I'm a critic of "My movement is only the good people, and the bad ones are unrelated.
Take half a second and think about this with your brain. "My movement is only good people and bad ones are unrelated" is the conclusion someone would have if they also believe "small number of people did something bad so everyone tangentially related is responsible or guilty"". You're not arguing against me, you're agreeing with me in pointing out the flaws of this logic.
Sorry, but if you lie down with dogs, you wake up with fleas. Your stance would give zero consequences for extremism
Actually my stance gives full consequences for bad things to the people who do bad things, instead of trying to absolve them. As Reagan once said
We must reject the idea that every time a law's broken, society is guilty rather than the lawbreaker. It is time to restore the American precept that each individual is accountable for his actions.
because only a small number of their members are carrying out attacks.
Ok in your own framing only a small number did it, so why haven't most other members done anything bad? Maybe the club is so big there are niche insider clubs inside of it that they can't control. Like how the "rationalists" had the niche cult of "zizians" who murdered people. But would you blame someone like Scott Alexander or Yudkowsky for those murders? Do you blame the EA community? Would you blame them for the attempted assassination of Sam Altman? That Yud can claim all he wants that he doesn't want houses firebombed, but his anti AI rhetoric lead to this so he's guilty too.
I don't, I say "wow those individuals who did something bad are bad individuals, I blame them for their own choices and not society". But your logic says Yud is a threat.
And as a member of TheMotte, a rationalist adjacent site, do you accept responsibility for how the fleas you apparently laid down with tried to firebomb Sam Altman's house? I'm going to assume no and that you agree with my argument of "that guy is just that guy, he's not me" once you're being asked to account for bad people of "your group". I'll believe you are sincere in your "personal responsibility for other people being bad" stance when I see you apply it to yourself and accept personal responsibility for bad people existing in your own groups.
I'm a huge critic of the "small number of people did something bad so everyone tangentially related is responsible or guilty" sort of arguments, but I do at least appreciate that the conspiracy theories formed after bad events are logically consistent with that. After all if you do truly believe in the concept then you're forced to deny that anyone tangentially related to you could do bad or else you're admitting that you are bad.
So of course then people have to go with "This Trump shooting was staged" or "the people who beat up cops and planted bombs during Jan 6th were secret fed antifa" or whatever because it can't simply be "oh that guy was nuts, but I'm not that guy so it doesn't impact me or my beliefs". Not that false flag attempts don't exist at all, but the question really should be, so what?
What does it matter if the guy who shot a police station was actually a boogaloo boy false flagging instead of a BLM protestor? No one is accountable for his actions except for him. To me it didn't make BLM look bad beforehand and it didn't make right wing groups look bad afterwards just cause this individual sucks. I appreciate the consistency but it's still really stupid.
It's an interesting sort of prudishness to find support for something like the Holocaust as acceptable, every slur imaginable is allowed, but a little bit of swearing could be beyond the pale if it's found to be "rude".
as long as they are polite about it.
Is "I am politically working towards the goal that you and your entire people are subhumans who will be subjected to cruel torture and genocide" a polite statement? If so, how about "I'm gonna beat your mother, cause fuck you". Both are hypothetical goals of enacting violence on the other speaker.
I think most people in general society would agree that genocide and murder is worse than just beating someone up and calling them a few swears while doing it, but hey maybe the normies just don't understand what being polite actually means.
while other comparable fora have died from lack of engagement
As if this place isn't mostly like 7-8 people who are that active
or collapsed into (greater) ideological conformity.
Yeah, it's already severely conformist with how aggressive people are (refer back to how it's circlejerked so hard that calls for violence against someone are seen as more polite than a little swearing) but I'll admit I've seen worse among some of the online tankie groups.
magicalkittycat
1d ago
It doesn't? Pumping oxygenated air into an existing umbilical cord is different from growing one de novo along with a placenta. The best people have done to oxygenate/feed a blastocyst is mechanical rollers (I assume this is the paper you're referring to). IVF followed by gestation is still an entire other, much more difficult, level.
I like these types of arguments so much. The "oh my god this tech is so simple now, just do X Y Z thing that we didn't know about or understand until relatively recently. It can't possibly be used as an example of how we discover and invent new things". That alone is still something that people just a bit ago didn't know.
This recent thing was just 2017. Why should I not assume there will be substantial progress on artificial womb technology in the next 50 years if barriers to research this topic decrease and AI massively amplifies research ability? It doesn't mean we're close yet, but each step forward is progress made to a better understanding.
Comically, your reply was probably the least dignified and most validating argument in favor of such skepticism possible. You offer no sympathy, no understanding, just go straight into the most selfish and aggressively verbalized ingroup/outgroup pathology possible.
To be fair though, if someone was talking about hurting you, then is there much of a meaningful difference if they say it with an emotional passion vs a deadpan matter of fact tone? Either way their intent and meaning is the same, they want to hurt you!
"I want to kill people like you" vs "I want to fucking kill people like you" only really differs in that maybe the emotional passion behind the second makes it more believable. But if we believe both to be equally honest, then what difference is left in actual meaning? Even if we dress it up as "I believe it is beneficial to me and my group if we killed people like you" it's basically the same.
If we have an issue with the swear one but not the other two then it comes off more as prudishness about swearing or "conduct" rather than anything else.
Like look at the mod response
You may even believe that they are enemies who should be fought to the death. But here we do not fight over words, but meet the arguments of others with arguments of our own.
So if they said "I politically believe that people like me are benefited from seeing people with views like you as demonic monsters and that killing you would be a net positive to my group's quality of life" is that really gonna be ok?
magicalkittycat
1d ago
stand corrected, I misread that data source.
Well no offense but that you had read it at all and didn't have little alarm bells blaring in your head to double check that California would have volunteer criminal grand juries is still what I mean by ignorance of the system. That would be incredibly shocking to learn any state did it that way.
I still think you’re badly underestimating the selection effects of the rest of the grand jury selection process, of radicalization among the average progressive and lefty, and of statistical artifacts in a random selection, and of the effect of heavily-leaning districts where the political lean is more severe and where most of the political attack happen.
I'm not saying there isn't any, but even when we stack the deck and assume that every single Harris voter is a super partisan radical again we still only hit 36% of the total population that is biased in this way, in California one of the bluest leaning states. Also age and intelligence bias go the other way for juries. Random chance might get a few grand juries where they stack the deck with blue partisans, but they're disproportionately smarter, younger and higher income people who will get out of jury duty easier!
For the most part of any grand jury anywhere you're gonna have to deal with convincing a bunch of normies who couldn't manage to get out and bored retirees who are just happy to be doing something again. And often those times where you think someone got off unfair is really just because you didn't understand the specifics of the law just like you didn't understand criminal grand juries. There's multiple understandable parts, if you know the specifics, why he didn't get indicted.
The government's laughable attemps to upcharge it as a felony. The cop laughing it off later as no big deal (and lying in court about the details too for some reason) made it harder to suggest there was a reasonable chance of bodily harm in the sandwich throwing given that it didn't result in harm. (It's not impossible since we're talking about chances, but juries see "X happened and Y didn't" as evidence that X causing Y is less likely then), that they had originally released him without charge until the scene went viral later weakened their case significantly (if it was clearly assault to them, they should have pressed then and not let him go) suggesting politically motivated prosecution rather than fact based ones which the felony upcharging and public statements by the Trump admin did not help. And the history that other "soft objects" throwers don't normally get charged under this statute weakened the case even more from that.
That a grand jury refused to indict a hilariously upcharged felony assault over a case which was blatantly politicized in prosecution motive, one that the officers themselves had initially treated as no big deal and nothing to charge over is not that much of a surprise. They then had to cut it down to a misdemeanor, but given the already rocky history and details here and the still hilarious allegations that the sandwich caused bodily harm, the petit jury at trial found him not guilty. Sean Dunn was probably guilty of something, but through multiple unforced errors of choosing stupid statutes to charge him under, letting him go to begin with, blatant politicized prosecution motives, etc the prosecution really hurt their chances at what could have been a slam dunk. They wanted to make an example out of him and fucked up.
California, specifically, favors volunteer applications for grand juries. This selects directly for civic engagement, but if you think it's a random selection of political engagement, drop that estimate from 3B param to something that runs on a Raspberry Pi.
Nope, not true. Civil grand juries are voluntary (and not really juries in the typical sense, they're more like government watchdogs].
Criminal grand juries are random like normal petit juries
All persons selected for the criminal grand jury shall be selected at random and shall be reasonably representative of a cross section of the population that is eligible for jury service in the county. For this reason, there is no mileage limitation for the criminal grand jury and no excuse will be granted because of the distance from the courthouse or inconvenience to the juror.
Please refer back to my prior statement that you do not understand the legal process. This is what happens when the base of your knowledge is going "oh shit, let me Google that" and you should be wondering that maybe you're applying this same ignorance to other parts of these cases.
The Hanania approach is that there's not really anything weird going on to begin with and I think he might be right. https://unherd.com/2026/04/behind-the-disappearing-scientists-hysteria/
First of all, a lot of these scientists are crackpots or retired (so we have a very expensive view of what counts as a scientist here and thus a pretty large base group) or have known suspects involved.
Like
Nearly everything about Eskridge’s background raises red flags about any narrative that might include her in a list of important scientists. She was the co-founder of an organization called the Institute for Exotic Science, where she purported to be working on something called “gravity-modification research,” which isn’t a recognized branch of science. In 2020, she claimed to be ready to present groundbreaking work on “antigravity” but needed approval from NASA.
And
They included a retired Air Force major general,
And
Two of the names were shot and killed. Nuno Loureiro, the MIT professor, was murdered by a former classmate from Portugal. This has led some to speculate that a personal dispute or professional jealousy might have been the motive, though we may never know, since the suspect killed himself. Carl Grillmair was a Caltech astrophysicist whose alleged killer had previously been reported for trespassing on his property. In addition to Grillmair’s murder, the 29-year-old suspect in the case has been charged with carjacking and burglary in separate incidents.
So these don't seem to be top targets to kill, and a good chunk aren't even suspicious deaths cause we know the killers. He also adds
In a country with an estimated 2 million researchers, some of them are bound to fall victim to unfortunate events, possibly even within a short span of time. And there is nothing to indicate that the events that have been linked together in the Right-wing media have any connection to one another.
But he's actually wrong here, cause again remember that we're including the crackpots, administrators, professors, military, and retired ones of all those groups too! The number is significantly higher than 2 million then. This highly expansive group, with three known false positives, still reaches only 11 people in four years. Most of whom don't even seem to be important.
I think this could just be a "people don't look up" type scenario where dumbasses saw airplanes and thought they were foreign drones, but instead it's people not realizing that death and disappearances happen from time to time and in the ridiculously large populations we're pulling from it's statistically likely you'll find a few.
What does the pro-war side want?
The US government and officials have said it multiple times. The war was started because Israel. Literally, they say it themselves in this press release.
As the United States has explained in multiple letters to the U.N. Security Council, including most recently on March 10, the United States is engaged in this conflict at the request of and in the collective self-defense of its Israeli ally, as well as in the exercise of the United States’ own inherent right of self-defense.
Mike Johnson has said it. Rubio has said it. Lindsey Graham is blatant about it. This war is for Israel.
They say it's not just Israel, and sure maybe it's not the only thing, but it is strange that it's both their first listed reason and most of the release is focused specifically on Israel and Israeli interests. And Israel being listed first happens quite a bit here.
Third, Iran’s extensive, long-term support of Hizballah, Hamas, the Houthis, and various Iran‑aligned militia groups in Iraq and Syria has enabled those terrorist organizations to carry out destabilizing attacks against Israel, the United States, Argentina, and others, including countries seeking to freely exercise transit rights through the Strait of Hormuz.
It's not in alphabetical order, so can't be that. Strange where the focus is.
You seeing no difference is not the same as the actual legal specifics seeing no difference. Law is complex, especially weird niche financial stuff like this.
Whether or not it's fraud by legal standards if you squint and stand on one foot and jump through the loopholes, I think it's bad behavior for an NGO to engage in.
But your thoughts don't matter, the actual specifics of the law is what matters! If they are guilty of violating the law, and the evidence is collected and presented through proper procedures then they should be found guilty. But if they aren't, they shouldn't. "I don't personally like it" is not a good legal standard for a rule of law country to follow!
It seems like it's you who wants the legal system to be corrupt and unfair, and when things don't go your personal way you have to assume that it is only because someone else must be corrupting it.
generally around 60/40 like California
needs a simple majority,
Do you not know, or not care, how fractions work?
Yes, I also understand that not everyone is partisan or political to begin with. Only about 60% of eligible voters turned out in California so even from the very start we have 40% of the population who is not particularly political. Then the remaining 60% of people are also split roughly 60/40 themselves, leaving only about 36% of the population who is Dem leaning. And that again is just leaning, they aren't all hyperpartisan. Some are swing voters, some are people who just vote what their spouse says, some just show up and pick randomly.
The large majority of randomly selected people in a grand jury, even in California, will not be that politically biased against the Trump admin. They're normies like the normies in basically every state. If you're losing them you either have a bad case, or you're despised among even the most apolitical normies.
And I also notice that you haven't actually engaged with the point (or examples!) of clear video evidence of criminal behavior being no-billed by Dem-leaning grand juries, juries, and magistrates.
Or perhaps you misunderstand the specifics of the law, the actual quality of evidence allowed in court (good evidence can get tossed because it was collected illegally or other procedural reasons) wasn't as strong, or plenty of other potential factors like that.
Considering you seemingly don't even know basic concepts like voter turnout not being 100% in the US, ignorance in the American legal field seems likely.
magicalkittycat
2d ago
Correct, it's inherent to neighbors.
It is insulation quality, not neighbors.
Sound insulation can make even the loudest neighbors playing a boombox basically unnoticeable, while leaky insulation (or lack of insulation) can make even basic everyday noise echo and amplify. And when very minor mistakes dumpster sound insulation quality, many people are left thinking that noise is just a part of life when it's really just shit construction.
It requires a 50 but there's basically no actual testing or enforcement of it done so STC ratings in the real world are often much lower. In part because even a tiny mistake can dumpster the rating. https://www.slrconsulting.com/insights/the-devil-is-in-the-acoustic-details-part-two-acoustic-caulking-wall-joints/
Even small gaps can drastically reduce the sound isolation performance of an acoustical assembly. A small gap permits sound to be readily transmitted just as easily as light in a corridor is transmitted through a cracked door or under-door gap, to a darkened room. A small opening of less than 1% of the area in a partition reduces an STC 50 rated assembly by as much as 30 dB.
Consider the case of a GWB wall assembly that is normally rated at STC 50, but has a ½” (12mm) gap between the floor and the wall at both the top and bottom of the wall. For a 14 ft high wall assembly (floor- underside of floor), these seemingly insignificant gaps represent a mere 0.6%, of the total area (i.e., 1” out of 168”) but degrades the sound isolation to STC 22. A reduction of 28 points!
Because there's no actual require testing and enforcement of insulation, so many buildings just go wasted.
magicalkittycat
2d ago
Tokyo, one of the best big cities in the world is filled with apartments. From tiny cheap ones next to the stations for young folk who are out and about all day anyway to bigger ones for families where the kids can get their own rooms. Apartments can be great, we've just decided we don't care.
And so many of the issues I see listed with apartments are completely fixable. Like one of the main complaints I see is noise, and I get it. I hated having upstairs neighbors but that is not inherent to apartments, that is just because we don't do sound insulation properly. It's insane to me that we over regulate basically everything else and drive up the costs of building to an insane degree and then with the biggest complaint apartment dwellers have we just shrug and go "oh well, nothing we can do". Sound insulation is not some new technology, we can make apartments that are quiet no matter how much your upstairs neighbor stomps. We just don't.
This is the case with so many problems people got about apartments. Completely fixable, but instead we're wasting money on pointless regulated shit like second stairwells and parking minimums way over the amount of occupants.
Personally I'm a huge tech optimist AGI in the next few years or at least next few decades believer and I really don't think a fair bit of these things are going to be an issue. Lowered birth rates sound awful at first, but we've already made significant advantages into artificial wombs for preemies and the idea that this tech could eventually extend to the very beginning of a pregnancy until birth doesn't seem unreasonable anymore. With stable conditions and active monitoring they might even be able to be healthier! What care do we have if people aren't fucking when we won't need people to fuck for society to have children anyway? And with AGIs, robots can be effective parents (probably better on average if they aren't abusive) for the artificial womb babies.
But even that is a complete misdirection, birth rates won't be much of an issue to begin with. The current problem with an aging society is that the old don't produce as much as the youth do, but still consume resources. But who cares about that if AGI bots can do all the work for humans? There's barely a difference in productivity between a society of average age 35 vs 55 when almost all the labor is handled by automation to begin with. And with AGI, just building another robot will always be more efficient to improving the lives of already living people than creating a new baby and having to raise them.
Of course this sort of concept is creepy and inhumane and no one really wants to talk about it. The idea of machines birthing and raising human children feels disturbing for an old population that doesn't work but it's honestly one of the better possible outcomes. People are happy and humanity thrives and grows increasing utility in multiple ways. And at the very least it's way preferable to a future where humanity shrinks/goes extinct instead whether from low birthrates or robots killing us.
If you want to do sarcasm parody it would be better if you didn’t hold up things that are literally true as objects of ridicule
Sorry but this is fake news. Israel and the US says that Iran was just a week away from being able to make nukes and we needed to stop them in February. The idea they are set back years by the failed Biden strikes is a lie, Iran is very dangerous and we need the war now!
magicalkittycat
2d ago
The fraud is in creating fake bank accounts and shell entities. That it's stupid and absolutely inappropriate behavior for an NGO are separate complaints.
It seems like the actual law is rather specific given that using other company names for billing is a not that uncommon practice (see tons of sex toy/porn/etc companies for instance). IDK whether or not the SPLC behavior qualifies for that specific violation or not, but it's clearly not a given.
These sorts of rules are highly technical, and given the poor track record of targeted lawsuits so far against other enemies of the admin, I think it's fair to expect not much difference here.
magicalkittycat
2d ago
Even the most partisan states are still generally around 60/40 like California and that's not including the rising number of independent aligned voters and nonvoters who are not "radicalized blue tribe". And a grand jury just needs a simple majority, it's famously easy to get past.
Now sure, maybe Trump is just so uniquely unpopular among the normies and independents now that even they are willing to sabotage their indictments against political opponents but I'm not sure the average American is that spiteful.
This comment doesn't make much sense. The war was won weeks ago (we won so hard we kept winning 30 times after just to rub it in their face), the strait has been opened numerous times, Iran's military force has been obliterated, it is fake news to imply their nuclear program hasn't been set back by multiple years since the strikes a year ago just by themselves yet alone with these recent strikes which we have a huge 100% chance of obtaining (ignore that it's a less than 30% chance to just get even a token amount by the end of the year, that's also fake news) soon, and it all happened over the first weekend because it was such a huge success. The anti war crowd has been proven wrong time and time again here and if we have to spend a few measly more resources like American lives and tens (hundreds?) of billions of dollars in a boots on the ground operation that will definitely go just as well as the rest of the military operation, that's something people shouldn't be concerned about.
So what doesn't make sense to me is that it doesn't matter if we left now. Everything is already won and handled, so nothing could go wrong by leaving.
magicalkittycat
3d ago
As I said in another comment whether or not it's actually effective is a different question. It's not fraudulent to do a dumb idea that you genuinely think could work. If Tom accepts money on Kickstarter to make a new indie movie sequel, tries out a new editing technique for it and it turns out the sequel sucks because of that, Tom didn't commit fraud. Backers can be upset that the movie sucked but unless it was caused by purposefully wasting the money for something else then there's nothing illegal there.
The SPLC may or may not have been ineffective when using this strategy, but little proof has been actually presented as specific fraud. "I think their strategy is dumb or counterproductive" is not it.
magicalkittycat
3d ago
But either way, how exactly would that change anything? My objection, and the DOJ's, is that the SPLC was telling donors that it opposed a white nationalist rally, while in reality they were secretly promoting and helping to facilitate that rally. That the SPLC was not solely responsible for the rally does not mean they didn't spend money they promised would oppose the rally to instead secretly promote and facilitate the rally. Can you explain otherwise? What am I missing?
Refer back to how informants are used elsewhere like the DEA. Federal officials paying a drug informant to give them information on drug deals is not interpreted as them "secretly promoting and helping to facilitate" taking drugs. Heck, even if the DEA helps an informant or cop stay undercover by providing drugs, we know contextually that this is not a pro drug action.
While law enforcement using a technique may be a testament to that technique's effectiveness, it does not follow from that statement that the SPLC should do the same. The SPLC is not a law enforcement agency, and there are a lot of things inherent to law enforcement agencies which are not inherent to the SPLC.
You can disagree with them as to whether or not the strategy is effective here, but "I don't think their idea works as well as they hope" isn't the same as fraud.
This is not a quote in support of CI programs.
Again, whether or not it's actually effective is a different question. It's not fraudulent to do a dumb idea that you genuinely think could work. If Tom accepts money on Kickstarter to make a new indie movie sequel, tries out a new editing technique for it and it turns out the sequel sucks because of that, Tom didn't commit fraud. Backers can be upset that the movie sucked but unless it was caused by purposefully wasting the money for something else then there's nothing illegal there.
magicalkittycat
3d ago
No, it doesn't. I don't have to assume that a particular supporter was critical to an even to call him a supporter.
But if it would have happened anyway because he wasn't critical then having an informant on the inside doesn't meaningfully change much besides their access to information.
Yeah, glowies are also known for creating situations that would later allow themselves to swoop in, and call themselves heroes.
So you understand that it is a common strategy to use informants, and that doesn't indicate support of a particular policy. You can disagree on how effective the strategy is, but the DEA using drug informants isn't meaningfully supportive of drugs anymore than informants are here.
The SPLC billed this as a hate rally, they told their donors they were working against it, and they solicited donations from them on that basis. At the same time they were paying organizers, they were telling people they paid to attend, and they were coordinating transportation to the rally. They told their donors they were working to stop a hate group doing "hate speech" while they directly funded and coordinated with leaders of that group to do that very same thing they promised to stop, with money that they said would be used to stop it!
This seems to assume that the Charlottesville rally would not have occured had they not been in touch with a single member of the larger group chat behind the rally. Informants have to be higher ups in order to provide solid information, but it's not like they are gods who make all the decisions by themselves for the groups. Helping the informant avoid exposure also seems like a basic concept that doesn't require assuming Charlottesville wouldn't have happened without them.
This is what the SPLC tells its donors about the National Alliance. If the SPLC wanted to dismantle National Alliance why would they give their fundraiser a million dollars? How exactly could donating to a group be considered dismantling that group
Because if you want an informant on the inside to leak you information and stay under cover, financial appeal can help you where moral appeal might not. Just paying people to snitch is not some new concept. It's not something the SPLC has invented, it's been around since the beginning of snitches and is used by law enforcement constantly.
Consider in just the five years from 2012 to to this hearing in 2017 the ATF and DEA alone paid informants almost 260 million.
Since 2012, ATF and DEA paid CIs almost $260 million, with payments largely determined by field agents who did not seek approval or review from headquarters.
magicalkittycat
3d ago
I don't think it's that surprising to begin with that they might pay some people tbqh. The SPLC would get leaks somehow after all. and paying people some money to leak information is not a new concept they invented. If you can't make a moral appeal to group insiders, you can often make a financial one.
Sure ok, we can find plenty of others, how about the killing of the two Minnesota Dems just last year?
We have two options under the "people are responsible for what others in their groups do".
Conservatives are responsible for those two deaths.
It's a false flag and he was actually a liberal because one time he was on some large board for business owners where the governor signs off on it and therefore it's anti conservatives are responsible.
And we have one simple.thing under my belief of personal responsibility.
It's striking that I rarely ever see "People are responsible for what happens in their groups" come with "I take responsibility for what other people did in my groups". It's always either blatant self serving hypocrisy or conspiracy theories about how everyone in.their group doesn't count.
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