ymeskhout
1yr ago
Back in August 20 people were arrested in Florida as part of a sting operation on "voter fraud" heavily publicized by Gov. DeSantis. Each person had a felony conviction and voted, but I wrote about how each person was specifically told by election authorities that they were legally able to vote. The confusion stems from how felony voter right restoration was implemented in Florida, where the state insisted that everyone had to pay all outstanding fines while at the same time admitting it had no way of keeping track of all these fines.
A small update since then is that bodyworn video footage of the arrests has been released. The language in an arrest warrant issued by a court usually says something along the lines of "To every peace officer of blah blah, you are commanded to..." which means the decision to arrest is not discretionary. I've watched thousands of arrest videos by now and while the modal arrest is far less eventful that what the typical viral incident would have you believe, it's still an event that is inherently antagonistic. After all, the cop is placing handcuffs on you and taking you to jail, with serious retribution if you impede the process in any way.
I have never seen cops anywhere near as apologetic about an arrest as in the videos just released from Florida. They caught these people unaware outside of their homes, and as they explain the arrest warrant they pepper every sentence with "sir" and "m'am". When they explain that they're about to be handcuffed, they use "unfortunately" as a prefix. Thanks to qualified immunity along with the general deference courts give law enforcement, each cop would have had the legal authority to leg sweep each person and slam them to the ground if they displayed anything that could remotely be construed as resistance. Instead they take the time to calmly explain the process, including when they would likely be released, in a bid to secure as much of their cooperation as possible through what is understandably a distressing event for any person to go through. They're treated with astounding compassion. The people arrested start talking (of course they do), with one explaining how he was told he could legally vote, and the cop responds with "there's your defense". I've never seen a cop highlight legal defenses to the person they just arrested.
DeSantis is a Yale/Harvard educated former federal prosecutor. I would assume based on his background that he's not an idiot, and that he knows how criminal prosecutions work. If I keep my cynic hat on, DeSantis chose to make a big show of these arrests entirely as a means to appease the portion of the electorate that still believes the 2020 election was stolen and remains angry no one has gotten punished. But even so, what exactly was the follow-up supposed to be? Whatever charges one would levy against these people would require that you prove beyond a reasonable doubt that they knew they weren't allowed to vote but voted anyway, and how would any prosecutor counter the fact that election authorities approved their registration? What this does also just brings more attention to the confusing labyrinthian mess around court fines the state of Florida intentionally created as a hurdle for felons pursuing voter right restoration.
If the cops conducting the arrest are expressing this much skepticism about the charges, you can surmise how a random jury pool would react. These charges were patently frivolous from the very start but setting that aside they don't even make sense from the political grandstanding perspective. Bewildering.
ymeskhout
3mo ago
Given the significant interest around the 2020 stolen election claims (definitely my favorite hobby horse topic), and the serious accusations that I have been weakmanning the overall category of election fraud claims, I would like to extend an open invitation to anyone interested in exposing the errors of my ways to a real-time discussion for a Bailey episode.
Here are the conditions I would suggest:
- Given the wide array of stolen election claims and our limited time on earth, you will have free reign to pick 2 or 3 of whatever you believe are the strongest claims worthy of attention, particularly if any of the claims are ones I have conspicuously ignored. Hopefully this will address any concerns that I'm weakmanning.
- Once you have the 2-3 topics chosen, you agree to share in advance all the evidence that you plan to rely upon to make your case so that I have a chance to look at it. Same obligation applies to me for anything I might rely on. I want to avoid anyone thinking that they were either surprised or caught off-guard, and it's also not interesting to listen to someone carefully read a 263-page PDF.
- In terms of number of participants, this might be best as me versus 3. Any more than that is prone to be too chaotic and too tedious to edit, and any fewer I'd be concerned of being insufficiently comprehensive about the topic.
- Everyone involved will have immediate access to everyone's raw recording to guard against any concerns of selective/misleading editing.
- Ideally, you're a bona fide believer (or at least genuinely believe the theories are sufficiently plausible) in the stolen election claims you're arguing for, rather than just someone who can competently steelman the arguments. I want to make sure that every claim is adequately defended.
- I don't intend enforcing any strict format or time limit, as it would be best to discuss each claim for as long as is necessary to ensure it all gets a fair shake.
Are any of the above unreasonable or unfair? Do you have any suggested additions/changes?
I've been trying to set a conversation like this for years but haven't found any takers. @Dean, @jfk, @motteposting are the ones I know are sufficiently motivated and informed about the topic, and whom I'd most look forward to dissecting this topic with. Feel free to nominate anyone else you think would be good.
Trump got hit by two gag orders from two different judges. The precedent in this area of law is severely underdeveloped, both because so few defendants get gagged, and of those who do very few have the resources or energy to mount an appeal. Jacob Sullum writes a great overview of the issue:
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is presiding over Donald Trump's trial on federal charges related to his attempted reversal of Joe Biden's 2020 election victory, yesterday imposed a gag order that bars the former president from "publicly targeting" witnesses, prosecutors, or court personnel. Trump lawyer John Lauro vigorously opposed the order on First Amendment grounds, saying it would stop his client from "speak[ing] truth to oppression." While that characterization exaggerates the order's impact, constraining the speech of a criminal defendant, especially one who is in the midst of a presidential campaign, does raise largely unsettled constitutional issues.
Chutkan's order was provoked by Trump's habit of vilifying anyone who crosses him, including Special Counsel Jack Smith ("deranged"), the prosecutors he oversees (a "team of thugs"), and Chutkan herself (a "highly partisan" and "biased, Trump Hating Judge"). "IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I'M COMING AFTER YOU!" Trump wrote on Truth Social after his indictment in this case. The next day, The New York Times notes, "a Texas woman left a voice mail message for Judge Chutkan, saying, 'If Trump doesn't get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you, so tread lightly.'"
So to avoid the common pitfalls in discussions like this, set aside Trump for a moment. Should judges have any authority to impose gag orders? If so, what limits should be in place? After working out the questions in theory, how does your position apply to Trump?
I think gag orders can be appropriate in a very limited set of circumstances. For example let's say a newspaper owner is charged with murder in a small town. He should always have the absolute and unrestricted right to discuss the allegations against him and mount a defense in public. There are some areas where it starts to get cloudy for me, like for example if he hires an investigator (legal & appropriate) to dig into the history of the main witness against him (legal & appropriate) and he gets his hands on her diary (potentially legal & potentially appropriate). He then spends the lead-up to the murder trial publishing massive coverage the lurid details of all her sex kinks and fantasies, which isn't implicated in the murder charges. To me this starts to look like witness tampering/intimidation, where the defendant is humiliating a witness with the intent to discourage her from giving testimony.
So my answer is here would be yes, judges can impose gag orders but they should be extremely narrow. The operating principle should be to always allow defendants to discuss the direct charges against them, including the ability to discredit witness credibility. There's a blurry line between when someone is discrediting a witness on relevant matters, and when they're just trying to make their life hell to discourage them from testifying. An example of this blurry line is what happened to SBF, where his pretrial release was revoked in part because he leaked Caroline Ellison's diary to the NYT and because he seemed to have been coordinating testimony with FTX's general counsel.
So with that out of the way, how does it apply to Trump? Judge Chutkan's order restricts him from making statements that "target" the prosecutor, court staff, and "reasonably foreseeable witnesses or the substance of their testimony". Practically speaking, it goes without saying that it's a terrible idea to talk shit about the court or prosecutor while your case(s) is pending. There are some obvious areas where Trump's commentary is inane and irrelevant, like posting a photo of a judge's law clerk and claiming she's "Schumer's girlfriend", or posting about the prosecutor's family members. Discrediting witnesses is harder to draw a clean line on, because again there's a gradient between discrediting and intimidating. I think Trump should have the absolute and unrestricted right to discuss any of his charges and discredit any evidence and witnesses against him. While I disagree with that part of the ruling, I don't know how I would rephrase that clause, and so my reaction is that in these close cases we should default to allowing speech rather than restricting it.
Edit: @guajalote changed my mind on the propriety of Judge Engoron's order prohibiting "personal attacks on my members of my court staff". I agree that criticizing government officials should always be protected, even if the speech is targeting irrelevant or uninvolved individuals. A narrower order prohibiting incitement would've been more appropriate.
ymeskhout
9mo ago
Why Cross-Examination Is So Damn Great
There's an obvious solace within the written medium. You get to carve out a space safe from constraints and take as much as you need to fully express yourself. Words are neat! I mean, just look at the torrential avalanche I regularly shit out just on my own.
But still, I don't want people to forget about the benefits to real-time adversarial conversations, benefits which cannot be as easily replicated with writing. I recently wrote (ahem) about how humans have this nasty aversion to admitting error. You'll rarely ever get someone willing to outright say "I am a liar" and the roomy comfort that we all love so much about text also provides bad faith actors the ability to build up elaborate defensive ramparts in peace. Nevertheless, even in instances where a smoking gun confession is missing, I cite to a few examples to outline how you can still construct a damning indictment using only a few minor inference hops:
Ehrlich is playing a seemingly uncomfortable game of Twister here, but his behavior makes perfect sense if you read intelligence and agency behind his decisions. The only explanation for the indirect, tangential, and collateral measurements is that Ehrlich knows that a direct measurement will not be favorable to his pet theory. He does not believe in truth, but rather believes in belief as the kids say, and he's not willing to jeopardize it.
Of course, this gets way easier to accomplish in a real-time confrontation. Chalk it up to the stereotype but yes, I fucking love cross-examination and I want to explain why. Lessons From The Screenplay had a fantastic video analyzing the climactic cross-examination from the movie A Few Good Men while using the vocabulary normally reserved to discuss physical duels. The story's hook is watching the military lawyer protagonist (Kaffee) figure out how he can elicit an outright confession from a notoriously disciplined and experienced commander (Jessep) using only the 'weapons' found within a courtroom. The primary elegance of cross-examination as a weapon stems from the fact that, when done successfully, you can fabricate a solid cage for your opponents using only their own words as ingredients. Kaffee does exactly this by asking questions that appear superficially innocent but, when joined together, weld into a formidable trap Jessep is unable to escape.
I want to highlight a few other recent examples, running the gamut across the political spectrum. My aim here is not to ignite a debate about the specific issue that happens to be discussed (though a toe dip is inevitable) but rather to comment on the rhetorical maneuvers at play and see what lessons we can impart. And a strong word of caution is warranted here: It's true that some this veers dangerously close to mind-reading, which is obviously prone to confirmation bias and erroneous conclusions. With that in mind my goal is to ensure that any conclusion I reach is both solidly grounded within the available evidence and appropriately qualified (with any alternative explanations highlighted). I think the utility is worth the risk of error, and the harm can be mitigated by a commitment to acknowledging one's own mistakes.
First up is Nathan Robinson interviewing Christopher Rufo, specifically the part where they discuss whether the Founding Fathers were racist hypocrites — extolling the virtues of liberty while also owning slaves:
Robinson: You don't believe that Thomas Jefferson was a racist?
Rufo: It's not true. It's such a lazy reduction.
Robinson: Do you want me to quote him? [...]
Rufo: So I think to go back and say, "Oh, they're all racist." It's just so lazy.
Robinson: But it's true. It's not lazy, it's just a fact. [...] Again, it seems a way to not acknowledge that the country was founded by people who held Black people in chains and thought they were inferior.
Rufo: I acknowledge that. That's a fact. That's a historical fact. I don't see how anyone would deny that. [...] But to say that they are racist is a different claim because you're taking an ideological term and then back imposing it on them to discredit their work advancing equality. And so I think that I reject it in a linguistic frame, while acknowledging the factual basis that there was slavery.
Robinson: "The blacks are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind." That's Jefferson. Is that not racist?
Rufo: I disagree with that statement. I don't know what you want me to say.
Robinson: I want you to say it's racist.
Rufo: Saying "oh, we're going to cherry pick one sentence."
Robinson: I want you to tell the truth. I want you to tell the truth about this man.
So Rufo finds himself in a bit of a pickle. He's fully aware that he can't say "Thomas Jefferson, the man who believed blacks were inferior and held 130 of them in bondage, was not a racist" with a straight face. But simultaneously he also expends a lot of acrobatic energy trying to dodge answering a straightforward question. The italicized portion of his statement above explains why. Although Rufo has made his career as a stalwart opponent of Critical Race Theory (however you define it) he reveals that he might accept one of its core tropes — that the United States is indelibly and irredeemably tainted by its original sin of racism. Notice that Robinson did not ask "Should we discredit Jefferson's work in advancing equality?" he simply asked if Jefferson was racist. But Rufo looks past Robinson's question and sees the warning beacons coming up on the horizon, and so he charges forward in an effort to preemptively maintain a defensive line on ideas he suspects would next be attacked.
According to his own words, Rufo divulges that he thinks racism is potentially grounds to have your accomplishments discredited. If you accept that framework then it makes sense why he would expend so much energy avoiding admitting that Jefferson was racist; the fear is that this concession would cause the rest of his favored structure to crumble. It's not likely we would've gotten this admission in writing; he had to be cornered by his own statements in real-time for this to slip.
I am going to now praise Tim Pool of all people. A few months ago he invited Lance/TheSerfsTV to his livestream to be grilled on a range of topics. On the abortion question, some of the more enthusiastic pro-choice activists have staked their position on legalizing elective abortion not just at the "viability" line (~22 weeks) but up until the millisecond the fetus exists the birth canal. Lance affirms this is his position, claiming that the mother should always maintain full and absolute autonomy over what happens with the pregnancy. But as the real-time discussion evinced, it's not clear if he actually believes this:
Seamus: You believe that the moment the child is outside of the birth canal, that they are now endowed with human rights.
Lance: Yes.
Seamus: However, when they are inside of the mother, literally anything you do to them is acceptable because they're inside of the mother.
Lance: Oh no, I don't think anything's acceptable, but I think the mother should still have the choice — ultimate authority over what happens to her body. [crosstalk]
Tim: Wait wait wait hold on hold on. What about meth?
Lance: Like she should be allowed to do meth? I think if someone is doing meth while they're pregnant, that it is completely acceptable for [child protective services to get involved].
Tim: Woah but that's her body though.
Lance: Yeah it's her body.
Tim: She wants to do meth, what's the big deal?
Lance: The big deal is that she's intentionally trying to kill a child. [flashes of cosmic realization]
Tim: Hold on there a minute.
Lance: Yeah. And I see where we're going.
Tim: I don't- I don't understand what you're saying. It's her body. If she wants to do meth, what's the problem?
Lance: [pregnant pause] Well first off doing meth is illegal period. Doesn't matter if you're doing it with a child or without a child.
Such a spectacular reveal would not have made it through the cognitive filters had it not taken place in real time. If someone's position is that a pregnant woman can do whatever she wants with her body, up to and including terminating the life of the fetus, it logically follows that such an expansive authority would also include less fatal harms. But as Lance discloses in the moment, he doesn't believe that a pregnant woman has the right to take meth and so he offers a justification that is on its own eminently reasonable, but only after it's too late does he realize the self-inflicted rhetorical leg sweep he tripped into.
The rest of the conversation gets bogged down on the legality of certain drugs but to Lance's credit, he does eventually bite the bullet and concede that although he may not agree with the decision he still believes a pregnant woman has the right to take heroin. The eventual consistency is commendable, but the fact that he so reflexively resorted to the commanding ethos of "do not intentionally kill a child" should call into question how much he really believes in the "absolute dominion of the mother" position he insisted upon.
Lastly is our old friend Meghan Murphy again. I already wrote extensively about the numerous logical fallacies deployed in her conversation with Aella on the ethics of the sex industry. Murphy also discussed the same topic with professional debate bro Destiny and he describes the fundamental issue after she had walked out in frustration:
This is what somebody will do, they'll say "I don't like cheeseburgers, because they have meat, the buns look orange, and because they go in my mouth." Then I'll say what if the bun was blue? And they'll go like "I still wouldn't like it." Ok what if the bun was blue and you ate them with your hands? "I still wouldn't like that." Ok what if the bun was blue, you ate them with your hands, and it didn't have meat or whatever? and "I still wouldn't like that." Ok then why the fuck would you tell me all these reasons why you don't like it when none of them are actually important to why you don't like it?
That's a fair question! If someone says they don't like X because of reasons A/B/C, and you get rid of A/B/C but they still don't like X, then it inevitably follows they have other reasons for disliking X they're not divulging. What Destiny has outlined here is an effective method to uncovering pretextual justifications — the false reasons someone provides as a bid to keep the true reasons hidden (likely because they're too unpalatable or unpersuasive to say out loud).
Destiny spends an agonizing amount of time trying to get Murphy to explain what her precise objections to the sex industry are and gets nowhere, and their final exchange illustrates why. They're discussing one of Murphy's argument that the sex trade is unethical because of women's particular vulnerability during penetrative sex:
Destiny: I understand that women are particularly vulnerable during sex, that's probably true. How do you feel about male prostitutes then? Do you think that it would be ethical for men to do sex work?
Murphy: Um, what I don't think is ethical is again for a man to pay a woman or a man for sex.
[crosstalk & sidetracking]
Destiny: So I'm going to ask again: is it unethical to pay men for sex? If a male wants to do pornography or if a male wants to sell his body for sex? Is that unethical?
Murphy: Yeah, I think it's unethical to pay anyone for sex.
Destiny: Okay. Then the vulnerability and the penetration part don't matter then. I don't know why you bring that up if a guy can't even sell his body for sex then—
Murphy: Well he's being penetrated also, no?
Destiny: But what if it's a male prostitute that has women but not with a strap-on?
Murphy: Oh I mean that's a real common thing eh? How many women do know who have ever paid for sex with a male prostitute? I mean, I think that's unethical too.
Destiny: Ok! That's what I'm getting at! I'm just trying to figure out why you think it's unethical!
[more crosstalk & yelling]
Murphy: Every time I start explaining my arguments you interrupt me and act completely exasperated because I'm not saying what you want me to say. You want to frame the conversation in a way that I am not interested in framing the conversation. Like the way that I want to talk about this is not how you want to talk about it and you can't accept that. The way I'm looking at this is not the way that you're looking at it but you don't really want to hear how I'm looking at it. You want to have the conversation you want to have so there's not really any point to this. You don't want to learn anything you don't want to hear, so you are just annoyed that I'm saying something you don't want me to say.
[more crosstalk & yelling]
Destiny: I'm not showing off to anybody! I'm just trying to have a conversation, I don't even know why you're against sex work! That's what I'm trying to figure out right now.
Murphy: I appreciate the big show that you're having but I don't want to continue this if you're going to keep interrupting me.
Take note of the italicized responses; that kind of evasion is not a generally pervasive reaction for Murphy. She speaks for a living and within other moments in this debate and elsewhere, Murphy has demonstrated a clear ability to confidently answers questions with immediacy and relevancy. It can't be just a coincidence when acrobatics are prompted only by these vexing questions.
Murphy's responses make a lot more sense if you assume that her true objections to the sex industry are really borne out of an aesthetic or disgust aversion, and specifically only when men are the patrons. Murphy is evidently aware that this argument can't be spoken out loud because it's likely too vacant to be generally persuasive, so she instead cycles through a rolodex of pretextual (read: fake) arguments that she's willing to unhesitantly discard whenever they risk becoming a liability to her core thesis. That's why she dodges the male prostitute hypothetical to instead reiterate her dislike of men paying women for sex. That's why she laughs off the female client hypothetical as implausible instead of grappling with its implications.
I'm comfortable accusing Murphy of dishonesty here because her acrobatic evasions are selectively deployed in response to concrete threats to her position, rather than the result of random chance.
It's unfortunate that human beings sometimes lie, and it's too bad that they also refuse to admit mistakes. Such is life. Given the examples I outlined above, some generalizable heuristics is to be suspicious of anyone who refuses to answer straightforward questions (in writing or otherwise), or who refuses to engage in anything but the most sympathetic of conversations. A lot of our contentious interactions have and continue to migrate over towards asynchronous text exchanges, but hopefully I've made a case for why talking is still cool. Also I host The Bailey podcast and I'm always delighted to talk to people I vehemently disagree with, so reach out if you want to butt heads!
As a parting bonus, here's the journalist Beth Rigby interviewing Iain Anderson, chair of the LGBT organization Stonewall. It's quite the bloodbath.
ymeskhout
1yr ago
2020 stolen election time! There's been some rather big developments with my favorite cute little hobby horse. I haven't had the time to make a deep-dive write-up, but it's has already been extensively reported on elsewhere (e.g. this post by Jacob Sullum). To summarize, Dominion voting systems sued Fox News (and Newsmax, and OAN) for defamation. Dominion has been past the discovery stage for more than a year now but their filings only recently became public and, no way to say this lightly, it's been extremely humiliating for Fox. Tons of text messages from the big names (Carlson, Hannity, etc.) either talking shit about how crazy Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani are, or (especially for Lou Dobbs and Maria Bartiromo) credulously accepting and repeating the stolen election theories.
One especially funny example involved Sidney Powell credulously forwarding an email to Bartiromo from a complete rando claiming they had "Election Fraud Info". In that same email, the anonymous rando claimed that they got their information from their dreams, that the wind tells them they're a ghost, and that Justice Scalia was murdered during a human hunting expedition. As evidenced by the filings she submitted to court, Powell's skepticism faculties appear to be basically non-existent, and the fact that so many people took her seriously at first is a good illustration of the pitfalls of siloed reasoning.
Maybe the most damning revelation of how Fox was operating (from both a legal liability as well as a journalistic ethics perspective) is how they treated their fact-checking process. When Fox reporter Jacqui Heinrich tweeted on November 12 that "there is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised" Carlson texted Hannity "Please get her fired. It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It's measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke." If Dominion needed to prove the actual malice (and it's not yet clear if they would need to) in a defamation case, they couldn't have asked for better evidence.
There isn't much for me to say that I haven't said before. My operating theory has long been that some people seemed to earnestly believe the crazy theories they were spouting about Hugo Chavez or whatever (e.g. Powell, Giuliani, maybe Dobbs) while many others were just pretending to entertain it because it was in their best financial interests (e.g. Carlson, Hannity, Murdoch, etc.) and the text messages confirm this. To Carlson's credit though, he endured a lot of negative pushback from his criticism of Powell.
I've already done my hand-wringing on how the media seems to love shooting itself in the foot, except it was framed in context of how liberal outlets fucked up the Covington debacle from four years ago. The Dominion lawsuit demonstrates the problem behind audience capture; Fox pundits and reporters had to deal with a credible financial pressure to cater to the crazy fringes of their audience for fear of losing them to their less scrupulous competitors. If so, it would be a demand-side problem. I'm not sure if the problem with liberal media fuck-ups follows the same framework, but I'm open to arguments. My general impression there is that the call is coming from inside the house: liberal journalists too afraid of their fellow cohort to break ranks. I suppose a good test-case scenario would be to see how NYT's current "trans youth reporting controversy" plays out. They obviously already got a severe amount of criticism from the activist fringe, but would a significant portion of their audience care? And if so, where would they go?
One last question: has anyone here changed their opinion on the 2020 stolen election theories?
ymeskhout
1yr ago
From Quillette, an MIT professor describes the outraged reaction from fellow philosophers when he argued that a woman is an adult human female.
Back in 2019 Alex Byrne wrote one of my favorite essays on the incoherence of gender identity and as far as I can tell no one has managed to offer a solid refutation. Byrne follows up by discussing the difficulties he's had in getting a chapter and a book published on the topic, and his travails are equal parts infuriating and hilarious. For example, consider how a fellow colleague was treated once the crowd got wind that her book might be a bit too critical:
The imminent publication of Holly Lawford-Smith's Gender-Critical Feminism was announced that same month, and almost immediately no less than two petitions of complaint appeared, one from the OUP USA Guild (the union representing the New York staff of OUP), and the other from "members of the international scholarly community" with some connection to OUP. The latter petition expressed the scholars' "profound disappointment" at OUP's forthcoming publication of Lawford-Smith's book, and suggested various "measures the press could undertake to offset the harm done by the publication of this work." OUP needed to confess to a mortal sin and repent. None of the scholars had read the book that they so confidently denounced (since no copy of the book was available for them to read), but this is a mere detail.
This trend of protesting a book before anyone even reads it will never stop being funny to me. Byrne expected his book to go through several revisions and by his account he was happy to accomodate feedback. His reviewers, though, were not:
Publishers often commission reviews of a manuscript from (anonymous) experts in the relevant field, and I had to go through that time-consuming process yet again. It was also rather risky, since—as by now you are well aware—the experts in the philosophy of sex and gender tend to brook no dissent. Responding to the (hopeful) publisher’s question, “Will it make for an outstanding book in your view, or simply a work of average quality?”, one expert wrote: “Neither. It is of extremely poor quality.” Another question: “What would you highlight as the ONE feature about this book that might make you recommend it over other titles available?” “None. It shouldn’t be published.” Lastly: “Is there anything superfluous that could be left out?” “Everything—see above.”
Of course, there is nothing wrong with harsh criticism; I have doled out plenty of that myself. Maybe my book deserves it. But a reviewer is expected to give reasons for her verdict—that helps both the author and the publisher. If I had made, as the reviewer said, “sweeping claims” that are “often false,” or had “seriously misunderstood” arguments on the other side, it would be a simple matter to give examples. But the reviewer supplied none: not a single quotation, page number, or chapter reference. From my experience publishing in this particular area of philosophy, this lack of engagement was par for the course. In fact, I found the reviewer’s hyperbolic report reassuring: if I had made mistakes, at least they were not easy to identify.
"What is wrong with my argument?"
"Everything."
"Can you be more specific?"
"Just all of it, it's just bad."
This is the kind of sophistry one would expect from random online arguments, and I'm sure you can identity similar instances even in this very forum. The take-away I'm generally left with is that Byrne's interlocutors are an amalgamation of intellectually fragile individuals. Conclusory statements rather than specifics are a transparent indication that you are aware your arguments will crumble when exposed to a light breeze. Protesting rather than arguing are a transparent indication that you are unable to defend your ideas on their own merits.
All this seems painfully obvious to me as an outsider, and I'm baffled why anyone engages in this ablution pantomime. Who could it possibly convince?
Freddie DeBoer recently put out a banger of a post called "A Conversation About Crime" about the absolute intellectual void behind the "defund the police" movement. The whole thing is worth reading in full, but I'll include the parting shot here:
Look, I’m gonna level with you here. Like the vast majority of leftists who have been minted since Occupy Wall Street, my principles, values, and policy preferences don’t stem from a coherent set of moral values, developed into an ideology, which then suggests preferred policies. At all. That requires a lot of reading and I’m busy organizing black tie fundraisers at work and bringing Kayleigh and Dakota to fencing practice. I just don’t have the time. So my politics have been bolted together in a horribly awkward process of absorbing which opinions are least likely to get me screamed at by an online activist or mocked by a podcaster. My politics are therefore really a kind of self-defensive pastiche, an odd Frankensteining of traditional leftist rhetoric and vocabulary from Ivy League humanities departments I don’t understand. I quote Marx, but I got the quote from Tumblr. I cite Gloria Anzaldua, but only because someone on TikTok did it first. I support defunding the police because in 2020, when the social and professional consequences for appearing not to accept social justice norms were enormous, that was the safest place for me to hide. I maintain a vague attachment to police and prison abolition because that still appears to be the safest place for me to hide. I vote Democrat but/and call myself a socialist because that is the safest place for me to hide. I’m not a bad person; I want freedom and equality. I want good things for everyone. But politics scare and confuse me. I just can’t stand to lose face, so I have to present all of my terribly confused ideals with maximum superficial confidence. If you probe any of my specific beliefs with minimal force, they will collapse, as those “beliefs” are simply instruments of social manipulation. I can’t take my kid to the Prospect Park carousel and tell the other parents that I don’t support police abolition. It would damage my brand and I can’t have that. And that contradiction you detected, where I support maximum forgiveness for crime but no forgiveness at all for being offensive? For me, that’s no contradiction at all. Those beliefs are not part of a functioning and internally-consistent political system but a potpourri of deracinated slogans that protect me from headaches I don’t need. I never wanted to be a leftist. I just wanted to take my justifiable but inchoate feelings of dissatisfaction with the way things are and wrap them up into part of the narrative that I tell other people about myself, the narrative that I’m a kind good worthwhile enlightened person. And hey, in college that even got me popularity/a scholarship/pussy! Now I’m an adult and I have things to protect, and well-meaning but fundamentally unserious activists have created an incentive structure that mandates that I pretend to a) understand what “social justice” means and b) have the slightest interest in working to get it. I just want to chip away at my student loan debt and not get my company’s Slack turned against me. I need my job/I need my reputation/I need to not have potential Bumble dates see anything controversial when they Google me. Can you throw me a bone? Neither I nor 99% of the self-identified socialists in this country believe that there is any chance whatsoever that we’ll ever take power, and honestly, you’re harshing our vibe. So can you please fuck off and let us hide behind the BLM signs that have been yellowing in our windows for three years?
Does Trump sue just to fundraise?
Throughout the early history of the American legal system, if you wanted to sue anyone in court you had to follow this arcane and inconsistent labyrinth of common law pleading rules. What we today generically call "lawsuits" were pointlessly split up into "actions at law" or "bills in equity" or whatever, all of which had different pedantic rules depending on the jurisdiction you're in (for a long time, federal courts dealing with state law had to apply procedural rules that were in effect at the time the state joined the Union). When the Federal Rules of Civil Procedure were first created in 1938, the intent was to get rid of the stodgy traditional requirements in favor of something comparatively more informal. As reflected in Rule 8, all you really need to file a lawsuit is a "a short and plain statement of the claim showing that the pleader is entitled to relief" in your complaint.
This "permissive" paradigm was put to the test in front of the same guy who was responsible for writing those new rules, Judge Charles E. Clark. The 1944 case Dioguardi v. Durning is a fun read, and involves a handwritten lawsuit filed by a guy with a very questionable grasp on the English language complaining about a customs official seizing "tonic" bottles "of great value" imported from Italy. Clark ruled that "however inartistically they may be stated" the guy was clear enough to meet the new pleading standards. For a more modern example from a much more complicated case, see the complaint that was filed in the Tesla Securities lawsuit (I know nothing about this case, just picked it at random for an example). Despite the complex subject matter and the number of people involved, the complaint is only 58 pages and is structured logically enough to make it relatively easy to follow. It establishes why the court should hear the case, some background facts, and then articulates in clear detail who harmed who and why the court should do something about it.
In contrast, compare the lawsuit that Lance Armstrong filed against the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency in 2012. The Judge took one look at the PDF, saw that it was 80 pages long, and promptly dismissed it with a "I ain't reading all that" ruling:
Armstrong's complaint is far from short, spanning eighty pages and containing 261 numbered paragraphs, many of which have multiple subparts. Worse, the bulk of these paragraphs contain "allegations" that are wholly irrelevant to Armstrong's claims and which, the Court must presume, were included solely to increase media coverage of this case, and to incite public opinion against Defendants. See, e.g., Compl. [#1] ¶ 10 ("USADA's kangaroo court proceeding would violate due process even if USADA had jurisdiction to pursue its charges against Mr. Armstrong."). Indeed, vast swaths of the complaint could be removed entirely, and most of the remaining paragraphs substantially reduced, without the loss of any legally relevant information. Nor are Armstrong's claims "plain": although his causes of action are, thankfully, clearly enumerated, the excessive preceding rhetoric makes it difficult to relate them to any particular factual support. This Court is not inclined to indulge Armstrong's desire for publicity, self-aggrandizement, or vilification of Defendants, by sifting through eighty mostly unnecessary pages in search of the few kernels of factual material relevant to his claims.
Since lawsuits are already a vehicle to air grievances, it's understandable when clients/lawyers try to sneak in as many parting shots as possible. Lawsuits are endowed with an aura of gravity and seriousness that a bare press release or op-ed outlining the same grievances would lack. Unless things get *too *egregious, there's not a whole lot a judges can do to stop the practice of trying to disguise a press release under a legitimate lawsuit costume.
Back in March of last year, Trump filed a wide-ranging 108-page lawsuit against Hillary Clinton and several dozen other defendants. You can read the entire lawsuit yourself here but the basic allegation is defamation over claims/insinuations that Trump colluded with Russia during the 2016 election. The complaint was later "amended" in June to include yet more defendants, and ballooned to 193 pages in the process.
The Trump v. Clinton et al lawsuit eventually got dismissed last September. For a full accounting as to why you can read the 65-page opinion but the short summary is the lawsuit was a confusing constellation of disconnected political grievances Trump had smooshed together into a laundry list of allegations that could not conceivably be supported by any existing law. For example, Trump's lawyer Alina Habba alleged malicious prosecution without a prosecution, alleged RICO violations without predicate offenses, alleged obstruction of justice without a judicial proceeding, cited directly to reports that contradicted their claims, and on and on. None of these problems are supposed to be common knowledge, but it is *very *basic stuff any lawyer filing a federal lawsuit should either know or research before they step foot on a rake. But when the defendants in this case pointed out the problems, Habba's response was to just double down instead of correct them. My favorite tidbit was when they justified why one of the 30+ defendants, a New York resident, was being sued in a Florida court (even federal courts need personal jurisdiction established) by claiming that defendant should've known that the false information they were spreading would end up in Florida, and also that they "knew that Florida is a state in the United States which was an important one."
When someone is served with any lawsuit, they have an obligation to respond or risk losing the entire case by default. In very rare circumstances (namely with handwritten complaints from prisoners with nothing better to do), a lawsuit is so patently bogus that a defendant can sit on their laurels doing nothing, confident it will get dismissed without them having to lift a finger. Before Trump's lawsuit was dismissed, a veritable legal machinery from the 30+ individuals/corporations sued whirred into action, ginning up an eye-watering amount of billable hours in the process to investigate and respond to the allegations. The judge in this case was seriously annoyed by all this and on Thursday she imposed sanctions by ordering Habba and Trump to pay everyone's legal bills, totalling almost $938,000. You can read the 46-page opinion here.
I've written before about pretextual excuses, such as when NYC *claimed *their employee vaccine mandate was for public health reasons, but then implemented exceptions that were inconsistent with their lofty claim. I argued it's reasonable to conclude NYC was lying. Similarly, Habba may claim as a lawyer that her lawsuit was to pursue valid legal remedies on behalf of her client, but when her efforts are completely inconsistent with that goal, it's perfectly reasonable to conclude she's lying. If valid legal remedies was the real goal of the suit, even someone like me --- with no experience civil litigation --- can contemplate trivial changes which would have significantly improved its success (most obviously don't wait past the statute of limitations, don't try to sue 31 different entities all at once, don't try to sue in a court that lacks jurisdiction, don't try to sue fictitious entities, etc.). So if that wasn't the real goal, what was?
The judge in this case strongly suspects the real purpose of the (bogus) lawsuit was to use it as a vehicle for fundraising. The vast scope of characters sued matches with this explanation because while a disparate cast of defendants legally frustrated the lawsuit in the courtroom, it does make for a better headline when soliciting donations (Clinton! Adam Schiff! James Comey! Lisa Page! Peter Strzok!). Trump has a pattern of filing frivolous lawsuits (like suing the Pulitzer Prize Board for defamation for awarding NYT and WaPo) and then following up with "breaking news alerts" soliciting donations for his Save America PAC, so the timing matches up. The fundraising efforts appear to be working well, with the PAC having about $70 million on hand as of last fall.
The sanction this judge imposed is the highest by far imposed on any of Trump's attorneys. It's possible this is a coincidence, but the day after the sanctions, Trump voluntarily dismissed the lawsuit he filed in Florida (??) against New York's Attorney General. I'm assuming the judge hopes the $1 million penalty will discourage further waste of time for the courts and other potential defendants, but the fundraising mechanism I described feeds itself. The higher the sanction imposed, the more urgent the breaking news alert begging for money will be.
=edited
ymeskhout
1yr ago
So it looks like Elon Musk officially owns all of Twitter now, and he's already fired the CEO, CFO, and policy chief. I don't have any strong opinions on this, but does anyone want to stake some predictions?
Musk presents himself as a free speech absolutist, which is encouraging to me, but I'd be concerned about the conflict of interest. I anticipate there will be some accusations of throttling unfavorable opinions about either him or his companies (RIP rogue driverless Tesla videos). I think the tension between unrestricted speech and a quality user experience will continue to be a problem, as I can't identify an obvious solution. Blue checkmarks are making hilariously cataclysmic remarks but I predict Twitter will remain a favored haven for the journalist class.
ymeskhout
11mo ago
I've been ruminating on a question about Trump's prosecution. One of the common arguments I've come across is that prosecuting Trump is improper because it's just political retaliation falsely disguised as a neutral and dispassionate application of the law. In support of this argument, you could cite the fact that the apparent mishandling of government records occurs fairly regularly by similarly-positioned politicians (Clinton, Biden, Pence, etc.) and yet its enforcement appears to be selectively doled out. This is potentially also supported by the fact that, speeding tickets notwithstanding, no other US president (former or sitting) has ever been charged for anything before. The fact that US institutions chose to break such a long-standing norm at this particular moment seems a bit too much of a coincidence to believe it was done with honest motivations.
Assuming all of the above is true, are there any limiting principles? Until something happens for the first time, it remains by definition "unprecedented", so if your rule is based solely on precedence then nothing would ever be allowed to happen unless it has already happened before which doesn't seem workable. Another consideration also is just because something hasn't happened for a very a long time, it doesn't mean it accidentally created an inviolable precedent that can never be broken now. For example, the crime of piracy is one of the few specifically mentioned in the Constitution and it used to be regularly prosecuted way back in the day but there was a very long lull before the feds dusted it off to go after some Somalis.
I don't think anyone would agree that a permanent bar was created, because that would bestow elected officials and political candidates the extra benefit of potentially perpetual & absolute immunity from all criminal liability, including for conduct that happens after they leave office. In its most absurd implementation, this hypothetical system would allow any criminal a "get out of jail" card just by declaring election candidacy.
So if the longstanding norm against prosecution can indeed be broken, then under which circumstances? For Trump's supporters, I suppose one possible answer is that he has been the target of such a relentless and unprecedented avalanche of (presumably bad faith) lawfare — Russiagate, impeachments, etc. — that trust in the system has been depleted to the point that all action against him should be assumed to be ill-disguised political retaliation as a rule. Assuming that's true, then what? Should the rule be that other politicians can be prosecuted but that Trump should have a carve-out in consideration of the unusually aggressive persecution he had to endure? If so, how serious of a crime would this cover? How long should this immunity last for? Should everyone who faces relentless persecution be afforded similar benefits?
The Jewish Conspiracy To Change My Mind
I never had much of an opinion on the whole Israel-Palestinian affair, because — true to my brand — I avoid opining on what I know nothing about. My horrified reaction to Hamas's attacks morphed into existential despondency when I saw others cheering on the massacres with inexplicable glee. My curiosity was piqued, so I read up on the topic with the specific goal of understanding what could motivate joy as a response to carnage. I expected a heavy slog and wrenching ethical dilemmas, all submerged within murky ambiguity. Instead, I was very surprised at how lucid the delineations of the conflict were, and how lopsided the moral clarity was.
I very quickly shifted from 'ignorant agnosticism' towards generally favoring Israel's position on the matter (I can't recall ever changing my mind on an issue so dramatically). I don't want to turn this into a "midwit deludes himself into thinking he's a savant after some Wikipedia perusal" meme — I'm absolutely no expert, but I can't grasp what I'm missing.
I'll start with my opinion on various facets of the conflict, and then finish off with some theories I have for why this issue generates such implacable disagreement.
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Motte-and-Bailey: I admit, I never knew what 'Zionist' meant except as a grave denunciation yet the Zionist movement has been fairly transparent about its goals from its beginning in the 19th century. You could categorize its aim across a spectrum, simplified from least to most radical: 1) Jewish homeland somewhere,[1] 2) Jewish homeland somewhere in the Levant, and 3) Exclusive and total Jewish domination of the entire Holy Land. Both pro & anti-Zionism labels have a strategic ambiguity that can be intentionally levered by any extremist wishing to blend in the crowd. There's a similar dynamic with the Palestinian chant 'From the river to the sea', because is it calling for totally and completely erasing Israel from the map? Or is it simply advocating for a coexisting independent Palestine in both the West Bank (river) and Gaza (sea)? Whatever you want! I see the motivations for a Jewish homeland in the Levant to be sound and understandable. The scattered Jewish diaspora suffered unrelenting oppression across millenia virtually anywhere they went, culminating in some particularly nasty pogroms within the Russian Empire in the late 19th century. The general land borders the Zionists agreed upon weren't pulled out of thin air, and although the-land-formerly-known-as-Canaan exchanged bloody hands multiple times, the area historically represented the only cogent Jewish political entities to have ever existed. Zionist migration had already begun in earnest throughout the early 20th century, and the horrors of the Holocaust only further emphasized the necessity for a Jewish state.
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Palestinian Land: The area was already inhabited by Arab Muslims by the start of early Zionist migration. The Arabs too have a historical claim to the area and also benefited from being last in the very long list of adverse possession feuds. If a stranger shows up to your figurative house and suggests taking only 20% in response to your attempts to evict them, it's not unreasonable to tell them to fuck off. The Zionists had way more of a diplomatic bargaining chip after the Holocaust, but either way it wasn't unreasonable for the Arabs to reject ceding 56% of the land that was Mandatory Palestine. I don't want to frame this as a "shoulda negotiated" fable, but the practical outcome of the ensuing 1948 war resulted in the creation of Israel with about 78% of the territory. It's reasonable for any loser of a war to hold a grudge against their conquerors.
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The Nakba: The human toll of the 1948 war on the Palestinians shouldn't be diminished or overlooked. The war resulted in around 25,000 total dead and the displacement of 700,000 Palestinians, an event forever commemorated by the Arabic word for "catastrophe" — Nakba. Displacement doesn't just mean a change of address; it was a wrenching life upheaval. The Nakba led to squalid refugee camps, outbreaks of diseases like typhoid, and the erasure of villages that had stood for centuries. Material and immaterial culture — homes, orchards, community centers, dialects, local traditions— were lost, perhaps irretrievably. This was very Bad and unfortunately all too common.
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Vendetta Forever: Human history is rife with violence, often fueled by ancestral grudges. There's nothing wrong with suggesting that some blood feuds should have been abandoned long ago. Next door to Israel, the ongoing Syrian Civil War has a death toll (500k-600k dead) nearing that of the Nakba's displacement figure, alongside a global refugee crisis.[2] After 12 years of destructive stalemates, the best outcome Syrians can hope for is to solidify the current status quo; it's not plausible for any side to conclusively end the conflict without additional bloodbath. But imagine a Syrian refugee in Turkey disavowing this hypothetical ceasefire and instead pledging a lifelong vendetta — as well as the lives of all his future descendants — fixated on reclaiming his family's vineyard in Homs from Al-Assad's forces. The wounds are still fresh but steering someone away from such an insane and self-destructive fanaticism isn't unreasonable. And yet, that's not the reception Palestinian grievances from 1948 land grabs receive, despite their much older expiration date. I don't want to turn this into a catastrophe pageant competition; we can acknowledge the suffering someone's ancestors endured while also reminding those living that their unyielding attachment to past vendettas has only brought further ruin to themselves and their families. The fanatical obsession over relatively resource-barren land simply cannot be explained by just tallying up the generational wealth the expelled Palestinians lost out on; there's much more than is admitted to here (more on this later).
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Arab Humiliation: After the 1948 war, Israel's borders were left on a standstill with an armistice agreement with Egypt taking over Gaza, and Jordan grabbing the West Bank. It's tediously irrelevant to litigate the 'who started it?' chain, but Israel (along with the UK and France) did indeed invade Egypt in 1956 over the Suez Crisis, though they pulled out after a week and Egypt agreed not to block their shipping lanes through the Straits of Tiran. In 1967, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria planned a surprise invasion against Israel but instead got absolutely trounced in what was named the Six Day War. Their invasion didn't just spectacularly fail on its intended merits, but everyinvading country lost significant territory to Israel's counter-offensive (Golan Heights from Syria, West Bank from Jordan, and Gaza Strip plus the entire fucking Sinai Peninsula from Egypt). The Arab League convened three months later and doubled down on their vendetta against Israel, issuing the Three Noes Resolution against Israel: No peace, no negotiation, no recognition. Not content with their first military invasion, they tried another surprise attack six years later in 1973. The Yom Kippur War wasn't as quick, taking slightly less than three weeks to resolve in yet another Israeli victory. It's hard to overstate just how much of an existential humiliation for the Arab world this time period was. The Arabs were ostensibly blessed by Allah Himself, and fighting in their home desert turf, and yet they couldn't put a dent on the Yahud? Knowing full well they couldn't match the Jews in conventional warfare, much of the Palestinian cause shifted towards "unconventional" methods of indiscriminate rocket attacks, suicide bombings, & kidnappings. It's reasonable to discount the Arab countries' self-serving claims about being motivated by the plight of the Palestinian people,[3] because instead of assisting them directly they squandered tens of thousands of lives on foolish military adventures.
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Israel Sometimes Lies: Israel, like virtually any other government, has a history and incentives to lie about its actions. The most notable example is the 1996 Qana massacre where IDF lobbed artillery shells at a UN compound in Southern Lebanon, killing over 100 Lebanese civilians. The IDF has maintained it was all totally an accident and initially repeatedly denied they had any reconnaissance drones in the area, until serendipitous UN footage proved otherwise. In 2009, Israel initially denied ever deploying white phosphorus in Gaza, until the video evidence from journalists on the ground was too overwhelming to ignore. In the current phase of the conflict, Israel is simultaneously asserting that 1) Hamas militants were able to break through a heavily-monitored security fence and go on a rampage because of an unprecedented intelligence failure and 2) Israel has the capabilities to execute targeted strikes against Hamas leadership while minimizing civilian casualties within the urban jungles of Gaza. It's perfectly reasonable to be skeptical of any self-serving claims made by Israel absent any corroborating evidence.
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Orthogonal Violence: I'm not a pacifist, but anyone who decides to deploy violence as a tool should be extremely careful they're not simply succumbing towards quenching a primeval bloodthirst. Any application of violence should be oriented towards a specific goal, proportional to the objective, and carried out with humility.[4] I wrote about how the relatively bygone Punch A Nazi discourse failed all three prongs: 1) vague hypothetical that the spread of dangerous ideas will be curtailed if enough "Nazis" are punched in the face, 2) Antifa's awful target acquisition meant random Bernie supporters got metal pipes to the skull, and 3) the violence enactors were generally extremely hostile to any criticism about their tactics. Within this narrow framework[5] I'm willing to say that the suicide bombing of CIA base involved in drone strikes in Afghanistan was justified, as was the targeted assassination of the architects behind the Armenian genocide, and as were either tête-à-tête military battles or guerilla actions between Jewish and Arab forces in 1948.
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Perverse Excuses: In contrast, I find no justification for indiscriminate attacks on orthogonal targets. What exactly is the objective and how does murdering Olympic athletes, or bombing a discotheque, or bombing a pizzeria, or murdering bus passengers, or sniping a baby in a stroller get anyone closer to it? The rockets Hamas regularly launches against Israel are slap-dash affairs, jury-rigged from water pipes and common materials. There's no guidance system to speak of, and the most precise aim Hamas could hope for is [waves vaguely over the distance]. Their only practical purpose is to sow psychological trauma on a civilian population, which is as cogent of a definition for terrorism you could get. I don't believe I've encountered anyone directly defending the strategic merits of indiscriminate unguided rocket attacks, or music festival mass shootings. Instead, I see either excuses about how we outsiders shouldn't cast judgement upon the anguished and desperate actions of an oppressed populace, or affirmative declarations that "resistance" is justified through "any means necessary". Hamas leadership parrot this argument, as seen in this rare moment where Ghazi Hamad breaks into English to say that as the victims in this conflict, anything they do is by definition justified. This view is beyond heinous, because it has no bounds. It posits an insane moral outlook that once someone is anointed as sufficiently oppressed, their actions — no matter what! — are indefinitely beyond reproach or scrutiny. This is indistinguishable from how some of my domestic violence clients jettison any semblance of responsibility for their abuse, by focusing exclusively on how they were "provoked" into ripping out a chunk of their girlfriend's scalp. This is a framework I thought was too fucking stupid to entertain seriously, because the parody writes itself. We always can and must maintain the capacity to simultaneous condemn and empathize, without requiring us to plunge into the abyss of moral sociopathy. Jeffrey Dahmer's actions can't suddenly become righteous endeavors if he happened to be a Palestinian eating Israelis. And no matter how righteous a cause might be, it will never be worth having this as one of its Wikipedia pages.
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Security Dilemma: I am a proponent of 100% open borders (for both trade & people) but concede it's not a tenable position during ongoing hostilities. It's true, both Gaza and the West Bank are surrounded by formidable security barriers that require Palestinians to be subjected to intrusive, arbitrary, and often humiliating security screening, but it was largely built in response to a wave of suicide bombings during the Second Intifada. I would love to see a free flow of goods and people but any security relaxation whatsoever is immediately exploited, with children as young as 14 regularly employed into martyrdom. I have no idea what the alternative solution is supposed to be here.
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Placating the Extremists: Both sides™ of the conflict contend with warring internal strife. On the Israeli side, you have hardcore Zionists who are religiously motivated to habitate as much of the Promised Land as possible, chant "Death to Arabs", and are now forming roving gangs to dispense retributive violence in the West Bank and elsewhere. On the Palestinian side, you have Hamas and its implacable founding principles calling for the absolute and total elimination of all Jews, and a RETVRN to a worldwide caliphate. The messy logistics of coalition politics necessitates cooperating with unsavory actors lest the whole structure irreparably collapses. Any moderate who strays too far from the flock faces serious risk from the fanatics with any sizeable power, which is why Yitzhak Rabin's openness to a peace plan got him assassinated by a right-wing Jewish activist. This also explains Israel's unjustifiable & needlessly antagonist (IMO) settlement policy of sort-of-maybe-not-but-actually-yes encouraging civilian takeover of contested territory. This also explains Yasser Arafat's intransigence during the Camp David talks, refusing to provide any counter-offer after rejecting Israeli's proposal. The moderate wing of either side balances benefiting from the zealot's "enthusiasm", while also making sure not to scare the hoes (by hoes I mean the international community of course).
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Apartheid State: Given the constant sloganeering about "Apartheid" and given that Israel was founded to be an ethnostate intended to prioritize the interests of a Jewish population, I was surprised to learn about the conditions of Arab-Israelis. 21% of the population is Arab — almost all of whom are Muslim. Arab-Israelis are nominally afforded the exact same rights as any other Israeli citizen, though there remains rampant disparities in income, employment, and municipal funding. I don't want to pull a Kendi here and claim the only explanation for disparate outcomes is discrimination, because it very well could be a 'pipeline problem' that stems from the aforementioned disparities in public services, or perhaps differences much more inherent. Arabs are exempt from Israel's compulsory military service, which traditionally provides a highly-respected advancement ladder. Arab-Israelis are allowed to volunteer though this virtually never happens but the ones that do are well assimilated into Israeli society, such as the highly-celebrated Captain Amos Yarkoni. But set all that aside for now and just assume that Arab/Jewish disparities are strictly the result of incessant discrimination. It's true that Arab-Israelis earn about 60% as much income as Jewish-Israeli households, yet this roughly translates into an average daily wage of $50 for Arab-Israelis compared to $32 in the West Bank, and $13 in Gaza. I don't know how directly comparable the ratios are to individual income, but as a rough metric Israel's $54k GDP per capita is more than ten times what is available in neighboring Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan. By any material measure, Arab-Israelis fare much better under Israeli governance than under any neighboring Arab governance.
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Decolonization Narrative: The "colonization" narrative is facile and misleading but let's assume the truth of the charge, what exactly is the complaint? I used to think the "only functioning democracy in the region" mantra was an exaggeration but no, it's true. Some Arab-Israelis even serve in parliament. If the worry is a lack of political self-determination among non-Jewish Israelis, the concern doesn't appear substantiated. Personally, political self-determination has little inherent value to me; it's useful only insofar as it helps foster governance better tailored to a community's needs and if the two aims are ever in tension, I will always prioritize material benefits (give me Hong Kong under British colonial rule over democratic India any day of the week). Israeli governance is already demonstrably vastly superior from a wealth perspective, so I don't understand the complaint lodged. I also personally would always prioritize a cosmopolitan open society over the self-determination of followers of a repressive religion, and nowhere is that schism funnier than with the unironic "Queers for Palestine". Palestinian culture has regressive aspects I have no interest in seeing replicated. Beyond economic comfort and civil freedoms, Israel has demonstrated a broader commitment to cosmopolitan multiculturalism, as illustrated by how the Temple Mount is governed. It's the former site of the destroyed Second Temple (Judaism's holiest site) which was later replaced by the Al-Aqsa Mosque (Islam's third holiest site) and despite its central importance within Jewish lore, I was surprised to find out that Israel has prohibited all Jewish prayer since its takeover of the area in 1967 after the Six Day War. The Temple Mount area is governed by a religious committee composed only of Muslims members. I can't fathom the countervailing scenario where Muslims are willing to prohibit prayers at Al-Aqsa.
Sorry for that encyclopedia up there, I had to get it out of my system. There are no doubt some valid Palestinian grievances scattered among the bloodied ashes above, but I can't shake off the conclusion that much of the unrelenting rage lobbed towards Israel is driven overwhelmingly by petty nationalistic pride, fanatical religious zealotry, or just plain ethnic bigotry. Again, I'm not saying all! Previously, I would roll my eyes at the reflexive refrain that any criticism of Israel is driven by anti-Jewish[6] bigotry. I was generally skeptical of bare allegations of bigotry in any context (as a baseline), but particularly within Israeli discourse given the potential for nationalistic motives to skew reasoning. Some of my skepticism remains warranted, but I readily admit I had seriously underestimated the ambient level of anti-Jewish bigotry.
There's been a real mask-off moment among the Pro-Palestinian movement, with no pushback against the atrocious message discipline. Shortly after Hamas' incursions, before Israel's Gaza pulverization campaign, we had crowds in Sydney with "Gas the jews!" chants. The posters of Israeli children kidnapped by Hamas continues to be irresistible bait for folks driven into an uncontrollable rage to tearing them down, and in the process showcasing their barely-veiled animosity. I feel like I'm insulting everyone's intelligence here because they're not even trying to hide it, otherwise why would anyone cite the expulsion of the Khaybar Jewish community by the Muslims in 628 CE supposedly to protest a country founded in 1948?
The early Zionists secured land through legal purchases, though the transactions were often made with absentee landlords and came as a surprise to the occupants. The Palestinian Arabs reacted with enmity towards the growing Jewish presence in the area, leading to a wave of deadly riots and revolts throughout the 1920s and 1930s. One way to describe the Palestinian reaction here is as violent anti-immigrant vigilantism fueled by racial animus. The enmity was obvious from the neighboring governments too; few instances in history rival the unequivocal refusal to even entertain negotiation or peace as a possibility, as expressed in the Khartoum Declaration. The closest historical analogue I could fathom is maybe Carthago delenda est but even that one was a warning about the threat of a geopolitical rival, not a promise to forever disavow any diplomatic entreaties.
It's funny how easily the phrase "economic anxiety" is lobbed as a punchline to skewer the notion that Trump supporters are motivated by anything except virulent racism. A couple hundred people wielding tiki torches is presented as definitive proof of America's enduring and widespread racism problem, but brays to slaughter the Yahudis is reflexively dismissed as understandable human reactions. If that's your position, the question always remains what evidence would convince you otherwise about their true motivations? If every call to arms about killing all the Jews can be justified within the oppression rubric, you now have an unfalsifiable theory that is immune from scrutiny.
There's an argument on the Palestinian "resistance" side I've seen from several sources that apes the misguided politics of Identitarian Deference. The idea being that someone's willingness to detonate a suicide vest among a crowd of people is conclusive proof of their desperation, because no rational person would do something so terminal unless they were truly pushed to the brink with no other option. In other words, their depravity is evidence of their virtue.
There are so many things wrong with this argument but what I'll focus on is its assumption of rationality, because human beings are capable of acting in all sorts of deranged ways for all sorts of reasons. We have cults whose members are subject to what is functionally elaborate mind control. We have debilitating mental illnesses that rob people's ability to tell what is real and what isn't. And of course, we have fanatical religions that can maintain a robust foothold despite indoctrinating its followers into self-obliteration.
Gaza polling is not totally reliable, but recent findings indicated tepid support for Hamas and its apocalyptic mission, clocking in only at 20%. Yet it's difficult to imagine how such a severe ideology can remain neatly contained within its own bucket. The mentality behind the Hamas militant gleefully bragging to his parents about all the Jews he killed cannot spawn out of thin air, nor could his parents' immediate emotionally-overwhelmed congratulations. The Hamas-run show Tomorrow's Pioneers aired the most deranged children's television segment I have ever seen. In one episode, children sang about how qualified they are for martyrdom (can you believe it gets worse?) and in another, the actual children of Reem Riyashi are invited to sing a song written from their perspectives, about how it's ok their mom couldn't hug them on the last day they saw her...because her arm was too busy holding a bomb.
What's the counter-argument here? Is the homicidal propaganda taken out of context? Is the claim that it's not representative? Maybe that's true, but how can you tell? It's baffling that anyone seriously believes the Palestinian cause is primarily motivated by someone's great-great-grandparent losing their farm 75 years. Al-Aqsa Mosque imagery is inextricably linked with the broader messaging. Hamas names everything after it (TV, brigades, floods, etc.), and Israel's administration of the Mosque itself remains a point of serious contention. Zealots are incentivized to garner broader support for their fanaticism by sanewashing it into palatability, and the unique amalgamation of revolutionary Marxism and Arab nationalism afforded a readily available mantle:
In this new reading, the possibility of transcendence outside history was reworked into the possibility of transcendence inside history through revolution. Salvation was secularized, and atheized, into temporal salvation brought on by a political collective will. That Islam is a philosophical totality to be achieved through national liberation and socialism, and progressive revolution against the forces of colonialism, Judaism (particularly as embodied in Israel), and reaction (embodied in conservative pro-Western Arab monarchies), became the generic message.
Longstanding land grievances get repackaged as anti-colonial struggle, and genocidal religious fanaticism gets rebranded as anti-imperialist resistance. So when we are presented with acts of extreme desperation, demanding our unquestioning empathy for their purported plight, we can decline. We have the capacity to think critically and carefully scrutinize their self-professed motivation and see if it's in accord with reality. Sometimes we are intentionally fed a misleadingly sanewashed narrative, and sometimes the behavior we're observing is not the result of rational faculties.
I did not revisit some personal interactions until recent events prompted otherwise. Whenever I visited my family back home in Morocco, no other topic generated as much acrimony as Israel. It's a common trope for home families to worry their emigrated members will be brainwashed into secularism, and bizarrely the most scrutiny I ever received from them about my life in the United States wasn't about whether I ate bacon or drank alcohol, but whether I was friends with any Jews. The Yahud aren't to be trusted, they warned, as evidenced by the fact that no Jew was ever killed on 9/11, or by the fact that Mossad created ISIS as a bid to make Arabs look bad (I'm not joking, these claims are unironically professed by several of my family members). I assumed their baffling conspiracies were the understandable byproduct of what had to be justifiable rage against Israel.
I admit deep embarrassment at how under-informed I previously was about this topic. Everything I wrote above took time obviously,[7] but it was all based on readily available sources (ChatGPT was also an amazing help in quickly filling in gaps and finding counter-arguments). My operating assumption used to be that this was all too complicated of an issue to untangle. I presume I might have been influenced by the underdog memeology of a child throwing a rock at a soldier.
I'm also willing to blame media coverage on this topic. This Vox video purporting to 'explain' Gaza is the perfect illustration of this genre of lying by omission. See how much it breezily glosses over the lead-up to the 1947 civil war:
In 1947, as the British prepared to leave they left the fate of Palestine up to a newly formed United Nations who voted to divide Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. Soon, Zionist forces and militias began to forcibly expel hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their land...
So the UN had a plan but the Jews responded by just kicking people out? Damn that's so crazy! That segue belongs in a museum somewhere, as it eviscerates decades of conspiracy theorizing about who really controls the media.
Ultimately, I find very little to sympathize with on the Palestinian cause. Except for the ongoing West Bank encroachments, I can't take any of the land grievances from 1948, 1967, or 1973 seriously; at least not seriously enough to justify the knee-deep bloodshed. I can't support any movement, no matter how righteous its cause might be, that employs sadistically orthogonal violence. I can't endorse any culture that punishes sexual and political non-conformity with forceful repression. And I want absolutely nothing to do with any ideology capable of such self-serving justifications towards its destructive fanaticism.
Despite the zealous wing in its own house, its history of covering-up its war crimes, and its ongoing settlement expansion campaign, Israel remains the obvious choice for whom to favor if I had to pick. I'm neither Jewish nor do I have any interest in a religious ethnostate, but out of the available options I'd much rather have a society that can build up material comfort enviable to its oil-laden neighbors, establish a semblance of multicultural cosmopolitanism, and provide a haven of responsive governance within a region known for its rarity.
I remain open to having my mind changed. You may attempt this in several ways, including but not limited to:
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Point out any specific factual errors or misunderstandings in anything I wrote. If you believe any of my (mostly Wikipedia) sources are too biased or otherwise unreliable, explain why and suggest alternatives.
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If you object to Zionism, specify what kind and why.
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If you believe persistent Palestinian land grievances remain warranted today, be specific about which ones (Early migrations? 1948? 1967?) and explain why. Also make sure to specify if your standard applies to all displaced people anywhere else, or if it's unique to the Palestinians'.
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If you object to how Israel deploys its military or security apparatus, specify if you disagree with their goals or with their tactics, and be specific about what they should do differently.
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If you object to my comparative preference for Israeli's model of governance and culture, be specific about which aspects of Palestinian governance/culture have superior merits.
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If you disagree with my criticism of oppression-status granting infinite moral immunity, be specific about what limiting principle you'd propose (if any).
That's it. Thank you for weathering through this with me.
Salam & Shalom.
[1] One of the earliest proposals was for Uganda of all places.
[2] Around the same time as the Nakba, the 1947 India-Pakistan Partition resulted in up to 2M dead and up to 20M displaced. It feels unconscionably perverse to flatten the sheer scale of human tragedy here into a glossed reference to "millions" but it's all the time we have.
[3] Israel's Arab neighbors have had a contentious relationship with the Palestinian cause, despite the superficial optics. Palestinian Fedayeen for example tried to overthrow the King of Jordan in 1970. When they got expelled from Jordan, they tried to use Lebanon as a staging ground for attacks against Israel, events which culminated into the protracted Lebanese Civil War. And today, Egypt still enforces its half of the Gaza blockade.
[4] Only after writing this section did I realize I basically rederived the Just War Theory.
[5] For the love of Allah please remember that I am only assessing whether the violence is justified within the contours of bounded scenarios; I am not making any larger pronouncements about the righteousness of any side's cause.
[6] Anti-Semitism is such a misleading term as 'Semitic' is a language family, not an ethnic categorization, and includes Arabic!
[7] Many thanks to the Baileyites for their invaluable feedback.
ymeskhout
8mo ago
"Did you lock it?"
A common trait among my social circle used to be that everyone shared an obsession with bicycles. Few of us had or even wanted a car in the city, and having everyone on two wheels made it much easier to roam down our house party itinerary. Between all of us we had a deep well of metis to draw from; everything from which wheels to buy to the easiest way to make derailleur adjustments. We were naturally attached to our steeds and none of us wanted our bicycles to pull a disappearing act, and so we discussed ways to keep safe.
U-locks were ubiquitous and we'd warn each other of the brands that were still susceptible to the infamous pen trick. Some of us of the more paranoid variety installed locking skewers to keep expensive saddles or wheels latched in place. We'd even caution each other to check bolts anchoring bike racks to the ground, since the U-lock was useless if the whole setup could be lifted away. It wasn't possible to reach full immunity but you never need to be the fastest gazelle to escape the cheetah, just faster than the slowest one.
Naturally, if anyone ever suffered the ultimate calamity of having their ride stolen, we would ask if it was locked and how. There was nothing sadistic about our inquiries. Our questions were problem-solving endeavors saturated with sympathy; we wanted to know what went wrong precisely to help others avoid the same fate. Maybe the local thieves discovered some new exploit in our standard security apparatus, or maybe this was just an opportunistic snatch while they left their bike unlocked outside during a quick peek inside.
"If you do X, you're likely to get Y" is the format to an unremarkable factual observation. "If you leave your bike outside unlocked, you're likely to have it stolen" is just reality and, on its own, is a statement that carries no moral judgment. If the victim wasn't previously aware of this correlation, they are now, and are better equipped to evade a rerun.
The parallels to my actual point are probably getting obvious by now.
Kathleen Stock charges right into deconstructing the surprisingly enduring ritual of affixing the "victim-blaming" reprimand to any advice aimed at reducing the risk of sexual assault. Now, in case anyone needs the clarification: I believe that rape is way worse than bicycle theft. Nevertheless the principles at play here remain the same:
Still, given that rape, precisely, is so devastating, I think we have a duty to tell women about which circumstances might make their victimisation more likely, and which might make it less. To repeat --- this is not victim-blaming, nor making women responsible for violations that men choose to commit. It is more in the spirit of "forewarned is forearmed". This is how dangerous men behave, and these are the environments in which they become more dangerous. This is how you can try to reduce your risk, even if you can never eliminate it. No panacea is being offered. Nothing guarantees your safety. Still, a reduced risk is better than nothing.
Consider the victim of the unattended bike snatch again. Imparting wisdom on the implacable chain of consequences is about the most compassionate thing you could do. They can choose to accept that advice, and if it is sound then they'll be met with the disastrous outcome of...not having their bike stolen. Or they can choose to reject that advice and adhere to the mantra that instead of putting the onus on cyclists not to have their bikes stolen, we should teach thieves not to thieve. In which case, best of luck with completely overhauling the nature of man; here's hoping their bicycle budget rivals the GDP of a small country to withstand the inevitable and wholly predictable hits.
Defamation Bear Trap
The legal field is filled with ad-hoc quirky legal doctrines. These are often spawned from a vexed judge somewhere thinking "that ain't right" and just making up a rule to avoid an outcome they find distasteful. This is how an exploding bottle of Coca-Cola transformed the field of product liability, or how courts made cops read from a cue card after they got tired of determining whether a confession was coerced, or even how an astronomy metaphor established a constitutional right to condoms. None of these doctrines are necessarily mandated by any black letter law; they're hand-wavy ideas that exist because they sort of made sense to someone in power.
I've dabbled in my fair share of hand-wavy ideas, for example when I argued that defendants have slash should have a constitutional right to lie (if you squint and read between the lines enough). Defamation law is not my legal wheelhouse but when I first heard about Bill Cosby being sued by his accusers solely for denying the rape allegations against him, I definitely had one of those "that ain't right" moments. My naive assumption was that a quirky legal doctrine already existed (weaved from stray fibers of the 5th and...whatever other amendment you have lying around) which allowed people to deny heinous accusations.
I was wrong and slightly right. Given how contentious the adversarial legal system can get, there is indeed the medieval-era legal doctrine of "Litigation Privilege" which creates a safe space bubble where lawyers and parties can talk shit about each other without worrying about a defamation lawsuit. The justification here is that while defamation is bad, discouraging a litigant's zeal in fighting their case is even worse. Like any other cool doctrine that grants common people absolute immunity from something, this one has limits requiring any potentially defamatory remarks to have an intimate nexus with imminent or ongoing litigation.
It's was an obvious argument for Trump to make when Jean Carroll sued him for defamation for calling her a liar after she called him a rapist (following?). A federal judge rejected Trump's arguments on the grounds that his statements were too far removed from the hallowed marble halls of a courthouse. Generally if you want this doctrine's protection, your safest bet is to keep your shit-talking in open court or at least on papers you file in court. While the ruling against Trump is legally sound according to precedent, this is another instance where I disagree based on policy grounds.
Though I'm a free speech maximalist, I nevertheless support the overall concept of defamation law. Avoiding legal liability in this realm is generally not that hard; just don't make shit up about someone or (even safer) don't talk about them period. But what happens when someone shines the spotlight on you by accusing you of odious behavior from decades prior?
Assuming the allegations are true but you deny them anyways, presumably the accuser would have suffered from the odious act much more than for being called a liar. If so, seeking redress for the original harmful act is the logical avenue for any remedies. The (false) denial is a sideshow, and denial is generally what everyone would expect anyways.
But assuming the allegations are false, what then? The natural inclination is also to deny, except you're in a legal bind. Any denial necessarily implies that the accuser is lying. So either you stay silent and suffer the consequences, or you try to defend yourself and risk getting dragged into court for impugning your accuser's reputation.
My inclination is that if you're accused of anything, you should be able to levy a full-throated denial without having to worry about a defamation lawsuit coming down the pipes. You didn't start this fight, your accuser did, and it's patently unfair to now also have to worry about collateral liability while simultaneously trying to defend your honor. Without an expansion of the "Litigation Privilege" or something like it to cover these circumstances, we create the incentive to conjure up a defamation action out of thin air. The only ingredients you need are to levy an accusation and wait for your target's inevitable protest. That ain't right.
ymeskhout
1yr ago
Do you think that this action will, on the margins, increase or decrease the chances of someone attempting actual voter fraud in the 2022 elections in Florida?
The answer isn't obvious. These actions will absolutely discourage anyone with a felony conviction from trying to vote, even if they are legally permitted to, because who wants to risk getting arrested years down the line over something as individually trivial as voting? Felony disenfranchisement currently affects almost a million people in Florida, almost 10% of the adult population, so it's bound to have a significant effect.
In contrast, actual voting fraud is extremely rare. Just for perspective, 19 foreign nationals were charged for illegally voting in North Carolina in 2020. To me, it's not obvious how many of those foreign nationals were acting with malicious intent, or whether they made an honest mistake. Jeopardizing one's immigration status to cast one vote seems like an idiotic gamble. Beyond that, the scenarios where voter fraud is clearly motivated by malicious intent are too sporadic to get a comprehensive accounting for. I'm aware of very few cases, like for example this Nevada man who used his dead wife's ballot to cast a vote.
I suppose you can defend the heavy-handedness if your overriding priority is primarily to tamp down on the handful of actual voter fraud that takes place. But if so, I would like to at least see an earnest attempt to address the collateral damage. Is dissuading a handful of bad actors worth putting some innocent people in jail? Worth dissuading large swathes of the population from legally voting? If so, say so.
ymeskhout
1yr ago
I write in favor of letting criminals vote. The main argument is that gatekeeping the franchise is not easy and requires a lot of state capacity to securely enforce it. Most of the world lets current and former criminals vote, and I generally don't find arguments to restrict it to be very convincing:
It's not that crazy, because the norm across the world is letting people vote from prison. Literally ballot boxes installed in prisons. To the extent there are any limitations imposed, they're doled out selectively, with apparently fewer than a handful of countries even considering restricting the vote of criminals post-release. In contrast, the United States is rather unique in its disenfranchisement zeal. Only Vermont, Maine, and DC allow voting from prison, but otherwise, the norm in most other states is automatic voting restoration upon release. In total, about 4.6 million Americans can't vote today because of a felony conviction, which is about triple the percentage it was in 1976, but down from a peak in 2016.
Despite all the words here, I'm actually not someone who particularly cares about democracy. While I can acknowledge the strong correlation between democratic governments and overall quality of life, I'm in the consequentialist camp on this issue. Give me Hong Kong under British colonial rule over democratic India any day of the week. Beyond that, voting is a waste of time on an individual level and not something I ever engage in (to answer the tiresome what if everyone thought that? retort: "Then I would vote"), and my anarchist foibles generally leave me politically stranded.
But my egalitarian foibles are why felony disenfranchisement bothers me. A steelman could be either consequential or an appeal to fairness. If you take a "wisdom of crowds" defense of democracy --- that it is a mechanism to arrive at better policies --- then perhaps giving former criminals a say would lead the ship astray. But most of the world seems to function OK despite letting criminals vote, and neither Vermont or Maine seem notably dysfunctional in any way (maybe DC does, but not sure how much you can pin that on the voting prison population). But even if consequences be damned, perhaps violating the social contract is cause enough to muzzle you. I concede it's a slightly stronger argument, but I'm not convinced the justification isn't used as a pretextual excuse to tip the scales in some political party's favor. This wouldn't be a novel effort, as Mississippi implemented literacy tests and poll taxes in 1890 with the express purpose of indirectly suppressing the black vote without explicitly violating the 15th Amendment. The state's governor, James Vardaman, said outright in 1903 the restrictions were imposed "for no other purpose than to eliminate the nigger from politics". Nowadays, nefarious motivations require a little more finesse. Good data on felon voting trends is hard to come by, but the obvious demographic skew (blacks are significantly more likely both to vote for Democrats and to have a felony record), combined with the energy in sustaining felony disenfranchisement coming almost exclusively from Republicans, is enough to sustain my suspicions that this is a pretextual exercise.
Beyond whether or not disenfranchisement is the right thing to do, there's also the question of implementation:
The next step further up --- restoration upon completion of supervision --- is where the difficulty really starts to ramp up. Unlike inmate rosters updated on the daily, when exactly someone's supervision ends is information that will be buried within reams of figurative dossiers in filing cabinets scattered across the state. There's nominally a system in place, such as the National Voting Rights Act, which allows different parts of the country to keep everyone up to date about voting registration. But I've written about how judicial record systems have to straddle an unenviable position: simultaneously maintaining an iron grip on legacy compatibility (imagine the nightmare of a computer upgrade wiping out entire convictions) while cracking the door just widely enough to allow cross-pollination with other systems.
Consider the situation in detail. Let's say that I, your favorite public defender, am able to track down a judgment & sentence order from the 1990s and find that my client was sentenced to X months in prison and Y months of supervision after release. I can't just plug that into a date calculator. First, I would need to know if this was the only charge they served time under, including, potentially, an extradition hold for a warrant from another jurisdiction. Then I'd need to track down whether any early release for good behavior applied to their charge, including noting any legislative changes that may have occurred and been retroactively applied. Even if I have a definitive release date, the length of supervised release is far less static. Maybe there was a court order that ended it early, or maybe there was a change in the law for that specific offense, or maybe their supervision time was tolled or extended for whatever reason by the probation authority. And so on. Despite what I do for a living, I have absolutely no confidence that I am able to accurately calculate the precise end of someone's supervision, and this is why I always leave that task to the math wizards at the Department of Corrections. I hope and pray to Allah they get it right, because there's no fucking way I'll know otherwise.
And beyond implementation by the state, there's also the question of how normal people are expected to navigate the cobwebs:
Pamela Moses' case in Tennessee illustrates how much of a bog this is even for experienced legal professionals. Moses was previously convicted of an evidence tampering felony, and in 2019, she tried to run for mayor. Election officials told her she was not eligible because she had not yet finished her probation. A court echoed what those officials said, but her probation officer later signed off on a certificate of restoration that Moses submitted when she registered. Moses was convicted of voter fraud and sentenced to six years in prison before her conviction was overturned on appeal. The probation officer was wrong about her probation term being over, but that wouldn't have mattered anyway because her predicate conviction --- evidence tampering --- was one of the few Tennessee offenses that led to permanent disenfranchisement. This was a fact that neither the probation officer, his supervisor, nor the trial judge knew about, as seen from page 24 of the trial transcript (cleaned up):
PROSECUTOR: The tampering with evidence we're addressing today, which is permanent. I don't remember all the ones. I know murder, probably rape ---
THE COURT: That's something I didn't know. Are you telling me if you get convicted of tampering with evidence, you can never vote? Where is that in the law?
DEFENSE: It's titled-- I think it's 39-15 or 39-17 where it talks about the interference with government operations. Those are ---
PROSECUTOR: It's 40-29-204.
THE COURT: "Those convicted after July 1, 1996, but before July 1, 2006 --- those convicted after July 1, 2006, any of the offenses set forth in one and two above, voter fraud, treason, murder in the first degree, aggravated rape." And then it goes on to say, "Any other violation of title 39 chapter 16 part one, four, and five, designated as a felony" --- so are you telling me I've got to go back and look at 39-16?
PROSECUTOR: Yes. Now you have to, and that's where the tampering with evidence, along with --- it falls under, like, bribery, contraband, false pretense, the ones that are felonies.
Apparently, it's impossible to wade through the cobwebs of cross-referencing statutory codes without tripping up somehow, even if wading boots are part of your job uniform. And absent malicious intent, these examples illustrate how easy it is for mistakes to happen. What purpose does punishing these types of mistakes accomplish? Focusing one's ire toward the people ensnared by the cobwebs doesn't do anything to get rid of the cobwebs. Getting rid of the cobwebs gets rid of the cobwebs.
And finally:
I’ve already made my position on felony disenfranchisement clear: I don’t think there should be any. If you believe otherwise, that’s fine, but the argument in favor needs to take into account the additional resources such a regime necessarily eats up. You need higher state capacity to check people’s convictions, calculate the terms of their sentence, and tabulate their LFOs, and an entire additional apparatus to investigate and prosecute scofflaws. Any argument in favor of disenfranchising felons has to explain why these additional costs are worthwhile.
ymeskhout
4mo ago
Last week, @SlowBoy posted about Ray Epps being sentenced to probation and asserted this was a "uniquely generous outcome" for Epps. I was puzzled by this assertion and so I asked some clarifying questions and most of my responses were heavily downvoted. As a barometer of community sentiment, I tried to understand why my questions would be met so negatively and so this post is my attempt to formulate some theories. I am open to feedback on how I can post better!
Theory 1: I focused on the wrong parameters for evaluating Ray Epps' situation
I would like to think I have some practical experience in evaluating whether a given defendant is treated with unusual leniency/harshness. I once had a client who was arrested along one other guy at the same place, both for illegally possessing a firearm. Both were felons with comparable criminal history but in addition to a gun, the other guy also was caught with what the cops referred to as a "pharmacy" of drugs in his backpack (very likely worth at least $20k on the street) and also very openly admitted to police that the gun was his. So it was really weird that my guy got charged with a gun felony while the street pharmacist was charged with only a gun misdemeanor and offered a diversion program on top of that (charges get dismissed if he stays out of trouble). I investigated more of the pharmacist's background and found out he's been arrested at least three times within the last year for exactly the same conduct (gun + drug backpack) and each time no charges were filed. I had no way of proving this conclusively but the only explanation that made sense is that he was an informant of some kind. Letting the prosecutors know I was aware of pharmacist's disparate treatment was likely instrumental in getting my guy a misdemeanor plea offer.
Obviously that was a serendipitous comparison scenario, but when I was presented with Ray Epp's situation the reasonable starting point was to examine the severity of charges and sentences that other J6 defendants received. The DOJ and other sources make this information very easy to find. At least from a bird's eye view, nothing about Ray Epps pleading guilty to misdemeanors (505 out of all 1,265 J6 defendants also did), avoiding jail time (282 out of 749 convicted J6 defendants also did), or avoiding pretrial detention (70% of J6 defendants also did) seemed unusual.
If there are factors besides the severity of the charges, sentencing, or pretrial detention that I should have evaluated instead, I would love to know about them. Maybe I can even use this information at my real job.
Theory #2: I posted false or misleading information
Maybe I focused on the correct parameters, but DOJ information is either false or misleading? That's certainly a possibility, and it wouldn't be the first time a government agency made shit up. But if so, either some evidence of this duplicity or some alternative source should be offered and I'm aware of neither.
Theory #3: I posted truthful information that people thought was false or misleading
This is an online forum and we often shoot from the hip when posting. Sometimes mistakes happen. @HlynkaCG for example responded to my questions by offering two points of comparison as a contrast to how Ray Epps was treated: "we had so-cal soccer-moms and that guy who took a selfie sitting at Nancy Pelosi's spend over a year in prison only to be released after pleading to misdemeanors." I don't know who the soccer-moms are but the Nancy Pelosi reference is presumably referring to Richard Barnett who was convicted of 4 felonies and sentenced to 54 months in prison, definitely not "released after pleading to misdemeanors". As I showcased more than a year ago, this wouldn't be the first time someone here makes a confident assertion on the topic of J6 or on related election fraud theories that are not necessarily reflected in reality.
Speaking personally, I would react with genuine gratitude if anyone pointed out I had made a false or misleading assertion, because it's not something I ever wish to repeat intentionally. Part of that effort requires introspection to investigate what went wrong in the process. I again maintain there is absolutely nothing shameful about making mistakes, and part of what I value about this community is how much we celebrate remedial acknowledgement and introspection for faulty thinking and I hope HlynkaCG can shed light on the matter.
Theory #4: I posted truthful information that could lead to false or misleading implications
This reaction is commonly encountered, and likely stems from a poor decoupling ability. For example, it's likely true that Africans had a higher life expectancy enslaved in the US than they did free in Africa at the time of the slave trade. Whether or not this is true is purely a factual determination, but many people can't help it and get ahead of themselves to pre-emptively address what they believe are necessary implications of this fact. The only way that the "slavery can raise life expectancy for the enslaved" fact could in any way threaten the position of "slavery is bad" is if the former is a significant pillar of the latter, or if someone had succumbed to 'arguments as soldiers' mentality. The classic example of this scenario is AOC's famously-lampooned "Factually inaccurate but morally right".
And so I've often wondered if this is driving part of the negative reaction to fact-checking J6-related claims. Maybe challenging one specific premise (Ray Epps was treated with unusual leniency) necessarily challenges an overall conclusion (J6 defendants are treated unfairly) because someone assumes the two are coupled at the hips together:
To use a deliberately outlandish example, someone arguing "J6 defendants are treated unfairly" links to video footage of Hillary Clinton using a hot iron to torture a MAGA prisoner. I swoop in with my google-fu and point out that the video is actually a scene from a porn with surprisingly high production values. A satisfying ending to this story is possible: the person who linked the video can just say "Damn I was wrong!" and we both can just move on, skipping into the horizon.
There are several things that I think definitely should NOT happen. One, I cannot cite my deboonking to claim I've conclusively proven that J6 defendants are actually treated fairly. That wouldn't follow, especially if I'm deliberately ignoring other, much stronger arguments. Two, the person who posted the hot iron porn shouldn't refuse to admit they were wrong on that premise. This evasiveness serves absolutely no purpose in this space, and it's startlingly immature. And three, now also would not really be the time for them to pivot towards dredging up ancillary reasons for why their conclusion still remains correct.
I don't know what the solution is to this lack of decoupling. It's really hard to teach nuance.
Theory #6: I'm ruining the fun
People have deeply cherished beliefs they want to hold on to, and challenging those beliefs ruins the prospect of a good time. This is the least charitable theory obviously. The operating principle of the Motte is to be "a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas" but unfortunately this has and will forever risk being prescriptive more than descriptive. Cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias clearly exist but it stretches my empathy to its limits for me to try and understand what could motivate someone to sacrifice truth-seeking in order to pursue belief affirmation points. I don't understand it and, given the nature of its manifestation, I don't anticipate a transparent confession. I offered a template of what an introspective admission could potentially look like when I admitted to having previously believed in abolishing police/prisons despite my awareness that I lacked the ability to defend those beliefs, but maybe that confession was only possible because enough time had passed to give me distance from the sting.
True to the spirit of this post, I'm open to being proven wrong.
ymeskhout
1yr ago
Remember Seattle's CHAZ/CHOP? After the place was cleared, a bunch of local businesses and property owners sued the city and now they all reached a settlement. One part that definitely didn't help Seattle were tens of thousands of deleted text messages:
The city of Seattle has settled a lawsuit that took aim at officials’ handling of the three-week Capitol Hill Organized Protests and further ensnared the former mayor and police chief, among others, in a scandal over thousands of deleted text messages. The Seattle City Attorney’s Office filed notice of a settlement Wednesday in U.S. District Court, just three weeks after a federal judge levied severe legal sanctions against the city for deleting texts between high-ranking officials during the protests and zone that sprung up around them, known as CHOP.
[...]
Attorneys for the more than a dozen businesses that sued the city, led by Seattle developer Hunters Capital, sent a series of letters to the city in July 2020 — after another lawsuit over the violent police response to the protests — demanding that any evidence pertaining to the city’s alleged support and encouragement of the zone’s creation be retained, according to the court docket and pleadings.
U.S. District Judge Thomas Zilly concluded last month that officials ignored the notifications, sending the so-called Hunters Capital lawsuit to trial on two of five claims and dismissing three others. In doing so, Zilly issued a blistering order that leveled crippling sanctions against the city for the deletion of tens of thousands of text messages from city phones sent between former Mayor Jenny Durkan, former police Chief Carmen Best, fire Chief Harold Scoggins and four other ranking city officials during the protests.
The judge found significant evidence that the destruction of CHOP evidence was intentional and that officials tried for months to hide the text deletions from opposing attorneys.
ymeskhout
1yr ago
Recently I watched a debate between friend-of-the-motte Aella and infamous Canadian radical feminist Meghan Murphy on the subject of the ethics of the sex industry. I found the debate infuriating to listen to, so I wrote way too many words breaking down my issues with it, namely outlining Meghan's extremely dodgy arguments. Much of the ideas contained herein would be well-worn to most of y'all but enjoy either way. Excerpted to avoid character limit (Zorba please save us!!):
I can't help feeling a tinge of awkward self-consciousness whenever I describe myself as part of the modern-day "Rationality" movement. As I've said before, it's perfectly reasonable to be suspicious of a group with such a self-serving and masturbatory name, because isn't everyone in favor of rational thinking? The core lessons of rationality are --- or at least should be --- dreadfully pedestrian: you should test your theories with evidence, you shouldn't believe things that aren't true, you should make logically coherent arguments, threatening to kill someone is not a valid rebuttal to their arguments, et cetera forever.
Like I said, boring stuff that you would expect from any public intellectual or anyone with even a passing familiarity with logic and critical thinking. It's at least one reason why I didn't really understand or appreciate why Eliezer Yudkowsky spent so much time writing The Sequences, a long series of blog posts that aims to break down rationality into delicious bite-sized chunks. But I live in a bubble full of rat nerds, and sometimes I get shocked awake with some cold water thrown at me. In this post, I want to highlight one recent episode that particularly stood out to me as emblematic of the evergreen utility of rationalist concepts, and it's the debate between Aella and Meghan Murphy on the ethics of the sex industry (prostitution and pornography) on the Calmversations podcast hosted by Benjamin A. Boyce.
To set things up, Meghan Murphy is a feminist thinker who has written extensively about the harms prostitution and pornography have imposed (primarily) on women, including arguing in favor of a total ban on pornography. Aella has worked as a prostitute and produced porn, and her positions on the sex industry are significantly more positive. I should say that I'm friends with Aella, but that hasn't stopped me from pointedly criticizing her ideas before. I reached out to Meghan Murphy by email, and although this post will be rather critical of her reasoning, she should absolutely be commended for responding to my questions despite the severe snark I previously tweeted her way.
I should also make it clear that any criticism should be construed narrowly, and is not meant as a broad denunciation of either Meghan's work in general nor --- crucially! --- her specific criticisms about the sex industry. I want to make sure this point is heavily emphasized, as one of the most useful (and, unfortunately, least adopted) tools in rationality is the ability to cut discussions into discrete pizza slices, such as abstracting from the object level to the meta level, or decoupling distinct ideas from each other. This is an invaluable practice in any discourse because humans are prone to irrational distractions, and very often we get reflexively defensive and assume that an attack on an argument or premise is an attack on a conclusion. To use the parlance, someone could be "accidentally right" and reach a true conclusion despite using faulty logic. So just because I criticize someone's argument does not mean that their conclusion is false.
Make Your Belief Falsifiable (i.e., Make That Motherfucker Burnable)
If I had a rationality genie grant me one wish, it would be to force everyone to make their theories falsifiable. Put simply, all it means is that if you present a theory, you should be able to articulate at least the theoretical circumstances by which your theory would be "falsified" --- proven wrong. Carl Sagan elucidated an excellent illustration of falsifiability when he described the dragon in his garage.
Consider if we were in the same house and I claimed the roof was on fire. Given what you know about the potential risks of fire, you may then want to evacuate the house, or (if you're feeling frisky) perhaps decline any water and just let the motherfucker burn. But if you look around you and point out that you don't see any flames, don't smell any smoke, nor do you hear any fire alarms, you've reasonably falsified my claim. If my response is to claim the fire I'm talking about is invisible, doesn't produce any smoke, and doesn't trigger any fire alarms, you'd be right to dismiss what I'm saying as complete fucking nonsense because I'm not conveying any useful information to you. A theory that is unfalsifiable is like a compass that always points north no matter what direction it's facing; it's useless precisely because it's "true" no matter what.
One of the very first topics Aella and Meghan broached in their debate was on the subject of the effects of pornography on its users. Meghan's argument is fairly straightforward (2:23): she believes that a consistent exposure by men to violent and/or extreme pornography (and reinforced by orgasmic dopamine feedback loop) would encourage men to replicate the acts depicted on screen in real life. Meghan repeats a version of this argument several times, and ties it explicitly to child abuse (11:51):
I think that the theory of men seeking out barely legal porn and the amount of men who look for child porn, even online, proves that there's a lot of men who are seeking out girls and underage women online to jack off to. And I think that we know that molestation and child abuse and sexual abuse and men predating on young girls, or like young women, to young women is a pretty big problem in our society. So I think that adding porn to that mix is for sure not helping and probably making it worse.
This is a logically sound and straightforward argument and, most importantly, testable and falsifiable. If Meghan argues one reason that porn is bad is because it causes bad things, then a falsification would be the absence of said bad things. But when Aella asks Meghan "What kind of data would make you update your mind?" Meghan responds "No data" and blithely asserts "I think it's bad for men to jack to barely legal porn."
The same happened when I reached out by email and asked about her position vis-à-vis the harm on women within the industry. Meghan has demonstrably changed her mind on several issues over time, so I cannot accuse her of being completely immune to new evidence or arguments. Her initial approach to porn involved "feminist porn" projects in school and reading articles by "empowered" sex workers and academics about female agency and how we need to flip the script on the "victim" narrative. But over time, she couldn't shake off the persistent and gnawing discomfort she had with pornography and eventually connected with and interviewed women who spent many years in the sex industry, who did frontline work, and academics who extensively studied the sex trade (along with reading a lot more second-wave analysis of the topic). In other words, Meghan discovered new evidence and arguments that made her change her mind.
I asked Meghan to explain the apparent contradiction between claiming that no data would change her mind, while simultaneously lucidly explaining how data did indeed change her mind. Meghan's answer was not responsive to the issue; she reiterated that no data would change her mind because her position is based on ethics.
As shown in numerous instances throughout the debate, Meghan readily provides evidence and support to explain why she is against the sex industry (31:23):
I mean, I talked to lots and lots of women in prostitution. Women who've worked as high-end escorts, women who've worked in the street, women who worked in the Downtown Eastside, women who worked in brothels. And they all said they didn't want to be there. They all have suffered immense physical and emotional trauma. Most of them came from physical and emotional trauma. Most of them came from homes where there was sexual abuse. And it was really a scary, horrific experience for them that is very difficult to get out of. So I think most of the women who are in prostitution and pornography don't actually want to be there.
But does this mean you can Believe All Women™ regarding what they say about the conditions of the sex industry? Of course not, because Meghan preemptively applies a strict credibility filter, her version of "No True Prostitute" (37:35):
ymeskhout
10mo ago
There Are No Amendments In Islam
Sarah Haider writes a compelling analysis of the odd political re/alignment you see playing out today between Christians and Muslims on social issues:
Similar scuffles are taking place in Canada, and around the world conservative Christians are locking arms with Muslims in their opposition to the inclusion of gender and orientation in classroom materials. Some are applauding this new brotherhood of Abraham, and hoping that this heralds a change in the winds.
There's really nothing surprising about this alliance at the object-level. What religious Christians and Muslims believe about how society should be structured in regards to promiscuity, sexual modesty, and traditional family structures have long been near-impossible to tell apart. The overlap also bleeds into superficial similarities about isolated rural ranchers defending their traditional way of life from outside influences, while openly carrying their firearms to their places of worship (am I talking about the Taliban or...?).
Sarah is correct that the modern alliance between liberal progressives and Muslims was a marriage of convenience that took advantage of some unusual culture war circumstances, but it's a tryst that was bound to fray apart given the fundamental policy disagreements. One of the efforts to keep the bandwagon held together comes from what Sarah terms Muslims in Name Only (MINOs):
If Muslims decide to be more vocal about their opposition to leftist social agenda, they will find that MINOs will be invited to speak over them, and will succeed in drowning them out. We will be treated to a barrage of ludicrous op-eds that posit Islam as a LGBT friendly religion ("How Muhammad Was The First Queer Activist", etc) as well as profiles of camera-friendly gay Muslims who claim to find no contradictions between "their Islam" and homosexuality. The more intelligent among the MINOs might attempt to put a more theological spin on it with a few cherry-picked quotes from hadith or the Quran, or perhaps bring in some historical flavor by blaming colonizers for anti-gay legislation in the Middle East. "True Islam", it will be revealed, is a religion of Peace and #Pride.
I was raised Muslim but abandoned it as an atheist a long time ago, and this passage is particularly painful for how real it is. The discordant discourse above has largely been operating in parallel and disconnected tracks. On one side you get a bevy of purportedly "Muslim" activists announcing that Islam can mean whatever you want it to mean, and actual Muslim religious scholars responding with The Fuck?:
By a decree from God, sexual relations are permitted within the bounds of marriage, and marriage can only occur between a man and a woman. In the Quran, God explicitly condemns sexual relations with the same sex (see, e.g., Quran, al-Nisā': 16, al-A'rāf: 80–83, and al-Naml: 55–58). Moreover, premarital and extramarital sexual acts are prohibited in Islam. As God explains, "Do not go near fornication. It is truly an immoral deed and a terrible way [to behave]" (Quran, al-Isrā': 32). These aspects of Islam are unambiguously established in the Quran, the teachings of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), and a chain of scholarly tradition spanning fourteen centuries. As a result, they have gained the status of religious consensus (ijmā') and are recognized as integral components of the faith known to the general body of Muslims.
As an atheist I have all sorts of complaints about all religions, but the attempts to rehabilitate Islam's image to better fit liberal sensibilities are pernicious for their particular dishonesty. Because one of the few good things I'll say about Islam is to praise its unusual commitment towards scriptural fidelity.
In case you didn't know, Islam was founded around 600 AD explicitly as the final entry in the Abrahamic religion trilogy. Islam was not presented as an alternative to Judaism and Christianity, rather it was heralded as the true and uncorrupted version of those creeds. According to Islamic lore, Allah (literally just the Arabic word for God) created the world and everything in it and then spent the next however many millennia trying — and implicitly failing — to convey his divine message to humans through a long succession of prophets. First man Adam was also the first prophet, and he was followed by well-known Biblical heavy-hitters like Ayyub (Job), Musa (Moses), and of course 'Isa (Jesus). The full list is unknown and unknowable but Islam assures us that every community throughout history received at least one of Allah's Verified™ messengers.
The reason Muhammad of Mecca is special in Islam is because he's Allah's final message delivery attempt. Adam was the first, and Muhammad is heralded as the "Seal of the Prophets" to underscore the finality. I won't get into exactly why god needed so many attempts to convey his message, but a common point of criticism from Muslims about past attempts (such as Christianity) is that god's message was corrupted and lost through misguided translation attempts. I say this as a Muslim apostate with no stake in the debate but the concern over the Bible's reliability seems uncontroversially true to me given the inherent limitations of translation, and the resulting myriad of competing versions. After centuries of debating whether the in John 1:1 was intended to be a definite or indefinite article from the original Greek, I can see why someone would be too traumatized by the prospect of any translation attempt.
To their credit, early Muslim scholars appear to have taken this mistranslation concern very seriously. All of Muhammad's revelations were collected over time by his followers and, after his death in 632 AD, were compiled into a single book known as the Quran. Islamic theology insists that the Quran is the literal word of Allah which means it has never been modified. Given the religious motivations at play, it's natural to be skeptical of such a claim but it does appear to be solidly supported by the archeological evidence available, with the oldest Quranic manuscripts radiocarbon dated to between 568 and 645 AD and matching what we have available. The commitment to the divine inviolability of the Quran is also reflected in the expectation that, everywhere from America to Indonesia, all practicing Muslims are required to learn and recite passages in the original Arabic. Translations of the Quran exist of course, but reluctantly so and intended solely as a study aid.
The Quran is the central commanding text, but below it are hadiths — a sporadic collection of stories, speeches, and anecdotes attributed to Muhammad and a significant source for how to live the Good Muslim Life (covering topics such as when to assalamualaikum your bros, whether cats are cool, or how to wash oneself before praying). Unlike the Quran, hadiths are not seen as direct guidance from Allah. Instead, their reliability as a guiding lodestar is obsessively assessed in proportion to their authenticity. So some hadiths will be accepted as controlling authorities because they're heavily corroborated by reliable narrators, while others get dismissed because they're fourth-hand accounts on a weird topic and with a dodgy chain of transmission.
The point is, given the obsession over the lineage of the Quran and *hadiths, *it's no surprise that Muslims today come across as especially zealous about following their deen. There's no leeway to fall back on mealy-mouthed "Living Quran" rationalizations for why only some aspects of Islam should be obeyed but not others.
Islam's etymology is about unquestioning submission to authority, purportedly only to god's authority but that's a hard demarcation to keep in mind when political and religious power is near-impossible to disentangle within Muslim countries. Its focus on the eternal afterlife for doling out rewards for devotion endowed me with a fatalistic perspective about my temporary earthly existence at a formative time where I was still grappling with immigrating to the US. My depressed ass then couldn't wait to hurry up and die — an overwhelming desire to to get it over with already so that can experience the promised happiness at last. I left Islam because it's a regressive and stifling bundle of superstitions, ill-suited to living out a fulfilling existence. In consideration of the billions today living under its penumbra, I wish it wasn't so, but that sentiment is not enough to change reality.
I'm comfortable saying that the MINOs who self-appoint themselves as the religion's modern rehabilitators are blatantly lying. If I had to guess at their motives, it probably has something to do with the fact that being a member of a religious minority is too valuable an emblem within the Progressive Stack of oppressed identities to give up completely. For Islam to be the religion least amenable to revisionism does not matter when it's put up against such an irresistible force.
ymeskhout
4mo ago
Follow-Up On That Jewish Conspiracy
My post on the Israel-Palestine affair was the most widely-read thing I ever wrote; not something I anticipated from what was originally intended to be a learning exercise for myself. I've been meaning to address some of the thoughtful feedback I received but I've been busy. There were (alhamdulillah) no factual errors to correct and my overall thesis has not materially changed, but some connective context was missing and some of my points were badly articulated. I'll try to keep this post self-contained but you'll likely miss some context if you hadn't read the first part.
Why the Discourse™ is so Fucked
Before we get into specifics, it's important to first sketch out the discourse battlelines on this issue. Special shout-out again to Inverse Florida who wrote Denial by a thousand cuts barely a week after Hamas's attacks regarding the unusually prevalent campaign of factual denial by the Left/Progressives/"Woke" [1] on the pro-Palestinian side. Their essay helped me understand the dynamics more than any other piece of writing, and it was thoroughly depressing because Inverse makes an airtight argument I don't want to be true.
Woke ideology overwhelmingly spawned out of American left-of-center spaces and its core tenet is the Manichean worldview that neatly divides everyone into stark binary categories of oppressor versus oppressed. Because of its origins, the splits generally reflect only the tensions prevalent within U.S. culture wars (cis vs trans, white vs black, colonizer vs indigenous, and so on) and so the parody/reality for how it's applied to foreign conflicts is to ask: who is the white person in this dispute? Whoever that may be is automatically and permanently adjudicated as the malefactor, and so for the Israel-Palestine conflict, Jews are the 'white person' not because of their genetics but because they're shoehorned as fitting into the white/oppressor archetype (colonizers, imperialists, Western-aligned, successful, rich, etc).
Because of the oppression binary, Inverse Florida points out that another core tenet for Leftists is they see themselves as perpetually powerless, no matter how untrue that might be. Taken altogether, the typical defense mechanisms against Leftist criticism tends to boil down to "Maybe this Leftist did a bad thing, but you the observer are worse for noticing and drawing attention to something so insignificant." If significance swells past the point of viable dismissal, then the only option remaining is to deny, deny, deny. Whatever accusation is levied cannot be true and therefore is not true, all to protect the worldview from falling apart.
This translates into serious ire against anything whatsoever that deigns to complicate the cleanly-drawn villain/victim narrative. Because Oppressed = Virtuous, and because Hamas = Oppressed, condemning their rampage is impossible without severe cognitive malaise. Similarly, because Israel = Villain, any atrocities against Israelis must by definition be justified, and if you haven't found a reason it's because you need to keep looking. Any potential threat to this binary framework is a pestering gnat that must be immediately crushed in order to keep the gnawing cognitive dissonance at bay.
Again, I do not want to be right about this, but I have encountered no other plausible explanation why for example posters of kidnapped Israelis has whipped up so many into a frothy rage. This confrontation with two poster rippers is four tedious minutes long and not once are either of them able to articulate a modicum of justification for their actions. Only the 'pestering gnat' theory makes sense.
I've also experienced exactly the same dynamic recently with close friends I had known for years. I maintain an iron curtain between my writing and my personal social media accounts, but about two months ago I posted what I believed to have been a tepidly-worded condemnation of anti-Jewish elements among the pro-Palestinian movement. The vitriolic response was painfully predictable. I set alerts and within minutes a friend I had known for 13 years blocked me without explanation, an acquaintance excoriated me for bringing attention to something so insignificant, and another claimed ignorance about whether the bigotry I described even existed. Another close friend I've known for a decade to her credit tried to have a conversation about the topic, but then blocked me. Her final straw appears to have been when I pointed out the serious inaccuracies with the map she sent me. Dismiss, deny, and if those fail, disavow.
It's disturbing seeing so many folks on the pro-Palestinian side (to be clear, not all) robotically Beep Boop Beep into this position.[2] I have long viewed Woke ideology with some measure of guarded concern, but because of its blatant recurring incoherence, I figured it would eventually burn itself out into irrelevance after it has generated enough podcasting material. But it's clear I have severely underestimated the enduring influence of this ideology.
Pestering Gnats Everywhere
Once you have the 'pestering gnat' theory in mind, previously inexplicable behavior neatly falls into place. I mentioned the problem of media outlets blatantly lying by omission on this topic, but it's far worse than just one Vox video about Gaza. Amnesty International is a widely respected international human rights advocacy organization that issued a fucking 280-page novel in 2022 lamenting the injustices of Israel's security barriers. They outline scores of legitimate concerns (which I'll get to later) but across those hundreds of pages, not once does the report say anything about the rash of suicide bombings that prompted construction of the barriers and checkpoints. The only reference I could find was near the end on page 263 where they obliquely mention Israel justifies its policies on unspecified "security grounds". Amnesty International can't pretend to be ignorant here, as they already condemned the practice of Palestinian child suicide bombers in 2005.
It's perfectly reasonable to argue that Israel's security barrier is unjustified because it's too ineffective, or too costly, or too onerous, or too abusive --- and I definitely would love to hear those arguments --- but playing ostrich is anti-persuasive as I assume you're hiding something for a reason. Anyone who reads only this report (all 280 pages!) to educate themselves about the topic would be left with the bizarre and misleading impression that Israel chose to dedicate immense resources into building up an elaborate security apparatus because...they're mean I guess?
Similarly, the sanewashing is absolutely egregious. I was shocked to find out that everyone's favorite geographic chant has a completely different meaning in the original Arabic, conveniently transmogrifying "Palestine will be free" from the far less palatable "Palestine is Arab" in the original. It's so well known that throngs of protestors in front of the White House, far away from the region, know it well enough to repeat it.
This is plainly what a cognitive dissonance defense mechanism looks like. Anyone who exhibits this level of aversion towards tackling issues head-on in a transparent and honest manner is openly incriminating themselves. They're revealing lack of confidence in their advocacy, demonstrating a belief their position is indefensible without obfuscation.[3]
Maybe they're internally conflicted yet psychologically unwilling to directly confront the dissonance, or maybe they're consciously choosing to deceive. Regardless of the reason, it's an extremely worrisome development to see take hold on any topic.
Now, back to addressing some of my claims in the original post.
Apartheid: Same but Different
Given the scores of readers who misunderstood my point on this topic, I have to take responsibility for doing a terrible job articulating it. Under the section titled "Apartheid State", I discussed the economic status of Arab-Israelisbut in doing so I painted an unintentionally misleading picture of the Apartheid condemnation levied against Israel.
Some demographic clarification is necessary here. Before the founding of Israel, the common trait among the overwhelming majority of Mandatory Palestine's population is that they spoke Arabic. Hence, Arabs. After Israel was founded some of those Arabs remained within Israel's borders, were granted Israeli citizenship, and are colloquially referred to as 48-Arabs. While the other Arabs, the ones displaced from Israel's borders are referred to as Palestinians. After the 1967 Six Day war, Israel has fully occupied Gaza, the West Bank, and all of its Palestinian residents. The point here is the two Arab groups were virtually indistinguishable genetically/culturally/religiously before the schism, and any differences today is the result of cultural and political forks. Besides a limited family reunification program, Israel never made a meaningful attempt to offer Palestinians citizenship or otherwise integrate them. Instead, Palestinians have remained mired in a legal purgatory within isolated enclaves.
When we talk about "Apartheid" we're conjuring up South Africa's system of institutionalized racial segregation that began in 1948[4] and served as a humiliating stain on the country's reputation until widespread diplomatic condemnation forced its end in the early 1990s. So when Israel is described as an Apartheid state --- as a state with institutionalized racial segregation --- this denunciation can be understood as a reference to the Arabs (read: Palestinians) under Israeli military occupation, but it's incoherent when applied to Arabs who are full Israeli citizens. So is the dividing line actually based on race, or something else entirely?
I'm generally agnostic about vocabulary choices and what matters far more than which lexical denominator to affix is describing Palestinian conditions straightforwardly. Sam Kriss (whose writing I highly recommend) chimed in the comments with lurid details about the "calculated unfreedom" Palestinians live under. There is no denying that Palestinians endure abject poverty that is made even worse by the intrusive security apparatus and the passively-tolerated spate of settler violence. The occupation's legal system is explicitly bifurcated not along territorial boundaries, but along individual legal status. Jewish settlers in the West Bank fall under the jurisdiction of a civil justice system, while Palestinians in the West Bank are subject to military tribunals staffed entirely by Israeli soldiers (including the prosecutors, judges, and translators), with far lower evidentiary standards and an expanded scope of what counts as a criminal offense.
The comparison I aimed to draw with Arab-Israelis was a means of contemplating reasons why a hypothetical full Israeli annexation of the Palestinian territories and its people would be seen as anathema, at least from a material standpoint. If Arab citizens of Israel suffered a horrendous quality of life under Israeli sovereignty now, I could begin to understand some of the intense resistance to Israeli governance from Palestinian Arabs. But as I noted, Arab-Israelis enjoy far higher quality of life than almost anywhere else in the Arab world, so that potential explanation was a total dead-end to me.
However, it is worthwhile to examine whether the Arab-Israeli living arrangement, who are only 21% of all Israelis, can scale.
Ethnostate but Democratic
It's worth pointing out that the 48-Arabs did not always enjoy the legal equality they have today. The Zionists didn't really have a plan for how to integrate Arabs into Israel, and though they were granted 'citizenship' they were subject to martial law until 1966. This means that throughout Israel's existence, the only period when Israel did not have a bifurcated legal system split along ethnic lines was a brief window of time between 1966 and the beginning of its Palestinian occupation in 1967.
It's also worth pointing out that the hypothetical full Israeli annexation (including full citizenship to Palestinians) I mentioned would be supported by virtually nobody, least of all by Israel. The Muslim world would be howling with rage at what would be seen as the extinction of the Palestinian Cause, while worldwide condemnation would focus on the baseline disdain against territorial acquisition. Israel meanwhile, as a country explicitly founded as a refuge for Jews from across the world, would be unwilling to absorb the voter demographic shock.
Israel rightfully prides itself as a democratic enterprise, but there is no question that this adherence to democratic principles is at least in part conditional on not having too many of the wrong kind of voters. As Freddie DeBoer pointed out, the objective of an ethnostate will always be in tension with expanding the voter franchise. Arab-Israelis have full voting rights, but they're also only 21% of the population and therefore not a threat to Jewish voting supremacy on policy issues that fall along religious/ethnic lines. That calculus changes completely if the 4.9 million Palestinians living in occupied territories are added to Israel's 9.7 million population and its voter rolls. To the extent that ethnicity and religion can predict political stability within this region of the world, it's also reasonable to be concerned whether a one-state solution would repeat the same downward spiral neighboring Lebanon charted.
I notice a pointed discomfort among Israeli supporters in the West when I describe Israel as an ethnostate. It is! An ethnostate is any country organized along ethnic lines, and undeniably that's what Israel is! The label may have distasteful connotations, but that doesn't make it inaccurate! You may argue that an ethnostate is justified on this narrow exception because of the persistent history of Jewish oppression et cetera yadda yadda, and I'm sympathetic to those arguments but I have no patience for reality denial.
My preferred policy palette is basically libertarian, though I refer to myself as an anarchist because my overriding priority would be to see an archipelago of diverse systems of customized governance. You can call this the "Voltairean" vision of government in that I may disagree with someone's preferred form of government, but I will defend their right to establish it. "Let a hundred flowers of distinct governance systems bloom" as Mao famously said. I have severe disagreements with any government that cleaves along racial or ethnic lines, but I support anyone's right to found one.
I'm at peace with my position, but supporters of Israel who feel conflicted about the ethnostate/democracy tension are responsible for undergoing their own soul-searching to figure out what to prioritize at the margins. How much national Jewish identity is worth potentially sacrificing at the altar of expanding the democratic franchise? I can't answer that for you.
Violence for Thee, but not for Me
I'm not a pacifist and I transparently outlined the principles I rely upon to evaluate whether any application of violence is justified. It depends on how much the violence is oriented towards a specific goal, proportional to the objective, and carried out with humility. I applied these principles to denounce the depressingly common Palestinian practice of indiscriminate attacks against orthogonal civilian targets. Some of the pointed criticism I received in response to my essay carried the implication that I would be unwilling to denounce Israeli violence which fails to satisfy these principles, but I hold no such aversion.
1. A History of Jewish Violence
In fairness, I can understand the basis for such a suspicion. When I decried Israel's history of lying to cover up its war crimes, I cited only two examples from the IDF. There were illustrative examples, never intended to serve as a comprehensive list of all Zionist atrocities. Faceless Craven pointed out several omissions of atrocities by the Jewish side from across the history of the conflict, many I admittedly was not aware of at the time. Some notable examples I did not mention include the 1946 King David Hotel bombing by the Irgun which killed 91 people, the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre which was directly perpetrated by Christian Lebanese militias but with the support of the IDF and resulted in 460 to 3,500 dead civilians, or the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre where one far-right Zionist killed 29 people and injured 125.
Beyond specific acts, it's perfectly relevant to examine how much the Israeli government tacitly encourages a culture of indemnity for gratuitous violence perpetrated by its own. In 1991, a 13-year-old Palestinian girl named Iman Darweesh Al Hams was shot and killed by an IDF commander who emptied his machine gun into her. The commander expressed no regrets, saying he would've done the same had she been 3-years-old, and was cleared of any wrongdoing by a military court. The same issue can be examined regarding broader Israeli culture as reflected by who gets elected to its highest office. Menachem Begin, the leader of the Irgun and the guy responsible for the King David Hotel bombing, was elected Prime Minister in 1977. Yitzhak Shamir, the leader of the Stern Gang, a Zionist terrorist group that splintered from the Irgun because they weren't radical enough was elected Prime Minister in 1986. As did Ariel Sharon in 2001, despite his involvement in the Sabra and Shatila massacre and a list of antics way too insane and numerous to get into here. One of the dominant political entity in Israel today is the right-wing Likud party, and it was founded by Sharon and Begin.
Evidently in the realm of Israeli politics a history of egregious violence against non-Jews is not a drawback, but potentially a sought-after qualification for a significant portion of the electorate. You could be charitable and maybe argue this simply reflects a legitimate desire for leaders who have a demonstrated commitment to national security, and with direct experience in armed conflict. But just as I denounced homicidal bloodthirst within Palestinian culture, I must do the same for Israeli culture. I would be betraying my principles otherwise.
2. Ceasefire When?
Relatedly, my post was published as Israel's pulverization of Gaza was ramping up but it was quiet on that specific issue. That was not obfuscation, I just do not have the information or expertise to play armchair commander. I can't fully trust casualty numbers from Hamas but even halving their claims leaves you with at least 10,000 Gazans killed by Israel, a number far beyond my capacity to comprehend. The IDF already admitted their proportionality calculus accepts the obliteration of 50 civilians in exchange for a chance to kill one Hamas commander. The IDF may claim to care about minimizing civilian casualties, but if 3 Israeli hostages waving white flags can get mistakenly killed by the IDF, we have plenty of reasons to question that commitment's veracity. Israel may be pursuing a perfectly justifiable objective (destroying Hamas), and the preceding examples are all absolutely damning indicators against sufficient proportionality and humility, but it's not conclusive without answering the question: compared to what?
I admit without any hesitation that Israel's actions in Gaza have been immensely destructive. But as noted by the highly recommended Trembling Mad, raw numbers alone are insufficient for adjudicating moral culpability, no matter how far off-the-charts they might be. The falsifiability argument would be to imagine a hypothetical Israel that is pursuing the exact same military objectives, but whose commitment towards minimizing collateral destruction is earnest and unimpeachable. I fully expect the civilian death toll accumulated by this hypothetical Israel to be lower than it is in reality, but it cannot be zero. This is purely a result of the baseline challenges of confronting a surreptitious belligerent within a dense urban environment. And yet, unless we have viable alternatives to contrast Israel's behavior against, it's difficult to accurately evaluate Israel's level of misconduct (and again, I already said there are ample reasons for suspicion).
The calls for an Israeli ceasefire are directly implicated by this question. I've repeatedly asked and desperately searched for any suggestions for how Israel should conduct its war differently, and it's near-impossible to get a straight answer because so many ceasefire advocates outright reject the premise that Israel has any justifiable objectives whatsoever. Watch AOC's serious discomfort in reaction to this very simple question. To his credit, Cenk Uygur is the only pro-Palestinian advocate I've come across willing to articulate an alternative, but his idea that Israel should just send special forces into Hamas's tunnels is advertising serious ignorance about the subject matter. If you've come across any other viable alternatives, I'm desperate to see them.
I anticipate perplexity for how it's possible for me to express support for Israel in spite of what I wrote above, and the simple answer is my support should be understood as a comparative ranking relative to the alternatives within this conflict. Nobody is under any obligation to pick any side --- and more power to you if you choose to abstain --- but I picked to avoid the simplistic nihilism that comes along with decrying everyone's hands as equally dirty. I disagree that they are, and I stake my position from a place of clear-eyed transparency, fully acknowledging Israel's sins. Because it would be another betrayal of my principles for me to engage in the same dismissal and denial I condemn in others.
In Which I Solve Everything
There's no reason for anyone to listen to what I have to say here regarding any potential solutions --- Wikipedia binging hasn't deluded me to that extreme --- but I'll offer more scattered thoughts.
Popular Israeli support for Likud and its hardline focus on security has historically risen in response to heightened Palestinian violence. Right now Netanyahu and Likud appear to be reviled by most Israelis for their massive fuck-up on October 7th, but it seems highly unlikely to expect appetite for a two-state solution (which necessarily requires accepting increasing Palestinian autonomy) to do anything but continue to crash among the Israeli public.
An argument I've regularly encountered from more honest advocates on the pro-Palestinian side is they first acknowledge the concerns over Palestinian violence as legitimate, but then they claim that Israeli's intrusive security measures are ultimately counterproductive because they provoke further radicalization and thus further violence. This strikes me as a naive argument, but I admit I have no way of falsifying it except through hypotheticals. Imagine Israel suddenly announcing a complete policy shift: every military checkpoint and every concrete barrier will be completely dismantled, and every Palestinian will have full autonomy to move about wherever they please within Israel, free of any security screening of any kind...how many Jews do you expect to be murdered the next day? I can't give an exact number beyond "a fucking fuckton".
I don't see how any mutual de-escalation can be viable given the fanatical devotion commanded by Palestinian militancy. Richard Hanania is correct to argue that Palestinians are maxed out on hatred, with Hamas's military wing (al-Qassam Brigades) garnering the highest approval rating among Palestinians, polling at 89%. If you want to draw an equivalency between al-Qassam and the terrorizing violence doled out by extreme Zionist settlers, that's fair! But the comparison cannot hold regarding overall societal sentiment, as Israelis demonstrably express far more disagreement on the application of military deterrence and other issues. As recently as July 2023, 15% of Israelis were willing to negotiate on a resolution with Hamas, despite the group's penchant for rocket barrages.
When I cite the insanity of Palestinian militancy, I wonder how many think I'm exaggerating. If you didn't learn about Farfour the Mouse last time, here's another chance to see the level of fanatical indoctrination aimed at Palestinian children. I can't stress how illuminating it is to see footage from the Hamas TV show Tomorrow's Pioneers. I cannot claim that this show is representative of Palestinian opinion (and the linked video highlights many who expressed public disagreement) but the detail I found most unsettling were the number of young callers to the show readily naming and singing from a disturbingly long roster of songs all about genocidal martyrdom.
I would hope it's apparent how much of an outlier this level of unbridled animosity is, inculcated from a very young age. For everyone's sake, Palestinians are in urgent need of severe deradicalization, but I cannot fathom what that process could look like.
And finally, where should Palestinians live? I'm writing this from the comfort of my home as someone who has never known displacement, and my immigration story involved a cushy plane seat, so discount what I have to say accordingly. In my previous post, I did not but should have addressed the issue of displaced Palestinians' right of return. Matt Yglesias examined this issue in greater detail, and his article highlights one of the core tensions I already touched upon though. Let's assume the worst case displacement scenario (a scenario I am explicitly not endorsing and bringing up solely to analyze its ramifications) where Israel rounds up and forcibly deports all 4.9 million Palestinians currently living under Israeli occupation. What happens next?
If we consider all the major Arab countries who claim to be ardent supporters of the Palestinian people (e.g. Egypt population 100 million, Saudi Arabia 35M, Algeria 43M, Iran 83M, etc.), what would prevent any of them from opening their borders to the survivors of a second Nakba? Countries all over the world regularly accomodate refugees and mass migrations. Over the course of the ongoing Syrian civil war, Turkey (population 85 million) already has accepted 3.3 million Syrian refugees in what is functionally a permanent arrangement. If Turkey managed this influx on its own (to be clear, not without strife or hardship) I don't see what would prevent the aforementioned countries from enacting a similar endeavor.
The answer is while there may not be practical barriers towards accommodating millions of Palestinian refugees, there are serious political hurdles. Remember that from 1948 to 1967, Gaza was partof Egypt and the West Bank was part of Jordan. When Israel signed a peace treaty with Egypt in 1978, Egypt was offered Gaza back but they declined and instead renounced any territorial claims over it. Jordan pulled a similar move and relinquished its claims over the West Bank in 1988 and eventually stripped West Bank Palestinians of the Jordanian citizenship they had.
To recap my main thesis again, none of this makes any sense unless you incorporate the ideological component that needs Palestinians to remain stuck where they are, playing their role as the downtrodden in this grand theatrical production, all to ensure the jihadi casus belli against the Jews is maintained. This is what makes this conflict so perverse, so many people are just fucking pawns. Had Gaza been re-absorbed and became assimilated as just another governorate of Egypt, or had the share of Jordanians with Palestinian descent continued to increase beyond the estimated 50% it already is today, what remaining grievances would be worth the self-immolation remedy?
The key takeaway in understanding the intractability of this conflict is that much is deliberately constructed to remain that way. While I can't claim to offer any viable solutions, its perpetuity will remain partly a result of the aversion towards transparent acknowledgements of reality, and a result of the persistent unwillingness to critically examine the actual motivations of those involved.
[1] Words are very fuzzy beasts and I'm normally very reluctant to use terms like 'Woke' because of its charged ambiguity, but unfortunately there are scant other alternatives available to uncontroversially describe an undeniably real phenomenon.
[2] What I'm describing is simply a particularly intense variant of cognitive dissonance, and it's not at all exclusive to just Western Leftists. Anyone else who ever experiences the serious mental discomfort upon realizing their closely-held beliefs could be in jeopardy of being contradicted by reality is susceptible to similarly severe reactions.
[3] Just because an advocate believes dishonesty is necessary to advance their cause does not mean they're correct!
[4] Quelle coïncidence.
ymeskhout
8mo ago
Defunding My Mistake
Confessions of an ex-ACAB
Until about five years ago, I unironically parroted the slogan All Cops Are Bastards (ACAB) and earnestly advocated to abolish the police and prison system. I had faint inklings I might be wrong about this a long time ago, but it took a while to come to terms with its disavowal. What follows is intended to be not just a detailed account of what I used to believe but most pertinently, why. Despite being super egotistical, for whatever reason I do not experience an aversion to openly admitting mistakes I've made, and I find it very difficult to understand why others do. I've said many times before that nothing engenders someone's credibility more than when they admit error, so you definitely have my permission to view this kind of confession as a self-serving exercise (it is). Beyond my own penitence, I find it very helpful when folks engage in introspective, epistemological self-scrutiny, and I hope others are inspired to do the same.
How Did I Get There?
For decades now, I've consistently held plain vanilla libertarian policy preferences, with the only major distinction being that I've aligned myself more with the anarchists. Whereas some were content with pushing the "amount of government" lever to "little", I wanted to kick it all the way to "zero". There are many reasons I was and remain drawn to anarchist libertarianism, and chief among them was the attractively simple notion that violence is immoral and that government is violence. The problem with moral frameworks is that they can be quite infectious. To pick on one example for demonstration's sake, I notice that for many animal welfare advocates a vegan diet is heralded not just as the ideal moral choice, but also as the healthiest for humans, the least polluting, the cheapest financially, the best for soil conservation, the most water-efficient, the least labor-exploitative, et cetera & so forth. There's a risk that if you become dogmatically attached to a principled position, you're liable to be less scrutinizing when reflexively folding in other justifications. I suspect that happened to me with prisons, for example, where because I felt immediate revulsion at the thought of the state forcing someone into a cage, I was unwilling to entertain the possibility it could be justified. Ceding the ground on this particular brick was too threatening to the anarchism edifice I was so fond of.
Obviously if you advocate getting rid of the government, people naturally want to know what will replace it. Some concerns were trivial to respond to (I'm not sad about the DEA not existing anymore because drugs shouldn't be illegal to begin with), but other questions I found annoying because I admittedly had no good answer, such as what to do with criminals if the police didn't exist. I tried to find these answers. Anarchism as an umbrella ideology leans heavily to the far left and has a history of serious disagreements with fellow-travelers in Marxism. Despite that feud, anarchist thought absorbed by proxy Marxist "material conditions" critiques that blame the existence of crime on capitalism's inequalities --- a claim that continues to be widely circulated today, despite how flagrantly dumb it is. As someone who was and continues to be solidly in favor of free market economics, these critiques were like parsing an inscrutable foreign language.[1] I was in college around my most ideologically formative time and a voracious reader, but I churned through the relevant literature and found nothing convincing. Instead of noting that as a blaring red flag, I maintained the grip I had on my preferred conclusion and delegated the hard work of actually defending it to someone else. I specifically recall how Angela Davis's 2003 book Are Prisons Obsolete? (written by a famous professor! woah!) had just come out and the praise it was getting from my lefty friends. If this synopsis of the book is in any way accurate, Davis's arguments are so undercooked that it should come with a health warning. The fact that I never read the book all the following years could have been intentional, because it allowed me a convenient escape hatch: whenever pressed, I could just hide behind Davis and other purportedly super prestigious intellectuals as my security detail. Back then, I carried the incredibly naive assumption that any position held by prestigious academics couldn't be completely baseless...right?
Also pertinent is exploring why I felt so attached to something I knew I couldn't logically defend, and the simple explanation is that it was cool. Being a libertarian can be super socially isolating, especially if you live only in places overwhelmingly surrounded by leftists like I do. I navigated the social scene by prioritizing shared political values --- let's not discuss how I don't support the minimum wage, focus instead on how much I hate the police and on how much I love punk rock. That worked really well. Putting "ACAB" on my Tinder profile was an effective signaling move that dramatically improved my chances of matching with the tattooed and pierced cuties I was chasing. Announcing at a party that you are so radical that you're willing to eliminate prisons is an effective showmanship maneuver that few others have the stomach to challenge. There was plenty of social cachet motivating me to ignore niggling doubts.
How Did I Leave?
Whatever the outward facade, my position was crumbling behind it. Almost seven years ago I started working as a public defender and was inundated with hundreds of hours of police encounter footage that were completely uneventful; if anyone, it was usually my client who acted like an idiot. I've seen bodycam footage that starts with officers dropping their lunch in the precinct breakroom in order to full-on sprint toward a "shots fired" dispatch call. I've seen dipshits like the woman who attempted to flee a traffic stop while the trooper was desperately reaching for the ignition with his legs dangling out of the open car door. Despite this, the trooper treated her with impeccable professionalism once the situation was stabilized. At least about five years ago, I found myself in a conversation with a very normie liberal lawyer on the question of police/prison abolition. It was one of the first times I encountered serious pushback and I quickly realized just how woefully under-equipped I was. I distinctly remember how unpleasant the feeling was --- not from the fear of being wrong about something, but rather the fear of being found out.
There were instances where I pulled bullshit what-I-really-mean defenses of ACAB and tried to pontificate about how it's less about whether individual officers are per se "bastards", but rather how the institutional role is blah blah blah. I played similarly squirmy motte-and-bailey games with the abolition topic when I was confronted with undeniable rebuttals. I found an example from almost 10 years ago of one of my most common responses, where I'd highlight some police scandal (e.g., cops seizing more stuff through civil forfeiture than is stolen from people by burglars) and accompany it with the eminently lukewarm "on net, society might be better off without police". The argument is as abstract as it is unconvincing; soaring at an altitude too high for effective critique yet also too remote for anyone to care. Tellingly, I wouldn't and couldn't address the more pressing questions of how to deal with more serious crimes.
It was bizarre watching the discourse unfold during the 2020 BLM riots/protests. Almost overnight, the normie liberal demographic that previously was willing to push back on my inanity was now hoarse from screaming for police abolition. My younger self would've been thrilled watching the populace fully adopt radical anarchist sloganeering, but my actual self was aghast. I couldn't believe these people were speaking literally (yep!) or whether they somehow discovered the elusive magic elixir that transformed police abolition into a viable policy proposal (nope!). I'm someone who was and remains a full supporter of BLM's policy proposals, and I even defended burning down a police precinct building in Minneapolis for fuck's sake, and yet I didn't join the defund chorus.
Still, there's a noticeable bend to some of my writing from that time where I consciously mirrored some of the language du jour --- such as making a bog standard argument against mass incarceration while aping abolition language, or responding to a DTP conversation by discussing police overcompensation. I haven't changed my mind about anything I wrote there, but nevertheless it's fair to accuse me of indirectly "sanewashing" the DTP issue. I took my boring, wonky arguments and adorned them with the faintest slogan perfume. This let me carry my hobbyhorses on the attention wave, but it also contributed to rehabilitating (however slightly) the totally crazy slogan position.
Now What?
I know it sounds crazy, but I think effective law enforcement is a vital component of any well-functioning society. Tons of cops are perfectly decent people who try to do the best they can at a difficult and unenviable job. There are bad people out there who can be prevented from doing bad things only when they are physically restrained with chains and metal bars. Unless we develop some revolutionary new technology or fundamentally modify the nature of man, this is the reality we're stuck with. I still firmly believe there are loads of improvements we can make to the policing and incarceration we have, but abolishing it all is a delusional idea untethered from reality. Radical stance, I know.
Regarding the anarchist responses to the topic, the only coherent proposals I've ever encountered are from David Friedman and others on the anarcho-capitalist side (a variant thoroughly detested by left-wing anarchist thinkers who think it's an affront even to consider it "real" anarchism). Friedman's response is essentially a cyberpunk future with competing private companies offering insurance, security, and arbitration in one package. Friedman's proposal is unusually thoughtful and coherent (the bar is low) and yet still remains largely a thought exercise reliant on some generous game theory assumptions. Who knows if it will or can ever work.
In terms of lessons learned, I should first note that introspection of this kind, spanning across such a long time period, will have significant blind spots and would be particularly prone to flattering revisionism. The most obvious mistake I made was in burying those unnerving moments of doubt. Instead of running toward the fire to put it out, I did my best to tell myself there was no fire. I had already arrived at a conclusion in my mind and worked backward to find its support, and I suppressed how little I could actually find. Whether intentionally or not, I fabricated comforting explanations for why my position was right even though I couldn't directly defend it, often citing evidence that was more aspiration than reality. My ideological isolation kept me safe from almost all pushback anyways. And magnifying all of this were the social dynamics that rewarded me for keeping the horse blinders on.
I'm likely overlooking other factors of course, and there's the ever-present, gnawing worry that haunts me, whispering that I might be fundamentally mistaken about something else. Maybe I am, but hopefully I'll be better equipped to unearth it.
[1] This isn't really on point or even about crime, but to give just one example of the "vibe" I encountered from left-wing anarchists, Voltairine de Cleyre in one of her essays makes a very Kulak-esque argument about how to best guarantee freedom of speech:
Anarchism says, Make no laws whatever concerning speech, and speech will be free; so soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that "freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license"; and they will define and define freedom out of existence. Let the guarantee of free speech be in every man's determination to use it, and we shall have no need of paper declarations.
In the thread below about the WNBA player who was sentenced for weed possession in Russia, the discussion dovetailed into how January 6th defendants are treated and a couple of people made what to me were eyebrow-raising claims. @anti_dan worried about the fact that J6 defendants could "be held without bail for wandering in", and @The_Nybbler was concerned about how "many of the "rioters" who committed no crime worse than trespassing (in some cases not even entering the building, just supposedly-forbidden parts of the grounds) are getting harsh punishments for political reasons".
As the token defense attorney who cares about criminal justice reform, both concerns piqued my attention. But as far as I can tell, the concerns are fictitious [EDIT: see notes below]. I've previously written about the difficulties inherent with collecting representative data about state crime statistics (tldr: lots of scattered jurisdictions + lack of court record transparencies), and while I've previously whinged about people here being sloppy with their claims about state crime trends, I fully appreciate the reluctance in committing to what can amount to a thesis-level research endeavor.
But it's different with the J6 prosecutions because they're all happening in a single jurisdiction with a lot of people paying attention. Information is surprisingly easy to find. Just googling "january 6th defendants database" will lead to dozens of hits.
Regarding the people held without bail just for wandering in, I did a quick google search but couldn't come up with an updated number of how many defendants are still held in jail (either with no bail or with unrealistic bail). There was a DC Appeals Court decision a while back that instructed magistrates to release people unless the government can demonstrate a specific threat. This means that anyone who is "held without bail for wandering in" would be contrary to that court's order. It's possible I missed something, but I couldn't find any evidence of this happening [EDIT: see notes below].
For the claim that "many" of the J6 defendants were facing "harsh punishments" (in fairness, this is ambiguous) for doing no worse than just trespassing, this too was easy to quickly google. This database from Politico is out of date but was at least searchable. Most of what I was familiar with for misdemeanor J6 pleas was just probation with no jail time. I plugged in "entering a restricted building" in the full table and sorted by incarceration and saw only three people got jail time (reminder that the database is incomplete) with the highest being 50 days for William Tryon. I quickly googled and easily found the guilty statement that was filed in his case. I would guess that the aggravating factors that made his case stand out was that he asked police to enter the building, was denied, tried to enter anyway, was pepper-sprayed, created an opening at another location by removing broken glass, encouraged other people to enter the building, and then confronted another line of police. He couldn't have claimed a plausible defense of "I didn't know I couldn't enter" based on those facts. Given what I know about misdemeanor sentencing, 50 days of jail for this fact pattern did not strike me as out of the norm. Maybe The_Nybbler knows about "many" other cases that I somehow missed, or perhaps they have a specific definition of "harsh punishments" which would encompass probation.
I responded to both with my concerns but neither replied. Maybe either/both have some evidence to showcase, in which case they now have another opportunity to do so (yay!). I think this is an illuminating exercise because it can shed light on our biases and how we can process information. In my last whinge on this topic, I had an enlightening exchange with adamsb6, where they initially suspected that J6 defendants were treated especially harshly. I asked some basic Bayesian questions (how many J6 defendants? what % of those were released? what % of all federal defendants are released?) and they were surprised at how off-base some of their assumptions were. This does not mean that J6 defendants are not treated especially harshly, but the exchange was instructive because it plainly demonstrated how even a conclusion arrived at in earnest can be muddied up if you are led by inaccurate premises.
I hope we can have a similarly enlightening exchange with the above examples. It's possible that both @anti_dan and @The_Nybbler 's claims are true, in which case I remain eager to see their evidence. If neither claim is true, then I would be very curious to know how they arrived at these conclusions. I anticipate that the likely issue is feeding inaccurate premises into the system, which can befall anyone and is not a personal failing. You don't always know what you don't know after all. In either case, I hope I've shed light on just how easy quickly googling shit can be (I swear I am not sponsored by the search engine company).
Edit1: @DradisPing helpfully pointed me to the case of Timothy Louis Hale-Cusanelli. As further explained in my post below, I think this is someone @anti_dan can plausibly argue was "held without bail for wandering in", but not "without them even proving that you knew it was illegal to be there".
Edit2: @JarJarJedi had a solid response and pointed out Karl Dresch and Michael Curzio to which I responded to below. Both were indeed "held without bail for wandering", although arguably they knew it was illegal to be there.
ymeskhout
10mo ago
When Someone Tells You They're Lying, Believe Them
Some people refuse to admit they're wrong, but there's other clues
Paul Ehrlich became well-known for his 1968 book The Population Bomb, where he made many confidently-stated but spectacularly-wrong predictions about imminent overpopulation causing apocalyptical resource scarcity. As illustration for how far off the mark Ehrlich was, he predicted widespread famines in India at a time when its population was around 500 million people, and he wrote "I don't see how India could possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980." He happened to have made this claim right before India's Green Revolution in agriculture. Not only is India able to feed a population that tripled to 1.4 billion people, it has long been one of the world's largest agricultural exporter.
Ehrlich is also known for notoriously losing a bet in 1990 to one of my favorite humans ever, the perennial optimist (and business professor) Julian Simon. Bryan Caplan brings up some details to the follow-up that never was:
We've all heard about the Ehrlich-Simon bet. Simon the cornucopian bet that resources would get cheaper, Ehrlich the doomsayer bet that they would get pricier, and Simon crushed him. There's a whole book on it. What you probably don't know, however, is that in 1995, Paul Ehrlich and Steve Schneider proposed a long list of new bets for Simon - and that Simon refused them all.
The first bet was fairly straight-forward: Ehrlich picked 5 commodities (copper, chromium, nickel, tin, & tungsten) and predicted that their price would be higher in 1990 compared to 1980 as the materials become scarcer. Instead of rising, the combined price went down. Ehrlich's decade-spanning obstinance and unparalleled ability to step on rakes make him an irresistible punching bag but despite his perennial wrongness, his responses have ranged from evasion to outright denials:
Anne and I have always followed U.N. population projections as modified by the Population Reference Bureau --- so we never made "predictions," even though idiots think we have. When I wrote The Population Bomb in 1968, there were 3.5 billion people. Since then we've added another 2.8 billion --- many more than the total population (2 billion) when I was born in 1932. If that's not a population explosion, what is? My basic claims (and those of the many scientific colleagues who reviewed my work) were that population growth was a major problem. Fifty-eight academies of science said that same thing in 1994, as did the world scientists' warning to humanity in the same year. My view has become depressingly mainline!
Some humans possess the unfortunate egotistical and dishonorable habit of refusing to admit error. It's a reflex I personally find utterly baffling, because nothing engenders someone's credibility to me more than their ability to admit error. So if we can't always rely on people to admit a mistake, what else do we have?
What I find so interesting about the second bet in 1995 is how peculiar the proposed conditions were [image link]:
I kept thinking "...so?" as I read these. Why would someone care about the availability of firewood versus the heating and cooking costs in general? Why would someone care about per capita cropland statistics versus the availability of food in general? Many of these are also blatant statistical fuckery, such as monitoring increases in absolute worldwide AIDS deaths during a period of persistent population growth.
Ehrlich is playing a seemingly uncomfortable game of Twister here, but his behavior makes perfect sense if you read intelligence and agency behind his decisions. The only explanation for the indirect, tangential, and collateral measurements is that Ehrlich knows that a direct measurement will not be favorable to his pet theory. He does not believe in truth, but rather believes in belief as the kids say, and he's not willing to jeopardize it.
The acrobatics are the tell here. When Meghan Murphy debates the sex industry, she has to keep the wheels on her goalposts perpetually greased up. Meghan wants to say that everyone who works in the industry has a negative view of it, but the preemptive goalpost shifting she employs is proof she knows that's a lie. The guy claiming there's a dragon in his garage can only preemptively dismiss [thermal imaging/flour/whatever] as a legitimate investigatory tool only because he knows there is no dragon.
It's not perfect but it's often the best we have. Ideally we get people who act honorably and admit mistakes and are willing to falsify their own theories but barring that, just look for the acrobatics. They're the product of intelligent design, not random chance.
ymeskhout
1yr ago
I generally find the 21st Century Salonnière’s (also known as Dolly) writing to be thoughtful and insightful, despite the controversial arena she roams around in. Back in April (I have a terrifying reading backlog, ok?) she published the post Sexual Offenses Are More Common Among Transwomen Than Men, a title as provocative as it is unambiguous.
Using prison data from both the UK and the US, Dolly finds that about 50% of trans prisoners are there for a sexual crime, in contrast to 11% - 19% of the general prison population. Hopefully it’s obvious that prisoners are overwhelmingly male by a huge margin, especially for violent offenses, and that the number of trans prisoners is so miniscule as to be almost a rounding error (in the UK there were only 142 trans prisoners out of a total prison population of 92,949 as of 2017).
Dolly’s overall argument is structured thus:
Premise- Trans prisoners are more likely to be there for a sexual offense
Conclusion- Trans people are more likely to commit a sexual offense
I’m not the only one who noticed some glaring omissions in this argument, and a few commentators pointed this out. I would hope my criticism is seen as constructive, but the main feedback I would give is to be more transparent about implicit assumptions. To be clear, Dolly’s operating assumptions (whether stated or not) may be perfectly reasonable, but the discussion is clouded when they're kept shelved away.
The two main assumptions implicitly made are:
-
Trans prisoners are representative of the trans general population
-
The amount of law enforcement attention spent on any particular crime is representative of that crime's frequency
I might be missing others, but those are at least the most important. Setting aside the validity of the prison statistics (I’m assuming they’re legit and have no reason to think otherwise) I remain skeptical these are reasonable assumptions for many of the same reasons “And I for truth” listed in their comment to the post:
It could be the case, for instance, that transwomen commit non-sex crimes at lower rates than other males but sex crimes at the same rates. It could also be that males in prison for sex crimes are more likely to claim a trans identity in the hopes of getting transferred to a woman's prison, either for nefarious reasons (access to women in prison) or self-protection (recognition of the higher risk that other male prisoners might commit violence against them). Both of those situations are consistent with the data you cite.
I’m also skeptical based on my experience as a public defender.
Sex criminals are by far the people treated the worst by the criminal justice system, both by the legal punishments but also informally by retribution from other inmates. When I'm dealing with a sex offense case, I make informal requests to the prosecutor and the judge to not read out their charges out loud, or to take their case last when the courtroom is emptier. Those same clients routinely ask me to not give them any paperwork about their case for fear that it would be discovered by others. All of this is done to protect them, by limiting the number of people who find out about the nature of their charges.
Inmates in general are almost by definition more violent that the general public, and beating the shit out of someone accused of a sex crime is the kind of violence most likely to be implicitly condoned by the powers that be. Correctional officers genuinely have a thankless and very difficult job, and the last thing on their mind is worrying about kiddie diddler getting shanked. Didn’t see it happen, and even if they did, it was self-defense because the rapist provoked it. So yes, the idea that someone accused of a sex offense is more likely to identify as trans once in prison solely for the purposes of better accommodations makes a lot of sense to me. This says less about the authenticity of trans gender identity and much more about the horrific conditions our criminal justice system casually tolerates.
There would also be an added filter at the investigation stage. Sex crimes are notoriously difficult to prosecute, absent clear evidence of violence or coercion. Law enforcement is put in a very difficult situation because they WANT to be receptive of complaints, but they often can't do anything with them due to shoddy evidence. In most of the rape cases I've handled, there is rarely any dispute whatsoever that the people involved had sex, but then the only evidence of a crime is conflicting testimony from the only two witnesses (he said she consented, she denies it). For example, I once had a case where a guy in his 40s had a friends-with-benefits relationship with a 21 year-old for at least two years. The day she reported a rape to police, she was also seven months pregnant with his child. I am not at all saying it’s impossible to rape someone you’re in a relationship with (no matter how casual), but good luck convincing a jury of that beyond a reasonable doubt.
Prosecutors are thus more likely to pursue charges like this if there are other factors to tip the balance. In the case above, the guy had a domestic violence history from a very long time ago. I also have to assume that their age gap also played a role in moving the needle towards “prosecute”. It would not be surprising if a sex crime garners more lurid attention from the law enforcement apparatus just because the suspect is trans. Prosecutors openly advertising their preferred pronouns does not disavow them of any potential bias against trans people they may harbor, and either way they can only file charges when a beat cop or detective cares enough to forward a report. We’re not pulling from a progressive crowd here.
The overall methodology is complicated by the severe dearth of data on a population this miniscule — how many conclusions can you draw from a sample that is 0.15% of the population? This is further hampered by the relatively incoherent framework of gender identity, particularly when it melds into non-binary territory — how do you determine who should be counted in this group?
One of my hobby horses is being a spoilsport for when someone tries to hoist a heavy conclusion on some flimsy stilts. We can shore this up with some figurative gravel — perhaps some reasonable assumptions to close the gaps, but these should at least be stated outright and explicitly. Short of that, sometimes we just don’t have enough evidence to come to a conclusion, and it’s ok to admit when we don’t and can’t know something. This isn’t a call to give up on trying to answer questions, because even a failed attempt to resolve an inquiry can leave us with a useful blueprint for the future.
ymeskhout
7mo ago
Clarence Thomas's Gun Control Snare
So the Bruen decision came out more than a year ago, and it has scrambled how courts deal with gun control laws.
Step back first. The way courts typically evaluate laws that putatively infringe on a constitutional right was through an analysis called strict scrutiny. Basically, take any constitutional guarantee ("Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech...") and add an "...unless it has a really good reason!" exception. This isn't an exaggeration. Courts were allowed to give the government a free pass on constitutional infringements provided the state's efforts were "narrowly tailored" and "necessary" to achieve a "compelling state interest".
But what counts as a compelling reason? Who decides which laws are narrowly tailored? It's judges, all the way down. For something like freedom of speech, there's a robust enough appreciation that you can expect a reasonable amount of skepticism among the judicial corps against efforts by the government to muzzle expression. In practice, strict scrutiny generally functioned as decently high threshold, unlike its contrasting rational basis test which practically was a free pass for the government to do whatever.
But what about topics a little more heated, like guns? Judges have been squishier and far more willing to accept the government's justifications that a given legal restrictions was "necessary". Hell, some judges even weaseled their way into ditching strict scrutiny in favor of the more permissible intermediate scrutiny. Judge VanDyke of the 9th Circuit lampooned this doormat reflex in his 2022 McDougall dissent (cleaned up):
Our circuit has ruled on dozens of Second Amendment cases, and without fail has ultimately blessed every gun regulation challenged, so we shouldn't expect anything less here. As I've recently explained, our circuit can uphold any and every gun regulation because our current Second Amendment framework is exceptionally malleable and essentially equates to rational basis review.
The cases VanDyke cited illustrate the problem well. The 9th Circuit has ruled it's ok to require people to demonstrate either "good cause" or "urgency or need" to the government before they're allowed to carry a gun outside their home. Set aside whatever negative sentiments you might have about guns, and instead imagine the reaction if similar restrictions were imposed on newspaper licenses. Imagine having to convince a cop that you have "good cause" to start a blog. Constitutional guarantees are worthless if they're predicated on a government agent agreeing that your reason for exercising them is good enough.
The practice of circuit judges shrugging off challenges to gun control laws with "I don't know man this seems totally reasonable to me" went on for several years, and I can only imagine it pissed off the pro-2A wing of the Supreme Court. Sure, Trump's appointments eventually meant they had the numbers on their side and so a very favorable 2A opinion was inevitable, but a stern rebuke of "We really mean it this time!" didn't seem like it was going to work in getting the circuit courts to stop fucking around.
So when they finally got their chance, SCOTUS tried a different approach. Instead of just triple-underlining and double-highlighting the words STRICT SCRUTINY, Clarence Thomas writes the majority opinion that created a brand new analysis wholly unique to the Second Amendment: gun control laws can only be constitutionally permissible if they're consistent with "historical tradition of firearm regulation." Any law being evaluated must therefore have a historical analogue, and the closer the analogue was to the year 1791 (when 2A was ratified), the better.
I was thrilled with Bruen's result, but puzzled by its reasoning because it seemed to just recreate the circumstances that led to the "fake strict scrutiny" problem. It turns out Bruen had way more of an effect than I anticipated. Clarence Thomas is a fascinating figure in many ways, in part because he's America's most powerful black conservative, who just happens to draw direct inspiration from the black nationalism Malcolm X espoused. I have no idea if this was intentional, but Thomas laid out a beautiful carpet of caltrops that the government couldn't help but step on over and over again.
What followed Bruen was a litigation maelstrom. Government attorneys across the land scoured dusty historical tomes, in search of whatever they could get their hands on and use as justification. The first problem they ran into was there just weren't that many laws on the books around the time of the Founding, let alone laws that specifically governed firearms. Generally speaking, Americans were free to strut about town with their muskets in tow, no questions asked. The lawyers had to cast a ever-wider net to snag anything relevant, desperately expanding their search way beyond 1791 to include things like an English prohibition on "launcegays" from 1383. When they did find timely laws, they ran into a second and far more pressing problem: the laws regulating firearm possession were...awkward. Really awkward.
Judge Benitez overseeing the ongoing Duncan case ordered the state lawyers to compile a list of every single relevant law they could find, and the 56-page spreadsheet they created is incredible. It's not surprising to find governments actively disarming disfavored groups, it's another to see the arbitrariness outlined so starkly. Modern gun control critics have regularly pointed out how skewed enforcement can be, particularly along racial lines. And because Bruen requires historical analogues, lawyers defending gun control restrictions had no choice but to immerse themselves unhappily within its sordid origin story.
Numerous early laws specifically prohibited only "negroes, mulattos, or Indians" from carrying firearms (1792 Virginia law, 1791 Delaware law, 1798 Kentucky law, etc.), or specifically targeted only slaves (1804 Indiana law, 1804 Mississippi law, 1818 Missouri law, etc.). California had it out particularly for those with "Spanish and Indian blood" (aka what the law called 'Greasers') and prohibited them from possessing firearms in 1855. These are all laws favorably cited in courts today.
When tasked to defend §922(g)(3), the law that prohibits anyone who is an "unlawful user" of a controlled substance from owning a gun, government lawyers tried their best with what little they had. The closest analogues they could find were colonial laws that prohibited actively drunk people, "dangerous lunatics", or what they termed "unvirtuous citizens" from possessing a gun. And you know that's BASICALLY the same thing as preventing the occasional marijuana smoker today from ever having a gun. The judge wasn't convinced.
After languishing in a stalemate for decades, the legal precedent around gun laws has dramatically changed in very quick order thanks to Bruen. Prohibitions on drug users were struck down, a (limited) prohibition for non-violent felons was struck down, and so were prohibitions on individuals subject to domestic-violence restraining orders (for now...). Courts are normally slow to move, but these developments have happened at blazing speed, and it's only the beginning as there's still plenty of ongoing litigation.
None of this means that gun control advocates have given up, far from it! @gattsuru has extensively catalogued numerous ways anti-gun politicians and judges putting in absolutely heroic efforts to gum up the machinery, however they can. Judge VanDyke publicly accused his colleagues on the 9th Circuit of some robe & dagger procedural shenanigans putting the thumb on the scale in the Duncan case. Meanwhile, legislation of dubious constitutionality gets passed faster than it can be struck down and the NYPD is somehow approving fewer gun permits than before (maybe because their approval stamp fell behind a desk, or something?). The efforts Gattsuru highlighted are definitely a hurdle but we'll see if they're the beginning of a new stalemate, or just desperate cadaveric spasms. For now, I'm going to continue enjoying the spectacle of government lawyers arguing with a straight face to a judge that pot smokers are the historical equivalent of dangerous lunatics.
True The Vote, the group behind the wildly popular "2000 Mules" film that purported to document extensive election fraud in Georgia, has admitted to a judge that it doesn't have evidence to back its claims.
Y'all know I love my hobby horse, even if it's beaten into an absolute paste, and I admit at having ongoing puzzlement as to why 2020 stolen election claims retain so much cachet among republican voters and officials. TTV has a pattern of making explosive allegations of election fraud only to then do whatever it takes to resist providing supporting evidence. TTV has lied about working with the FBI and also refused to hand over the evidence they claimed to have to Arizona authorities. In Georgia, TTV went as far as filing formal complaints with the state, only to then try to withdraw their complaints when the state asked for evidence.
The founder of TTV was also briefly jailed for contempt in 2022 because of her refusal to hand over information in a defamation lawsuit where TTV claimed an election software provider was using unsecured servers in China.Edit: @Walterodim looked into this below and I agree the circumstances are too bizarre to draw any conclusions about the founder's intentions.I have a theory I'm eager to have challenged, and it's a theory I believe precisely explains TTV's behavior: TTV is lying. My operating assumption is that if someone uncovers extensive evidence of election fraud, they would do whatever they can to assist law enforcement and other interested parties in fixing this fraud. TTV does not do this, and the reason they engage in obstinate behavior when asked to provide evidence is because they're lying about having found evidence of election fraud. It's true that they file formal complaints with authorities, but their goal is to add a patina of legitimacy to their overall allegations. TTV's overriding motivation is grifting: there is significant demand within the conservative media ecosystem for stolen election affirmations, and anyone who supplies it stands to profit both financially as well as politically. We don't have direct financial statements but we can glean the potential profitability from how 2000 Mules initially cost $29.99 to watch online, and the millions in fundraising directed towards TTV (including a donor who sued to get his $2.5 million back). There's also a political gain because Trump remains the de facto leader of the conservative movement, and affirming his 2020 stolen election claims is a practical requirement for remaining within the sphere.
I know this topic instigates a lot of ire and downvotes, but I would be very interested to hear substantive reasons for why my theory is faulty or unreasonable! I believe I transparently outlined my premises and the connective logic in the above paragraph, so the best way to challenge my conclusion could be either to dispute a premise, or to rebut any logical deduction I relied on. You could also do this by pointing out anything that is inconsistent with my theory. So for example if we were talking about how "John murdered Jane", something inconsistent with that claim could be "John was giving a speech at the time of Jane's murder". I would also request that you first check if any of your rebuttals are an example of 'belief in belief' or otherwise replaying the 'dragon in my garage' unfalsifiability cocoon. The best way to guard against this trap would be to explain why your preferred explanation fits the facts better than mine, and also to proactively provide a threshold for when you'd agree that TTV is indeed just lying.
I'm excited for the responses!
Edit: I forgot I should've mentioned this, but it would be really helpful if responses avoided motte-and-bailey diversions. This post is about TTV and their efforts specifically, and though I believe stolen election claims are very poor quality in general, I'm not making the argument that "TTV is lying, ergo other stolen election claims are also bullshit". I think there are some related questions worth contemplating (namely why TTV got so much attention and credulity from broader conservative movement if TTV were indeed lying) but changing the subject isn't responsive to a topic about TTV. If anyone insists on wanting to talk about something else, it would be helpful if there's an acknowledgement about TTV's claims specifically. For example, it can take the format of "Yes, it does appear that TTV is indeed lying but..."
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