by juris | 2026-02-20 01:35:02+00:00
i am well-aware that what follows is a rant, but i really do feel boxed in from every moral angle from my upbringing. from surveilled e2e communication from the "conservatives", to surveilled 3d printers from the "liberals", and watching the political pendulum ratchet a rope around my throat with increasingly fascist tooling, i am given to wonder if I am not a side character in 1984.

so i don't mind if you downvote me. but if you care to listen to a man rant:

we have an incredibly sycophantic doj which selectively enforces the law according to socioeconomic status, so it boggles the mind that some of us in this thread maintain that this issue is partisan alone ("oh you liberals"). this line of thinking is a trap.

is it really the dems in california? is it really trump's doj? or, taking a step back and looking at fascist trends worldwide in aggregate, don't these policies benefit those groups who operate and lobby above common law? those groups of people who we magically let slide time and time again after committing gross misconduct? those companies whose monopolies fundamentally destroy free trade?

so much tribalism.

conservative or liberal, once the pendulum swings maybe consider what happens when your phantom political 'enemies' on the other side of the aisle can monitor what you create in your home, what queries you toss into your AI assistant, who you talk to on social media, what you are buying, or where your location is on the cell tower map.

then if you have a second brain cell, maybe consider whether those enemies on the other side of the aisle are struggling to feed kids and make shelter just the same as you, whether they are as much the rabble as those goliaths who dictate what the topics of division -are-

who benefits most from your fear of the other but those groups who lobby both sides??

isn't it would be better to have a world of celebrated differences and rules of decorum that instill trust and foster co-operation? isn't that the world that we want, so that we may put the monsters at epstein island, sarajevo, (and so many other places) in prison? maybe it is time to rise up and hold our leaders accountable, on the left and the right!

"oh this is just political posturing, those lawmakers are rewarded merely for doing 'something'" yes-- this is true. but from the outset, whose political posturing is it really? because the end result for every one of these laws that come to pass don't seem to prevent the folks up top from getting away scott-free.

just remember that with all illegal files (violations of copyright law, banned books, etc): it is easy to determine whether you are in possession of them. whether it is enforced against you is a matter of convenience and leverage, your personal value (and optic political value). be value-less.

rant aside. obvious, stupid questions to the topic at hand:
- (yes, shooting people is bad).
- what is the definitive geometry of a gun?
- who arbitrates that?
- is it a crime to print a rubber band gun? a toy gun?
- what about parts for a gun? how is that known?
- who do we register our printers to?
- what mechanisms are in place to side channel whether a person purchases tools such that we can detect whether they own an unregistered 3d printer?
- how do we deal with false positives?
- if I have a novel prototype of a non-gun which I would like to patent in a highly litigious first-to-file country, how can I guarantee that the file in question is submitted only to the government entity or API endpoint in question?
- do we ban chinese printers? whose companies form the superset of allowable printers? how do smaller manufacturers join in?
- what happens when the printer EOLs and software updates for the device stop (and therefore can't update the API endpoint)?
- will open source printers be illegal?
- what else should our government forbid us for printing: cock rings and contraceptive devices? emblems associated with religious groups (modernly) associated with hate speech?

i am sorry if you read this much and are from elsewhere. watch that it does not happen to your country. my heart goes out to you.