pigeonburger
11d ago
On April 10-11, 2024 they were arrested and sent to jail for 30 days for "contempt of court". The problem is that the Ag Department seems to have issued the arrest warrant on their own. The case has never been in court. They have not been before a judge.
So they are both in jail serving a 30 day sentence that didn't involve a judge and they haven't been allowed to see a judge.
This is what pisses me off so much in the relationship between government and citizens, is that government officials has free reign to do abuse their power pretty much however they want (short of personal enrichment, and even then) because the worse that happens to them is punishment to their office, not to them personally. You can be absolutely certain if those two guys had unlawfully sequestered an employee or official of the agricultural department for 30 days, they themselves would be sentenced to a lot more than 30 days in prison. But we all know that the worst that's gonna happen there is the office gets told they can't do this, maybe someone or two lose their jobs (and don't worry, they won't have any trouble finding another) and maybe Pennsylvania's taxpayers have to foot the bill on some damages (and don't worry here either, approximatively 0 democrat voters in Pennsylvania will change their vote just because their party's officials unlawfully throws people in jail).
pigeonburger
8mo ago
In the same spirit: pointing and shaming how wasteful north americans are for driving instead of using public transport, claiming that if almost all the money we put on road maintenance and car infrastructure instead went to public transport it would be fast, clean, cheap and wonderful and all the junkies and mentally ill people belligerently bothering people on it would disappear, despite it being the very same people who push for everyone using public transport that are also pushing for complete tolerance of every nuisance in public spaces in the name of compassion.
pigeonburger
3mo ago
The powers that be seem intent on making examples of very average people these days. We've seen extreme prosecution of actions that "reasonable people" would believe would not draw nearly that much individual attention from the government (trucker protest in Canada, J6). And the other side is worried about the idea that, for instance, a right-wing government could use private collected information to identify and deport immigrants. "If you haven't done anything wrong (or big) you have nothing to fear" is not convincing to anyone.
pigeonburger
6mo ago
Because the world doesn't want politically motivated encyclopedias, it wants accurate, unbiaised, apolitical ones. Of course, Wikipedia isn't that, but that is current only known to the extremely online centrists and conservatives/right-wingers. The move is not to make an explicitely political one as it will be rightfully ignored, it's to continue to raise awareness that Wikipedia is not accurate, unbiaised and apolitical.
pigeonburger
7mo ago
I think there's a big distinction between the actual culture of today's youth and the one being pushed by over-correcting revanchist millenials. The super woke media is not the DOOM or rap music of this era, it's its complete opposite. It's what today's kids' parents would prefer they like instead of what they actually like. I'm not fully understanding what the majority of kids actually like these days, they're quite secretive and tend to share around in small groups online instead of in the public square, but sometimes I get glimpses of it and it's very much not what the OP is complaining about. They don't like it either.
pigeonburger
8mo ago
The administrative state when it was thought up, had these people be mindless cogs that would pass and process information to the next level until clear orders were drafted and sent for whoever actually ultimately executes them. But consolidation of roles, education and computers now has many of these people aware of the picture they are painting and opinionated with regards to the orders and the people who gave them. Even in cases where they nominally don't have any discretionary power, they can selectively apply rigor, sabotage their own work, know who to inform or not inform of a situation, etc... to give themselves some margin of discretionary power.
And recently they seem to relish how much power leaking to the press gives them.
Honestly I'm not really that surprised. It's the result of taking extremely sincere feminism and running it through the wringer that have been the last 8 years of so. Ishida went hyper-feminist during Gamergate, insufferably so; the comic went from trying (with limited success, but not entirely without success) to make an adult Calvin & Hobbes, to non-stop preaching. Then mainstream feminism was told "shut up, it's trans people's time now", and those who didn't toe the line were thrown in the TERF pit. There's essentially two reactions to being thrown in the TERF pit, with a spectrum in between them: 1) compartimentalize the trans stuff as being the only thing the mainstream liberal order is wrong on, but keep every other belief intact, or 2) question everything.
Ishida went closer to 2). I think he still compartimentalize the feminism as the one thing the liberal order is right on, but he went hard on the other side for everything else.
I think the comic is still annoyingly preachy and cringy though, just red colored cringe instead of blue colored cringe.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
I'm 100% ready to believe this pessimism in the air comes from our inability to self-organize. We are locked in with people we do not like 24/7, reading their crappy opinions, we can't just splinter off and make a new community and so we live with a slight psychological chip on our shoulder but we're not sure why.
I get your feeling, and I think the main culprit, the biggest reason the insular internet mostly collapsed is Reddit (and recently Discord). The technical superiority of Reddit when it came out, its ability to spin up new subreddits on any topic and its originally relaxed moderation turned it into a natural Schelling point for any community. Previously if I wanted to find an active community talking about topic_x, I'd google "topic_x forum" and look at some of the results and join a PHPbb (or similar) forum that seemed to have a vibe I liked. Now the first place I, or pretty much everyone, will think about is /r/topic_x. It will be bigger and more active than almost any other community about topic_x.
The only exceptions are going to be existing communities that don't want to be Schelling points that passively attract newcomers (like this place) or people who have an axe to grind against Reddit. And while I do myself have an axe to grind against Reddit, I have to admit I'm in the company of a lot of witches who really just want a place they can spam the n-word, and the communities created by that second group are likely going to suck.
Seeing that over a summer it was free game to take over neighborhoods, torch police stations, do nightly assaults on federal courtrooms, attempting to blind police officers, and in the previous years interrupt official proceedings (supreme court nominations), some people could have been given a wrong impression, yes. Not so much that the government wouldn't be interested in it, but that the judiciary branch would be so captured as to do what looks at least to one side like enforcing laws on blatantly political lines.
pigeonburger
3mo ago
The only people who might call them on it are other scientists and scientists are a cliquey bunch.
Some professions requires the public trusting that you will prefer defending their interest over defending your in-group. Doing these jobs properly require taking a skeptical, sometimes even adversarial stance towards your colleagues. Cops, judges, journalists, doctors and scientists come to mind; any hint of wagon-circling from these harms society greatly.
pigeonburger
3mo ago
This is it, yes.
If there was a widespread invasion of privacy by our governments in the physical realm, as in once every year when you're out of the home a team of detectives (or to make the analogy more 1:1, a sophisticated automated drone) breaks in and inspect your home for evidence of crimes without warrants, we would very likely have at least some evidence that they did. If they did it in the digital realm, we would have... Exactly the evidence we have right now: no clear admission that it is so but also courts allowing "de-anonymising" of people of interest, implying they actually do intercept data without any kind of warrants, whistleblowers like Snowden, etc...
OP can dismiss it as "QAnon" stuff if he wants, but there's a hightened general distrust of our governments nowadays from both the left and the right. The red tribe today has reason to believe that the legal system, including police and the judiciary are weaponized against them, there's a discussion about such here today. You can disagree, but even if you do I think it's unfair to call it unreasonable to believe. And the blue tribe loudly frets about scenarios where if the red tribe gains power again they will weaponize government against them. So concerns about surveillance being in the interest of legitimate police interventions are convincing no one.
pigeonburger
4mo ago
This is an ordinary, and probably unavoidable, epistemic failure mode.
I'm not sure what's so difficult about saying "It sounds bad if it's true, but I'll reserve judgement until I hear the other side's case." I say it all the time, to the endless frustration of friends and family, but still. I'd expect rationalists to get that one right.
pigeonburger
4mo ago
I don't know, maybe (definitely) I hang out with mostly nerds, but from where I'm looking men seem less ashamed/self-conscious than ever to flaunt their geeky hobbies. Retro gaming setups, arcade machines, gaming computers and consoles, VR setups, etc... are proudly displayed in living rooms in a way that they wouldn't have been before, when you would only see a Super Nintendo or Playstation plugged in to the secondary basement TV only the kids use.
I grew up with videogames being a thing for boys and teenager boys that we were supposed to grow out of, and it seems men of my generation while growing up put their foot down and decided that no, videogames are not inherently more childish than watching TV shows and we have no reason to be ashamed of them.
And its not just gaming; I look at the younger generations, young men in their early 20s, and I don't think for instance being into anime is the 'red flag' for women that it was for my generation.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Besides, the original Gamergaters were utterly vanquished. Gaming is one of the wokest industries now, unlike back then when there was a sense that it wasn't too late to claw it back from the brink.
Would not say utterly vanquished, it was a pyrrhic victory for the press and wokies at best. Gaming journalists barely exist anymore, sure some of that can be blamed on existing trends towards independent video bloggers and streamers and the threat of AI, but you know what would have surely helped them weather these conditions better? Not having alienated the very core fandom of the topic they're covering, those that would have kept consuming high quality written content about their favorite topic, if that had been what was on offer. As for the game industry itself, it's not doing so hot, especially on the western AAA side. Again, alienating the core fans lost them the support they would have needed in these tougher economic times. Meanwhile, it's not like gamers could really lose to begin with; they're the one with the money and who drive the transactions. If the western AAA market refuses to make games they want, well, if there's demand there's gonna be some clever indies or 2nd tier devs snapping up the opportunity. And there's always Japan. And the past can't be taken away from them, there's an essentially infinite back catalog to explore.
Meta-trends can also break immersion. If you watch 10 films all with race swapped leads and each on their own works just fine, but you know that the studio heads made big noise about race swapping for the sake of it, about representation, and about making Hollywood less white, etc, you might still have your immersion broken by the clear politics behind the trend, even if each one works self contained.
Ultimately that's what makes it intolerable for me. I don't have a problem with one adaptation doing "what if we tried changing the race of characters in this to challenge their expectations?" But now the entirety of culture seems to be about racism. Every single recent show or movie it seems, if somehow they can't make it all about racism, they will at least try to fit in a subplot or even just a line to remind you of it. Recently I watched The Nun 2, a horror movie about a spooky Nun-impersonating demon happening in 1950s France. What does racism have to do with it? It makes no goddamn sense why, but in this one the main character's sidekick is a an afro-american girl who was sent to a convent, all just so they could fit in a line about how it was better for her to become a nun out in Europe than be black in america. For the rest of the movie, all the things her character does could have been done by other characters.
I mean the typical suspicion is that this has become necessary to secure funding or to be allowed to have a chance to win an award, but it's so damn transparent; it breaks immersion entirely. At this point, it's so overdone, even if it were done with innocent intent, I will resent it. And it's hard to believe it's done with innocent intent, because it would be hard for one not to notice just how oversaturated every aspect of culture is with this message already.
pigeonburger
8mo ago
I think nothing demonstrates this better than the case of Alexander Vindman. Let's assume his whistleblowing was not a premeditated impeachment trap for Trump as I don't think there was any evidence to that. His whistleblowing was based on that public servant's impression that the POTUS was undermining US Foreign Policy, which when you think about it with in mind who is supposed to set US Foreign Policy, is a really odd thing to say.
Is what I'm describing part of some ancient philosophy or religion?
Indeed, as others have pointed out, this mindset is at the heart of Stoïcism. It's also fairly close to Taoism.
What Stoïcism instructs is what to direct your will at: yourself. If you think that you have some influence over the DA, even just as a private citizen voting and writing letters to other people, then consider doing that. Or shape yourself into someone who would become a DA that would achieve the outcomes that you consider optimal. Make yourself into a better person and a better world will flow from that. The world is what it is; it can be improved if the people in it are improved, but the only one you can ultimately control is yourself. "But this DA is bad and is encouraging more bad people to do bad things!" Good is virtue, bad is vice. And virtue and vice can only be truly known from the inside. If the DA's actions are driven by greed and the desire to be popular, that would be vice. But most people would consider forgiveness to be virtuous, maybe that's what's driving this DA? And your view that these charges should be brought up against these criminals, it's important that you observe your own thinking to understand if that's truly driven by wisdom, a virtue, or by a vice (in that case I think most would see wrath as a vice). Broadly: worry about yourself. Your soul, your actions, your reasoning.
And couching things in emotional terms, is a sure way to lessen your power of reasoning, to lessen the quality of your very soul. You see it everywhere; the originally well-meaning extremists that believe that because they see what they consider an injustice, it gives them licence to cause similar injury to others. Or single issue political/social crusaders who become blind to unintended consequences because they see one thing as "bad".
pigeonburger
10mo ago
I'm sure the conservatives would all love to conquer the institutions, they're mostly wary that yet another "ally" savvy to the ways of the institutions will turn out to be an infiltrator who will betray them when the stakes get high enough. Many would rather bet on the boisterous man who makes himself an enemy of institutions at every turn. He might not be the best to convert institutions, but perhaps he will succeed at razing them or culling them (he hasn't so far, but there's also a much longer record of conservatives betraying their base).
pigeonburger
11mo ago
It's a shame because Reddit largely killed the standalone forum for non-ossified communities. For the passively apolitical majority, those who are okay with simply ignoring the politics or are used to hearing it as background noise and don't think there's anything weird with it, it's a Schelling point for conversations on any topic.
pigeonburger
1mo ago
Is there a way to tell which of these is true?
I don't think so, but let's dive into each one.
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It's true that most users probably don't notice the sculpting, but then again, they do notice that for some reason, somehow, Google has gotten worse. I don't know if the sculpting is the issue with search, I don't think anyone outside Google (and maybe inside Google too) knows the exact reason why Google Search sucks now, but since for Gemini's image generation it seems exceedingly likely sculpting was the reason for images not matching the expectations of the prompter, then I think we should assign a fairly high probability to it being at least part of the cause for the degradation of service for search too. And as dominant as Google is now, changing search engines is very easy, low friction, so once a competitor gets enough traction it might turn out to have been very counterproductive.
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I think people at the very top could dial back if they wanted to, as long as it's not framed to be dialing back on the commitment to ideology, but as a technical matter; they don't have to give any rationale except degradation of the service. Companies have been laying off DEI employees/departments with little pushback, because companies still officially run on the rules that put finances above ideology (for now). As long as it's because the company needs to trim some of the less "core" employees, and not framed as "our customers and employees hate everything the DEI department has been doing". So while businesses are not allowed to explicitely retreat from the ideological battleground, they still have the latitude to excuse themselves for technical reasons.
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This one seems pretty unfalsifiable and conspiracy minded. I don't think most people outside of extremist political operatives think along those terms. And demoralization is easily countered by reminding oneself that if it was truly hopeless, they wouldn't need the propaganda, whether it's opinion shaping or demoralizing.
That kind of person exists, his name is Kanye West and it was hilarious until it started being sad as it became harder and harder to ignore that his outbursts, his inability to read social cues (to play armchair psychiatrist, I think he is likely a savant autist), were not only selecting him out of super-stardom but alienating him from friends and family.
pigeonburger
3mo ago
and whoever hacks them, which is a very remote possibility
Would you consider Microsoft making a configuration mistake giving read access to every Office 365 account to a test account that was then trivially hacked more or less likely than Facebook making a similar mistake? I work in IT too, and I would have considered Microsoft more serious than Facebook regarding security. Maybe I'm wrong and Microsoft is just unserious about security while Facebook is serious. Maybe. But personally I still adjusted my estimation of the likelihood of this kind of serious breach from all of FAANG(O)/big tech upwards.
From the latest news, it seems it's now over 500 employees that are pledging to leave for Microsoft with Sam if the board doesn't immediately rehire Sam and resign, so I think it's safe to say Microsoft has that lightning pretty well bottled if they want it. https://twitter.com/balajis/status/1726600151027073374#m
Assuming the board does it, the question that remains is for Microsoft. Is having essentially full control of OpenAI's human capital without a non-profit meddling worth potentially losing access to its current IP, and some initial friction as these employees work to replicate everything they can inside of Microsoft.
*EDIT: I'm saying potentially, because I can easily see the non-profit just deciding it's too late and that their current structure is just not workable. Tell all the employees to move to Microsoft, dissolve the OpenAI for-profit and sell all the IP to Microsoft (or just sell the for-profit for Microsoft to run as a subsidiary) and give the money to some other AI safety orgs or to "worker re-training" orgs, etc...
While we're on the subject of Star Trek Voyager episodes with interesting allegories for race, there's Living Witness (which was directed by Tim Russ, the actor for Tuvok, even!). There's two alien races living on the same planet and Voyager's passage caused a war after which one of the races subjugated the other. Centuries have passed and relations between the two races have improved, but a copy of the Doctor wakes up and finds out that this relatively peaceful state of affair is based on a rather false retelling of the events where the race that won the war was belligerent and had Voyager kill the leader of the other race for them, when the doctor knows the subjugated race actually attacked Voyager unprovoked. The Doctor is stuck between leaving things as is, even if it's based on a lie, or pursuing the truth, which threatens the peace as some of the subjugating race always felt bad about the way they were cast as the villains and the subjugated race wants to clings to a view of history where they were blameless. Eventually it's settled on the truth. The whole episode has a feel of exasperation towards grievance politics.
Voyager got maligned for having some of the worst episodes (and the worst multi episode arcs) in Star Trek, but it had some great one-offs too. And it's funny to me how a show like Star Trek that's meant to be progressive can be "left behind" by an ideology that by design keeps moving.
I think this point bears highlighting. A lot of the "believe the science" message seems to hinge on the belief that scientists, doctors and other highly credentialed professionals are, within their sphere of expertise, able to ignore misaligned incentives and politics that history and experience has shown time and time and time and time again are universal. The original scientific method created an adversarial system to counteract these human failings, to align the incentives with bold truth finding. But nowadays coordination at the size of our current scientific institutions has misaligned the incentives again, to put them in line with affirming the consensus and the political class.
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