ymeskhout
2mo ago
Given the significant interest around the 2020 stolen election claims (definitely my favorite hobby horse topic), and the serious accusations that I have been weakmanning the overall category of election fraud claims, I would like to extend an open invitation to anyone interested in exposing the errors of my ways to a real-time discussion for a Bailey episode.
Here are the conditions I would suggest:
- Given the wide array of stolen election claims and our limited time on earth, you will have free reign to pick 2 or 3 of whatever you believe are the strongest claims worthy of attention, particularly if any of the claims are ones I have conspicuously ignored. Hopefully this will address any concerns that I'm weakmanning.
- Once you have the 2-3 topics chosen, you agree to share in advance all the evidence that you plan to rely upon to make your case so that I have a chance to look at it. Same obligation applies to me for anything I might rely on. I want to avoid anyone thinking that they were either surprised or caught off-guard, and it's also not interesting to listen to someone carefully read a 263-page PDF.
- In terms of number of participants, this might be best as me versus 3. Any more than that is prone to be too chaotic and too tedious to edit, and any fewer I'd be concerned of being insufficiently comprehensive about the topic.
- Everyone involved will have immediate access to everyone's raw recording to guard against any concerns of selective/misleading editing.
- Ideally, you're a bona fide believer (or at least genuinely believe the theories are sufficiently plausible) in the stolen election claims you're arguing for, rather than just someone who can competently steelman the arguments. I want to make sure that every claim is adequately defended.
- I don't intend enforcing any strict format or time limit, as it would be best to discuss each claim for as long as is necessary to ensure it all gets a fair shake.
Are any of the above unreasonable or unfair? Do you have any suggested additions/changes?
I've been trying to set a conversation like this for years but haven't found any takers. @Dean, @jfk, @motteposting are the ones I know are sufficiently motivated and informed about the topic, and whom I'd most look forward to dissecting this topic with. Feel free to nominate anyone else you think would be good.
Trump got hit by two gag orders from two different judges. The precedent in this area of law is severely underdeveloped, both because so few defendants get gagged, and of those who do very few have the resources or energy to mount an appeal. Jacob Sullum writes a great overview of the issue:
U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who is presiding over Donald Trump's trial on federal charges related to his attempted reversal of Joe Biden's 2020 election victory, yesterday imposed a gag order that bars the former president from "publicly targeting" witnesses, prosecutors, or court personnel. Trump lawyer John Lauro vigorously opposed the order on First Amendment grounds, saying it would stop his client from "speak[ing] truth to oppression." While that characterization exaggerates the order's impact, constraining the speech of a criminal defendant, especially one who is in the midst of a presidential campaign, does raise largely unsettled constitutional issues.
Chutkan's order was provoked by Trump's habit of vilifying anyone who crosses him, including Special Counsel Jack Smith ("deranged"), the prosecutors he oversees (a "team of thugs"), and Chutkan herself (a "highly partisan" and "biased, Trump Hating Judge"). "IF YOU GO AFTER ME, I'M COMING AFTER YOU!" Trump wrote on Truth Social after his indictment in this case. The next day, The New York Times notes, "a Texas woman left a voice mail message for Judge Chutkan, saying, 'If Trump doesn't get elected in 2024, we are coming to kill you, so tread lightly.'"
So to avoid the common pitfalls in discussions like this, set aside Trump for a moment. Should judges have any authority to impose gag orders? If so, what limits should be in place? After working out the questions in theory, how does your position apply to Trump?
I think gag orders can be appropriate in a very limited set of circumstances. For example let's say a newspaper owner is charged with murder in a small town. He should always have the absolute and unrestricted right to discuss the allegations against him and mount a defense in public. There are some areas where it starts to get cloudy for me, like for example if he hires an investigator (legal & appropriate) to dig into the history of the main witness against him (legal & appropriate) and he gets his hands on her diary (potentially legal & potentially appropriate). He then spends the lead-up to the murder trial publishing massive coverage the lurid details of all her sex kinks and fantasies, which isn't implicated in the murder charges. To me this starts to look like witness tampering/intimidation, where the defendant is humiliating a witness with the intent to discourage her from giving testimony.
So my answer is here would be yes, judges can impose gag orders but they should be extremely narrow. The operating principle should be to always allow defendants to discuss the direct charges against them, including the ability to discredit witness credibility. There's a blurry line between when someone is discrediting a witness on relevant matters, and when they're just trying to make their life hell to discourage them from testifying. An example of this blurry line is what happened to SBF, where his pretrial release was revoked in part because he leaked Caroline Ellison's diary to the NYT and because he seemed to have been coordinating testimony with FTX's general counsel.
So with that out of the way, how does it apply to Trump? Judge Chutkan's order restricts him from making statements that "target" the prosecutor, court staff, and "reasonably foreseeable witnesses or the substance of their testimony". Practically speaking, it goes without saying that it's a terrible idea to talk shit about the court or prosecutor while your case(s) is pending. There are some obvious areas where Trump's commentary is inane and irrelevant, like posting a photo of a judge's law clerk and claiming she's "Schumer's girlfriend", or posting about the prosecutor's family members. Discrediting witnesses is harder to draw a clean line on, because again there's a gradient between discrediting and intimidating. I think Trump should have the absolute and unrestricted right to discuss any of his charges and discredit any evidence and witnesses against him. While I disagree with that part of the ruling, I don't know how I would rephrase that clause, and so my reaction is that in these close cases we should default to allowing speech rather than restricting it.
Edit: @guajalote changed my mind on the propriety of Judge Engoron's order prohibiting "personal attacks on my members of my court staff". I agree that criticizing government officials should always be protected, even if the speech is targeting irrelevant or uninvolved individuals. A narrower order prohibiting incitement would've been more appropriate.
ymeskhout
8mo ago
Why Cross-Examination Is So Damn Great
There's an obvious solace within the written medium. You get to carve out a space safe from constraints and take as much as you need to fully express yourself. Words are neat! I mean, just look at the torrential avalanche I regularly shit out just on my own.
But still, I don't want people to forget about the benefits to real-time adversarial conversations, benefits which cannot be as easily replicated with writing. I recently wrote (ahem) about how humans have this nasty aversion to admitting error. You'll rarely ever get someone willing to outright say "I am a liar" and the roomy comfort that we all love so much about text also provides bad faith actors the ability to build up elaborate defensive ramparts in peace. Nevertheless, even in instances where a smoking gun confession is missing, I cite to a few examples to outline how you can still construct a damning indictment using only a few minor inference hops:
Ehrlich is playing a seemingly uncomfortable game of Twister here, but his behavior makes perfect sense if you read intelligence and agency behind his decisions. The only explanation for the indirect, tangential, and collateral measurements is that Ehrlich knows that a direct measurement will not be favorable to his pet theory. He does not believe in truth, but rather believes in belief as the kids say, and he's not willing to jeopardize it.
Of course, this gets way easier to accomplish in a real-time confrontation. Chalk it up to the stereotype but yes, I fucking love cross-examination and I want to explain why. Lessons From The Screenplay had a fantastic video analyzing the climactic cross-examination from the movie A Few Good Men while using the vocabulary normally reserved to discuss physical duels. The story's hook is watching the military lawyer protagonist (Kaffee) figure out how he can elicit an outright confession from a notoriously disciplined and experienced commander (Jessep) using only the 'weapons' found within a courtroom. The primary elegance of cross-examination as a weapon stems from the fact that, when done successfully, you can fabricate a solid cage for your opponents using only their own words as ingredients. Kaffee does exactly this by asking questions that appear superficially innocent but, when joined together, weld into a formidable trap Jessep is unable to escape.
I want to highlight a few other recent examples, running the gamut across the political spectrum. My aim here is not to ignite a debate about the specific issue that happens to be discussed (though a toe dip is inevitable) but rather to comment on the rhetorical maneuvers at play and see what lessons we can impart. And a strong word of caution is warranted here: It's true that some this veers dangerously close to mind-reading, which is obviously prone to confirmation bias and erroneous conclusions. With that in mind my goal is to ensure that any conclusion I reach is both solidly grounded within the available evidence and appropriately qualified (with any alternative explanations highlighted). I think the utility is worth the risk of error, and the harm can be mitigated by a commitment to acknowledging one's own mistakes.
First up is Nathan Robinson interviewing Christopher Rufo, specifically the part where they discuss whether the Founding Fathers were racist hypocrites — extolling the virtues of liberty while also owning slaves:
Robinson: You don't believe that Thomas Jefferson was a racist?
Rufo: It's not true. It's such a lazy reduction.
Robinson: Do you want me to quote him? [...]
Rufo: So I think to go back and say, "Oh, they're all racist." It's just so lazy.
Robinson: But it's true. It's not lazy, it's just a fact. [...] Again, it seems a way to not acknowledge that the country was founded by people who held Black people in chains and thought they were inferior.
Rufo: I acknowledge that. That's a fact. That's a historical fact. I don't see how anyone would deny that. [...] But to say that they are racist is a different claim because you're taking an ideological term and then back imposing it on them to discredit their work advancing equality. And so I think that I reject it in a linguistic frame, while acknowledging the factual basis that there was slavery.
Robinson: "The blacks are inferior to the whites in the endowments of both body and mind." That's Jefferson. Is that not racist?
Rufo: I disagree with that statement. I don't know what you want me to say.
Robinson: I want you to say it's racist.
Rufo: Saying "oh, we're going to cherry pick one sentence."
Robinson: I want you to tell the truth. I want you to tell the truth about this man.
So Rufo finds himself in a bit of a pickle. He's fully aware that he can't say "Thomas Jefferson, the man who believed blacks were inferior and held 130 of them in bondage, was not a racist" with a straight face. But simultaneously he also expends a lot of acrobatic energy trying to dodge answering a straightforward question. The italicized portion of his statement above explains why. Although Rufo has made his career as a stalwart opponent of Critical Race Theory (however you define it) he reveals that he might accept one of its core tropes — that the United States is indelibly and irredeemably tainted by its original sin of racism. Notice that Robinson did not ask "Should we discredit Jefferson's work in advancing equality?" he simply asked if Jefferson was racist. But Rufo looks past Robinson's question and sees the warning beacons coming up on the horizon, and so he charges forward in an effort to preemptively maintain a defensive line on ideas he suspects would next be attacked.
According to his own words, Rufo divulges that he thinks racism is potentially grounds to have your accomplishments discredited. If you accept that framework then it makes sense why he would expend so much energy avoiding admitting that Jefferson was racist; the fear is that this concession would cause the rest of his favored structure to crumble. It's not likely we would've gotten this admission in writing; he had to be cornered by his own statements in real-time for this to slip.
I am going to now praise Tim Pool of all people. A few months ago he invited Lance/TheSerfsTV to his livestream to be grilled on a range of topics. On the abortion question, some of the more enthusiastic pro-choice activists have staked their position on legalizing elective abortion not just at the "viability" line (~22 weeks) but up until the millisecond the fetus exists the birth canal. Lance affirms this is his position, claiming that the mother should always maintain full and absolute autonomy over what happens with the pregnancy. But as the real-time discussion evinced, it's not clear if he actually believes this:
Seamus: You believe that the moment the child is outside of the birth canal, that they are now endowed with human rights.
Lance: Yes.
Seamus: However, when they are inside of the mother, literally anything you do to them is acceptable because they're inside of the mother.
Lance: Oh no, I don't think anything's acceptable, but I think the mother should still have the choice — ultimate authority over what happens to her body. [crosstalk]
Tim: Wait wait wait hold on hold on. What about meth?
Lance: Like she should be allowed to do meth? I think if someone is doing meth while they're pregnant, that it is completely acceptable for [child protective services to get involved].
Tim: Woah but that's her body though.
Lance: Yeah it's her body.
Tim: She wants to do meth, what's the big deal?
Lance: The big deal is that she's intentionally trying to kill a child. [flashes of cosmic realization]
Tim: Hold on there a minute.
Lance: Yeah. And I see where we're going.
Tim: I don't- I don't understand what you're saying. It's her body. If she wants to do meth, what's the problem?
Lance: [pregnant pause] Well first off doing meth is illegal period. Doesn't matter if you're doing it with a child or without a child.
Such a spectacular reveal would not have made it through the cognitive filters had it not taken place in real time. If someone's position is that a pregnant woman can do whatever she wants with her body, up to and including terminating the life of the fetus, it logically follows that such an expansive authority would also include less fatal harms. But as Lance discloses in the moment, he doesn't believe that a pregnant woman has the right to take meth and so he offers a justification that is on its own eminently reasonable, but only after it's too late does he realize the self-inflicted rhetorical leg sweep he tripped into.
The rest of the conversation gets bogged down on the legality of certain drugs but to Lance's credit, he does eventually bite the bullet and concede that although he may not agree with the decision he still believes a pregnant woman has the right to take heroin. The eventual consistency is commendable, but the fact that he so reflexively resorted to the commanding ethos of "do not intentionally kill a child" should call into question how much he really believes in the "absolute dominion of the mother" position he insisted upon.
Lastly is our old friend Meghan Murphy again. I already wrote extensively about the numerous logical fallacies deployed in her conversation with Aella on the ethics of the sex industry. Murphy also discussed the same topic with professional debate bro Destiny and he describes the fundamental issue after she had walked out in frustration:
This is what somebody will do, they'll say "I don't like cheeseburgers, because they have meat, the buns look orange, and because they go in my mouth." Then I'll say what if the bun was blue? And they'll go like "I still wouldn't like it." Ok what if the bun was blue and you ate them with your hands? "I still wouldn't like that." Ok what if the bun was blue, you ate them with your hands, and it didn't have meat or whatever? and "I still wouldn't like that." Ok then why the fuck would you tell me all these reasons why you don't like it when none of them are actually important to why you don't like it?
That's a fair question! If someone says they don't like X because of reasons A/B/C, and you get rid of A/B/C but they still don't like X, then it inevitably follows they have other reasons for disliking X they're not divulging. What Destiny has outlined here is an effective method to uncovering pretextual justifications — the false reasons someone provides as a bid to keep the true reasons hidden (likely because they're too unpalatable or unpersuasive to say out loud).
Destiny spends an agonizing amount of time trying to get Murphy to explain what her precise objections to the sex industry are and gets nowhere, and their final exchange illustrates why. They're discussing one of Murphy's argument that the sex trade is unethical because of women's particular vulnerability during penetrative sex:
Destiny: I understand that women are particularly vulnerable during sex, that's probably true. How do you feel about male prostitutes then? Do you think that it would be ethical for men to do sex work?
Murphy: Um, what I don't think is ethical is again for a man to pay a woman or a man for sex.
[crosstalk & sidetracking]
Destiny: So I'm going to ask again: is it unethical to pay men for sex? If a male wants to do pornography or if a male wants to sell his body for sex? Is that unethical?
Murphy: Yeah, I think it's unethical to pay anyone for sex.
Destiny: Okay. Then the vulnerability and the penetration part don't matter then. I don't know why you bring that up if a guy can't even sell his body for sex then—
Murphy: Well he's being penetrated also, no?
Destiny: But what if it's a male prostitute that has women but not with a strap-on?
Murphy: Oh I mean that's a real common thing eh? How many women do know who have ever paid for sex with a male prostitute? I mean, I think that's unethical too.
Destiny: Ok! That's what I'm getting at! I'm just trying to figure out why you think it's unethical!
[more crosstalk & yelling]
Murphy: Every time I start explaining my arguments you interrupt me and act completely exasperated because I'm not saying what you want me to say. You want to frame the conversation in a way that I am not interested in framing the conversation. Like the way that I want to talk about this is not how you want to talk about it and you can't accept that. The way I'm looking at this is not the way that you're looking at it but you don't really want to hear how I'm looking at it. You want to have the conversation you want to have so there's not really any point to this. You don't want to learn anything you don't want to hear, so you are just annoyed that I'm saying something you don't want me to say.
[more crosstalk & yelling]
Destiny: I'm not showing off to anybody! I'm just trying to have a conversation, I don't even know why you're against sex work! That's what I'm trying to figure out right now.
Murphy: I appreciate the big show that you're having but I don't want to continue this if you're going to keep interrupting me.
Take note of the italicized responses; that kind of evasion is not a generally pervasive reaction for Murphy. She speaks for a living and within other moments in this debate and elsewhere, Murphy has demonstrated a clear ability to confidently answers questions with immediacy and relevancy. It can't be just a coincidence when acrobatics are prompted only by these vexing questions.
Murphy's responses make a lot more sense if you assume that her true objections to the sex industry are really borne out of an aesthetic or disgust aversion, and specifically only when men are the patrons. Murphy is evidently aware that this argument can't be spoken out loud because it's likely too vacant to be generally persuasive, so she instead cycles through a rolodex of pretextual (read: fake) arguments that she's willing to unhesitantly discard whenever they risk becoming a liability to her core thesis. That's why she dodges the male prostitute hypothetical to instead reiterate her dislike of men paying women for sex. That's why she laughs off the female client hypothetical as implausible instead of grappling with its implications.
I'm comfortable accusing Murphy of dishonesty here because her acrobatic evasions are selectively deployed in response to concrete threats to her position, rather than the result of random chance.
It's unfortunate that human beings sometimes lie, and it's too bad that they also refuse to admit mistakes. Such is life. Given the examples I outlined above, some generalizable heuristics is to be suspicious of anyone who refuses to answer straightforward questions (in writing or otherwise), or who refuses to engage in anything but the most sympathetic of conversations. A lot of our contentious interactions have and continue to migrate over towards asynchronous text exchanges, but hopefully I've made a case for why talking is still cool. Also I host The Bailey podcast and I'm always delighted to talk to people I vehemently disagree with, so reach out if you want to butt heads!
As a parting bonus, here's the journalist Beth Rigby interviewing Iain Anderson, chair of the LGBT organization Stonewall. It's quite the bloodbath.
ymeskhout
10mo ago
I've been ruminating on a question about Trump's prosecution. One of the common arguments I've come across is that prosecuting Trump is improper because it's just political retaliation falsely disguised as a neutral and dispassionate application of the law. In support of this argument, you could cite the fact that the apparent mishandling of government records occurs fairly regularly by similarly-positioned politicians (Clinton, Biden, Pence, etc.) and yet its enforcement appears to be selectively doled out. This is potentially also supported by the fact that, speeding tickets notwithstanding, no other US president (former or sitting) has ever been charged for anything before. The fact that US institutions chose to break such a long-standing norm at this particular moment seems a bit too much of a coincidence to believe it was done with honest motivations.
Assuming all of the above is true, are there any limiting principles? Until something happens for the first time, it remains by definition "unprecedented", so if your rule is based solely on precedence then nothing would ever be allowed to happen unless it has already happened before which doesn't seem workable. Another consideration also is just because something hasn't happened for a very a long time, it doesn't mean it accidentally created an inviolable precedent that can never be broken now. For example, the crime of piracy is one of the few specifically mentioned in the Constitution and it used to be regularly prosecuted way back in the day but there was a very long lull before the feds dusted it off to go after some Somalis.
I don't think anyone would agree that a permanent bar was created, because that would bestow elected officials and political candidates the extra benefit of potentially perpetual & absolute immunity from all criminal liability, including for conduct that happens after they leave office. In its most absurd implementation, this hypothetical system would allow any criminal a "get out of jail" card just by declaring election candidacy.
So if the longstanding norm against prosecution can indeed be broken, then under which circumstances? For Trump's supporters, I suppose one possible answer is that he has been the target of such a relentless and unprecedented avalanche of (presumably bad faith) lawfare — Russiagate, impeachments, etc. — that trust in the system has been depleted to the point that all action against him should be assumed to be ill-disguised political retaliation as a rule. Assuming that's true, then what? Should the rule be that other politicians can be prosecuted but that Trump should have a carve-out in consideration of the unusually aggressive persecution he had to endure? If so, how serious of a crime would this cover? How long should this immunity last for? Should everyone who faces relentless persecution be afforded similar benefits?
The Jewish Conspiracy To Change My Mind
I never had much of an opinion on the whole Israel-Palestinian affair, because — true to my brand — I avoid opining on what I know nothing about. My horrified reaction to Hamas's attacks morphed into existential despondency when I saw others cheering on the massacres with inexplicable glee. My curiosity was piqued, so I read up on the topic with the specific goal of understanding what could motivate joy as a response to carnage. I expected a heavy slog and wrenching ethical dilemmas, all submerged within murky ambiguity. Instead, I was very surprised at how lucid the delineations of the conflict were, and how lopsided the moral clarity was.
I very quickly shifted from 'ignorant agnosticism' towards generally favoring Israel's position on the matter (I can't recall ever changing my mind on an issue so dramatically). I don't want to turn this into a "midwit deludes himself into thinking he's a savant after some Wikipedia perusal" meme — I'm absolutely no expert, but I can't grasp what I'm missing.
I'll start with my opinion on various facets of the conflict, and then finish off with some theories I have for why this issue generates such implacable disagreement.
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Motte-and-Bailey: I admit, I never knew what 'Zionist' meant except as a grave denunciation yet the Zionist movement has been fairly transparent about its goals from its beginning in the 19th century. You could categorize its aim across a spectrum, simplified from least to most radical: 1) Jewish homeland somewhere,[1] 2) Jewish homeland somewhere in the Levant, and 3) Exclusive and total Jewish domination of the entire Holy Land. Both pro & anti-Zionism labels have a strategic ambiguity that can be intentionally levered by any extremist wishing to blend in the crowd. There's a similar dynamic with the Palestinian chant 'From the river to the sea', because is it calling for totally and completely erasing Israel from the map? Or is it simply advocating for a coexisting independent Palestine in both the West Bank (river) and Gaza (sea)? Whatever you want! I see the motivations for a Jewish homeland in the Levant to be sound and understandable. The scattered Jewish diaspora suffered unrelenting oppression across millenia virtually anywhere they went, culminating in some particularly nasty pogroms within the Russian Empire in the late 19th century. The general land borders the Zionists agreed upon weren't pulled out of thin air, and although the-land-formerly-known-as-Canaan exchanged bloody hands multiple times, the area historically represented the only cogent Jewish political entities to have ever existed. Zionist migration had already begun in earnest throughout the early 20th century, and the horrors of the Holocaust only further emphasized the necessity for a Jewish state.
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Palestinian Land: The area was already inhabited by Arab Muslims by the start of early Zionist migration. The Arabs too have a historical claim to the area and also benefited from being last in the very long list of adverse possession feuds. If a stranger shows up to your figurative house and suggests taking only 20% in response to your attempts to evict them, it's not unreasonable to tell them to fuck off. The Zionists had way more of a diplomatic bargaining chip after the Holocaust, but either way it wasn't unreasonable for the Arabs to reject ceding 56% of the land that was Mandatory Palestine. I don't want to frame this as a "shoulda negotiated" fable, but the practical outcome of the ensuing 1948 war resulted in the creation of Israel with about 78% of the territory. It's reasonable for any loser of a war to hold a grudge against their conquerors.
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The Nakba: The human toll of the 1948 war on the Palestinians shouldn't be diminished or overlooked. The war resulted in around 25,000 total dead and the displacement of 700,000 Palestinians, an event forever commemorated by the Arabic word for "catastrophe" — Nakba. Displacement doesn't just mean a change of address; it was a wrenching life upheaval. The Nakba led to squalid refugee camps, outbreaks of diseases like typhoid, and the erasure of villages that had stood for centuries. Material and immaterial culture — homes, orchards, community centers, dialects, local traditions— were lost, perhaps irretrievably. This was very Bad and unfortunately all too common.
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Vendetta Forever: Human history is rife with violence, often fueled by ancestral grudges. There's nothing wrong with suggesting that some blood feuds should have been abandoned long ago. Next door to Israel, the ongoing Syrian Civil War has a death toll (500k-600k dead) nearing that of the Nakba's displacement figure, alongside a global refugee crisis.[2] After 12 years of destructive stalemates, the best outcome Syrians can hope for is to solidify the current status quo; it's not plausible for any side to conclusively end the conflict without additional bloodbath. But imagine a Syrian refugee in Turkey disavowing this hypothetical ceasefire and instead pledging a lifelong vendetta — as well as the lives of all his future descendants — fixated on reclaiming his family's vineyard in Homs from Al-Assad's forces. The wounds are still fresh but steering someone away from such an insane and self-destructive fanaticism isn't unreasonable. And yet, that's not the reception Palestinian grievances from 1948 land grabs receive, despite their much older expiration date. I don't want to turn this into a catastrophe pageant competition; we can acknowledge the suffering someone's ancestors endured while also reminding those living that their unyielding attachment to past vendettas has only brought further ruin to themselves and their families. The fanatical obsession over relatively resource-barren land simply cannot be explained by just tallying up the generational wealth the expelled Palestinians lost out on; there's much more than is admitted to here (more on this later).
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Arab Humiliation: After the 1948 war, Israel's borders were left on a standstill with an armistice agreement with Egypt taking over Gaza, and Jordan grabbing the West Bank. It's tediously irrelevant to litigate the 'who started it?' chain, but Israel (along with the UK and France) did indeed invade Egypt in 1956 over the Suez Crisis, though they pulled out after a week and Egypt agreed not to block their shipping lanes through the Straits of Tiran. In 1967, Egypt, Jordan, and Syria planned a surprise invasion against Israel but instead got absolutely trounced in what was named the Six Day War. Their invasion didn't just spectacularly fail on its intended merits, but everyinvading country lost significant territory to Israel's counter-offensive (Golan Heights from Syria, West Bank from Jordan, and Gaza Strip plus the entire fucking Sinai Peninsula from Egypt). The Arab League convened three months later and doubled down on their vendetta against Israel, issuing the Three Noes Resolution against Israel: No peace, no negotiation, no recognition. Not content with their first military invasion, they tried another surprise attack six years later in 1973. The Yom Kippur War wasn't as quick, taking slightly less than three weeks to resolve in yet another Israeli victory. It's hard to overstate just how much of an existential humiliation for the Arab world this time period was. The Arabs were ostensibly blessed by Allah Himself, and fighting in their home desert turf, and yet they couldn't put a dent on the Yahud? Knowing full well they couldn't match the Jews in conventional warfare, much of the Palestinian cause shifted towards "unconventional" methods of indiscriminate rocket attacks, suicide bombings, & kidnappings. It's reasonable to discount the Arab countries' self-serving claims about being motivated by the plight of the Palestinian people,[3] because instead of assisting them directly they squandered tens of thousands of lives on foolish military adventures.
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Israel Sometimes Lies: Israel, like virtually any other government, has a history and incentives to lie about its actions. The most notable example is the 1996 Qana massacre where IDF lobbed artillery shells at a UN compound in Southern Lebanon, killing over 100 Lebanese civilians. The IDF has maintained it was all totally an accident and initially repeatedly denied they had any reconnaissance drones in the area, until serendipitous UN footage proved otherwise. In 2009, Israel initially denied ever deploying white phosphorus in Gaza, until the video evidence from journalists on the ground was too overwhelming to ignore. In the current phase of the conflict, Israel is simultaneously asserting that 1) Hamas militants were able to break through a heavily-monitored security fence and go on a rampage because of an unprecedented intelligence failure and 2) Israel has the capabilities to execute targeted strikes against Hamas leadership while minimizing civilian casualties within the urban jungles of Gaza. It's perfectly reasonable to be skeptical of any self-serving claims made by Israel absent any corroborating evidence.
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Orthogonal Violence: I'm not a pacifist, but anyone who decides to deploy violence as a tool should be extremely careful they're not simply succumbing towards quenching a primeval bloodthirst. Any application of violence should be oriented towards a specific goal, proportional to the objective, and carried out with humility.[4] I wrote about how the relatively bygone Punch A Nazi discourse failed all three prongs: 1) vague hypothetical that the spread of dangerous ideas will be curtailed if enough "Nazis" are punched in the face, 2) Antifa's awful target acquisition meant random Bernie supporters got metal pipes to the skull, and 3) the violence enactors were generally extremely hostile to any criticism about their tactics. Within this narrow framework[5] I'm willing to say that the suicide bombing of CIA base involved in drone strikes in Afghanistan was justified, as was the targeted assassination of the architects behind the Armenian genocide, and as were either tête-à-tête military battles or guerilla actions between Jewish and Arab forces in 1948.
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Perverse Excuses: In contrast, I find no justification for indiscriminate attacks on orthogonal targets. What exactly is the objective and how does murdering Olympic athletes, or bombing a discotheque, or bombing a pizzeria, or murdering bus passengers, or sniping a baby in a stroller get anyone closer to it? The rockets Hamas regularly launches against Israel are slap-dash affairs, jury-rigged from water pipes and common materials. There's no guidance system to speak of, and the most precise aim Hamas could hope for is [waves vaguely over the distance]. Their only practical purpose is to sow psychological trauma on a civilian population, which is as cogent of a definition for terrorism you could get. I don't believe I've encountered anyone directly defending the strategic merits of indiscriminate unguided rocket attacks, or music festival mass shootings. Instead, I see either excuses about how we outsiders shouldn't cast judgement upon the anguished and desperate actions of an oppressed populace, or affirmative declarations that "resistance" is justified through "any means necessary". Hamas leadership parrot this argument, as seen in this rare moment where Ghazi Hamad breaks into English to say that as the victims in this conflict, anything they do is by definition justified. This view is beyond heinous, because it has no bounds. It posits an insane moral outlook that once someone is anointed as sufficiently oppressed, their actions — no matter what! — are indefinitely beyond reproach or scrutiny. This is indistinguishable from how some of my domestic violence clients jettison any semblance of responsibility for their abuse, by focusing exclusively on how they were "provoked" into ripping out a chunk of their girlfriend's scalp. This is a framework I thought was too fucking stupid to entertain seriously, because the parody writes itself. We always can and must maintain the capacity to simultaneous condemn and empathize, without requiring us to plunge into the abyss of moral sociopathy. Jeffrey Dahmer's actions can't suddenly become righteous endeavors if he happened to be a Palestinian eating Israelis. And no matter how righteous a cause might be, it will never be worth having this as one of its Wikipedia pages.
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Security Dilemma: I am a proponent of 100% open borders (for both trade & people) but concede it's not a tenable position during ongoing hostilities. It's true, both Gaza and the West Bank are surrounded by formidable security barriers that require Palestinians to be subjected to intrusive, arbitrary, and often humiliating security screening, but it was largely built in response to a wave of suicide bombings during the Second Intifada. I would love to see a free flow of goods and people but any security relaxation whatsoever is immediately exploited, with children as young as 14 regularly employed into martyrdom. I have no idea what the alternative solution is supposed to be here.
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Placating the Extremists: Both sides™ of the conflict contend with warring internal strife. On the Israeli side, you have hardcore Zionists who are religiously motivated to habitate as much of the Promised Land as possible, chant "Death to Arabs", and are now forming roving gangs to dispense retributive violence in the West Bank and elsewhere. On the Palestinian side, you have Hamas and its implacable founding principles calling for the absolute and total elimination of all Jews, and a RETVRN to a worldwide caliphate. The messy logistics of coalition politics necessitates cooperating with unsavory actors lest the whole structure irreparably collapses. Any moderate who strays too far from the flock faces serious risk from the fanatics with any sizeable power, which is why Yitzhak Rabin's openness to a peace plan got him assassinated by a right-wing Jewish activist. This also explains Israel's unjustifiable & needlessly antagonist (IMO) settlement policy of sort-of-maybe-not-but-actually-yes encouraging civilian takeover of contested territory. This also explains Yasser Arafat's intransigence during the Camp David talks, refusing to provide any counter-offer after rejecting Israeli's proposal. The moderate wing of either side balances benefiting from the zealot's "enthusiasm", while also making sure not to scare the hoes (by hoes I mean the international community of course).
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Apartheid State: Given the constant sloganeering about "Apartheid" and given that Israel was founded to be an ethnostate intended to prioritize the interests of a Jewish population, I was surprised to learn about the conditions of Arab-Israelis. 21% of the population is Arab — almost all of whom are Muslim. Arab-Israelis are nominally afforded the exact same rights as any other Israeli citizen, though there remains rampant disparities in income, employment, and municipal funding. I don't want to pull a Kendi here and claim the only explanation for disparate outcomes is discrimination, because it very well could be a 'pipeline problem' that stems from the aforementioned disparities in public services, or perhaps differences much more inherent. Arabs are exempt from Israel's compulsory military service, which traditionally provides a highly-respected advancement ladder. Arab-Israelis are allowed to volunteer though this virtually never happens but the ones that do are well assimilated into Israeli society, such as the highly-celebrated Captain Amos Yarkoni. But set all that aside for now and just assume that Arab/Jewish disparities are strictly the result of incessant discrimination. It's true that Arab-Israelis earn about 60% as much income as Jewish-Israeli households, yet this roughly translates into an average daily wage of $50 for Arab-Israelis compared to $32 in the West Bank, and $13 in Gaza. I don't know how directly comparable the ratios are to individual income, but as a rough metric Israel's $54k GDP per capita is more than ten times what is available in neighboring Egypt, Lebanon, and Jordan. By any material measure, Arab-Israelis fare much better under Israeli governance than under any neighboring Arab governance.
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Decolonization Narrative: The "colonization" narrative is facile and misleading but let's assume the truth of the charge, what exactly is the complaint? I used to think the "only functioning democracy in the region" mantra was an exaggeration but no, it's true. Some Arab-Israelis even serve in parliament. If the worry is a lack of political self-determination among non-Jewish Israelis, the concern doesn't appear substantiated. Personally, political self-determination has little inherent value to me; it's useful only insofar as it helps foster governance better tailored to a community's needs and if the two aims are ever in tension, I will always prioritize material benefits (give me Hong Kong under British colonial rule over democratic India any day of the week). Israeli governance is already demonstrably vastly superior from a wealth perspective, so I don't understand the complaint lodged. I also personally would always prioritize a cosmopolitan open society over the self-determination of followers of a repressive religion, and nowhere is that schism funnier than with the unironic "Queers for Palestine". Palestinian culture has regressive aspects I have no interest in seeing replicated. Beyond economic comfort and civil freedoms, Israel has demonstrated a broader commitment to cosmopolitan multiculturalism, as illustrated by how the Temple Mount is governed. It's the former site of the destroyed Second Temple (Judaism's holiest site) which was later replaced by the Al-Aqsa Mosque (Islam's third holiest site) and despite its central importance within Jewish lore, I was surprised to find out that Israel has prohibited all Jewish prayer since its takeover of the area in 1967 after the Six Day War. The Temple Mount area is governed by a religious committee composed only of Muslims members. I can't fathom the countervailing scenario where Muslims are willing to prohibit prayers at Al-Aqsa.
Sorry for that encyclopedia up there, I had to get it out of my system. There are no doubt some valid Palestinian grievances scattered among the bloodied ashes above, but I can't shake off the conclusion that much of the unrelenting rage lobbed towards Israel is driven overwhelmingly by petty nationalistic pride, fanatical religious zealotry, or just plain ethnic bigotry. Again, I'm not saying all! Previously, I would roll my eyes at the reflexive refrain that any criticism of Israel is driven by anti-Jewish[6] bigotry. I was generally skeptical of bare allegations of bigotry in any context (as a baseline), but particularly within Israeli discourse given the potential for nationalistic motives to skew reasoning. Some of my skepticism remains warranted, but I readily admit I had seriously underestimated the ambient level of anti-Jewish bigotry.
There's been a real mask-off moment among the Pro-Palestinian movement, with no pushback against the atrocious message discipline. Shortly after Hamas' incursions, before Israel's Gaza pulverization campaign, we had crowds in Sydney with "Gas the jews!" chants. The posters of Israeli children kidnapped by Hamas continues to be irresistible bait for folks driven into an uncontrollable rage to tearing them down, and in the process showcasing their barely-veiled animosity. I feel like I'm insulting everyone's intelligence here because they're not even trying to hide it, otherwise why would anyone cite the expulsion of the Khaybar Jewish community by the Muslims in 628 CE supposedly to protest a country founded in 1948?
The early Zionists secured land through legal purchases, though the transactions were often made with absentee landlords and came as a surprise to the occupants. The Palestinian Arabs reacted with enmity towards the growing Jewish presence in the area, leading to a wave of deadly riots and revolts throughout the 1920s and 1930s. One way to describe the Palestinian reaction here is as violent anti-immigrant vigilantism fueled by racial animus. The enmity was obvious from the neighboring governments too; few instances in history rival the unequivocal refusal to even entertain negotiation or peace as a possibility, as expressed in the Khartoum Declaration. The closest historical analogue I could fathom is maybe Carthago delenda est but even that one was a warning about the threat of a geopolitical rival, not a promise to forever disavow any diplomatic entreaties.
It's funny how easily the phrase "economic anxiety" is lobbed as a punchline to skewer the notion that Trump supporters are motivated by anything except virulent racism. A couple hundred people wielding tiki torches is presented as definitive proof of America's enduring and widespread racism problem, but brays to slaughter the Yahudis is reflexively dismissed as understandable human reactions. If that's your position, the question always remains what evidence would convince you otherwise about their true motivations? If every call to arms about killing all the Jews can be justified within the oppression rubric, you now have an unfalsifiable theory that is immune from scrutiny.
There's an argument on the Palestinian "resistance" side I've seen from several sources that apes the misguided politics of Identitarian Deference. The idea being that someone's willingness to detonate a suicide vest among a crowd of people is conclusive proof of their desperation, because no rational person would do something so terminal unless they were truly pushed to the brink with no other option. In other words, their depravity is evidence of their virtue.
There are so many things wrong with this argument but what I'll focus on is its assumption of rationality, because human beings are capable of acting in all sorts of deranged ways for all sorts of reasons. We have cults whose members are subject to what is functionally elaborate mind control. We have debilitating mental illnesses that rob people's ability to tell what is real and what isn't. And of course, we have fanatical religions that can maintain a robust foothold despite indoctrinating its followers into self-obliteration.
Gaza polling is not totally reliable, but recent findings indicated tepid support for Hamas and its apocalyptic mission, clocking in only at 20%. Yet it's difficult to imagine how such a severe ideology can remain neatly contained within its own bucket. The mentality behind the Hamas militant gleefully bragging to his parents about all the Jews he killed cannot spawn out of thin air, nor could his parents' immediate emotionally-overwhelmed congratulations. The Hamas-run show Tomorrow's Pioneers aired the most deranged children's television segment I have ever seen. In one episode, children sang about how qualified they are for martyrdom (can you believe it gets worse?) and in another, the actual children of Reem Riyashi are invited to sing a song written from their perspectives, about how it's ok their mom couldn't hug them on the last day they saw her...because her arm was too busy holding a bomb.
What's the counter-argument here? Is the homicidal propaganda taken out of context? Is the claim that it's not representative? Maybe that's true, but how can you tell? It's baffling that anyone seriously believes the Palestinian cause is primarily motivated by someone's great-great-grandparent losing their farm 75 years. Al-Aqsa Mosque imagery is inextricably linked with the broader messaging. Hamas names everything after it (TV, brigades, floods, etc.), and Israel's administration of the Mosque itself remains a point of serious contention. Zealots are incentivized to garner broader support for their fanaticism by sanewashing it into palatability, and the unique amalgamation of revolutionary Marxism and Arab nationalism afforded a readily available mantle:
In this new reading, the possibility of transcendence outside history was reworked into the possibility of transcendence inside history through revolution. Salvation was secularized, and atheized, into temporal salvation brought on by a political collective will. That Islam is a philosophical totality to be achieved through national liberation and socialism, and progressive revolution against the forces of colonialism, Judaism (particularly as embodied in Israel), and reaction (embodied in conservative pro-Western Arab monarchies), became the generic message.
Longstanding land grievances get repackaged as anti-colonial struggle, and genocidal religious fanaticism gets rebranded as anti-imperialist resistance. So when we are presented with acts of extreme desperation, demanding our unquestioning empathy for their purported plight, we can decline. We have the capacity to think critically and carefully scrutinize their self-professed motivation and see if it's in accord with reality. Sometimes we are intentionally fed a misleadingly sanewashed narrative, and sometimes the behavior we're observing is not the result of rational faculties.
I did not revisit some personal interactions until recent events prompted otherwise. Whenever I visited my family back home in Morocco, no other topic generated as much acrimony as Israel. It's a common trope for home families to worry their emigrated members will be brainwashed into secularism, and bizarrely the most scrutiny I ever received from them about my life in the United States wasn't about whether I ate bacon or drank alcohol, but whether I was friends with any Jews. The Yahud aren't to be trusted, they warned, as evidenced by the fact that no Jew was ever killed on 9/11, or by the fact that Mossad created ISIS as a bid to make Arabs look bad (I'm not joking, these claims are unironically professed by several of my family members). I assumed their baffling conspiracies were the understandable byproduct of what had to be justifiable rage against Israel.
I admit deep embarrassment at how under-informed I previously was about this topic. Everything I wrote above took time obviously,[7] but it was all based on readily available sources (ChatGPT was also an amazing help in quickly filling in gaps and finding counter-arguments). My operating assumption used to be that this was all too complicated of an issue to untangle. I presume I might have been influenced by the underdog memeology of a child throwing a rock at a soldier.
I'm also willing to blame media coverage on this topic. This Vox video purporting to 'explain' Gaza is the perfect illustration of this genre of lying by omission. See how much it breezily glosses over the lead-up to the 1947 civil war:
In 1947, as the British prepared to leave they left the fate of Palestine up to a newly formed United Nations who voted to divide Palestine into a Jewish state and an Arab state. Soon, Zionist forces and militias began to forcibly expel hundreds of thousands of Palestinians from their land...
So the UN had a plan but the Jews responded by just kicking people out? Damn that's so crazy! That segue belongs in a museum somewhere, as it eviscerates decades of conspiracy theorizing about who really controls the media.
Ultimately, I find very little to sympathize with on the Palestinian cause. Except for the ongoing West Bank encroachments, I can't take any of the land grievances from 1948, 1967, or 1973 seriously; at least not seriously enough to justify the knee-deep bloodshed. I can't support any movement, no matter how righteous its cause might be, that employs sadistically orthogonal violence. I can't endorse any culture that punishes sexual and political non-conformity with forceful repression. And I want absolutely nothing to do with any ideology capable of such self-serving justifications towards its destructive fanaticism.
Despite the zealous wing in its own house, its history of covering-up its war crimes, and its ongoing settlement expansion campaign, Israel remains the obvious choice for whom to favor if I had to pick. I'm neither Jewish nor do I have any interest in a religious ethnostate, but out of the available options I'd much rather have a society that can build up material comfort enviable to its oil-laden neighbors, establish a semblance of multicultural cosmopolitanism, and provide a haven of responsive governance within a region known for its rarity.
I remain open to having my mind changed. You may attempt this in several ways, including but not limited to:
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Point out any specific factual errors or misunderstandings in anything I wrote. If you believe any of my (mostly Wikipedia) sources are too biased or otherwise unreliable, explain why and suggest alternatives.
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If you object to Zionism, specify what kind and why.
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If you believe persistent Palestinian land grievances remain warranted today, be specific about which ones (Early migrations? 1948? 1967?) and explain why. Also make sure to specify if your standard applies to all displaced people anywhere else, or if it's unique to the Palestinians'.
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If you object to how Israel deploys its military or security apparatus, specify if you disagree with their goals or with their tactics, and be specific about what they should do differently.
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If you object to my comparative preference for Israeli's model of governance and culture, be specific about which aspects of Palestinian governance/culture have superior merits.
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If you disagree with my criticism of oppression-status granting infinite moral immunity, be specific about what limiting principle you'd propose (if any).
That's it. Thank you for weathering through this with me.
Salam & Shalom.
[1] One of the earliest proposals was for Uganda of all places.
[2] Around the same time as the Nakba, the 1947 India-Pakistan Partition resulted in up to 2M dead and up to 20M displaced. It feels unconscionably perverse to flatten the sheer scale of human tragedy here into a glossed reference to "millions" but it's all the time we have.
[3] Israel's Arab neighbors have had a contentious relationship with the Palestinian cause, despite the superficial optics. Palestinian Fedayeen for example tried to overthrow the King of Jordan in 1970. When they got expelled from Jordan, they tried to use Lebanon as a staging ground for attacks against Israel, events which culminated into the protracted Lebanese Civil War. And today, Egypt still enforces its half of the Gaza blockade.
[4] Only after writing this section did I realize I basically rederived the Just War Theory.
[5] For the love of Allah please remember that I am only assessing whether the violence is justified within the contours of bounded scenarios; I am not making any larger pronouncements about the righteousness of any side's cause.
[6] Anti-Semitism is such a misleading term as 'Semitic' is a language family, not an ethnic categorization, and includes Arabic!
[7] Many thanks to the Baileyites for their invaluable feedback.
ymeskhout
7mo ago
"Did you lock it?"
A common trait among my social circle used to be that everyone shared an obsession with bicycles. Few of us had or even wanted a car in the city, and having everyone on two wheels made it much easier to roam down our house party itinerary. Between all of us we had a deep well of metis to draw from; everything from which wheels to buy to the easiest way to make derailleur adjustments. We were naturally attached to our steeds and none of us wanted our bicycles to pull a disappearing act, and so we discussed ways to keep safe.
U-locks were ubiquitous and we'd warn each other of the brands that were still susceptible to the infamous pen trick. Some of us of the more paranoid variety installed locking skewers to keep expensive saddles or wheels latched in place. We'd even caution each other to check bolts anchoring bike racks to the ground, since the U-lock was useless if the whole setup could be lifted away. It wasn't possible to reach full immunity but you never need to be the fastest gazelle to escape the cheetah, just faster than the slowest one.
Naturally, if anyone ever suffered the ultimate calamity of having their ride stolen, we would ask if it was locked and how. There was nothing sadistic about our inquiries. Our questions were problem-solving endeavors saturated with sympathy; we wanted to know what went wrong precisely to help others avoid the same fate. Maybe the local thieves discovered some new exploit in our standard security apparatus, or maybe this was just an opportunistic snatch while they left their bike unlocked outside during a quick peek inside.
"If you do X, you're likely to get Y" is the format to an unremarkable factual observation. "If you leave your bike outside unlocked, you're likely to have it stolen" is just reality and, on its own, is a statement that carries no moral judgment. If the victim wasn't previously aware of this correlation, they are now, and are better equipped to evade a rerun.
The parallels to my actual point are probably getting obvious by now.
Kathleen Stock charges right into deconstructing the surprisingly enduring ritual of affixing the "victim-blaming" reprimand to any advice aimed at reducing the risk of sexual assault. Now, in case anyone needs the clarification: I believe that rape is way worse than bicycle theft. Nevertheless the principles at play here remain the same:
Still, given that rape, precisely, is so devastating, I think we have a duty to tell women about which circumstances might make their victimisation more likely, and which might make it less. To repeat --- this is not victim-blaming, nor making women responsible for violations that men choose to commit. It is more in the spirit of "forewarned is forearmed". This is how dangerous men behave, and these are the environments in which they become more dangerous. This is how you can try to reduce your risk, even if you can never eliminate it. No panacea is being offered. Nothing guarantees your safety. Still, a reduced risk is better than nothing.
Consider the victim of the unattended bike snatch again. Imparting wisdom on the implacable chain of consequences is about the most compassionate thing you could do. They can choose to accept that advice, and if it is sound then they'll be met with the disastrous outcome of...not having their bike stolen. Or they can choose to reject that advice and adhere to the mantra that instead of putting the onus on cyclists not to have their bikes stolen, we should teach thieves not to thieve. In which case, best of luck with completely overhauling the nature of man; here's hoping their bicycle budget rivals the GDP of a small country to withstand the inevitable and wholly predictable hits.
Defamation Bear Trap
The legal field is filled with ad-hoc quirky legal doctrines. These are often spawned from a vexed judge somewhere thinking "that ain't right" and just making up a rule to avoid an outcome they find distasteful. This is how an exploding bottle of Coca-Cola transformed the field of product liability, or how courts made cops read from a cue card after they got tired of determining whether a confession was coerced, or even how an astronomy metaphor established a constitutional right to condoms. None of these doctrines are necessarily mandated by any black letter law; they're hand-wavy ideas that exist because they sort of made sense to someone in power.
I've dabbled in my fair share of hand-wavy ideas, for example when I argued that defendants have slash should have a constitutional right to lie (if you squint and read between the lines enough). Defamation law is not my legal wheelhouse but when I first heard about Bill Cosby being sued by his accusers solely for denying the rape allegations against him, I definitely had one of those "that ain't right" moments. My naive assumption was that a quirky legal doctrine already existed (weaved from stray fibers of the 5th and...whatever other amendment you have lying around) which allowed people to deny heinous accusations.
I was wrong and slightly right. Given how contentious the adversarial legal system can get, there is indeed the medieval-era legal doctrine of "Litigation Privilege" which creates a safe space bubble where lawyers and parties can talk shit about each other without worrying about a defamation lawsuit. The justification here is that while defamation is bad, discouraging a litigant's zeal in fighting their case is even worse. Like any other cool doctrine that grants common people absolute immunity from something, this one has limits requiring any potentially defamatory remarks to have an intimate nexus with imminent or ongoing litigation.
It's was an obvious argument for Trump to make when Jean Carroll sued him for defamation for calling her a liar after she called him a rapist (following?). A federal judge rejected Trump's arguments on the grounds that his statements were too far removed from the hallowed marble halls of a courthouse. Generally if you want this doctrine's protection, your safest bet is to keep your shit-talking in open court or at least on papers you file in court. While the ruling against Trump is legally sound according to precedent, this is another instance where I disagree based on policy grounds.
Though I'm a free speech maximalist, I nevertheless support the overall concept of defamation law. Avoiding legal liability in this realm is generally not that hard; just don't make shit up about someone or (even safer) don't talk about them period. But what happens when someone shines the spotlight on you by accusing you of odious behavior from decades prior?
Assuming the allegations are true but you deny them anyways, presumably the accuser would have suffered from the odious act much more than for being called a liar. If so, seeking redress for the original harmful act is the logical avenue for any remedies. The (false) denial is a sideshow, and denial is generally what everyone would expect anyways.
But assuming the allegations are false, what then? The natural inclination is also to deny, except you're in a legal bind. Any denial necessarily implies that the accuser is lying. So either you stay silent and suffer the consequences, or you try to defend yourself and risk getting dragged into court for impugning your accuser's reputation.
My inclination is that if you're accused of anything, you should be able to levy a full-throated denial without having to worry about a defamation lawsuit coming down the pipes. You didn't start this fight, your accuser did, and it's patently unfair to now also have to worry about collateral liability while simultaneously trying to defend your honor. Without an expansion of the "Litigation Privilege" or something like it to cover these circumstances, we create the incentive to conjure up a defamation action out of thin air. The only ingredients you need are to levy an accusation and wait for your target's inevitable protest. That ain't right.
ymeskhout
3mo ago
Last week, @SlowBoy posted about Ray Epps being sentenced to probation and asserted this was a "uniquely generous outcome" for Epps. I was puzzled by this assertion and so I asked some clarifying questions and most of my responses were heavily downvoted. As a barometer of community sentiment, I tried to understand why my questions would be met so negatively and so this post is my attempt to formulate some theories. I am open to feedback on how I can post better!
Theory 1: I focused on the wrong parameters for evaluating Ray Epps' situation
I would like to think I have some practical experience in evaluating whether a given defendant is treated with unusual leniency/harshness. I once had a client who was arrested along one other guy at the same place, both for illegally possessing a firearm. Both were felons with comparable criminal history but in addition to a gun, the other guy also was caught with what the cops referred to as a "pharmacy" of drugs in his backpack (very likely worth at least $20k on the street) and also very openly admitted to police that the gun was his. So it was really weird that my guy got charged with a gun felony while the street pharmacist was charged with only a gun misdemeanor and offered a diversion program on top of that (charges get dismissed if he stays out of trouble). I investigated more of the pharmacist's background and found out he's been arrested at least three times within the last year for exactly the same conduct (gun + drug backpack) and each time no charges were filed. I had no way of proving this conclusively but the only explanation that made sense is that he was an informant of some kind. Letting the prosecutors know I was aware of pharmacist's disparate treatment was likely instrumental in getting my guy a misdemeanor plea offer.
Obviously that was a serendipitous comparison scenario, but when I was presented with Ray Epp's situation the reasonable starting point was to examine the severity of charges and sentences that other J6 defendants received. The DOJ and other sources make this information very easy to find. At least from a bird's eye view, nothing about Ray Epps pleading guilty to misdemeanors (505 out of all 1,265 J6 defendants also did), avoiding jail time (282 out of 749 convicted J6 defendants also did), or avoiding pretrial detention (70% of J6 defendants also did) seemed unusual.
If there are factors besides the severity of the charges, sentencing, or pretrial detention that I should have evaluated instead, I would love to know about them. Maybe I can even use this information at my real job.
Theory #2: I posted false or misleading information
Maybe I focused on the correct parameters, but DOJ information is either false or misleading? That's certainly a possibility, and it wouldn't be the first time a government agency made shit up. But if so, either some evidence of this duplicity or some alternative source should be offered and I'm aware of neither.
Theory #3: I posted truthful information that people thought was false or misleading
This is an online forum and we often shoot from the hip when posting. Sometimes mistakes happen. @HlynkaCG for example responded to my questions by offering two points of comparison as a contrast to how Ray Epps was treated: "we had so-cal soccer-moms and that guy who took a selfie sitting at Nancy Pelosi's spend over a year in prison only to be released after pleading to misdemeanors." I don't know who the soccer-moms are but the Nancy Pelosi reference is presumably referring to Richard Barnett who was convicted of 4 felonies and sentenced to 54 months in prison, definitely not "released after pleading to misdemeanors". As I showcased more than a year ago, this wouldn't be the first time someone here makes a confident assertion on the topic of J6 or on related election fraud theories that are not necessarily reflected in reality.
Speaking personally, I would react with genuine gratitude if anyone pointed out I had made a false or misleading assertion, because it's not something I ever wish to repeat intentionally. Part of that effort requires introspection to investigate what went wrong in the process. I again maintain there is absolutely nothing shameful about making mistakes, and part of what I value about this community is how much we celebrate remedial acknowledgement and introspection for faulty thinking and I hope HlynkaCG can shed light on the matter.
Theory #4: I posted truthful information that could lead to false or misleading implications
This reaction is commonly encountered, and likely stems from a poor decoupling ability. For example, it's likely true that Africans had a higher life expectancy enslaved in the US than they did free in Africa at the time of the slave trade. Whether or not this is true is purely a factual determination, but many people can't help it and get ahead of themselves to pre-emptively address what they believe are necessary implications of this fact. The only way that the "slavery can raise life expectancy for the enslaved" fact could in any way threaten the position of "slavery is bad" is if the former is a significant pillar of the latter, or if someone had succumbed to 'arguments as soldiers' mentality. The classic example of this scenario is AOC's famously-lampooned "Factually inaccurate but morally right".
And so I've often wondered if this is driving part of the negative reaction to fact-checking J6-related claims. Maybe challenging one specific premise (Ray Epps was treated with unusual leniency) necessarily challenges an overall conclusion (J6 defendants are treated unfairly) because someone assumes the two are coupled at the hips together:
To use a deliberately outlandish example, someone arguing "J6 defendants are treated unfairly" links to video footage of Hillary Clinton using a hot iron to torture a MAGA prisoner. I swoop in with my google-fu and point out that the video is actually a scene from a porn with surprisingly high production values. A satisfying ending to this story is possible: the person who linked the video can just say "Damn I was wrong!" and we both can just move on, skipping into the horizon.
There are several things that I think definitely should NOT happen. One, I cannot cite my deboonking to claim I've conclusively proven that J6 defendants are actually treated fairly. That wouldn't follow, especially if I'm deliberately ignoring other, much stronger arguments. Two, the person who posted the hot iron porn shouldn't refuse to admit they were wrong on that premise. This evasiveness serves absolutely no purpose in this space, and it's startlingly immature. And three, now also would not really be the time for them to pivot towards dredging up ancillary reasons for why their conclusion still remains correct.
I don't know what the solution is to this lack of decoupling. It's really hard to teach nuance.
Theory #6: I'm ruining the fun
People have deeply cherished beliefs they want to hold on to, and challenging those beliefs ruins the prospect of a good time. This is the least charitable theory obviously. The operating principle of the Motte is to be "a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas" but unfortunately this has and will forever risk being prescriptive more than descriptive. Cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias clearly exist but it stretches my empathy to its limits for me to try and understand what could motivate someone to sacrifice truth-seeking in order to pursue belief affirmation points. I don't understand it and, given the nature of its manifestation, I don't anticipate a transparent confession. I offered a template of what an introspective admission could potentially look like when I admitted to having previously believed in abolishing police/prisons despite my awareness that I lacked the ability to defend those beliefs, but maybe that confession was only possible because enough time had passed to give me distance from the sting.
True to the spirit of this post, I'm open to being proven wrong.
ymeskhout
10mo ago
There Are No Amendments In Islam
Sarah Haider writes a compelling analysis of the odd political re/alignment you see playing out today between Christians and Muslims on social issues:
Similar scuffles are taking place in Canada, and around the world conservative Christians are locking arms with Muslims in their opposition to the inclusion of gender and orientation in classroom materials. Some are applauding this new brotherhood of Abraham, and hoping that this heralds a change in the winds.
There's really nothing surprising about this alliance at the object-level. What religious Christians and Muslims believe about how society should be structured in regards to promiscuity, sexual modesty, and traditional family structures have long been near-impossible to tell apart. The overlap also bleeds into superficial similarities about isolated rural ranchers defending their traditional way of life from outside influences, while openly carrying their firearms to their places of worship (am I talking about the Taliban or...?).
Sarah is correct that the modern alliance between liberal progressives and Muslims was a marriage of convenience that took advantage of some unusual culture war circumstances, but it's a tryst that was bound to fray apart given the fundamental policy disagreements. One of the efforts to keep the bandwagon held together comes from what Sarah terms Muslims in Name Only (MINOs):
If Muslims decide to be more vocal about their opposition to leftist social agenda, they will find that MINOs will be invited to speak over them, and will succeed in drowning them out. We will be treated to a barrage of ludicrous op-eds that posit Islam as a LGBT friendly religion ("How Muhammad Was The First Queer Activist", etc) as well as profiles of camera-friendly gay Muslims who claim to find no contradictions between "their Islam" and homosexuality. The more intelligent among the MINOs might attempt to put a more theological spin on it with a few cherry-picked quotes from hadith or the Quran, or perhaps bring in some historical flavor by blaming colonizers for anti-gay legislation in the Middle East. "True Islam", it will be revealed, is a religion of Peace and #Pride.
I was raised Muslim but abandoned it as an atheist a long time ago, and this passage is particularly painful for how real it is. The discordant discourse above has largely been operating in parallel and disconnected tracks. On one side you get a bevy of purportedly "Muslim" activists announcing that Islam can mean whatever you want it to mean, and actual Muslim religious scholars responding with The Fuck?:
By a decree from God, sexual relations are permitted within the bounds of marriage, and marriage can only occur between a man and a woman. In the Quran, God explicitly condemns sexual relations with the same sex (see, e.g., Quran, al-Nisā': 16, al-A'rāf: 80–83, and al-Naml: 55–58). Moreover, premarital and extramarital sexual acts are prohibited in Islam. As God explains, "Do not go near fornication. It is truly an immoral deed and a terrible way [to behave]" (Quran, al-Isrā': 32). These aspects of Islam are unambiguously established in the Quran, the teachings of Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him), and a chain of scholarly tradition spanning fourteen centuries. As a result, they have gained the status of religious consensus (ijmā') and are recognized as integral components of the faith known to the general body of Muslims.
As an atheist I have all sorts of complaints about all religions, but the attempts to rehabilitate Islam's image to better fit liberal sensibilities are pernicious for their particular dishonesty. Because one of the few good things I'll say about Islam is to praise its unusual commitment towards scriptural fidelity.
In case you didn't know, Islam was founded around 600 AD explicitly as the final entry in the Abrahamic religion trilogy. Islam was not presented as an alternative to Judaism and Christianity, rather it was heralded as the true and uncorrupted version of those creeds. According to Islamic lore, Allah (literally just the Arabic word for God) created the world and everything in it and then spent the next however many millennia trying — and implicitly failing — to convey his divine message to humans through a long succession of prophets. First man Adam was also the first prophet, and he was followed by well-known Biblical heavy-hitters like Ayyub (Job), Musa (Moses), and of course 'Isa (Jesus). The full list is unknown and unknowable but Islam assures us that every community throughout history received at least one of Allah's Verified™ messengers.
The reason Muhammad of Mecca is special in Islam is because he's Allah's final message delivery attempt. Adam was the first, and Muhammad is heralded as the "Seal of the Prophets" to underscore the finality. I won't get into exactly why god needed so many attempts to convey his message, but a common point of criticism from Muslims about past attempts (such as Christianity) is that god's message was corrupted and lost through misguided translation attempts. I say this as a Muslim apostate with no stake in the debate but the concern over the Bible's reliability seems uncontroversially true to me given the inherent limitations of translation, and the resulting myriad of competing versions. After centuries of debating whether the in John 1:1 was intended to be a definite or indefinite article from the original Greek, I can see why someone would be too traumatized by the prospect of any translation attempt.
To their credit, early Muslim scholars appear to have taken this mistranslation concern very seriously. All of Muhammad's revelations were collected over time by his followers and, after his death in 632 AD, were compiled into a single book known as the Quran. Islamic theology insists that the Quran is the literal word of Allah which means it has never been modified. Given the religious motivations at play, it's natural to be skeptical of such a claim but it does appear to be solidly supported by the archeological evidence available, with the oldest Quranic manuscripts radiocarbon dated to between 568 and 645 AD and matching what we have available. The commitment to the divine inviolability of the Quran is also reflected in the expectation that, everywhere from America to Indonesia, all practicing Muslims are required to learn and recite passages in the original Arabic. Translations of the Quran exist of course, but reluctantly so and intended solely as a study aid.
The Quran is the central commanding text, but below it are hadiths — a sporadic collection of stories, speeches, and anecdotes attributed to Muhammad and a significant source for how to live the Good Muslim Life (covering topics such as when to assalamualaikum your bros, whether cats are cool, or how to wash oneself before praying). Unlike the Quran, hadiths are not seen as direct guidance from Allah. Instead, their reliability as a guiding lodestar is obsessively assessed in proportion to their authenticity. So some hadiths will be accepted as controlling authorities because they're heavily corroborated by reliable narrators, while others get dismissed because they're fourth-hand accounts on a weird topic and with a dodgy chain of transmission.
The point is, given the obsession over the lineage of the Quran and *hadiths, *it's no surprise that Muslims today come across as especially zealous about following their deen. There's no leeway to fall back on mealy-mouthed "Living Quran" rationalizations for why only some aspects of Islam should be obeyed but not others.
Islam's etymology is about unquestioning submission to authority, purportedly only to god's authority but that's a hard demarcation to keep in mind when political and religious power is near-impossible to disentangle within Muslim countries. Its focus on the eternal afterlife for doling out rewards for devotion endowed me with a fatalistic perspective about my temporary earthly existence at a formative time where I was still grappling with immigrating to the US. My depressed ass then couldn't wait to hurry up and die — an overwhelming desire to to get it over with already so that can experience the promised happiness at last. I left Islam because it's a regressive and stifling bundle of superstitions, ill-suited to living out a fulfilling existence. In consideration of the billions today living under its penumbra, I wish it wasn't so, but that sentiment is not enough to change reality.
I'm comfortable saying that the MINOs who self-appoint themselves as the religion's modern rehabilitators are blatantly lying. If I had to guess at their motives, it probably has something to do with the fact that being a member of a religious minority is too valuable an emblem within the Progressive Stack of oppressed identities to give up completely. For Islam to be the religion least amenable to revisionism does not matter when it's put up against such an irresistible force.
ymeskhout
4mo ago
Follow-Up On That Jewish Conspiracy
My post on the Israel-Palestine affair was the most widely-read thing I ever wrote; not something I anticipated from what was originally intended to be a learning exercise for myself. I've been meaning to address some of the thoughtful feedback I received but I've been busy. There were (alhamdulillah) no factual errors to correct and my overall thesis has not materially changed, but some connective context was missing and some of my points were badly articulated. I'll try to keep this post self-contained but you'll likely miss some context if you hadn't read the first part.
Why the Discourse™ is so Fucked
Before we get into specifics, it's important to first sketch out the discourse battlelines on this issue. Special shout-out again to Inverse Florida who wrote Denial by a thousand cuts barely a week after Hamas's attacks regarding the unusually prevalent campaign of factual denial by the Left/Progressives/"Woke" [1] on the pro-Palestinian side. Their essay helped me understand the dynamics more than any other piece of writing, and it was thoroughly depressing because Inverse makes an airtight argument I don't want to be true.
Woke ideology overwhelmingly spawned out of American left-of-center spaces and its core tenet is the Manichean worldview that neatly divides everyone into stark binary categories of oppressor versus oppressed. Because of its origins, the splits generally reflect only the tensions prevalent within U.S. culture wars (cis vs trans, white vs black, colonizer vs indigenous, and so on) and so the parody/reality for how it's applied to foreign conflicts is to ask: who is the white person in this dispute? Whoever that may be is automatically and permanently adjudicated as the malefactor, and so for the Israel-Palestine conflict, Jews are the 'white person' not because of their genetics but because they're shoehorned as fitting into the white/oppressor archetype (colonizers, imperialists, Western-aligned, successful, rich, etc).
Because of the oppression binary, Inverse Florida points out that another core tenet for Leftists is they see themselves as perpetually powerless, no matter how untrue that might be. Taken altogether, the typical defense mechanisms against Leftist criticism tends to boil down to "Maybe this Leftist did a bad thing, but you the observer are worse for noticing and drawing attention to something so insignificant." If significance swells past the point of viable dismissal, then the only option remaining is to deny, deny, deny. Whatever accusation is levied cannot be true and therefore is not true, all to protect the worldview from falling apart.
This translates into serious ire against anything whatsoever that deigns to complicate the cleanly-drawn villain/victim narrative. Because Oppressed = Virtuous, and because Hamas = Oppressed, condemning their rampage is impossible without severe cognitive malaise. Similarly, because Israel = Villain, any atrocities against Israelis must by definition be justified, and if you haven't found a reason it's because you need to keep looking. Any potential threat to this binary framework is a pestering gnat that must be immediately crushed in order to keep the gnawing cognitive dissonance at bay.
Again, I do not want to be right about this, but I have encountered no other plausible explanation why for example posters of kidnapped Israelis has whipped up so many into a frothy rage. This confrontation with two poster rippers is four tedious minutes long and not once are either of them able to articulate a modicum of justification for their actions. Only the 'pestering gnat' theory makes sense.
I've also experienced exactly the same dynamic recently with close friends I had known for years. I maintain an iron curtain between my writing and my personal social media accounts, but about two months ago I posted what I believed to have been a tepidly-worded condemnation of anti-Jewish elements among the pro-Palestinian movement. The vitriolic response was painfully predictable. I set alerts and within minutes a friend I had known for 13 years blocked me without explanation, an acquaintance excoriated me for bringing attention to something so insignificant, and another claimed ignorance about whether the bigotry I described even existed. Another close friend I've known for a decade to her credit tried to have a conversation about the topic, but then blocked me. Her final straw appears to have been when I pointed out the serious inaccuracies with the map she sent me. Dismiss, deny, and if those fail, disavow.
It's disturbing seeing so many folks on the pro-Palestinian side (to be clear, not all) robotically Beep Boop Beep into this position.[2] I have long viewed Woke ideology with some measure of guarded concern, but because of its blatant recurring incoherence, I figured it would eventually burn itself out into irrelevance after it has generated enough podcasting material. But it's clear I have severely underestimated the enduring influence of this ideology.
Pestering Gnats Everywhere
Once you have the 'pestering gnat' theory in mind, previously inexplicable behavior neatly falls into place. I mentioned the problem of media outlets blatantly lying by omission on this topic, but it's far worse than just one Vox video about Gaza. Amnesty International is a widely respected international human rights advocacy organization that issued a fucking 280-page novel in 2022 lamenting the injustices of Israel's security barriers. They outline scores of legitimate concerns (which I'll get to later) but across those hundreds of pages, not once does the report say anything about the rash of suicide bombings that prompted construction of the barriers and checkpoints. The only reference I could find was near the end on page 263 where they obliquely mention Israel justifies its policies on unspecified "security grounds". Amnesty International can't pretend to be ignorant here, as they already condemned the practice of Palestinian child suicide bombers in 2005.
It's perfectly reasonable to argue that Israel's security barrier is unjustified because it's too ineffective, or too costly, or too onerous, or too abusive --- and I definitely would love to hear those arguments --- but playing ostrich is anti-persuasive as I assume you're hiding something for a reason. Anyone who reads only this report (all 280 pages!) to educate themselves about the topic would be left with the bizarre and misleading impression that Israel chose to dedicate immense resources into building up an elaborate security apparatus because...they're mean I guess?
Similarly, the sanewashing is absolutely egregious. I was shocked to find out that everyone's favorite geographic chant has a completely different meaning in the original Arabic, conveniently transmogrifying "Palestine will be free" from the far less palatable "Palestine is Arab" in the original. It's so well known that throngs of protestors in front of the White House, far away from the region, know it well enough to repeat it.
This is plainly what a cognitive dissonance defense mechanism looks like. Anyone who exhibits this level of aversion towards tackling issues head-on in a transparent and honest manner is openly incriminating themselves. They're revealing lack of confidence in their advocacy, demonstrating a belief their position is indefensible without obfuscation.[3]
Maybe they're internally conflicted yet psychologically unwilling to directly confront the dissonance, or maybe they're consciously choosing to deceive. Regardless of the reason, it's an extremely worrisome development to see take hold on any topic.
Now, back to addressing some of my claims in the original post.
Apartheid: Same but Different
Given the scores of readers who misunderstood my point on this topic, I have to take responsibility for doing a terrible job articulating it. Under the section titled "Apartheid State", I discussed the economic status of Arab-Israelisbut in doing so I painted an unintentionally misleading picture of the Apartheid condemnation levied against Israel.
Some demographic clarification is necessary here. Before the founding of Israel, the common trait among the overwhelming majority of Mandatory Palestine's population is that they spoke Arabic. Hence, Arabs. After Israel was founded some of those Arabs remained within Israel's borders, were granted Israeli citizenship, and are colloquially referred to as 48-Arabs. While the other Arabs, the ones displaced from Israel's borders are referred to as Palestinians. After the 1967 Six Day war, Israel has fully occupied Gaza, the West Bank, and all of its Palestinian residents. The point here is the two Arab groups were virtually indistinguishable genetically/culturally/religiously before the schism, and any differences today is the result of cultural and political forks. Besides a limited family reunification program, Israel never made a meaningful attempt to offer Palestinians citizenship or otherwise integrate them. Instead, Palestinians have remained mired in a legal purgatory within isolated enclaves.
When we talk about "Apartheid" we're conjuring up South Africa's system of institutionalized racial segregation that began in 1948[4] and served as a humiliating stain on the country's reputation until widespread diplomatic condemnation forced its end in the early 1990s. So when Israel is described as an Apartheid state --- as a state with institutionalized racial segregation --- this denunciation can be understood as a reference to the Arabs (read: Palestinians) under Israeli military occupation, but it's incoherent when applied to Arabs who are full Israeli citizens. So is the dividing line actually based on race, or something else entirely?
I'm generally agnostic about vocabulary choices and what matters far more than which lexical denominator to affix is describing Palestinian conditions straightforwardly. Sam Kriss (whose writing I highly recommend) chimed in the comments with lurid details about the "calculated unfreedom" Palestinians live under. There is no denying that Palestinians endure abject poverty that is made even worse by the intrusive security apparatus and the passively-tolerated spate of settler violence. The occupation's legal system is explicitly bifurcated not along territorial boundaries, but along individual legal status. Jewish settlers in the West Bank fall under the jurisdiction of a civil justice system, while Palestinians in the West Bank are subject to military tribunals staffed entirely by Israeli soldiers (including the prosecutors, judges, and translators), with far lower evidentiary standards and an expanded scope of what counts as a criminal offense.
The comparison I aimed to draw with Arab-Israelis was a means of contemplating reasons why a hypothetical full Israeli annexation of the Palestinian territories and its people would be seen as anathema, at least from a material standpoint. If Arab citizens of Israel suffered a horrendous quality of life under Israeli sovereignty now, I could begin to understand some of the intense resistance to Israeli governance from Palestinian Arabs. But as I noted, Arab-Israelis enjoy far higher quality of life than almost anywhere else in the Arab world, so that potential explanation was a total dead-end to me.
However, it is worthwhile to examine whether the Arab-Israeli living arrangement, who are only 21% of all Israelis, can scale.
Ethnostate but Democratic
It's worth pointing out that the 48-Arabs did not always enjoy the legal equality they have today. The Zionists didn't really have a plan for how to integrate Arabs into Israel, and though they were granted 'citizenship' they were subject to martial law until 1966. This means that throughout Israel's existence, the only period when Israel did not have a bifurcated legal system split along ethnic lines was a brief window of time between 1966 and the beginning of its Palestinian occupation in 1967.
It's also worth pointing out that the hypothetical full Israeli annexation (including full citizenship to Palestinians) I mentioned would be supported by virtually nobody, least of all by Israel. The Muslim world would be howling with rage at what would be seen as the extinction of the Palestinian Cause, while worldwide condemnation would focus on the baseline disdain against territorial acquisition. Israel meanwhile, as a country explicitly founded as a refuge for Jews from across the world, would be unwilling to absorb the voter demographic shock.
Israel rightfully prides itself as a democratic enterprise, but there is no question that this adherence to democratic principles is at least in part conditional on not having too many of the wrong kind of voters. As Freddie DeBoer pointed out, the objective of an ethnostate will always be in tension with expanding the voter franchise. Arab-Israelis have full voting rights, but they're also only 21% of the population and therefore not a threat to Jewish voting supremacy on policy issues that fall along religious/ethnic lines. That calculus changes completely if the 4.9 million Palestinians living in occupied territories are added to Israel's 9.7 million population and its voter rolls. To the extent that ethnicity and religion can predict political stability within this region of the world, it's also reasonable to be concerned whether a one-state solution would repeat the same downward spiral neighboring Lebanon charted.
I notice a pointed discomfort among Israeli supporters in the West when I describe Israel as an ethnostate. It is! An ethnostate is any country organized along ethnic lines, and undeniably that's what Israel is! The label may have distasteful connotations, but that doesn't make it inaccurate! You may argue that an ethnostate is justified on this narrow exception because of the persistent history of Jewish oppression et cetera yadda yadda, and I'm sympathetic to those arguments but I have no patience for reality denial.
My preferred policy palette is basically libertarian, though I refer to myself as an anarchist because my overriding priority would be to see an archipelago of diverse systems of customized governance. You can call this the "Voltairean" vision of government in that I may disagree with someone's preferred form of government, but I will defend their right to establish it. "Let a hundred flowers of distinct governance systems bloom" as Mao famously said. I have severe disagreements with any government that cleaves along racial or ethnic lines, but I support anyone's right to found one.
I'm at peace with my position, but supporters of Israel who feel conflicted about the ethnostate/democracy tension are responsible for undergoing their own soul-searching to figure out what to prioritize at the margins. How much national Jewish identity is worth potentially sacrificing at the altar of expanding the democratic franchise? I can't answer that for you.
Violence for Thee, but not for Me
I'm not a pacifist and I transparently outlined the principles I rely upon to evaluate whether any application of violence is justified. It depends on how much the violence is oriented towards a specific goal, proportional to the objective, and carried out with humility. I applied these principles to denounce the depressingly common Palestinian practice of indiscriminate attacks against orthogonal civilian targets. Some of the pointed criticism I received in response to my essay carried the implication that I would be unwilling to denounce Israeli violence which fails to satisfy these principles, but I hold no such aversion.
1. A History of Jewish Violence
In fairness, I can understand the basis for such a suspicion. When I decried Israel's history of lying to cover up its war crimes, I cited only two examples from the IDF. There were illustrative examples, never intended to serve as a comprehensive list of all Zionist atrocities. Faceless Craven pointed out several omissions of atrocities by the Jewish side from across the history of the conflict, many I admittedly was not aware of at the time. Some notable examples I did not mention include the 1946 King David Hotel bombing by the Irgun which killed 91 people, the 1982 Sabra and Shatila massacre which was directly perpetrated by Christian Lebanese militias but with the support of the IDF and resulted in 460 to 3,500 dead civilians, or the 1994 Cave of the Patriarchs massacre where one far-right Zionist killed 29 people and injured 125.
Beyond specific acts, it's perfectly relevant to examine how much the Israeli government tacitly encourages a culture of indemnity for gratuitous violence perpetrated by its own. In 1991, a 13-year-old Palestinian girl named Iman Darweesh Al Hams was shot and killed by an IDF commander who emptied his machine gun into her. The commander expressed no regrets, saying he would've done the same had she been 3-years-old, and was cleared of any wrongdoing by a military court. The same issue can be examined regarding broader Israeli culture as reflected by who gets elected to its highest office. Menachem Begin, the leader of the Irgun and the guy responsible for the King David Hotel bombing, was elected Prime Minister in 1977. Yitzhak Shamir, the leader of the Stern Gang, a Zionist terrorist group that splintered from the Irgun because they weren't radical enough was elected Prime Minister in 1986. As did Ariel Sharon in 2001, despite his involvement in the Sabra and Shatila massacre and a list of antics way too insane and numerous to get into here. One of the dominant political entity in Israel today is the right-wing Likud party, and it was founded by Sharon and Begin.
Evidently in the realm of Israeli politics a history of egregious violence against non-Jews is not a drawback, but potentially a sought-after qualification for a significant portion of the electorate. You could be charitable and maybe argue this simply reflects a legitimate desire for leaders who have a demonstrated commitment to national security, and with direct experience in armed conflict. But just as I denounced homicidal bloodthirst within Palestinian culture, I must do the same for Israeli culture. I would be betraying my principles otherwise.
2. Ceasefire When?
Relatedly, my post was published as Israel's pulverization of Gaza was ramping up but it was quiet on that specific issue. That was not obfuscation, I just do not have the information or expertise to play armchair commander. I can't fully trust casualty numbers from Hamas but even halving their claims leaves you with at least 10,000 Gazans killed by Israel, a number far beyond my capacity to comprehend. The IDF already admitted their proportionality calculus accepts the obliteration of 50 civilians in exchange for a chance to kill one Hamas commander. The IDF may claim to care about minimizing civilian casualties, but if 3 Israeli hostages waving white flags can get mistakenly killed by the IDF, we have plenty of reasons to question that commitment's veracity. Israel may be pursuing a perfectly justifiable objective (destroying Hamas), and the preceding examples are all absolutely damning indicators against sufficient proportionality and humility, but it's not conclusive without answering the question: compared to what?
I admit without any hesitation that Israel's actions in Gaza have been immensely destructive. But as noted by the highly recommended Trembling Mad, raw numbers alone are insufficient for adjudicating moral culpability, no matter how far off-the-charts they might be. The falsifiability argument would be to imagine a hypothetical Israel that is pursuing the exact same military objectives, but whose commitment towards minimizing collateral destruction is earnest and unimpeachable. I fully expect the civilian death toll accumulated by this hypothetical Israel to be lower than it is in reality, but it cannot be zero. This is purely a result of the baseline challenges of confronting a surreptitious belligerent within a dense urban environment. And yet, unless we have viable alternatives to contrast Israel's behavior against, it's difficult to accurately evaluate Israel's level of misconduct (and again, I already said there are ample reasons for suspicion).
The calls for an Israeli ceasefire are directly implicated by this question. I've repeatedly asked and desperately searched for any suggestions for how Israel should conduct its war differently, and it's near-impossible to get a straight answer because so many ceasefire advocates outright reject the premise that Israel has any justifiable objectives whatsoever. Watch AOC's serious discomfort in reaction to this very simple question. To his credit, Cenk Uygur is the only pro-Palestinian advocate I've come across willing to articulate an alternative, but his idea that Israel should just send special forces into Hamas's tunnels is advertising serious ignorance about the subject matter. If you've come across any other viable alternatives, I'm desperate to see them.
I anticipate perplexity for how it's possible for me to express support for Israel in spite of what I wrote above, and the simple answer is my support should be understood as a comparative ranking relative to the alternatives within this conflict. Nobody is under any obligation to pick any side --- and more power to you if you choose to abstain --- but I picked to avoid the simplistic nihilism that comes along with decrying everyone's hands as equally dirty. I disagree that they are, and I stake my position from a place of clear-eyed transparency, fully acknowledging Israel's sins. Because it would be another betrayal of my principles for me to engage in the same dismissal and denial I condemn in others.
In Which I Solve Everything
There's no reason for anyone to listen to what I have to say here regarding any potential solutions --- Wikipedia binging hasn't deluded me to that extreme --- but I'll offer more scattered thoughts.
Popular Israeli support for Likud and its hardline focus on security has historically risen in response to heightened Palestinian violence. Right now Netanyahu and Likud appear to be reviled by most Israelis for their massive fuck-up on October 7th, but it seems highly unlikely to expect appetite for a two-state solution (which necessarily requires accepting increasing Palestinian autonomy) to do anything but continue to crash among the Israeli public.
An argument I've regularly encountered from more honest advocates on the pro-Palestinian side is they first acknowledge the concerns over Palestinian violence as legitimate, but then they claim that Israeli's intrusive security measures are ultimately counterproductive because they provoke further radicalization and thus further violence. This strikes me as a naive argument, but I admit I have no way of falsifying it except through hypotheticals. Imagine Israel suddenly announcing a complete policy shift: every military checkpoint and every concrete barrier will be completely dismantled, and every Palestinian will have full autonomy to move about wherever they please within Israel, free of any security screening of any kind...how many Jews do you expect to be murdered the next day? I can't give an exact number beyond "a fucking fuckton".
I don't see how any mutual de-escalation can be viable given the fanatical devotion commanded by Palestinian militancy. Richard Hanania is correct to argue that Palestinians are maxed out on hatred, with Hamas's military wing (al-Qassam Brigades) garnering the highest approval rating among Palestinians, polling at 89%. If you want to draw an equivalency between al-Qassam and the terrorizing violence doled out by extreme Zionist settlers, that's fair! But the comparison cannot hold regarding overall societal sentiment, as Israelis demonstrably express far more disagreement on the application of military deterrence and other issues. As recently as July 2023, 15% of Israelis were willing to negotiate on a resolution with Hamas, despite the group's penchant for rocket barrages.
When I cite the insanity of Palestinian militancy, I wonder how many think I'm exaggerating. If you didn't learn about Farfour the Mouse last time, here's another chance to see the level of fanatical indoctrination aimed at Palestinian children. I can't stress how illuminating it is to see footage from the Hamas TV show Tomorrow's Pioneers. I cannot claim that this show is representative of Palestinian opinion (and the linked video highlights many who expressed public disagreement) but the detail I found most unsettling were the number of young callers to the show readily naming and singing from a disturbingly long roster of songs all about genocidal martyrdom.
I would hope it's apparent how much of an outlier this level of unbridled animosity is, inculcated from a very young age. For everyone's sake, Palestinians are in urgent need of severe deradicalization, but I cannot fathom what that process could look like.
And finally, where should Palestinians live? I'm writing this from the comfort of my home as someone who has never known displacement, and my immigration story involved a cushy plane seat, so discount what I have to say accordingly. In my previous post, I did not but should have addressed the issue of displaced Palestinians' right of return. Matt Yglesias examined this issue in greater detail, and his article highlights one of the core tensions I already touched upon though. Let's assume the worst case displacement scenario (a scenario I am explicitly not endorsing and bringing up solely to analyze its ramifications) where Israel rounds up and forcibly deports all 4.9 million Palestinians currently living under Israeli occupation. What happens next?
If we consider all the major Arab countries who claim to be ardent supporters of the Palestinian people (e.g. Egypt population 100 million, Saudi Arabia 35M, Algeria 43M, Iran 83M, etc.), what would prevent any of them from opening their borders to the survivors of a second Nakba? Countries all over the world regularly accomodate refugees and mass migrations. Over the course of the ongoing Syrian civil war, Turkey (population 85 million) already has accepted 3.3 million Syrian refugees in what is functionally a permanent arrangement. If Turkey managed this influx on its own (to be clear, not without strife or hardship) I don't see what would prevent the aforementioned countries from enacting a similar endeavor.
The answer is while there may not be practical barriers towards accommodating millions of Palestinian refugees, there are serious political hurdles. Remember that from 1948 to 1967, Gaza was partof Egypt and the West Bank was part of Jordan. When Israel signed a peace treaty with Egypt in 1978, Egypt was offered Gaza back but they declined and instead renounced any territorial claims over it. Jordan pulled a similar move and relinquished its claims over the West Bank in 1988 and eventually stripped West Bank Palestinians of the Jordanian citizenship they had.
To recap my main thesis again, none of this makes any sense unless you incorporate the ideological component that needs Palestinians to remain stuck where they are, playing their role as the downtrodden in this grand theatrical production, all to ensure the jihadi casus belli against the Jews is maintained. This is what makes this conflict so perverse, so many people are just fucking pawns. Had Gaza been re-absorbed and became assimilated as just another governorate of Egypt, or had the share of Jordanians with Palestinian descent continued to increase beyond the estimated 50% it already is today, what remaining grievances would be worth the self-immolation remedy?
The key takeaway in understanding the intractability of this conflict is that much is deliberately constructed to remain that way. While I can't claim to offer any viable solutions, its perpetuity will remain partly a result of the aversion towards transparent acknowledgements of reality, and a result of the persistent unwillingness to critically examine the actual motivations of those involved.
[1] Words are very fuzzy beasts and I'm normally very reluctant to use terms like 'Woke' because of its charged ambiguity, but unfortunately there are scant other alternatives available to uncontroversially describe an undeniably real phenomenon.
[2] What I'm describing is simply a particularly intense variant of cognitive dissonance, and it's not at all exclusive to just Western Leftists. Anyone else who ever experiences the serious mental discomfort upon realizing their closely-held beliefs could be in jeopardy of being contradicted by reality is susceptible to similarly severe reactions.
[3] Just because an advocate believes dishonesty is necessary to advance their cause does not mean they're correct!
[4] Quelle coïncidence.
ymeskhout
7mo ago
Defunding My Mistake
Confessions of an ex-ACAB
Until about five years ago, I unironically parroted the slogan All Cops Are Bastards (ACAB) and earnestly advocated to abolish the police and prison system. I had faint inklings I might be wrong about this a long time ago, but it took a while to come to terms with its disavowal. What follows is intended to be not just a detailed account of what I used to believe but most pertinently, why. Despite being super egotistical, for whatever reason I do not experience an aversion to openly admitting mistakes I've made, and I find it very difficult to understand why others do. I've said many times before that nothing engenders someone's credibility more than when they admit error, so you definitely have my permission to view this kind of confession as a self-serving exercise (it is). Beyond my own penitence, I find it very helpful when folks engage in introspective, epistemological self-scrutiny, and I hope others are inspired to do the same.
How Did I Get There?
For decades now, I've consistently held plain vanilla libertarian policy preferences, with the only major distinction being that I've aligned myself more with the anarchists. Whereas some were content with pushing the "amount of government" lever to "little", I wanted to kick it all the way to "zero". There are many reasons I was and remain drawn to anarchist libertarianism, and chief among them was the attractively simple notion that violence is immoral and that government is violence. The problem with moral frameworks is that they can be quite infectious. To pick on one example for demonstration's sake, I notice that for many animal welfare advocates a vegan diet is heralded not just as the ideal moral choice, but also as the healthiest for humans, the least polluting, the cheapest financially, the best for soil conservation, the most water-efficient, the least labor-exploitative, et cetera & so forth. There's a risk that if you become dogmatically attached to a principled position, you're liable to be less scrutinizing when reflexively folding in other justifications. I suspect that happened to me with prisons, for example, where because I felt immediate revulsion at the thought of the state forcing someone into a cage, I was unwilling to entertain the possibility it could be justified. Ceding the ground on this particular brick was too threatening to the anarchism edifice I was so fond of.
Obviously if you advocate getting rid of the government, people naturally want to know what will replace it. Some concerns were trivial to respond to (I'm not sad about the DEA not existing anymore because drugs shouldn't be illegal to begin with), but other questions I found annoying because I admittedly had no good answer, such as what to do with criminals if the police didn't exist. I tried to find these answers. Anarchism as an umbrella ideology leans heavily to the far left and has a history of serious disagreements with fellow-travelers in Marxism. Despite that feud, anarchist thought absorbed by proxy Marxist "material conditions" critiques that blame the existence of crime on capitalism's inequalities --- a claim that continues to be widely circulated today, despite how flagrantly dumb it is. As someone who was and continues to be solidly in favor of free market economics, these critiques were like parsing an inscrutable foreign language.[1] I was in college around my most ideologically formative time and a voracious reader, but I churned through the relevant literature and found nothing convincing. Instead of noting that as a blaring red flag, I maintained the grip I had on my preferred conclusion and delegated the hard work of actually defending it to someone else. I specifically recall how Angela Davis's 2003 book Are Prisons Obsolete? (written by a famous professor! woah!) had just come out and the praise it was getting from my lefty friends. If this synopsis of the book is in any way accurate, Davis's arguments are so undercooked that it should come with a health warning. The fact that I never read the book all the following years could have been intentional, because it allowed me a convenient escape hatch: whenever pressed, I could just hide behind Davis and other purportedly super prestigious intellectuals as my security detail. Back then, I carried the incredibly naive assumption that any position held by prestigious academics couldn't be completely baseless...right?
Also pertinent is exploring why I felt so attached to something I knew I couldn't logically defend, and the simple explanation is that it was cool. Being a libertarian can be super socially isolating, especially if you live only in places overwhelmingly surrounded by leftists like I do. I navigated the social scene by prioritizing shared political values --- let's not discuss how I don't support the minimum wage, focus instead on how much I hate the police and on how much I love punk rock. That worked really well. Putting "ACAB" on my Tinder profile was an effective signaling move that dramatically improved my chances of matching with the tattooed and pierced cuties I was chasing. Announcing at a party that you are so radical that you're willing to eliminate prisons is an effective showmanship maneuver that few others have the stomach to challenge. There was plenty of social cachet motivating me to ignore niggling doubts.
How Did I Leave?
Whatever the outward facade, my position was crumbling behind it. Almost seven years ago I started working as a public defender and was inundated with hundreds of hours of police encounter footage that were completely uneventful; if anyone, it was usually my client who acted like an idiot. I've seen bodycam footage that starts with officers dropping their lunch in the precinct breakroom in order to full-on sprint toward a "shots fired" dispatch call. I've seen dipshits like the woman who attempted to flee a traffic stop while the trooper was desperately reaching for the ignition with his legs dangling out of the open car door. Despite this, the trooper treated her with impeccable professionalism once the situation was stabilized. At least about five years ago, I found myself in a conversation with a very normie liberal lawyer on the question of police/prison abolition. It was one of the first times I encountered serious pushback and I quickly realized just how woefully under-equipped I was. I distinctly remember how unpleasant the feeling was --- not from the fear of being wrong about something, but rather the fear of being found out.
There were instances where I pulled bullshit what-I-really-mean defenses of ACAB and tried to pontificate about how it's less about whether individual officers are per se "bastards", but rather how the institutional role is blah blah blah. I played similarly squirmy motte-and-bailey games with the abolition topic when I was confronted with undeniable rebuttals. I found an example from almost 10 years ago of one of my most common responses, where I'd highlight some police scandal (e.g., cops seizing more stuff through civil forfeiture than is stolen from people by burglars) and accompany it with the eminently lukewarm "on net, society might be better off without police". The argument is as abstract as it is unconvincing; soaring at an altitude too high for effective critique yet also too remote for anyone to care. Tellingly, I wouldn't and couldn't address the more pressing questions of how to deal with more serious crimes.
It was bizarre watching the discourse unfold during the 2020 BLM riots/protests. Almost overnight, the normie liberal demographic that previously was willing to push back on my inanity was now hoarse from screaming for police abolition. My younger self would've been thrilled watching the populace fully adopt radical anarchist sloganeering, but my actual self was aghast. I couldn't believe these people were speaking literally (yep!) or whether they somehow discovered the elusive magic elixir that transformed police abolition into a viable policy proposal (nope!). I'm someone who was and remains a full supporter of BLM's policy proposals, and I even defended burning down a police precinct building in Minneapolis for fuck's sake, and yet I didn't join the defund chorus.
Still, there's a noticeable bend to some of my writing from that time where I consciously mirrored some of the language du jour --- such as making a bog standard argument against mass incarceration while aping abolition language, or responding to a DTP conversation by discussing police overcompensation. I haven't changed my mind about anything I wrote there, but nevertheless it's fair to accuse me of indirectly "sanewashing" the DTP issue. I took my boring, wonky arguments and adorned them with the faintest slogan perfume. This let me carry my hobbyhorses on the attention wave, but it also contributed to rehabilitating (however slightly) the totally crazy slogan position.
Now What?
I know it sounds crazy, but I think effective law enforcement is a vital component of any well-functioning society. Tons of cops are perfectly decent people who try to do the best they can at a difficult and unenviable job. There are bad people out there who can be prevented from doing bad things only when they are physically restrained with chains and metal bars. Unless we develop some revolutionary new technology or fundamentally modify the nature of man, this is the reality we're stuck with. I still firmly believe there are loads of improvements we can make to the policing and incarceration we have, but abolishing it all is a delusional idea untethered from reality. Radical stance, I know.
Regarding the anarchist responses to the topic, the only coherent proposals I've ever encountered are from David Friedman and others on the anarcho-capitalist side (a variant thoroughly detested by left-wing anarchist thinkers who think it's an affront even to consider it "real" anarchism). Friedman's response is essentially a cyberpunk future with competing private companies offering insurance, security, and arbitration in one package. Friedman's proposal is unusually thoughtful and coherent (the bar is low) and yet still remains largely a thought exercise reliant on some generous game theory assumptions. Who knows if it will or can ever work.
In terms of lessons learned, I should first note that introspection of this kind, spanning across such a long time period, will have significant blind spots and would be particularly prone to flattering revisionism. The most obvious mistake I made was in burying those unnerving moments of doubt. Instead of running toward the fire to put it out, I did my best to tell myself there was no fire. I had already arrived at a conclusion in my mind and worked backward to find its support, and I suppressed how little I could actually find. Whether intentionally or not, I fabricated comforting explanations for why my position was right even though I couldn't directly defend it, often citing evidence that was more aspiration than reality. My ideological isolation kept me safe from almost all pushback anyways. And magnifying all of this were the social dynamics that rewarded me for keeping the horse blinders on.
I'm likely overlooking other factors of course, and there's the ever-present, gnawing worry that haunts me, whispering that I might be fundamentally mistaken about something else. Maybe I am, but hopefully I'll be better equipped to unearth it.
[1] This isn't really on point or even about crime, but to give just one example of the "vibe" I encountered from left-wing anarchists, Voltairine de Cleyre in one of her essays makes a very Kulak-esque argument about how to best guarantee freedom of speech:
Anarchism says, Make no laws whatever concerning speech, and speech will be free; so soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that "freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license"; and they will define and define freedom out of existence. Let the guarantee of free speech be in every man's determination to use it, and we shall have no need of paper declarations.
ymeskhout
9mo ago
When Someone Tells You They're Lying, Believe Them
Some people refuse to admit they're wrong, but there's other clues
Paul Ehrlich became well-known for his 1968 book The Population Bomb, where he made many confidently-stated but spectacularly-wrong predictions about imminent overpopulation causing apocalyptical resource scarcity. As illustration for how far off the mark Ehrlich was, he predicted widespread famines in India at a time when its population was around 500 million people, and he wrote "I don't see how India could possibly feed two hundred million more people by 1980." He happened to have made this claim right before India's Green Revolution in agriculture. Not only is India able to feed a population that tripled to 1.4 billion people, it has long been one of the world's largest agricultural exporter.
Ehrlich is also known for notoriously losing a bet in 1990 to one of my favorite humans ever, the perennial optimist (and business professor) Julian Simon. Bryan Caplan brings up some details to the follow-up that never was:
We've all heard about the Ehrlich-Simon bet. Simon the cornucopian bet that resources would get cheaper, Ehrlich the doomsayer bet that they would get pricier, and Simon crushed him. There's a whole book on it. What you probably don't know, however, is that in 1995, Paul Ehrlich and Steve Schneider proposed a long list of new bets for Simon - and that Simon refused them all.
The first bet was fairly straight-forward: Ehrlich picked 5 commodities (copper, chromium, nickel, tin, & tungsten) and predicted that their price would be higher in 1990 compared to 1980 as the materials become scarcer. Instead of rising, the combined price went down. Ehrlich's decade-spanning obstinance and unparalleled ability to step on rakes make him an irresistible punching bag but despite his perennial wrongness, his responses have ranged from evasion to outright denials:
Anne and I have always followed U.N. population projections as modified by the Population Reference Bureau --- so we never made "predictions," even though idiots think we have. When I wrote The Population Bomb in 1968, there were 3.5 billion people. Since then we've added another 2.8 billion --- many more than the total population (2 billion) when I was born in 1932. If that's not a population explosion, what is? My basic claims (and those of the many scientific colleagues who reviewed my work) were that population growth was a major problem. Fifty-eight academies of science said that same thing in 1994, as did the world scientists' warning to humanity in the same year. My view has become depressingly mainline!
Some humans possess the unfortunate egotistical and dishonorable habit of refusing to admit error. It's a reflex I personally find utterly baffling, because nothing engenders someone's credibility to me more than their ability to admit error. So if we can't always rely on people to admit a mistake, what else do we have?
What I find so interesting about the second bet in 1995 is how peculiar the proposed conditions were [image link]:
I kept thinking "...so?" as I read these. Why would someone care about the availability of firewood versus the heating and cooking costs in general? Why would someone care about per capita cropland statistics versus the availability of food in general? Many of these are also blatant statistical fuckery, such as monitoring increases in absolute worldwide AIDS deaths during a period of persistent population growth.
Ehrlich is playing a seemingly uncomfortable game of Twister here, but his behavior makes perfect sense if you read intelligence and agency behind his decisions. The only explanation for the indirect, tangential, and collateral measurements is that Ehrlich knows that a direct measurement will not be favorable to his pet theory. He does not believe in truth, but rather believes in belief as the kids say, and he's not willing to jeopardize it.
The acrobatics are the tell here. When Meghan Murphy debates the sex industry, she has to keep the wheels on her goalposts perpetually greased up. Meghan wants to say that everyone who works in the industry has a negative view of it, but the preemptive goalpost shifting she employs is proof she knows that's a lie. The guy claiming there's a dragon in his garage can only preemptively dismiss [thermal imaging/flour/whatever] as a legitimate investigatory tool only because he knows there is no dragon.
It's not perfect but it's often the best we have. Ideally we get people who act honorably and admit mistakes and are willing to falsify their own theories but barring that, just look for the acrobatics. They're the product of intelligent design, not random chance.
ymeskhout
6mo ago
Clarence Thomas's Gun Control Snare
So the Bruen decision came out more than a year ago, and it has scrambled how courts deal with gun control laws.
Step back first. The way courts typically evaluate laws that putatively infringe on a constitutional right was through an analysis called strict scrutiny. Basically, take any constitutional guarantee ("Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech...") and add an "...unless it has a really good reason!" exception. This isn't an exaggeration. Courts were allowed to give the government a free pass on constitutional infringements provided the state's efforts were "narrowly tailored" and "necessary" to achieve a "compelling state interest".
But what counts as a compelling reason? Who decides which laws are narrowly tailored? It's judges, all the way down. For something like freedom of speech, there's a robust enough appreciation that you can expect a reasonable amount of skepticism among the judicial corps against efforts by the government to muzzle expression. In practice, strict scrutiny generally functioned as decently high threshold, unlike its contrasting rational basis test which practically was a free pass for the government to do whatever.
But what about topics a little more heated, like guns? Judges have been squishier and far more willing to accept the government's justifications that a given legal restrictions was "necessary". Hell, some judges even weaseled their way into ditching strict scrutiny in favor of the more permissible intermediate scrutiny. Judge VanDyke of the 9th Circuit lampooned this doormat reflex in his 2022 McDougall dissent (cleaned up):
Our circuit has ruled on dozens of Second Amendment cases, and without fail has ultimately blessed every gun regulation challenged, so we shouldn't expect anything less here. As I've recently explained, our circuit can uphold any and every gun regulation because our current Second Amendment framework is exceptionally malleable and essentially equates to rational basis review.
The cases VanDyke cited illustrate the problem well. The 9th Circuit has ruled it's ok to require people to demonstrate either "good cause" or "urgency or need" to the government before they're allowed to carry a gun outside their home. Set aside whatever negative sentiments you might have about guns, and instead imagine the reaction if similar restrictions were imposed on newspaper licenses. Imagine having to convince a cop that you have "good cause" to start a blog. Constitutional guarantees are worthless if they're predicated on a government agent agreeing that your reason for exercising them is good enough.
The practice of circuit judges shrugging off challenges to gun control laws with "I don't know man this seems totally reasonable to me" went on for several years, and I can only imagine it pissed off the pro-2A wing of the Supreme Court. Sure, Trump's appointments eventually meant they had the numbers on their side and so a very favorable 2A opinion was inevitable, but a stern rebuke of "We really mean it this time!" didn't seem like it was going to work in getting the circuit courts to stop fucking around.
So when they finally got their chance, SCOTUS tried a different approach. Instead of just triple-underlining and double-highlighting the words STRICT SCRUTINY, Clarence Thomas writes the majority opinion that created a brand new analysis wholly unique to the Second Amendment: gun control laws can only be constitutionally permissible if they're consistent with "historical tradition of firearm regulation." Any law being evaluated must therefore have a historical analogue, and the closer the analogue was to the year 1791 (when 2A was ratified), the better.
I was thrilled with Bruen's result, but puzzled by its reasoning because it seemed to just recreate the circumstances that led to the "fake strict scrutiny" problem. It turns out Bruen had way more of an effect than I anticipated. Clarence Thomas is a fascinating figure in many ways, in part because he's America's most powerful black conservative, who just happens to draw direct inspiration from the black nationalism Malcolm X espoused. I have no idea if this was intentional, but Thomas laid out a beautiful carpet of caltrops that the government couldn't help but step on over and over again.
What followed Bruen was a litigation maelstrom. Government attorneys across the land scoured dusty historical tomes, in search of whatever they could get their hands on and use as justification. The first problem they ran into was there just weren't that many laws on the books around the time of the Founding, let alone laws that specifically governed firearms. Generally speaking, Americans were free to strut about town with their muskets in tow, no questions asked. The lawyers had to cast a ever-wider net to snag anything relevant, desperately expanding their search way beyond 1791 to include things like an English prohibition on "launcegays" from 1383. When they did find timely laws, they ran into a second and far more pressing problem: the laws regulating firearm possession were...awkward. Really awkward.
Judge Benitez overseeing the ongoing Duncan case ordered the state lawyers to compile a list of every single relevant law they could find, and the 56-page spreadsheet they created is incredible. It's not surprising to find governments actively disarming disfavored groups, it's another to see the arbitrariness outlined so starkly. Modern gun control critics have regularly pointed out how skewed enforcement can be, particularly along racial lines. And because Bruen requires historical analogues, lawyers defending gun control restrictions had no choice but to immerse themselves unhappily within its sordid origin story.
Numerous early laws specifically prohibited only "negroes, mulattos, or Indians" from carrying firearms (1792 Virginia law, 1791 Delaware law, 1798 Kentucky law, etc.), or specifically targeted only slaves (1804 Indiana law, 1804 Mississippi law, 1818 Missouri law, etc.). California had it out particularly for those with "Spanish and Indian blood" (aka what the law called 'Greasers') and prohibited them from possessing firearms in 1855. These are all laws favorably cited in courts today.
When tasked to defend §922(g)(3), the law that prohibits anyone who is an "unlawful user" of a controlled substance from owning a gun, government lawyers tried their best with what little they had. The closest analogues they could find were colonial laws that prohibited actively drunk people, "dangerous lunatics", or what they termed "unvirtuous citizens" from possessing a gun. And you know that's BASICALLY the same thing as preventing the occasional marijuana smoker today from ever having a gun. The judge wasn't convinced.
After languishing in a stalemate for decades, the legal precedent around gun laws has dramatically changed in very quick order thanks to Bruen. Prohibitions on drug users were struck down, a (limited) prohibition for non-violent felons was struck down, and so were prohibitions on individuals subject to domestic-violence restraining orders (for now...). Courts are normally slow to move, but these developments have happened at blazing speed, and it's only the beginning as there's still plenty of ongoing litigation.
None of this means that gun control advocates have given up, far from it! @gattsuru has extensively catalogued numerous ways anti-gun politicians and judges putting in absolutely heroic efforts to gum up the machinery, however they can. Judge VanDyke publicly accused his colleagues on the 9th Circuit of some robe & dagger procedural shenanigans putting the thumb on the scale in the Duncan case. Meanwhile, legislation of dubious constitutionality gets passed faster than it can be struck down and the NYPD is somehow approving fewer gun permits than before (maybe because their approval stamp fell behind a desk, or something?). The efforts Gattsuru highlighted are definitely a hurdle but we'll see if they're the beginning of a new stalemate, or just desperate cadaveric spasms. For now, I'm going to continue enjoying the spectacle of government lawyers arguing with a straight face to a judge that pot smokers are the historical equivalent of dangerous lunatics.
ymeskhout
11mo ago
What are the limits of the weak man?
Note: Although this post cites specific real-life examples, the intent of the discussion is intended to be entirely at the meta level.
Scott Alexander's definition is apt to cite:
The straw man is a terrible argument nobody really holds, which was only invented so your side had something easy to defeat. The weak man is a terrible argument that only a few unrepresentative people hold, which was only brought to prominence so your side had something easy to defeat.
Also instructive is Bryan Caplan's gradation:
OK, what about "collective straw manning" -- questionably accusing a group for its painfully foolish positions? Now we have:
3. Criticizing a viewpoint for a painfully foolish position no adherent holds.
4. Criticizing a viewpoint for a painfully foolish position some adherents hold.
5. Criticizing a viewpoint for a painfully foolish position many adherents hold.
6. Criticizing a viewpoint for a painfully foolish position most adherents hold.
What Caplan is describing as "collective straw manning" seems to be a good scale for weakmanning's range. And lastly, consider also Julian Sanchez's disclaimer:
With a "weak man," you don't actually fabricate a position, but rather pick the weakest of the arguments actually offered up by people on the other side and treat it as the best or only one they have. As Steve notes, this is hardly illegitimate all the time, because sometimes the weaker argument is actually the prevalent one. Maybe the best arguments for Christianity are offered up by Thomas Aquinas or St. Augustine, but I doubt there are very many people who are believers because they read On Christian Doctrine. Probably this will be the case with some frequency, if only because the less complex or sophisticated an argument is, the easier it is for lots of people to be familiar with it. On any topic of interest, a three-sentence argument is unlikely to be very good, but it's a lot more likely to spread.
At least in theory, I think weakmanning should be avoided, but I struggle with how to draw the line exactly. If your goal is to avoid weakmanning, there's at least two axes that you must consider:
-
All the possible arguments for position X, ranked on a spectrum from least to most defensible.
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All the possible arguments for position X, ranked on a spectrum from least to most *representative *of believers in X.
Weakmanning is not much of an issue if you're arguing against a single individual, because they either endorse the particular arguments or not. You can't showcase the error of one's ways by refuting arguments they never held.
But generally we tend to argue over positions endorsed by many different people, where each person may differ with regard to which argument they either advance or prioritize, so what should count as "representative"?
For example, many people believe in the theory of evolution, but some believers do so under the erroneous belief that evolutionary change occurs within an individual organism's lifespan. [I know some smartass in the comments will pipe up about some endangered tropical beetle or whatever does demonstrate "change-within-lifespan" evolutionary changes. Just remember that this is not an object-level discussion.] If you use a crude heuristic and only poll relevant experts (e.g. biology professors) you're not likely to encounter many adherents of the "change-within-lifespan" argument, so this could be a decent filter to narrow your focus on what should count as "representative" for a given position. This is generally an effective tactic, since it helps you avoid prematurely declaring victory at Wrestlemania just because you trounced some toddlers at the playground.
But sometimes you get a crazy position believed by crazy people based on crazy arguments, with a relatively tiny minority within/adjacent to the community of believers aware of the problems and doing the Lord's work coming up with better arguments. InverseFlorida coined the term "sanewashing" to describe how the meaning of "defund the police" (DTP) shifted [TracingWoodgrains described the same dynamic with the gentrification of /r/antiwork. Credit also to him for most of the arborist-themed metaphor in this post.] to something much more neutered and, correspondingly, much more defensible:
So, now say you're someone who exists in a left-adjacent social space, who's taken up specific positions that have arrived to you through an "SJW" space, and now has to defend them to people who don't exist in any of your usual social spaces. These are ideas that you don't understand completely, because you absorbed them through social dynamics and not by detailed convincing arguments, but they're ones you're confident are right because you were assured, in essence, that there's a mass consensus behind them. When people are correctly pointing out that the arguments behind the position people around your space are advancing fail, but you're not going to give up the position because you're certain it's right, what are you going to do? I'm arguing you're going to sanewash it. And by that I mean, what you do is go "Well, obviously the arguments that people are obviously making are insane, and not what people actually believe or mean. What you can think of it as is [more reasonable argument or position than people are actually making]".
Keep in mind that this is not an object-level discussion on the merits of DTP. Assume arguendo that the "sanewashed" arguments are much more defensible than the "crazy" ones they replaced. If someone were to take a position against DTP by arguing against the now obsolete arguments, one of the sanewashers would be technically correct accusing you of weakmanning for daring to bring up that old story again. This fits the literal definition of weakmanning after all.
As Sanchez noted above, for most people for most positions, intuition predates rationality. They stumble around in the dark looking for any sort of foothold, then work backwards to fill in any necessary arguments. Both the sanewashers and the crazies are reliant on the other. Without the sanitization from the hygiene-minded sanewashers, the position would lack the fortification required to avoid erosion; and without the crazy masses delivering the bodies and zeal, the position would fade into irrelevance. The specific ratio may vary, but this dynamic is present in some amount on any given position. You very likely have already experienced the embarrassment that comes from a compatriot, purportedly on your side, making an ass of both of youse with their nonsensical arguments.
If your ultimate goal is truth-seeking, weakmanning will distract you into hacking away at worthless twigs rather than striking at the core. But sometimes the goal isn't seeking truth on the specific position (either because it's irrelevant or otherwise already beyond reasonable dispute) and instead the relevant topic is the collective epistemological dynamics [I dare you to use this phrase at a dinner party without getting kicked out.]. InverseFlorida's insightful analysis would not have been possible without shining a spotlight on the putative crazies — the very definition of weakmanning in other words.
Here's the point, at last. Normally someone holding a belief for the wrong reasons is not enough to negate that belief. But wherever a sanewasher faction appears to be spending considerable efforts cleaning up the mess their crazy neighbors keep leaving behind, it should instigate some suspicion about the belief, at least as a heuristic. Any honest and rational believer needs to grapple for an explanation for how the crazies managed to all be accidentally right despite outfitted — by definition — with erroneous arguments. Such a scenario is so implausible that it commands a curious inquiry about its origin.
It's possible that this inquiry unearths just another fun episode in the collective epistemological dynamics saga; it's also possible the probe ends up exposing a structural flaw with the belief itself. In either circumstances, a weakmanning objection is made in bad faith and intended to obfuscate. Its only purpose is to get you to ignore the inconvenient, the annoying. You should pay no heed to this protest and continue deploying the magnifying glass; don't be afraid to focus the sun's infernal rays into a burning pyre of illumination. Can you think of any reasons not to?
Happy Birthday Elon Twitter
We're almost at the one-year anniversary of Elon Musk taking over Twitter X. How have your predictions fared? I'll answer below.
ymeskhout
8mo ago
Ohio Republicans' Inexplicable & Baffling Abortion Blunder
I support expansive abortion access purely as a matter of practical considerations because of how legal prohibitions encourage horrific black market alternatives. I part ways with the pro-choice crowd when they respond to a difficult morality question with flippant dismissal. So at least from that standpoint, I sympathize with the earnest pro-life crowd because they're helplessly witnessing what is (by their definitions) a massive genocide made worse by the fact that it's legally-sanctioned.
So if you're in that unenviable position, what are your options? The major practical problem is that abortion restrictions have been and continue to be extremely politically unpopular. The Dobbs decision generated a lot of what basically amounted to legislative reshuffling at the state level. Some states had trigger laws banning abortions, that awakened from their long slumber only for courts, legislatures, or voter referendums to strike them back down to sleep.
Ohio's law banning abortions when a fetus heartbeat could be detected (typically occurs within 6-7 weeks of pregnancy) was struck down by a court last year, and so currently abortions there are legal up until "viability" (typically understood to be 22 weeks). On top of that, a referendum was set to be voted on this upcoming November election which would solidly enshrine abortion access within the Ohio state constitution (worth noting that this is the only referendum on the ballot). Given where public opinion is at on this issue, the amendment is virtually guaranteed to be approved by voters. What can you do to stop this train?
Ohio Republicans responded in a very bizarre and inexplicable manner (part of a pattern it seems). Apparently aware that the November referendum was going to be a shoe-in, they organized a whole special election in August as a preemptive maneuver to increase various thresholds for constitutional amendments, including raising the passing percentage from 50% to a 60% supermajority. That measure failed in the special election held yesterday, with 57% of voters against it.
Where to start? First, asking voters to vote against themselves was always going to be a challenge, and Elizabeth Nolan Brown notes the rhetoric supporters of Issue 1 had to resort to:
One talking point has been that it protects the Ohio Constitution from out-of-state interests. (For instance: "At its core, it's about keeping out-of-state special interest groups from buying their way into our constitution," Protect Women Ohio Press Secretary Amy Natoce told Fox News.) Another has been that it signals trust in elected officials to safeguard citizen interests, rather than letting a random majority of voters decide what's best. (The current simple-majority rule for amending the state constitution "sends the message that if you don't like what the legislature is doing, you can just put it on the ballot, and soon the constitution will be thousands of pages long and be completely meaningless," Carol Tobias, president of the National Right to Life Committee, told Politico in a prime example of this tack.)
Some of the TV ads the supporters ran were so incoherent. I don't know how representative this particular example is but the 30-second spot avoids saying anything at all about abortion and instead argues that voting yes on Issue 1 would somehow...protect kids from trans drag queens in schools? The fuck? I guess they knew that "vote yes on Issue 1 to keep abortion restricted" wasn't going to be a winning message so this tangent was the only option.
Even if somehow Issue 1 had anything to do with gender identity indoctrination in schools or whatever (if anyone can explain this please do!) it bears repeating that the only referendum on the ballot in November was about enshrining abortion access. Voters are dumb but they're not that dumb.
Just this last January Ohio Republicans passed HB 458 which eliminated almost all August special elections, but then they insisted on passing another law walking that back specifically to make sure Issue 1 got its very own election. The gambit apparently was to help its chances by leveraging low voter turnout in special elections. This too is baffling, because the timing gimmick very likely energized the "Democrats' highly educated neurotic base" as my boy Yglesias so eloquently put it. Also, the type of voter that is willing to show up to a special election is not going to be the type that is inclined to wrest control away!
None of these decisions made any sense. By investing into a preemptive referendum to raise the threshold, they loudly advertised they knew their issue was going to lose in November. By carving out an exception for an August election, they demonstrated they knew they couldn't win unless they act like a Turkish ice cream man with voters. By conspicuously avoiding talking about abortion, they're acknowledging their policy position's unpopularity.
I'm again acknowledging that the pro-life crowd faces an unenviable challenge in advocating for their position, and clearly their attempts at persuasion over the last several decades have not been panning out. But who actually thought the blatant gimmickry described above was actually going to work? All it did was showcase how weak they must be if the only tool in their arsenal was comically inept subterfuge.
ymeskhout
2mo ago
Conspiracy Investigation Done Right
In 1996, TWA Flight 800 exploded and crashed into the ocean off the coast of Long Island, killing all 230 people on board. After an extensive four-year investigation, the NTSB concluded the explosion was caused by a short circuit ignition within the center fuel tank. Or at least that's the official story.
Now normally when you encounter a disclaiming phrase like that it tends to be a klaxon warning to strap in because you're about to hear some crazy shit about what really happened. I'm not going to argue for some crazy shit though, instead I want to showcase a real-life illustration on how to properly investigate and litigate what otherwise would be dismissed and derided as some crazy shit.
Someone (thanks Jim!) brought to my attention this pending lawsuit that aims to challenge the TWA 800 official narrative.[1] The basic summary you need to know is that, in contrast to the official story, the "alternative" narrative claims the airplane was hit by an SM-2 surface-to-air missile launched by the United States government during a weapons testing exercise. You can read the 38-page lawsuit complaint yourself where they allege:
Defendants [Raytheon, Lockheed Martin, US Government, etc.] negligently, recklessly, or intentionally authorized and conducted the testing of missiles in commercial airspace. As a result of these tests, a missile downed TWA 800 and killed Plaintiffs' decedents.
And humorously enough:
Defendants owed decedents and Plaintiffs a duty not to negligently test missiles in commercial airspace. Defendants breached that duty by negligently testing missiles in commercial airspace.
TO BE CLEAR: I find the overall claim to be extremely implausible based on Bayesian reasoning I'll get to later, but the focus here is less about delving into the specific allegations[2] and more about showcasing how one should go about uncovering a criminal conspiracy that otherwise sounds kooky on its face.
As far as I can tell, the law firm involved has a reputation for serious lawyers doing serious work. The complaint they filed directly addresses many procedural issues that would normally be a hindrance for these types of claims. For example, the major hurdle would be the statute of limitations given that the explosion took place in 1996 but the lawyers cite the fraudulent concealment exception based on some FOIA foot-dragging:
Specifically, key evidence confirming that a missile caused the crash of TWA 800 was hidden from the public and the victims' families for over 25 years. This evidence was only recently unearthed by Dr. Tom Stalcup in his hard-fought FOIA litigation, which has now been pending for over ten years....Before April 15, 2021, the Plaintiffs were not aware of, or on notice of, the information that forms the basis of this complaint, nor have the Plaintiffs had any reasonable opportunity discover their injury, its cause, and the link between the two.
The legal system relies on attorneys as an (imperfect) screening mechanism to separate valid claims from the torrential garbage. Before an attorney can rouse a court into examining a claim, Rule 11 requires them to affirm that the attorney has made reasonable efforts to investigate it themselves to make sure they're not just re-shoveling whatever bullshit their client dropped on their lap. The lawsuit offers specific allegations about which government agencies were involved in the cover-up, when the cover-up took place, and how it took place. A sample:
The FBI essentially froze the NTSB out of the investigation. The FBI removed all copies (original and duplicates) of Navy radar tapes from the Navy, placing them out of the NTSB's reach, and refused to allow the NTSB to conduct eyewitness interviews or review the FBI's records that indicated the true cause of the TWA 800 crash...the CIA concocted materials to discredit eyewitnesses who could confirm that TWA 800 had been downed by some kind of projectile. These materials included a video and animation that was displayed during a nationally-televised FBI press conference that attempted to reconcile the eyewitness testimony that the plane was struck by a projectile with the U.S. Government's official position that the crash was caused by a defect in the plane's center fuel tank.
They even pontificate on what might have prompted a rush towards testing live warheads over a populated area:
The Aegis System's radar also needed improvement in its ability to operate close to shore and to properly integrate into existing systems...These serious flaws could result in a missile striking an unintended target...Instead of waiting five years for ships to be properly constructed with the SPY-ID(V) [an advanced radar system] so that testing could be conducted far from congested air corridors and at established test ranges, the SPY-ID(V) was tested on an expedited basis in and around the CSEDS in New Jersey, in a highly congested area.
And they managed to track down evidence of missile testing right around the time and place of interest:
An electrician on the roof of a nearby Long Island hospital was filming the sunrise and captured the second missile witnessed by the Coastguardsman on his VHS camera [five days before TWA 800 went down]...on November 16, 1996, almost precisely where TWA 800 went down off Long Island, a Pakistani Airlines pilot reported to Air Traffic Control that a "rocket" rose in front of him and continued rising above his altitude.
I've only picked a sample, there's a lot more details in the complaint. In contrast to the persistent and arguably intentional vagueness found in many disdained conspiracy theories, I'm genuinely impressed by how comprehensive the lawsuit's claims are regarding who/how/why. They explain exactly which organizations are involved in the cover-up and the evidence behind that belief, which missile system brought the plane down and the evidence behind that, specific reasons for why live warhead testing took place in a busy air traffic corridor, and explanations for why it took so long to uncover all this.
If (again, arguendo) TWA Flight 800 was indeed brought down by reckless missile testing involving a live warhead and this was covered-up by the government, then the way this lawsuit is conducted is the best opportunity for legal redress. The legal system has serious and persistent deficiencies with its inability to offer all petitioners the relief they're owed, but certain rules and expectations it has developed over time are worthy of replication.
As a foil, the strengths of how the TWA 800 complaints are presented become more obvious when it's contrasted against another lawsuit whose deficiencies resulted in Rule 11 sanctions for the lawyers that filed it. In 2020, two Colorado attorneys filed a class action lawsuit on behalf of all registered voters in the country, and sought $160 billion in punitive damages, alleging the election was stolen from Trump.[3] Their 84-page complaint (plus a dozen affidavits) alleges that a wide roster of defendants (Dominion, Facebook, various state governors, and "1 to 10,000" as-of-yet unidentified co-conspirators) engaged in unspecified-but-definitely illegal conduct. For example, here's what one of the supporting affidavits claimed:
After much research and contemplation, it has come to my attention that the 2020 general election, and probably many more, have been compromised by a number of persons, including a corporation in the United States called Dominion Voting Machines, Inc., and others, such as, Mark Zuckerberg and his wife, Priscilla Chan; and other individuals acting as governors and secretaries of state, including, Brian Kemp and Brad Raffensperger of Georgia, and Gretchen Whitmer and Jocelyn Bensen from Michigan.
Contrast this "research and contemplation" with the straightforward allegation of "The Navy and various defense contractors caused an airline explosion by deciding to test live warheads in a highly-populated area". The magistrate who ordered sanctions against the Colorado attorneys noted their conspicuous aversion to investigation:
It appears that Plaintiffs' counsel's process for formulating the factual allegations in this lawsuit was to compile all the allegations from all the lawsuits and media reports relating to alleged election fraud (and only the ones asserting fraud, not the ones refuting fraud), put it in one massive complaint, then file it and 'see what happens.'...Material, including affidavits, from other lawsuits was accepted at face value, with no apparent critical assessment. Mr. Fielder says he watched videos and listened to talk show interviews with some of the experts involved. He also says relied on his own many years' experience as a lawyer to "connect the dots."
Pro-tip: don't decide to file a lawsuit after listening to a podcast.
Back to the TWA 800 case, the central claim involving the US accidentally shooting down a passenger airline isn't impossible because it happened once in 1988 with Iran Air Flight 655, killing all 290 people on board. What's least plausible of all with TWA 800 is how the military, the defense contractors, and the law enforcement agencies involved managed a successful cover-up over so many people over such a long period of time.
There's an oft-utilized but facile heuristic that claims that if there was a cover-up, then someone would've leaked it, and so therefore no leak = no cover-up. This is unreliable because there plenty of government cover-ups that were successful, at least for a while. The Tuskegee Syphilis study went on for 40 years until an AP story in 1972. Operation Mockingbird, MKUltra, and COINTELPRO all took place in the 1950s but weren't exposed until the 1970s. Project SUNSHINE which involved collecting body parts from dead children to study radioactive fallout started in 1953, didn't become publicly known until 1956, and the full extent wasn't fully exposed until the 1990s.
However, the common elements with these schemes is that they all involved either a small number of conspirators, or had victims that no one really gave a shit about. None of this is reflected in Flight 800, its 230 dead, and the multiple entities implicated.
The incentive behind the cover-up doesn't make much sense either, because anyone helping with the cover-up has no way of knowing ahead of time whether it will remain under wraps, especially if perpetual silence relies on the cooperation of hundreds or thousands of people. You only need one leak and if the whole thing blows open, no one wants to be left holding the proverbial gun while everyone is pointing fingers at each other. Anyone at the decision fulcrum faces an obvious pay-off from defection that needs a serious countervailing cooperation pay-off to convince them into shouldering that level of culpability.
The lawsuit allegations also rely heavily on eyewitness testimony (though with some video corroboration), which is particularly unreliable and prone to suggestion when it involves widely publicized events like an airline crash. Lay witnesses who lack the appropriate specialized training and background are vulnerable to misinterpreting what they see or hear.
Implausible is still not the same as impossible, and crazier shit has happened before. If there's any validity to these wild claims at all, this lawsuit tees up a stellar attempt at uncovering the truth.
[1] I've long had an aversion to describing anything as a 'conspiracy theory' because it's often wielded as a discussion-terminating cudgel. Once the label is affixed, the very notion of scrutinizing, investigating, or grappling with the underlying claims is dismissed as a waste of time.
[2] The Flight 800 Wikipedia page has lots more of the technical details if you're so inclined.
[3] The two lawyers, Gary Fielder and Ernest Walker, were acting on their own and had no connection to Donald Trump or his campaign.
ymeskhout
3mo ago
MonoPoly Restricted Trust
Two months ago (an eternity in podcasting, I know) I was on the Bayesian Conspiracy podcast to discuss polyamory with Aella and Eneasz, both of whom are hella fucking poly.[1] I favor monogamy without moral objection to polyamory, yet its appeal eludes me. Given the caliber of my interlocutors, I walked away feeling uncharacteristically frustrated with our conversation, largely because I think we lack a shared understanding of each other's vocabulary.
This post is a belated attempt to remedy the miscommunication, and not one that necessarily requires listening to the episode first (though it helps of course). I address the definition of polyamory, how we talk about 'restrictions' in relationships, and where trust comes from.
Return of the Antipodes
We started by rehashing my ongoing disagreement with Aella and her idiosyncratic definition of 'polyamory'. While this definition offers a new perspective, it's important to consider how it aligns with the broader understanding of polyamory and its impact on communication:
The definition of 'polyamorous' that I find cleanest, for me, is not forbidding your partner from having extra-relationship intimacy. It doesn't matter if they're acting on it or not, it doesn't matter if you don't feel like banging anybody else, as long as your partner could go have sex/love someone else if they wanted, then to me, that's polyamory.
I previously addressed why I really don't like this 'antipodal' re-definition, in contrast to the straightforward and commonly-accepted "the practice of or desire for multiple concurrent romantic/sexual relationships" understanding.[2] Aella has subsequently stated that her position is best expressed as a 2D chart, which nullifies a lot of my criticism. If you had to compress the spectrum down to just one, Aella favors the 'restriction' axis as more fitting while also acknowledging that some information is lost in the process. I agree that a chart allows for more nuance, but disagree with re-defining polyamory to focus away from the 'interested in many' axis for multiple reasons:
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The risk of confusion by the re-definition is very high
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The information conveyed by the re-definition is very low
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The 'restrictions-on-partner' framing can get incoherent
It's totally fine to use words with semantic ambiguity (e.g. light, right, match) when their meaning is clear enough in context (e.g. "You made the right choice by striking a match in the dim light"); and it's totally fine for Aella to want to express a perspective that doesn't align with mainstream understanding of polyamory. But it's really confusing to use a word with an obscure interpretation that forks away from its pre-existing common understanding. Consider the outrage if a politician ran on a platform of "green infrastructure" only to deliver oil refineries painted green. Sure, the election promise wasn't technically false, but the confusion is significant and foreseeable enough to deem it intentional.
The re-definition could be justified if it had compelling benefits, yet it ends up conveying less information. If someone said "I'm a vegetarian" everyone would interpret this as describing their personal abstention from eating meat. But if this person privately redefined 'vegetarian' to mean they're okay with others not eating meat, it shifts the emphasis from a direct expression of one's own attributes to an indirect reactive stance regarding others' choices, leading to a conversation that feels needlessly convoluted. It certainly can be relevant to know what the vegetarian will tolerate, but that's rarely ever the most relevant information. Similarly, if someone hitting on me tells me they're poly, my first thought would be "they have a desire for multiple relationships" and definitely not "if we were in a relationship, and if I had a desire for multiple relationships, this person is willing to tolerate me pursuing these relationships". What purpose could this circuitousness possibly serve?
It's trivial to conjure examples of how the 'restrictions-on-partner' framing devolves into incoherency. One man has a harem relationship with 50 women who he forbids them from seeing anyone else, while they're fine with him sleeping with whomever (If you're following along on the chart, he would be on the top left while they would be on the bottom right). The women are all considered "poly" according to Aella's 'restrictions' re-definition, but the man is not. If he wanted to expand the harem, seeking out "poly" women to add to the roster would be unnecessarily frustrating for everyone involved, because it's just not how people use the term.
One of Aella's objections to focusing on the traditional 'wanting multiple relationships' axis is that it isn't distinctive enough, since almost everyone has some semblance of that desire. This is true but flattens far too much. Her survey data is the gold standard here, and it does show mild interest in banging others among the monogamous.
There's a meaningful difference between an errant desire to bend the barista over the counter, and playing calendar tetris with a dozen of your secondaries, such that it doesn't make sense to cleave "want to pursue extracurricular intimacy" into a neat yes/no binary. There's no dividing line under the classic mono/poly definition, it's a gradient spectrum ranging from "fleeting thought" to "overriding purpose in life". Aella has written about how the 'restrictions' axis also falls along a spectrum (poly couples often have rules on condom use, emotional boundaries, or not fucking your partner's dad) which means it's not immune from her own criticism.
Overall I have a very high opinion of Aella's integrity and have no reason to believe she's intentionally duplicitous, but the re-definition appears motivated by propaganda purposes. She's very transparent about believing polyamory to be the more virtuous path in contrast to monogamy (as is her right!), and it's often useful to use language to influence social dictate, but no one has to agree with accepting terminology with baked-in beliefs. Remember how protestors against the Dakota Access Pipeline insisted they be referred to as 'water protectors'? Given the negative connotations attached to promiscuity (which, as a former slut myself, I neither share nor endorse) there appears to be an aversion to advertising 'polyamory' too much under the "wanting multiple partners" framing. Instead, it's marketed under the much more palatable "not wanting to restrict others" framing.
However, the same accusations of wielding definitions as an ideological cudgel could be fairly levied against me. She rightly pointed out that our primary concern should be the accuracy of the definition, rather than focusing excessively on avoiding ideologically charged framing.[3] When I was asked if polyamory did indeed place fewer "restrictions" on people, I said yes but as I'll expand upon in the next section, I'm retracting my answer because I don't believe we have the same understanding of the term "restriction". Otherwise I agree with prioritizing accuracy; I don't care what specific words we use so long as they're useful at conveying information to others.
The ultimate question for vocabulary choices should always be "Am I reasonably certain that my listener has the same understanding of this word that I do?" Based on the multiple reasons I outlined, the focus on 'restrictions' is too confusing and too ambiguous to pass this test.
I Want You to Want Me
Let's marinate into whether 'restrictions' is the best way to cleave the mono/poly dichotomy. Consider two scenarios:
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You are cordially invited to contribute to a vegetarian-only potluck.
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You are subject to criminal penalties under the Peter Singer world regime if you consume any sustenance of animal progeny.
The two pictures are not the same. Both, technically, describe 'restrictions', but this again flattens far too much under a single banner. The aforementioned "don't fuck my dad" rule used by poly couples is also a 'restriction', but it would be absurd if that's enough to void their polyamorous certification.
When Jonah Hill asked his then-girlfriend surfer Sarah Brady not to post bathing suit photos, he framed it as expressing his relationship "boundaries". Oh but isn't that just what a controlling abuser would say to whitewash his yoke? There's no bright line rule here, you can't delineate between "boundaries" and "abusive control" without having to conjure up an array of debatable and interpretative factors.
I was once in a monogamous relationship where my partner then expressed a strong desire to date other people. I had no desire to get in her way or otherwise be a hindrance, so I said "Ok!" and promptly broke up with her. I didn't tell her what she wasn't allowed to do, instead I unambiguously expressed my own interest in not wanting to be in a relationship with someone who has an active desire to fuck other people. Would skipping out on a vegetarian-only potluck because you're tired of quinoa count as a 'restriction' imposed upon the host? Under a very strict literal reading, sort-of-yes, but it's an incoherent use of the term that confuses more than clarifies.
The poly brigade's retort about how everyone wants to fuck other people doesn't fly. Granting that this desire widely exists, it does so on a spectrum of intensity. I've often found myself swept up by the nascent intoxication of a new situationship where the thought of pausing for a define-the-relationship talk seemed almost alien. My Tinder matches would be left fallow and rotting on the vine, because why bother? I want my partner to have the same overriding desire for me; not for them to reluctantly forgo others because of my say so. If I had to utter that kind of proclamation, it's probably too coercive.
When the county clerk stamped my marriage license recently, my touch neurons did not suddenly get cryptographically locked to only respond to my wife's DNA. I'm not pursuing hot people not because I somehow lost the ability to notice them, and I'm not fucking anyone else not because my wife forbids me, but because I just don't care to. My wife certainly could double-explicitly prohibit me from doing so, but that would be the equivalent of her forbidding me from taking up fly-fishing.
I wonder if there's a lack of imagination from both camps. I've had several casual dating periods, so I have some insight into the thrill and excitement of rotating through flings like a flipbook. But when I see my poly friends juggling a stable cadre of full-blown secondary relationships in addition to their primary, I feel vicarious exhaustion. I admit it, the energy devoted seems so excessive that I wonder how much of it is performative, motivated by the desire to showcase their apparent enlightenment,[4] or maybe it's to ensure they have enough board game partners. On the flip side, I wonder if they believe my assertions that I'm not interested in pursuing others to be genuine, or whether they assume I've been browbeaten by the dominating cultural narrative into accepting my imaginary handcuffs.
To be fair, the prevalence of cheating is very strong evidence that monos (especially men) are indeed dishonest about their desires for extra-relationship fucking, either because they're lying to themselves, or because they're willing to abandon this desire as a practical concession to finding a partner in a monogamy-dominated landscape. Honesty is good, and so I would heartily recommend polyamory to anyone who (for whatever reason) is irresistibly drawn towards breaking their exclusivity pledges. All this is also a strong indicator that polyamory is socially disfavored, so this potentially justifies using deliberate vocabulary re-framing as a balancing counter-force.
What is Trust? Baby Don't Hurt Me
Moving from the semantics of polyamory to its practical implications, let's delve into the pivotal roles of trust and jealousy in these relationships. The foundational problem we have to deal with here is humans' persistent proclivity towards lying, which remains because of how often it's personally advantageous to do so. Naturally, humans also developed a countervailing proclivity for detecting and dissuading dishonesty as a safeguard. It's impractical to live ensconced within an intractable and perpetual barrier of suspicion, so we have measures to let our guard down selectively.
Ideally we build trust over time through shared experiences and history, but there's also potential "trust shortcuts" such as costly signals and commitment rituals.[5] Basically, any actions that someone is unlikely to undertake unless they were genuinely committed count. In the context of romantic relationships, these can range from the extravagant (atrociously expensive weddings) to the mundane (introducing a new girlfriend to your friends). Though far from infallible, shortcuts retain some usefulness because the traditional method of building trust can be unreasonably and agonizingly slow.[6]
This nicely segues into the role of jealousy. It's considered a negative and disdainful emotion, and fair to say that the polyamorous are particularly proud of the cultural technology they've developed for dealing with it, but I want to make sure we're talking about the same thing here. If Alice sees her boyfriend Bob talking to Cindy and feels [negative emotion] in response, it could be a result of pure resentment (Alice hates seeing Bob receive attention from other women) or it could be a reasonable response to a lack of security and assurance (read: lack of trust). The problem is both variants (call them resentful vs rational) get shoved into the same "jealousy" laundry hamper without efforts to distinguish the two, and what would otherwise be a reasonable emotional response gets dirtied by proximity.
Consider another example with polyamorous couple Doug and Emma. They've been each other's primary partners for years and have mutually disclosed social security numbers. One day Emma jets off to Europe with a new fling without telling Doug, who only finds out about this through her LinkedIn updates. Upon her return she continues exhibiting increasingly detached behavior, spending less time with Doug and cancelling plans at the last minute with irreverent excuses, all while reassuring him he remains her top priority in life. Doug is no spring chicken and deploys an arsenal of polyamory tools as remedy (open communication, compersion seances, and even a meticulous line chart of their decreasing time together) but nothing works. Emma continues to reaffirm how important he is to her via garbled late-night texts, and Doug continues to feel [negative emotion].
Would anyone dispute Doug has valid reasons for trusting Emma less? Yes, she says he's a priority, but her actions indicate otherwise. He has ample reasons to believe Emma is gasp lying. Maybe she's not, perhaps this is all just a misunderstanding with an imminent denouement. But if Emma was indeed lying, what can be done to maintain the relationship? After such a grievous betrayal, it wouldn't be tenable for Doug to carry on as usual, nor would it be practical to proactively commit to the uncertainty of rebuilding trust via the traditional slow-burn accumulation. Only trust shortcuts --- within the grand lineage of romantic serenades perhaps --- are likely to be viable options here, if anything.
I never expected any of the above to be a point of contention, but it was! Again, humans routinely lie, especially about sex and relationships. Emma could have been lying to Doug about her commitment to their relationship just to stall for time until she meets an upgraded Doug replacement. Poly relationships commonly organize around having a primary partner, and even relationship anarchists necessarily express a hierarchy through the inescapable constraints of the attention economy, all of which are potential opportunities for trust to erode. Around 25 mins mark, I asked my poly interlocutors how to ensure someone isn't lying to you, their responses were a variant of "just trust them bro". Ok, but how? The point here is that trust cannot appear out of thin air, it has to come from somewhere,and this is true regardless if it's a polyamorous or monogamous relationship!
This is another area in particular where I worry that a polyamorous framing saturated with righteousness could lead one astray. If you've inculcated your lifestyle as inherently virtuous because "jealousy" is either non-existent or adequately contained, there's a risk of aligning all suspicion (not matter how reasonable) as inherently sinful or indicative of moral failing. Sometimes it's good to distrust.
We should use words that other people know the meaning of. We should avoid creating unnecessary ambiguity by flattening distinct phenomena under the same banner. Prioritizing clarity is particular important when dealing with something as complex as human relationships, whether polyamorous or monogamous.
Now, let's play some board games.
[1] Throwback to 2020 where I also discussed polyamory with Aella on episode 12 of The Bailey podcast.
[2] If you only trust our future robot overlord, here's also what chatGPT said: "It's fair to say that the definition of polyamory you provided is not widely accepted in its entirety. Polyamory, as commonly understood, involves more than just not forbidding extra-relationship intimacy. It typically includes aspects of ethical, open, and consensual engagement in romantic or sexual relationships with multiple partners. The definition you've provided focuses primarily on the aspect of non-restriction, which is a part of polyamory but doesn't encompass its full scope."
[3] At the 16mins mark, Aella said "I think the question should not be 'Are we trying to avoid virtuous framing?' but rather 'Is this accurate? Are poly people in fact placing fewer restrictions on their partners?'"
[4] I've also previously written in Cuckoldry as Status Jockeying about concerns with the way polyamory is framed socially, and how that might discourage transparency about one's desires.
[5] I take responsibility for contributing to the confusion with how I discussed 'costly signals' in relationships. The classic example of a costly signal is the peacock's extravagant tail, a reliable indicator of overall fitness precisely because it's so gratuitously expensive to maintain. When I described 'commitment rituals' as 'costly' on the podcast, I meant it in the sense that they impose social costs. Public declarations like pledge ceremonies and weddings "work" not because they physically prevent the oath-takers from subsequently breaking their commitments, rather the aspiration here is the pomp and circumstance of the ritual comes laden with sufficient social pressure to encourage ongoing compliance.
[6] The galaxy-brain take here is to tally up all the "trust shortcuts" we grudgingly rely upon on a daily basis and imagine how you'd cope without them: online product reviews, uniformed police officers, food safety inspection grades on restaurant windows, bank logos on ATMs, and on and on. The point is not that these shortcuts are infallible, they can and are indeed frequently exploited, but that's not enough to throw them all away.
ymeskhout
11d ago
The Happy Birthday Question
in which I write about HBD
The Rogue Fishermen
Back in my early public defender days, one of the niche misdemeanors I'd be periodically appointed to was for unlawful fishing. Typically the offense took place at a beach, involving someone harvesting dozens and dozens of shellfish beyond the allowable amount while a Fish & Wildlife officer hides in the trees with binoculars meticulously counting how many individual clams went into what particular bag. Out of the dozen or so cases I've handled, every single defendant —100%— was a Cambodian man.
Since the general population is not 100% Cambodian (let alone Cambodian men), a class of criminal defendants that is exclusively Cambodian is an undeniable example of a disparate outcome. We're missing a ton of vocabulary precision on this issue, so please bear with me but when I say race, I'm using it broadly to include ethnicity and basically any related phenotype. And when I say racial discrimination, I'm using it to mean discrimination based on race itself rather than discrimination on a collateral trait that may end up with a racial correlation.
Now if you want to pull a Kendi here, the only explanation for racial disparate outcomes is racial discrimination. This is always patently facile logic because 1) it doesn't do the work[1] in ruling out alternative explanations and 2) often requires accepting some questionable premises. For unlawful fishing you have to first assume that members of every race breaking fishing laws at exactly the same rate [citation needed], but racist officers use their binoculars not just to count clams but to ascertain who to single out for arrest. Or maybe it's racist prosecutors writing up indictments who scan through the police reports and dump any with non-Cambodian names into the wastebasket. Or maybe a combination of both.
I cannot accept the "because racism" conclusion unless I see strong evidence supporting the above premises, and because I haven't seen this evidence, I have no reason to accept the conclusion. See how easy it was? But if I reject this proposed explanation, does that mean I have my own explanation for the disparity? Nope! And crucially, I don't need one. Some of the contraband shellfish quantities involved seem way too high for just personal consumption, and so we wondered if the motivation was selling their haul to some less-than-scrutinizing restaurants. Maybe word spread among the Cambodian community that this was an easy scheme with lagging enforcement. Maybe they lacked the cultural understanding that a government would ever be interested in stopping you from picking up natural bounty off the ground. Or maybe individuals within the O-M122 haplogroup carried a particular genetic mutation which made them unable to resist the siren song of free clams on the beach.
I can't imagine anyone would ever endorse that last explanation, it's deliberately absurdist. The point stands; I don't need to hitch my wagon to any particular alternative explanation to reject the "because of racism" one, all I need to reject a theory is its own lack of supporting evidence.
Genetic Destiny
Genetics are extremely consequential. Our chromosomes hold an unyielding and elaborate blueprint that govern not just an overwhelming of who we are, but also of who our lineage could be eons into the future. Humans certainly exhibit a remarkable adaptability across a dizzying spectrum of environments and circumstances, and our infinitely more malleable cultural memetic evolution deserves credit for turbocharging our advancement beyond the confines of our languorous flesh and blood. But this demonstrable flexibility can never refute the harsh unyielding control our DNA commands over certain domains. If your assembly instructions includes a third copy of chromosome 21, you will have Down syndrome and, however much we might wish otherwise, no amount of nurture will ever reverse that nature. Such is life.
Just like any other organism subject to natural selection, humans exhibit differences from each other on a multitude of heritable traits. Evolution cannot occur without variability after all, and sometimes you end up with agglomerated clusters. For example, the sickle cell gene is highly prevalent among populations from Sub-Saharan Africa because it provided a protective advantage against malaria, which just so happens to be best transmitted by mosquitos, which just so happens to favor tropical regions, which just so happens to advantage higher melanin levels for UV protection in humans. Through this complex chain of coincidental correlations, you end up with the fact that having black skin is highly predictive of sickle cell anemia risk.
That humans exhibit physical differences, across both short and long timescales (whether lactose tolerance within 10 thousand years or bipedalism across 4 million years), is tediously and trivially true. But there's absolutely no reason to believe that the same natural selection process that created such physical diversity would somehow treat mental traits as untouchable. Or as they say, evolution is not relegated to only from the neck down.
The Pretextual Charade
Acknowledging the undeniable reality that humans exhibit biological diversity is the weakest and least controversial definition of what is euphemistically called human biological diversity, or HBD for short. There's nothing ever wrong — neither in principle nor in practice — with studying the kaleidoscope that is the human genome and documenting any apparent patterns. The problem is that the HBD label attracts roughly two different camps of devotees with wildly divergent aims.
One camp is best exemplified by my old economics professor and friend Bryan Caplan. Caplan is a principled libertarian and an earnest academic who believes that IQ is highly heritable and enormously consequential, beliefs that I myself hold just as fervently. Setting aside how amorphous and arbitrary racial categories are, I also believe there's likely some relationship between certain racial groups and average [insert your favorite cognitive trait].[2] The other camp is best described by Caplan himself:
In my experience, if a stranger brings up low IQ in Africa, there's about a 50/50 chance he casually transitions to forced sterilization or mass murder of hundreds of millions of human beings as an intriguing response.
Go down deep enough the HBD rabbit hole and you'll easily encounter extended mythology about how members of the white race on average are genetically predisposed towards everything from being on time to meetings, to democracy. Start with an arbitrarily-designated geographic line that is putatively about female nuptiality, but also more-or-less fits your list of favored European stock (sorry Ireland) and there's no shortage of just-so stories that you can assemble by spotting associations through Vaseline-smeared spectacles.[3]
But let's assume the truth of the most extreme version of the above: white people on average are better on every relevant conceivable metric that is conducive to a thriving society. Now what? The fixation on group averages rather than individual merit remains baffling.
Consider how the average male is undeniably significantly stronger than the average female. But while sex is indeed highly predictive of physical strength, it isn't determinative and inevitably some females will be stronger than some males. If you were screening for a job that required the ability to lift 100lbs, screening for "men only" would for sure be better than picking candidates at random, but it also means turning down the female powerlifter and ending up with a guy with cerebral palsy.
The closest I've come to encountering a coherent proposal from "group average aficionados" is on immigration policy, generally taking the form of blanket/severe prohibitions against immigrants from countries with low average IQ (or whatever). But if IQ is of such vital importance, why not just test for it directly rather than relying on a crude circuitous heuristic? I took an IQ test myself and scored extremely high,[4] so what do you gain by overlooking that in favor of the purported average of ~37 million people? The biggest practical point in favor of testing IQ directly is that while it no doubt remains politically unpopular within certain circles, there's no universe where "let's just ban countries with low average IQ" isn't even more unpopular. Setting that aside, could the blanket prohibition option potentially be justified on cost concerns? The Wechsler Adult Intelligence Scale (WAIS) is the most widely used IQ test and costs around $100-$400 and takes 2 hours to administer. Meanwhile, the cheapest and most straightforward legal immigration pathway to the US is the K-1 Fiancé visa, which costs $675 just to submit an application. So I've seen nothing to substantiate this cost excuse.
Anytime anyone insists on a low-resolution filter when it has no conceivable benefits compared to a high-resolution filter, you can conclude an unspoken motivation is at play. HBD offers a convenient mantle to don for any bog standard textbook racists looking for pretextual (read: fake) justification to hide what is fundamentally an aesthetic disgust they're too timid to be honest about.
The Omnipresent Allergy
If racial group averages shouldn't ever be used as the basis for policies, can raising their salience serve any other purpose? Nathan Cofnas is another "IQ realist" who openly acknowledges HBD's tarnished association:[5]
Most self-identified "race realists" are not actually realists, but below-average-intelligence JQ (Jewish Question) obsessives whose beliefs have little to do with science. Virtually every genuine scholar of race is one or (at most) two degrees of separation removed from deranged crackpots and neo-Nazis, which makes it difficult for intellectually responsible outsiders to know whom to listen to.
Despite that, Cofnas argues the race & IQ chorus needs to be amplified because he thinks it's the only way to refute the Blank Slate ideology that has been the foundation of "because racism" progressive ideology. Dickie Hanania — definitely no stranger to the HBD arena — pointed out several problems with Cofnas's mission which I echo completely, but I'll add an even bigger hurdle: Progressives are already viciously allergic to accepting the conclusions that naturally flow from their own worldview. I'll explain.
If you accept the institutional racism framework, various downstream effects must inevitably follow. If you believe that black mothers are systematically denied adequate prenatal medical care (because of doctors' unreceptiveness to complaints from black patients, geographic disparities in healthcare facility locations, implicit bias in medical training, and general economic barriers to accessing care) then wouldn't you expect this racism to cause problems? If you believe that black families are disproportionally impacted by environmental racism (because polluting industrial facilities and toxic waste dumps are predominantly located near black neighborhoods due to historical zoning and discriminatory policies) then same question, wouldn't you expect this racism to cause problems?
I don't know about you guys but in my naive understanding of the world, I would fully expect pollution and poor medical care to Cause Bad Things™️, including any number of lifelong intellectual disabilities and behavioral disorders. You would think that acknowledging the problems that your proposed policy would solve would be the easiest thing in the world, but progressives consistently exhibit a very bizarre combination of presenting racial minorities as both uniquely victimized and materially unaffected. Freddie deBoer observed the same dynamic on the other side with affirmative action:
Lately though I am confused about how progressive people talk about affirmative action. It's come to be considered offensive to say that affirmative action recipients have enjoyed a material advantage, as doing so delegitimizes their successes and implies that they would not succeed without special consideration.
The question is, if affirmative action programs don't provide a material advantage to minority applicants... what do they do? The entire premise and purpose of affirmative action is to provide a material advantage to minority applicants. What could it mean to say that an affirmative action program does not provide benefits to minority applicants? If they don't do so, they don't exist. This stance is not just self-defeating, it's self-erasing.
If institutional racism doesn't create any material disadvantages to minorities...what does it do? If you can't get progressives to admit that the thing they hate the most causes problems, in what world would you think they'll be more receptive to messengers uncomfortably associated with reviving the Fourth Reich?
IQ is real, genetics matter, and progressives are not going to be reasoned out of an ideology they didn't reason into. The way to jettison the Blank Slate fallacy isn't to dust off the racial group averages stats that are pretextually obsessed about by bona fide racists. Theories that lack evidence should die for exactly that, lacking evidence. To the extent there is a taboo against asking the "because racism" crowd to show receipts, break it.
[1] How ironic.
[2] I even hold the rare honor of literally having been physically assaulted by a particularly deranged heckler in public, who was furious that I expressed this belief in response to a question. Those who know know.
[3] The "woke" identarian left makes identical claims but uses an oppression framework as the scaffolding rather than genetics, and is the other side of the exact same coin.
[4] Ok in fairness it was a Buzzfeed quiz and the result I got was Jasmine, but we all can read between the lines and know what it really meant.
[5] Cofnas is still a soft collectivist about racial affinity, writing in the same piece: "That does not mean that I advocate colorblindness or multiculturalism, or say that race is politically irrelevant. A race is like an extended family (although you'll probably be disappointed if you expect your racial brethren to treat you that way), and it's natural to care about the fate of your people. Our physical and psychological nature reflects our racial heritage, and for partly biological reasons we may feel a connection to our cultural traditions."
you have regularly sought to use specific cases as a broader disproof to concerns or condemnations or malbehavior of the 2020 elections as unfounded/unjustified/'very poor quality in general'
I think if there's a bunch of specific cases that turn out to be unfounded, then it's justified to presumptively downgrade the broader claim only as a heuristic. I don't believe I've ever used a specific election fraud case to disprove the broader election fraud claim, but if I did then I disavow it now because that's not a valid argument. This would be akin to saying "Michael Richards never killed someone" as a way to establish that no Seinfeld cast member has ever killed someone.
You likewise have a pattern of then later referring to those selectively narrow motte-arguments in serve of more expansive baileys, such as claiming no substantive or well-founded issues were raised in previous iterations, or otherwise minimizing the existence or legitimacy of counter-positions, generally expressed by claimed befuddlement on how people could believe a broader topic despite numerous presentations to you.
Can you cite a specific example of my evasion/obstinance? To assist you, I have every single one of my reddit motte posts archived in this google spreadsheet.
Then there's the point that someone claiming they are not making an argument is not the same as not making the argument. Arguments do not have to be explicitly made to be made- this is the purpose of metaphor, as well as allusion, or comparison, and especially insinuation, which are techniques you have used in previous iterations of your reoccurring hobby horse pasting and examples can be found here.
Can you cite a specific example of an allusion or insinuation that you believe I've made in a surreptitious manner? If explicitly disavowing an argument is insufficient for you, is there anything I can say that could possibly militate against the mind-reading? I'm often accused of holding positions I either never made or explicitly disavowed, and at some point I have to conclude that the reason people fabricate and refute arguments I've never made is borne out of frustration at apparently being unable to respond what I actually said. This post from @HlynkaCG remains the best example of this bizarre trend, where he's either lying about or hallucinating something I've never come close to saying.
As such, it remains appropriately helpful for anyone wishing to contest the background argument to ignore the bailey, which is raised to defend the motte.
Sure, I have an admitted interest in the overall 2020 election claims. If I made a post that aimed to claim that all of those were bullshit, then obviously pushing back on that is fair game. The reason I included that disclaimer was explicitly to avoid Gish galloping or similar distractions when discussing specifics. The scenario I have in mind is someone who believes that the 2020 election was stolen comes across the TTV claims I've made, but is frustrated because they realize they can't substantively rebut them. They're reluctant to admit that out loud, because they see arguments as soldiers and believe that conceding TTV to be liars will further erode their overall claims about the 2020 elections. Accordingly, their only viable response is evasion; doing everything possible to avoid discussing TTV directly, and instead preemptively changing to a different subject they believe to be more defensible.
Edit: I'm mindful that we've discussed many of these same issues a year ago almost to the day. I appreciate that you've tempered your accusations somewhat, and I nevertheless would be eager for specifics to support your claims.
Edit: Merrick Garland timeline, and MAGA grandma below
I really appreciate the specifics in your response! I'll go point by point first, from the standpoint of how unusually Ray Epps was treated:
Factor 1: Epps encouraged others to enter the Capitol
It's true that Epps 1) repeatedly encouraged others to go into the Capitol "peacefully" (whatever that means) and 2) did not enter the Capitol himself. Moreover, he's captured on video trying to calm protestors down. I agree #1 is a negative factor for sentencing, but would you agree that #2 is a positive factor for sentencing? I don't know if the two factors exactly cancel each other out but it's fairly routine for the legal system to have drastically lowered penalties for criminals who change their mind at the last minute.
Besides that, both Alex Jones (though he did say "We are peaceful" and "we need to not have the confrontation with the police") and Nick Fuentes ("Keep moving towards the Capitol! It appears we are taking the Capitol!") encouraged others to march towards the Capitol but did not enter themselves, and unlike Epps neither of them were charged with any crimes.
Because far more prominent individuals who encouraged others to go to the Capitol and were not even charged, while Epps was charged with misdemeanors, this particular factor does not indicate that Epps was treated unusually. What do you think I'm missing?
Factor 2: FBI's most wanted
It's true that Epps was put on an FBI "Seeking Information" list as Photograph #16. He still shows up on Twitter, but no longer on the official list, but lots of other photos have also been taken down from that list (they're numbered sequentially so if you start at the beginning you'll see it goes 1, 2, 5, 9, 13, etc). I don't understand how this is indicative of unusual treatment if the FBI is removing dozens (hundreds?) of other photos.
Regarding the timing of charges, it's true that Epps wasn't charged until a mere 3 days after Merrick Garland was asked about him. [Edit: I hadn't looked closely when I posted this, but Merrick Garland was asked about Ray Epps by Thomas Massie on 9/20/23 and charges against Ray Epps were actually filed two days prior on 9/18/23. Epps appeared virtually in court on the 20th to plead guilty, which heavily indicates the plea was negotiated a couple of months prior]. The timing could be more than just a coincidence, but in what direction? You could argue that Epps was treated unusually harshly if you compare his conduct to Jones and Fuentes (who have not been charged) but you're arguing the opposite and I don't understand how.
Factor 3: Undercharged relative to others
It's true it's difficult to draw a direct comparison about conduct regarding what the "baseline charge" should be, but you're begging the question by saying Epps was undercharged "relative to other major J6 figures". Regarding his specific conduct (and not the attention he's garnered) why should Epps be considered a major figure to begin with? To conduct any comparison it would be helpful if you can identify an illustrative example of a J6 defendant who acted similarly to Ray Epps but was charged/sentenced much more harshly.
Factor 4: Victim of Conspiracies
This is a recursive argument. The judge at his sentencing said "While many defendants have been vilified in a way unique to Jan. 6, you seem to be the first to have suffered for what you didn't do". I don't deny that's a unique situation, but to establish that Epps was treated uniquely generously you need a baseline to compare against. I don't know the grandma you're referring to [Edit: Found what I think is the grandma, who entered the capitol and got 2 months in jail], so all I have to compare against is the fact that Epps avoided jail just like 37% of other convicted J6 defendants.
Maybe if we had a hypothetical Ray Epps Two who was the subject of similarly intense conspiracy theories but whose sentencing judge did not acknowledge his suffering then you could argue that Ray Epps One was treated unusually generously, but if it's not reflected in sentencing why would that matter?
Factor 5: Epps' suit against Fox News
I don't understand any of this. Why is the suit shameless? How could the DOJ possibly stop Epps from suing Fox News? Even if somehow they charged him with triple-digit felonies, he would still be able to sue (almost a quarter of federal lawsuits are filed by prisoners!). This is a baffling point.
TL;DR
- Other people also encouraged others to go to the Capitol and never even got charged
- Other people were also put on the FBI "Seeking Information" list and later removed
- To argue he was undercharged, you need to provide a comparable example
- I fail to see the relevance of a judge acknowledging Epp's unique status as a victim of conspiracy theories
- DOJ cannot "allow" Epps to sue Fox News
ymeskhout
2mo ago
Assuming arguendo that voting fraud is possible because there aren't enough safeguards, I don't see how that gets us to 1) fraud did not cancel itself out and instead favored a particular candidate then to 2) the one-sided fraud was significant enough to affect results 3) the fraud remained undetected despite significant efforts to uncover it.
If someone just wants to argue that fraud is possible, I'll take whatever I can get, but I'm looking for the strongest possible claims.
ymeskhout
1mo ago
Making fun of stupid people for being stupid is sneering.
Intelligence is not the only relevant axis here. I represented someone who had an IQ of around 60-80 and he was one of my favorite clients ever. He got dinged on a DUI and was super respectful and always on time to our meetings, and I really felt for him when he expressed fear and earnest confusion about why he was in trouble. He was verifiably the least intelligent client I've ever had, but he never lied to me or the cops ("Yes I was drinking tonight sir, I am so sorry sir, I am so sorry sir.") and except for that one case he just carried on his life working as a nighttime janitor.
The clients I laugh about above also lack intelligence but to a lesser degree that the janitor. What really sets them apart is their dishonesty combined with the baseless confidence that deludes them into thinking they can successfully pull off their cons.
ymeskhout
1mo ago
What's your job by the way? I've dealt with similar scenarios when I volunteered as a low-income tax preparer. I remember one guy who came in with his sister or whatever and who wanted to claim three kids as dependents even though he earned $500 the whole year. His sister earned way more and could plausibly claim all three kids, and we sort of gently and patiently tried to explain to them that there was no net profit to be gained from spreading the kid deductions/credits around. Of course they didn't believe us and concluded we were a barrier to their scheme and left in a puff.
True The Vote, the group behind the wildly popular "2000 Mules" film that purported to document extensive election fraud in Georgia, has admitted to a judge that it doesn't have evidence to back its claims.
Y'all know I love my hobby horse, even if it's beaten into an absolute paste, and I admit at having ongoing puzzlement as to why 2020 stolen election claims retain so much cachet among republican voters and officials. TTV has a pattern of making explosive allegations of election fraud only to then do whatever it takes to resist providing supporting evidence. TTV has lied about working with the FBI and also refused to hand over the evidence they claimed to have to Arizona authorities. In Georgia, TTV went as far as filing formal complaints with the state, only to then try to withdraw their complaints when the state asked for evidence.
The founder of TTV was also briefly jailed for contempt in 2022 because of her refusal to hand over information in a defamation lawsuit where TTV claimed an election software provider was using unsecured servers in China.Edit: @Walterodim looked into this below and I agree the circumstances are too bizarre to draw any conclusions about the founder's intentions.I have a theory I'm eager to have challenged, and it's a theory I believe precisely explains TTV's behavior: TTV is lying. My operating assumption is that if someone uncovers extensive evidence of election fraud, they would do whatever they can to assist law enforcement and other interested parties in fixing this fraud. TTV does not do this, and the reason they engage in obstinate behavior when asked to provide evidence is because they're lying about having found evidence of election fraud. It's true that they file formal complaints with authorities, but their goal is to add a patina of legitimacy to their overall allegations. TTV's overriding motivation is grifting: there is significant demand within the conservative media ecosystem for stolen election affirmations, and anyone who supplies it stands to profit both financially as well as politically. We don't have direct financial statements but we can glean the potential profitability from how 2000 Mules initially cost $29.99 to watch online, and the millions in fundraising directed towards TTV (including a donor who sued to get his $2.5 million back). There's also a political gain because Trump remains the de facto leader of the conservative movement, and affirming his 2020 stolen election claims is a practical requirement for remaining within the sphere.
I know this topic instigates a lot of ire and downvotes, but I would be very interested to hear substantive reasons for why my theory is faulty or unreasonable! I believe I transparently outlined my premises and the connective logic in the above paragraph, so the best way to challenge my conclusion could be either to dispute a premise, or to rebut any logical deduction I relied on. You could also do this by pointing out anything that is inconsistent with my theory. So for example if we were talking about how "John murdered Jane", something inconsistent with that claim could be "John was giving a speech at the time of Jane's murder". I would also request that you first check if any of your rebuttals are an example of 'belief in belief' or otherwise replaying the 'dragon in my garage' unfalsifiability cocoon. The best way to guard against this trap would be to explain why your preferred explanation fits the facts better than mine, and also to proactively provide a threshold for when you'd agree that TTV is indeed just lying.
I'm excited for the responses!
Edit: I forgot I should've mentioned this, but it would be really helpful if responses avoided motte-and-bailey diversions. This post is about TTV and their efforts specifically, and though I believe stolen election claims are very poor quality in general, I'm not making the argument that "TTV is lying, ergo other stolen election claims are also bullshit". I think there are some related questions worth contemplating (namely why TTV got so much attention and credulity from broader conservative movement if TTV were indeed lying) but changing the subject isn't responsive to a topic about TTV. If anyone insists on wanting to talk about something else, it would be helpful if there's an acknowledgement about TTV's claims specifically. For example, it can take the format of "Yes, it does appear that TTV is indeed lying but..."
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