I wrote for Singal-Minded (non-paywalled) on the topic of PayPal suspending accounts for what appear to be politically motivated reasons. I describe my experience with PayPal suspending my own account a few years ago, and how I managed to get it back:
I called, emailed, and waited on hold, but never got a straight answer from PayPal’s customer service drones. They endlessly repeated that I had violated PayPal’s acceptable use policy as if it were some mantra. If I asked for any detail whatsoever, their response had the tone of a schoolteacher frustrated at having to explain repeatedly to the same kid that crayons should not be shoved up one’s nose. I knew what I did to get my account deleted, apparently. If I wanted to hear it from them, I’d need a court order.
I took inventory of my options.
Here is what I did not have: money in the account, any serious reliance on it, or any wisp of nostalgia for the 14 years we shared.
Here is what I did have: too much free time and a whole heap of pettiness to propel things forward.
So I made a crazy decision. I read PayPal’s User Agreement.
PayPal, like many other companies, have a mandatory arbitration clause in their user agreements that require you to "agree" to waive your right to sue them in court if you have a dispute. I took PayPal up on the offer to settle our shit via arbitration but we never got that far because they quickly caved. I was prompted to write about all this after I met Colin Wright and offered to help him deal with his own PayPal bullshit. From my perspective, he refused my help but nevertheless kept writing opeds about the issue and soliciting donations. I heavily insinuated that he was intentionally holding on to his victimhood status as a grifting strategy. Turns out, I was wrong.
Colin has brought up the issue publicly multiple times since then (writing about it in Quillette and the New York Post for example), but he never responded to my email until I reached out to him for comment on this piece. He did share correspondence with me where prominent free speech attorneys told him, in an apparent contradiction to my claims, that he had no viable legal recourse to getting his account reinstated. I had transmogrified into a gadfly in his mentions, heavily implying Colin was intentionally choosing not to solve the problem, but I was off-base with my insinuation. Colin was bombarded with countless random people (besides just me) offering their one weird trick to solve the problem, and he had no reason to believe any of them knew something that experienced advocates did not. Colin has now initiated dispute resolution with PayPal using the steps I gave him, and I’m intensely curious to see how it will play out.
As best as I can tell, virtually nobody thinks to try to address the issue of politically-motivated corporate censorship with the tools already available to them. Not even FIRE talked about arbitration dispute resolution. This leads me to think this a low-hanging fruit counter-attack that's just ripe for the taking.
Edit: I found out about another instance of someone taking a company to arbitration and winning. See also the hacker news thread, esp. thathndude's posts where they explain how hiring an attorney (even one that doesn't do anything) can result in absurdly higher settlements.
New York City has been ordered to reinstate with back-pay city employees who were fired for refusing to get the covid-19 vaccine. When I first encountered this story, the quote that was bandied from the judge was "Being vaccinated does not prevent an individual from contracting or transmitting Covid-19" and my initial impression was of a fringe anti-vax judge. But the judge meant this literally, as in "the vaccine is not 100% effective" and what he writes in the decision is much more nuanced and generally in support of vaccination.
I am not philosophically opposed to vaccine mandates. Vaccines are easily one of the greatest inventions of mankind, and I don't find it unreasonable to impose a cost on individuals to the extent it can potentially mitigate negative externalities. I'm also not someone who opposes other public health mandates in general, and I was OK with mask mandates for the most part, up until we had widely available vaccines. What never made sense to me was the incoherent overall set of rules. For example, some time around mid-2021, my gym instituted a vaccine passport system whereby you could show proof of vaccination and thereafter be able to work out without a mask. I was totally fine with this system, especially since it was a private entity finding a way to accomodate the needs of a varied clientele. A few months later however, the government ordered all gyms to require masks no matter what and I was fucking pissed. I had to now wear a mask at the gym despite being surrounded by vaccinated people, but meanwhile I could go maskless for several hours at a time at restaurants surrounded by unknown quantities. It didn't make any sense, and it just needlessly burned up whatever credibility public health authorities had. I made the same point at the height of the BLM protests/riots, when social distancing magically didn't matter anymore.
So back to New York City, in October 2021 the city ordered all public employees to be vaccinated. The judge in this case found the order to be "arbitrary and capricious" largely because of how nonsensical the implementation was. If the purpose of the mandate is to increase vaccination with the goal to decrease the spread of a deadly contagion, why exempt certain professions like athletes, artists, and performers? And why allow city employees who are appealing the mandate to continue working full-time as their appeal is pending?
The term "pretextual" comes up sometimes in legal contexts, and it's where a false reason is provided as a bid to hide the true motivations of an action. For example, a cop can say they stopped a vehicle only because the car was speeding, but their true motivation for the stop is to create an opportunity to investigate something else entirely. In Whren v. United States, SCOTUS unanimously decided that pretextual traffic stops were legal (they call them "mixed-motive stops" which is lol) and to date Washington and New Mexico are the only states that prohibit the practice. Because it is virtually impossible to perfectly comply with traffic rules at all times, the practical effect of allowing pretextual stops is that a cop can pull over basically any car they want to. They just need to watch them long enough.
New York City may claim their goal is purely public health related, but it's perfectly reasonable to be skeptical of their stated reasons when the implementation does not align with their goals. The judge in this case wrote:
The vaccination mandate for City employees was not just about safety and public he alth; it was about compliance. If it was about safety and public health, unvaccinated workers would have been placed on leave the moment the order was issued. If it was about safety and public health, the Health Commissioner would have issued city-wide mandates for vaccination for all residents.
Perhaps they can overcome this suspicion by providing a damn good reason for how art protects against transmission, or how pursuing an appeal makes one less contagious, but I have not been able to find one. In the absence of a good reason, I can conclude their stated goal is pretextual. Despite their claims otherwise, it's obvious that the stated goal of public health was not always an overriding priority. The city was apparently willing to let the Very Important Goal be subsumed by comparatively trivial concerns, like not pissing off Very Important People in the entertainment industry. So next time New York City or similar claims they are doing something in furtherance of public health, it's reasonable to assume they're lying until you see evidence otherwise. If the public trusts these bodies less, they can blame themselves.
ymeskhout
8mo ago
Public Pretenders
The difference between a public defender and a private attorney can often be measured not in skill, but in pinstripes.
The defendant had dropped a rhetorical bomb in court. He lobbed the grenade of all insults. He called his attorney (may Allah forgive me for repeating this) a public pretender. The courtroom's sparse decorations afforded plenty of space for the silence to permeate. The room was almost empty as they were basically done with that morning's calendar. Early too, which meant the judge had some time to fuck around.
The judge adopted the familiar tenor of a police interrogation — the verbal equivalent of a slow-moving suffocation. He turned to the so-called public defender and started asking him questions.
"Mister Weber...did you even go to law school?"
"Yes Your Honor."
"Well...are you even licensed to practice in this state?"
"Yes Your Honor."
The judge was hamming it up with the weight of a Shakespearean monologue and the public defender did his best to stifle his laughter, just enough to utter out a coherently monotone answer. The judge continued, savoring every liminal pause for dramatic effect.
"Mister Weber...I need you to answer this next question truthfully...are you — are you a real lawyer?"
This was the final Yes Your Honor, what finally broke the tension. The judge's demeanor visibly relaxed and he shifted back in his dais. He turned back to the defendant and said "Thank you very much for bringing this serious accusation to my attention, but I am relieved to find out that Mr. Weber is indeed a real attorney and is not just pretending to be."
Oh yes the defendant was being blatantly fucked with, but the artificial gravitas was a sufficiently plausible deniability shield to keep him guessing. Besides, what the fuck was he going to do anyway? Pull a rhyming dictionary out of his ass and look up another entry for defender? Maybe next time he can come to court prepared with a more original barb than calling his attorney a public pretender.
Make Me Feel Mighty Real
Money is what makes it real. Which is why I, a public defender, am fake as fuck. I am free of charge. I am the budget option. I am also functionally the default.
Choosing to navigate the legal field without an attorney — also known as "rawdogging it" in the parlance[1] — doesn't usually work out very well for reasons I previously wrote about. And yet, the modern public defense system exists entirely because of a handwritten appeal to the Supreme Court scrawled out on prison stationary. Easily history's most successful pro se filing. Gideon v. Wainwright is why if the government finds itself primed to shove you through the prosecution grinder, they are at least magnanimous enough to give you an attorney. They'll even go so far as to foot the bill if your ass is broke as fuck. Noblesse oblige is not totally dead!
But how good is this default, really? It's Complicated™.
Anyone seeking to examine the criminal justice system by comparing public defenders with privately retained attorneys will find themselves stymied by the fact that public defenders basically are the system. Any poor schmuck (notice I didn't say blameless) unfortunate enough to capture the attention of our nation's indefatigable law enforcement apparatus is almost by definition financially destitute, and that's all you need to qualify for the free option. How much of a shit a jurisdiction gives about people [nose scrunched up in disgust] accused of a crime will vary, and this will be reflected in detail within boring public finance documents. But regardless of that variance, courtrooms are brimming with such a glut of indigent defendants that when the BJS looked into this decades ago, they found that roughly 80% of state felony defendants were represented by a public defender. Point at any random spec of meat pushed through the grinder and you can reasonably assume a public defender is chained along for the ride.[2]
Another confounder is that many public defenders are...private attorneys.[3] Some towns are way too small to have a dedicated agency with full-time government employees, so they farm out indigent defense to local attorneys who can periodically step in as needed on a contractual basis. Even big cities with gargantuan public defense departments rely heavily on private attorneys as gravel to fill in the gaps left by conflict of interest recusal (something like an entire agency withdrawing from a case because one of their lawyers had previously represented the victim or something) or just when they're over-capacity. At the federal level, private attorneys take up about 40% of public defense cases. Every private criminal defense attorney I know takes on public defense cases as a supplement to their paying clients. No need to advertise your services or chase after the inevitable unpaid invoice when the local government takes care of both problems.
The overwhelming majority of criminal defense is not financially sustainable, and would not exist without the constant injection of taxpayer money. The reason for this discrepancy is obvious. Rare is the criminal defendant who has enough of their shit together to afford a defense attorney at market rate. As authentic as Better Call Saul! was overall in its depiction of criminal defense life (and I can't praise the show enough on that front) the idea that Saul Goodman could financially sustain a criminal defense practice by marketing to the dregs of society was pure fantasy. I once had a client stab a dude in broad daylight, in front of a dozen witnesses, slightly fewer surveillance cameras, and screamed his own name in the process. This is not a dude with the temperament to get a regular paycheck every two weeks. Financial security (either directly or as a confounding variable) also gives you the respectability, influence, and resources to shield any potentially criminal behavior away from the prying eyes of law enforcement. Money is great, and I highly recommend having it.
All this to say that any attorney working in criminal defense is necessarily working with a skewed clientele pot. Without some adroit specialization, there is no cash to wring out of this crowd. The options are limited for carving out a private practice that doesn't feed at the public defense contract trough. Some freak attorneys do so by launching their stature to the stratosphere, high enough to sustain a steady living off big-ticket celebrity defendants. The more realistic solution is to be selective in your fishing, pursuing only the practice areas most likely to deliver on the narrow Venn diagram slice of "accused of a crime" and "has money". A reliable eddy for this approach is to be boring as fuck and dedicate yourself almost exclusively to drunk driving cases.
Sartorially Deficient Efficiency Machines
I got my start at a public defense agency and while we did indeed have caseloads stacked high to the ceiling, this doesn't tell you the full story. For one, the benefits of functionally being part of the system means you can spread some fixed costs across several clients (e.g. handling dozens of clients during a single morning calendar). The other part is that public defenders naturally become machines of raw unbridled efficiency.
You can usually easily tell them apart from their privately-funded aristocratic colleagues. One of the best public defenders I know wears the exact same cringe-inducing blazer to court, with the sleeves nearly a foot too long drooping over his hands like a monk's robe. He doesn't give a shit though as he's pared down his repertoire of tools down to the bones, leaving behind only the things that will actually make a difference for his client's cases.
The sheer volume of cases also comes with some supernatural scrying abilities. The prosecutor's office we worked with handled thousands of cases, and they used internal plea deal standards to maintain some semblance of uniformity across the thousands of cases they handled. Their (at times robotic) devotion to fairness chafed at the idea of giving two similarly situated defendants vastly different plea deals. And while they never shared those internal standards with us, all it required was churning through a few dozen cases before the standards became obvious to anyone paying attention.
For DUIs, the biggest factor was blood alcohol concentration. The scale public defenders operated at made it trivial to figure out the BAC threshold for getting a one level reduction in the charges, or even two levels if you were lucky. We also knew which factors could tip the scales for edge cases (Practice Tip: crashing into a trailer home and narrowly hitting a sleeping twelve year-old is Very Bad).
We used a checklist to quickly triage our never-ending DUI caseload. Tell me just a handful of details about a case and I can predict its ultimate conclusion with startingly accuracy. Most of our cases were obvious enough that they were on auto-pilot to a predictable plea deal conclusion, and we could then focus our attention on the edge cases that were most liable to topple over. With the volume of cases I had, the median DUI misdemeanor probably took me maybe two or three hours of work total, including all the time spent in court waiting. This was all boring, tedious, and predictable work.
Besides all that, I got to know all the player's tics. Jennifer the court clerk was a total sweetheart, and she was the one I should talk to if I need to overset on an already full morning calendar. Brett the prosecutor really did not like repeat offenders, so I continued those cases until he finished his rotation and I had to deal with someone different. And you memorize the judges especially. I had a client who was summoned to court because her drug treatment provider kicked her out for "contraband". I assumed that meant she brought drugs to rehab, but turns out the "contraband" was just a cell phone. Before the court even knew what was going on, she had re-enrolled voluntarily and completed a month of inpatient treatment. When she told me all this I figured it was a shoo-in for the judge to impose no sanctions. I said "You were proactive, which is something this judge really appreciates. Also, the judge absolutely hates the prosecutor on this morning, so this hearing should be a cakewalk." Five minutes into the hearing, the judge was yelling at the prosecutor already. My client and I exchanged knowing glances, and she marveled at my divination.
Private attorneys knew we had a finger on the pulse, and we were often asked for input. Sometimes it was something as banal as asking for a temperature check on a judge right before sentencing. By far the most jaw-droppingly alarming was when a client walked into the courtroom about to plead guilty to a DUI. His attorney paused at the door where I happened to be loitering and asked me "Hey my client is a green card holder and he's going to plead guilty to a marijuana DUI. That's not a big deal is it?" That could've been a catastrophe, to the extent you consider immediate deportation to be a big deal.
America's Universal Crime
There's a reason DUIs come up frequently in my writing — they're the bread and butter of misdemeanor criminal court and what virtually all defense attorneys cut their baby teeth on.
Americans love drinking. Americans also love driving. If you're concerned about this concatenation, worry not commie scum because the third branch in this triumvirate is another perennial American favorite: an unrelenting police force. Hands wiped, problem solved.
You have not experienced the unique essence of America until you are drunk as hell at a strip mall parking lot at 2AM, locked out of the Applebee's that just closed for the night, your designated driver friend nowhere to be seen, and with the only legal option to get to your house in the suburbs being a $70 Uber ride. Prime setting to chance it. No surprise then that out of the ten million or so criminal arrests that happen every year in this country, 10% are just DUIs, more than all violent crimes combined. Drunk driving is one of the most intersectional of crimes. Rich and poor alike, this is the universal criminal temptation.
When someone is arrested for drunk driving, they get handcuffed, their vehicle is towed away into the abyss, and they might spend a few hours in jail if they're particularly unruly or the cop is in a shitty mood. When they're released from the precinct into the cold morning hours, they're handed a gift bag with some terrifying paperwork informing them DUIs are punishable by up to three hundred and sixty four days in jail. That's just the statutory maximum that never (almost, we'll get to that) gets imposed, but they don't know that, so naturally they panic. They panic and google.
I've written before about how useless I am, and I am especially useless with DUI cases. DUI cases are so boring because of how straightforward they usually are. They were drunk. They were driving. And more often than not, they admitted their drinking to the cop that saw them using their car to recreate a crochet weaving pattern across multiple lanes of traffic. Despite these lopsided conditions, establishing someone's guilt through the constitutionally-mandated public jury trial avenue remains a pain in the ass for the system — way too expensive, takes way too long, and [gasp] might not actually work if the jury doesn't buy the government's story. The prosecutor takes the tack of "it sure would be super if you saved us the hassle and just admitted you're guilty." (No, history doesn't repeat itself, why do you ask?) and they incentive this outcome with plea deal offers that are entirely within their discretion. At least ninety-four percent of defendants take them up on it.
Keeping the assembly line humming was most of our job. We negotiated plea deals in whatever crevices in the courthouse building we could spare. Sometimes the prosecutors would find a spare jury room and set up shop there with their laptops, and all the defense attorneys (private and public alike) would crowd inside and wait in line to talk about the merits of their case. The open air atmosphere inside that room was chummy, but we also would witness negotiations happening transparently in real time.
One private attorney seemed particularly attentive to his appearance, and was that day glamorously adorned with a pinstripe suit and a lumbering gold watch that seemed uncomfortably heavy. When it was Pinstripes' turn in the pit, his pitch to the prosecutor was as succinct as the insider's lingo could sustain: "No priors, no aggravators, and the blow is in the low teens. Negligent amendment?" The prosecutor was nodding along and flipping through their notes and pulled out a template form to memorialize the deal. No surprise given the circumstances, I could've secured the same deal in my sleep for any of my clients.
But if you can swap in virtually any attorney into the slot without affecting the outcome, how would any individual attorney stand out from the rest? Theoretically a private attorney can devote their craft and grind away to become the best goddamn DUI lawyer to ever roam the land, but the infinitely more efficient approach to standing out is just by dialing up the marketing. They play the search engine optimization game and dump a thesaurus' worth of synonyms for the "I got a DUI and I'm not poor" query to capture those panic-stricken google searches. Their billboards are conveniently located near every major highway exit, with a photo crossing their arms to showcase how hard they'll fight the cops for you. One law firm required their attorneys to show up to court in a muscle car splattered with letters as tall as a toddler spelling out "DUI?" along with the firm's phone number. The specter of up to three hundred and sixty four days in jail ricocheting inside a client's head is all the sales closing you need to rack up a five to ten thousand dollar retainer. Three hours of my time as a public defender was a windfall to a private attorney lucky enough to snag a client with money.
Pricey Asymmetry
Outside of the courtroom and outside of the negotiation room, there were the hallways. The courthouse building was old enough to lack the luxury of private conference rooms, so every attorney would find an empty spot on the hallway pews to have a "confidential" meeting with their client. There was an unspoken code of honor not to eavesdrop, one which even the court marshals and deputies earnestly respected, but sometimes you can't help but overhear.
Pinstripes came out of the negotiation room, holding that basic bitch Negligent Amendment plea offer in his hands. His client was sitting in a pew, anxiously fidgeting.
"The prosecutors gave me hell for your case, but I put those sons-of-bitches through the ringer until they caved! They're willing to offer you that negligent reduction we talked about."
The sigh of relief from the client felt like it was forced out by bellows. He visibly relaxed, managed to crack a smile, presumably relieved he was finally allowed to drop the emotional rucksack he'd been carting around.
A necessary throat-clearing: an attorney's competence and commendability is not at all predicated on either their practice area or the source of their compensation. Pinstripes was a competent attorney. He delivered on effective representation, and his client was fully satisfied with the resolution. Pinstripes may have been exaggerating his own contributions, but he was under no formal obligation to notify his client of any cheaper competitors. All I point out here is how different circumstances can lead to different incentives. Mr. Monk Sleeves above had over the years whittled himself away into a finely-honed and effective apparatus, devoid of any extraneous adornments. It didn't matter how stupid his sleeves looked, he was still going to be appointed to clients. Privately retained attorneys face a different set of incentives. They need the hand that pays to feel good about the transaction and so have every incentive to exaggerate their efforts. The fact that their client has money to pay them very likely means they've never been in trouble before, never needed a lawyer before, and never had to face the bore end of a judge before. The paying client is unlikely to get arrested again, and even if he did he never would attain the bird's eye view of the system necessary to evaluate Pinstripe's comparative utility. Classic information asymmetry.
Can money help tip the needle? Yes, of course, sometimes, and typically only when gargantuan sums are levied. OJ Simpson had the means and motivation to throw loot at objectively hopeless needle in a haystack endeavors. For DUIs, I knew of one case where the guy blew a 0.12% BAC (not that bad by my caseload's standard) and managed to get acquitted after sinking about $20,000 to fly in three different nationally-recognized breath test experts to testify at his trial in podunk district court.
But most of the time, no. The primary benefit of money is as a paradoxical prophylactic — the fact that you have it is a very good indicator you won't need to use it.
364 Days
I'll end with one last story. If someone is still in jail by the first appearance hearing, the court assumes they are indigent and expects the public defender's office to handle it unless a private attorney told them otherwise. I scanned through the dozens of cases on my jail calendar docket and quickly triaged them based on a brief skim of the docket and police reports. One guy stood out to me as uniquely fucked. It was a DUI, of course, except he was already on probation for a third DUI with the same court. Nothing within the police report raised any evidentiary red flags, this was a plain vanilla clean case as far as I could tell. I saw through the Matrix and read the green letters directly, and they spelled Doom.
Seated on the molded plastic chairs the jail uses as he wore some ill-fitting Crocs, I delivered my grim prognosis, appropriately qualified given my limited vantage point. I advised him not to bail out, as the money would vanish within the coffers of a bail bondsman and only provide a vanishingly temporary reprieve from jail. Spending several thousand dollars to be out for a few weeks didn't seem worth it to me, but I reminded him it was his and his family's choice to make.
The next time I saw him was in court, and he was not wearing jail scrubs with Crocs. I walked up to talk to him but before I could get a word in, he cut me off brusquely and flat-out declared he didn't me because he had retained private counsel. All delivered with the haughty cadence that would make a Royalist blush. I shrugged and moved on to my next entry. With him having bailed out and hiring a private attorney, his expenses were steadily mounting.
What the judge eventually did with his case was highly unusual, but not at all surprising to me, given my scrying ability. He plead guilty, because of course, and the judge was so fed up with his repeat offenses that she didn't even bother giving him a probation period to right his wrongs, just imposed and closed. He was sentenced to the maximum three-hundred and sixty four days, to this day the only time I ever saw it happen. His lawyer could've been a pillow and nothing would have been different.
I must confess schadenfreude. Despite my own feelings about the carceral state, someone else's liberty is a small price to pay for gratifying my own ego and affirming my prognostications.
If you're in trouble with the law, do your best to qualify for a public defender. They may not always have pinstripes, but they know the system and the players inside and out. The Constitution guarantees your right to change your mind at any point after, but there's no harm in test-driving the budget option first. You might get to the same destination, just with a lot more money in your wallet.
[1] I made this up.
[2] The number of methodological issues inherent in comparing public defenders and private attorneys is way too long to get into here.
[3] For those who are curious, this is me. I got my start working for a public agency but then opened my own private practice. So I'm technically a private attorney, but one whose caseload is 100% indigent defense. It's much simpler and still accurate to just call myself a public defender, and no I will not change my Tinder bio.
ymeskhout
1yr ago
Leftist video game youtuber Hbomberguy just put out a remarkable two hour video. Ostensibly, all he set out to do at first was investigate the origin of the "Oof" death sound used in the obscenely popular video game Roblox. The basic story was not that difficult to piece together: a few years ago another guy noticed "Oof" in an older video game called Messiah where the sound effect credits listed Joey Kuras and Tommy Tallarico. Tallarico owns an audio company named after himself, and Kuras worked for that company. Kuras is a prolific sound effects designer who worked on a ton of video games over the years, and is still quietly plugging away in the sound effects industry.
Tallarico's personality is much more bombastic and showy in contrast to Kuras. While he has bona fide creative chops as a video game composer, he hasn't really worked on anything since his career peak in the 90s and 2000s. He seems content to ride the coattails of his past achievements, and recently used his semi-celebrity status to seek crowdfunding for a new home video game console called the Intellivision Amico. The Amico was announced by Tallarico way back in 2018 but its release has been repeatedly delayed with no sign that it's getting any closer to existing. Citing the delays, Tallarico turned to asking for money through crowdfunding campaigns and was successful, raising at least $18 million dollars. Tallarico launched at least four different funding campaigns, each one on a different crowdfunding platforms (curious!) before abandoning the final attempt after raising only $58k. During all these delays, leaked internal documents showed that the Amico was going to use some shitty obsolete hardware and Tallarico of course responded by threatening lawsuits and calling people "gaming racists".
Back to Roblox. They apparently got the "Oof" sound from some random sound library that included it without permission from Tallarico's company. When Tallarico found out his company's sound was being used by an obscenely lucrative video game corporation, he sprung to action and demanded a shitton of money from Roblox in licensing fees. The two kind of danced around this issue for a couple of years, working out a deal involving royalties before Roblox eventually stopped using the sound. Curiously however, when Tallarico talked about who exactly created the sound, he spoke vaguely and frequently alternated between "we" and "I" when discussing its progeny. Hbomberguy does some research and concludes (for many many reasons) that the evidence overwhelmingly favors crediting Joey Kuras as the sound's creator, not Tallarico. But if Tallarico is exaggerating about this for prestige points, is he lying about anything else? This is the part where the video goes completely off the rails. Hbomberguy was originally going to stop the video at this point, but curiosity got the better of him and he went down a deep deep rabbit hole and started fact-checking everything.
As an illustrative example, Tallarico repeatedly highlights how he is the recipient of the Guinness World Record for the "person who has worked on the most video games in their lifetime" with credits in at least 275 games, maybe even 350 games depending on how Tallarico tells it. At this point it's kind of a running joke that the world records Guinness bandies about are increasingly ludicrously specific (highest number of organic cherry pies eaten while bouncing on a pogo stick at sea level or whatever). Guinness makes money by selling its books but the organization also offers its services to anyone who has the $10,000 or so it costs to have an official Guinness world record adjudicator show up in person for your marketing stunt. So the organization is less an authoritative body and more of a novelty commercial business, but whatever. Tallarico's world record was apparently bestowed in 2008, but it only shows up in the off-brand "Gamer's Edition" book, and the source for this claim appears to be just something that Tallarico said during an interview. Setting aside the lack of verification for something so banal, can anyone charitably reach anything close to the 275 350 total amount of games? Tallarico has a list of video games he has "worked on" on his official website and the list does have 295 entries. Close enough, right? Well until you realize that Tallarico inflates the number of entries in many ways, including listing games with "Special Thanks" credits, or listing the exact same game multiple times depending on how many systems it was released on. For example, Tallarico definitely did the music for Earthworm Jim and its sequel, but instead of having two mentions for Earthworm Jim, he has it eighteen times on his list. Guinness gave Tallarico a certificate for his "worked on the most video games in their lifetime" claim in 2008. For whatever reason, Guinness thereafter revised the language and gave him an updated record certificate for "most prolific composer of video game soundtracks" in 2014 instead. The coup de grâce is that Tallarico kept and displays both certificates in a bid to also inflate the number of total world records he holds.
I don't know for sure if there's an overarching lesson here. Tallarico is quite clearly a flagrantly unapologetic fabulist, and Hbomberguy's video is deliciously entertaining solely for the sheer brazenness of it all. The biggest surprise in my opinion is that Tallarico managed to get away with this for so long, despite regularly interacting with a nerdy demographic I would assume would be especially fastidious about video game history claims. But no one seems to have bothered to check any of his claims, until now. There's still a lot of alpha in being skeptical and googling shit. Be safe out there.
ymeskhout
1yr ago
An update, largely for the sake of visibility, about my post below on January 6th defendants.
I received a number of very helpful responses pointing out some things I missed. I was wrong when I said @anti_dan 's claim about J6 defendants "held without bail for wandering in" was fictitious. At least three different people reasonably fit this qualification: Timothy Louis Hale-Cusanelli, Karl Dresch, Michael Curzio, and possibly others. All three had their bail denied, meaning they were going to remain behind bars no matter what, and no amount of money would get them released ahead of trial. Dresch and Curzio ended up getting released about 6 months later after pleading guilty to misdemeanors. Hale was convicted at trial and was sentenced to 48 months of prison.
The reasons why their pretrial release was unconditionally denied are not that surprising, especially in light of how unforgiving US legal standards are in this area. Hale was frantically trying to destroy evidence by deleting his accounts and disposing of clothing & javelin flag pole. His coworkers at the naval weapons base he had a security clearance for thought he was crazy because he'd regularly show up to work with a Hitler mustache and make holocaust jokes. Curzio spent 8 years in prison for attempted 1st degree murder conviction, and within two years of his release he perhaps demonstrated some poor judgment by traveling from Florida to be on the frontlines of the J6 riot. Dresch is someone whose case I wrote about before within the discussion of pretrial detention. He had bad criminal history (multiple law enforcement obstruction charges, and a number of felonies from when he led cops on a high-speed chase reaching speeds of 145mph) and despite his felony convictions, he was caught with multiple guns after J6.
So going back to @anti_dan 's original claim:
That you can be held without bail for wandering in, without them even proving that you knew it was illegal to be there (for most people the barricades had been long abandoned by the incompetent, Pelosi directed, Capitol Police), is Eugene Debbs shit.
In case you don't know, Debs was a prominent and unusually eloquent socialist (Freddie DeBoer is a big big fan) who was sentenced to ten years for sedition for protesting America's participation in WW1. If you've ever heard the phrase "can't yell fire in a crowded theater", it's because that was used by Oliver Wendell Holmes to justify the imprisonment of another socialist WW1 protestor in Schenck v. United States, and so Debs' SCOTUS appeal was rejected for the same reasons. First Amendment jurisprudence was pathetic back then.
I don't know if anti_dan still holds their belief on comparing some J6 defendants to Debs, but now that we have some identifiable cases of people who were held without bail for wandering in, perhaps this can prompt a more fruitful discussion on the legitimacy of this comparison. Some questions for everyone: Are you surprised by the reasons why these people were denied pretrial release? Is denial of their release indicative of politically-motivated retribution?
ymeskhout
1yr ago
Truth is a defense to defamation. Why do you think Fox isn't trying that approach?
It's well established that there has long been a concerted effort by the left to narrow the definition of racism to ONLY apply when the discrimination is done against an oppressed racial minority. Under the revised definition, "anti-white racism" cannot be a thing. Although this redefinition may be fashionable among certain circles, it has never been reflected in anti-discrimination law within the United States. All the relevant civil rights laws I am aware of prohibit discrimination on the basis of race, full stop, without any qualifiers. Yet the "racism = power plus prejudice" crowd appears to be under the mistaken impression that discrimination against white people is legal.
A significant portion of the contemporary DEI training curricula is blatantly anti-white, and I've been curious why there have not been more legal challenges on that front. Part of it, I assume, is that any plaintiff who takes on this role will be subjected to a vicious public campaign of hate, as happened with Abigail Fisher in 2016, derided with nicknames like "Becky with the bad grades" and so on.
We haven't really had a case that dealt with the particular type of DEI training that became prominent after the 2020 summer protests/riots. One lawsuit recently filed in Seattle might be an interesting test case for this. Robby Soave covers this:
According to Diemert, a supervisor berated him for refusing to step down and yield his job to a person of color. He says he was asked, "What could a straight white male possibly offer our department?" And he says he was frequently made to participate in RSJI training, which involved insulting games and activities designed to address his alleged complicity in white supremacy.
[...]
RSJI's explicit mission statement was to inject race-based considerations into government work. One document summarizing the initiative's priorities listed colorblindness, not as a positive thing, but as a hindrance to be overcome. Another described colorblindness as "centering whiteness." Diemert says that his former colleagues took this mission very seriously. In fact, he discovered that one coworker had rejected a qualified white applicant from a public assistance program specifically because of the applicant's race. "I asked her, well, this doesn't make sense to me," he recalled. "Why did you deny this person? And she said, well, because they have white privilege." Diemert says he reported the matter to his supervisor—it was, in his view, obvious racial discrimination—but nothing was done about it.
I don't believe the legal system is a panacea, but it can offer a useful contrast in terms of how arguments that may be popular on Twitter get handled inside a courtroom. A related example that comes to mind was when a leftist activist tried to use a copyright lawsuit as a pretext to punish Sargon of Akkad but instead lost badly and was forced to pay $38k in attorney's fees. So I'm excited to see a real life lawyer try to defend Seattle's anti-white training in court. Should be fun.
ymeskhout
5mo ago
I got married a month ago, in a barebones courthouse elopement. Click through for some pictures of our adorable ring-bearer.
ymeskhout
3mo ago
If I'm making an argument about TTV, it would be nice if the responses are about TTV so I don't see what's irrelevant about that. I can't control what people say but my interest here is wanting to avoid time-wasting Gish gallops and motte-and-bailey diversions, because an unfortunately common rhetorical trick used by some when they encounter arguments inconvenient to their position is to try and change the subject.
You're welcome to suggest an alternative disclaimer wording, and you're also welcome to challenge my premise for why I even included a disclaimer.
ymeskhout
11mo ago
Back in the days before it was fashionable to prosecute Trump and anyone related to Trump, when the possible charges were against Hillary, it was a grave and serious thing to prosecute politicians, especially when they had possible elections in front of them. "That's the stuff of banana republics!" they said. "That's, like, what Putin does!" they said. It was "deeply dangerous for democracy". Whether or not our democracy was legitimate was supposedly hanging in the balance, depending upon whether their preferred candidate was charged with a crime. You don't hear that anymore.
Do you have any theories for why this changed? Were there any chants at political rallies or something agitating for this shift in norms?
ymeskhout
1yr ago
I ran a little experiment this week. Deep within a thread from last week @motteposting and I were discussing the Hunter Biden laptop story. The quick context necessary here is that some emails discussing a deal with the Chinese company CEFC mentioned "the big guy" getting a 10% cut of the deal. I already think it's obvious that Hunter Biden was getting sweetheart board of directors positions and other highly lucrative financial opportunities almost entirely because of who his father is. But the theory here is that it wasn't just Hunter cashing in on his name, but that Joe Biden was explicitly contemplated as receiving kickbacks from these kinds of deals.
[For the record I agree that exploiting one's own political positions for monetary gain is not good. Even if nothing untoward actually happens, it's still a really bad look for the son of a president to be involved in deals and investments, especially with foreign governments where the influence-peddling concern would be at its apex.]
The evidence that motteposting presented that Joe Biden is indeed the "big guy" is that one of the people involved in negotiating the CEFC deal, Tony Bobulinski, personally confirmed that fact. I hadn't heard of Bobulinski before and didn't know why I should believe what he said. You can click through the thread for the details but I highlighted a few reasons why I would be skeptical of Bobulinski, but none of it was really a smoking gun. If you were to ask me to describe my actual belief it would be "Bobulinski's claim is certainly plausible but this other stuff kind of contradicts him so overall I'm skeptical but leaning towards not believing him." Motteposting was definitely not as skeptical as I was, and I found it curious that he (sorry if I misgendered you) appeared primed to believe Bobulinski in ways that seemed highly credulous.
This reminded me of another instance where someone's credibility was being evaluated as a result of a bombastic claim they made. Think back to six months ago, when Cassidy Hutchinson was in the news. For those who don't remember, Cassidy is the White House aide who gave the bombshell testimony about Trump lunging at the wheel of his Secret Service vehicle and at an agent when he was told he wasn't going to the capitol on January 6th. Everyone here knows I really don't like Trump so theoretically I would be primed to believe something that paints him in an embarrassing light. But similar to Bobulinski, I never heard of Cassidy before and don't know who she is but my opinion of her claims regarding the steering wheel incident hasn't changed: it cuts against her that she's relying on hearsay within hearsay ("someone told me someone else said this happened") but she at least names every level of the hearsay. Immediately after her testimony came out, multiple news outfits cited an anonymous source close to the Secret Service that two agents were prepared to testify that the lunging incident never happened. As far as I can tell these agents never came forward publicly but maybe that's still in the works. Similar to Bobulinski above, if you were to ask me to describe my belief it would be "Cassidy's claim is tenuously supported but is neither implausible nor substantially contradicted, so I would lean towards believing her but wouldn't bet the farm."
So back to the thread about Bobulinski, instead of writing my own position about him transparently, I wrote this instead:
One possible explanation is that Bobulinski is apparently still very upset with Jim and Hunter Biden over a deal he missed out on. He said himself the two brothers "defrauded" him of at least $5 million. This seems like good evidence he's at least partly motivated by payback. The Hunter Laptop saga hasn't really delivered and people lost interest over the years, which means right-wing pundits like Tucker Carlson and Sean Hannity are especially excited to herald Bobulinski with a moment in the spotlight. It doesn't matter if all that Bobulinski has is uncorroborated gossip, they know they can shore up ratings by resurrecting a dead story on a political figure their audience loathes.
If any of this comes across as weirdly stilted, I was intentionally trying to mirror what motteposting writing about Cassidy Hutchinson:
Simpler hypothesis: Cassidy Hutchinson is a former employee of Meadows’s who had a falling out with him and was subsequently passed over for a post-WH job in Trumpworld. This is her revenge tour. And the January 6th Committee is only too happy to turn to tabloid gossip because their ratings sucked and it worked well for some of their members three straight years during the Trump-Russia conspiracy theory heyday.
My suspicion was that motteposting was primed to believe Bobulinski and not believe Cassidy solely because he liked one conclusion but not the other. Obviously the two scenarios are not precisely comparable 1:1 but I think they have enough clear parallels for this to be an instructive exercise. If I'm being fully honest, the scenario I would find the most emotionally satisfying and personally motivated towards pulling off would be where motteposting blunders haplessly into my trap and exposes himself as a complete hypocritical partisan about the standards of credibility he applies. I must admit that I did not get that, and I'll specifically give credit for things he did that were commendable.
The first thing motteposting hones in on is that Cassidy has a motive to lie. The evidence he cites is entirely just this:
But there was a falling out between Hutchinson and Meadows in 2021, a former White House aide told CNN. She was supposed to become permanent staff at Mar-a-Lago, but those plans fell through, the outlet reported. The New Jersey native has yet to hold a full-time job since leaving the White House, the Washington Post reported.
So an anonymous source told CNN that Cassidy was supposed to have a job at a Mar-a-Lago but didn't, and now she's still unemployed. Based on this alone motteposting comfortably claims that Cassidy's testimony is "her revenge tour". I can see how being passed up for a job might make someone bitter, but it seems highly implausible that's enough to motivate someone into a public scorched earth campaign of defamation (and this didn't come out until later but the Daily Caller obtained text messages where Cassidy expresses annoyance at being subpoenaed to testify).
In contrast, Bobulinski claims Hunter Biden "defrauded" him of $5 million, which seems a much sharper indication of personal animus. To motteposting's credit he at least gives a concession of this point with "Maybe so. That's something to take into account." and "I agree that his motive for revenge means what he says should be taken with a grain of salt." But why is this not enough to conclude "This is Bobulinski's revenge tour" in the same way he concluded about Cassidy?
The second thing mentioned is that Cassidy's audience (J6 committee) is motivated to accept her lies because their TV ratings suck. That's a plausible explanation but it seems to apply at least as much to cable news pundits who rely on a content pipeline constantly running for their living. But unlike with Cassidy, motteposting does not appear to think audience credulity is a salient point in Bobulinsky's case.
I think motteposting made some good points about the structure of the CEFC deal. The fact that Hunter Biden was getting double the shares (20%) compared to his partners is compelling evidence he was going to hold it for someone else. If that's the surreptitious structure, then it makes sense for Joe Biden's name not to be on the agreement itself. There's good reasons to not believe Gilliar's denial that Joe Biden was involved, since there are text messages where he tells Bobulinski not to talk about Joe Biden's involvement except in face-to-face. Bobulinski also appears to be cooperating with the FBI and I agree that raises his credibility. Overall, motteposting did a good job convincing me that Bobulinski is telling the truth and that Joe Biden was at least contemplated to receive a cut of a deal that fell through. I updated my belief to "I have questions about some details but Bobulinski is probably telling the truth."
It still seems that motteposting was unusually primed to denounce Cassidy as a vindictive liar on a revenge tour. I think it's helpful to investigate to what extent our biases motivate us towards credulity and away from skepticism when presented with conclusions we already favor. If you ever suspect me of doing that, you should call me out.
ymeskhout
1yr ago
I think you meant "we can assume it's because you weren't doing your job the way he wanted you to". If so then yes, I agree, but that would be an unremarkable observation. The real question is what exactly Elon Musk was upset about that led to this guy's firing. Musk has fired Twitter developers that criticized him or talked back at him. It's his right to fire them, but it comes across as petty and vindictive. Because he has a very recent history of this kind of retribution against his employees, I don't think it's reasonable for me to assume that Musk fired Baker for lofty high-brow reasons. It could be true, but I don't have evidence to believe that at this point.
In a comment below @DradisPing made the confident assertion that "Sharpiegate was ultimately confirmed" but when I asked for evidence they couldn't provide anything except their "recollection". This is quite a curious phenomenon for many reasons.
For those not in the know, Sharpiegate was one of the very first entries in the very long list of 2020 election fraud claims. This theory appears to have originated with an unnamed woman outside an AZ polling place claiming to have seen tabulation machines reject ballots where sharpie markers were used. She hypothesized that poll workers were handing out sharpies to voters with the express purpose of invalidating ballots. This claim was quickly repeated by others and went viral, with some additional details glommed on (e.g. ink bleeding through paper, voters finding their ballots were 'canceled', etc.). The Maricopa board of supervisors quickly issued a statement the next day on Nov 4 2020:
sharpies do not invalidate ballots. We did extensive testing on multiple different types of ink with our new vote tabulation equipment. Sharpies are recommended by the manufacturer because they provide the fastest-drying ink. The offset columns on ballots ensure that any bleed-through will not impact your vote. For this reason, sharpies were provided to in-person voters on Election Day.
As far as I can tell, Maricopa's statement was the last word on this topic, despite the amount of election integrity scrutiny that was subsequently focused on Arizona. Sharpiegate was an election fraud theory with an unusually short lifespan.
So back to @DradisPing, their confident assertion had more than just one piece:
-
Sharpiegate was ultimately confirmed
-
Some votes were lost because of Sharpiegate
-
The votes that were lost were primarily/entirely Trump votes
All three parts appear to be false. DradisPing was aware enough of Sharpiegate's history to know that it was putatively debunked (hence "ultimately confirmed"), so where did the other parts come from? DradisPing's claim was up for at least 5 hours and generated multiple comments before I took the unusual step of using Google (or Bing for the freaks out there, you know who you are) to see the assertions had any merit. If the only evidence they can muster is their "recollection", and if nothing on the internet corroborates this recollection, it's fair to conclude DradisPing was mistaken. If so, I will preemptively praise them for editing their post and admitting their error.
While it's not unusual for humans to err, it is unusual for errors to fall in the same direction as this one did. Assuming that DradisPing was earnestly mistaken, I would be very curious to know exactly how they came to believe multiple fictitious claims. We're all just fish doing our best to swim in this ether, and sometimes we inadvertently absorb false information just through osmosis. For example recently I was out drinking with a friend and we ended up talking about the nutritional value of organ meats and I made the confident assertion that "beef heart has a ton of creatine" but my friend gave me a skeptical "you sure about that?" look. Sure enough, a quick google search (or Ask Jeeves for all you good girls out there) made me realize I was talking out of my ass. My best guess is that I read a random bodybuilding forum post years ago, uncritically accepted it as true for whatever reason, and then carried it undisturbed since then.
[Edit1: a few people reasonably interpreted my story as me trying to downplay my errors by offering up something banal. That was not the intent. I've made other mistakes bigger than the example I used, but that was meant to be an illustration. Working backwards in time, one mistake I made was how I had previously heavily insinuated that Colin Wright was intentionally refusing to have his PayPal account restored as a way to grift more donations. I reached this belief based on how often he was shilling for donations and how he ignored my emails. After speaking to him further, I realized he had perfectly innocent reasons for having ignored me. I publicly stated that my suspicion was off-base.
Prior to that, I admitted error here: "I was wrong when I said @anti_dan 's claim about J6 defendants "held without bail for wandering in" was fictitious. At least three different people reasonably fit this qualification: Timothy Louis Hale-Cusanelli, Karl Dresch, Michael Curzio, and possibly others."]
Hopefully DradisPing will do the right thing here, but perhaps it's again worth revisiting why some people are apparently so reluctant to admit error? Question for everyone: Have you ever found yourself making errors in a uniform direction? If so, what steps did you take to prevent that from happening again? To the extent that your media diet, social bubble, whatever are the source of your errors, what heuristics do you follow to avoid falling into motivated reasoning and confirmation bias? And lastly, how can we make people less terrified of using search engines?
[Edit2: DradisPing now claims their source for this claim is remembering someone prominent on Twitter saying it. No other evidence has been presented besides that]
ymeskhout
1yr ago
I don't really understand your point. I've said many many times that voter fraud exists, and anyone who claims it doesn't exist is lying. I've also never claimed that the people who get caught for voter fraud constitute the entire universe of voter fraud. It's damn-near certain that plenty of people have engaged in voter fraud and gotten away with it, but how many exactly? Because there's a slight gap between a claim like A) "19 foreign nationals were caught illegally voting in North Carolina" and something like B) "vans are pulling up to polling places delivering suitcases full of tens of thousands of fraudulent ballots". You can't just point to A, add an unspecified "uncaught fraud" variable, and claim to have proven B. I can't just accept B as a leap of faith, and it's reasonable to discount B if the evidence presented in its support is consistently shoddy.
ymeskhout
3mo ago
Yeah that's true, I agree no one needs my permission! Do you have any opinions about whether TTV is lying or not?
ymeskhout
1yr ago
Sexual Panopticon in the Kingdom of Morocco
“Are you guys having sex in there??”
[I wrote this for Jesse Singal's newsletter in December, now unlocked for everyone]
Let's talk about sex. Specifically, let's talk about the bizarre dynamics of how sex is policed in the Islamic Kingdom that is my homeland.
Morocco's government is explicitly religious — there is no such thing as separation of Mosque and State. The constitution establishes the King as Amir al-Mu'minin, the supreme commander of the faithful. Morocco isn't alone here, as Muslim countries are notable not only for formally adopting a state religion but for regularly using government violence to enforce pious conduct among their populaces. This kind of enforcement is facilitated by a population's homogeneity — ninety-nine percent of Moroccans are Muslim and drawn from the same Arab-Berber ethnic stock. Given these factors, you might expect a very strict, orthodox version of Islam to reign, but the truth is a little more complicated.
Saudi Arabia stands out for its uniquely puritanical approach to Islam (known as Wahhabism), and for the notoriety of its religious police force (known as the mutawwa'in). The stories you've heard about Islam in general are probably true. Alcohol is haram. Pork is haram.Premarital sex is hella haram (unless you get a temporary marriage with a prostitute), and don't get me started on the premarital sex with a drunken pig hat trick. Some edicts are easier to enforce than others (say, by monitoring agricultural supply chains), but because fornication usually happens behind closed doors, the mutawwa'in schlep around Saudi Arabia's public spaces to cut off the problem at the source: ensuring no unrelated people of the opposite sex ever get a chance to interact alone. The authorities will do things like surveil entrances to shopping malls and make sure single men never set foot inside unless they're accompanied by a female relative. Any boy and girl caught on a date at a park or wherever might get forcibly escorted to the local police station. (Paradoxically, this obsession with disrupting such dyads might have the unintended consequences of making it easier for gay men to date — no one bats an eye at two dudes hanging out.)
Morocco is significantly chiller on this front. Compared to other Muslim countries, Morocco is known for being fairly relaxed — the land where women can wear bikinis to the beach and are not legally prohibited from operating motor vehicles, and where men and women freely comingle in public without the threat of being caned.
What accounts for this? It's Complicated™, but one explanation has to do with tourism. As the birthplace of Islam, Saudi Arabia welcomes millions of visitors for the Hajj — the annual pilgrimage to Mecca. Because this enormous "tourism" economy comes preinstalled, the country has long been kind of hostile to and uninterested in Western tourism (entire cities, like Mecca and Medina, are completely forbidden to non-Muslims).
In contrast, Morocco's location as one of the gateways to the Mediterranean is consistent with its long history of welcoming Western visitors (fun fact: it was the first country to recognize the newly independent United States back in 1777). Morocco often ties Egypt for first place as the most popular tourist destination in Africa, with millions of visitors every year, despite not having any pyramids. The economy's heavy reliance on tourism necessarily encourages tolerance of foreign kafirs purely as a cynical, pragmatic matter.
The puzzle about how the government can have its cake (enforce religious mores) and eat it too (don't scare the tourists) nevertheless remains. One way it tries to solve this conundrum is simply by explicitly bifurcating the legal code, with some laws carving out broad exceptions for foreigners. It's impossible to keep this laissez-faire approach exclusively quarantined just to les étrangers, and so the tolerance for secularism necessarily bleeds out somewhat.
While Morocco may lack Saudi-style Sharia SWAT teams, a distributed network of civilian snitches can step in to fill the void wherever the government's efforts at morality policing fall short. In 2016, two gay men were violently beaten by neighbors who shouted on the now-unavailable video "this is not manliness" throughout the attack. The assailants were the ones who summoned the police, who then arrested the victims for "sexual deviancy." For economic reasons, but also to avoid the impropriety of scandal, single adults in Morocco are expected to reside with their families and move out only when they get married. Studies have consistently established that the most reliable form of birth control is to live in your parents' apartment with your four siblings. And so landlords in Morocco will flat-out refuse to lease apartments to unmarried individuals, especially women, for fear of potentially bringing dishonor to their roof. Good luck finding a place to hook up with your Minder match.
"What about hotels?" you sheepishly ask. You naive fool, they're way ahead of you. The ultimate example of this public-private partnership enforcement is Article 490 of the penal code, which prohibits unmarried couples from renting hotel rooms. Anyone caught is liable to jail terms, and hotel keepers are legally required to ask for marriage certificates, with police officers checking their logs every week to ensure compliance.
I was subject to this myself. The last time I visited my homeland, I briefly stayed with my sister at a hotel. I announced myself at the front desk, and upon realizing that I, a full-blooded male with no wedding ring, was going to reside in the same room as a female who also lacked a ring, the clerk gave me a raised eyebrow. You'd think our sharing a last name would have been sufficient evidence for the front desk, but given the prevalence and acceptance of cousin marriage in this area, I was required by the keeper to provide proof of sufficient consanguinity. Season two of the masterpiece TV show Ramy portrayed the titular character confronted by Cairo hotel staff about him shacking up with his cousin (spoiler: they were indeed fucking). [I can't say enough good things about this show, and I have emphatically written my praise for its contribution toward providing "true" diversity in media.]
The encounter was surprising (and terrifying) enough that some viewers expressed incredulity at this plot point, but rest assured, it's a depiction of something very real.
A cousin of mine — male, single, unmarried, and on the aforementioned form of parental cohabitation birth control — told me his favorite method for finding a place to hook up: Arrive separately to the hotel, get two separate rooms, and sneak into the same room when the coast is clear. If somehow the double-booking scheme falls through, you can get the hotelier to look the other way with a fistful of dirhams.
Maybe now's a good time to talk about how corrupt Morocco is.
[continued below due to character limit]
ymeskhout
1yr ago
Then we had some weird shit on election night that still hasn’t been fully explained (eg the water main break that wasn’t).
What attempts have you made to research this issue, and what evidence would you accept that it was investigated satisfactorily?
ymeskhout
1yr ago
I'm not sure how you misread what I wrote to this degree. The post you are directly responding to explicitly said that it's possible that Musk fired Baker for lofty high-brow reasons. It's perfectly reasonable to place the burden of proof on the one making an assertion and my assertion in this case is "I don't have evidence to believe that". What objection do you have with my assertion?
You are instead asking me to provide evidence that Baker was fired for petty reasons, or that Baker acted in good faith. I never asserted either positions! I don't know if either of those things are true! How many different ways do I need to say this?
The emails make it clear the management at Twitter reflexively did not want the Hunter story to spread, and they either deluded themselves or made up the "hacked materials" excuse as a pretext to suppressing the story. In the end, the suppression likely became way bigger of a story than the story itself, to the point that even Democratic lawmakers were contacting Twitter to tell them what a boneheaded move that was.
When this story first came out, I was skeptical about the laptop in part because Rudy Guiliani was the source but since then I don't have any doubts that this was really Hunter Biden's laptop and emails. I still don't know how this was supposed to be such a smoking gun. Hunter is obviously a fuck up, and I think it's obvious that he only got executive positions because of who his father is, but the attempts to stretch this up the chain haven't really delivered so far, even an another two years after.
ymeskhout
1yr ago
Both your explanations are reasonable. Still, it wouldn't hurt if people tried to put up a fight more often with more companies. That would give us useful information.
I conceded that my legal background definitely gave me a strong edge here, but I think that was primarily in reducing the intimidation factor. Arbitration is intended to be a departure from the procedure labyrinth and inscrutable legalese that you find in traditional courtrooms. I would love to see how someone who isn't a legal professional wrangles with this process but I could not find any examples in my search.
ymeskhout
2mo ago
People on here often like to prognosticate doom for the Down's kids if they are permitted to be born and grow up, but my dude, I tell you: parents much more likely to be committed to doing best for the kid, much more likely to be two parents, and way less chance kid is going to grow up to be involved in drugs, petty crime, and a string of kids by different partners, not-so-optional extra includes jail time (not no chance but way less chance).
Yes, I've noticed a similar pattern regarding my verifiably low-IQ clients. They're so chill and easy to work with and overall have their shit together. I get whiplash when I see low-IQ reflexively correlated with criminality because while that may certainly be a component (from the standpoint of making it more likely to be caught criming) the far bigger problem is horrendously poor impulse control and sociopathic tendencies.
ymeskhout
3mo ago
I don't believe I gained any super powers from being a lawyer, and I reached my positions with access to the exact same resources that anyone else has. But whatever advantages I may have I would assume are mitigated by sharing resources ahead of time and the 1v3 format. I'm open to other suggestions. I also think it's perfectly ok/commendable for people to admit they're incapable of defending their beliefs, but keep in mind that the three I tagged have made confident assertions about my dishonesty and bad faith on this particular topic. Unless someone is making a baseless accusation, I have to assume it's based on some evidence and that they would be eager for an opportunity to establish the validity of their beliefs.
ymeskhout
1yr ago
Part 2 [continued from above]
Maybe now's a good time to talk about how corrupt Morocco is. Not only can you bribe cops, bureaucrats, judges, officials, whoever to make problems go away, it's expected of you to make anything happen. Because corruption is, by definition, surreptitious and thus difficult to observe and measure directly, the best evidence normally available are studies like the Corruption Perception Index, which rely on subjective reporting. On that ranking, Morocco places eighty-seventh out of 180 countries for honesty. But perception doesn't tell us the full story on corruption, so I want to take this opportunity to cite what is perhaps my favorite economics study, based solely on its ingenious methodology.
Diplomats enjoy legal immunity, and for a while this extended even to banalities like parking tickets. Researchers examined the pattern of parking violations of United Nations diplomats working in Manhattan and used it to construct a plausible heuristic for each country's social norms for corruption — the idea being that a history either of no violations or no unpaid tickets (despite the lack of legal penalties) would indicate a low propensity for corruption. By the unpaid tickets standard, Morocco ranked #13 in the world for corruption.
This illustrates the other way the legal system is functionally bifurcated: money. The ban on unmarried couples staying in hotels is one of the laws that, at least on paper, applies equally both to Moroccans and foreigners. But officials know not to do something as idiotic as enforcing fornication prohibitions on dumbfounded white people just there to hashtag-Marrakesh and, most importantly, spend money. Everyone knows not to kill the golden goose of tourism, but equally as important is not to slut-shame it either.
Similarly, Muslims — which all Moroccans are legally assumed to be unless officially denoted otherwise — are purportedly prohibited from purchasing alcohol of any kind in Morocco, and yet this decree is flagrantly and openly violated every day. Alcohol bodegas are found on almost every corner, and none of the proprietors inquire about the Shahadah at the point of sale. Same with Moroccans rich enough to eat at a restaurant — they're presumed to be secular enough to be trusted to peruse the wine list. Either way, there's enough lucre to grease the wheels and keep the coppers at bay.
The economist Bruce Yandle coined the term "Bootleggers and Baptists" to describe a type of regulatory capture. Baptists are the ones pure of heart, who want to ban alcohol for moral reasons. Bootleggers are the profiteers, who want to ban alcohol for their pecuniary benefit because they have a competitive advantage working within an illicit market. The ones who want to uphold the law work synergistically (if unintentionally) with the ones seeking to break it for profit. The movement to repeal Morocco's hotel law has made some progress, but it has also been hit by pushback from Baptists and Bootleggers alike. The Baptists are ever concerned about the youth's downward trajectory into degeneracy, and anxious about transforming the Kingdom's hotels into functional brothels (which, given the lack of hook-up venues, is not an unreasonable concern). The Bootleggers are hoteliers who benefit from the "double-booking" trick and government officials reluctant to give up a source of extorted bribery. Meanwhile, the loopholes built into the system mean that the law really only applies to the poors, so who cares?
I'll end with a story an aunt relayed to me, which perfectly illustrates the bizarre amalgam of business-as-usual corruption within Moroccan law enforcement.
My aunt was driving with her friend to another city, miles away from her home. A cop pulled her over for speeding. The traffic code is enforced under penalty of a fine, with the money paid directly to the officer (I know, it's nuts). If you don't happen to have the money on hand, not a problem — they'll just confiscate your actual driver license and hold it at the local Sûreté Nationale bureau until you can come back with the funds.
Problem number one: My aunt did not have enough to pay the full traffic fine amount, the functional equivalent of about $40, and having her license confiscated this far away from her home would be an enormous hassle. While the cop was away, her passenger helpfully suggested offering a $10 bribe to the officer. But problem number two: My aunt had only a $20 bill, with no way to make change. Ten dollars would be a perfectly appropriate amount for a bribe, but getting only a 50% discount on the traffic fine felt like an awful bargain.
The cop heard all this. He popped up and said, "I have change for a twenty." My aunt kept her license that night.
It's interesting to me that even something this tepid generated a strong pushback. Passing the amendment would've done nothing on its own, but instead just would have laid the groundwork for future legislative effort. This further highlights just how much of a losing position banning abortion is on the overall policy spectrum.
The rejections were very surprising to me. I figured that after a decade of seeing states legalize marijuana as NBD, this would have continued the momentum. I guess this is a blind spot of mine, as I just cannot comprehend the desire to keep sending people to jail for smoking weed.
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