishers before removing content from stores, allowing them time to appeal or make changes to their software. So no immediate and opaque bans (article 4).

The regulations (in article 5) will force stores to be more transparent in how their ranking systems work, letting publishers understand how ‘trending’ apps are being chosen for instance.

Article 7 follows similar themes, with storefronts having to disclose any ‘differentiated treatment’ it may give one seller of goods over another, which should put paid to any real (or imagined) preferential treatment for larger publishers – or at least make it clear to everyone how and when the playing field isn’t even.

Also, that information, and all the information that publishers receive will have to be written in terms that you can understand. With all terms and conditions to be drafted in ‘plain and intelligible language’.

Armchair lawyers and real lawyers have been discussing various deplatformings as well as the 72 Bears vs Patreon situation. One thing they have repeatedly failed to grasp, however, is that the very clear trend of the legislators is strongly pro-consumer and anti-platform.

Some have questioned why I’m not banned from various platforms when less controversial figures have been. But there is no reason for suspicion as the reason is very straightforward: I live in Europe and any sensible US-based company is very, very hesitant to put itself at the mercy of an anti-US European court given the enthusiasm European courts have repeatedly demonstrated for saddling US tech companies with massive fines.

Never let it be said that the ideological Left is all bad. Their instinctive opposition to corpocracy is the one thing they have on the ideological Right.

A labor-free economy

Nothing destroys the fantastical imaginings of Marxist economics more completely than the observation of the disappearance of work:

A common topic around the web is whether automation will drastically increase unemployment. The usual scholarly answer is only a bit, and conservatives often insist that new jobs will always be found. Actually, automation has already created much joblessness. It continues to do so. We don’t notice because we have disguised the unemployment.

Consider. In 1850, everybody worked. In England, children notoriously were sweated in mines and factories and, in America, worked on their parents’ farms.

Then child labor laws took kids off the labor market, keeping them from competing with adults. Compulsory high school removed adolescents perfectly capable of doing many jobs of adults. College now keeps millions more in, usually, economically pointless idleness. We have over three million people in prisons. Large numbers live on welfare. The government factors none of these into the unemployment stats. If it did, the unemployment numbers would rise sharply.

Then there is makework. A great many governmental workers do little or nothing of use. This amounts to paid unemployment. Sometimes this unemployment is distributed: A hundred workers do useful work that thirty could do. Then there is the military. It produces nothing and, since the US has no military enemies, amounts to more paid unemployment. The arms industry uses more multitudes in building things of no use, such as ever more intercontinental nuclear bombers. For engineers, this is marginally more dignified than digging holes and filling them in. It is as much a jobs program as the Depression-era CCC.

Another phenomenon we see is the disimportantification (patent applied for) of work. In 1850, work done was genuinely important: growing food, without which we tend to be dead and not of much use in an economy. Then the farms automated and everybody went to work in factories, making cars and refrigerators. These were pretty important, but not as important as food. You can’t eat a refrigerator. Then the factories automated or went away and people became massage therapists, nail salon operators, psychologists, sociologists, consultants, or diversity counselors. Others ran massage parlors, restaurants, gymnasiums, or cutesy-wootsy boutiques selling unbearable kitsch. They were employed, but in occupations of ever-increasing triviality. We have gone from feeding people to rubbing their backs.

You know it’s getting out of hand when even the world’s oldest profession is being automated.

Adios to the Redskins

The NFL goes full SJW:

The Washington NFL franchise, 10 days after announcing that a “thorough review” of its name will be conducted, has made a preliminary decision.

At the end of the current review, the old name will be retired.

“On July 3rd, we announced the commencement of a thorough review of the team’s name,” the franchise announced in a statement. “That review has begun in earnest. As part of this process, we want to keep our sponsors, fans and community apprised of our thinking as we go forward.

“Today, we are announcing we will be retiring the [current] name and logo upon completion of this review.”

It’s going to be amusing to see all the journalists trying to thread the needle explaining why the Redskins had to go, but the Chiefs don’t, right up until the narrative shifts again and the Chiefs become the target du jour.

A cause for celebration

The rapid increase in immigration may explain Israel’s insistence on annexing the West Bank:

The Knesset’s Immigration, Absorption, and Diaspora Affairs Committee met last Wednesday to discuss a major dilemma: Jewish immigration is expected to double nest year but budgetary constraints will make it difficult, if not impossible to absorb them into Israeli society.

Earlier this month, Jewish Agency Chairman Isaac Herzog reported to the committee that an estimated 250,000 people, mostly young people, will immigrate to Israel within the next three to five years. Herzog added that the number of people who have contacted the Jewish Agency about Aliyah from English-speaking countries has increased by 50{4e01b0bc4ab012654d0c5016d8cbf558644ab2e53259aa2c40b66b3b20e8967d}, and by 70{4e01b0bc4ab012654d0c5016d8cbf558644ab2e53259aa2c40b66b3b20e8967d} from French-speaking countries.

Israel could receive as many as 90,000 new immigrants in 2021 – nearly three times the number of immigrants in 2019.

This is really win-win for pretty much everyone, except the Palestinians. The more homogenous the nations, the more peaceful they will be for everyone. If you truly want to visualize world peace, nationalism that rejects imperialism is the only solution that is even modestly viable.

The precision of science

Now the Moon is 85 million years younger than it was yesterday.

Planetary geophysicists have used a new numerical model to determine that the moon is in fact 85 million years younger than previously thought, having formed from the extremely violent and unlikely collision of two protoplanets.

The boffins at the German Aerospace Center, led by Maxime Maurice, produced a model to more accurately calculate what exactly happened when the protoplanet Theia smashed into a nascent, and still-forming, Earth about 4.425 billion years ago.

Previous estimations had suggested the moon formed around 4.51 billion years ago – that is, about 85 million years earlier. The new model suggests, however, that it was millions of years later when the molten Earth was still in the process of taking shape and covered in a vast ocean of liquid magma, that the collision took place.

Whatever. I’m not going to even pretend to be interested until scientists announce their discovery that dinosaurs landed on the Moon using nuclear fusion technology developed by black scientists during the Jurassic Era 33,000 years ago.

The Lawstream’s take

Nick Rekeita, the lawyer who hosts the Lawstream, analyzes yesterday’s hearing:

Okay, here’s the skinny. If Patreon does not pay up within 30 days on all 100 of the claims, if they don’t pay up in 30 days, they’re in default. That means that they lose,  basically, and it doesn’t mean that they lose the arbitration action, because they lose this one, but then the backers can compel another one or go to court. In either case, there’s a monetary sanction, there’s also a cost of arbitration plus attorneys fees, or the backer sanctions. If Patreon doesn’t pay up, not only will they then have to go back, and they may have to pay up anyway, well, they will, I mean at some point they’ll have to pay up anyway. They’ll also end up having to pay the attorneys fees for the backers and that gets devastatingly expensive, again, millions and millions of dollars.

This is massive because if this preliminary injunction fails, look to see all of your Terms of Service updated across the board. Big Tech will be watching this, they absolutely will. Anyone who uses adhesion contracts and has arbitration clauses in it is going to be looking at this and the rules are going to change dramatically. But it also shows that we as consumers do have tools in our toolbox to go ahead and combat them, and those tools are often given to us by big tech companies.You just have to find the right situation.

Personally, I think the injunction should be denied. Why we don’t hold these companies to account for their choices is beyond me. Of course Patreon wanted this, they wanted it this way. Now the reason they wanted it this way is because they never for a moment considered that things would go down this way because I think, at their core, Patreon never considered banning creators at the onset.

It looks like it is just going to get even crazier from here. I am informed that Patreon has begun responding to the first independent arbitrations with incoherent rants directed at the JAMS National Arbitration Council. Their argument, such as it was, was explained to me:

“This should not be arbitrated because we know we will lose and we don’t like it and it’s expensive for us.”

At this point, I wouldn’t put it past Patreon to sue both JAMS and the State of California for unfairly holding them accountable to their own contracts of adhesion. The whole thing is beginning to look a lot like a Kids in the Hall sketch.

The Quartering has also put in his two cents on the situation, as has GamerGate legend Sargon of Akkad.

The obvious question the LLOE has to consider now is whether the time has arrived to call Patreon on all their idiotic posturing and bring a massive class action lawsuit against them in the Superior Court. I imagine they would suddenly recall why they mandated arbitration in the first place and do a very fast and astonishingly hypocritical 180.

War in the South China Sea

It looks as if President Trump is inclined to call China’s raising the stakes in the South China Sea:

U.S. officials say the Trump administration is poised to escalate its actions against China by stepping squarely into one of the most sensitive regional issues dividing them and rejecting outright nearly all of Beijing’s significant maritime claims in the South China Sea.

In a move the officials say is expected as early as Monday, the administration will present the decision as an attempt to curb China’s increasing assertiveness in the region with a commitment to recognizing international law. But it will almost certainly have the more immediate effect of further infuriating the Chinese, who are already retaliating against numerous U.S. sanctions and other penalties on other matters.

The Syracuse Moment approaches….

Court hearing today

CGC-20-584586 (PATREON, INC. VS. PAUL MICHAEL AYURE ET AL)
will be heard at 12:30 PM Eastern and should go a long way towards ending the ongoing dispute between Owen, the 72 Bears, and Patreon.

Discuss amongst yourselves. Make predictions if you like, play armchair lawyer if you wish, and provide a running commentary for those who can’t watch if you’re so inclined, but be polite and respectful to all the parties.

UPDATE: The tentative ruling has been published on the Superior Court site by the judge.

Patreon seeks a preliminary injunction to enjoin defendants “from continuing to pursue improper claims against Patreon in JAMS arbitration,” pending this Court’s consideration and final adjudication of Patreon’s complaint for declaratory judgment. Defendants are individual claimants in 72 pending JAMS arbitration proceedings against Patreon. Patreon claims that those claims are barred by its Terms of Use. Patreon’s request for a preliminary injunction is denied, for several reasons.

And so it is back to arbitration they go, to face the reality of 91 defaulted arbitrations, among others.

UPDATE: The hearing went about as well as it could reasonably go, but the judge is not going to issue a ruling yet because Patreon’s lawyers produced some new arguments based on some new precedents that weren’t in their copious filings. So, the judge graciously allowed them more rope with which to hang themselves, since the reason they produced the new arguments was because their previous arguments had already been rejected. Randazza has ten days to rebut the relevance of the new citations, then the judge will issue his ruling.

This, by the way, is why Randazza was so uncharacteristically unchallenging, even when Patreon was making totally false claims about having provided sufficient notice. He did make one very substantive and well-substantiated point, however, about the date of the applicable terms being from “the date of accrual”, or the date on which notice was given, rather than from the date of the actual filing as Patreon has been arguing. Which, of course, renders Patreon’s entire case a non-starter.

As for what will happen next, there are two important things to note here. First, the emergency injunction was not granted. Second, none of these new issues to be addressed have anything to do with the injunction. So, in addition to the evidence of the reasoning behind the tentative ruling, what we can deduce is that the judge is not merely going to reject the injunction, he is probably going to throw out the case in his ruling.