Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
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User ID: 863
New Twitter policy just dropped:
Promotion of alternative social platforms policy
...
What is a violation of this policy?
At both the Tweet level and the account level, we will remove any free promotion of prohibited 3rd-party social media platforms, such as linking out (i.e. using URLs) to any of the below platforms on Twitter, or providing your handle without a URL:
Prohibited platforms:
Facebook, Instagram, Mastodon, Truth Social, Tribel, Post and Nostr
3rd-party social media link aggregators such as linktr.ee, lnk.bio
Examples:
“follow me @username on Instagram”
“username@mastodon.social”
“check out my profile on Facebook - facebook.com/username”
Accounts that are used for the main purpose of promoting content on another social platform may be suspended. Additionally, any attempts to bypass restrictions on external links to the above prohibited social media platforms through technical or non-technical means (e.g. URL cloaking, plaintext obfuscation) is in violation of this policy. This includes, but is not limited to, spelling out “dot” for social media platforms that use “.” in the names to avoid URL creation, or sharing screenshots of your handle on a prohibited social media platform.
It's like the man himself says
The acid test for any two competing socioeconomic systems is which side needs to build a wall to keep people from escaping? That’s the bad one!
ETA:
Seems like some large accounts are calling Twitter's bluff. Dril posted a link to their linktree hours ago and so far both post and account are still up.
ETA2:
Musk now polling whether he should step down as head of Twitter, Yes in the lead with 51.5% and just over a million votes cast at the time of this writing.
ETA3:
The link at the top of this post is now a 404, apparently a result of the policy being rescinded, but the internet never forgets.
Elie Mystal over at The Nation has a pretty skeptical take. Noting that the statute of limitations has passed for both crimes and the theory for why it should be tolled is not great.
The first issue that Bragg has is time. Trump committed the underlying campaign finance offense in 2016, and the statute of limitations on bookkeeping fraud and campaign finance violations is five years. That brings you to 2021. The statute of limitations for tax evasion is three years. Even if you don’t start the clock on that until the story breaks in the news in 2018, that brings you, once again, to 2021. To get to 2023, Bragg appears to be arguing that the statute of limitations paused while Trump was president and living out of state. That’s… a theory, but not necessarily a good one, and certainly not one that has been tested enough to know how it’s going to hold up in the courts. Remember, the alleged immunity Trump had from prosecutions applied only at the federal level. Local prosecutors, like Bragg’s predecessor Cyrus Vance, who was the Manhattan DA during Trump’s presidency, could have charged him with this crime at any time.
ETA:
My understanding is the case is a claim that Trump falsified business records with his payments to Cohen that were ultimately intended for Daniels. Normally this is a misdemeanor:
A person is guilty of falsifying business records in the second degree when, with intent to defraud, he:
1. Makes or causes a false entry in the business records of an enterprise
However, it upgrades to a felony if:
his intent to defraud includes an intent to commit another crime or to aid or conceal the commission thereof.
So the question is does "another crime" include federal crimes or only state crimes? He's not being prosecuted for violating any particular federal law, his violation of federal law is merely the predicate for finding he committed a more serious violation of New York State law.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
The latter seems like the biggest scandal since JFK assassination.
I cannot tell if this is intended to be hyperbole. I feel like I could name a dozen government scandals worse than anything the US government could possibly have been doing with Twitter. Iran-Contra? NSA spying? Watergate? Pentagon papers? The government pressuring a social media company to suppress speech it doesn't like and promote its own agenda is bad, to be sure, but I am not sure it is "sell weapons to Iran and send the profits to South American rebels in direct violation of an act of Congress" bad.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
What makes Dune such fertile ground compared to, say, Lord of the Rings?
This paragraph threw me for a loop. My impression is that Lord of the Rings is way more of a cultural Thing compared to Dune. Like, there also LotR video games? Action adventure, turn based RPG, RTS, even an MMORPG! There are movie series both live action and animated. All these vary wildly in quality so I'm not sure savvy licensing is the reason for their existence and success. Not to mention Lord of the Rings influence on the development on fantasy as a genre of media in general.
Apologies for not commenting on the more general question on your post, which I don't have many thoughts on, but feels like a very specific cultural bubble to regard Dune as more fertile ground for inspiration than Lord of the Rings...
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
11mo ago
I feel compelled to note that the "another lawyer" (Steven Schwartz) was the listed notary on Peter LoDuca's initial affadavit wherein he attached the fraudulent cases in question. This document also appears to have been substantially generated by ChatGPT, given that it gives an impossible date (January 25th) for the notarization. Really undermines Schwartz's claim that he did all the ChatGPT stuff and LoDuca didn't know about any of it.
The thought that people put this much trust in ChatGPT is extremely disturbing to me. It's not Google! It's not even Wikipedia! It's probabilistic text generation! Not an oracle! This is insanity!
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
I don't really see how the video supports the gay prostitute hypothesis. If DePape was a gay prostitute Paul hired, why did DePape have to break into the house to get in? Why did Paul call 911? Why did DePape try to murder Paul with a hammer when the police showed up?
We also have DePape's own testimony about what he was doing there. If DePape was a prositute hired by Pelosi, why tell the police he was there to interrogate Nancy Pelosi and break her kneecaps?
However strange Paul's behavior is when answering the door I feel like the gay prostitute hypothesis is many times more absurd.
I feel like people underestimate how small Ivy League universities are compared to how many people are out there with high standardized test scores.
Here are the seven Ivy League universities with their 2023 incoming class undergraduate numbers (plus MIT for fun):
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Harvard: 1966
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Yale: 1554
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Princeton: 1782
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Columbia: 1464
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Cornell: 3218
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Brown: 1730
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University of Pennsylvania: 2420
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Dartmouth: 1209
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MIT: 1092
That's 16k total student admitted across all those universities. According to the college board, 1.9 million students in the class of 2023 had taken the SAT. That means there are 19k students with scores in the top 1% on the SAT. Getting a score above 1400 puts you in the 93rd percentile according to the college board's statistics for 2023, so 133k people. Even if Ivy League universities admitted students solely on SAT test score this guy would be nowhere close. Indeed, you could staff every incoming Ivy League class (and then some) with students who had a score in top 1%.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
Two points I guess.
First, can I get some theory or principle for when people are obliged to accept the limits of their biology and when they aren't? I'm assuming your ok with humans ignoring the limits of their biology when it means not going blind, or letting deaf people hear, or crippled people walk. If I'm correct about the above why are LGBT people obliged to respect the "limits of [their] biology" with respect to having children but the others aren't for their conditions?
Second, why care specifically about being "human"? Whatever that means to you. I see downthread you complain about playing the definition game so I'll sidestep that and say that if becoming a "cross-over between Umgah Blobbies and the Borg" leads people to live longer, happier lives of the kind they want to have I think that's good, whether or not you (or anyone) would call the resulting entities "human."
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1mo ago
Probably my favorite article on this topic is BloodKnife's everyone is beautiful and no one is horny.
And muscles—giant, pulsating, steroid-enhanced muscles—returned to screens. But the new muscle era lacks the eroticism of Eighties action cinema. Arnold Schwarzenegger showed his glutes in Terminator; Sylvester Stallone stripped for First Blood and Tango & Cash; Bloodsport shows more of Jean Claude Van Damme’s body than that of his love interest.
For the most part, though, today’s cinema hunks are nevernudes. The Marvel Cinematic Universe is strictly PG-13, as one expects from a Disney product. And even in the DC universe, there’s very little of human sexuality. Capefans’ demands for more “mature” superhero movies always mean more graphic violence, not more sex. They panicked over Dr. Manhattan’s glowing blue penis in Watchmen, and they still haven’t forgiven Joel Schumacher for putting nipples on the batsuit.
Today’s stars are action figures, not action heroes. Those perfect bodies exist only for the purpose of inflicting violence upon others. To have fun is to become weak, to let your team down, and to give the enemy a chance to win, like Thor did when he got fat in Endgame.
The short version is that our bodies are not a thing we inhabit, the medium to experience the world. Instead we objectify ourselves. Our bodies are another Attribute To Be Maximized, dissociated from any purpose. Our art merely reflects this change in orientation.
I think Matt Levine had the correct take in his latest Money Stuff. The basic idea is there's some natural tension between the board of OpenAI and its employees/investors. The board is committed to the non-profit mission of building safe AI while the employees and investors want to build a commercially viable product that turns their equity into big piles of money. There can naturally be some tension between these things!
While the board has a certain formal legal power over the employees and investors it cannot actually accomplish much without them. So the employees and investors have a great deal of informal power. Currently it seems like the balance of power is on the "make big piles of money" side and this will probably be more true after the restructuring.
I think one outcome here is the IRS should probably revoke OpenAI's charitable status. It is hard for me to take the idea they are a charitable organization seriously when the CEO of the for-profit subsidiary can overrule the board to which he ostensibly reports in order to make more money.
To perhaps bring this back to more familiar Culture War ground I think the desire to accommodate dietary restrictions springs from the same place as the desire to use preferred pronouns: the perception that it's the courteous thing to do, that it would be rude to do otherwise. Underlying this is a belief that society ought to change in certain ways to accommodate individuals living their lives the way they would prefer to, and that we as individuals have some responsibility to create that space for others. Exactly what we should accommodate in what circumstances is a question on which underlying theories differ but I think this is the general motivating principle.
ETA:
After reading some other replies I'm wondering how much of a left/right divide on social issues is about who, when, and how has an obligation to accommodate others. It seems to me right-coded non-libertarian positions tend towards the individual having an obligation to alter their behaviors to conform with wider society while more left-coded positions tend towards society (really other people) altering so as to accommodate individuals.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
5mo ago
I keep meaning to make a post about the dichotomy between what I think of as "private reasons" (the reasons that convince some individual of some position) and "public reasons" (the reasons that might convince some group of some position) but this post will have to do for now.
For my part: I am probably about as SJW/Woke/whatever as they come in regards to LGBT issues in both a public policy and cultural norm sense. Separately I think it is exceedingly unlikely that either gender identity or sexual orientation are fixed from birth and have no connection to cultural factors. For clarity's sake I don't believe LGBT people can will themselves otherwise any more than I think non-LGBT people can will themselves LGBT but I do think there are cultural factors that influence where on that spectrum one ends up. I suspect where I depart from many people who believe the prior statements is that I don't think of people being trans or gay as being strictly worse than cis or straight such that society or government ought to be oriented around the minimization of such people. That is, my "private reasons" for supporting LGBT people legally and socially aren't conditional on the immutability of the traits in question, from a cultural context perspective.
I suspect the reason immutability features so heavily in modern discourse is because it was a rhetorical convenience in the United States. At the time the gay rights movement was gaining steam the United States was in the midst of several other civil rights movements more closely tied to immutable characteristics (black americans and feminism). I believe there was a widespread perception (probably correct) that those traits apparent immutability was key to the eventual success of their movements. Tying LGBT rights to a similar notion of immutability was, therefore, a convenient rhetorical move (a compelling "public reason") to get people on board with LGBT rights in a similar way.
I think this dichotomy between "public" and "private" reasons explains a great deal of perceived motte-and-bailey/hypocrisy in our political discourse.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
10mo ago
I propose a simpler explanation for the underperformance of The Little Mermaid: It's a live action remake of a beloved animated show. Consider Dragonball Evolution, or The Last Airbender, or the Cowboy Bebop TV series, or Aladdin. I could do this all day! Has taking a beloved animated property and turning it into a live action remake ever worked? At some point you would think studios would learn this is Shit Nobody Wants, and yet...
Anyone else watching the drama play out electing the Speaker in the United States House of Representatives? You can watch for free on C-SPAN. Today is the first day of the 118th Congress and the House's first order of business is electing a Speaker. Normally this is a pro-forma affair and whoever is the leader of their party cruises to victory on their first ballot. The last time a Speaker election went beyond one ballot was 1923, and that was resolved only after five ballots. So far today we've had one ballot in which Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) (the presumptive speaker) has not only failed to win a majority of votes cast and become Speaker, but to win even a plurality of votes in the ballot (the Democrats voted unanimously for Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY)). The current split in the House is 222 Republicans to 212 Democrats. So if every member votes then 218 votes are needed to win and McCarthy can afford to lose just 4 Republican votes (assuming no cross-party-voting). Currently McCarthy is on his way to lose a second ballot, with 19 votes having gone to Jim Jordan (R-OH). On the first ballot McCarthy lost 19 votes, mostly to Andy Biggs (R-AZ) but some to Other. Jordan has already exceeded Biggs total, but the voting isn't finished so it remains to be seen whether more people have fallen in line and voted for McCarthy or if Republicans coalesce around Jordan or some other candidate.
It seems to me the most likely outcome is Republicans eventually fall in line and elect McCarthy, but other outcomes are possible. Republicans could potentially coalesce around another candidate (Jordan seems possible). Since what's required is a majority of all votes cast Jeffries could win if enough Republicans abstain or don't vote, leading to a Dem speaker in a majority Republican house.
It's interesting to look at the drama today through the lens of the common complaints about infighting among the Democrats and the left. For all that discussion it seems the Democratic Party has gotten behind Jeffries as Pelosi's replacement in short order, while Republicans can't seem to reach consensus on who should be their leader in the House.
ETA:
At the end of the second ballot the results stand at:
Jeffries - 212
McCarthy - 203
Jordan - 19
This means McCarthy picked up no votes between first and second ballot. All the votes that went to Biggs/Other on the first ballot went to Jordan on the second ballot.
ETA2:
At the end of the third ballot the results stand at:
Jeffries - 212
McCarthy - 202
Jordan - 20
McCarthy now officially losing ground to Jordan. This is kind of funny because Jordan (at least by his own words on the House floor) doesn't want the job and wants McCarthy to have it.
ETA3:
The House just adjourned (Speaker still undecided) until noon tomorrow.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
Maybe this is just my confusion but when I read your description of Whelan as an "American security official" I assumed that meant he did some kind of security work for the US government. In fact he was a "security official" in the sense that he was director of global security for an international automotive part manufacturer based in Michigan. He also has a Bad Conduct Discharge from the Marines due to attempts to defraud the government with a fake Social Security Number.
Frankly, I don't think you need to reach for any race or gender based explanations to determine why the US would rather free Brittney Griner than Paul Whelan. And looking at the crimes each was charged with (Griner with pot possession, Whelan with spying) seems to adequately explain Russia's relative reluctance to exchange each.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
I have a question. Why, after this fiasco with FTX, should I have any faith that the Effective Altruism movement has any handle on existential risk or any capability to determine what actions will increase or decrease said risk? My impression is that this management of existential risk is a substantial part of EA's brand. Especially William MaCaskill and longtermism as a movement. Some of the leading lights of the EA movement (like MaCaskill) were apparently unable to manage the well defined risk of "maybe this guy running a cryptocurrency exchange is a scam artist" but I'm supposed to believe they have a handle on the vastly more nebulous and ill defined risk of "maybe an unfriendly artificial intelligence extincts humanity." Why should I believe this?
In the wake of the House of Representatives passing a Continuing Resolution maintaining current funding levels a group of Republicans, led by Matt Gaetz (R-FL), have filed a motion to vacate against Kevin McCarthy (R-CA). This is a motion that, if passed, would remove McCarthy as Chair of the House of Representatives after only nine months on the job. The reporting I'm seeing on Twitter says Democrats are united in supporting the motion, which means only three Republicans would need to join Gaetz for the motion to pass. I believe this would also be the first time in US history the House will have removed a Speaker with a motion to vacate.
What happens after that is anyone's guess. In a literal sense we move back to where we were this January and do another election for Speaker. Presumably Democrats are going to nominate and vote for Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) as they did then. It's not clear who on the Republican side would be a replacement for McCarthy. He still enjoys the support of a strong majority of Republicans, but the Republican majority is so small he needs basically everyone. His getting elected Speaker again would almost certainly need someone who voted to vacate to vote for him to Speaker. I'm skeptical there are promises McCarthy could make to the Republicans voting to oust him that could convince them to support him again. On the other hand I'm not aware of any consensus about who Republicans could be convinced to support except McCarthy. By far the funniest outcome, I think, would be the Republicans who voted to oust McCarthy abstaining in the Speaker vote, letting the Democrats elect Jeffries Speaker.
Vote on the motion is supposed to be held this morning though the House is currently debating other bills. You can watch the House Session on C-SPAN. Will update this post as the news develops.
ETA:
By a vote of 216-210-0 Kevin McCarthy becomes the first Speaker of the United States House of Representatives removed by a motion to vacate.
Vote breakdown by party (based on the vote on the motion to table, C-SPAN roll call doesn't break down by party):
| Ayes | Nays | NV | |
| Republicans | 8 | 210 | 3 |
| Democrats | 208 | 0 | 4 |
As expected McCarthy retains the support of the vast majority of his own Conference. I think the rule is the House can't do business without a Speaker so I imagine we go directly into elections for Speaker of the House now. Given the multiple days it took to elect McCarthy before I am not confident about any particular path forward from here.
ETA2:
Am hearing online that the Speaker pro tempore (selected by McCarthy when he became Speaker) may be able to function as Speaker indefinitely. They may not have to have an election for Speaker on any particular time table.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
Highly recommend reading Ian Hacking's Making Up People which was a decade ahead of The Geography of Madness in describing this phenomenon.
Around 1970, there arose a few paradigm cases of strange behaviour similar to phenomena discussed a century earlier and largely forgotten. A few psychiatrists began to diagnose multiple personality. It was rather sensational. More and more unhappy people started manifesting these symptoms. At first they had the symptoms they were expected to have, but then they became more and more bizarre. First, a person had two or three personalities. Within a decade the mean number was 17. This fed back into the diagnoses, and became part of the standard set of symptoms. It became part of the therapy to elicit more and more alters. Psychiatrists cast around for causes, and created a primitive, easily understood pseudo-Freudian aetiology of early sexual abuse, coupled with repressed memories. Knowing this was the cause, the patients obligingly retrieved the memories. More than that, this became a way to be a person. In 1986, I wrote that there could never be ‘split’ bars, analogous to gay bars. In 1991 I went to my first split bar.
This story can be placed in a five-part framework. We have (a) a classification, multiple personality, associated with what at the time was called a ‘disorder’. This kind of person is now a moving target. We have (b) the people, those I call ‘unhappy’, ‘unable to cope’, or whatever relatively non-judgmental term you might prefer. There are (c) institutions, which include clinics, annual meetings of the International Society for the Study of Multiple Personality and Dissociation, afternoon talkshows on television (Oprah Winfrey and Geraldo Rivera made a big thing of multiples, once upon a time), and weekend training programmes for therapists, some of which I attended. There is (d) the knowledge: not justified true belief, once the mantra of analytic philosophers, but knowledge in Popper’s sense of conjectural knowledge, and, more specifically, the presumptions that are taught, disseminated and refined within the context of the institutions. Especially the basic facts (not ‘so-called facts’, or ‘facts’ in scare-quotes): for example, that multiple personality is caused by early sexual abuse, that 5 per cent of the population suffer from it, and the like. There is expert knowledge, the knowledge of the professionals, and there is popular knowledge, shared by a significant part of the interested population. There was a time, partly thanks to those talkshows and other media, when ‘everyone’ believed that multiple personality was caused by early sexual abuse. Finally, there are (e) the experts or professionals who generate (d) the knowledge, judge its validity, and use it in their practice. They work within (c) institutions that guarantee their legitimacy, authenticity and status as experts. They study, try to help, or advise on the control of (b) the people who are (a) classified as of a given kind.
This banal framework can be used for many examples, but roles and weights will be different in every case. There is no reason to suppose that we shall ever tell two identical stories of two different instances of making up people. There is also an obvious complication: there are different schools of thought. In this first instance, there was the multiple movement, a loose alliance of patients, therapists and psychiatric theorists, on the one hand, who believed in this diagnosis and in a certain kind of person, the multiple. There was the larger psychiatric establishment that rejected the diagnosis altogether: a doctor in Ontario, for example, who, when a patient arrives announcing she has multiple personality, demands to be shown her Ontario Health Insurance card (which has a photograph and a name on it) and says: ‘This is the person I am treating, nobody else.’ Thus there are rival frameworks, and reactions and counter-actions between them further contribute to the working out of this kind of person, the multiple personality. If my sceptical colleague convinces his potential patient, she will very probably become a very different kind of person from the one she would have been had she been treated for multiple personality by a believer.
I would argue that the multiple personality of the 1980s was a kind of person previously unknown in the history of the human race. This is a simple idea familiar to novelists, but careful philosophical language is not prepared for it. Pedantry is in order. Distinguish two sentences:
A. There were no multiple personalities in 1955; there were many in 1985.
B. In 1955 this was not a way to be a person, people did not experience themselves in this way, they did not interact with their friends, their families, their employers, their counsellors, in this way; but in 1985 this was a way to be a person, to experience oneself, to live in society.
As I see it, both A and B are true. An enthusiast for what is now called Dissociative Identity Disorder will say, however, that A is false, because people with several ‘alter personalities’ undoubtedly existed in 1955, but were not diagnosed. A sceptic will also say that A is false, but for exactly the opposite reason: namely, that multiple personality has always been a specious diagnosis, and there were no real multiples in 1985 either. Statement A leads to heated but pointless debates about the reality of multiple personality, but in my opinion both sceptics and enthusiasts can peacefully agree to B. When I speak of making up people, it is B that I have in mind, and it is through B that the looping effect occurs.
Multiple personality was renamed Dissociative Identity Disorder. But that was more than an act of diagnostic house-cleaning. Symptoms evolve, patients are no longer expected to come with a roster of altogether distinct personalities, and they don’t. This disorder is an example of what in my book Mad Travellers (1998) I called a ‘transient mental illness’. ‘Transient’ not in the sense of affecting a single person for a while and then going away, but in the sense of existing only at a certain time and place. Transient mental illnesses can best be looked at in terms of the ecological niches in which they can appear and thrive. They are easy cases for making up people, precisely because their very transience leads cynics to suspect they are not really real, and so could plausibly be said to be made up.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
Iran is a different country. Our constitution doesn’t apply to them.
The part of the Iran-Contra affair that is scandalous does not primarily concern events that occurred in Iran. The part that is scandalous is the part where the executive branch of the government deliberately defied a restriction on what it can spend money on passed by Congress, in violation of Article 1 Section 9 of the United States Constitution.
Watergate feels like child play to me. Some burglary.
Again, the significance in Watergate is not in the initial break in, it is in Nixon's attempts to impede or end the investigation into the break in, due its links to his campaign and top officials. Imagine some people are arrested breaking into Mar-A-Lago. Investigation by the FBI reveals the perpetrators are connected to high level members of the Biden administration and perhaps the president himself. The Attorney General appoints a special prosecutor to investigate. After the special prosecutor's investigation implicates Biden, he fires his Attorney General and Deputy Attorney General, because they refuse to fire the special prosecutor and end the investigation into him. Would you characterize the scandal here as "some burglary"?
Pentagon Papers - again bad shit we did to people who weren’t Americans. We expect the CIA and Pentagon to fuck up our enemies
The significance of the Pentagon Papers is only partially the things the US government did in Vietnam, it is also about the way the US government deceived the American people with respect to its intentions and motivations for engaging in the Vietnam War, a war that killed some 50k Americans!
This was literally a coup by the deep state against the will of the American people to overthrow a Democratically elected government.
Can you describe for me, as literally as possible the acts you understood the "deep state" to have taken?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
5mo ago
I think the article is big on Vibes, Narrative, and Metaphor but pretty light on reason or evidence. If you buy all the authors premises its a nice polemic but as someone skeptical I found basically nothing in it convincing.
You might enjoy Matt Levine's take in Everything Everywhere is Securities Fraud
You know the basic idea. A company does something bad, or something bad happens to it. Its stock price goes down, because of the bad thing. Shareholders sue: Doing the bad thing and not immediately telling shareholders about it, the shareholders say, is securities fraud. Even if the company does immediately tell shareholders about the bad thing, which is not particularly common, the shareholders might sue, claiming that the company failed to disclose the conditions and vulnerabilities that allowed the bad thing to happen.
And so contributing to global warming is securities fraud, and sexual harassment by executives is securities fraud, and customer data breaches are securities fraud, and mistreating killer whales is securities fraud, and whatever else you’ve got. Securities fraud is a universal regulatory regime; anything bad that is done by or happens to a public company is also securities fraud, and it is often easier to punish the bad thing as securities fraud than it is to regulate it directly.
...
But the principle of the thing is that U.S. securities law is a global universal regulatory regime: If a foreign company never issues shares in the U.S. and files its financial statements and other reports only abroad, it can still be sued in the U.S. for securities fraud. And in the U.S., everything is securities fraud.
He also has a take on the Bankman-Fried trial in today's issue.
In the FTX case I think the case for fraud is pretty simple.
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As an exchange FTX was a custodian of customer assets. If a customer bought 10 BTC then FTX was obliged to hold that 10 BTC in case that customer wanted to sell it or transfer it or whatever.
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FTX did in fact represent to customers that it was a custodian of their assets and did have their assets.
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FTX did not actually have custody of the relevant assets. They sold them or lent them or sent them to Alameda or otherwise did not retain the assets they were obliged to.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
7mo ago
I think it is important in this context to distinguish between "unlawful" in a criminal sense and "unlawful" in a civil sense. Functionally all criminal laws are written the way you describe. With a list of the prohibited conduct and a range of penalties for doing it. Civil law penalties are more vague because their purpose is to redress some harm that some individual A has caused some other individual B. Legislatures can (and do) pass laws modifying what kinds of damages one may receive when one has been wronged in various civil ways but there is not (by design) as complete a specification as criminal law. Civil law instead relies on the Plaintiff (the person bringing the suit) being able to articulate how much they have been wronged and asking a court for appropriate relief. To some extent we put trust in judges and courts (and a complex system of precedents) to figure out what the appropriate relief is in civil cases.
Lawsuits for violations of civil rights are, in the United States, civil lawsuits and generally are asking courts for (1) damages actually suffered and (2) an injunction against the defendant. The second part is important because it means if the enjoined defendant engages in the described conduct again there can be additional penalties (criminal and civil) for violating a court order, above whatever civil law violations it would also entail.
Circling back to your AA example the Supreme Court's ruling is more like "If You Discriminate On The Basis Of Race We'll Order You To Pay Damages To The People You've Discriminated Against And If This Isn't The First Time We'll Impose Additional And Escalating Penalties."
(As far as I know, the universities have not been penalized or ordered to compensate their victims in any way – if this is incorrect, I would be open to being corrected.)
If they haven't yet, they will be. I think a little civil procedure is instructive here. Before anyone in a civil suit gets ordered to pay anyone else damages you first need to figure out whether the defendant is liable. After a court has made a determination about the defendant's liability, that determination becomes appealable to some higher court (and eventually SCOTUS). On appeal the appellate court doesn't take over the whole case, they are usually only deciding the particular issue being appealed. Afterwards they'll send the case back down to the original court with an order to continue proceedings consistent with their opinion. So SCOTUS's decision was the "end" of the case in the sense it found Harvard and UNC liable and created a national precedent that their conduct was a violation of the student's constitutional rights but it was not the end in a procedural sense. The trial court still needs to actually issue an injunction and figure out how much in damages to award the plaintiffs.
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
1yr ago
I know the whole premise of longtermism is in thinking about the far future but it seems to me the degree of uncertainty involved with respect to what it will be like makes it impossible to take them seriously. Making decisions today about what you expect things to be like in 11 generations, in a sociological or technological sense, is not rational, it is irrational.
Take the Collins example (that you rightly call crazy). How long is 11 generations? Assuming each of their kids has kids between the ages of 20-30 (for simpler math) it means their 11 generations is going to take between 220 and 330 years to realize. What was our own world like 220 to 330 years ago? Well 220 years ago would have been circa 1803. This is before the founding of Mormonism, indeed a few years before Joseph Smith's birth. The United States was still in the grip of a fierce debate over slavery. This was before the development of the ideology of communism by Marx and Engels. If you take the longer end, 330 years, that puts you at around 1693. So now we're back before the founding of the United States. This is around the time the Amish are founded in Switzerland and just a few years after Locke publishes his Treatises.
There is nothing "just" about 11 generations! Making decisions today on the assumption that your kids, and their kids, and so on up to 8 billion people will keep your ideology over the course of centuries is making decisions on the basis of a false assumption.
Even leaving aside this one family, how have various religious or ethnic organizations managed to hold their beliefs across this length of time? My impression is not very well. Firstly, many such organizations that are prominent today have not even *existed * that long. Secondly, among those that have, how many of the versions of these organizations from 11 generations ago would even recognize their modern incarnations? How much is the Catholic church today like the Catholic church of 1803? Of 1693? How much has the LDS church changed, since it's founding by Smith, in a much shorter time?
Gillitrut
Reading from the golden book under bright red stars
4mo ago
I think this undersells how much of the emphasis on WMDs was on nuclear weapons, specifically. As other commenters have pointed out we did find large stockpiles of chemical weapons in Iraq. The problem with using chemical weapons as a justification for invasion is that (1) lots of countries (including the US) had large chemical weapons stockpiles at the time and (2) chemical weapons are not actually that effective. I think there was much more focus on nuclear weapons than other categories of WMD due to the idea of Iraq giving terrorists sufficient material to make a dirty bomb or similar. As you note, manufacturing some kind of plausible trail or stockpile of nuclear weapons or fissile material is much harder than doing so for chemical weapons.
I think there are a few under-appreciated explanations for this one.
One reason is that kids are, frankly, surveilled by their parents to a degree that was literally impossible in the 90's. Tons of kids today have phones and tons of parents use location tracking apps so they know where their kids are at basically all times. And these kids often know they are being surveilled, which surely changes their behavior. In the 90's you could plausibly lie to your parents about your location to go hang out with your friends or SO. That is much harder today.
It is much harder today to engage in the kind of deception required to have sex when one's parents wouldn't approve than it has been historically.
Another reason might be changing social mores about sex. There's been a big push to normalize ideas like enthusiastic consent and similar. If a lot of the sex in the 90's was dubiously consensual on the part of one party or the other it may be that kind of sex is happening less frequently, leading to less sex over all. I don't have hard data on this unfortunately but my impression from being on the internet is also that zoomer-age people tend to be more skeptical about significant age gaps. Sometimes to the point of silliness (I've seen Discourse about 25 year old being with a 21 year old) but if that translates to younger gaps as well that may be another factor.
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