gattsuru
7hr ago
I think people should take it seriously when those on a pathway to a position of power suggest people should -- just morally, not legally -- accept a couple percentage point risks of death rather than be capable of defending themselves against an illegal assault, and accept ejection from public fora before either.
If you do not want to share so much as a country with me, then you will at most be someone I occasionally argue with on the internet--nothing more--and my commentary about you will reflect that.
Yeah, I'd gotten the feeling that's how things were going. I'd hoped for a different answer to the naive experiment, but if the answer is "The friend-enemy distinction matters", Litany of Tarski go.
gattsuru
8hr ago
And I'd be lying if I didn't look with grim satisfaction at the place others said would turn into a progressive monoculture and see that it has, despite being quiet, remained precisely the thoughtful discussion space I hoped it would be.
Of writers that could be plausibly described as outside of progressive monoculture (or at least outside of the ethos that formed theSchism, you and I (and I guess DuplexFields?) seem the only current significant overlap between TheSchism and TheMotte, and I'm marginal. Lykurg480 stopped posting here about seven months ago, professorgerm/desolation set their motte account private, ymeskhout and ChrisPratt haven't posted in the schism for years and what they did post were pretty mainstream progressive stuff.
I'll disclose that I upvoted FCFromSSC's "I do not think I share a common understanding of peace and justice with you." I'd be interested to know if you read, upvoted, and/or downvoted it, but it's probably best that I don't know, and ultimately it doesn't really matter if you and Numbers never had similar discussions on the schism by accident, or by plan.
If the overlap between here and theschism were a success story in the sense that we disagreed on matters but could still have serious conversations, than it'd be part of the solution. If it's just a race between those who don't want to bring up the disagreements and those who know they can't, then it's just a top hat and monocle on top of the problem.
gattsuru
8hr ago
Yes, I've edited to note you find a big distinction between just feeling betrayed by people voting for someone you hate, and not wanting to share a country or be ruled by "Would they have killed him? From a probabilistic standpoint, I'd give it maybe 1-2% odds at most assuming he was passive/compliant."
There's an obvious difference, but as always the problem is and remains why the distinction matters. Clearly you care, and there's no small number of people who feel very strongly the exact opposite direction. I'm willing and happy to engage, to the extent that I'm allowed to engage, with questions like that at TheSchism if there's a chance of exploring the deeper disagreement.
This discussion, and that you find the current state of the subreddit a success, sounds very much like that's not the point of "the thoughtful discussion space" you hoped theschism would be.
gattsuru
9hr ago
Or, if we're looking to 2020:
So—yes. When it comes down to it, with everyone who supported Donald Trump, "I'm ready to bury the hatchet" is about as uplifting and positive I can get. I didn't support Obama when he was in office. I felt like Bush was a good man who would be vindicated by history. I wanted McCain to win, then Romney. I grew up emotionally fully in the camp of Team Red, frustrated at how much it felt as though the left hated and misunderstood me, and I felt deeply personally betrayed when Team Red embraced Donald Trump, as if everything I had ever hoped about them was a mirage and they really did want to be as bad as the left always claimed they did. I can put the past in the past, but I can't pretend I don't strongly wish that particular chapter of the past never even came close to happening.
Sorry, I'm trying to not to take out a bad mood and what I see as a repudiation of Trace's entire ethos on him, and I get the distinction TW's trying to move around ("I'm not going to write off the half of the country who supported him"). But it's hard to read this conversation and not see my (and I guess @drmanhattan16 's?) participation in TheSchism (and TW's twitter sphere) as part of the problem.
gattsuru
10hr ago
Thanks for the warning. Homeworld 2 had turned me off enough, I guess I'll put this along with the X series as having jumped the shark.
Anyway, I've tarried long enough (without even mentioning the reportedly excellent Cataclysm, which I haven't played!).
It's an excellent (though probably no-longer canon) piece, mixing a bit of cosmic horror with some fun new mechanics and giving the Bentusi a lot better a characterization and sendoff than Cataclysm 2 did, imo, avoiding a lot of the weird chosen-oneisms in favor of Alien-style truckers in deep shit. The Beast is a shocking and chilling monster, and the fight against it never feels either unfair or canned.
The shield mechanics in particular were a blast: Sentinel fighters could link into powerful geometric shields that, when fully upgraded, can block everything but fightercraft... at the cost of the Sentinel itself becoming a sitting duck, and individual panels of the shield being vulnerable to sustained fire even from attacks it can block. They were seldom things that turned the tide of battle, especially in multiplayer, but the possibility an opponent might have picked up enough of them made a lot of other mechanics work very well, without mandating annoying micromanagement.
(The last boss of the campaign missions do end up being a bit of a gimmick, as a downside, though it was still pretty fun the first time, imo.)
gattsuru
11hr ago
Plus, to be anything more than useless lone-wolf terrorism would require organization...
I'm... not so optimistic. I think people here have spent too long in white-collar environments. While I'd expect that anything going hot will involve more garbage person emotional spasms than cold-blooded planning, a serious and dedicated red team attacker with even a moderate amount of certain infrastructure knowledge could cause massive amounts of deaths, infrastructure costs, and/or economic costs, and it only takes a couple highly-reported bad actors for the processes to become Common Knowledge as something that can happen.
That passivism and atomic individuality makes the low-capability people a lot more prone to They Kept Using Discord problems, but despite the increasingly common progressive assumptions, not everyone in that field is low-capability.
That's still not enough to take control over large geographic locations (or even a CHAZ), if that's what you mean, but not everyone's going to have the same idea of what 'winning' means. The sort that take shutting down large parts of New York City are just, you know, not mine.
gattsuru
11hr ago
Also, murdering anyone who wears those tattoos without going through the necessary gang initiations. I could see the false-positive rate being a little higher, and I'm skeptical that El Salvador's actual murder rate has dropped as far as the reported murder rate, but a lot of the due process concerns are... misplaced or based on poor understandings of the environment (or, conversely, what due process looks like in the United States).
gattsuru
20hr ago
That's an argument that it will not win; it's not an argument against doing it. Indeed, if actually sure you're really doomed, a lot of arguments against escalation -- what happens with the next step on the wheel, what if we could delay or bargain -- become a lot less compelling. Even doomed lashing out can be expensive, and there's a lot of self-defense arguments about how dangerous 'unarmed' people can be.
I don't think we're there, yet, though I'll admit the last week has not been encouraging.
gattsuru
20hr ago
Vullo is interesting, but ultimately the court leaves qualified immunity on the table, the Second Circuit is almost certainly going to give her it, and almost any plausible future case will have some excuse for why it's just slightly different enough that they get qualified immunity too, and that makes it hard to care too much. The facts for the NRA to get here were very much outliers -- had Lockton been the slightest bit less NRA-friendly to start with, or James been the slightest bit more circumspect, and that balancing test becomes even harder to demonstrate.
It's better than the carte blanche for 'nice non-profit you have here, shame if something happened to it' the Second Circuit appeals court gave, and it's nice to see even Sotomayor willing to push back on lower courts doing this stuff, but it's more going to discourage overt acts at the margins over actually making anyone whole.
Jackson's argument is that the matter should have been handled as a retaliation case, rather than a censorship one. That's not quite a dissental, but it would be a much harsher standard to show in future or unrelated cases, and maybe even in future proceedings in this one would have made it easier to rebut.
gattsuru
23hr ago
I don't think he's written too much on it in one place, but basically this: a large portion of extremists (and especially violent extremists) are just generally miserable and unlikable (and "jarringly Not a Normal Person"), lashing out in an unstable emotional spasm rather than any serious plan (and sometimes with little real connection to their ideological alignment, to the extent they even have rather than wear ideological alignments).
They're extremely dangerous individually, despite or because of all that, but it's mostly important in how little they're tied to actual concrete positions or principles; the 'real' motivating factors are more Travis Bickle Lost His Job and the manifesto's are excuses.
gattsuru
1d ago
Yep. Before J6, I literally argued that the Red Tribe side at least wouldn't be riots, and that was a mistake, and I'm not gonna make the mistake of arguing that they'll keep managing to avoid killing people if it happens again.
Just because it'll slide into violence doesn't mean the people who have morons going first violent will win, or even that they won't be the ones most of the violence, in the long run, is aimed at.
gattsuru
1d ago
This week's feeling more like a Lando Mollari thing than a Kosh one, but yes.
gattsuru
1d ago
How can you tell the difference between overt political lawfare and the conviction of a felon by a jury of peers?
It'd be nice to start with :
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A law that is regularly and consistently applied, in this context, against normal people, for this level of sentence.
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A judge that either does not have a record of donating significantly to the political opponent of That Politician, and does not have immediate family who fundraise against That Politician Specifically.
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A prosecutor that did not campaign on finding the crime for the man.
gattsuru
1d ago
Yeah, the punchline to Hrazdka's garbage person thesis is that you just need a few morons around hearing "current thing is beyond the pale!" at the wrong time, maybe thinking the wrong type of protest is Actually Allowed, and then whoops dozens or hundreds of deaths, and then it's too late for the pebbles to vote.
gattsuru
1d ago
The big issues:
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Cohen campaign finance violations were part of a plea bargain about some much more serious charges; on top of the normal limitations of using a plea bargain (or the National Inquirer non-prosecution agreement) as evidence, there's a unusually steep chance that Cohen plead to it whether or not it was a crime he actually committed rather than face much more serious charges and as part of his pivot to go after Trump. ((This is a pretty common issue in more normal criminal law, where prosecutors will hammer on whoever they think has the least spine to get a plea that implicates the people they're really after, whether or not any of them were breaking the law.))
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The scientier requirements would normally require not just that Trump did something that concealed a crime, but that Trump be aware that he was concealing a crime; this is one of the few places in criminal law where ignorance of the law could well be a defense.
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And it requires that Trump intend his false statements conceal that crime; if Trump believed no one was going to look at the records and care, than it couldn't be fraud.
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There's also some messiness in that Cohen plead to a federal campaign finance charge. It's not clear that's what the jury (or part of the jury) considered the underlying crime, but if they did, this raises serious questions about whether a state can bootstrap a misdemeanor into a felony by relevance of a federal law. It's... not clear that's how that works.
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There's a variety of other process issues, from whether judge's family's financial interests would justify a recusal (contrast), or whether Cohen's plea and testimony should have gotten more serious disclaimers given everything going on with them, to some goofiness about Wiesselberg being required to testify or plea the fifth.
((It's also very unclear Trump cutting Daniels a check would have avoided legal scrutiny, here; there are also federal laws against using campaign funds for personal expenses, and if Trump had written it down as a campaign expense, well, how do you know he was using his pot-of-money rather than the campaign-pot-of-money.))
gattsuru
1d ago
Guilty verdict's not a huge surprise: even before the trial started, the best Trump could really hope for was a hung jury.
Sentencing is set for July 11th (hilariously, less than a week before the RNC). There's a lot of procedural messiness here -- even by the low standards of state trials, this was a clown show, and that's before you get to the Biden campaign (!) sending Robert DeNero(?!) to argue for conviction in front of the courthouse -- but appeal is going to be a clusterfuck just as a matter of timing. Trying to get an appeal in the four months between sentencing and the election is unlikely, the first two levels of appeal will still be dealing with New York judges, SCOTUS doesn't like taking appeals directly from a trial court (might do it anyway?), and even if everything lines up perfectly, most avenues for success on appeal still only kicks the case back down.
In the short term, it's not really clear that appeal matters. Given the Carrol verdict being reported as Trump being 'found guilty of rape', I dunno that many people even considering voting for Trump will care that he's a felon; anyone who does won't care or notice about a technical appeal remand a month before the election. Republican bloodlust for lawfare aren't going to be sated, whether Trump wins or loses, by an admission of legal oopsie, whether before or after the election. Supposedly there's an array of moderates that will "kick and scream and shake my fist impotently at the sky before casting a meaningless vote against" Biden in the case of continued escalation, but I'm not holding my breath. I guess if Trump loses by anything less than an absolute landslide and the conviction is overturned after the election (or worse, after January 20th!), it'll radicalize people more?
Yay?
Longer-term... this is gonna get messy. There is very little argument to Republicans against goose-for-gander here, and while professional Democratics think they're much less vulnerable to criminal lawfare (and that the Republicans that were get elected won't be willing to risk it), whatever extent that's true today, it's not going to stay that way for long: there's no way someone can campaign against the platform of going against various scuzzy Dems. And while Dem politicians are sure that they can avoid stepping into Texas, the phrase 'conspiracy jurisdiction' is going to become Very Interesting in the next five or six years.
gattsuru
1d ago
Yeah, I feel like I recently saw a US court case where someone was found guilty for breaking a law that wasn't a law when they committed the acts. I can't find it now for the life of me.
The rules for ex post facto laws are complex and more than a little arbitrary: the courts have basically allowed everything and anything to pass muster in civil contexts, criminal laws which are 'merely' regulatory in contrast to punitive ones get a pass, and for kinda goofy historical reasons only a very small subset of process changes specific to testimony or rules of evidence are really taken seriously.
There are plenty of not-straight furries at Google, so if there's a culture/legal shift I would expect Google (and other FAANG companies) to fight tooth and nail (heh) against court orders to reveal incriminating stuff related to that.
There's definitely stuff that would fall into that category, sometimes even stuff that would heavily squick out normies, but I'd caution against overestimating solidarity of any group. Even outside of cases that ultimately revolve around stupid interpersonal shit, there's a long-standing interest in reporting certain classes of bad actors when they're exposed through the fandom. That's not even always necessarily wrong, but neither code nor major names in the fandom notice the difference between Laws I Like versus Potential Laws I Don't.
As a trivial and probably-not-too-controversial here example, were federal law changed such that use of uncleared AI image generation models were criminal copyright infringement, I'm very skeptical that a lot of the mainstream fandom or even its Google-specific employee base would be willing to bend over backwards to protect customers from overbroad warrants in the way that they would over, say, sex toy sales receipts or did over normal copyright infringement.
I don't think it's likely we'll see a massive swing back (zero isn't a probability, though) on the more standard homosexuality, or even just Braeburned- or Rukis-level stuff, but I'm old enough to have seen a number of new taboos established around the borders or less common tastes.
The VeraCrypt file is annoying because I have to upload the whole thing when any small part of it changes, but I'm not sure there's a better solution. I have zero trust in any company's claims of zero-knowledge, unbreakable encryption, or resistance to government seizure.
Yeah, lots of agreement there. Cryptomator is supposed to be pretty decent as per-file encryption goes, but their security audit situation is nowhere near as robust as VeraCrypt's and the user experience is Not Great Bob (though better than using GPG raw!), and per-file encryption unavoidably leaks some metadata. Bulk-mounting a variety of smaller veracrypt volumes can kinda work as a compromise, but it's definitely not supported well by the VeraCrypt GUI, acts inconsistently if you're working with volumes rather than files, most workarounds risk leaking password info, so on. Dunno of any approaches that are better.
gattsuru
2d ago
There were also a number of 'official' recordings that just disappeared, too, along with other disappearing physical evidence like the famous front door. With the noteworthy exception of Kahoe after Ruby Ridge, it's less that bringing any enforcement against FBI or DoJ destruction of evidence was tried and found hard, and more than trying them was found undesirable and left untried.
Why not demand the emails from Google? The government spies on my emails just fine, why can't they get those of Fauci and friends?
In theory, that's the next step: the House had already asked Morens twice about his personal e-mails, producing 2k with a 'voluntary' letter in November 2023, and then getting this dump of 30k pages after a subpoena mid-April 2024, and they had credible reason to believe he was sandbagging them.
But the House investigations are not criminal investigations, nor are they the FBI or DoJ. The theoretically-broad subpoena powers are limited on the enforcement side, and there's little if any executive branch support here. With a few notable exceptions all on one side of the political aisle, the threat of a contempt of congress charge is toothless unless the issuing subpoena bends over backwards about following all rules, and unlikely even then.
And one of those rules are 18 USC 2702, which generally prohibits ISPs from disclosing stored data. There are a few exceptions -- LEO have wide cutouts in 18 USC 2517, 18 USC 2511(2)(a)ii lets FISA and the attorney general do whatever they want -- and some that apply outside of a warrant, but nothing relevant here. This is also why, even though using a personal e-mail for government business makes the entire personal e-mail subject to FOIA review in civil courts (though see caveat about "under agency control", since Fauci retired), it's almost always necessary to motion for a party to the case to disclose them, rather than the ISP or e-mail service.
So, uh, mostly because they don't want to be able to.
gattsuru
2d ago
This seems reasonable. My threat model is a little broader than yours -- the question of 'what happens if something I've already done and isn't controversial today becomes a felony', possibly without me knowing or having prior notice, is a little more prominent in my mind, as a not-straight furry who follows a lot of CTRLPew stuff -- but for a lot of people (and, honestly, even my own use case) there's reasonable questions about where this falls into paranoia.
gattsuru
2d ago
There's been more than one cloud provider data failure, but yes, it's absolutely true that the average cloud provider (even including the bad ones!) on average are better than the average end user (even excluding the very bad ones).
My argument is more against the framework where the Cloud solves the problem, either entirely or to such a degree that end users don't really need to consider it. That might seem like a strawman -- everybody talks versioning and backup! -- but Actual Professional Standards often difference between centralized and decentralized backup approaches, people colloquially treat the 3-2-1 rule as solved by using different regions or services on a single provider (or worse a locally synced version) for 'media', and I've seen no small number of mid-sized deployments that have bought into it hook, line, and sinker. AWS in particular has a whole spectrum of (weirdly price and provisioned) services Just For being your all-in-one backup solution. There have been IT people responding to this incident as though Unisuper recovered its data thanks to help from Google, rather than a secondary provider.
That's not a Cloud-specific problem. People could -- and people did and do! -- leave all your backup drives plugged in and spinning at the same computer with your live copy, running in your personal server closet. But you could (and would) get slapped in any credible audit.
I think Cloud makes this particularly dangerous because the actual processes and ownership are often obscured or multilayered, at the same time that an increasingly few baskets have increasingly large portions of the eggs. As a business, if you don't investigate close enough, you can find out that your 'multiregion' is really just two sides of the same data center. As an enterprise user, if you don't watch your e-mails, you can find that your data is gone even if the actual hardware owner knows what they were doing. ((And along those lines, the "accidental" in "accidental loss" is some work, here: Google either lost 0% or 100% of Album Archive, depending on how you look at it.)) As a personal user, you can find out that wildly-different subscriptions all use the same (sometimes intermediate) provider.
I guess my point isn't to say that Cloud is bad, but that the Cloud isn't magic, even if it looks close enough for most people that they've stopped thinking about the matter. If you're going to use a cloud-style approach, a single account at a single provider can't be the end-all be-all for any seriously critical data. It's better than just storing your one live copy -- but better than nothing is not a complete and balanced solution. And this incident should put anyone in that sphere on notice.
((And for the broader theme for this roundup, sleep-walking into disaster because someone else will solve your problems for you runs into problems, even at a level where the 'someone else' is either Google or the Aussie regulatory system.))
gattsuru
2d ago
How is it difficult? I regularly takeout photos at original resolution and then compress the cloud copies.
It's not unusually bad, either by Google standards or by the Cloud in general*, but Takeout has almost no tech support, can take arbitrary amounts of time to create the archive files, throttle(d) after daily download bandwidth limits that are often far less than the typical Takeout, can miss data, and is weirdly inconsistent between Takeouts. It's very far from the typical Photos experience, both in terms of user experience and in terms of literally not being part of the Photos UI.
- compare Ring, where bulk downloads of more than fifteen videos at a time requires either a warrant or the use of a half-broken python script.
gattsuru
3d ago
Even contemporaneously with the release of the story, Yudkowsky was complaining at length that people read both Harry and Quirrel as both far more correct and far more competent than they actually were, whether not noticing their failures or overstating their accomplishments. Reality ended up pushing that even further, for Harry -- the first twenty chapters are filled with a lot of pop social science that was iffy to start with and didn't really survive the replication crisis -- but there are other errors that I think were intentional, even fairly early on.
In theory, it's a serious case, but if Willis gets booted, much of her office will be booted too, and almost none of the alternates have anywhere near the interest in trying the case.
((Also, the Georgia RICO statute dates back to at least the 1980s, and despite the popular history version, 1980 Georgia was not a deep red state.))
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