magicalkittycat
9d ago
No, it doesn't. I don't have to assume that a particular supporter was critical to an even to call him a supporter.
But if it would have happened anyway because he wasn't critical then having an informant on the inside doesn't meaningfully change much besides their access to information.
Yeah, glowies are also known for creating situations that would later allow themselves to swoop in, and call themselves heroes.
So you understand that it is a common strategy to use informants, and that doesn't indicate support of a particular policy. You can disagree on how effective the strategy is, but the DEA using drug informants isn't meaningfully supportive of drugs anymore than informants are here.
The SPLC billed this as a hate rally, they told their donors they were working against it, and they solicited donations from them on that basis. At the same time they were paying organizers, they were telling people they paid to attend, and they were coordinating transportation to the rally. They told their donors they were working to stop a hate group doing "hate speech" while they directly funded and coordinated with leaders of that group to do that very same thing they promised to stop, with money that they said would be used to stop it!
This seems to assume that the Charlottesville rally would not have occured had they not been in touch with a single member of the larger group chat behind the rally. Informants have to be higher ups in order to provide solid information, but it's not like they are gods who make all the decisions by themselves for the groups. Helping the informant avoid exposure also seems like a basic concept that doesn't require assuming Charlottesville wouldn't have happened without them.
This is what the SPLC tells its donors about the National Alliance. If the SPLC wanted to dismantle National Alliance why would they give their fundraiser a million dollars? How exactly could donating to a group be considered dismantling that group
Because if you want an informant on the inside to leak you information and stay under cover, financial appeal can help you where moral appeal might not. Just paying people to snitch is not some new concept. It's not something the SPLC has invented, it's been around since the beginning of snitches and is used by law enforcement constantly.
Consider in just the five years from 2012 to to this hearing in 2017 the ATF and DEA alone paid informants almost 260 million.
Since 2012, ATF and DEA paid CIs almost $260 million, with payments largely determined by field agents who did not seek approval or review from headquarters.
magicalkittycat
9d ago
I don't think it's that surprising to begin with that they might pay some people tbqh. The SPLC would get leaks somehow after all. and paying people some money to leak information is not a new concept they invented. If you can't make a moral appeal to group insiders, you can often make a financial one.
magicalkittycat
9d ago
Probably in part, but they also don't bring the indictments in Japan to begin with. https://usali.org/comparative-views-of-japanese-criminal-justice/carlos-ghosn-and-japans-99-per-cent-conviction-ratenbsp-examining-japans-criminal-justice-system-from-a-comparative-perspective
In Japan the majority of cases are cleared by prosecutors through the exercise of broad discretion to refrain from bringing any indictment. Unlike plea bargains in the US, the suspect receives no punishment and has no criminal record. Prosecutors decide to indict in fewer than one-third of the referred cases (see here and here for Japanese FY2017 data in English). Some 90% of the cases indicted in district courts result in confessions and guilty pleas, although in Japan these cases still go to trial. The remaining 10% of the indicted cases are contested at trial.
There are some other differences including just weird statistical quirks like that, but being selective in only bringing high confidence cases is a good thing for both efficient use of taxpayer money and minimizing harassment of innocents.
magicalkittycat
9d ago
This is something I went into a little with my comment, the purpose of this doesn't have to be actually convicting anyone. In the same way that defamation suits don't necessarily have to win. The point of lawfare is to throw accusations into the public eye and to make your victims suffer having to spend lots of money and fight for years in court.
Even if this case is as frivolous as their many other cases against political opponents, the Trump admin still makes out in important ways. They get to tar the SPLC's reputation simply by having the indictment make the news to begin with. They get to force the SPLC to dedicate lots of time and money fighting the allegations. And interestingly enough like and I've never considered this before, the DOJ just used this to publicly expose SPLC informants and sources inside of extremist groups, helping the groups to clean house of leakers. If that's the intent, it's clever. Incredibly unethical and fucked up abuse of law enforcement, but clever.
magicalkittycat
9d ago
Grand juries have long been considered incredibly easy to get past, to the point a common joke is that you could even manage it with a ham sandwich. Given that nothing about the system has changed (they're still just made up of ordinary citizens through the jury selection process), the constant failings to convince ordinary people of crime seems to suggest a selection bias. Normal smart prosecutors would never try to indict a ham sandwich anyway so the grand juries never turn them down, similar to how Japan maintains their high conviction rates.
magicalkittycat
9d ago
No country or system will ever be perfect, especially not for one right next door to an actively hostile country 60x bigger constantly trying to interfere behind the scenes. But by the metrics the Taiwanese system doesn't seem to be much worse. Things like approval ratings are at somewhat similar levels to other democracies for example.
magicalkittycat
9d ago
Yeah but the end state here is this also getting brutally regulated. It's how this industry works.
Yes most likely but in the meantime people are expecting tons of money from it.
magicalkittycat
9d ago
Saw a great This You? style tweet on it. The closer you cut the gerrymander the riskier it gets and some of the partisan shills on X who supported Texas are freaking out about it now with Virginia having gone left in most counties.
I think it's useful to note before getting into any particular details that the Trump admin's record of even securing a grand jury in prosecutions against groups and people they don't like has been extremely poor, yet alone ever getting to a conviction. Whether it be frivolous defamation lawsuits or nakedly politically motivated investigations against someone like Jerome Powell, they keep losing when forced to find or put actual evidence in front of judges and juries. One reason as stated by a top Bondi aide is that finding competent lawyers who are also willing to play MAGA politics over their career prosecution success rates has been quite difficult. Not many want to walk away in 2028 with tons of failed indictments that couldn't even get past a grand jury attached to their name.
Not that it necessarily matters, as FIRE points out
But sometimes, the lawsuit is the punishment. SLAPP suits are weaponized by the wealthy and well-connected to punish speakers with costly litigation, even if the suit is ultimately thrown out. They’re abuses of America’s legal system, and FIRE fights against these violations of our First Amendment rights.
In the same way, just having the federal government use the legal system to smear your name, out private details, and force you to defend yourself is a victory for lawfare wagers.
But let's get into the details anyway.
In brief, the indictment alleges that the SPLC raised money under false pretenses by claiming to fight right-wing extremism, instead funding extremist informants with roughly $3 million dollars of donor money. The informants included members of the KKK and an organizer of the infamous Charlottesville unite the right fiasco.
This is already questionable. The idea that paying for an informant inside of a group to provide you leaks and information that you report on, and even share with law enforcement if it hints at potential criminal behavior counts as "funding" the movement as a form of support is quite a stretch. I doubt they'll find many major donors who consider this to be a fraudulent use of a really small fraction of their money.
It's also really interesting to see some of the blatant social media shills flip from "unite the right was peaceful" (which it was) to "unite the right was a dangerous rally caused by the SPLC!' just because of a single guy unrelated to the informant organizer driving into a crowd. Just peak partisan brain on display.
They allegedly did this using illegal means, creating fictitious cutouts and lying to banks to open phony bank accounts to obscure the flow of funds from the SPLC to their informants.
Now that might actually have some teeth to it, assuming of course that this is actually correct considering ya know, the Trump admin repeatedly failing over and over when having to actually provide evidence for their claims in court against political opponents. But assuming this one is true and they did lie to the banks themselves, then it does seem criminal.
magicalkittycat
10d ago
Sounds like he's made something quite valuable then, a workaround for a major industry that has been regulated to hell and back by big government.
Well, no, you didn't.
You had an probabilistic compiler assemble what would be the most probable completion to a prompt you wrote. There was no real data outside of what you offered in your own prompt.
Yeah and it turns out what would be the most probable completion to a question asking for information with accompanying sources to a question is information with sources, which I can then go to and read and link. It got me a writeup from an associate professor at George Mason University.
Feature, not a bug. Federalist 10 does a better job of laying out the argument than I can, but my best attempt is that factions are inevitable and factions look out for themselves. Factions will often try to pass laws that are bad not only for their opponents, but for the polity at large and that infringe upon the rights of individuals.
If you're after a "pure" majority rule democracy with no checks and balances, you're going to have a bad time
Taiwan is the 14th highest GDP per capita and they elect their leaders through simple FPTP. But we don't even have to go to foreign nations, we have proof it's ok right at home.
State governorships all around the country don't use their own internal versions of the electoral college, and yet they seem to be generally fine. Same with many cities and their mayoral elections. 50 State elections + god knows how many city elections don't seem to have some unique glaring issues that implementing an electoral college system in them would fix.
It's quite telling that even the most ardent supporters of the federal electoral college don't seem to be calling for it in their own states. Do they hate their state having a healthier democracy?
magicalkittycat
10d ago
Senators shouldn't represent people anyways. They should represent state governments like they were supposed to.
In a world where government is representative of the constituents, these are effectively the same thing.
And California should split into multiple states if it wants better representation in the senate
Yeah, it's a stupid system that would reward behavior like this.
But they'd be dumb to do so because they get far more government control of the country by just having their state legislature act like a mini-national government and pass a bunch of regulations. Corporations/manufacturers are basically forced to comply because of the size of the California market. I'm unsympathetic to these complaints. On paper they have less representation, in reality they have an outsized influence.
They don't have to, it's just that simple market dynamics and efficiency of scale generally means making just version X is better than making X and Y unless there's serious demand for deviation. Now there is enough demand spread across the other states that if consumers in the rest of the US really cared, many companies would do a version Y for them. A state like Texas or Florida could easily do some form of anti-regulation too if they really wanted.
Issue is, the consumers often don't actually care that much and sometimes even like it. Texas and Florida don't enact such opposite regulation laws because they don't really want that or care much to begin with.
magicalkittycat
10d ago
Circular argument. Was it necessary to line his pockets? What good comes of it? I doubt it.
Just because you don't see a value doesn't mean there isn't one. I don't care about going to concerts but I can understand that other people do and that's why the industry makes tons of money off of it. I don't like soccer, but I understand that lots of the world does and that's why they make tons of money.
Right. Instead of a good website that can run honest prediction markets. Great.
This might be shocking to learn but people generally like to have money. And most things in the world get done because people want money to trade with, not just to do "good honest work".
magicalkittycat
10d ago
Why isn't Polymarket a darknet site that runs on Monero?
Because it wants to be a successful business that could eventually make lots of money for the owners.
Why is it run by that kid with the afro? What does he add to it?
He is the founder, he created it. He is the world's youngest self-made billionaire so clearly he's added a lot.
Did he make the decision to do this?
It's possible he personally did, but he might not be that directly involved in most individual markets either. Even if he did personally sign on it, he has a bunch of lawyers and management types advising him as well so maybe he felt it would cause too much legal hassle (refer back to them wanting to be a successful business).
The federal election system is already biased heavily towards Republicans to begin with what with the electoral college (both Dubya and Trump 1 benefited from that) and congress apportionments. A state like California has 20 million people per senator, Mississippi is almost 1.5 million. A citizen in Mississippi has more than 10x the influence in the Senate than one in California, entirely based on state lines.
I had ChatGPT find some information on this and due to this blue states even on lower estimates have twice the people per senator than red ones. In the strongly partisan states, it's almost 4x!
While the house of reps doesn't have such a bias (or at least a very very minimal one), even if the Dems could manage to lean the house countrywide towards themselves it still leaves them 1v2 in biased institutions. (Argubly 1v2.5 or something given that the bias in the Senate and presidency also means more likely to get SC picks through). And that's a big if.
It's also unfair to just be counting it for federal elections. State legislatures are often gerrymandered as well (or at least split in a way that is effectively gerrymandered) such as my state of NC where despite being a purple swing state, is effectively a red state in terms of state government despite having a Dem governor right now. The NC governorship is one of the weakest in the country due to state legislatures gerrymandering and things like Republican governors literally signing bills to limit their own power before leaving the position for a Dem successor. This is a routine thing the state legislature does, transferring power away from positions that Dems win to positions that Republicans win. Even when a Democrat wins in NC, they still lose.
The NC senate is 30:20 and house 71:49 for Republican/Democrat makeup. The GOP has held a veto proof majority until recently and are still so close they barely have to try to pass things they want. Again, this is considered a purple swing state that regularly votes in Democrats. It doesn't matter, the gerrymandering is simply too strong.
magicalkittycat
10d ago
It's not just words either, behavior works this way too. I like to say, imagine if Mr Rogers cursed someone out. If I saw a man who was famous for his kindness and patience and general saint like behavior yelling and swearing at someone, I'd think "woah, that guy getting yelled at must have seriously fucked up". It'd be harder to convince me that somehow Mr Rogers was the one in the wrong.
Meanwhile when I see someone who is known for anger doing it, I just think they're an asshole and view them with less respect.
Rude socially unacceptable behavior is a currency that is more valuable when you don't use it everywhere.
magicalkittycat
10d ago
I suspect that the current age-gap discourse actually serves to benefit powerful/wealthy older men, as they become the only ones with enough clout to ignore the social shaming... and the only ones with enough appeal to convince a woman to ignore the social shaming. Acquiring a hot young girlfriend thus becomes even more of a flex and proof of their own status.
Well this is gonna be a fun little narrative violation then. That is just about marriage rather than girlfriend but wealthy people are also significantly less likely to divorce as well. They tend to marry when they're young and then stay with their wives.
magicalkittycat
11d ago
To be clear here, I said a lot lower. The types of dudes who are getting off to loli content and actually she's a 2000 year old dragon sort of things, where they obsess over "barely legal" and "jailbait" because they are pedos and just don't do anything because of the law. And the existence of such people should be expected if we assume the deterrent argument of law is true.
magicalkittycat
11d ago
Then we disagree. I think it's inarguable that there is not just meaningful but a clear logical distinction between the two. The most obvious one being direct personal animus.
You're right, there is a major difference. "Gays should be hanged" calls for violence against even more people than just wishing death on John's son. If we take the logic that a mass shooting is worse than a single shooting, even if both are bad then the call for mass death is even worse!
You are equating the rights of the employer and the employees. I don't agree with that equivocation due to the difference in power and circumstance. Quitting your only job is not the same as firing employee number 85.
Yeah they aren't the exact same but why does that mean government should limit an employer's right to free association?
Why an employer needs the ability to fire an otherwise good employee because they don't like their stated political opinions is just bonkers to me.
Doesn't matter if I agree with their business policies, they should be able to do what they want! If I dislike it, I can shop somewhere else. If enough people dislike it, they might feel an economic effect. Of course many real life boycotts show the stated vs revealed preferences of consumers, but that's really just a sign that they don't actually care as much as they say.
To that extent, an optimized market is just as well a market that provides job security and stability that reinforces segregation and whatever else. Depends on where you are coming from!
Yes, markets are just a form of emergent phenomena. They are simply the actions and choices of what people do (work) and what they exchange (trade). The market is just a subset of human behavior, and the same basic principles are everywhere such as with evolution.
So its no secret that people, particularly zoomers, like to bitch and moan about age gaps in relationships. Should someone who's 30 date someone who's 18? Does it make you a pedophile if you do
It depends. There are definitely people who are sketch and seem like they'd go a lot lower if only it was allowed and those people are pedos, but actually spotting them vs just finding someone who is on the younger side hot isn't an easy task so people fuck it up often.
But assuming this is true, where does sexual relationships lie on the age scale? Is a 16 year old really too immature to date some one who is 19? 20?
A lot of places (including most US states) do have 16 as the age of consent so they could sleep with whoever! And even many of those that don't have "Romeo and Juliet laws" allowing small age differences.
Now legal vs moral are different questions though. I think 16 year olds are generally mature enough to handle body responsibility and should be treated that way both morally and legally for most things. There are some who are still stupid, but a lot of that is just from coddling our kids too much. For example, many parents will get a babysitter for their sixth grader nowadays whereas sixth grade just a few decades ago were the babysitters
If we should have universal age of adulthood, that tracts onto everything (alcohol, crime, sex) where would it be.
Age of adulthood has always been arbitrary, the point of a single age is mostly for simplicity and being consistent. It's way easier to know and enforce the rules when it's simply "18" instead of having to roll the lottery each time if police and a judge disagree with your assessment of maturity. As for that exact age, it's generally between 16-20 in modern culture. Some do go higher and some go lower but it is mostly in that range. Doesn't matter where exactly, just has to be reliable.
That could explain anti-Israel/antisemitism sentiment growing among the left but those views are not exclusive to the left. But weirdly enough among some groups, there is a negative correlation from embracing anti-Israel and embracing the antisemitic views.
But while antisemites were indeed more likely to have extremely negative views about the state of Israel, many of the groups that were most critical of Israel, at least according to this measure — people with graduate degrees and those who identify as “extremely liberal” — were the groups least likely to express more explicit antisemitic beliefs (i.e., those unrelated to Israel).
So seemingly the woker you are, the more anti Israel you are but less antisemitic. Or at least less explicit in it.
While I myself will use insults like that, at the end of the day they're pretty much entirely just "I don't like this person's ideas and disagree with them and want to be mean about that" in actual usage. So really in a polite mature conversation we shouldn't use retarded cause we shouldn't be insulting to begin with.
As for when we do want to be mean, which insult you pick is contextual. Dummy is silly and gives a joking vibe. Idiot and stupid are the classic and basic "I disagree with you and want to be mean about it". Retarded is the "I'm really upset about how much we disagree and will violate social norms to express this" one. IRL I would not be dishing out the extreme one too often or else it diminishes the value there. The guy who calls everything retarded has less meaning when they say it vs the guy who barely ever calls anything retarded.
Refer back to how informants are used elsewhere like the DEA. Federal officials paying a drug informant to give them information on drug deals is not interpreted as them "secretly promoting and helping to facilitate" taking drugs. Heck, even if the DEA helps an informant or cop stay undercover by providing drugs, we know contextually that this is not a pro drug action.
You can disagree with them as to whether or not the strategy is effective here, but "I don't think their idea works as well as they hope" isn't the same as fraud.
Again, whether or not it's actually effective is a different question. It's not fraudulent to do a dumb idea that you genuinely think could work. If Tom accepts money on Kickstarter to make a new indie movie sequel, tries out a new editing technique for it and it turns out the sequel sucks because of that, Tom didn't commit fraud. Backers can be upset that the movie sucked but unless it was caused by purposefully wasting the money for something else then there's nothing illegal there.
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