StableOutshoot
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User ID: 2253
If you've got 10 people seated around a table, and a Nazi violent dirtbag leftist sits down, and nobody gets up, you've got 11 Nazis violent dirtbag leftists. The simple truth is that activists can forcefully occupy territory in downtown Madison, a jurisdiction controlled entirely by the left from the city council all the way up to the governor, because they have enough political power within the left coalition to make it politically infeasible to send in riot cops or the national guard.
StableOutshoot
7d ago
I think fumbling melees with multiple officers and multiple implements (gun, knife, taser) have a high chance of tragic results.
This seems so blindingly obvious to me that my only explanation for people not understanding it is because they are too ideologically committed to hating cops to acknowledge when the use of force is reasonable.
StableOutshoot
7d ago
The problem with comparing policing between rich western countries is that the USA is the only rich western country with a substantial population of violent and antisocial people. The raw rate of crime in the USA is multiple times that of the other countries you want to compare us to, and police doctrine must necessarily accommodate this. If you dropped a European police officer into the south side of Chicago they would get eaten alive, because for all the alleged superiority of European policing, they have the outcomes that they have because European police just have to police Europeans. American police have to police Americans.
StableOutshoot
7d ago
It's hard to mobilize people who believe in the rule of law into doing extralegal things.
StableOutshoot
7d ago
I don't remember anybody doing a civil unrest over Philando Castile.
StableOutshoot
7d ago
Yeah, but... every single time, though. Like I can't think of a single one of these left-wing martyrs who didn't make me go "wait a second, this is the guy you want to spend political capital on?"
StableOutshoot
7d ago
How so? For the anti-police folks, anything that might hint at the notion that the police officer didn't just shoot a random guy for no reason whatsoever is radioactive to their cause, they ignore it to the greatest extent practical.
Two culture war bombs in the upper midwest this week
In May 2025, a woman in Rochester Minnesota uttered the N-word at a child who tried to steal from her, and then again at an adult who confronted her about it while recording with his phone. Both the child and adult are Somali. The video, uploaded to Youtube, went massively viral.
The woman was charged with three counts of disorderly conduct. One of the charges was dropped, the other two just went to trial. After a four day trial and 10 hours of deliberation, the jury found a guilty verdict for one of the charges.
The defendant's lawyer is claiming misconduct by the court and intends to appeal.
Our nation's few remaining principled free speech advocates do not approve of this. This verdict will likely be appealed and may, at minimum, result in Minnesota's disorderly conduct statute being nullified with regard to offenses that are limited to speech and no other disruptive behavior.
In a somewhat ironic twist, apparently the guy who recorded the viral youtube video at the center of all this, was arrested for gang raping a child in 2022, and had those charges dropped "in the interests of justice" by the same prosecutor's office that this year thought it was in the interests of justice to throw the book at somebody for saying a naughty word. What a funny world we live in.
Bomb number two: Police in Madison, WI, responding to reports that someone was casing vehicles to break into, confronted a suspect, who fled, resisted arrest, and finally attacked one officer with a knife, causing that officer to respond with lethal force.
Activists are very clearly trying to turn this into a reprise of the George Floyd moment, including transporting the raised fist monument from Minneapolis' "George Floyd Square" to Madison. The area around the shooting has been barricaded by activists. Activists stormed a police press conference, seizing the podium to deliver a rant about Zionism.
State representative and gubernatorial candidate Francesca Hong has thrown her lot fully in with the activists. Whether this helps or hurts her electoral chances will remain to be seen.
Madison's "Independent Police Monitor", who has also thrown her lot in with the activists, is confused about why the Madison Police Department are not involving her in their investigation of the incident.
Attorney Ben Crump, whose list of cases is a who's who of law-enforcement-related racial grievances, is representing the family of the deceased.
And the deceased? Over 40 arrests, multiple felony convictions, including a history of assaults on police officers. (No way to link directly to this, but go here and search for Corey Ruiz).
It never ceases to amaze me how the left is so consistently able to mobilize itself in the defense of the worst people in the world.
StableOutshoot
9d ago
I guess this calls for some sort of definition of "terrorism."
The definition I generally see used is unlawful non-state force intended to coerce a political outcome.
I suppose whether summer 2020 counts as an outbreak of terrorism could hinge on whether it can still be considered "non-state force" when it has the overt material support of one of our political parties.
StableOutshoot
10d ago
Left-wing terrorism in the United States killed about two dozen Americans and dealt over two billion dollars in property damage in 2020.
StableOutshoot
12d ago
It's possible that "imprison" here is meant in the sense of the crime of "false imprisonment," which is the crime of hindering someone's movement without cause, but which does not require a literal prison.
But even in that sense, someone's arrest by law enforcement would also constitute "imprisoning" them.
StableOutshoot
12d ago
18 USC 878 also references 18 USC 112, which prohibits imprisoning any foreign official.
StableOutshoot
13d ago
A city mayor with no authority to conduct foreign relations proposing the arrest of an internationally protected person in violation of both US federal law and a UN treaty that the US is party to does not seem to me to be a simple "discussion of public policy". It feels like a line has been crossed quite decisively.
Mamdani feels like he is trying to run NYC as a sovereign city-state and doesn't want to explicitly acknowledge the reality that he is legally required to defer to the authority of higher political entities. It really shows here, where his discussion of why he won't actually do the arrest mentions "the laws here in New York City." New York City doesn't have a law about this! This feels very much like a phrasing deliberately chosen to avoid acknowledging that New York City is under the political authority of the United States.
Promising things you know are impossible is pretty standard politician behavior, but empty political promises normally consist of things that you won't actually get in trouble for promising. Mamdani mentions discussing his options re: Netanyahu with the city's legal team, but surely any competent lawyer would be aware of 18 USC 878 and would advise him strongly to shut the fuck up about wanting to arrest a foreign head of state, which suggests that either Mamdani's lawyers are incompetent or he is ignoring them. And I cannot possibly imagine anyone at the UN being happy about any suggestion that the mayor of the city that hosts the UN thinks that section 11 of the UN Headquarters Agreement is optional.
StableOutshoot
13d ago
Zohran Mamdani is threatening to arrest Benjamin Netanyahu when he visits the UN in September
18 USC 878 makes it a federal crime to threaten to imprison any foreign head of state, which suggests that the DOJ has grounds to take action against Mamdani here. This would, of course, cause absolutely nuclear levels of insanity to erupt, especially since I have very little faith in the media not to frame it as "Fascist Trump arrests political rival". But also, it's also extremely unlikely that there will be an actual attempt to arrest Netanyahu, since that would require the NYPD to tangle with the United States Secret Service. All of this seems obvious to me, which means it must be obvious to Mamdani, which raises the question, what is his play here? Even the suggestion that the city that hosts the UN would seriously consider arresting guests of the UN should be insanely problematic.
StableOutshoot
16d ago
I don't think that's too inconsistent, I think the strain of techno-libertarianism that defined the internet of the '00s was adjacent enough to progressivism for most of those people to end up with rabid TDS in the late '10s to '20s. Seems like very very few of the old school techies did not fall into this... ESR, DHH, a few others. Notably, the people who run nearlyfreespeech.net, a web host who pride themselves on their willingness to host anything that is legal to host in the United States (a very '00s internet attitude), including literal swastika-wielding nazis, now have a blog full of various progressivisms that give me the feeling that the only reason they continue to have a permissive content policy is because they understand that changing it would utterly destroy the value of their service.
Total side note that has nothing to do with this but I used to moderate a subreddit (I know, boo, hiss) and one year, Reddit hosted some events for moderators to get together and meet various Reddit employees, and Spez showed up to the one that I went to. I'm not sure how wealthy he was at the time but going by current net worth he would be the wealthiest person, and only billionaire, I have ever been face to face with. I think this would have been before the scandal where he was hand-editing comments.
I think there's a pretty big unquestioned assumption underlying this post, which is that it is desirable in the first place to expand the scope and popularity of whatever project you are engaged in. The greatest rebuttal to this is this classic essay. I have watched the lifecycle outlined in this essay play out in pretty much everything I have ever liked. If you like something, the absolute worst thing you can do for it is try to make it more popular. I can't think of anything that would be worse for The Motte than for it to become more relevant to normies.
This is exactly the thing that happened to Reddit - It didn't start off as the Wet Sock Appreciator hellhole that it is today. Its culture starting out was very much the techno-libertarianism that was pervasive throughout the internet of that era. The "moderators own the subreddit" dynamic was the attempt by the founders of the site, who like most people in tech at the time were very libertarian, to create a structure that would absolve them of responsibility for the content posted to the site, in the hopes of being able to plausibly preserve it as a place for free speech. The problem is that Reddit became popular, and popular web sites cost money to operate, and advertisers are skittish about associating their brand with "that website with an entire section devoted to jailbait photos." So /r/jailbait had to go. And then once that door opened, Reddit's content policy became, in effect, "we will delete anything that causes PR problems for Reddit," with predictable results when the Wet Sock Appreciators became sufficiently powerful as to be able to turn anything they disliked into a PR problem for anyone associated with it.
The other problem is that popular things attract entryists, and also, Reddit is located in San Francisco, which means as the company expands their hiring pool consists of people who live in San Francisco or are willing to move there. In retrospect it was inevitable that as Reddit expanded it would fall victim to the same long march through the institutions as every other powerful and influential organization.
The biggest and most important questions you need to ask and answer, if you seek to expand the scope of The Motte, are not technical, they are social. How do you intend to keep The Motte from suffering the same fate as Reddit, Wikipedia, Google, open source, academia, journalism, science fiction fandom, or any of the other countless formerly neutral and now totally ideologically captured institutions? The only example I can find of a reversal of this trend is Twitter, which required it to be forcibly taken over by a billionaire and most of its staff unceremoniously fired. Honorable mention to Coinbase and 37signals, who famously managed to deal with their respective entryism problems by paying them to go away. This is expensive and probably can't work for everything for that reason.
My vote is that The Motte stays fundamentally what it is rather than trying to expand its scope.
StableOutshoot
21d ago
that is a business risk.
Framing deliberate government action as a "business risk" is ridiculous. If a mobster shows up at your door expressing his sincere concern about the flammability of your property, you wouldn't call your protection money payment a "business risk," that would be absurd! If the government decides to deliberately reduce your ability to commercially exploit your property, destroying the value of your investment, calling this a "business risk" is insane. The 5th amendment requires the government to compensate you if public policy requires the use of your property. I don't see where the 5th amendment says "unless it's a business risk."
StableOutshoot
21d ago
He can just stop renting and sell the property if he wants to.
This seems obviously bogus to me because the value of the property depends on your ability to commercially exploit it. If a new regulation reduces or destroys your ability to commercially exploit the property, the value of the property is now obviously lower, it will not be worth as much to anyone who would buy it. I cannot see how the lost value of your property is not a taking!
StableOutshoot
22d ago
On the topic of 5th amendment violations
If this right of second refusal is an unconstitutional taking of the financial interests of the mortgage-holders, it seems pretty straightforward to me that rent control is an unconstitutional taking of the financial interests of property owners, and I have no idea how we've managed to get this far without a court ruling to that effect.
StableOutshoot
23d ago
I think I get it now
You think a "space datacenter" is a monolithic piece of hardware, a single satellite bus that's carrying 100% of the compute that's intended to be operated in orbit
You do understand that they're going to launch more than one of these, right?
StableOutshoot
23d ago
What do you mean by "serious engineering organizations"?
I mean organizations with a track record of delivering on ambitious projects.
StableOutshoot
23d ago
solar roadways
Zero serious engineering organizations were involved in any of the various "solar freakin roadways" proposals. I give a lot more credence to SpaceX, who have a decades-long history of actually delivering on serious technical challenges previously considered outlandish under conventional wisdom.
building them out on the ocean or in Antarctica
In both of these places you are adding bandwidth/latency challenges, and Antarctica is forbidden from commercial exploitation.
StableOutshoot
23d ago
SpaceX gives values of 150kW of compute power and 110 m^2 of radiator panels (220 m^2 of total radiating surface area since they are double sided).
A typical radiator has an emissivity of about 0.95.
So, per Stefan-boltzmann:
150000 = 220 * 0.95 * 5.67e-8 * T^4
T^4 = 12.6579e9
T = 335K or 61.85 C
If you run your chips at 80C (not unreasonable!), that's a 20 K delta from the chip to the radiator, which seems very reasonable to me? My gaming PC does about 40C from my chips to ambient and I'd expect SpaceX to be able to engineer a better thermal solution than me.
My memory is indeed faulty
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