gattsuru
1yr ago
Imagine if everyone committed minor tax fraud in the course of day to day life, but only partisan Republican activists were prosecuted for it. Well, they're being destroyed by the Truth, right, so this is good?
I think "only" is where this metaphor falls apart. Quite a lot of people get smacked for plagiarism, often less severe plagiarism than discovered here, both in Harvard and in the more general world. Perhaps those hits are only a small portion of all plagiarism that occurs, but it's clearly not something only partisans need fear.
This doesn't undermine Scott's broader point about journalist motivations, but that's separate from the question of Gay's 'destruction'.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Nowhere there or anywhere else do I call anyone racist for doubting the claim, or call anyone on the board racist.
Hm...
And, yeah, this is white fragility. In a week when two white kids lost a highschool debate for quoting Ben Shapiro, and also a week where a black homosexual was severely beaten with a rope tied around his neck while the attackers yelled homophobic and racist slurs and yelled 'MAGA Country', which one did we spend 3x as many comments talking about? When some people can't walk down the street without fear of violence, why is this tiny incident apparently so much more worthy of our notice and concern?
While earlier:
But I'll say this, for those who aren't aware: part of the standard progressives critique of classical liberalism - ie 'lets be blind to differences' - is that, in practice, it always ends up favoring those already in power and reinforcing existing power structures, and that when there are 'accidental' deviations from the maxim of blindness, they always coincidentally seem to involve hurting minorities and those without structural power. See What was Liberalism, especially section 2 starting around 3:30.
So while it's off the mark to directly call this sort of classic liberalism 'racist', the steelman accusation is that it has a tendency to favor the continuation of racist structures if such things just happen to already exist. And the corollary is that any public intellectual who talks about these issues should be aware of this tendency because this is a pretty basic and old critique. And the corollary to that is that the people who stridently ignore this problem and pretend it doesn't exist, are probably doing so for motivated reasons... which is where we come to the accusations of racism and the relevance of pointing out the demographics of the speaker.
You not saying it, just implying it favors the continuation of structures that do it... well, if you want @somedude to issue a mea culpa and say "the kind of progressive who calls people racist makes two-faced and not-especially-subtle insinuations people are racist", hope you enjoy that. I'm sure they'll love the opportunity to say it twice. But it's a pretty weak defense.
And we have had this discussion with me talking about my mistake of getting drawn in and believing there must be some truth to the story several times on the old subreddit (mostly that I didn't think cops would fail to correct misstatements about gross physical evidence of injury, updated on that now).
That's closer (perhaps I missed the 'several'), though it rather failed to engage with your original position.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I of course didn't, but since that's a meme started on here by my #1 long-term stalker who also happens to be a mod, I don't expect people to be much interested in being careful about the facts of the matter.
Hey, I'm not a moderator.
... as per any slander, it's a bunch of lies and mischaracterization built around a true seed of a real event.
gattsuru
1yr ago
There's a precedent for the bulk firing of ATC, but even if it worked, it's not an elegant fix. And at best it's hating the players, rather than the game.
gattsuru
1yr ago
It's technically already there, they don't revolt (yet?) but working pals have a SAN meter which drains as they work and refills as they eat, sleep or use amenities like hot springs.
Ah, that makes more sense. The Dwarf Fortress player in me loves the idea of a tantrum spiral, especially since there's such an asymmetry between how many Pals people look to end up having around their base in the late-game vs how many they can have on them at once, but I could definitely see that being too frustrating even if you had a ton of warning signs about it.
I tried it and, hilariously, it's completely not worth it in the current state - the productivity gains are noticeable but entirely offset by pals slacking off and stuffing themselves much more often (during which they obviously don't work).
Interesting. I wonder if the 'harsher' modes are intended as a panic button for short bursts, or if players are intended to use longer periods at default-speed (such as dedicated servers when offline) to build up simple resources to support short bursts of the hard and super-hard work when players are online.
They will consume
productPokemon game and be excited for the nextproductPokemon game.
Maybe. A lot of these people are otherwise pretty critical of Pokemon, though, especially given recent flops or semi-flops like Arceus.
But even if the marginal buyer (or their parent's/grandma) doesn't end changing orders, this could still be a pretty hot fire under Nintendo's marketing and executive side, if it doesn't get solved by the legal one.
A few things I'd point out :
-
Trace's effortpost mentions that the FAA paused hiring in 2013 awaiting the new test, but I'll spell out that the FAA had previously expected to hire over a thousand ATC each year.
-
At best, this means a lot of people didn't retire when they were planning to do so; more likely, this resulted in a lot of shuffled schedules and reduced overlap (and not-ideal workload).
-
ATC work is hard, and important, often in stupid small ways. The New York, Chicago, and Southern California TRACON are some of the busiest in the world, and even with modern radar and computerized systems you're juggling a half-dozen aircraft in three-dimensional space moving at high speeds (and often with incomprehensible accents). There are major accidents where ATC, including overworked or undersupported ATC, have been responsible.
-
Ostensibly, everyone who passed this test still had to pass a cognitive AT-SAT test (though now mixed with biodata?), though not the Centralized Selection Panel. But with a now vastly reduced numbers taking that test (FAA expected 70% failure rates at the Biographical Assessment score), the final group to pull from was drastically smaller, and they almost certainly had to pull from wider ranges scores than before.
It's really blatant. If I summed up the Biographic Assessment right, there are 28 actually-scored questions, with 179 possible points. To pass, you need a 70%, or 126 points, meaning you can miss no more than 53 points. EDIT: maybe 114 minimum score, and 65 missed points?)
30 points are the "lowest scoring class" grades (15 for science in high school, 15 for history/polysci in college), 3-4 points go for not playing a lot of different high school sports, 2-5 points if you worked too much or too little during your last year of college, 2-10 points if you were unemployed too long or not long enough before applying, 5 points if you took the wrong number (1-6 hours) of art/music/drama/dance, 3 more points if you had three years of formal training.
I dunno if "random" is the right word, but it's pretty close. You lose 2 points compared to someone who had been unemployed the last three years if you didn't submit formal suggestions to your boss, but three formal suggestions would cost you 8 points. Peers describing you as a person who "takes chances" is worth points, rather than costing them. You lose a point for "Baccalaureate-transfer oriented" rather than "Other" to describe your aviation coursework, which is just a mess.
It's possible for someone to pass without the answer sheet, but I don't think the model air traffic controller would.
If the class allegations are true (and they seem well-evidenced!) the Biographical Assessment was issued before you could even attempt the AT-SAT, rather than a final exam. Worse, you could only take the Biographic Assessment once; while some questions like "how long unemployed/how long training" change over time.
EDIT: I'm not sure on the 70% number. I could have sworn I saw it leafing through this stuff yesterday, but I'm not seeing it now. The plaintiffs cite a FAA e-mail saying the pre-cognitive-testing weedout would filter out 70% of applicants (139-24), but the grading rubric for that comes with the Biographical Assessment Answer key says that the score calculation was...
= 70 + (((((Sum of all answer scores in the Biographical Assessment Section - 105.88)/13.25) * 2.5) + ((AT-SAT score - 69.82)/7.62)) * (30/7.48)) - 6.25
(yes, literally: that 30 divided by 7.48 is at least not my typo.).
With the final score requiring the output of that math equation of 70, and the Biographical Assessment score at or over 114. 114 is a weird percentage (63.68%) of 179. Might have been selected as the outcome of picking the second-'best' answer in every scored question, although I think someone actually being in that category would be impossible for college/no-college reasons.
I don't know the range for the (non-cognitive?) AT-SAT score mentioned at the end of that score weighting sheet is, but assuming that the final metric is taken against 70 as a number rather than a percent of something, a perfect Biographical Assessment score would let you pass with an 86, and a minimum 114 Biographical Assessment would require a score of 180 on the other test.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Dealing with NPCs doing things in any not-fake way is surprisingly rough, especially if you have any serious amount of building or terrain movement going on -- I dunno whether it's technically impressive, but getting it to behave non-crazy ways without chugging down a server takes more effort than you might expect.
I did some unrelated small work (json and ui futzing) on a Minecraft mod called Minecolonies a few years ago, which tried to have 4 to 250 npcs doing pretty basic activities in a well-defined range, and the developers who were running the main pathfinding code had to pull some amazing tricks and awkward compromises to have it work, and it was still extremely scary just trying to help diagnose or replicate failure modes. Just the question of 'find trees in X blocks from X position had a million different ways to break.
Ark/Palworld is a slightly easier version of the problem since there's fewer nav updates (building, not block), it's a sparser field to work with, and you can more easily register just the relevant ones, but it's still something where I've got a huge amount of patience for people who try it and get a slightly-buggy result.
(Though, uh, too buggy can be a problem: Ark's solution still occasionally resulted in disappearing critters ten years in, bad enough that one of the most popular mods was a hitching post, and that was only Terraria-level wandering.)
I think there are a lot of defenses, and far more possibility: Palworld is, after all, just recently into early access, and some few games have done amazing things with the model, and just by allowing private servers and a modding api they've done a lot better than some of the more obnoxious Steam shovelware (and just by releasing something playable, they're better than the typical kickstarter scam). I'll probably try the game eventually once my free time has been consumed less by work and stem outreach stuff.
But I think there's something more than Arjin's proposed causes, than loser-hate or Nintendo-loyalty (or immune reaction to AIgen proponents).
gattsuru
1yr ago
A valid concern, but surely, at this point everybody buying early access knows what they're signing up for?
You would think so, but there's no small number of fools willing to pay out for 'em still, and bitching about shovelware is how people warn each other. And there's a messier question of whether high-profiles for some of the worst games end up undermining better games in the same genre: I'll point to both ShooterGame.exe Ark (as rough as it was) and Vintage Story for games that had much rougher times getting player buy-in given how much absolute schlock was getting thrown up onto Steam.
Of course, that just gets back to the question of whether this is or just looks like shovelware.
I understand why Nintendo would be crying for blood, but so far they seem to be the most reasonable people of all involved, how is this a problem for players?
I mean, Nintendo's probably being reasonable while they coordinate the lawsuit (/hitmen), but you're certainly right in that a lot of (often very strongly anticorporatist otherwise!) people are just being bizarrely fast to put their names on the line for a big company. And some people just genuinely do have principled stances on intellectual property that I don't share nor can there really be a utilitarian (and maybe even virtue-based) argument on.
Perhaps naively, the first explanation that comes to mind is that they must be scratching some kind of an itch people can't get scratched anywhere else, and so my brain ends up rounding it off to jealousy. Am I missing something obvious about cloning being bad?
Oh, agree that Palworld absolutely scratched an itch people were looking for. If you went in time a year ago and told Ark people there'd be a less-janky fantasy game with a big emphasis on more casual-friendly play and smarter critter mechanics, they'd absolutely have drooled over it, and I think a lot of that has driven some interest from Ark/Valheim players. ((It also looks like it hits a particularly strong niche within that play, since it's just at the sweet spot of a few different game behaviors.))
And there's a fair complaint that clones aren't necessarily bad; fanfiction as a whole is about taking someone's idea into novel places (sometimes even well), and going too far from the source material in satire risks undermining any recognition. To some extent, I think that's a part of why people are complaining as loudly. If this were just another PUGB clone, it could go in the pit with the rest.
There's a reasonable response (and I think rayon and, to a lesser extent, FCfromSSC already make it) that this game is interesting, just not in ways that a lot of people see when they're looking at My Neighbor Electrobuzz, but there's 30 USD jump from here to there.
Well if you want to say the UI sucks, that's fair enough, but I cannot take the complaint of "stealing UI" seriously.
I haven't played the game; it's quite possible it works better for Palworld than Ark, given the different tech tree. But I bring it up as something that's harder to justify as part of the parody/satire. Legally, yeah, it doesn't matter, and morally 'oh no a level-based list with a pickaxe' is not exactly stealing the factory keys.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Yeah, that's definitely fair. I've not had a chance to play anything in the last couple weeks, and almost all of the serious critics are pretty clearly working more from marketing material or watching other people's streamed play. I don't know that's entirely Critics-as-in-intelligentsia -- I've definitely seen complaints from Ark/Valheim player circles, although that seems to be changing a bit as bigger names like Syntac seem to be sticking with it -- but it's definitely a complaint that makes more sense outside of the box. Among those who've bought and played it, reactions generally seem far more positive.
(and from what I've heard, bad as building and entity interactions are, they're still not Ark-bad.)
To be fair, Pokemon Sun/Moon had both the Pokemon Refresh mechanic and the weird idle game island thing.
But otherwise agreed. Even the pokemon show are really inconsistent about how much pokemon are part of people's lives outside of trainer battles or other competitions; the games have never been able to engage well with the pokemon as characters rather than stat blocks. And there's a lot of interest in it.
"Pokemon meets Zelda" was something probably every kid considered back at the time of Pokemon Red/Blue, and modded-world attempts to get some sort of serious interactions between mons or between the trainer and mons dated back some of the earliest Pokemon mods in Minecraft and elsewhere. There's been a few moderately-successful merges touching on the farming sim world (Slime Rancher is one of the more minimalistic, with only about a dozen base slime species).
Maybe Palworld will get more serious about that as time goes on (I think I've heard you can already have a slave pal revolt?) and end up where rather than just showing all the ways being a Pokemon Trainer could make you an awful person, it contrasts the factory farm approach with a more personalized and even-handed one that might not be as strong or efficient but comes with other benefits (or less chance of getting eaten in your sleep). Or maybe it will inspire Nintendo to step up from the crappy shovelware, or for someone else to do a more creative take.
gattsuru
1yr ago
The steelman is that it looks and feels a lot like shovelware, and both Minecraft-likes and the basebuilding genres are filled with them, to the genres' detriment.
Rayon bring up ARK, and that gets pretty bad at times -- the game is notoriously buggy (and so prone to subtle save-breaking glitches that most servers will run up days or up to a week of save backups, at 100+mb per), depended on user mods for basic QoL functionality for the better part of a decade, is hilariously (500GB install!) badly optimized, and throws out increasingly unbalanced expansion- or map-specific content into a heavily PvP-focused game -- but the worst part is that it's a success story, despite the flirtations with bankruptcy. It made it to a mostly-working final release, it has a fandom today, you can (and imo should) run your own servers, the story completed with the third expansion (and then got two fillers to bridge to the sequel, releasing in 2022 2024 SoonTM). Similarly, Eco is still getting updates five years in, and always been as much as political statement as an actual game, but it's also mostly been lipstick on a pig.
By contrast, Windborne died a pretty awful death, and TUG was taken down to await a v2.0 that will never come. Planet Explorers is at least free to play (with story DLC), which I absolutely can't recommend. Skysaga] actually got a small fandom together before falling over. And those are the memorable ones.
Even where it's not that overt of a failure, there's just a lot of stuff that gets made with asset flips, feted at length, given a long and shiny roadmap, and then completely ignored. There's nothing that inherently prevents this stuff from having tons of polish, or unique or clever mechanics or story, but there's a lot of reasons to be suspicious, not least of all that the previous game from the same dev has a lot of mechanical overlap... and are still in early access.
Palworld seems like it has more work put toward it, and it looks more competent, but no small amount of that reflects the Unity sphere have better cheap assets available. And especially if Nintendo decides to leave a Rapidash Rooby's head in the developer's bed, there's more reasons than normal to expect that this game might not get out of eternal early access. Which gets to the more common complaint.
The more common complaint is that it's incredibly overt in its cloning, even by the standards of satire. Now, that satire is genuinely present, if sometimes crossing the line from 'biting and clever' to 'Rick and Morty would think it a little too low', but even if this (might -- Japan doesn't really have a fair use exception for parody) make it legal as a matter of law, it makes a lot of things feel particularly shallow at first glance, and lazy more often. I don't know that this would have been as big an issue five years ago, but AI-gen and Palworld dev's takes on AI don't help, even if I'm skeptical that any AI-gen was used here -- I think that's a lot of what started things off.
((And it doesn't just borrow the mons, which tbf are only sometimes that bad. The tech tree's UI layout is very reminiscent of Ark's, for example, which... why? It's famously bad there, why not at least steal something that doesn't suck?))
The... less charitable take is that the line between condone and criticize has almost completely dissolved for at least some of the political field. The game features firearms, animal cruelty, slave labor, pokepal-cannibalism and -shields (and whatever the 'pal essence' gimmick is), so on, all as things the players can do, and some that you're pretty strongly incentivized to do. And whatever charity that some people might have been willing to extend (or overextend) if they liked the stuff, they're absolutely going to hate on it if they already didn't want to like the game's concept.
gattsuru
1yr ago
At least for this court case, the only thing that's been ordered so far is costs for Gircys and Cornell, the two challengers who had standing (because their cards and bank accounts were frozen), but not the public interest challengers or those who had less direct or less clear harm. Even for the Gircys and Cornell, the judge said he "will not award them costs for the preliminary steps in these proceedings which I considered to be often misguided or for the preparation of the largely irrelevant memorandum of fact and law that was filed".
Canada's equivalent to qualified, executive, and professional qualified immunity is complicated, but I would be very surprised if anyone was found personally liable -- I don't have a great understanding, but 'presume good faith' seems common and a complete block against one-offs like this.
It'll be a little embarrassing for Trudeau, but they're more likely to appeal to challenge the framework where the Emergency Powers Act only can be applied in limited circumstances. Neither are real consequences, especially since this ruling is only as-applied, and the application was so tremendously fact-specific.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Would jail be mandatory if Clarence Thomas or Kamala Harris were subpoenaed, and refused on separation of powers grounds?
In theory, this could be contempt; whether it could result in jail time is much more complicated. At the trivial level, as Eric Holder demonstrated, even the clearest and most bipartisan finding of contempt of congress won't matter if the DoJ doesn't want to bring the charge to court. Even if charges are brought, there are some defenses.
gattsuru
1yr ago
How are they excluding the border patrol from it?
From a legal perspective, Shelby Park is owned by Texas or the town of Eagle's Pass. From a practical sense, they put up fences and parked some state humvees on state or town-owned roads.
I expect the answer is Biden says go in anyway is that Texas flinches and adds trespassing to their lawsuit, but I wouldn't want to bet a whole lot of money on that, or how it would go if it happens.
gattsuru
1yr ago
Yeah, it's not even as close as the rental emergency thing, but it's still a lot closer than I like or I expected Texas or Abbot to be willing to fuck with.
I think the combination of this decision and one-off current events could be a motivator. I've pointed to other cases where someone could have turned True Believer, but while guns give the obvious approaches and reasons, there's a lot of ways a repeat offender who was also an illegal immigrant could become extremely prominent to a politician's mind.
Are those records not public? Couldn’t somebody go through and theoretically demonstrate that he got a light treatment compared to others on the list?
... kinda? I tried doing that as a conversation with ymeskhout separately, but it's hard to overstate how much of a mess the available data is, and how much information either isn't publicly available or may never have been gathered to start with, and how much what is available depends on interpretation and value assessments that likely aren't shared. Some of the best documents are ones brought by plea bargainers during their sentencing request, which also means that they're out-of-date at time of publication, and possibly introduce errors.
((Though given the number of typos and miscites I've found on the DC DA's site, maybe not more error.))
There are only about 40 of the 720+ sentences published by the DoJ which contain probation-only sentences of the same or lesser length; only a dozen are shorter terms of probation than what Epps got. Sometimes that reflects a judge with a softer hand, like in Cudd's case where McFadden seemed generally skeptical of sentencing comparisons brought by the DoJ; others, such as the Kulas brothers, probably fall to what are euphemistically described as "serious physical and mental health issues" (and presumably one of the brothers caring for the other). Some of them are weird: Blauser seems like a combination of his extreme age, clear attempts to physically restrain a particularly nutty protestor that seems like she dragged him to the Capitol, long military service, and ... reading between the lines, probably a lot of health stuff. Bratjan's seems a mix of the above, though imo the court seems to take his claims of a past traumatic neurological injury as more justification for a short sentence than I would consider ideal.
Lower 5% of sentences is still a pretty big gap, though, so you have to start digging into the details, and then you end up with a giant hairball of forking paths. How serious were Epps' calls to go into the Capitol? How long was he at the Capitol grounds, even if he didn't enter the building (a matter often cited for longer probation sentences for people who did not spend long in the Capitol building itself)? How much Were his manhandling of a big metal-framed sign trying to slow other protestors down, or a threat to officers nearby? How credibly do you take Epps' claims of confusion about the Capital access -- you point out it's ass-covering, but perhaps that at least indicates knowing there's an arse to be covered? Should Epps be getting unusual credit even compared to other remorseful defendants given his Congressional testimony, even if that puts him into a class of one? What if one or two of the other cases are just badly-decided, like Bratjan's?
What about the signals that we might just not have for other cases? I can show where bringing heavy-duty first aid kit was treated as suspicious in other cases, but I can't show cases where someone brought it and no one cared to mention them. I can show cases where other people who never entered the capitol building nor committed violence themselves and received longer probation or (generally weeks of) incarceration; I have no clue how many people did not enter the building and were never charged, and even a lot of the defendants awaiting trial don't have great info quality.
But even with a lot of OCR and some carefully-written scripts, this isn't the sort of thing you can readily do off-the-cuff, or present verbally during a discussion. It's a massive gish gallop of (literally) almost a thousand Bleemer and Gorpman; worse, one that even people taking this position don't find interesting.
And it wouldn't even have been fair to ymeskhout's perspective had someone done it during the podcast; compare the two's reaction to the comparably well-known Vaughn/Mackey case -- there's a lot to be said about it, but without serious prep and focus it turns into a mess (this amici is one of the more in-depth pieces I've found, and it probably post-dates the initial recording here, and it's an hour-long discussion of its own.
gattsuru
1yr ago
It's an old habit, arising from conventions of online dialogue, most often seen in fanfiction and roleplay communities, where (()) was a popular way to indicate asides, stage directions, or more general notes, that are not essential to the post and may contradict it in theme, but still help illuminate the view the writer is trying to bring forward.
The telos was to apparently enable a particularly good pun about parenting vs divorce that I can't find from the old subreddit.
gattsuru
1yr ago
It's less the specific charge -- you note fictional pleas, but even beyond that the relevant statutes are just vague and open-ended enough that a good half-dozen can fit pretty easily -- and more the behavior I'm trying to isolate down, and with things like charges and sentences are the closest proxies that the USAO DC page you linked actually exposes. I bring 40 USC 5104(e)(2)(G) and 18 USC 1752(a)(1) because they're the only other convictions that have similar or lesser sentencing that what Epps faced in the entire spreadsheet.
In an ideal world, we'd filter by what the alleged (or actual) behaviors were, but I tried throwing a couple scripts at the full USAO DC setup, and between missing pdfs (Andrew Morgan's courtlistener page makes him look like he got slapped more for his political views... but only because his sentencing request is still pacer-locked; taking it from other sources makes clear he behaved unusually poorly), heavily obfuscated descriptions, or bizarre descriptions... well, I got those three I mentioned last post out who didn't enter the capital building proper, but I also got another ten that did go into the building, and I'm 90%+ sure there's some false negatives.
((And I'm still finding typos and misfiles and stupid case citation errors, but that's more typical.))
gattsuru
1yr ago
To be fair, Torgersen received a double nomination in 2012 for Hugo Novelette and a Campbell (a not-Hugo-for-historic-reasons award selected by WorldCon voters in the same packet), and came close second in both, and Correia was nominated for the Campbell in 2011 (though he didn't rank very high, and that year was an absolute mess from block voting perspectives).
For winners, a while. Pournelle famously never won one, though Niven did in the 70s. Orson Scott Card in 1987? Progressives might argue Resnick, but... not very credibly.
Maybe one of the lesser-known slots like editor, but it'd have been before my time.
gattsuru
1yr ago
I've followed the Hugos since ~2004ish -- and been crotchity yelling at cloud over Best Related Work never being that Related or that Best almost the whole time -- so a good part of it's just me yelling at clouds.
That said, even in recent years there's often been occasional good results: Welcome to Your Authentic Indian Experience™ is definitely the sort of thing that I'd expect to be schlocky Blue Tribe culture war porn and lack introspection, and it's definitely a Blue Tribe work, but it's a lot more self-criticizing than you'd expect -- not a 10/10 work, but definitely more worth the time than you'd see from the summary. I found Ted Chiang through The Merchant and the Alchemist, and older folks would have known about his Story of Your Life a decade and a half before Arrival, for example.
And the Hugos in particular were nice because you'd get a big voter's packet with all of the finalist pieces together. While sometimes you got some stinkers (and there have always been stinkers), just a couple good works outside of your normal wheelhouse would often pay for the membership.
At a deeper level... while you can be a successful writer in other ways and other approaches, the field and especially the successful commercial part of the mainstream field is both insular and incestuous. Even if you don't care about any particular award or convention hall speech or signing-books-for-dollars, they're often how behind-the-scenes discussions bring a sudden consensus forward.
At the big picture level, I'm unclear what we exactly disagree about.
If I'm understanding your arguments correctly, your position is that we have no evidence that Epps is a fed because he was not treated uniquely or unusually. My argument is that he has been treated unusually and possibly uniquely, but that this is not strong evidence he is a fed because there's enough of a spread of possible selection bias to pick such outliers.
You mention two incriminating factors for Epps that appeared to have been ignored. He did indeed initially blame Antifa, but then also fully cooperated with law enforcement by calling the FBI on January 8th, and then sitting down for an interview on March (with a lawyer) where he admitted what he did was wrong.
Epps continued to state the possibility of antifa infilitrators over a year later during congressional hearings. Maybe that's not enough to overcome the question of remorse, and after all that's what sentencing is supposed to rest on. I can't even say, since the final reasons for sentencing from the judge are (afaict) almost always sealed in these cases. But there's a few people who did that sort of ambivalence -- albeit usually on social media rather than before Congress -- and it was read as evidence of insincerity.
I don't see how having tourniquets can possibly be viewed as incriminating, it's normal for anyone attending a protest/rally to bring first aid supplies, especially with how violent 2020 was.
I agree with you, but the DoJ does not. There are several informations or sentencing requests that highlight first aid, non-weapon personal protection such as body armor, or other non-weapon preparation (painter's mask!, sometimes explicitly to describe culpability or planning. Now, I can't prove how many other cases don't mention such a thing despite it being present -- we only know for Epps because he discusses it before Congress, after all! And yet back to the start we go again.
What would illuminate that question is someone with comparable conduct who nevertheless received a harsher sentence, and then ensuring that this hypothetical person wasn't just an outlier... This should be very easy if it was so obvious.
Yet in practice, it's impossible to show anyone charged with the same conduct. Only a handful of people were sentenced after pleaing or being found guilty of the same offense and only the same offense: I provided a list: 10 of the 14 include jail time, including no small number of plea bargains -- but almost all of them entered the Capitol proper, so that's not a fair comparison.
Same for 18 USC 1752(a)(1): I can easily show cases that showed similar or greater levels of remorse and admission of culpability but received home detention and longer probation, but the overwhelming majority entered the Capitol building, if only for minutes. The only cases I can show didn't enter the Capitol proper was a nutjob with a long criminal history, who brought her kid with her and tried/helped moved barriers, or maybe that one moron who ran for Michigan governor. They all got significantly harsher sentences, but there are easy ways to pull them as unique in their own various ways, and they're certainly either less remorseful or more plainly two-faced in their fake 'remorse'. Kepley is probably the closest, but you could readily argue (and I might agree!) that her sentence reflected assumptions her 'remorse' was especially fake or she had closer responsibility to attacks on police than shown in the indictment or sentencing memo, or just that she drew a hanging judge.
((You can even flip this analysis: there are a lot more sole-1752(a)(1) sentences, so out of all of them, you can pull three that received 12-month probation, though their fact patterns in turn (sorry, the courtlistener for this one is nearly empty) are drastically different. And that'd even be fair, although in turn I can readily point to the same nitpicks or exclusions.))
You can (and as far as I can tell, do) hold that this must mean Epps was charged unusually harshly. After all, I can only find three people with comparable sentences who didn't enter the grounds! (though, uh, that's not a deep search). But you're demanding a remarkable amount of rigor, here: trying to break apart whether they're the only three at all is rough enough. Figuring out and proving whether that means they were the only people to commit that particular offense but no further, if those others who did either weren’t caught yet or have yet to be sentenced, or if the DOJ decided to do some sub-criminal investigation punishment, would range from incredibly difficult and expensive to impossible at a philosophical level.
((This, on top of their long-proposed fedishness, is part of why Ali Alexander and Fuentes seem like distractions. They fit into AshLael's defense of not-committing-technical-crimes closer than Epps, who plead and had long admitted to crossing into restricted grounds.))
Regarding evidence of pre-planning, the most illustrative would be everything outlined in the Proud Boys sentencing memo. They created hierarchies, chain of command, recruitment standard, guidelines for communication, etc etc
That's fair. I've got some quibbles about it, but got more weight as evidence than the vaguer assessments of non-uniqueness. As I’ve said, I don’t buy the Epps theory. But it’s easy to dismiss as not-even-wrong when you aren’t really engaging with it.
gattsuru
1yr ago
There have been some interesting results in relation to the Hugo Awards, and to the broader WorldCon environment. Kevin Standlee, a previous chair of the World Science Fiction Society (the WorldCon runners) posts Elections have Consequences:
Something that I think most people have forgotten is that Worldcons happen in the real world and are subject to real-world conditions. Among other things, Worldcons have to obey the laws of the place in which they are held, no matter what their governing documents say.
An overwhelming majority of the members of WSFS who voted on the site of the 2023 Worldcon (at the 2021 Worldcon in DC) selected Chengdu, China as the host of the 2023 Worldcon. That meant that the members of WSFS who expressed an opinion accepted that the convention would be held under Chinese legal conditions. Furthermore, those people (including me) who suggested that there might be election irregularities were overridden, shouted down, fired from their convention positions, and told that they were evil and probably racist for even suggesting such a thing.
The Hugo Nomination statistics were released on Friday, and unsurprisingly there are some oddities. Some of the disqualifications are likely politically charged over Chinese-specific matters, and others more universal. To be fair, the exact rules for qualification are complex, and some past nominees have been screwed over by esoterica of first publication dates; given the number of new voters, it's not too surprising that some nominated works fell outside of the eligibility timeline.
To be somewhat less charitable, I'm not familiar with too many previous times where nominees were listed as eligible by associated vendors before getting disqualified. The nominations are also bizarre in other ways, if one expected a largely Chinese fandom: there's a few Chinese-original pieces and editors, but not many.
Officially, there was absolutely no political pressure for these decisions, which have an explanation that the WorldCon Chendgu admins won't be providing.
On one hand, it's hard to be surprised if something wacky happened, and surely the people who set up WorldCon inside the CCP should have known it'd be a charlie foxtrot one way or the other. It's even part of the WorldCon bylaws that given a lot of power to the laws of the hosting nation, as Standlee points out. WorldCon locations are determined by member votes, even if this rounds out a little weird.
On the other hand, there were some fun questions about exactly how fair that vote for the 2023 WorldCon bid was well before this point -- quite a lot of ballots were allegedly filled out remotely and dropped off by a small number of visitors. Which wasn't and currently isn't against the rules, mind you! And the WSFS certainly wouldn't bring up questions of authenticity in 2021.
((On the gripping hand, unlike nearly every other vote at WorldCon, the location vote is heavily vetted internally rather than going through a member nominee process; only sufficiently prepared locales are listed. And WorldCon Chengdu advocates had been wining-and-dining hard for a while, which, given the logistical issues the convention had that included a complete rescheduling, might have been descisive.))
Schadenfruede isn't great for the soul, so to some extent I'm pretty happy to that a number of critics of modern WorldCon have had better things to do with their time, even if I personally have struggled not to snark a bit. And it's hard to expect too much to come from any retrospective at this point: because ballots and nominations, proving or disproving any tomfoolery incoherent as a position; more likely, it ends up with some minor tweaks to the location bid process, and just becomes one of those weird bits of fan lore, like when people wonder why Mercedes Lackey disappeared from SFWA conferences.
It's already too late to pass out the Asterisk Awards v2, and most of the winners weren't bad; many would have won regardless, even if the novel slot is definitely curious. ((Though I'm definitely less-than-happy that Scalzi squeaked in a nomination on another terrible work because of the DQ's)). Which brings up the culture war side. Standlee has an example :
Imagine a Worldcon held in Florida. It would be subject to US and Florida law (and any smaller government subdivision). Given legislation passed by Florida, it would not surprise me if such a hypothetical Florida Worldcon's Hugo Administration Subcommittee would disqualify any work with LGBTQ+ content, any work with an LGBTQ+ author, or any LGBTQ+ individual, because the state has declared them all illegal under things like their "Don't Say Gay or Trans" laws and related legislation.
To be fair, Standlee gets pushback, and eventually admits that no, that's not actually the existing law. I expect if pressed hard enough, he'd even admit it would surprise him were a Florida WorldCon's subcommittee willing to comply with such a law. (To be a little less charitable, he's probably going to be a go-to example for people on the left assuming conservative jurisdictions will ignore courts orders, if only because most people use video format or circumlocutions). And perhaps there are uses to bringing forward a nearby hypothetical over a distant reality (and, tbf, the at-least-up-as-a-bid-but-still-implausible WorldCon Uganda gets some attention on File 770).
But it's a slightly awkward comparison. It's not like either of these hypotheticals are really things this cohort experience personally, or even by second- or third-hand. Yet they're useful boogeymen.
I'm going to make a different critique than most people, here :
This is hilariously naive. It's not just or even mostly journalists, in the same way that a pressure wave isn't just or even mostly any one particle.
There's a poster on tumblr named brazenautomaton, who's a bit of a mad artist in all of the best ways. One of those are his rants -- and I use the term as a compliment -- on popularity. I can't find the best one of the top of my head, but as a good example:
Yes, this is clinical depression, though see Scott re: Malcolm Muggeridge. It's also non-falsifiable: anyone who can be punished can't be popular, and anyone who is popular can't be punished. But it's also a pattern that exists.
Scott knows this, more intimately than most. It's not like that's even a one-off! But I can play examples of the confessed rapist you could not even discuss the 'allegations' of over at RPGnet, until they annoyed someone enough to get booted, and then the deluge. I can give examples as severe as alleged grooming and as minor as 'appropriated her own culture' in the furry fandom. Nor is it specific to online or the left: the pastor everyone loves until, posthumously, it turns out everyone had a horror story about is trope with a lot of recently-live examples. Nor it is about big stuff: the Friday Fun thread conversation about Palworld has some steelmen, but it's almost certainly downstream of some popular people wanting to start wars over AIgen.
You and I will do it too. It's hard to care for what's real, rather than what's talked about and what the people around you find important.
Maybe Scott doesn't think it necessary to say, maybe he knows that one of the big rules for being on the Inside is that you don't mention that there's an Inside.
But it's not just the journalists doing this, and I'm increasingly convinced that they're neither driving the stampede nor surfing the crowd.
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