naraburns
nihil supernum
No bio...
User ID: 100
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
goofy-ass Disney fight
I feel like this reflects a failure to grasp the best of what DeSantis represents. Now, the Martha's Vineyard thing was, I think, a mistake, most especially since the immigrants involved didn't even leave from Florida. But Disney came out swinging against DeSantis. It wasn't his "goofy-ass...fight," it was Disney's goofy-ass fight. DeSantis' only real choice there was to remind them that they are a corporation and tell them to get back in their lane. Anything else would have resulted in DeSantis looking like a bootlicker who caves to Woke Corporatism the moment his moneyed masters yank on the chain.
Disney owns (and tyrannically enforces) a lot of beloved IP, so there will always be some people who think "Disney hates DeSantis, so I hate DeSantis." But politically speaking, "there are consequences to getting politically involved" was exactly the right message to send to businesses in this case. As they say--if you're going to take a shot at the king, don't miss. Disney sticking its corporate neck out to object to a bill forbidding schools from exposing young children to sexually explicit pedagogy was a horrible, horrible choice. They missed their shot, and DeSantis had exactly the correct response: punish defectors.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
Certainly the corporate news media has been spinning wildly in hopes of a Trump defeat.
I have a number of criticisms of Harris, but historically, the most consequential impact of most Presidents has been through Supreme Court nominations. And Harris has always been a "no friends to the right of me, no enemies to the left of me" sort of politician. The independents/undecideds are rarely sufficiently dialed in to understand or care about the intricacies of law and its long-term impact on culture. Justice Jackson has already shown herself to be an unsophisticated jurist who simply votes for whatever seems Wokest, and Harris would appoint more of the same.
The fact that we've reached a point in our political history where every cultural disagreement turns into a Constitutional Question does not really bode well, I think. We are supposed to have a federal system; not every question of importance is supposed to be answered the same way for the entire nation. To the contrary--questions of importance are precisely the questions that states should be free to disagree about. Trump's nominees have moved the needle in the right direction, albeit only slightly. Harris would move us more toward totalitarianism and ruin than Trump could ever hope to manage, assuming she gets an even slightly sympathetic Congress (and I do expect her to win in November, as a direct result of the corporate news media being the propaganda arm of the Democratic Party--the fix is clearly in).
I don't like Trump, I've never liked Trump, and he has been a disaster for the Republican Party. But he was genuinely a kind of bland president who made okay SCOTUS picks. I would expect Harris to be essentially his equal-but-opposite--actually a much more boring President than one might expect from her public buffoonery, but something of a jurisprudential catastrophe in the long run.
More Olympic culture warring: Olympic Games official has accreditation revoked for...
Honestly, I can't even complete the headline, it feels too much like giving credence to the delusion. Can you guess? Here's a hint: think 2017.
Yes, that's right. The rest of the headline is "‘white supremacy’ hand gesture."
Dictionary.com has a whole entry on the "circle game" which is mostly not about the circle game, but is about the "OK hand gesture" that in almost no context has ever been a genuine signal of white supremacist beliefs. The Telegraph article asserts without evidence that "its use as a far-Right symbol is apparently on the rise." And from Dictionary.com:
Beginning in 2017, the “OK” hand gesture began to be interpreted as a white supremacist hand signal due to a hoax spread by alt-right communities and users of the web site 4chan that the symbol was actually a secret white supremacist gesture.
Even the ADL's own expert had this to say about the "OK hand gesture" in 2017:
If someone presents you with a symbol and says it is the big new white supremacist symbol, you should be appropriately skeptical.
Of course, the ADL has since changed its tune, because, well, if you're not a part of the solution, there's money to be made prolonging the problem, I guess. I honestly kinda thought this particular meme had run its course when it got misapplied during the Kavanaugh hearings. It got new life when the Christchurch shooter flashed it in 2019, but that was more than 5 years ago, now--an eternity on 4chan. I don't know--did it actually catch on in Europe? Apparently it caught on in Brazil, kinda--
The Brazilian journalist who reported the matter to Olympic organisers said the issue was “nothing new” in his country, citing a trial last year in which the judge overturned the acquittal of Filipe Martins, Special Advisor for International Affairs to the government of Jair Bolsonaro, of the crime of racism, after he used the hand gesture in the Senate in 2021.
I hadn't heard the Brazil story before now. "The crime of racism" sounds pretty damn Orwellian to me, but I live in the land of the First Amendment... people do things differently in foreign countries. I'm also a little taken aback by the actions of the Brazilian journalist, who did not report a man saying racist things, or a man harassing people, but a man who might have been positioning himself on camera while making a hand signal that has sometimes been associated with having beliefs outside the Overton window. I already hold journalists in pretty low regard, generally, but this Brazilian displayed all the dignity of a classroom snitch, minus any compelling evidence that there was anything to snitch about.
For whatever it's worth, offensive hand gestures are nothing new for the Olympics--not even for these Olympics. But flipping the bird in each case appears to be pretty context-informed. As far as I can tell from the story, the dude maybe playing the circle game and maybe not doing anything especially deliberate at all was booted without hesitation:
The person in question has been identified and confirmed not to be a member of the OBS team. They are associated with one of its contractors. The contractor has been informed, consequently, the individual’s accreditation has been cancelled effective immediately.
I have never been much of a sports fan, but the Olympics in particular really get me conflicted. I've seen some remarkable displays of athleticism; Olympic gymnastics and figure skating are events I have on several occasions watched on purpose and with some interest. But I simply have no good feelings at all for the IOC. They are intellectual property trolls; they have for example attempted to use their trademark to prevent criticism (fortunately they lost that case, but the First Amendment doesn't reach everywhere). Other, specific cases of corruption are pretty well known. I, personally, would never spend any money in direct support of the Olympics, despite my occasional interest over the years.
Though I've little reason to care too much about one subcontractor getting an unceremonious boot for what, to my eyes, looks like playing a silly game he probably didn't even know had been at the center of a culture war flare-up five years ago--I do have reason to care about a slow, global slouch toward Orwellian big brother/little brother behavior. When people talk about "threats to democracy" and "the rise of fascism" I don't see Nazis goose-stepping down main street; I see progressives enforcing ideological conformity through everyday acts of institutional bullshit. This is "cancel culture," writ small.
naraburns
nihil supernum
11mo ago
This is not a warning, in the sense that I'm not putting a note on your account, but I have two moderator-level questions about your post that I'd be interested in an honest response to, if possible.
The first is your rhetoric concerning the Motte. You wrote:
...while there were some voices calling for restraint...
Which can actually literally mean anywhere from one voice, to all voices; from a small majority to a large one, and anywhere in between. Then you wrote:
...many commenters demanded blood from the left...
Which literally means the same thing as the first part of that sentence, in reverse. However you chose "many" instead of "some," which paints a certain picture of this space. You then dropped four quotes. But weirdly, the first and fourth quotes are from the same post, and it is a post for which that user got banned, which you don't mention. So my first question is: why did you decide to portray the discussion here with such uncharitable rhetoric?
The Motte exists as text. One of the things that sometimes happens to places like this is, what sets them apart from other spaces gets amplified as it gets noticed. So for example people notice that reddit is a teeming hive of fedora-wearing atheists, which attracts more fedora-wearing atheists (and repels non-fedora-wearing-atheists) until the admin slashes-and-burns their way through the algorithm (or whatever), converting the site to a teeming hive of reflexively woke young adults. In a way I suspect this is analogous to Flanderization, but with a community rather than a fictional character. Maybe sociologists have a name for this process?
Anyway, this is a space for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. But our "open debate, no positions banned" policy meant that people with Overton-suppressed political views found this space unusually welcoming. One way we try to tamp down the "seven zillion witches" problem that this eventually Flanderizes to is by emphasizing individual arguments over discussion of "groups" wherever possible. I have often repeated the line "you are not stuck in traffic, you are traffic" to people who make sweeping claims about the Motte. It applies to your post, here: the reason I don't want people making claims about the Motte is that I think it tends to Flanderize the space. People read your claim, and it shifts, however slightly, their priors on whether this space is "for them." But of course it's for them! As long as they follow the rules, this space is for everyone, no matter what they believe. That's the foundation; that's the bedrock.
My second question is: why did you include the ChatGPT summary? Did you feel the need to provide a summary but didn't feel up to writing one yourself? Were you just padding your word count in hopes of avoiding a "low effort" moderation action? I'm not accusing you of anything, mind--I'm just curious. You have a pretty good posting history so I was caught off guard by it. Not only does generative AI minimize engagement with your audience, it minimizes your own engagement with the text you're citing. No one benefits from it. It seems to me that ChatGPT quotes are quinessential low-effort participation, unless maybe you're showing your work on a post specifically about generative AI or something. I don't think we've explicitly made it against the rules but I do think it's incompatible with the rules we've got--but maybe I'm overlooking something.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
I suppose if I want to get more of his view on a way forward, I should read his book, The Cult of Smart, but I don't want to just now.
Read my review instead, my review is substantially better than his book, and that's not my way of saying that my review is especially good.
It seems like kids need more physical, sensory experiences, but it seems like a hard pitch, perhaps something to do with laptopping being high status and easy on the body, as is mentioned in the thread on class.
Something else deBoer wrote recently really resonated with me, and seems relevant:
like all political movements, the woke political movement is captured by the urge to occupy elevated status within it
Most educators don't give half a damn about genuinely improving the minds of the children they educate. Sure, they'll performatively care, they can talk a good game because that's the kind of signaling they are expected to deliver. But if you released, say, an adaptive computer program that could deliver a K-12 curriculum to a child at their own pace, with as good or better results than the average K-12 in-person education, without the need to leave their house or pay for school buildings or pay teachers--you would not change American public education in any perceptible way. K-12 school exist primarily to provide free daycare, and secondarily to give teachers government jobs. The movement to "educate children" is entirely captured by people who are extracting resources from the public for their own personal and political gain. That doesn't mean there aren't teachers involved who genuinely care about kids! But their care is largely incidental, except as it improves their ability to signal "cooperate" to the people running the show.
And the show in question is anti body. It has been this way from the beginning--read Socrates complaining about sex and tasty food as distractions from the really important stuff, like pure mathematics, and then check the latest memes on horny jail or eating bugs to save the planet and tell me how far we've really come, 25 centuries later. Once we were promised transcendence through death and salvation; today we are hoping for transcendence through mind uploads. "Disregard body, elevate mind" has certainly gotten occasional pushback (e.g. Epicurus, or more recently the free-love hippies) but attending to the well being of whole humans is not, and has not for most of history been, the goal of the greatest thinkers. In fact many of today's purportedly greatest thinkers will pretend to be deeply offended if you suggest e.g. that being born "into" a geno- and phenotypically female body is in any way pertinent to one's personal, human identity.
In that world, looking for ways to give kids more "physical, sensory experiences" isn't just low-status, it's downright subversive (and indeed: self-improvement through physical exercise is often negatively coded, especially when it arises in masculinity-building contexts).
It seems unsurprising as realpolitik: he's a lame duck, the election is over, and the corporate news media is currently focused on disasturbating over everything Trump is even thinking about doing. What's anyone going to do about it--impeach him? He was a pretty bad president, he may as well take the opportunity to do one last thing for his son (and also maybe cover his own ass a bit, by making the pardon broad enough to ensure the Justice Department can't use Hunter's Ukraine dealings to get to his dad).
Where are all our "no one is above the law, not even the President['s son]" American news reporters? Presumably explaining that a pardon is a part of the law and so there is nothing to see here! Which they will of course immediately forget should Trump deliver on some riot-related pardons of his own. (In fact I already see many social media comments to the effect of "criticizing this makes Republicans the real hypocrites, actually.")
(See, if it were me somehow in Biden's exact shoes, I would pardon Hunter and the Capitol rioters in the same batch, just to screw with everyone. It would also have been funny to pardon Trump at the same time, if only because I suspect Trump would be inclined to turn it down. Of course, my own mischievous nature is likely sufficient to prevent me from ever holding elected office, much less one capable of extending pardons.)
I would be surprised if anyone cynical enough to regularly post here will be surprised by the pardon, but it really does clear the rhetorical decks for Trump to hand out a whole mess of pardons, should he feel so inclined. "Accuse your enemy of what you are doing" apparently equates, in the Biden administration, to "do what you plan to later accuse your enemy of doing."
naraburns
nihil supernum
9mo ago
Is there anything the government could feasibly do to nudge Republicans towards accepting the results of the election in the event that Trump loses?
Serious question: is there anything the government could feasibly do now, to nudge Democrats towards accepting the result of the election in the event that Kamala loses?
Because my answer to your question is "Well, it could stop rigging elections."
Someone will inevitably cry, "But there's no clear and undisputable evidence of widespread or coordinated voter fraud sufficient to have changed the outcome of 2020!"
Sure, let's grant that. But let's also observe that setting up elections to come out the way you want them (i.e. rigging, in the most boring metaphorical sense) can be done in numerous legal and quasi-legal ways. In fact most attempts to "rig" elections are conducted in entirely legitimate ways, and people don't object because if everyone is free to do what they can to influence the outcome of the election, well, that's just democracy!
However there are at least two important institutions in our culture which we broadly expect to refrain from influencing elections. One is the government itself, including government actors like FBI agents and military personnel. Another is "the Press," that amorphous blob of journalists and corporations that purports to contribute to the political process by ensuring the dissemination of facts.
These two institutions have all but entirely abandoned the pretense of political impartiality. The recent example of 60 Minutes doctoring an interview in Kamala's favor can serve as just one instance of persistent and repeated behavior from the press. Disparities in the Justice Department's treatment of, say, 2020 DC rioters versus 2016 DC rioters can serve as just one example of persistent and repeated behavior from the government. The bureaucracy and the press are dominated by Democrats, such that a prospiracy to thumb the scales for Democratic candidates is basically inevitable.
One of my biggest problems with Donald Trump is that he often says false things that are directionally correct, which takes attention away from real problems to focus on fake ones. But one reason he might do this is simply that the truth is complicated and most people haven't got the attention span for it. I have not taken the time to make a lengthy linked catalog of ways which the government and the press abused their putative impartiality in part because most examples are, in isolation, small and easily dismissed. I'm not interested in getting dragged into a back-and-forth over the real significance of, say, dismissing Biden's violation of federal law due to his being an "elderly man with a poor memory." We used to impeach (or try to impeach) executives who used government power to hamper (or try to hamper) their political opponents. But not anymore! It's just that I notice the direction of these things, and the small examples pile up quickly.
(Well, don't worry. The FISA court ordered numerous corrective actions, which I'm sure will be followed meticulously any time they do not interfere with Democratic victories at the polls. What more do you want? Surely an impeachment would be far too much of a hassle.)
When Trump was first elected President, one common meme was for people to say and post, "NOT MY PRESIDENT." Hillary Clinton called Trump an "illegitimate President." Would you say that Democrats "accepted the results of the election" in that case? Because my read is that they very much did not, indeed still have not. Why didn't they accept the outcome of that election? What could the government have done, to nudge them toward greater acceptance?
Because if you can't answer that question, or you think it's a meaningfully different question, then I don't think anyone is in a position to give you a satisfying answer to your question, either.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
A peek at an alternate universe where I would like to live:
November 15, 2022
The Mar-a-Lago Club, Palm Beach, Florida
Donald Trump is at the podium. His eyes are as squinted as his lips. He waves.
"Tonight, you know, I have an announcement. It's a big one. The biggest."
Applause.
"As the President of the United States, I gave you the best economy. The best. I gave you the best Supreme Court judges. We repealed Roe.
More applause.
"Who did that? Me. Nobody could do it but me. I started building the wall. You remember the wall? Sleepy Joe Biden stopped all that. Did you know that an illegal immigrant hit Crazy Nancy's husband in the head with a hammer? You might think she would learn something. But these people, they don't learn. You know who learns? Me. Donald Trump."
Applause, somewhat hesitant.
"I stopped COVID. Operation Warpspeed? You remember? Sleepy Joe Biden says he did that. He's not well. He's not well. I made America well again. I made America great again, because that's what I said I would do. You're great. I'm great. We're great."
Applause, with renewed vigor.
"So tonight I have a big announcement. Huge. Huge. You think you know what it is? Who thinks they know. No, no. You don't know. You think you know, but you think I got where I am by being predictable? You don't know. I'm the best. Putin, he didn't dare touch Ukraine while I was President. He invaded during Obama, he invaded during Biden. But nobody invades Ukraine on my watch. You ever think about that?"
Perplexed applause.
"But I won't be around forever, folks. I know, I know--that's hard for you to hear. But it's true. So I have a gift for you. One more thing, because you know--I care. I do care. I care too much! Okay, okay. I know. I love you too."
Increasingly panicked applause.
"So here it is. I am now endorsing Florida Governor Ron DeSantis as the next President of the United States of America."
Silence descends on Mar-a-Lago.
"He couldn't become the governor without me. No way he gets to be President without my help. Well, I have some money, maybe you've heard. We're gonna kick sleepy Joe out of the White House, assuming he even lasts to 2024. We're gonna finish what we started. We're gonna make America great again. Thank you."
Pandemonium ensues.
This is pure fantasy, of course. A narcissist like Trump could never. Which is amazing, because just imagine if he did. A single, self-effacing moment of pure team contribution would win Trump a hundred times the accolades he could ever get running for a second term. Trump would go down as a legend (and probably win himself a useful pardon to boot). But that's the thing about narcissists--they don't seem to understand that all the attention and glory they so desperately want, is more often acquired by not doing the most self-aggrandizing thing possible. They fail to grasp that it's possible to get what you want by giving other people what they want--to win by being nice.
So I do not think this is even remotely a plausible scenario. Like, obviously, right? But it could be. Trump could make history, could absolutely cement himself as the craziest 5-D chess grandmaster in the multiverse. But he won't, because he can't. He can't choose any ending but the ignominious one.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
This comment has received at least three reports, with some commenters saying they've reported this comment.
I am responding with a modhat to remind the reporters that this is a forum for testing shady thinking, which means that by default even shady thinking is allowed. While concrete threats of violence are in many instances illegal and would in any event violate our ruleset (at minimum by excluding the targets of such threats from the discussion), opinions regarding what might arguably justify violence are not the same as threats of violence.
From the reports, @Goodguy stands accused of being "pro shooting up schools" and sounding "really unhinged." From @NolanE's comment on the other reported comment:
It seems to justify school shootings (including young children) because of workplace toxicity.
But this is uncharitable and suggests an aversion to thinking charitably about the motives of violent people, which--if we actually want to prevent school shootings, or even threats of school shootings--it might be helpful for us to think about clearly and accurately. @Goodguy says that violence is "not necessarily a good reaction" but an "understandable" one. This is supported with a characterization of public education that many people disagree with (some, here in the comments), but not one that is presented as the only or even the correct perspective. Nothing about this comment "justifies" school shootings--only attempts to explain them.
There is a famous story about John Adams defending British soldiers in the Boston Massacre trials. It has become the center of essays, books, television productions... Adams does not seem to have even been excessively sympathetic toward the soldiers, though he was certainly accused of such sympathies. Rather, he just regarded it as an injustice for the soldiers to go to trial unrepresented, and he had some rational doubts about the stories he was hearing. In the end, many of the soldiers were actually acquitted, because there was good evidence that they weren't involved or at fault, but this evidence would not have come to light had public opinion prevailed and the soldiers simply been lynched. Still, there were some people who continued to regard Jon Adams as "pro shooting up Americans" as a result.
In hopes of throwing reporters a bit of a bone, I want to say something like "@Goodguy's comment could be higher effort," but even that I think would not be quite right. If @Goodguy had written a higher-effort version of this comment, I think it would only have strengthened the objections; the comment as written does not excuse or defend school shootings, only explains (some of) them in a way that could potentially be probative of root causes. That it does so succinctly helps, rhetorically, to strengthen the idea that shooters are not being defended as, well, the "good guys"--just as humans responding to an arguably coercive environment.
If anyone using this website ever turns out to commit a serious crime, I will be very sad about that! But I'm not going to moderate people for trying to understand violence, on grounds that understanding violence might lead to violence. Because I think the opposite is at least as likely to be true--that honest attempts to understand violence could help us to prevent it.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
This seems like a troll to me. But if it's not a troll, then it's you wishing death on your outgroup without really engaging the argument in a plausibly serious way--for which you have already been banned once.
This is a discussion forum. If you aren't interested in engaging seriously and charitably with the thoughts of people whose views you abhor, then maybe this is not the place for you.
Banned for three days.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
This forum is an offshoot of rationalism but it's a pretty distant offshoot. Yud-Scott-motte and now motte.org... I think this is a rightist forum.
It's probably worth noting that the people who make a habit of publicly sneering at rationalism have been accusing Yud-Scott-motte and now motte.org of being rightists, or at least crytpo-rightists, for years. The "rationalists" are furthermore in many ways the cultural inheritors of the cypherpunks--the community is overwhelmingly IT-adjacent by profession, or was last time we checked. The cypherpunk culture, in turn, was heavily libertarian, which is not the same as "rightist" even though libertarians in U.S. politics tend to get lumped in with Republicans more often than Democrats. The meme of libertarians who want gay marijuana farmers defending their private crops with automatic weapons is a much better description of the "tendencies" I see in this space than "rightist."
By curating a space where people can test their ideas in a broad Overton window, I do think we tend to encourage the discussion of political heresies, and since our U.S. cultural institutions are dominated by the left and/or the extreme left, the discussions here tend to be about things the left and/or extreme left would prefer to taboo--for the simple reason that other things can be discussed elsewhere, but many of these things can not. And I've gotten many great responses to my Fetterman thread that are clearly not pro-Republican, and I've gotten clear leftist pushback on the "groomer" discussion, too. That's a long way from what I see on genuinely "rightist" spaces.
naraburns
nihil supernum
8mo ago
No, seriously, you can probably pick whatever ideologically-motivated starting point fits your narrative, but it didn't used to be like this.
Yeah, I suspect that which "starting point" people lean to will be a combination of their ideology and their age. I tend to reflexively regard the Bork hearing as the major inflection point in today's political partisanship, but that couldn't have happened without the Warren Court, and that couldn't have happened without... (on ad infinitum) There are not really events, only points along a process continuum. "Nothing ever happens."
But I agree! It didn't used to be like this. One suspicion I have is that our values pluralism has gotten the best of us. "Values pluralism" for most of our country's history has meant "you can live out any flavor of the European Christian good life imaginable!" When most of the nation shares fundamental values--even the people who opt to live differently, in an "I know I'm a bad person but I just can't help myself" sort of a way--then political parties aren't existential threats, they're just competing visions for implementation. Somewhat boring, really--"we're all welfare statists arguing about the optimal balance between taxation and redistribution." The retreat from values-oriented politics to identity-oriented politics did not happen all at once, but I think it has certainly happened, and the rise of the "alt-right" was just the inevitable result of certain "conservatives" finally getting the message that the time for discussion and compromise was over, and that a new age of tribalism was upon us.
I would like to find a way to reverse that trend, but the Motte is one of the few places I can even discuss it without encountering an outright refusal to engage on the merits.
There’s a fundamental difference between being bitter about an election result and actually thinking the result was actually illegitimate. I will of course grant you that occasionally the language can appear superficially similar, but the difference is real and very important. Democrats absolutely accepted the result of the election.
They did not. When Hillary Clinton says Trump is an "illegitimate President," I just don't understand how you conclude that this is "superficially similar" language with a "real and very important difference." She wasn't alone. Is it your position that because she didn't say "literally illegitimate" or "actually illegitimate," we should assume she's just being rhetorical?
The process was not in question, and this was telling in the actual actions taken: they thought Russia meddled a bit too much and so the solution is policy to stop it happening again.
Russia is an easy target, of course, but listen to the examples of outright election denialism in that video. Much of it targets process, too. There are allegations of conspiracy. Trump is louder and coarser than most, but on substance he's not saying anything Democrats haven't been saying for years.
Hell, even after 2000, Democrats still by and large accepted the result despite some very potent arguments that they had been robbed by some uncontrollable aspect of the administrative state (broadly). Sure, you had a decent chunk of individuals who continued or even still continue to believe the election result was rigged or undemocratic or whatever, but this didn’t translate to the political class, and it didn’t lead to a fundamental dispute of elections more broadly...
To the contrary, I would say that it translated to the political class very well, in a variety of ways. But you're not entirely wrong: the Democrats have, I think, been better at translating their losses into action. They are doing everything they can to disassemble any part of the system that doesn't guarantee their victory and continued ideological dominance of the government and the press.
...and in the actions, Florida got its shit together and fixed a lot of the issues for subsequent elections.
I don't want to read too much into it, but I can't help but notice that after Florida decided to take elections seriously enough to avoid a repeat of 2000, it changed from "purple" to "reliably red."
The immediate reaction of Trump and his allies was not merely bitterness but action that should be disturbing to all. They tried both literally and rhetorically to do an end run around the actual election and legal processes to corruptly (mens rea according to the evidence we’ve seen) subvert the actual election, irrespective of fact.
And yet nothing they did is without recent precedent in Democratic opposition to election results. Democrats have refused to certify elections results. Democrats have rioted in DC. Democrats have tried to do an end run around the actual election and legal processes to corruptly subvert the actual election. None of this makes Trump's own misdeeds good, by the by; the point here is not "whataboutism." The point here is that I can't understand how anyone can pretend with a straight face that any of this hasn't been done before by the exact people now decrying it.
Do you see the difference? “Let’s fix it” is of a fundamentally different character than “let’s change it”.
No: you are treating Democratic attempts to ensure their own permanent victory as "fix" while treating parallel Republican attempted to ensure their own permanent victory as "change." There is no difference of character there, much less a fundamental one. Rather, this is simply "our noble soldiers versus your barbarous brigands" in electioneering parlance.
That Trump’s personal motivations largely aligned with the country’s in his first term wasn’t an accident but was at least in some sense lucky - but I’m not convinced this can be taken for granted in a second term to the same degree.
Are you suggesting that, if Donald Trump wins in November, you would reject the outcome of that election?
I've never been to Baltimore myself, so I have exactly one Baltimore story.
A family member of mine is really into road trips and camping--not quite the "hashtag vanlife" sort, but he has been to all 50 states, driven up to Alaska, visits all the national parks along his routes, etc. He's always the family member to play the "every place has good people and bad people" card when people start talking about good or bad places; he is prone to smugly defending this by pointing out that, yes, whatever city you're talking about, he's probably actually been there, and no, you probably haven't.
In all his many travels, the only place he's ever had a problem was Baltimore. I want to say it was in the last year or two; he stopped for groceries in Baltimore--it wasn't even a destination--and had his window smashed in. He'd left a CD wallet (remember those?) on the passenger's seat of his car, and that was apparently sufficient inducement. I have a hard time imagining why someone would smash a window to steal 30 CDs in the Year of Our Lord Two Thousand and Twenty Two, but then--I have a hard time imagining why someone would smash in any car window that was not, say, between them and a dying person or animal.
Of course, this family member is now quick to point out that lots of people get their windows smashed in, say, San Francisco, too, and that his one bad experience shouldn't be taken as an indictment of a whole city. But the fact remains: Baltimore is where it happened.
There are a lot of places I will not go for any reason short of, maybe, a family member's wedding. Baltimore and San Francisco are thus on the same list as China and Mexico. "But there are amazing things to see there, and amazing people to meet!" Indeed, but there are safer places to go, equally filled with amazing things to see and amazing people to meet; I could spend my whole life traveling to amazing places that are not crime warrens or failed or totalitarian states, and still never get to see them all. So why in God's name would I choose the risky ones?
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
"Truth and Reconciliation" was the darling of progressive legal academics the world over back in the 1990s. I had one colleague who made it the center of a course he taught on "restorative" justice. He's been dead for a while now, so I'll never know what he would have to say about all this, but my impression generally is that academics are most comfortable absolutely ignoring the reality of what is happening in South Africa and continuing to blame colonialism for everything. The fact that they were dead wrong about "Truth and Reconciliation," and it failed, will not be taken as a lesson of any kind.
As much as I love to see jackass politicians hoist by their own petard, all any of this helps me to conclude is that the laws and regulations surrounding information handling in the United States are some combination of (1) retarded, (2) routinely ignored, and/or (3) disconnected from reality.
Somewhere, maybe in the old subreddit, I read a wonderful post by someone describing various levels of precaution that were supposed to be taken in labs doing "gain of function" research or similar, and then contrasting those levels of precaution with the actual levels of precaution likely to be taken by people who become accustomed to the environment by working in it day in, day out: much less precaution than required.
I have many reasons to believe that something similar is true of classified documents. Maybe some bureaucrats at the NSA or something actually take all the Mission: Impossible precautions of changing passwords regularly, air-gapping crucial secrets, etc. but I am confident that few (if any) elected officials even know what the damn regulations are--never mind actually taking pains to follow them. This goes double for the executive, particularly since it is arguably the case that the President (and even perhaps some others) can essentially just decide to declassify stuff (I'm oversimplifying, here, but the office of the President really does arguably have practically plenary power over many things under the Constitution, and national security is one of them).
This is really why Hillary's servers were such an annoying sideshow. Yes, I think she was probably guilty of a federal crime, but it's the same federal crime you could very probably pin on half the elected officials in DC, if you were sufficiently motivated to do so. Trump appears to probably be guilty of the same crime, more or less, and now we have evidence that Biden, too, appears to have basically done the same thing. Now, show me some evidence that any of these people were selling state secrets or something, and we could have a more lively conversation. And maybe I should be more angry about this kind of malfeasance than I am. But if you write enough laws, eventually everyone is always guilty of something, and laws that require you to be careful just in case, even though bad things almost never actually happen as a result of noncompliance, are almost always the first ones people grow comfortable ignoring. I doubt there is anything nefarious going on with Biden's lax document handling--but I feel the same about Trump, and Clinton.
What I don't like is giving the bureaucracy (like the Justice Department) a free hand to interfere with elected politicians, or not, as they please, based on rules the bureaucracy is paid to learn and know and enforce, but which elected officials can only, apparently, correctly interpret with the help of whatever Court they ultimately have to face on the matter. I don't like Biden (or Trump, or Clinton, it turns out I kind of hate all politicians) and part of me wants to just not care that his feet might get put to the fire on this, at least a little. But mostly I am suspicious of the frequency with which (what are probably in all cases entirely predictably) "mishandled documents" is becoming everyone's favorite "gotcha!"
naraburns
nihil supernum
8d ago
Happy Independence Day to those who celebrate!
First they came for the Nazis, and CNN did not speak out--because CNN reporters are not Nazis.
From CNN Politics today: Law used to kick out Nazis could be used to strip citizenship from many more Americans
This is not a meaty article--it seems like "the news" these days is mostly breathless speculation over the worst possible outcomes of things the Trump administration might be thinking about doing. As a rule, the "unprecedented" things Trump does are in fact wholly precedented--just, you know, not like that! But the substance is approximately this:
For decades, the US Department of Justice has used a tool to sniff out former Nazis who lied their way into becoming American citizens: a law that allowed the department to denaturalize, or strip, citizenship from criminals who falsified their records or hid their illicit pasts.
...
According to a memo issued by the Justice Department last month, attorneys should aim their denaturalization work to target a much broader swath of individuals – anyone who may “pose a potential danger to national security.”
The directive appears to be a push towards a larger denaturalization effort that fits with the Trump administration’s hardline immigration policies. These could leave some of the millions of naturalized American citizens at risk of losing their status and being deported.
The article is light on numbers--well, it's a speculative article--so I went poking around and was surprised (not surprised) to discover that this is nothing new. An AXIOS article from President Trump's first term (but updated just two days ago, apparently) suggests:
From 1990-2017, the DOJ filed 305 denaturalization cases, about 11 per year.
The number has surged since President Trump's first term.
...
Since January 2017, the USCIS has selected some 2,500 cases for possible denaturalization and referred at least 110 denaturalization cases to the Justice Department for prosecution by the end of August 2018.
This sounds about in line with the CNN article's suggestion that
Trump filed 102 denaturalization cases during his first administration, contrasted with the 24 cases filed under Biden, DOJ Spokesperson Chad Gilmartin said on social media Wednesday. So far, the second Trump administration has filed 5 cases in its first five months.
The CNN article does at least include information about the history of denaturalization, which is more bipartisan than you might initially imagine...
The statute in question is part of a McCarthy-era law first established to root out Communists during the red scare.
But its most common use over the years has been against war criminals.
In 1979, the Justice Department established a unit that used the statute to deport hundreds of people who assisted the Nazis. Eli Rosenbaum, the man who led it for years, helped the department strip citizenship from or deport 100 people, and earned a reputation as the DOJ’s most prolific Nazi hunter.
Rosenbaum briefly returned in 2022 to lead an effort to identify and prosecute anyone who committed war crimes in Ukraine.
But the department has broadened those efforts beyond Nazis several times, including an Obama-era initiative called Operation Janus targeting those who stole identities to earn citizenship.
That's more direct quotes than I intended to use, but the point is that I was really struck by the article's framing. Yes, the law has been used to "kick out Nazis," though it was originally intended to kick out Communists. But it has also been used to kick out e.g. scammers and child pornographers. Basically, the weight of history and legal precedent is that naturalized citizens absolutely can be denaturalized and expelled from the country for a variety of reasons, substantially at the discretion of the executive.
Several thoughts: first, even if aggressively prosecuted, I have a hard time imagining more than perhaps several thousand naturalized Americans being returned to their countries of origin in this way. This is not an approach intended to change actual demographics; rather, it is a way for the government to influence public attitudes and perceptions by identifying "enemies" and distinguishing them from "friends." Deporting Nazis, even after naturalization, sends a strong signal that we don't take kindly to Nazis around here. And who would object to that? Object too strongly, and you might start looking like a Nazi yourself...
I don't think this is a deep or surprising point, but as a consequence I was a little surprised to run into such a self-aware wolf moment on CNN this morning. "We made a law to expel Nazis, but now it might be used to expel Hamas supporters! Everyone: clutch your pearls now!" What I think of as the obvious question--"should we maybe have been criticizing the ideological slant of this law when it was being used to expel Nazis?"--never even gets asked. From the perspective of the CNN reporter, it's not the law that is bad, it's just that Trump is the one using that law, and against people CNN would prefer it not be used against.
"I can tolerate anything except the outgroup," indeed!
Anyway, add this one to the "Trump opposition continues to be mad at him for enforcing their favorite laws against them" file. I feel like, in a sane world, this would be inducement for Democrats to reconsider their historic commitment to infinite expansion of federal power. Imagine how things would look right now if Joe Biden (or his handlers, whatever) had made it his mission to dismantle as much of the federal government as possible. The easiest way to prevent a "Trump Tyranny" would have been to make law in a way that precludes tyranny, rather than to insist on empowering the executive and conspiring to ensure only the "right" tyrants ever ascend.
Why is it so hard for people to take the libertarian lesson from such events?
As I said--neither deep nor surprising. But I thought it was at least a thematically appropriate question on July 4th (even if Constitution Day might have been a better fit). The document of "enumerated powers" that is the putative core of our government practice is... "dead letter" might be an exaggeration, but maybe not. I do not usually perceive the federal government as in any meaningful way limited. Those bothered by Trump I would invite to consider the possibility that Trump is only a symptom; the disease is the statism toward which the United States has been creeping since, oh, probably July 5, 1776, but certainly since the Civil War, and more recently without even token opposition from any of its major political parties (since, I suppose, the Tea Party of 2007). DOGE makes many of the right noises, but the Big Beautiful Bill looks at best like one step forward, and one step back. (Republicans do not appear to have learned the lesson, either!)
Whether a reduction in liberty is worth the occasional schadenfreude of seeing one's ideological opponents kicked out of the country, I leave as an exercise for the reader.
naraburns
nihil supernum
1mo ago
Did everyone hear about the anti-natalist suicide bombing?
I feel like this warrants a lot more attention than I have seen it getting so far. Of course, antinatalist spaces are working to clarify the difference between anti-natalism and pro-mortalism, but bombing a fertility clinic is not merely pro-mortalism (unless you count embryos as human lives, I suppose, which none of the anti-natalists or pro-mortalists I know do).
But this looks like it was a suicide bomber on American soil in advancement of a radical leftist position. If you count Matthew Livelsberger (maybe you don't, since I guess he shot himself first?) this is our second leftist suicide bomber this year. Are these just not getting more attention because they failed to produce a significant body count? Because they didn't come with articulate manifestos? Because they were "lone wolf" actors? Because we want to keep the oxygen out of that room, lest a greater conflagration result?
Considered alongside the whole Ziz cult murder thing, I feel like I am watching the tentative re-emergence of something I have long associated with the 1970s or thereabouts (when it was all letter bombs and airplane hijacking)--radical intellectualism. From the 1980s through the 2000s, painting with a broad brush, my reflexive stereotype of terrorism was Islamic terrorism. This is very American of me, of course--this was also the operating era of the Tamil Tigers, for example, but most Americans could not say what country they threatened, nor point to it on a map. Terrorism--loosely defined as violence in furtherance of an ideology--is an idea that can be applied much more broadly than it normally is, but the central case seems most often to involve a racial, religious, or ethnic group acting in furtherance of identitarian interests. The connection between identitarianism and terrorism seems to me underexplored! But as a liberal who eschews both left- and right-identitarianism ("woke" and "alt-right," respectively) of course I would put it that way.
Anyway intellectual terrorism seems like a different sort of animal. It seems difficult to really get a group of people to cohere around pure ideas. The "rationalist movement," for example, is deeply fractious despite having managed to develop into something of an identity group, at least in San Francisco. But the left-wing prospiracy appears to have advanced to the point where it is sparking an increased number of violent radicals, declaring for causes that average people seem more likely to find confusing than anything else. To the average American, bombing a fertility clinic in the name of anti-natalism is like bombing a Chuck-E-Cheese in the name of anti-baloonism. "Well, that's obviously bad, but also... WTF? Was the bomber schizophrenic? Who's anti-baloonist?"
Here in the Motte we have rules against writing posts that are purely "can you believe what $OUTGROUP did" or picking the worst, most extreme examples of a group and holding them up as representative--so I want to add that I do not think anti-natalists are usually violent, or that bombing fertility clinics is especially representative of leftist political action. But of course the corporate news media gives no such disclaimers concerning, say, abortion clinic bombings or other right-coded "terrorism." Hell, they wouldn't even call it terrorism, when George Floyd extremists went around lighting things on fire in protest of a vibe. To some extent I guess I'm Noticing this particular suicide bombing in part because the FBI is actually calling it terrorism--and maybe in part because the intellectual, rather than identitarian, nature of the terrorism makes me a little bit worried. Because on reflection that doesn't actually sound like blue tribe terrorism, quite, even if it is "radical left" coded; it sounds like grey tribe terrorism. And while I am clearly not a member of either the Zizian or anti-natalist factions of the grey tribe, I think that distinction would be utterly lost on most people.
(Actually I experience something similar when people attack universities; many attacks on universities I regard as quite warranted, but sometimes I find myself wishing I had more of a platform, so that I could remind Republicans that there are still many conservative causes served by academia, and that some faculty members are broadly on their side and want to help. Please don't catch me in the crossfire...!)
naraburns
nihil supernum
5mo ago
Youth groups and drag shows don't cost $6.3 million.
The administrative salaries of the people running youth groups and drag shows, the venues for youth groups and drag shows, the consulting fees for ensuring that your youth groups and drag shows are totally compliant with all applicable rules and regulations, well... that costs $6.3 million, easy.
I have seen universities pay $100,000+ to consultants to give single day seminars on grant writing. Sometimes these consultants have a history of writing successful grants, so the expertise is definitely there. And some of the grants that result can be worth millions of dollars to the university, so the expense is justified on paper. But no one--absolutely no one--is doing controlled experiments in which they determine whether these consultants actually make a difference, or whether there are cheaper alternatives with similar (or better) results. It's all part of the higher education grift; if you know the right people, and have the right friends, you can quit your underpaid research post and instead make millions telling other underpaid researchers to try harder.
I strongly suspect it is the same in every grant-driven industry everywhere. (Indeed, the whole "Effective Altruism" grift has largely consisted in insisting that EA is totally different, it's definitely going to make real change, instead of just creating new jobs and generous salaries for charismatic people who would rather attend conferences in exotic locales, than do the hard work of producing meaningful work.)
To set the stage: apparently David French is a progressive liberal, now? I had heard he endorsed Kamala Harris based on his own personal cafeteria Christianity. But on Thursday he also wrote a flagrantly false-consensus-building article for the New York Times, arguing that the Supreme Court needs "reform" in the form of term limits--and furthermore, that this could even be done through legislation without being blatantly unconstitutional.
Dan McLaughlin then took him to task over at National Review, in one of the better discussions I've seen on this issue.
First, to call the Democrats’ proposals “reform” is to take partisan sides by parroting one side’s loaded talking points. . . . Second, these proposals are not “in the air.” They are not emanating from multiple sources in different places on the partisan and ideological spectrum. They are not generated by an impersonal History, before which we must simply stand aside. We would not say that building a wall across the Mexican border is “in the air.” These are the specific ideological demands of one political party. They have been pushed by a particular coterie of activists, all of whom have essentially the same desired policy ends in mind. They arose out of one party’s presidential primaries and its Senate Judiciary Committee members. They were on nobody’s agenda until after Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh were appointed to the Supreme Court. We heard a quite different tune in 2016 when Mark Tushnet was arguing for a triumphal march of liberal and progressive ideology through the courts on the premise that “right now more than half of the judges sitting on the courts of appeals were appointed by Democratic presidents. . . . Those judges no longer have to be worried about reversal by the Supreme Court if they take aggressively liberal positions.”
An honest accounting would be frank about the fact that these proposals came about for only one reason: There’s a conservative majority on the Court for the first time since 1930, and liberals and progressives don’t think it’s legitimate for our side to ever get what their side has enjoyed in the past.
The sole reason we are talking about restructuring the Supreme Court is that liberals and progressives are unhappy with the outcomes of its decisions. That’s the thing. It’s the whole thing. It’s the only thing. It’s the entirety of the thing. It’s 100 percent of the thing. There’s no other thing. And if you are endeavoring now to make a purportedly conservative (or at least non-ideological) case for restructuring, you need to first explain why it is that liberals and progressives being unhappy with outcomes is, in and of itself, a crisis. Why is it not a permissible result of a political process that liberals and progressives get something they dislike? Why is that not legitimate? Why, specifically, does it change the legitimacy of a system that was acceptable when it delivered outcomes that liberals and progressives liked?
French speaks of “instability and anger that harm the court and threaten the rule of law.” Whose anger? Why is the anger of progressives an infallible sign that something must be given to them to assuage it? Do we treat conservatives, let alone MAGA Republicans, as if the mere fact of their anger requires a restructuring of the existing rules to let them win? French typically treats the anger of Donald Trump’s devotees as a problem for the system to resist, not a cause for it to give them more of what they want.
Sorry for the length of that quote, by the way, I'm trying to not just cut-and-past the whole article, but it's really, really great. In particular, something he doesn't say outright but which I noted recently is that Democrats are "doing everything they can to disassemble any part of the system that doesn't guarantee their victory and continued ideological dominance."
Are Republicans doing the same, in reverse? I think I see as much at the state level; state legislatures, (R) and (D), seem to do their damnedest to gerrymander permanent majorities while flying just beneath the radar of watchdog authorities. But something that does not get discussed often enough, concerning the Supreme Court, is that while the Supreme Court has been dominated by progressive justices for almost a hundred years, it has also been overwhelmingly controlled by Republican-appointed justices since Nixon was in office. But for some reason, moving to Washington D.C. and taking a lifetime sinecure tends to shift people's politics leftward. Or, stated a little differently--these people are highly prone to losing what Rudyard Kipling once called "the common touch."
So here's my wonkish take for the morning: The United States of America is drowning in historically unprecedented wealth. This makes governance too easy. Keeping people happy enough to not revolt ("bread and circuses") is trivially achievable. Somehow, you can mismanage cities to the point of transforming San Francisco into an open-air sewer and still maintain total ideological dominance over the voting population. This sort of thing suggests to me that political competition just isn't happening at the object level. Party politics is approaching 100% meta--which could help to explain how a turn-of-the-century Democrat became the darling of Republican populism circa 2024. Politicians no longer offer competing visions from which voters can select--indeed, too clear a vision can be a liability to "big tent" rhetoric! The goal is not to demonstrate one's merits as a leader, a visionary, or an intellect; it is all pure meta.
Here's where someone slaps me with an "Always has been" .jpg, right? But I think that's not quite right, though I'm not sure I have anything original to say about it. I think that, throughout American history, we have had a fair number of politicians of vision and intellect, who established their merit and provided real leadership. Televised debates were probably the beginning of the end of that, but maybe just "mass media generally." We have become a nation in which politics has become the practice of demanding consensus on issues of real disagreement, even when that consensus is flatly contradictory with some other portion of the consensus.
Fake "term limits" where a lifetime appointment becomes "de jure" but not "de facto" justices is not a legitimate Constitutional approach; I suspect it is only being floated because the Constitutional approaches are politically unpopular. While Court packing (or, even more aggressively, Court impeachments) is a legitimate Constitutional approach to reforming the Supreme Court, doing do for nakedly political reasons is politically risky. People may in general be okay with politics at the meta, but if you make it too obvious, people demanding object-level politics start to look less crazy, which threatens to upend the apple cart.
So in an attempt to be the change I wish to see in the world here's an object-level take: I feel bad for David French. I would say he has lost the common touch. I definitely don't go out of my way to read his essays the way I have sometimes done in the past. I think circa 2015 I enjoyed most of what he had to say. His criticism of Trump in 2016 was not unwarranted. But the right-wing meta reacted very strongly against him, and he also gained some wealth and notoriety; he has been on a steady leftward trajectory ever since (not unlike the trajectory of some Republican-appointed Supreme Court justices)--though he maintains that it is others who have changed, not him.
Well, it's possible for two things to be true at the same time.
Can we talk about Rebekah Jones? Should we? I'm honestly incredibly conflicted about these questions. One of the rules of the Motte is that we shouldn't weakman:
There are literally millions of people on either side of every major conflict, and finding that one of them is doing something wrong or thoughtless proves nothing and adds nothing to the conversation. We want to engage with the best ideas on either side of any issue, not the worst.
Discussing Jones feels like walking a tightrope (called "meaningful cultural and political issues") that has been strung over an open toxic waste pit (called "are my political opponents just mentally ill?"). Out of sheer both-sides-ism I want to say "there are surely equally bizarre figures in right wing politics" but I can't actually find any. The best I can do is to say, suppose you combined Marjorie Taylor Greene's extremism with George Santos' fabulism, then made the resulting chimera guilty of the things Matt Gaetz was only ever rumored to have been guilty of doing--that would get you pretty close to Jones, I think. Except that MTG and Santos and Gaetz aren't darlings of reddit and don't command fawning loyalty from major media outlets, which Jones also does.
As a refresher, I first learned of Jones back in the old subreddit, when someone posted about her COVID activism. I don't remember when I learned of her criminal activities, but to simply quote the Wikipedia:
Jones has had prior criminal charges. At the time the search warrant was executed, Jones was facing an active misdemeanor charge on allegations of cyberstalking a former student of hers who was a romantic partner and publishing sexual details about their relationship online. She was fired from her Florida State University teaching position for threatening to give a failing grade to her romantic partner's roommate. She faced prior charges including felony robbery, trespass, and contempt of court stemming from an alleged violation of a domestic violence restraining order related to the same ex-boyfriend, but those charges were dropped. In 2017, she had been arrested and charged with criminal mischief in the vandalism of his car, but the charges were dropped.
Jones faced criminal charges in Louisiana in 2016 where she was arrested and charged by the LSU Police Department with one count each of battery on a police officer and remaining after forbidden and two counts of resisting arrest after refusing to vacate a Louisiana State University office upon being dismissed from her staff position.
Jones went on to say she was going to run for office in Maryland (IIRC), but when that didn't pan out for unclear reasons, she returned to Florida. I don't know how much she has received in crowdfunding from the anti-DeSantis crowd at this point, but two early efforts pulled over half a million dollars. Jones has continued to hold herself out as a "whistleblower," specifically against the DeSantis administration in Florida, even though these claims appear pretty thoroughly debunked.
"Aha!" You might say. "PolitiFact leans left, and debunks Jones, so even the Left is willing to disavow this nut!"
Sure, maybe, to some extent. She went on to win the 2022 Democrat primary to challenge Matt Gaetz for his seat in the House of Representatives, so at least 16,000 Democrats still preferred Jones to someone with an actual legal education and genuinely relevant experience. And yes--by this logic, some 50,000 Republicans preferred the candidate who was under investigation for sex trafficking minors! It's baffling, I agree. But this is one of those "meaningful cultural and political issues" I mentioned--the only way I can make sense of any of this is to take a deep breath and remind myself that most people lack anything approaching coherent principles, they don't care about these details--they only care to win.
Anyway, that's all just the background!
This morning I woke up with this in my feeds.
If you don't want to read "WhitePeopleTwitter" (and I wouldn't blame you), it is a tweet from Rebekah Jones, followed by others, which I have partly reproduced here:
Today's events will tell a story so enraging, heartbreaking and brutal that I'm sure when I'm ready to tell it, no one will ever defend the Florida governor's actions again.
My family is not safe. My son has been taken on the gov's orders, and I've had to send my husband and daughter out of state for their safety.
THIS is the reality of living in DeSantis' Florida.
There is no freedom here. Only retaliatory rule by a fascist who wishes to be king
A week after we filed our lawsuit against the state, a kid claiming to be the cousin of one of my son's classmates joined their snapchat group. They recorded their conversations, and anonymously reported my son to police for sharing a popular internet meme.
They said they had to complete a threat assessment since they received an anon complaint, which both the local cops and the school signed off on as not being a threat. The kids were joking about cops and video games, which included this meme: [pic of a fat cop with text about waiting for a school shooter to commit suicide]
Two weeks later, bringing us to earlier today, an officer told me the state issued a warrant for my son's arrest for "digital threats of terrorism."
I asked on whose orders. The officer said it was the state.
They aren't letting him come home tonight. They kidnapped my son.
I had to get my husband and daughter out of here because CPS now interprets my home as dangerous because they've charged my 13 year old son with a felony for sharing a meme.
Naturally, Jones also provides links to her crowdfunding platforms of choice. The reddit "discussion" is... predictable? Outrage, occasional people (mostly, but not always, downvoted) asking whether this is legit, very few people posting actual information. Well, proles gonna prole I guess. But the headline in the Miami Herald?
13-year-old son of Rebekah Jones, whistleblower who clashed with DeSantis, arrested over memes
So, that sounds bad! But is it really why he was arrested? In fact it is not. He was arrested for posting stuff like this:
I want to shoot up the school.
If I get a gun I’m gonna shoot up hnms lol.
I’m getting a wrath and natural selection shirt so maybe but I don’t think many ppl know what the columbine shooters look like.
Okay so it’s been like 3-4 weeks since I got on my new antidepressants and they aren’t working but they’re suppose to by now so I have no hope in getting better so why not kill the losers at school.
Does your plug have access to guns?
I always keep a knife on me so maybe I'll just stab people idk
As this information was coming out, Jones added to her tweetstorm:
I've been in contact with members of the press whom I trust. They have the videos of the police at my house, of my son being put in handcuffs, of the officer refusing to let us give him his medication, of my 13 year old autistic kid who can't stand to be touched having to spread his legs before going into the back seat of a police car. All of it.
I haven't been given any documents from the state or police. I asked to take a picture of the paperwork and was told no. All they would tell me was the charge. They didn't even read him his rights when they arrested him.
I'm going to the courthouse today. When we're cleared to, we'll join my family out of state.
And aside to get our things, I'm only coming back to see these people in court.
It's not clear when these events are supposed to have occurred; Max Nordau shared video of Jones delivering her son to the police station. Rather, as this tweet suggests, it appears that "Rebekah Jones tried to blame DeSantis and RAISE MONEY off law enforcement stopping a possible school shooting."
I don't know what Jones' problem ultimately is. Narcissism? Paranoia? DeSantis Derangement Syndrome? That she is a habitual fabulist is well-established. That she has profited substantially from vocal opposition to all things DeSantis is a matter of public record. She is a sufficiently shady known quantity that most really big national news outlets seem reluctant to continue signal-boosting her, but the Miami Herald (by circulation, reportedly Florida's seventh-largest paper) still seems happy to run false headlines at her mere behest.
This seems discussion-worthy, and yet part of me wants to just not even post about it because it seems wrong, somehow, to even discuss Rebekah Jones. Giving her any attention at all feels a bit like encouraging a delusional person to persist in their delusions; she clearly wants notoriety, she doesn't seem capable of handling notoriety in a healthy way, surely it would be best to just stop paying attention to her?
But also, this is a kid talking about doing violence at school, with guns or knives. Is narcissism hereditary? Did his home environment contribute to this? [CONTINUED BELOW]
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
It's a bad look, for sure, but how is this not just run-of-the-mill drunken disorderliness? "Racism" is not really the same thing as racial epithets. If you get drunk and repeatedly call a man a "dick" we don't generally run a story about a "sexist outburst." This strikes me as a wild exaggeration:
extreme racism can happen among the younger generations
Extreme drunkenness can happen among younger generations, for sure. And when your drunk brain looks for the most offensive thing it can say to someone, and your social milieu is one where a racial epithet is the most offensive word you can think of, then the more strongly we disapprove of racial epithets, the more often we're going to hear them from angry, irrational people. Calling that "racism" seems like rhetorical sleight of hand to me.
Imagine a student getting plastered and, noticing her RA's MAGA cap, calling the RA a "Nazi" two hundred times. I can't imagine students putting together a petition demanding the drunk person's expulsion--it would be ridiculous. The drunk girl clearly has some problems, but none of them appear solvable by either tarring her as a "racist" or by expelling her from school.
naraburns
nihil supernum
2yr ago
I don't have anything useful to say about this... I don't think Kanye is a mentally stable human being, but I'm not sure many humans at that level of fame can be stable. Existing on that scale is so far outside the ancestral environment that I suspect brain stuff just gets weird.
What immediately struck me about this case was how clearly it feeds Kanye's argument. When saying "the Jews are shutting down everyone who disagrees with their agenda" gets you shut down by organizations substantially owned and/or operated by Jews, like, what--you think he's gonna conclude "oh, I must be mistaken?" This is on the same rhetorical playground as the well-trod "canceling conservatives just gets them bigger book deals, 'left media bias' is obviously a myth."
I can't help but be reminded of Whoopi Goldberg's suspension over what sounded to me as mostly weird commentary--not anti-Semitic. The antipathy or even just skepticism so many black Americans have expressed toward Jews is remarkable. But I can imagine being a black person whose community openly expresses frustration at whites or Asians or Hispanics "keeping me down"--in such an environment, why wouldn't a statistically wealthy, powerful group of phenotypically white people be permitted targets of the same basic criticism?
It also seems related to stuff like this. Armed black militants demanding reparations and a closed border seems like evidence that some blacks, at least, have decided that they don't want to be pawns for either "Left" or "Right" politics. Not sure that works out for them, in a two-party left-right coalition environment... but maybe?
And yeah. Twitter delenda est.
naraburns
nihil supernum
22d ago
At eight user reports (seven of them negative) and meta-moderation landing on "bad" (but with low confidence), I feel obligated to actually say something about this post. Unfortunately, that meant I had to read the post, which I was unable to power through last night, I simply did not have the stamina for it.
While I appreciate the apparent effort that went into this post, I think it ultimately fails both "speak plainly" and "do not weakman." If you wanted to criticize Winters, specifically, or fisk the interview, that would be fine. But removing quotes from their original context to insert into a work of parody (or is it satire?) doesn't really meet the appropriate threshold, especially when your apparent intention is to smear "“BASED” subculture," which does not sound like an appropriately specific group.
I am getting the idea that you are very interested in criticizing (or mocking) certain very broad groups of people, most particularly anyone who is to your political right. I understand that is what most social media is used to do today. However, that is not really the purpose of this space. If you have a problem with the idea that some women think acting the part of a "girl boss" is stupid and exhausting, ideally you should talk about that idea, or charitably engage with the ideas of some specific person who said it. If you think that person is stupid or misguided, you can say that, provided you can explain why beyond just the fact of your disagreement. If there is some specific group that teaches the idea to which you object, you can complain about that, too!
The fact that 38% of liberal women aged 18-29 identify as LGBT is interesting and specific and warrants more than a throwaway line. The claim that "we shouldn't vaccinate children" is open to all kinds of thoughtful criticism. You have plenty of material here to plainly state your own views, and to criticize (with evidence!) the views of some specific people with whom you disagree.
But nakedly asserting that "'BASED' subculture is not Khan, it's Winters" doesn't get you anywhere. At best, you're just trying to shame people away from certain ideological influences, instead of persuading them. You've got the right level of effort! You just need to lose the disdain.
About 25 years ago, some elderly relatives of mine were victims of a home invasion. They had been living in the same house in California for 40 or 50 years, and the character of the neighborhood had changed dramatically over that span. Their children had a security screen installed, but the octogenarian parents never bothered to bolt it. One day someone knocked on their door, so... they opened their door! They were quickly overpowered by a couple of young men (very possibly teens, but no one was ever caught or charged so who knows) who tied them to chairs, pistol whipped them a bit, cleaned out their valuables, and left. One of their children happened to stop by later that day, by which point both had soiled themselves and achieved a number of wounds trying to get free from their bonds. Both lived a few more years, but neither ever really emotionally recovered from the trauma.
Daytime home invasions are exceedingly rare, but when they happen and are accurately reported in detail, they can seize the public imagination, particularly among vulnerable populations. I personally have occasional nightmares about answering my door to home invaders, even though I've never personally experienced such a thing (and rarely remember dreaming at all!).
This case in Kansas seems especially well-tuned for culture warring on both race and firearms, but depending on the shooter's mental and physical health, probably neither is the most salient feature of these events. I really think we would be better off if this started a conversation about filial piety, elder care, and the incredible benefits of cultivating close, supportive family, but I'm sure that is a hope in vain.
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