site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   25019 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of June 17, 2024

This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.

Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.

We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:

  • Shaming.

  • Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.

  • Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.

  • Recruiting for a cause.

  • Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.

In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:

  • Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.

  • Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.

  • Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.

  • Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.

8
Bottom New Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Another day, another Guardian hit job.

The title reads "Sam Bankman-Fried funded a group with racist ties. FTX wants its $5m back"

Take a moment to form a hypothesis about what kind of group this could be. The KKK? Some fringe right-wingers? An Israeli lobby group?

Turns out their target of the day is Lightcone Infrastructure. Lightcone is running lesswrong, which is a grandparent of themotte.

I personally have only heard of lightcone in context of TracingWoodgrains' writings on the Nonlinear investigation conducted by Ben Pace and Oliver Habryka. (TIL that this is a name different from the handle of a former motte mod. In my defense, I did not read a lot from either of them. Blame my racist brain.)

Of course Trace's critique could not be more different from what the Guardian writes about lightcone.

They start off by linking the NYT article on Scott Alexander. I think it is the one where they tried to doxx him. Apparently the NYT does not like my adblocker or something, the only think I get (besides a picture which indicates that the NYT designers have way too much time on their hand) is the text "Silicon Valley’s Safe Space -- Slate Star Codex was a window into the psyche of many tech leaders building our collective future. Then it disappeared." -- I guess that is one way to phrase it. Of course, the Guardian gleefully doxxes Scott again, not that anyone cares (but it's the thought that counts).

Robin Hanson is apparently misogynistic. From the linked article, I would say it is either being tone-deaf or intentionally courting controversy. He even has sympathy for incels. The nerve of that man!

Apparently they found no dirt on Eliezer, which to me seems like a failure of investigative journalism. EY has written a lot more than the six lines Cardinal Richelieu would have required.

Then they come to the "extreme figures" present at Manifest 2024.

Jonathan Anomaly is apparently pro eugenics. Never heard of him. However, given that anything from "select embryos which do not have a genetic disease" to "encourage smart and successful people to have kids" can be called eugenics, and given that the article would cite the most damning quotation, I will assume that he is not a Nazi.

Razib Khan is a journalist scientist and writer who got kicked out of the NYT because he wrote for some "paleoconservative" magazine. This matters only if you think that failing the NYT ideological purity test is some kind of fatal character flaw.

I vaguely recall Stephen Hsu being discussed on slatestarcodex and from what I remember my conclusion was that he got cancelled for a lack of ideological purity -- calling for research into increasing human intelligence is not acceptable, and talking about race differences is even less acceptable.

Brian Chau is apparently an e/acc and thus probably the most controversial person from my personal point of view. But then, engaging in honest discussion with advocates of other positions is generally a good thing, so if Lighthaven is more inclusive than Aella's birthday party, I am kinda fine with it.

Of course, the narrative would not be complete without the specter of antisemitism, here in the form of a quote "[Hsu is] often been a bridge between fairly explicit racist and antisemitic people [...]". I think the rationalist community is a bad place for antisemites for the same reason why the marathon Olympics are a bad place for white supremacists.

In the end, the plug for this story -- lightcone having received money from SBF -- has no bearing on the bulk of the article, which is about how icky these ratsphere nerds are. It does not matter if SBF donated to the Save Drowning Puppies Foundation or to the Feed Puppies to Alligators Alliance -- either the donations can be kept or not.

Edit: fixed Khan's profession.

Real mask-off moment from the author on Twitter:

“The greatest joy I get from this kind of reporting is sending such a fine selection of people into a spiral of seething cope on a gorgeous Sunday afternoon. Don’t want the smoke? Don’t be this kind of person”

Spoken like a fox on Rottnest Island. Of course this guy took the flimsiest possible excuse to list the worst things people he doesn’t like have ever said. That’s just “responsible journalism”. What you never get from these kinds of articles is any sort of intellectual curiosity about the ideas in question.

"Don't be this kind of person" is really a skeevy way to put it (in my opinion).

He justifies his interference in their activities not because they've impacted him in any way, they've not directed a single iota of attention towards him and thus there's no impetus for 'smoke' in the first place. It's not a rap beef where they dissed his fashion sense or cursed his dead mother and thus justified a response.

But oh, they're the 'kind of person' who invites such scrutiny. Isn't it so handy-dandy that he's the one who gets to describe what 'kind of person' they are and the audience is supposed to just assume that BECAUSE he states this that they are indeed worthy targets of his uninvited ire. And if they disagree with how he characterizes them, that is further proof that they're the 'kind of person' who needed to be called out.

I'd also guess that what he means by "kind of person" is almost literally just "someone who believes things that I find offensive" and so really he has no external reason for it, and he sees this as perfect justification for swinging the hatchet their way.

These are the sort of moments, I've learned, where being a quokka doesn't quite pay off, and it would be useful to have the resources available to hit back hard enough to convince this person that it is indeed not worth the smoke but also doing it in such a way that you're not retroactively justifying the hit piece itself.

But I'm also inclined to inflict the greatest insult an enemy can suffer. To be ignored.

These are the sort of moments, I've learned, where being a quokka doesn't quite pay off, and it would be useful to have the resources available to hit back hard enough to convince this person that it is indeed not worth the smoke but also doing it in such a way that you're not retroactively justifying the hit piece itself.

OK. Let's try to put our "recovering quokka" title to the test and say any response is on the table. Let's also pretend all resources are available to me. What's your solution?

It sounds to me like it's wishful thinking and cope.

First pass?

Just hire some research pros to dig into the background of any journos involved in the piece in question with the explicit goal of discrediting them, embarrassing them, or getting them fired.

Find any embarrassing or potentially criminal behavior they can, find solid evidence or cross reference it enough to prove it, then hire someone to write about it all in the most unkind light manageable. Then find the biggest platform for publication you can, and get ready to publish it.

Give the Journo about 30 minutes to respond to a request for comments before hitting 'publish.'

Kind of like how Christopher Rufo came after University Presidents and managed to get a few of them to resign merely by digging into their past scholarship and running it through a plagiarism detector. If it works on people in such positions of power, it'll work on Journos.

Or if they're too unremarkable and impotent for it to work, then yeah, revert to utterly ignoring them.

Looking at his previous work, he appears to be a left-wing activist calling himself an "investigative journalist", so intellectual curiosity certainly cannot be expected. Kinda bad taste to claim he's just doing it for ragebait rather than the very important work of exposing the far right.

Also has this charming post where, in a reply to Passage Publishing, the "journalist" posted a picture of the Passage Publishing logo upside down, next to a photo of Mussolini hanging upside down after his execution. The message communicated clearly being "Passage Publishing are fascists who should be executed by firing squad."

No idea what they did to earn such a response, but I'd put money on it being boringly inoffensive.

Truly pulitzer-worthy "anthropological curiosity" on display, dedicated to broadening the intellectual horizons of his audience.

At the risk of endlessly repeating myself: the media has done its job of detecting a potential counter elite (rationalists et al.), figured out what its sin is (spooky eich-bee-dee racism) and is now just churning out hit pieces to marginalize any organization that might come out of it.

It's their job to do this. And SBF is such a convenient easy target to attack both the cryptosphere and the grey tribe that I'm starting to wonder if his rise wasn't an op. He did have super suspicious establishment ties after all.

Though what hits me here isn't that, but how mundane the crime of the undesirable nerds is now. Accusations of racism have so lost power that it almost seems laughable to lob them at people who barely even qualify. Like really, they'reis going to appeal to 90s colorblind liberalism in 2024? What a joke.

Not that it has to make any sense or have any relationship to the truth of course, the article only means "here are a bunch of enemies which aren't so miserable we can ignore them, so go fuck with them".

At the risk of endlessly repeating myself: the media has done its job of detecting a potential counter elite (rationalists et al.), figured out what its sin is (spooky eich-bee-dee racism) and is now just churning out hit pieces to marginalize any organization that might come out of it.

I think this is giving “rationalists et al.” way too much credit. They aren’t a potential counter elite that’s a threat to the real elite. The media writes about them out of anthropological curiosity, in the same way they write about isolated tribes in the Amazon. Like there was a big NYT article about rationalist date-me-docs and the tone was the same, “ha ha aren’t these people weird and interesting” that underlies all these pieces.

Of course the tone is more negative now after SBF. But sorry, yes, if a guy in your movement does an enormous fraud, has a high-profile trial, and goes to jail, your movement attracts negative attention. But this isn’t tearing down a threatening counter-elite, this is an anthropological piece about how that weird Amazonian tribe that turned on its neighbors is still being weird.

I think this is giving “rationalists et al.” way too much credit. They aren’t a potential counter elite that’s a threat to the real elite.

There very obviously is a reasonably ideologically coherent right-wing counter-elite hiding in plain sight in Silicon Valley. Peter Thiel is the Grand Heresiarch, Roger Mercer was an early backer from the East Coast, and Steven Hsu, Dominic Cummings and Curtis Yarvin were all early recruited talent. Right now the biggest players are Elon Musk and Mark Andreesen, with David Sacks as court jester. Balaji Srinivasan is pursuing a separate project, but is clearly sympathetic. Richard Hanania's vomit-inducing hagiography of this group makes him the spoony bard of the movement. If the current elite is vulnerable to a coup by a shadowy cabal, then this group have the cash and talent to pull it off. They also control two important power centres - VC money (Sequoia and Kleiner Perkins have the prestige, but A16Z and The Founders' Fund have the cool) and Twitter. The main reason the Thielosphere doesn't matter more is that Trump has cut off all the oxygen for any anti-establishment right movement that isn't MAGA, and the Thielosphere disagrees with MAGA on too many points to be allowed near power in a MAGA regime.

"Rationalists et al." are a group with cash and talent who are close to the Thielosphere on the social graph and are sufficiently hostile to the centre-left establishment that they might have been recruitable in a slightly different world. I am 90% confident that Thiel did spend serious cash and effort trying to bring Eliezer Yudkowsky into his network, and I wouldn't be surprised if he had reached out to Scott Siskind as well. Cade Metz' hatchet job accused Scott, almost certainly correctly, of being widely read within the Thielosphere, and therefore presumably sympathetic.

If I was advising George Soros and Klaus Schwab on emerging threats to their world empire, I would include the Thielosphere on the list of things that aren't an immediate threat but need an eye kept on them if they become one. And if I were the Globohomo Elite, Third Class assigned to dealing with the Thielosphere then stopping them absorbing the rationalists would be part of my job. Obvious options include threatening to drive the rationalists out of polite society unless they dissociate themselves from right-wing heresy (worked on Eliezer) or offering a more attractive alternative.

Amusingly, the flow of money from SBF into effective altruism probably was part of the reason that the Thielosphere and the rationalists parted company. SBF was a (as it turns out, rogue) member of the establishment - even to the point of which VCs invested in him (Sequoia backed FTX largely because they were afraid of A16Z becoming the dominant player in crypto). Peter Thiel couldn't or wouldn't compete with SBF in rationalist-buying. If that was an op, then someone has earned a promotion to Globohomo Elite, Second Class.

People on this forum give these guys way too much credit. The tech/VC types keep making the same mistake of thinking that money and power are the same thing. I’ll update my priors if they can get the politics of their own backyard, SF, in any kind of reasonable order. Visit SF and visit NY and decide for yourself if the tech guys are in any way competent enough leaders to govern better than the finance and law guys.

I’m skeptical (they seem too busy cranking out AI SaaS slop to do anything serious) but who knows.

The tech people are not in charge in SF, and never have been.

thats my point, despite having a ton of money they’ve totally failed to accomplish anything political

If money was all someone needed to become powerful we'd be loving in the 2010s era neoliberal anomie of President Michael Bloomberg and be all the better for it. Power is relative influence over other people to action ones will, but oftentimes what matters is getting people to do something they were inclined to do anyways and convince them that it was your idea. No amount of high end pulled pork buffets could get people motivated to attend Bloombergs political rallies, and no amount of VC lavishing on startups can generate politically influential mass. Commies and MAGA capture the politically motivated crazies dedicated enough to waste time on entryist politics, VC captures nerds who would prefer to jerk off to, and play, MOBA games.

Yes. This is my point. These people are not/unable to make themselves politically relevant.

More comments

They aren’t a potential counter elite that’s a threat to the real elite.

Sure they are. Americans have a very weird way of talking about the elites, where I always have the impression they only ever mean "elected representatives" or "the ultra-rich". Intellectual elites are a thing too, and that's exactly who's threatened by the Rats, and who's writing the hit pieces.

From the way in which the NYT spins the Scott Alexander story (or at least headline), I think what puts the rationalists in the "designated enemy" camp from the point of view of traditional newspaper journalists is that rationalists are seen as affiliated with big tech and silicon valley startup culture. By writing a blog which is read by important SV/VC/startup people, Scott became an acceptable target to the NYT.

I would argue that many traditional publications are explicitly waging a war against SV.

I think there are multiple reasons for it. First, engineers and scientists are always rightfully suspected of being less ideologically pure than more human-centered professions, because their stuff needs to work in the physical world, not just in some ideological space. The strength of our people may be endless in abstract, but when you require them to produce torque it is very much finite. Metaphorically, our supreme leader may not be weighted down by a single sin, but in the physical space that does not really make him float. Just because most tech companies signal that they are fully on board with woke values that does not actually mean they can be trusted in the way some op-ed writer who majored in intersectionality could be trusted. Probably some of their nerds are secretly making fun of DEI.

Among other drastic changes in our lives, the internet was the biggest change to how journalism works since the printing press. And this was not a change authored by the previous elite any more than monks working in scriptoriums invented the printing press. Where in 1850 you had to rely on professional journalists to figure out what was going on internationally, in 2024 you can get by just reading a selection of amateur bloggers working without the blessings of the former gatekeepers.

More seriously, "write a hit piece on manifest 2024. Search the web for controversies involving any of the speakers any briefly summarize and link to them." is the kind of prompt which could replace this sort of low-effort journalism either today or in the near future.

And to be fair, it is reasonable to be critical of the new elites. The walled garden model favored by Apple feels offensive to me, and Facebook optimizing its site to maximize the amount of time people spent on that site will likely not increase human flourishing. Companies like Uber and airbnb clearly have some negative externalities which makes the value they add to society debatable. OpenAI has all but abandoned their veneer of being non-profit or caring about x-risk from AI. The ubiquitous smartphone might not actually improve the mental development of today's kids.

Perhaps this is just my biases, but it seems to me that the grey tribe (which is very emphatically not congruent with SV techbros) is less ideologically coherent than the red and blue tribes. "A rationalist is someone who has argued with Eliezer" and all that. I would not be surprised if even the startup scene turned out to be less ideologically homogeneous than just "techbros wanting to get rich".

Of course, such ideological crusades are bad no matter if you find yourself among the targets or not. The authors set out to write a hit piece on the rationalists. They wrote their bottom line first. The Bayesian information gained from such pieces is very limited. At the most, you could infer that nobody credibly has accused rationalists of sacrificing humans and feasting on their corpses (because they would have mentioned that) and that some vaguely rat-adjacent people have voiced HBD ideas (because the media very rarely lies (outright) and all that).

in the same way they write about isolated tribes in the Amazon.

I'm pretty sure the authors of pieces about isolated tribes in the Amazon don't go on Twitter to gloat about how it made the subjects "seethe" and scatter in fear. Are you going to update?

If the Amazonian tribesmen could seethe on Twitter the authors certainly would go on and gloat.

  • -10

They can, and that's not the response we got.

They aren’t a potential counter elite that’s a threat to the real elite

And yet they can apparently brainwash scammers with billions of dollars to follow their quasi-religion and donate money to them. I think you're underselling the importance of cultural influence.

the tone was the same, “ha ha aren’t these people weird and interesting”

Somehow, this weirdness only ever seems to be interesting to the prestige media when it's connected to VCs and other powerful people.

If that's not the deciding factor, how come they don't report on the much more sensational lolcow antics kiwis are obsessed with? My terminally online ass has hung out with weird and interesting people for decades and I only ever see them in the media when either they do something insanely criminal or get access to any significant amount of power.

Where's Rekieta's NYT article?

Where's Rekieta's NYT article?

The wider world of normies really needs to know more about his saga, it's hilarious!

I just find it tragic and sad honestly. Expose the one guy online that seems to have his shit together to the power of the Sonichu medallion and consequences will never be the same.

This is the trial streamer guy right? Some people just can’t help themselves. What happened now?

It appears he may have serious substance abuse problems and be a swinger of sorts, and he and his wife and another female friend were arrested on drug charges recently. This all happened a few months after someone sent him a Sonichu medallion in the mail along with a note saying "you are the next chosen one" or something like that. He wore the medallion on stream, leading people to theorize that it was cursed.

Edit: there's also a child endangerment charge in there, I'm assuming it's related to something involving his own kid

Well yes, the media focuses on powerful, influential people, and on crime.

I disagree. Rationalists from a core base of White and Asian men who have been systemically excluded from the traditional pathways to the elite (Ivy League) due to affirmative action. They are the counter elite who are waiting in the wings for when (if) the existing elite collapses.

These people are the smart ones who have been excluded, and the current elite feel the wind shifting. Thus, the attack.

Rationalists from a core base of White and Asian men who have been systemically excluded from the traditional pathways to the elite (Ivy League) due to affirmative action.

They're also privileged (i.e. have above-average incomes).

I feel it is more likely they (2010s white and asian men left behind in the current cultural conversation yet resourced enough to weather a storm independently) successfully sequester like a NIMBY John Galt (we see this with St George county in Baton Rouge) as opposed to forming a successful political movement sympathetic to their plight to wrest control. An existing elite collapsing will just lay bare the rotten bones of the system cannibalized by current incompetence, and enough of the rationalists do see the rot present even now, disincentivizing the seizing of the current reigns.

Agreed,

In addition, SBF and his associates have the issue of being, not strawmen per se, but a near-perfect encapsulation of what critics of utilitarianism say utilitarianism will lead to in practice, which makes them a go to example for said critics.

I do think mainstream left-leaning media (NYT et al) have been tacking more toward center of late because of the visible success of new platforms and publications with more moderate, rationalist-adjacent takes. I'm thinking of Substack (Nate Silver, Matt Yglesias), or The Free Press, for examples. Not necessarily huge success in what has long been described as a dying market, but enough that mainstream media is at least taking notes.

I do wonder what a rank-and-file rationalist or EA-ist looks like on politics, HBD, and so forth. My guess would be fairly woke, which makes this sort of attack amusing. But I don't actually know.

You know, I'd think that I'd have gotten accustomed to this sort of thing by now, but the specifics are still galling:

In March 2015, the New York Times announced that it had hired Khan on a short-term contract, and that he would write for them about once a month.[12] The Times wrote he is "a science blogger and a doctoral candidate in genomics and genetics at the University of California, Davis. He writes about evolution, genetics, religion, politics and philosophy."[12] The same day the Times announced hiring Khan, Gawker published an opinion piece written by J.K Trotter, who noted that Khan also wrote blogs for Taki's Magazine, an online publication "founded in 2007 by Taki Theodoracopulos, the flamboyantly racist Greek."[13] As a result of Khan's history of writing for controversial publications, the Times removed him as a regular periodic contributor, but stated they remain "open to consideration of submissions from him" in the op-Ed pages.[14] The Times did not specifically mention the part of Khan's work they found uncomfortable,[15] and he wrote two op-eds for the paper before they ended his contract.[16]

Never mind that the Times should be fine with having a writer on staff that has written something controversial, the stated reason here for him getting dropped isn't even that he wrote something controversial, it is just literally guilty by association. Is he a badthinker? Oh, most definitely by these standards, but his detractors don't even need to figure out why, because it's enough that he wrote blogs for a site founded by a flamboyantly racist Greek.

Guilt by association can obviously be a bad thing, but is sometimes totally understandable, so I visited the actual website in question: Taki's Magazine. I wanted to know how much was simple guilt by association and how much was more direct. About page:

We at Taki’s Magazine take our politics like we take life—lightly. We believe political labels such as conservative and liberal are as outdated as flared trousers and Nazis. Ideology is a false god, a secular religion that seeks vainly to create a paradise on Earth. Our only ideology is to be against the junk culture foisted upon us by the woke, Hollywood, the mainstream media, and promotors of a new world order. Think of us what you will, but read us. Our writers are never boring.

Main featured story: "How Does Your Garden Grow? Upon the Corpses of Millions" by Steven Tucker. Apparently a rant about how liberals are anti-green lawns and want to cast nice lawns as racist and somehow brings Jews into it too.

Trending story titles: "Tucker’s Tome" by Steve Sailer, "A Liberal Dose of Nonsense" by Taki, "The Week That Perished, Jun 9" by Takimag, "Nazis in Moderation" by David Cole, "Fight to the Death for Death!" by David Cole, "How Liberals Pay Off Their Bimbos" by Ann Coulter

Basically it's chock full, actually almost entirely consisting of, supercharged culture war posts with belligerent and sarcastic tones, few filters, and the like. I read Ann Coulter's piece, for example, and it contains a few trivially checked falsehoods which isn't strictly relevant but I found interesting (that the NYT did not cover the John Edwards campaign finance case which is trivially false; pulls 400k out of nowhere instead of 200k, which is bizarre; claims there's unequal treatment when Edwards did in fact go to trial, hung jury and dismissed) and is basically just a forum-style rant. Another post praises Tucker as an upstanding WASP. Another freely throws around terms like "tranny" and "faggy" and wishes pride protesters would get rolled by a steamroller. You can look for yourself.

In essence, this is not "oh you dug up something small the owner said who was owner of a part time gig you did ten years ago" as the framing, which happens sometimes and is bad. Nothing is hidden. Taki himself writes pieces on the front page! It's more like "you chose to participate in a media outlet that front-page peddles antagonistic things that most of our readers hate vehemently" and honestly that seems like a totally fair metric by which to select a writer for your newspaper. In other words, it's not so much guilt by association so much as we think you have a lack of professional judgement, are a reputational risk for us, and we also think your tone might not match our established tone and conduct.

Personally I think that though his own contributions are not as highly-charged, I think it does seem to violate the NYT's own policies, which also don't seem too out of the norm. From their ethics page:

Before accepting a freelance assignment, a staff member should make sure that the tone and content of the publication, website or program are in keeping with the standards of The Times. In general, a staff member should write nothing elsewhere that could not fit comfortably under his or her byline in The Times or that implies The Times’s sponsorship or endorsement.

Though I realize this is guidance for after employment, the hiring pages point to wanting candidates to already be basically following this or a similar ethics code. Essentially, the NYT wants your outside work to basically still look similar to the NYT. His actual articles, ehhh, kind of, though one in context might be interpreted as an HBD dogwhistle. So yeah. I think his case is a bit borderline but also fairly understandable. NYT might deserve pitchforks but not for this I don't think.

Essentially, the NYT wants your outside work to basically still look similar to the NYT.

"NYT rehires Hitler-praising Soliman Hijjy to cover Israel-Hamas war" - Oct 20, 2023

I do hope that's a disproof, but, well....

I think you misunderstand. I'm not saying that the NYT is free of hypocrisy. I'm only saying that the implication that the only thing wrong with Khan, who is otherwise innocent, was he happens to know some disliked people is a bad implication. It's clear from context that he knowingly chose to write for a news outlet that trivially is observed to have very questionable ethics and a very strong viewpoint which is not at all NYT-like, so it was more his direct actions that led to his firing rather than some vague notion of distributed guilt. It wasn't like he wrote for an innocent, normal magazine whose name happens to be on a fancy New Yorker blacklist. Rather, he knowingly appeared right next to some very potent and arguably toxic stuff.

Yeah, for me this is very much an "I against my brother; I and my brother against my cousin; I, my brother, and my cousin against the world" situation. I have my differences with the Lightcone guys, but the article was atrocious, and Oliver and I chatted a bit about it after its release.

Mind, I have a personal stake in this, since I was invited to present at Manifest and loved every second of it. I met a startling amount of old-school Motte users there as well. While the conference was ostensibly about prediction markets, in many ways it felt like keeping that spirit alive and bringing it into in-person spaces. Lighthaven is beautiful, Manifest rocked, and the Guardian can shove off.

One author is the same person who fruitlessly doxxed dissident right figure L0m3z the other week, while perennial anti-rationalist obsessive David Gerard bragged about giving background info. It's the sort of article that's much less interested in any real journalism and much more interested in creating a paper trail to establish the spookiness of everyone involved.

The EA forum has a couple of posts on the matter that I've been commenting in. It's an interesting environment, torn between social justice progressivism and rationalist instincts, but I usually get a more-or-less fair hearing over there. The posts in question:

Anyway, the most serious implication is a potential closing of Lighthaven, which would be a major blow for the Bay Area rationalists and for adjacent spheres, since it really is an incredible venue. That would happen with or without the article, though, and depends on a lot of funding questions. Manifest itself is unlikely to be moved by the article—the organizers and attendees know what they want, and the Guardian's irritation is only so much noise. Time will tell, though.

Razib Khan is a journalist who got kicked out of the NYT because he wrote for some "paleoconservative" magazine. This matters only if you think that failing the NYT ideological purity test is some kind of fatal character flaw.

He's not a journalist, never went to journalism school, never (except for the 4 hours when it looked like he'd write columns for NYT) worked for a newspaper- he studied genetics, worked in population genomics and then something to do with the cat genome.

He's been writing a lot but I'm not sure if he's quit his day job to concentrate fully on writing. In any case, given the reputation journalists have, and that he has a substack with a number of excellent essays it's unfair to describe him as 'journalist'. Writer, maybe.

Anyway: in particular, 'The Wolf at History's Door" is a must-read essay for anyone unfamiliar with early human history or very late prehistory.

He's not a journalist, never went to journalism school, never (except for the 4 hours when it looked like he'd write columns for NYT) worked for a newspaper

I hate living in a world where these two things are qualifiers for being a 'journalist'. Journalism is something you do and journalists are the people who do it, no more, no less.

Don't we all hate living in the world where 'Terrorists Won' ?

Reading Rufo's book at the moment. I was aware of most of details, but when you outline the case that yes, practically every major government, or educational institution in the US has been taken over by a memeplex hardly distinguishable from the post FAFO Weathermen, it is unsettling.

Sure just ~10% of population believes that shit, but that's till more than enough to hold together the bioleninist coalition and keep pushing to abolish 'the system'.

This kind of professionalization is older than the New Left, although they're certainly beneficiaries of it.

Yeah, the New Left is ultimately a creation of people who wanted to tear down the managerial regime created by FDR and his creatures.

It started as that, but the New Left was captured by the managerial state in the process of capturing it and now they're its biggest beneficiaries. That whole thing about the hippies cutting their hair and getting jobs and becoming yuppies.

OK, I changed it to "scientist and writer". FWIW, I did not intent any insult with the use of the word journalist.

That was a great read! Thank you for the recommendation.

This essay is closer to history than whatever KulakRevolt usually comes up with, but they are still in the same league.

Kulak plays fast and loose with facts and gets very creative, as far as I can tell Razib doesn't.

Razib has published reputable papers on paleogenetics and Indo-European history, and I have yet to hear from anybody who knows the field and thinks he's talking nonsense (I mean w/r/t paleogenetics, obviously there will always be HBD haters). Burden of proof is yours in this case, I should think.

The biggest thing that annoyed me was the conflation of the switch to pastoralism of the Pit Grave culture, the invention of the chariot (which happened much later) and the switch to horseback riding (which happened even later). The other thing was the idea that it was pastoralism that enabled the "restless young men" to form warbands, even though we see this in all kinds of societies.

they are still in the same league.

Is that criticism or praise? I've seen some strong opinions on both sides about Kulak.

Why not both?

Because I care about historical accuracy when I read essays about history. I think someone's ability to judge the historical accuracy of "early human history or very late prehistory" is orthogonal to whether they view KulakRevolt in a positive or negative light. If someone does have a good knowledge of that part of human history and is in a position to judge the accuracy of the linked article, I want to hear from them! I want to know how to adjust my Baysean weights on this topic. "One person provides a link to an interesting and convincing article" has less weight than "One person provides a link to an interesting and convincing article" && "Another person says this is a good description of the history", and maybe I'd even adjust in the other direction if I saw ""One person provides a link to an interesting and convincing article" && "Another person says this is a deceptive retelling of history and provides examples". What we got is "One person provides a link to an interesting and convincing article" && "Another person implies they know about this topic and makes an ambiguous post about their view", and that's not a valuable contribution.

I'm not sure what to make of this hostility towards the article. What about it is wrong, exactly?

By normie ideological purity standards sympathy for incels from a man is misogynistic. Pro-HBD guys like Razib Khan and Stephen Hsu are racist. By objective measure standards, wanting smart and beautiful people to have more children is eugenic.

Reaching verboten conclusions through 'rational means' on topics long decided by the 'ruling class' doesn't protect you from the consequences. Even if you always imagined yourself an enlightened rationalist far above the boorish outcasts that, unlike you, must have reached these very same racist conclusions through some dark age anti-rationalist sorcery.

Though I doubt this will lead anywhere, as this sort of reporting is usually just about petty politics and interpersonal relations between the uncool kids from school, I wouldn't mind it actually doing some damage. Why should this group of smarts be exempt from the contempt of mainstream society? They have certainly proven themselves to being no better morally.

It seems like some humbling is in order. After all, the very same 'rationalist sphere' in question has proven time and time again that they stand firmly behind the principles of 'racism bad', 'misogyny bad' and all the rest. By what mechanism do they propose to defend themselves after their better part falls firmly on the wrong side of these things? Like, does it need spelling out to these big brained luminaries of ours? You can't call an entire race of people stupid just because you understand statistics and studied psychology. It doesn't matter how nuanced and detailed your blogpost is. Some wordcel is just going to copy paste your conclusion and now you're no better than the evil racists you spent 15 paragraphs trying to distance yourself from. And you know what? The wordcel is right! You did reach the same conclusion, after all.

I too would love it if rationalists were forced to bite the bullet and say something like "yes, racism (in some senses) is rational". However, I'd say that most of them are simply deliberately silent on these issues because they know that dissenting would wipe out their credibility and force them to become a full-time advocate on an issue that they don't particularly care about. For example, James Damore.

I too find it incredibly sad when the ones that do write about sensitive topics toe the line dishonestly, e.g. like Nick Bostrom did on race in his apology, and Eliezer and Scott Siskind on trans issues. I commend Zack M. Davis for calling them out on this and being brutally honest, but he has a horse in this race.

Also, what did Razib Khan and Stephen Hsu do wrong? They put their jobs on the line to talk about the truth. They didn't go so far as to explicitly say that racism (in some senses) is fine, but they pull their punches less than anyone who hasn't been banned entirely.

I too find it incredibly sad when the ones that do write about sensitive topics toe the line dishonestly, e.g. like Nick Bostrom did on race in his apology, and Eliezer and Scott Siskind on trans issues.

Why do you believe that Scott is dishonestly toeing the line on trans issues rather than genuinely believing whatever he wrote?

I was thinking of https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-made-for-man-not-man-for-the-categories/

but that's fair, it might just have been motivated cognition. But given that Scott has independently reached unpopular contrarian opinions on his own so many times, and doesn't address the downsides of gender-defined-by-fiat head on, it's almost the same phenomenon as dishonesty imo.

I think it's definitely motivated cognition in the case of Scott. (But toeing the line for Bostrom.)

Why do you believe that Scott is dishonestly toeing the line on trans issues rather than genuinely believing whatever he wrote?

Zack Davis's posts on LW lay out the case for that in exhaustive detail, though he covers Yudkowsky more than Scott.

The gist of it is that Zack claims that identifying the word "male" with having the Y chromosome is carving reality at its joints, while saying that whoever decides they identify as male should be called male is a strictly worse way of describing reality.

The post implies that EY and Scott kinda agree with the biological definition being more robust in principle, but endorse the trans-favoring position out of political considerations.

I am mostly on board with Scott and EY here, even though I agree with Zack that in theory the chromosome-based definition is more robust. Being willing to die on definitional hills seems stupid. Once, "Sir" referred exclusively to English noblemen. From that, I could make the argument that the service industry should not refer to male (whatever's definition) customers as Sir unless they are indeed OBE or whatever.

But this is would be extremely stupid. Language evolves. Definitional battles are not worth it. What the Sequences would recommend doing would just be to taboo the words "male" and "female" to dissolve the conflict. Instead, we just swim with the tide.

Contrary to common belief, most interactions of humans in our society are not resulting in common offspring. The utility of tagging humans by whom they could breed with is basically zero (and in any case we would also want to encode fertility information if we were serious about that). Social genders are simply a weird leftover remnant, just like "Sir". We can adapt such words whatever we want them to mean.

Unlike blankly denying the possibility of any HBD because it would be to ugly to be true, calling a trans-man a man has no significant real life or epistemic costs. It would be different if we insisted that the cis-/trans-prefix and talking about sex chromosomes is verboten, and society would advise a trans-man, and cis-woman couple to just try to following a cycle calendar or specific sex positions if they have trouble conceiving a child.

The woke definition has big upsides for trans people for little costs, so I would prefer it even if I was language czar and could decide what "male" means. The ratsphere pushing back against that would be as ludicrous as if the New Atheists had decided that their No 1 priority was getting rid of "OMG" in chats.

It would be different if we insisted that the cis-/trans-prefix and talking about sex chromosomes is verboten

The cis-/trans- prefix is already on the spectrum of verboten. Behold, the parts of woke subculture that insist on spelling transwoman as two words. This is to emphasize the woman-ness of transwomen and de-emphasizes the transness as a mere modifier, like brunette.

Similarly, if you hang around progressives and always refer to cis women as just "women" and always refer to trans women as "trans women" I am pretty sure you'd get a talking to, eventually. I hope nobody is silly enough to say, "Well that's just a couple crazy people on reddit." I know because my real-life woke friends don't actually mention that someone is trans unless it's to mention how fearful they are for their safety somewhere as a victim.

That you suggest to taboo the word "male" (not "man!") shows just how far down the slippery slope these language games have moved us this past decade. At first, progressives merely claimed the word "man," and left "male" around for us to talk about chromosomes. Sure enough in the current year, progressives act like man and male are synonyms again!

I predict that the ever-more-cumbersome phrases we retreat to, like "biological sex," will also get phased out. Make no mistake, the purpose of putting trans and cis into the same mental bucket is to push normative behaviors onto people. Someone saying "no, no I only date people with a biological sex of female, you see..." is told, "that's not a sexual orientation, that's just bigotry."

What the sequences actually say about defining a word any way you like is that it is a common misconception

Someone saying "no, no I only date people with a biological sex of female, you see..." is told, "that's not a sexual orientation, that's just bigotry."

I am kind of with Scott on this one. Love is the one area where one can discriminate. People are attracted to what they are attracted, which includes presenting gender, what kind of interface the other person has between their legs, skin color, body type, hair color, relative height, dialects, high nobility, potential for offspring, appearance, socioeconomic status, criminal record and anything else under the sun.

And for what it is worth, I don't think that this "either date transgender or be called a bigot" will fly even in the LGBTQWhatever community. If some hairy dude goes into a lesbian bar, declares that he identifies as a woman and challenges some lesbian to take him home or be a bigot, then the queers will not be on the side of the dude.

Have you seen what's happened to lesbians lately? They have absolutely been attacked for "don't ask women to suck your dick at a lesbian bar" policies! The thing you're suggesting would never happen already happened 5 or 6 years ago, and with the full support of the lgbtqxyz++ media!

More comments

Language evolves. Definitional battles are not worth it.

The woke definition has big upsides for trans people for little costs

It sounds like you think this definitional battle is, in fact, worth it?

I'm encouraged that you acknowledged that there are costs - can you elaborate? I think Zac would claim that one serious downstream cost is autogynophiles being encouraged to castrate themselves. To me that is the main problem - confused and unhappy people being encouraged to mess up their bodies unrecoverably. I think that frank acknowledgement of the senses in which, due to the limitations of medical technology, trans people aren't actually their desired gender, would lessen this problem. So I do think that this is a definitional battle worth fighting (as do pro-trans advocates).

Once, "Sir" referred exclusively to English noblemen.

Trans people want to be called by their assumed sex because they're well aware that the word for that sex already has a preexisting meaning, and they want to be treated as though that preexisting meaning applies to themselves. Claiming that words can mean anything you want is disingenuous because if the words really did mean anything you wanted, trans people would no longer want to use them. And Zack already covered all of this.

The "sir" analogy doesn't work because people who want to be called "sir" don't do so because they want to be treated like English noblemen. The word did once refer to English noblemen, but people today are not using the word because they want to get in on the English nobleman business.

What the Sequences would recommend doing would just be to taboo the words "male" and "female" to dissolve the conflict.

Zack's extensive posts include direct references to the Sequences recommending otherwise.

The ratsphere pushing back against that would be as ludicrous as ...

You are conflating "not pushing back" with "actively promoting".

Reaching verboten conclusions through 'rational means' on topics long decided by the 'ruling class' doesn't protect you from the consequences.

This is... true in a black-pilled way, but the way you've stated it sounds like you're defending the ruling class's morals as correct. The whole point is that the rationalists are starting from reasonable moral principles and following logical reasoning using the available evidence and reaching different conclusions than the ruling class. The ruling class's morals either don't incorporate the available evidence (i.e. are unscientific), don't follow from logical reasoning (i.e. are inconsistent), or start from different principles. All of these apply to various extents. I think the most parsimonious explanation is that the ruling class uses morals as tools, and chooses the set of morals that get them what they want. It's reasonable to criticize the ruling class on these grounds, and to think it unjust that people are punished for advocating for a less selfish set of morals.

The ruling class's morals either don't incorporate the available evidence (i.e. are unscientific), don't follow from logical reasoning (i.e. are inconsistent), or start from different principles.

So what? They're still the ruling class despite this, which means they get to make the rules, not the rationalists. Having "reasonable moral principles and following logical reasoning using the available evidence" on your side matters little compared to having power on your side.

I think the most parsimonious explanation is that the ruling class uses morals as tools, and chooses the set of morals that get them what they want.

Yes, and so what? The lords are the lords — and the peasants are the peasants — all the same.

It's reasonable to criticize the ruling class on these grounds

Sure, but don't expect to escape the consequences of criticizing those who rule you, valid criticism or not. In the real world, the kid pointing out the emperor is naked doesn't get the crowd all agreeing with him, he gets executed (probably along with his parents) for lèse-majesté and treason, and everyone else doubles down on praising the beauty and refinement of His Majesty's raiment.

and to think it unjust that people are punished for advocating for a less selfish set of morals.

You can think it unjust all you want, but it's what the powerful think is "just" that matters.

You can't call an entire race of people stupid just because you understand statistics and studied psychology.

Did either Khan or Hsu make a statement to that effect? Note that this is different from stating that there is a racial IQ difference but hedging for individual differences.

Reaching verboten conclusions through 'rational means' on topics long decided by the 'ruling class' doesn't protect you from the consequences.

I would argue that the process through which conclusions are reached generally matters.

If policeman A looks at a suspect, sees that he is white, well-dressed and looks innocent, and policeman B talks to the suspect and verifies that his alibi checks out, they may both conclude that their suspect is innocent, but the path which they took would matter to me.

I would consider writing a long, carefully reasoned article to be equivalent to our rule "Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be."

If Darwin had just drunkenly jelled "Have you seen that hairy little man? I bet his ancestors were monkeys!" instead carefully curating his evidence for years before publishing The Origin of Species, the world would rightfully have judged him differently.

If we censure utterances like "all cunts are stupid", does this mean we should also proactively bar any research into any effect of sex hormones on intelligence? Should we try ethicists discussing the trolley problem for incitement to homicide?

There is a brand of utilitarianism called two-level utilitarianism. The idea is that you mostly follow well established heuristic rules for moral decisions -- perhaps even in system one. If a kid runs in front of your car, you don't calculate the odds of them being the next Hitler given the neighborhood you are in, you just hit the brakes. But under certain circumstances (like when speaking to a murderer asking you if you have seen his prospective victims) the usually good heuristic rules (like "don't lie") might cede to a more situational consequentialist analysis.

Likewise, I would propose a two-level handling system of utterances of opinions adjacent to verboten topics. Most utterances are low effort shitposts / tweets which can safely be dismissed out of hand. If someone posts "teh gayz should kill themselfs!!!1" it is valid to conclude that the poster is not contributing a method to fight demographic changes but just a bigot asshole.

Of course, every ugly sentiment can be padded with motivated reasoning and inflated into a scholarly-sounding article "voluntary suicide of non-reproducing individuals as a collective means of affect population dynamics" or whatever. There is probably someone out on the internet arguing lengthy that Nazi race "science" was 100% correct.

This is a pill I am willing to swallow as the alternative is to declare whole areas of research as verboten. Some Nazi rambling for tens of pages on skull forms or whatever will likely be memetically much less successful than someone who posts racist meme images. And in the odd case where the pre-decided societal consensus is actually factually false (it has happened once or twice in history!) we do not shoot the messenger.

In the words of Scott himself:

The Church didn’t lift a finger against science. It just accidentally created a honeytrap that attracted and destroyed scientifically curious people. And any insistence on a false idea, no matter how harmless and well-intentioned, risks doing the same.

By normie ideological purity standards sympathy for incels from a man is misogynistic. Pro-HBD guys like Razib Khan and Stephen Hsu are racist. By objective measure standards, wanting smart and beautiful people to have more children is eugenic.

I agree strongly. There is a set of views which society generally considers to be cancellable (in the sense that the currently ruling elite does, as does a supermajority of people who are smart enough to have well-formed views on the issue). Steve Hsu, Razib Khan, Robin Hanson and even Scott Siskind all in fact hold some of these views. So "cancel the rationalists" is, by the rules the Grauniad and NYT are playing by, good journalism. The partisan-flipped version of "don't cancel the rationalists" is "It is okay for communists to act in Hollywood", not "The actors on Joe McCarthy's list are not in fact communists".

I am a pro-free-speech liberal, so both "racists should not be cancelled" and "it is okay for communists to act in Hollywood" are bullets I am willing to swallow. But most people aren't.

Of course, the Guardian gleefully doxxes Scott again

Scott is no longer trying to conceal his real name, so you can't doxx him by publishing it any more. If doxxing means anything, it means either

  • Publishing (or signal-boosting obscure but publically-available) contact information in a way which makes it likely your more deranged followers will harass someone.
  • Publicly linking an online pseudonym to a real-world identity which the pseudonymous poster wishes to conceal.

Publicly linking an online pseudonym to a real-world identity which the pseudonymous poster wishes to conceal.

Okay, I may have stretched the word doxxed a bit, but looking on the about page of ACX, it seems to me that Scott Alexander does not prefer for his writing activities to be linked to his last name. Furthermore, that is the name under which he is known, adding his last name will not provide important context for the readers.

Insisting on stating his last name seems at least impolite. Given his history with journalists, I would roughly compare it to deliberately deadnaming a trans person.

If the Guardian had a policy to consistently write using the full civil names of people, as in "after finishing my latest hit piece, I danced to Mrs. Ciccone's music, watched the meeting of Mr. Bergoglio and Mr. Thondup on TV and finally fell asleep reading the biography of my idol Mr. Dzhugashvili" (or something), then a case could be made that they might also want to refer to Our Rightful Caliph by his civil name. But most of the time, they are fine referring to people by their common handle.

Human BioDiversity. It's the idea that different human populations have evolved different traits beyond different skin colors.

At its least controversial, it's about things like Tibetans' adaptation to high altitudes, or East Africans' talent for long distance running.

But what makes it a lighting rod is the radical notion that evolution does not stop at the neck.

The brain is an organ just like lungs, so it is perfectly possible for different races to also have different average intelligence, conscientiousness, aggressiveness, impulsivity, creativity, and so on.

Proponents of HBD argue that the evidence of e.g. IQ tests demonstrates that this is the case, and that HBD better explains persistent SES gaps than alternative explanations like racism or upbringing.

See "Achievement Gap Politics" and "Book Review: Charles Murray's Human Diversity: The Biology of Gender, Race, and Class" for more information.

Human Bio-Diversity. Academically, it's the belief that human races vary in physical, mental, and behavioral traits and capacities (in other words, that "race" is in fact a thing and has some explanatory power for... the world we live in). Critics say it's a euphemism for "scientific racism." While this is somewhat uncharitable, most people who use the phrase do mostly seem to want to talk about why black people suck.

While this is somewhat uncharitable, most people who use the phrase do mostly seem to want to talk about why black people suck.

While this is not infrequently the case, I haven't seen that at all in the context that this was brought up: that is, Razib Khan. While I'm pretty sure he does affirm that there are different racial averages in IQ (among other things), he's clearly more interested in population and genetic histories more generally than aggregates over current racial groups. His blog's fun; I've enjoyed learning things about the current state of knowledge on prehistory and ancient DNA.

I read Razib Khan too. I agree his agenda is not primarily proving the inferiority of black people. I'm not sure he explicitly uses the term "HBD."

You're responding to a filtered comment.

Pro-HBD guys like Razib Khan and Stephen Hsu are racist.

This is playing definitional games. "Believes there are measurable differences between races" is a fairly new definition. It will almost always, and probably on purpose, be conflated with "believes blacks should be treated detrimentally purely on account of being black."

Even the most ardent of public racists don't even pretend to entertain the notion that people should be treated badly because they are of this or that race.

"Believes there are measurable differences between races" is a fairly new definition.

It's not.

The only game being played here is pretending that there is some relevant distinction to be made between the views of 'rationalist HBDers' and George Lincoln Rockwell on racial differences other than confidence and honesty.

They are not only playing those games. They keep winning them and getting away with it.

By what mechanism do they propose to defend themselves after their better part falls firmly on the wrong side of these things?

Was this a deliberate echo of Sir Thomas More in A Man For All Seasons?

By normie ideological purity standards sympathy for incels from a man is misogynistic. Pro-HBD guys like Razib Khan and Stephen Hsu are racist. By objective measure standards, wanting smart and beautiful people to have more children is eugenic. [...]

It seems like some humbling is in order. After all, the very same 'rationalist sphere' in question has proven time and time again that they stand firmly behind the principles of 'racism bad', 'misogyny bad' and all the rest.

Does the rationalist sphere and ideologically pure normies share the same definition of racism and misogyny though?

wanting smart and beautiful people to have more children is eugenic

Using truly the broadest possible interpretation of a dictionary definition, sure. But we all damned well know that isn't what is being alleged when someone is called a eugenicist.

we all damned well know that isn't what is being alleged when someone is called a eugenicist.

Um, yes, in this case it very much is - Anomaly used the word himself in the paper Guardian is doing the Body Snatchers scream at, to refer (correctly) to what he was advocating.

More generally, "eugenics" is and has always been a very broad term; the eugenicists of the 19th and 20th centuries would absolutely consider these kinds of schemes eugenic. I agree that there's a lot of rhetorical trickery enabled by the term's breadth, but that breadth is authentic.

If you are out in public airing your view that it's an inherently good thing that smart and beautiful people are having more children then you are a eugenicist. The implications of what you have to think and believe to say such a thing are obvious.

Almost everyone thinks this though. It's just one of those things that people generally agree on but people get uncomfortable if you're too explicit about it.

Let's be precise.

The argument that high-IQ women should either get married and start having children as a first step after graduating from college, or avoid going to college altogether and focus on becoming mothers, i.e. that society should incentivize them to do so, I think it's fair to say, counts as borderline dissident among middle-class college-educated normies today. It doesn't count as 100% badthink maybe, but it's close. Ultimately this is the essence of positive eugenics.

Negative eugenics, i.e. the argument that the fertility rate of low-IQ people should be curbed in various ways, on the other hand, is definitely outside the Overton window. Yes, you can argue that liberal policies pertaining to abortion and birth control actually have this effect in the real world, but I doubt they actually reduce the relative fertility rate of low-IQ people as compared to that of high-IQ ones, so there's that.

Also, it's fair to say that, to the extent eugenics is dismissed as deplorable junk science by the Guardian-reading demographic, it is done so because it's interpreted as an outgrowth of White supremacism.

And yet in 2006 Idiocracy presented the ‘stupid people having too many children is destroying this country’ school of liberalism pretty openly. It’s clear that the taboo isn’t really that, it’s more as you say in the last paragraph.

Indeed, but that was a different era, before the Great Awokening. It's also true that feminist websites posted recommendations to women for avoiding getting raped back then. It's no coincidence that liberal critiques of the movie have also appeared.

How many people are actually on board with the Great Awokening though? I don't think it's that popular.

More comments

White middle class people having one kid is morally irresponsible in the age of climate change and economic precarity, brown people having kids in a warzone is proof that we need to open our borders and wallets to alleviate human suffering. Liberals get squeamish at any suggestion that abortion be extended specifically to populations with current, let alone future, suboptimal life outcomes. Any suggestion that abortions be subsidized for poor (brown) people or for mentally ill is met with cries of racism, and that instead their choice to carry a crack baby to term should be supported now and forever with more social welfare.

Ultimately it is pretty easy to drill down the opposition to (current thing) purely on the grounds of 'the people I hate love it'. To be fair, the right is super guilty of this too. White supremacists (larpers or not) get tied in knots when informed that abortion rights means you get less black or brown criminals ala Piketty, and there are exceedingly few white babies being aborted these days. White girls use contraceptives and aren't afraid to request condoms, black girls use their (shitty) math skills.

It's perfectly consistent to think that people should have fewer children but that they should be looked after once they're born.

My only nitpick is that you seem to be assuming that there's an overlap between racists and social conservatives. I doubt that is, or even was the case.

Yes there is. Old not-terribly online people.

More comments

Actual population control efforts in the real world are mostly targeted at third worlders.

There was plenty of drunken campfire agonizing about the morality of neocolonial imposition of western values on local populations back in the mid 2000s already, and the rhetoric has gotten worse since. Between theological opposition to population control and liberal white guilt, population control is very much not in vogue any more. My own thoughts are that externally encouraged population control schemes have never succeeded but that goes too deep into anecdata.

What I don't think is borderline dissident is the idea that smart beautiful women should have at least two kids starting in their mid to late 20s after getting their careers established and finding the right husband or that stupid ugly people should have at most two kids and also wait until they're financially and romantically stable. That is also a positive eugenics position albeit one less extreme and rarely stated explicitly. But I would guess most people agree with it.

There are plenty of people who think that beautiful, intelligent people having fewer kids is evidence that they’re ‘responsible’.

And they probably think it's even more responsible for stupid ugly people to have fewer kids.

Well yes, lots of those people will go on to say inmates shouldn’t be released without being sterilized first.

Most people would not think this or perceive the darkly hinted implications. This maximally benign idly wishing beautiful smart would have kids is not the common use understanding of eugenics and the implications are more in your imagination than other people's.

There's a small fringe of progressives actively looking for wrongthink. They denounce all sorts of mainstream views as fascism, racist dogwhistling, etc. This appears to be their hobby. Getting enraged at "bad" people feels good to them. They are a very small portion of the population. I suppose these people would sniff out the wrongthink in this and declare it to be just like the Nazis and [bad thing]-adjacent and wave around a non-common-use understanding of 'eugenics' as one of many disingenuous rhetorical smears.

Whether most people are dumb enough to not understand something or not is irrelevant. The journalist is obviously smart enough to. Doing the maximally benign wrongthink is still wrongthink. The Stasi doesn't owe you any favors to interpret you flirtations with eugenics as anything other than an ultimately hostile act.

Whether they are actively looking for wrongthink or not is irrelevant. You can't do positive flirtations about verboten subjects. Even if you are an old fuddy duddy and think your tweets are benign.

I don't strictly disagree with you. I just don't understand why you are arguing this. Neither one of us makes the rules.

Here is a Twitter thread listing some of the factual inaccuracies. https://x.com/ohabryka/status/1802563541633024280

Pro-HBD guys like Razib Khan and Stephen Hsu are racist.

Hsu claims no knowledge of cognitive differences between races caused by genetics. Has he said something different elsewhere? https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2012/10/my-controversial-views.html

https://x.com/ohabryka/status/1802563541633024280

Now here is actually something I can disagree with Oliver about: the choice of medium.

I am not even asking that people use fully open standards implemented by free software personally blessed by Richard Stallman running on open-design hardware they personally control, but twitter does not even allow the reading of a thread without being logged in (so that people don't train their LLMs with all that sweet high quality content without cutting Musk in). Nitter was the useful way to read it, but that is gone. x.com feels like it eats as much RAM as an 1000 reply OT on ACX before substack got their shit together (kinda) for showing me a measly four lines text and a single reply.

To use Hsu's own words in a different context:

As a physicist I am used to a high level of scientific rigor. Statistical certainty of 99.9% is not sufficient, in our field, to claim a discovery (e.g., a new elementary particle). Thus, the correct answer to many questions (e.g., do electrons have substructure? Are black people innately stupid? Did the holocaust happen?) is: I do not know.

Sorry, Hsu, but claiming a neutral position on certain topics doesn't cut it.

Maybe as I grow older I also grow more stupid but I feel like a lot of people really needed that article by Eric Turkheimer on why race science is objectionable. Claiming that your interest is purely scientific or whatever isn't good enough. Because the wrong discoveries can do a lot of damage. You need to meet the moral/ideological/philosophical underpinnings of the progressive worldview head on. Otherwise you have no relevant objection to them crushing you when you go too far astray.

feel like a lot of people really needed that article by Eric Turkheimer on why race science is objectionable.

This article sucks. As a congenital leftist who doesn't like racism per se but has been convinced as to the validity of HBD, I was expecting something worth reading rather than "These beliefs are offensive because... you know, they just are, there's no point examining this further." This article isn't an attempt at explaining why race science is objectionable, it just assumes that it is and then proceeds from there. Yes, I know that answering these questions might make some people feel bad. That's not actually a reason to continually lie about it and engage in efforts at restorative justice that are doomed to fail because they're based on motivated thinking rather than a look at the evidence. If my car is refusing to start, should I simply ignore the fuel gauge showing empty because I don't want to believe that I'm out of gas and spend tons of money taking my car to mechanics to figure out the problem?

If the question of African IQ is a matter of empirical science, exactly what piece of evidence are we waiting for? What would finally convince the racialists that they are wrong?

There's actually a lot of evidence that could settle this! The problem isn't that no scientific evidence proving Tabula Rasa is accepted, but that every single time you actually do the experiment you end up with evidence proving the opposite or a paper that doesn't replicate. What even is the point of raising this as a hypothetical when in other places in the article he flat out admits that his own side should ignore evidence in favour of ethical concerns? He's also destroyed his own ability to prevent that evidence - why exactly should I trust an article written by someone who says that on this particular topic it is a moral imperative to lie if the facts don't match up to his ideology?

Watson is a legitimately respected and famous person on the basis of his great scientific accomplishments and the awards they have won for him, but those accomplishments don’t have very much to do with racial differences in intelligence, except that both domains involve the concept of “genes” in a very general way. It is safe to say that he does not know anything more about the subject than anyone writing here.

No, it isn't fucking safe to say that! Watson would absolutely know more about genetics and evolution than Eric Turkheimer, or me, or most of the people on the motte. Hell, I will flat out say that I know more about genetics than Turkheimer despite his years of study, because in this article he doesn't even seem to know how genes work (see his section on how the legacy of slavery is why African americans do worse on IQ tests). Of course, I think there's a decent chance that he is aware and is simply lying about it - after all, the position he takes is that this is a matter of morality rather than evidence, so it doesn't matter what the facts say.

Maybe as I grow older I also grow more stupid but I feel like a lot of people really needed that article by Eric Turkheimer on why race science is objectionable.

I think a fair summary of this article is “it’s offensive”, which is not an argument I find compelling. Am I missing something here?

I'm not posting it to convince people of Turkheimers viewpoint, I'm posting it to demonstrate at what level the debate is being had. It doesn't matter what the science says. Race science is ugly and offensive. This is a fact and anyone who disagrees can be invited to explain the hereditarian viewpoint to a kind and caring black person without feeling gross.

Or to put it another way: We object to it on the same grounds we object to excavations of alleged mass graves from Nazi death camps: The holocaust happened, there's no reason to desecrate graves of its victims. The end!

If you want to argue in favor of science and knowledge... Why here, why now? What drives ones interest towards race or the holocaust? There is no answer here. You're just a racist nazi.

If there's a genuine position that can meet progressive ontology head on I'm willing to hear it. So far the only competitors I've seen are racists or people who either willfully or ignorantly ignore the glaring issues that lie between blacks and whites.

If you want to argue in favor of science and knowledge... Why here, why now?

I don't know how many more times this can be repeated, I'm sure everyone with your position who posts here has had this explained but then you go on to ask these questions again so I will explain to you again. The reason it matters to many of us is because White people in America and the world broadly are being accused of a grievous crime of holding entire races of people down. Of perpetrating massive and distributed systems of racial discrimination. The proof is the outcomes from claimed to be meritocratic processes being unequal along racial lines. Everywhere that explicit racism can be found has been rooted out by ever more hysterical people who have gotten to the point of calling the idea of meritocracy itself to be racist.

This calls out for a search for an alternate explanation. And there are some pretty obvious places to check.

If not HBD and our attempts at rooting out explicit discrimination what's the progressive's actual endgame? Permanent and continuous transfers along racial lines with the agreed understanding that white people are just incapable of not discriminating against black people? You think that's a stable solution?

Surely "permanent" is an exaggeration.

I think there's a fundamental difference between the sides here in terms of intuitions about social processes.

Assuming no genetic racial variance in relevant traits, and assuming no other policy or social interventions of any kind, how long would you expect it to take from the day that there is zero race-based discrimination anywhere in the country, to the day when all racial wealth and achievement gaps have been completely eradicated?

My answer is 'probably around 300 to 500 years.'

I don't even really think that's the end of the problem most unstable. The gaps will continue to exist among people with the same background so we're really going to go ahead with the belief that in 100 years when progressive thought is no longer fought at all that we're just going to let the obviously discriminatory leaders continue to do their harm?

I don't disagree, but I'd argue that your position is not scientific/knowledge seeking. You want to protect white people. According to the progressive oppression stack white people rest pretty low. That's where your problem with the progressives begins.

If you're a supremacist you want to protect white people no matter what. If you're not, why protect white people when there are so many others in need? Surely whitey can wait. And if you want to challenge that aspect of progressive ontology you will be so far outside the Overton Window that they can easily just call you a racist nazi and move on. And I don't think they would be all that wrong in doing so, technically speaking. I mean, we did storm the beaches of Normandy for a reason, right? We depict those guys as heroic for a reason, right?

I don't disagree, but I'd argue that your position is not scientific/knowledge seeking. You want to protect white people.

What a trick this is! Ask why someone might be motivated to seek knowledge "why here, why now?" to imply racial hatred as motivation and then when some other motivation is reached for you say "See!? I knew no one could just value scientific knowledge!". From how you've constrained the options no path can lead to a genuine motivation.

If you're a supremacist you want to protect white people no matter what. If you're not, why protect white people when there are so many others in need? Surely whitey can wait. And if you want to challenge that aspect of progressive ontology you will be so far outside the Overton Window that they can easily just call you a racist nazi and move on. And I don't think they would be all that wrong in doing so, technically speaking. I mean, we did storm the beaches of Normandy for a reason, right? We depict those guys as heroic for a reason, right?

Being somewhat username blind it's not clear to me if you're merely trying to demonstrate how tightly hermetically sealed the progressive outlook is or if you find yourself caught in it. But in the interest of trying to unravel this nut either way. I will say I care about avoiding the pitfalls of impugning a people with the blood libel of unfalsifiable racism from the same parable the jews were famously put through and in a way that ought resonate deep in the western psyche. It is enough for me that it is cruel, unfair and a violation of our national aspiration to hold whites culpable for a crime they have not committed. But if I must appeal to the progressive stack, that loathsome concept, then I will say that it did not serve the nazis well to place the blame for all their troubles in the jews, nor did it serve Lysenko well to place the soviets on the other side of genuine scientific inquiry. History is replete with people and peoples who thought they could, this time, let resentment and catharsis take priority over truth and the hatred will not serve you. There is nothing to gain from this willful ignorance and much to lose.

This is a fact and anyone who disagrees can be invited to explain the hereditarian viewpoint to a kind and caring black person without feeling gross.

Is there bulletproof glass between us?

Ah, I see. In that case I agree that it demonstrates the discussion well.

I’m a bit confused by your last paragraph though. The obvious answer would be to judge individuals on their merit, no? That’s explicitly opposed to progressive race-based judgement, aligns well with classical liberalism and HBD views, and already has a wide acceptance society-wide.

It works up until you need to answer why their literacy rates are so low and why there are practically none of them in higher education.

You can't tell the black people the truth because that's ugly and no one has the stomach for it, so where do you go? The exact same way our modern western society has gone: Towards progressivism. Because progressive ontology actually has a beautiful answer: ordained equality and racism.

While I think there is an argument to be made with regard to the harmful effects of promulgating HBD/race science among the general public, I don't think the Turkheimer article makes a particularly good case for it. To extract the relevant points:

They are offensive precisely because they violate our intuition about the balance between innateness and self-determination of the moral and cultural qualities of human beings.

...

...it is a matter of ethical principle that individual and cultural accomplishment is not tied to the genes in the same way as the appearance of our hair.

The issue is that the intuitions and ethical principles he describes are not universal. One is perfectly capable of believing that the moral qualities and cultural accomplishments of human beings are tied to genes, and such a belief wouldn't prevent such a person from celebrating such accomplishments any more than it prevents me from appreciating the beauty of a flower simply because said beauty was genetically determined.

But I suppose I am simply restating your point about meeting the philosophical underpinnings of your opponent's worldview head on, with which I agree.

I don't understand what your point is and want to clarify that the video part of your quote is made up and not the kinds of questions he is referring to.

Are you accusing Hsu of having an interest in HBD? If so, based on what?

I don't understand what your point is and want to clarify that the video part of your quote is made up

I had hoped that it was obvious to everyone that the part in bold was added by me. Though that may be an error as I just assumed people would read the link given to Hsu's blog. People are obviously more quick to comment than that, sadly.

and not the kinds of questions he is referring to.

It's exactly the kind of question he is referring to. A different example of his, given in an interview were he was asked about his views and the characterization as being racist he says, paraphrased:

so I've been attacked because... I'm not willing to categorically rule something out, I'm suddenly a racist. Which I think is absurd, I think for many question like... Is there a god? You might admit is even a more important question and I'd say the jury is out and I don't think I should be labeled as a bad person for that.

The point I'm making is that being open to everything obviously isn't allowed. You can't be agnostic on sacred matters and Hsu knows this. In my view he's just trying to weasel his way out since he's too proud to outright lie like Turkheimer or that he knows how ridiculous die hard environmentalism is.

Are you accusing Hsu of having an interest in HBD? If so, based on what?

Just casually scrolling through his blog. He did a fun interview with Razib Khan where they go over some of their shared interests together, population genetics included... I mean, yeah the guy is not a culture warrior and I think he very adamantly doesn't want to become one. But depending on your definition of HBD the guy is very interested in differences between humans. Just not in a way that's incendiary to his career.

What reason is there to think he is unsure that the Holocaust happened?

Population genetics is not HBD. That is not what is getting him called racist.

You're not getting the point, which is that there are certain things you are not allowed to be uncertain about. Claiming that you're a physicist and that you hold to some uncertainty principles isn't an excuse for the true sacred cows. To exemplify this I took a quote from Hsu and applied it to the holocaust.

Population genetics is not HBD. That is not what is getting him called racist.

"Population genetics is a subfield of genetics that deals with genetic differences within and among populations"

As I already said, and wish you would have read: "I mean, yeah the guy is not a culture warrior and I think he very adamantly doesn't want to become one. But depending on your definition of HBD the guy is very interested in differences between humans. Just not in a way that's incendiary to his career."

You're playing definition games here. Hsu himself says that there are people calling him racist. He does research into intelligence and has no problem with things like IQ. He has interest in population genetics and doesn't rule out a hereditarian perspective. Long story short, he's on a lot of thin ice. He's basically everything an HBD person would be if they were trying to hold down a job at a university. Now, is he? I don't know or care. It's irrelevant to the fact that he is doing too many suspect things. Which is why he is a good target for our fine folks in urbanite journalism.

As an aside: I'd appreciate if you stated your intentions here. I don't care to write every point twice. I also don't care to meet your personal definition for words after I explicitly state that there's an obvious issue with definitions of words going on.

Who uses that definition of HBD? HBD refers to socially relevant differences. Population genetics is based on possibly inconsequential differences that are nearly universally accepted. HBD doesn't even refer to differences in skin colour which are totally uncontroversial. Even if you want to define HBD this way, how is that relevant? No one is calling him racist because he's interested in population genetics.

I get your point. I'm just criticizing other things you've said.

More comments

By normie ideological purity standards sympathy for incels from a man is misogynistic. Pro-HBD guys like Razib Khan and Stephen Hsu are racist.

Nah. Left wing hit-job-writing "journalists" aren't normies. If your standard is "what will ordinary people think" as opposed to "what will the Guardian think", the ideological purity standards are not that high. I know they claim to speak for all decent people, but they really don't.

Yeah, journalists aren't normies. No one said they were. That doesn't change the fact they set the standard for normies. Racism bad. Misogyny bad. Everyone except your racist uncle agrees.

You can't go and talk about race and IQ in public and come to any sort of hereditarian conclusion and not be eligible as a racist. Those are the rules.

You absolutely can though. To the normie mind, "racist" equals "doesn't like (group)". If you talk in a way that doesn't actually imply any dislike of a group, they won't grok you as racist, and won't pay any mind to people who accuse you of racism.

If you talk in a way that implies blacks are innately dumber than some other group you are not getting anywhere. Race and IQ stuff are beyond the pale if you are a hereditarian.

In what universe? I mean maybe in Berkeley, but the normies around me say shit that implies a black intelligence disadvantage all the time, they just don’t use the words ‘blacks are on average one standard deviation lower in IQ than whites’.

We must hang around different types of people.

I would say this is probably true, but normies don’t say things where you can see them like ‘they’re kind of clueless’ when someone’s getting irritated with a black? No complaining about ‘football names’ and ‘shaniqua’ and ‘what did they expect when they decided the government should be daddy’ or snarking about Juneteenth being so close to Father’s Day so everyone could have something to celebrate? No ‘well they’re racist too’? No discussion of how ‘Katrina kids’ dragged down the public schools and they should be more like the Vietnamese or Mexicans?

More comments

The normies think what the journalists tell them to think.

They really don't. The journalists love to imagine that's the case, but it isn't.

If normies thought what the journalists told them to think, the Voice referendum would have passed with 80-90% of the vote.

Journalists have a huge influence on what people think, even if they don't follow journalists every single time. Elections are not won by every single voter doing what the journalist says; tilting the balance is enough to win the election.

In person, I've heard a lot of opinions from regular people with normal politics that you would typically only hear from the far-right online. What is considered allowable opinion online, much less the opinions that are typical of young journalists, are not at all typical of most people in the real world.

No they don't. Normies think whatever their friends do. That is, frequently, highly skeptical of the media.

I think "frequently" is understating the situation: "skeptical of the media" is now a supermajority, at an all time high, with 29% of last fall's Gallup poll reporting "not very much" trust in the mass media and 39% reporting "none at all".

Generalized distrust of media is insufficient if it does not result in skepticism of a given story. It observably did not do so for most people for COVID and BLM, which are the last two serious stress-tests of the thesis. It's really not so different from people having a super-low opinion of congress, yet reliably voting for their incumbent congressperson.

Isnt the whole alleged "crisis of consensus", "political polarization", and "rampant anti-intellectualism" that typifies modern America indicative of the opposite?

There may have been a time many years ago where, if Walter Cronkite said it, people would assume it was true. But that time is long gone.

Epstien didn't kill himself.

There may have been a time many years ago where, if Walter Cronkite said it, people would assume it was true. But that time is long gone.

The pandemic proved otherwise.

Epstien didn't kill himself.

That just marks you as a non-normie. The normies have forgotten who Epstein was, and if you remind them, of course he killed himself, what are you, some sort of paranoid?

I think that you are woefully out of touch with what "normal people" believe.

If any thing media viewership and trust were already trending downward before 2020 and the pandemic coupled with the George Floyd "summer of love" killed what was left.

We live in a world where (if a quick Bing.com search is to be believed) Joe Rogan's podcast averages more listeners per week than all of CNN.

The George Floyd "summer of love" had middle-aged white people setting up Black Lives Matter rallies in suburban towns. While wearing masks, as they were told by CNN et al. The pandemic and Floyd should have caused a huge drop in media trust; what it did is demonstrated that the power of the media was far greater than most thought.

Again, I think that you are woefully out of touch with what "normal people" believe.

That list of people seems pretty based. I must admit, I don't understand the Guardians argument here. Does Lightcone have to pay back the money because they invited bad people or because the money was sent fraudulently? If it's the former: lol, if it's the latter: Why even talk about the bad people for 90% of the article? I mean, imagine they were a pro social justice foundation or whatever. Would this mean that they shouldn't pay back the fraud money?

Robin Hanson is apparently misogynistic. From the linked article, I would say it is either being tone-deaf or intentionally courting controversy. He even has sympathy for incels. The nerve of that man!

Huh? His name is mentioned once, in passing. There's no mention of either incels or feminists in the entire article.

I meant "from the article linked by the Guardian article".

The Guardian:

misogynistic George Mason University economist Robin Hanson

(Their link.)

either the donations can be kept or not.

Yeah I was under the impression in cases like this any donations or gifts the fraudster has given are clawed back regardless of context.

Robin Hanson is apparently misogynistic

Hanson once wrote that a woman cheating on a man is as bad as (or worse than) a man raping a woman provided he does it in a "gentle, silent" way. No idea if he still endorses that opinion but it's a majorly sus thing to say.

The whole problem is that Hanson's arguments are usually based on a number of different premises that can't be easily reduced to a single sentence, so by rephrasing his arguments in such a simplified way it pretty much ceases to describe what he actually believes or claims to believe.

And him being autistic as hell means that a 'gentle, silent' rape that inflicts no physical injuries can certainly be compared to other acts in terms of psychological impact and harm, because he doesn't place any special sacredness on the word 'rape' that renders the act inherently more evil than any other act which humans find traumatic and distressing.

by rephrasing his arguments in such a simplified way it pretty much ceases to describe what he actually believes or claims to believe.

This grants him too much charity. To put it another way, there's a motte and bailey. The "simplified rephrasing" is the motte. Like when he arged that medicine doesn't work, where the motte was that, well, medicine didn't work, and the bailey was a bunch of much less serious criticisms of medicine that are much easier to defend than "medicine doesn't work".

Hanson is almost the definition of a guy who DOES NOT Motte and Bailey his arguments.

I might believe he artfully phrases some of his arguments to avoid explicitly admitting his belief or disbelief in a certain point. I've never seen him fall back from any 'outlandish' arguments he's made to a simpler or stronger one while pretending he's not backing down at all.

Where did he argue for the bailey, and what is it?

Hanson once wrote that a woman cheating on a man is as bad as (or worse than) a man raping a woman provided he does it in a "gentle, silent" way.

No he said being cuckolded as in literally raising someone else's child as your own would be worse. That's worlds apart from an affair that leads to no children.

Did you read the linked post? He's making the claim that it's a bigger harm in terms of genetic interests.

Can you expand on what you mean by "majorly sus"? Is the idea that the fact that he'd raise a hypothesis that could also be used to argue for taking crimes against women relatively less seriously, that's evidence that he's misoginystic?

I suppose that's a reasonable inference, but I also think he does raise a good question and point to a genuine mystery. More generally, if academics can't raise wrong-sounding ideas without being cancelled, then there's not much point in having them or listening to them. So I guess I implore you to ask if there is any venue or method by which someone could discuss disgusting-sounding ideas that would lead you to actually try evaluating their claims.

Am I the only one who's noticed surprisingly high overlap between describing behavior as "sus" and vague gestures that someone is problematic? Like that entire cluster of person converged on using the same word? That kind of dark hinting has been a primary part of the progressive playbook for awhile, but what's with the word sus?

I first time I heard "sus" was when Among Us went viral. I'm not very good at these social deception games, so of course I was never a fan of playing them. I'm curious, are other average motte spergs similar?

Enjoying those games and applying that lense to everyday social/political interactions seems like the extreme right-tailed distribution version of the oversocialised, status-obsessed sociopath

It's not a good inference because he explicitly states that he isn't trying to argue that rape is less bad.

I agree, but I was trying to be maximally charitable in case all that Folamh3 knew about Hanson was that he was arguing against rape being worse than something else. That's why I was asking if he read the post.

It's not very charitable to Hanson though.

I'm not saying "Hanson said this, therefore he should be cancelled". I'm saying that it's reasonable to characterise that specific belief as misogynistic.

why is it misogynistic? Being cheated on is remarkably traumatic for men or women, as evidenced by the evident link to homicide/suicide. The "gentle" and "silent" modifiers are there to disambiguate theories of where the harm is coming from, not to claim that harm doesn't exist.

I don't see how that's reasonable. He didn't say anything to diminish the perceived severity of rape. He only made an argument about the severity of cuckoldry.

Okay, but the framing as "sus" makes it sound like a hidden, rare opinion. What do you think of his claims?

Hanson throws a lot of crazy ideas out there. I think to have a really high number of good ideas in absolute numbers, you've also got to have a lot of stinkers in absolute numbers, so I don't hold his worst ideas against him as long as he doesn't start constantly shouting about them

Hanson likes throwing out interesting ideas. I'd be shocked if he was actually okay with rape.

It's not misogynistic though.

Remember that the post-2020 US election Time article "The Secret History of the Shadow Campaign That Saved the 2020 Election"? Somewhere between a victory lap and credit-claiming at a time it was generally thought Trump's political prospects were dead, it was a rare look behind the scenes of retroactively-admitted coordinated political obstruction and shaping efforts.

It was also the article with the memorable distinction of-

They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it.

Well, the New York Times on Sunday published a more pre-emptive form of democratic fortification: The Resistance to a New Trump Administration Has Already Started.

The article in short is a look at different wings of the Democratic Party apparatus, and steps they are taking in anticipation of a Trump victory to foil the predicted efforts of the 2025 Project. Some of these fears seem a good deal less grounded than others- Trump has been an abortion moderate such that it's hard to see why a Democratic governor would need to stock years of abortion supplies in a state warehouse beyond political theater- but then the article is quite likely a form of political theater. As far as election-year advertising goes, it's both a 'here are all the horrible things that could happen' fear campaign-

If Trump returns to power, he is openly planning to impose radical changes — many with authoritarian overtones. Those plans include using the Justice Department to take revenge on his adversaries; sending federal troops into Democratic cities; carrying out mass deportations; building huge camps to hold immigrant detainees; making it easier to fire civil servants and replace them with loyalists; and expanding and centralizing executive power.

-with the ACLU specifically focusing on four areas of potential lawfare-

That exercise, he said in an interview, led the group to focus on four areas, for which it is drafting potential legal filings. Those areas are Trump’s plans for an unprecedented crackdown on immigrants in the country without legal permission; the potential to further curtail access to abortion; firing civil servants for political reasons; and the possibility that he would use troops to suppress protests.

-but all with a back-edge 'but we thwarted him before and can do it again' of tribal-protection promise.

Interviews with more than 30 officials and leaders of organizations about their plans revealed a combination of acute exhaustion and acute anxiety. Activist groups that spent the four years of Trump’s presidency organizing mass protests and pursuing legal challenges, ultimately helping channel that energy into persuading voters to oust him from power in 2020, are now realizing with great dread that they may have to resist him all over again.

Not necessarily optimistic, but a 'we will fight for you' solidarity / call for support framing.

While there is the occasional (potentially deliberate) amusing word choice in ways that anyone who has used the term the Cathedral might appreciate-

“What Trump and his acolytes are running on is an authoritarian playbook,” said Patrick Gaspard, the CEO of the CAP Action Fund, the political arm of the liberal Center for American Progress think tank. He added, “So now we have to democracy-proof our actual institutions and the values that we share.”

The core strategies include the following, none of which are particularly surprising but which are good to see identified clearly in advance:

-Passing executive actions in the Biden administration before certain timelines so that Trump can't immediately revert them

-Litigation waves to tie things in court, with recruitment of sympathetic plaintiffs with likely standing already occuring

-Implicitly by virtue of the acknowledged past strategies and current participants, more protests

-More explicitly legal preparations to prevent/limit federal intervention in protests

-A national-scale counter-ICE network to disrupt immigration raids

-Pre-emptively doing self-auditing of activist group finances in preparation of politically motivated IRS scrutiny

-Various state-based nullification theory application (such as 'inter-state commerce doesn't apply to FDA if I already have the goods in-state')

-Use of Never-Trump 'ex-Republicans' groups as part of the Democratic network, especially the Principles First organization.

(Principles First was a Never Trump wing of the Republican Party associated with Liz Cheney that started in 2022 during the anti-Trump former Republican establishment's efforts to reassert control / torpedo Trump's post-presidential prospects by cooperating with the Democrat-led impeachment trial. Since then, and her fall from the Republican Party, it's been casting itself as an alternative to CPAC. Interestingly it also works in concert with Ranked Choice voting lobbying. (In the US, ranked choice voting is often, but not always, associated with the Democratic Party, at least in the sense of pushing for it in Red / Purple, but not Blue, states.)

Those plans include using the Justice Department to take revenge on his adversaries;

LOL. Sure, I might have found this troublesome in 2016. By 2020, it was clear Trump wasn't going to Lock Her Up. Now, with both the Justice Department AND state prosecutors being used as weapons against Trump, I'm actively hoping he does so. The only way back from this involves having it thrown back at its instigators. And if we don't step back, "one term in office and one term in jail" is more tolerable if it applies to both Republicans and Democrats rather than just Republicans.

sending federal troops into Democratic cities;

Maybe have the locals control the riots?

carrying out mass deportations; building huge camps to hold immigrant detainees;

What's that? Did you say "taking care that the laws be faithfully executed"?

making it easier to fire civil servants and replace them with loyalists;

IMO the "professional civil service" experiment has failed. It replaced civil servants who were cronies of those in power with civil servants who were aligned with the interests of one party at all times.

and expanding and centralizing executive power.

Somewhat troublesome, but pretty much all executives try to do this, so it's not special to Trump.

LOL. Sure, I might have found this troublesome in 2016. By 2020, it was clear Trump wasn't going to Lock Her Up. Now, with both the Justice Department AND state prosecutors being used as weapons against Trump, I'm actively hoping he does so. The only way back from this involves having it thrown back at its instigators. And if we don't step back, "one term in office and one term in jail" is more tolerable if it applies to both Republicans and Democrats rather than just Republicans.

My reasoning is somewhat different, but I'm with you here. It's a very good thing for politicians to face motivated legal scrutiny and while I have many misgivings about a second Trump term, vigorous politically motivated prosecutions are a clear positive. It is healthy for a society when their elected officials need to take care not to break the law.

This assumes that it is possible to not break the law. "Three felonies a day" is exaggerated only in that the number is less than three per day. It's still plenty per career.

It prevents otherwise very qualified people from running all the time. If they don't have the pull they must kowtow or have their "crimes" exposed.

Do you pay off pornstars with company money and cook the books to cover it up, conspire to prevent the duly elected President assuming office, or continue to keep a trove of classified docs at your home after the Feds explicitly ask for them back?

None of the things Trump is being charged with are three felonies a day bullshit. All four criminal indictments involve malum in se behaviour - the theory for the false accounting being a felony based on a predicate campaign finance violation is a stretch, but the fact that Trump committed misdemeanor false accounting was clearly established in Court.

  • -19

Trump used his own money to reimburse his lawyer for paying off stormy Daniels; legal expenses is a literally accurate descriptor. And classified docs is quite literally three felonies a day behavior; the fbi found some in Biden’s corvette.

I’m assuming you mean the Georgia case with conspiring to prevent the duly elected president from assuming office. That doesn’t seem a quite accurate descriptor- Trump actually believed he won Georgia and was trying to convince raffensperger to come up with the proof.

How can you know what Trump actually believed?

Have you considered the alternate possibility that he never believed the election was stolen?

  • -10

No one can withstand this level of scrutiny. There are thousands of entities in the United States capable of bringing prosecution against an individual. No one, not even you, can act so righteously to avoid prosecution from all of them – should they be politically motivated to do so.

This lawfare amounts to a hecklers veto. If even one jurisdiction can gin up a prosecution, it can disrupt the legitimate wishes of voters. It is undemocratic and a dangerous precedent.

I think it is eminently fair that those who have the power to make the law be expected to obey the law. This is even more true when the law is difficult to follow.

Trump imprisoned people for years for mishandling classified documents. Why should he be held to any lower a standard?

  • -14

Because this principle is not being uniformly applied, but instead being used selectively to manipulate the electoral process.

Trump was never a New York elected official and thus didn't make New York law. Nor Georgia.

I don’t disagree but it is also clear that an elected official probably can’t get a fair trial in heavily partisan areas and it opens up lawfare.

That’s why I support the Trump immunity argument. If the sin is grave enough and obvious enough to everyone, let the person be impeached and then removed. After that, go after him or her for criminal sanctions.

Various state-based nullification theory application (such as 'inter-state commerce doesn't apply to FDA if I already have the goods in-state')

It won't happen, but I would love to see Democrats take this all the way to the Supreme Court, and then have the Supreme Court accept this argument and roll back 90 years of commerce clause abuse.

Roberts would most likely commit seppuku before allowing this. He'd switch his vote then write the narrowest possible holding.

Is whats good for the goose also good for the gander? Democrats have railed endlessly at the foundational immorality of MAGAS (surprisingly well thought out) strategy of electing local county election commissioners to oversee future voting stations, calling foul on such procedural trickery before they have even been committed. Why is taking action to stymie the function of a legitimate potential future government celebrated like its the Rebels gearing up to take on the Empire when it sounds more like a cadre of ideologues burrowing themselves in the machinery of government to advance their political will over the interests of a theoretical wrongthink-infected majority.
Ever since 2016 I have seen a steady disgruntlement at the presumptions of the liberal elite grow slowly, like a cancer (to use the negative affect favored by the left). Protecting 'democracy' is the public facing statement masking 'keep my liberal ideology in place for eternity despite what all these white trash say they want'. If even normies get sick of liberal excesses, the playbook on place means there is no means to hold anyone accountable, whether its your own who went crazy at the roost or the evil republicans circling the nest. Pamela Price is likely to calcify her legacy of Alameda Countys 'no jail time for Black crime' practices, and thats just her rules-lawyering existing methods. Give more tools and the next hand wielding it would be worse than what we see now.

Trump has been an abortion moderate such that it's hard to see why a Democratic governor would need to stock years of abortion supplies in a state warehouse beyond political theater-

This is doubly dumb because the main way trump could make abortion harder to get, beyond pro-forma stuff like banning military hospitals from performing them, is making it harder to send abortion pills through the mail, which almost by definition blue states don’t have to care about.

-More explicitly legal preparations to prevent/limit federal intervention in protests

-A national-scale counter-ICE network to disrupt immigration raids

I’m curious as to what these two things actually look like. Will Paxton be able to point Rico at some of this stuff?

Wait so judging by the tone I thought this was some sort of accusation that the government was being weaponized in an unethical way but it's actually... think-tanks, advocacy groups, and Democratic party organs variously coming up with counter-arguments to Trump actions pre-emptively? That doesn't sound so strange or bad or unusual. The only actual officials cited in this piece are like, elected state AGs, where grandstanding partisan lawsuits are basically half the job, and who have electoral accountability, and a governor doing regular governor things. All presidents from both parties tend to do last-second executive actions that they try to make at least a little hard to undo. Everything else in the article is just action by non-governmental orgs.

So partisan people are doing partisan things on their own free time. Is that supposed to worry a regular citizen somehow? By contrast, some of these rumored Trump actions are far, far worse in that they use and abuse actual government vehicles in arguably unethical and dangerous ways. In other words, to use your words, "political obstruction and shaping efforts" are in my view, and the view of many others, only extra bad/super concerning if they are done by the government in a way that betrays principles of democracy, fairness, ethics, etc. Done by others, on their own time, it's just politics.

Let's examine the original claim, helpfully via the quote (bolded for ease of identification) in full context:

This is the inside story of the conspiracy to save the 2020 election, based on access to the group’s inner workings, never-before-seen documents and interviews with dozens of those involved from across the political spectrum. It is the story of an unprecedented, creative and determined campaign whose success also reveals how close the nation came to disaster. “Every attempt to interfere with the proper outcome of the election was defeated,” says Ian Bassin, co-founder of Protect Democracy, a nonpartisan rule-of-law advocacy group. “But it’s massively important for the country to understand that it didn’t happen accidentally. The system didn’t work magically. Democracy is not self-executing.”

That’s why the participants want the secret history of the 2020 election told, even though it sounds like a paranoid fever dream–a well-funded cabal of powerful people, ranging across industries and ideologies, working together behind the scenes to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. They were not rigging the election; they were fortifying it. And they believe the public needs to understand the system’s fragility in order to ensure that democracy in America endures.

The key phrase here in my opinion is actually: to influence perceptions, change rules and laws, steer media coverage and control the flow of information. Outside groups, individuals, and parties seeking to steer and influence media coverage is a normal election-time activity. Controlling information flow sounds more sinister, but in practice having re-read the original article on 2020, this was basically just being extra annoying to social media companies. Anyone can do this. It's not like, great, but it's fine in the sense that it's an equalish playing field. That's part of what makes it not so bad, even if not ideal. And a lot of the claims were overstated anyways. The article for example credited a "public information campaign" for setting up Fox to call Arizona for Biden earlier than others. This is actually a bizarre claim. The fact is that Fox's analytics setup was far more advanced than other news orgs, and were indeed correct about their call, and it didn't have much to do with a pressure campaign for or against, though certainly the call was controversial for some afterword. And this claim doesn't match up with any of the facts I'm aware of, based on reporting about the call itself as well as Fox's subsequent tone in reporting about election results and certification. Later, when it came to pressuring election boards, the manner of pressure also matters. Bribes, quid-pro-quo offers by other government officials, things like that are super bad. Some of these things were actually alleged to have been done by Trump and people around him, which is again, super bad. Contrast this: the article gave an example of a "successful" pressure tactic, which was a bunch of people showing up in chat to a streamed election board decision, and spamming hashtags. That's totally within-bounds.

I'm far more worried about the government putting their finger on the scale and abusing their power than the corporate media landscape. Because ultimately it is indeed the government that makes the rules and NOT the media. I think it's really critical to draw a distinction.

Edit: added a pair of examples from the article

The MAGA brigade is likely to try to perform outright election interference and (accidental) information warfare, employing tricks more on the incompetence end of the scale. That level of election security needs little additional reinforcement, though keeping it in mind certainly will be valuable just to enforce existing laws. Trump was stupid enough to try and intimidate Raffensperger, and there will certainly be other stupid stunts like false electors or disputes gumming up the tally. Nevertheless, something smells off about the calculated impact these activists had in 'protecting the election' against evil MAGA. The creaking machine of elections is slow to act and therefore slow to change, and the attempts by Trumps minions/cultists to effect change have been met by lazy people unwilling to jump through hoops more than by dedicated activists influencing the real world. This is where the difference between 'protecting the 2020 election' and 'resisting trump 2: the trumpening' comes about: the deliberate stated attempt in the NYtimes article is to set up a concerted effort to not just lawfare existing structures against Trump, but create new laws and resistances in advance to stop even downballot initiatives. A split ticket could leave Trump out of the Oval yet leave state senators or governors in Democratic hands or vice versa, and the net effect will be a tangled mess too convoluted to easily untangle and too easy to activate.

  • -15

In the US, ranked choice voting is often, but not always, associated with the Democratic Party, at least in the sense of pushing for it in Red / Purple, but not Blue, states.

As I understand it, there are Democrats (purposefully with a capital D) that do not support RCV because they believe it will draw voters away from the DNC.

In states that lean heavily, but not completely, in one direction RCV helps the minority party by making it easier for centrist candidates to get elected. So in Red leaning states it's seen as being pushed by the Democrats, and I can imagine in Blue leaning case they would be opposed.

None of this is unique, unusual, or dangerous. Leftist NGOs and Democratic governors/AGs preparing for a potential second term of Trump. Sinister-sounding quotes like "controlling the flow of information" and "democracy-proofing our institutions" but nothing actually out of the ordinary in terms of real actions. I'll remind you that the vast majority of the actual escalation has come from Republicans. Remember J6? Remember "the election was stolen!!!" 70% of Republicans still believe that crap.

Trump will try some hamfisted executive orders, which will get massacred in the courts like much of his EO's did in his first term. He'll declare victory anyways, and the base will love him because they desire the appearance of "owning the libs" more than any actual substantive policy changes.

  • -27

I'll remind you that the vast majority of the actual escalation has come from Republicans

Where are the republicans inventing new legal theories to prosecute their political opponents? Where are the republicans forcing businesses to boycott their opponents organizations? Where are the republicans using partisan organizations assessments of their ideological opposites as a justification to enact a domestic spying program?

I'll remind you that the vast majority of the actual escalation has come from Republicans. Remember J6? Remember "the election was stolen!!!" 70% of Republicans still believe that crap.

Believing something is escalation?

Did you mean to reply to garrison?

"Inventing new legal theories" is an inherent part of the common law system. Let's take a fairly straightforward case: Smith agrees to by a cow off of Jones for $100, with no terms regarding the order of performance. Several weeks go by and the transaction is not consummated. Each sues the other for breach of contract. This situation vexed judges for literally hundreds of years, until one brilliant judge finally ruled that, to the extent practical, in the absence of any contrary terms both parties are to perform simultaneously. This ruling seems obvious in retrospect, but it was a new idea when it came out. This obviously doesn't involve a lawyer arguing that, since he'd be admitting that the other party hadn't breached the deal, but lawyers use "novel" legal theories all the time. The law as it exists doesn't cover every exact situation, and when you feel that your client has been wronged, or has been unfairly sued, or even that certain evidence should or shouldn't be admitted, you're probably making a novel legal argument.

  • -10

Typically, inventing new legal theories as part of the ordinary process of law is a bit suspect when they’re being invented specifically to prosecute the candidate for the opposing political party.

"Inventing new legal theories" is an inherent part of the common law system.

All of the laws Trump is being prosecuted under are codified statute, ie. not common law in the strictest sense.

Strictly speaking they aren't, but that isn't really a concern as a practical matter. I practice an area of tort law that's mostly common law but has been somewhat modified by statute. If I'm arguing before a judge the standards aren't any different whether I'm arguing common law or statute, and most of the statutory argument is indistinguishable anyway because it's still based on judicial interpretation. I don't go into an argument thinking "Well, this is statute so I have to do this differently" or anything like that.

How much of the law you practice is judge made, versus prosecutor made?

None of it is prosecutor made because, first, I'm a civil lawyer, so there are no prosecutors involved, and, second, because prosecutors don't make laws. They can propose theories of liability and it's up to the judge to decide whether they are persuasive or not. It's all judge made, unless it's statutory.

Unless I'm misunderstanding, he practices civil law. So no prosecutors, just plaintiffs.

Where are the republicans inventing new legal theories

Lawyers arguing in new ways to new situations is just standard legal practice, e.g. when Trump's lawyers argued the presidency is not "an officeholder of the United States".

Where are the republicans using partisan organizations assessments of their ideological opposites as a justification to enact a domestic spying program?

The origin of the Trump-Russia investigation is shrouded in bias, just like the investigation into Biden's son was. But in both cases it was clear that there were actual problems there. Not problems that reached up to the highest level, but problems nonetheless.

I'm not a fan of plenty of the things Dems have done in regards to their woke crusade, but in terms of concrete escalation, storming the capital and trying to overturn a legitimate election due to being sore losers was far worse and more blatant.

  • -14

but in terms of concrete escalation, storming the capital and trying to overturn a legitimate election due to being sore losers was far worse and more blatant.

Other than the direction of media hysteria, it’s pretty similar to the protestors who stormed congress trying to stop the legitimate confirmation of a Supreme Court justice. Nor, as an aside, did Trump or any other ranking Republican tell them to do it; Trump actually told them to go home.

‘Muh J6’ is a convenient rhetorical point for democrats to try to paint Trump as some sort of special danger, but it doesn’t stand up to scrutiny.

The SCOTUS protestors had nowhere near anywhere near the level of support for their actions. Some leftists may have supported their cause (rejecting Kavanaugh), but no major political figure egged them on for their methods. For contrast, Trump egged on J6, and only stopped supporting it once he realized it was a PR disaster. He also still claims the 2020 election was stolen.

‘Muh J6’ is a convenient rhetorical point for democrats

My point isn't to prove that the Democrats are justified in anything they do, it's to argue against Rightists who are chugging the negative-partisanship Koolaid by the gallon, pointing at Leftist transgressions, some real, many exaggerated, and pretending the Right isn't doing stuff that's on-par or even worse.

  • -16

no major political figure egged them on for their methods.

Not, strictly speaking, about the Cavanaugh disaster, but there's no shortage of left-aligned public misbehavior to choose from during the Trump years:

"If you see anybody from that Cabinet in a restaurant, in a department store, at a gasoline station, you get out and you create a crowd and you push back on them, and you tell them they're not welcome anymore, anywhere." Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA)

"This is my call to action, here. Please don't just come here and go home, go to the Hill today. Get up and please get in the face of some congresspeople." Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ)

"You cannot be civil with a political party that wants to destroy what you stand for, what you care about. That's why I believe if we are fortunate enough to win back the House and/or Senate, that's when civility can start again. But until then, the only thing that Republicans seem to recognize and respect is strength." Hillary Clinton

Trump did not support J6. He started trying to dissuade his supporters as soon as it became clear they were breaching the capital. ‘Muh J6’ is absolutely a narrative, and it’s a narrative that is 1) false and 2) serves a specific purpose of framing the rise in negative partisanship/democratic backsliding as being mostly the right’s fault. Factually, domestic spying and targeting the opposition as major features of democrat’s regimes is something that dates to the Obama admin; the current round is an escalation of an existing trend and not a new idea, or a response to changing circumstances in 2020 or 2021.

He also still claims the 2020 election was stolen.

And he is allowed to believe this. It’s not an offense against democracy to believe that a particular election was badly administered or rigged. It’s not one to claim that, even if you happen to be wrong(as Trump is; even if Georgia or Michigan was stolen, he’s been running out the Bailey so hard that it doesn’t become a truth). Democrats make shit up about red states not being democracies constantly, and have for years and years, rather than admit that they’re just genuinely less popular.

Domestic spying dates back to at least the J Edgar Hoover days, a lot of the modern stuff is pretty weak and tame all things considered, though that doesn't make it right. I don't think it's really too relevant here though.

Your narrative about Trump and J6 seems false to me. Narrative is tricky to pin down of course, so beyond narrative, many of the actual words you are repeating are objectively untrue. And I will prove it. And I never want to hear this again, quite frankly.

I'm not even going to go into the hearsay too much, nor even planning before J6 by some smaller groups. These are at least the basic facts: The last few sentences of Trump's long speech ending a bit after 1pm talk about how he wants people to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol to give the weaker Republicans some "pride and boldness", to make their voices heard, and how the country is at risk. Allegedly (this is a bit unclear) he wanted to go too (he said things like "let's" and "we" in the speech) but the Secret Service said no. So he goes back to the White House and watches TV for a few hours, meaning he is watching what everyone else is watching. Trump disputes this, but watching TV seems highly, highly likely given Trump's well-known habits, though it's possible he missed a bit of the earliest stuff. He then tweets out a replay of the speech. At any rate, police lines are getting pushed back and in retreat since at least the 1:30 range, they are broken up in the 2-2:30 range and a lockdown is declared. In terms of TV, it seems most channels were broadcasting speeches right up until a little after 2 when both parts of congress went into recess and the aforementioned lockdowns started. Right in that time frame (2:24 pm) Trump tweets out a tweet saying Pence doesn't have courage to protect the country. Evacuations are starting in this same time frame of House, Pence, Pelosi, etc. and also in that same timeframe we get the first people breaking into the building. In the end we know many lawmakers only missed some rioters by a matter of minutes. So the Pence tweet is kind of right as things are going down, but some TV coverage has been varied, though it seems clear that by this point most channels have been showing some sort of breach. For reference, here is the CBS coverage that day. I can't find the whole Fox coverage but at least one clip from 2:39pm included the same footage and understanding of events.

So 2:38, now it's pretty blatantly obvious on TV that shit is going down, you can see Trump tweets:

Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!

You claimed:

[Trump] started trying to dissuade his supporters as soon as it became clear they were breaching the capital [sic]

This is clearly wrong. Notice what words do not appear at all in the tweet: go home, stop, don't do this; nothing of the sort. Just "hey be peaceful". That's not the same thing.

To be clear, what exactly is on TV at the time? CBS shows at 2:30 protesters in the building, (though a breach was clearly first shown and noted at 2:20), and some live video of them wandering around one of the rooms, maybe the Rotunda? Most of the video available is of course of the people outside because that's where the camera crews are. TV watchers already know Pence is being evacuated. Big chevrons and titles on screen clearly say the Capitol has been breached. The anchors are saying very clearly whoa, no one is supposed to be in there. It's hard to know how peaceful/violent the protests are because no cameras other than I guess the one (presumably live feed?) inside. A bit later of course we get some reports of some shots fired (Ashli Babbitt) and then on TV over the next hour or so we see a mixture of videos and photos of people arrested, other video of lawmakers with gas masks, others of barricades in the House, etc. They get McCarthy on the phone for a bit, reports are mixed. Though McCarthy does say: "From what I know and what I was able to view, I know people are being hurt" (later interview on CBS, he expressed the same in a 3:05 interview live on Fox News). Worth noting however, that this isn't broadcast to CBS at least until about 20 minutes later. During all this time, we can clearly see on TV that people are inside the Capitol, though there are still some crowds outside.

3:13pm shortly after McCarthy is on TV via call-in, Trump tweets again:

"I am asking for everyone at the U.S. Capitol to remain peaceful. No violence! Remember, WE are the Party of Law & Order – respect the Law and our great men and women in Blue. Thank you!"

Notice, again, nothing about going home here! Sure, there's a call against violence, especially not against cops. There's no "dissuading" going on here. Clearly he's aware that at least something is happening. There's scattered TV reports about maybe this is going to turn into an occupation, some noise about maybe the National Guard is going to show up, etc. It's again very obvious that at least some protesters are in the building.

Trump doesn't tweet anything else in the whole time. He doesn't start recording a video message about how they should "go home in peace" until 4pm.

So in summary: You could plausibly claim Trump didn't want violence, you can plausibly claim a fair amount of things. But it's very clear that Trump certainly didn't try very hard at all to dissuade any of this from happening. He called for the march, and for someone who was bragging on TV all the time about how he would send the National Guard to inner cities because of violence, "when the looting starts the shooting starts" and things of that nature, it is painfully clear that he did not have anything like that sort of reaction, and certainly wasn't on the phone calling (remember he IS the president at the moment!) for troops or a strong response or anything of the sort. We don't know many specifics about Trump and Meadows that afternoon, but according to Meadows' texts (chief of staff, usually is in close contact with the President constantly) he both had been texted extensively about how messed up things are and was in contact with the President at least as early as 2:53, so as of the 3:13 tweet we can reasonably assume they were aware of the substance of what was going on. Making the "I didn't know" defense completely indefensible.

Furthermore, it's very clear in several places that Trump wanted Pence to take a very specific action on January 6th and said as much. That's not a general feeling about things being rigged. It's a clear advocacy for not certifying!

The last few sentences of Trump's long speech ending a bit after 1pm talk about how he wants people to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue to the Capitol to give the weaker Republicans some "pride and boldness", to make their voices heard, and how the country is at risk.

His words were "PEACEFULLY make your voice heard" -- I don't get the feeling that you know/care too much about the actual facts here.

More comments

Democrats stormed the White House and laid siege to multiple federal buildings way before January 6th. The capitol riot could probably be considered a de-escalation since they didn't burn the Capitol building to the ground.

Democrats stormed the White House

The capitol riot could probably be considered a de-escalation since they didn't burn the Capitol building to the ground.

What are you talking about? When did Democrats ever storm the White House? I vaguely recall "sieging" federal buildings during the 2020 protests, but when did major left leaders ever support such violent measures?

  • -16

The direct comparison to J6 I can think of is in 2017, when there was a "DisruptJ20" movement, where the stated goal was:

We are planning to shut down the inauguration, that's the short of it ... We're pretty literal about that, we are trying to create citywide paralysis on a level that I don't think has been seen in D.C. before.

And

There has been a lot of talk of peaceful transition of power as being a core element in a democracy and we want to reject that entirely and really undermine the peaceful transition

Undermine the peaceful transition of power? Doesn't that sound like Insurrection? What happened to these hardened insurrectionists?

In late November 2017, six people charged with rioting went on trial. Prosecutors alleged that these six people were taking part in DisruptJ20 protests and vandalism.[37] A jury trial found the six defendants not guilty on all counts in December 2017.[38] On January 18, 2018, the U.S. Justice Department dropped charges against 129 people, leaving 59 defendants to face charges related to the DisruptJ20 protest.[39] By early July 2018, federal prosecutors had dropped all charges against all defendants in the case.[40]

Ah, so nothing serious. But hey, at least they didn't storm the Capitol Building!

In 2020, protestors surrounded the White House and tried to break down the barriers. Trump and his family had to hide in a bunker:

Thousands of protesters demonstrated peacefully near the White House during the day, but by nightfall, with hundreds still in the streets, the scene turned more volatile as crowds surged forward against lines of riot police with plastic shields as the two sides vied for control of Lafayette Square across from the White House. Protesters threw water bottles, set off fireworks and burned a pile of wood and at least one car.

At least they didn't succeed? Is that the metric we're going to use? Because then the J6 protestors should be off the hook, because they ultimately failed to do anything significant. I guess they just had the wrong amount of success, just enough to break down a barricade, not enough to break down America.

And that's leaving out all the other protests that have happened on Capital hill, some violent, some peaceful. Kids crowding congressional offices to protest Climate Change, the Kaunavaugh confirmation protests, etc. And even that is leaving out all the protests inside various state's Capitol Buildings.

Do Democrat leaders support violent action against federal buildings, such as the Oregon courthouse siege? Yes they do! Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler was among the rioters laying siege and Nancy Pelosi tweeted in support of the protestors (and against the government officials trying to resist them). If you don't remember much of what happened there, or maybe your news sources weren't reporting on it, Winston Marshall has a good 15 minute video here: https://youtube.com/watch?v=jNoxpP5Jhvo

I'm not a fan of what happened on Jan 6th. I posted in the motte that week something to the effect of, "I'm a conservative and I'm glad that Ashley Babbit was killed." But I would place it in the same realm of the riots and protests of the above, not some unique evil that members of the Republican Party have perpetrated.

when did major left leaders ever support such violent measures?

The current Vice President of the United States shilled for bail funds to get rioters out of jail (and incidentally got someone killed when a murderer was also bailed out using those funds). Congressional leaders encouraged mobbing and harassment of Trump administration staffers. The Biden DOJ made sure to exercise "prosecutorial discretion" to refrain from prosecuting criminal harassment of justices at their private residences over the leak of the Dobbs decision, after the Senate Majority leader threatened justices by name, stating that "I want to tell you, Gorsuch; I want to tell you, Kavanaugh, you have released the whirlwind and you will pay the price."

The fact that you're unaware of this rather says alot of how the media propagates some things and stifles others.

Lawyers arguing in new ways to new situations is just standard legal practice, e.g. when Trump's lawyers argued the presidency is not "an officeholder of the United States".

Sorry, that one goes back to the debates around the adoption of the 14th amendment. It is not new at all.

It's a novel argument because whether the president is an "officer" hadn't come up in this context. If you disagree with this, feel free to cite the court case that specifically argues this point in an identical context.

You're effectively arguing that lawyers should never be allowed to make new arguments even if the situation is different.

  • -11

It's a novel argument because whether the president is an "officer" hadn't come up in this context.

It came up in exactly that context in the debates on the 14th amendment.

I dug up some facts and brought the receipts. In the Colorado court that heard this play out, their decision you can see starting at the bottom of page 95.

It indicates that exactly once when the Amendment was first debated in Congress (not yet law) the issue was briefly mentioned. Mentioned as in we have literally only this one tiny and brief exchange. From the section summarizing the key points made in the Colorado case:

The most compelling testimony to that effect was an exchange between Senators Morrill and Johnson during the Congressional Debates over Section Three, where one Senator explained to the other that the Presidency was covered by “office, civil or military, under the United States.” Professor Magliocca also testified it would be preposterous that Section Three would not cover Jefferson Davis—the President of the Confederacy— should he have wished to run for President of the United States after the civil war.

So the brief worry was that Davis, as an insurrectionist, was obviously barred from running for most offices, but maybe he could run for President only? Morrill thought no, he was barred from basically everything including President.

No other court cases, legal opinions, or even history is cited. Meaning they couldn't find anything else. There's other arguments too both for and against listed in the decision, but overall the decision says there is "scant evidence" and most of the other arguments have to do with the text of the Constitution in other places.

So yeah. In my opinion, if a legal theory is mentioned exactly once, and back in 1866, it is for most practical purposes "novel". It's not novel in the sense that literally not a single person ever had ever thought about the concept (clearly at least two people had, if extremely briefly), but certainly was novel in the sense that we had gone 150 years and no one had ever brought it up again as such.

It might also bear noting, when it comes to novelty, that this conversation formed a legal theory (if you can even call it a theory, it's not like they went into big detail) claiming the President WAS in fact an officer. Trump's team did not advance this theory! They advanced the opposite! It wasn't even the same claim! So it wasn't so much a "legal theory" as "one person worried about it once 150+ years ago and then decided it wasn't a big worry". And then over a century later someone came out and claimed the opposite thing. Sounds pretty novel to me!

Edits: last paragraph.

Senator Johnson: But this amendment does not go far enough. I suppose the framers of the amendment thought it was necessary to provide for such an exigency. I do not see but that any one of these gentlemen may be elected President or Vice President of the United States, and why did you omit to exclude them? I do not understand them to be excluded from the privilege of holding the two highest offices in the gift of the nation. No man is to be a Senator or Representative or an elector for President or Vice President

Senator Morrill: Let me call the Senator's attention to the words "or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States."

Senator Johnson: Perhaps I am wrong as to the exclusion from the Presidency; no doubt I am; but I was misled by noticing the specific exclusion in the case of Senators and Representatives.

So Johnson brought up the theory, Morrill denied it, and Johnson chose not to argue further. But I didn't say the theory was accepted then; I said it wasn't novel. It's not novel.

Jefferson Davis was not involved. Jefferson Davis was disqualified by the fact that he was a Senator before he joined the confederacy; it is true that if the Presidency was not an "office" he would not have been disqualified from running for President, but nobody was worried about that; they were worried about him re-entering the Senate. Nor was anyone worried about some rebel President or Vice President running for office, for the simple reason that there weren't any.

More comments

Please link the court case.

I don't have to dance to your tune. The debates on the 14th amendment were (obviously) prior to any court case involving it.

More comments

Yeah so new that Justice Story had a view on it…. Story really was a helluva a legal mind as an aside.

Where are the republicans inventing new legal theories to prosecute their political opponents?

I don't think this is an accurate description of any of the Trump prosecutions. It mainly gets levelled at the falsification of business records case, on the theory that Bragg used a federal crime as the enhancer to kick it up to a first degree charge. But this isn't accurate. He used a state crime - New York Election Law Section 17-152. That charge itself refers to influencing an election by "unlawful means", and the unlawful means referred to in this context are violations of Federal election finance law, but my understanding is that it's well established by precedent that you can use federal crimes in relation to this statute. As always IANAL and I might be wrong. But as far as I can tell, although it's a bit of a convoluted approach to take, it's also one that specifically avoids using laws in unprecedented ways.

Republicans however certainly have invented new legal theories. They invented a new legal theory to overturn the 2020 election using competing slates of electors and having Pence refuse to certify disputed results. They invented a new theory to defend Trump by claiming Presidents have absolute immunity to criminal prosecution.

And, look, there's nothing wrong with inventing a new legal theory. You try it out, you test it in court, you see if it flies. And I think it's kind of natural for it to be the Republicans who are testing new ground here - the courts have become increasingly right wing (especially SCOTUS), and those new court majorities have different ideas about how laws should be interpreted. But if you're going to take the position that advocating novel legal theories for political purposes is some kind of no-no, then you really ought to be pointing the finger in the other direction.

  • -17

The idea that trump reimbursing his lawyer for paying stormy Daniels to sign an NDA constitutes a misreported campaign expense is, however, totally a novel legal theory.

They invented a new legal theory to overturn the 2020 election using competing slates of electors and having Pence refuse to certify disputed results.

Notably, the Republican Party decided not to do this. Like, there weren’t competing slates of electors. Mike Pence had openly said he wouldn’t go along with that plan. The most partisan red state where Trump disputed the results had a state government- made up of all republicans- who told him to eff off. In fact, republican elected officials who could have turned it into a matter for the courts chose to admit trump lost. Not as a general rule, as a universal one.

I’ve yet to see even the smallest of small democrats opposing the lawfare, targeting of conservative groups, criminal cases invented out of whole cloth, attempts at censorship, etc.

And I think it's kind of natural for it to be the Republicans who are testing new ground here - the courts have become increasingly right wing (especially SCOTUS), and those new court majorities have different ideas about how laws should be interpreted. But if you're going to take the position that advocating novel legal theories for political purposes is some kind of no-no, then you really ought to be pointing the finger in the other direction.

What are the new legal theories embraced by the 6-3 majority on scotus? Name them. Their most controversial, and predictable, decision was dobbs, which even liberals mostly admitted would be legally correct. Pretty much all the precedent overturned by the changing balance of the court has been in the form of things like changing the constitutional test applied in x specific situation- hardly novel legal theories.

The closest thing to a novel legal theory pushed out of conservative courts would be kaczmyrak’s decision on mifepristone, which got stayed immediately and slapped down by scotus.

The idea that trump reimbursing his lawyer for paying stormy Daniels to sign an NDA constitutes a misreported campaign expense is, however, totally a novel legal theory.

No it's not. The John Edwards case ran on the exact same theory.

Notably, the Republican Party decided not to do this. Like, there weren’t competing slates of electors. Mike Pence had openly said he wouldn’t go along with that plan.

Parts of the party refused to go along with that plan, sure. And they mostly got purged for disloyalty to the guy who spearheaded it.

What are the new legal theories embraced by the 6-3 majority on scotus? Name them.

Off the top of my head, the Major Questions Doctrine is one obvious example of a new legal theory adopted by SCOTUS. It's also highly likely they will be soon adopting a new legal theory in the area of administrative law, abandoning the current Chevron Deference legal theory. Again, I have 0 problem with them doing that, sometimes existing precedent is plain wrong and generally speaking I think the current court has made pretty good rulings.

The John Edwards case ran on the exact same theory.

Edwards was prosecuted for using campaign funds. Trump was prosecuted for not using campaign funds, on the theory that paying Stormy Daniels was really a campaign contribution!

I don't believe this is correct. The donors supplying the hush money in the Edwards case gave the money for the specific purpose of paying off his mistress. The money only counts as campaign funds if you embrace the legal theory used in the Trump case - that paying for an NDA to shut up the woman you cheated on your wife with is an election expense.

Edwards literally solicited donors to help pay his expenses. That's at least a theory of using campaign monies (monies he campaigned to get) for private ends. Trump used his own money!

The idea that trump reimbursing his lawyer for paying stormy Daniels to sign an NDA constitutes a misreported campaign expense is, however, totally a novel legal theory.

No it's not. The John Edwards case ran on the exact same theory.

I bolded the operative part that is completely different. Edwards did not pay for the expense out of his own pocket. Which is why when you later say:

Edwards' mistress was paid off in the same way that Daniels was paid off - Edwards got someone else to give her money.

...you're completely, 180 degrees, backwards. Edwards used somebody else's money. Trump used Trump's money, via an intermediary.

That's a factual difference, but it doesn't change the legal theory. Both cases hung on the idea that paying off the woman you cheated with is a campaign expenditure. If you concede that point, then the question of whether you get someone else to do it and then pay them back, or get someone else to give you money to do it, or get someone else to do it while the money never passes through your hands at all, is all pretty immaterial. All of those actions violate campaign finance law in some way, if and only if the payoff counts as a campaign expenditure.

This is just so wrong.

  1. You are using as precedent a case that is seen as a disaster for the government as precedent. It is precedent; just not the way you think it is (ie it turned the FEC and DOJ off of the theory you espouse).

  2. There is a big fucking difference between a presidential candidate funding his own campaign and a third party. The former has zero limits; the latter does. The latter could be criminal if it goes past the limit.

  3. If it were a campaign contribution, then the only thing Trump would’ve needed to do is report something in 2017. The prosecution’s theory is somehow the 2017 reporting stole the 2016 election. Time travel folks!

More comments

pretty immaterial

Negative. Your confusion comes from your explicit refusal to engage with the history of campaign finance laws, and the court cases that shape it. Most obvious in this setting is Citizens United, which narrowed the scope of the reasons which can ground regulation of these types of expenditures, to the extent that they can be considered expenditures (leaving aside this question for the moment and whether the FEC's current interpretation of the statute was actually informed by the failure to secure a conviction of Edwards), to only quid pro quo situations. Given this precedent, it is absolutely material whether there is a quid pro quo situation, and thus, a huge material difference between a candidate using his own money versus a candidate using someone else's money. It does not make sense to say that Donald Trump was entering in a quid pro quo relationship with Donald Trump by using his own money, whereas it is entirely plausible that the Edwards situation could be argued to constitute a quid pro quo.

We can reserve the question of whether it could count as a campaign expenditure in various hypos, as we discussed elsewhere. Suffice to say, the FEC of today disagrees with you, perhaps as I mentioned, in response to the Edwards debacle. The FEC might have agreed with you in the past, back then, but lots of developments have happened in the law since then, and at this point, they disagree with you.

More comments

ABC:

Federal prosecutors accused Edwards of soliciting nearly $1 million from wealthy donors to hide his affair with videographer Rielle Hunter -- and that he was the father of their baby -- to prevent damage to his reputation as a family man during the campaign.

Edwards' defense team argued the donations were personal gifts from friends, not campaign contributions, and were intended only to hide the affair from his cancer-stricken wife, not voters.

A North Carolina jury found Edwards not guilty of one count of receiving illegal campaign donations but deadlocked on five other charges, leading to a mistrial. The Justice Department ultimately dropped the charges.

Hm, but it didnt work to find Edward guilty.

Not only didn’t it work but the DOJ and FEC saw it as a resounding defeat. They viewed the matter as settled.

Correct, the prosecution was unsuccessful. Edwards argued that the payoff was made to hide his affair from his wife and not to influence the election, and presumably at least some of the jury thought that was plausible.

But recognise that this is a case of Edwards successfully convincing (some members of) the jury that the legal theory did not apply to him. it's still a case where the same legal theory was prosecuted in the past.

I take it you've never been to law school before, but it goes something like this: You read cases as your class assignments and the professor asks questions about them. Most of the questions are hypotheticals that change the facts slightly to see if you can apply the principles of the ruling to different situations. Then the professor poses a hypothetical that's nothing like the original fact pattern and asks what the result will be. Then when finals come you get more questions like that where nothing is exactly on point and you have to argue based on broad principles alone. Then you get to do the same thing in the bar exam, especially the multistate, where they might give you a fact pattern where you read it and you think "okay, the guy is clearly liable" and the final question asks "If the court finds that the defendant isn't liable, what is the probable reason?" and gives you four crappy answers from which you have to choose the most plausible.

As a practicing attorney, yes, most cases are boring and straightforward, and don't require too much creativity. But this isn't always the case. New situations require new legal theories. Look at autonomous vehicles; there's a whole universe of potential problems that could arise there that the law is seemingly unequipped to deal with, except through general principles. "No one has been convicted based on this specific fact pattern before" isn't a defense. This is especially true in the world of white collar crime, where the argument isn't so much that the defendant didn't do what the prosecution said he did but that what the defendant did wasn't a crime at all. Not everything is going to slot into convenient and obvious categories, and unless there's a viable legal argument for why a particular course of action shouldn't be a crime, a jury is going to get to decide.

  • -11

"No one has been convicted based on this specific fact pattern before" isn't a defense.

No, but "any lack of clarity about what the law does and does not allow must be resolved in favor of the defense" is such a rule - the Rule of Lenity, to be precise. I know only Neil Gorsuch and like 17 other principled civil libertarians care about it, but still!

I think what’s missing here is the background. The background is that a DA is supposed to prosecute crimes not persons. Bragg ran on prosecuting Trump (ie the person).

And then to get Trump, Bragg used a NY state law that hasn’t been used in god knows how long coupled with a very dubious theory of a questionable FECA violation as a predicate of the rarely used NYS law. Keep in mind the people with authority to prosecute FECA violations passed on this (both criminally and civilly). The prior DA passed. That should tell us something! It tells us about selective prosecution and show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.

And then to get Trump, Bragg used a NY state law that hasn’t been used in god knows how long coupled with a very dubious theory of a questionable FECA violation as a predicate of the rarely used NYS law. Keep in mind the people with authority to prosecute FECA violations passed on this (both criminally and civilly). The prior DA passed. That should tell us something! It tells us about selective prosecution and show me the man and I’ll show you the crime.

AND, they had to first corner Cohen on other charges into accepting a plea deal in order to "establish" that a (uncharged, untried, undefended) crime had taken place which could then be used as the basis for charging Trump in such a convoluted manner.

He didn't run on prosecuting Trump in the sense (as I have seen implied in some conservative outlets) that he made it a campaign promise. He ran on prosecuting Trump in the sense that he cited his participation in the AG investigation. In other words, he ran on his record, which is something every AG candidate does, especially when they were involved in a high profile case.

Bragg: "I’m the candidate in the race who has the experience with Donald Trump. I was the chief deputy in the attorney general’s office. We sued the Trump administration over 100 times, for the Muslim travel ban, for family separation at the border, for shenanigans with the census. So, I know how to litigate with him. I also led the team that did the Trump Foundation case. So, I’m ready to go wherever the facts take me, and to inherit that case. And I think it’d be hard to argue with the fact that that’d be the most important, most high-profile case, and I’ve seen him up front and seen the lawlessness that he could do."

Rosenberg: "And you believe it should happen?"

Bragg: "I believe we have to hold him accountable. I haven’t seen all the facts beyond the public, but I’ve litigated with him and so I’m prepared to go where the facts take me once I see them, and hold him accountable.

There's a fig leaf, but it's an embarrassingly narrow one.

Here is one example

“Let’s talk about what’s waiting for the new DA. The docket. We know there’s a Trump investigation. I have investigated Trump and his children and held them accountable for their misconduct with the Trump Foundation. I also sued the Trump administration more than 100 times for (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals), the travel ban, separation of children from their families at the border. So I know that work. I know how to follow the facts and hold people in power accountable."

Sure he talked about what he did but the clear implication that he would follow through on prosecuting Trump.

No it has never been established to at federal law (let alone FECA) can be a predicate for unlawful means. Never. Not once.

In fact it isn’t clear the NY statute has been used in fifty years let alone tying it to a federal crime.

There might not be anything exactly on point, but there isn't any case law I'm aware of that explicitly prohibits it, and the "lay of the land", so to speak, suggests it's okay. The courts have already ruled that Federal offenses could count for the old "habitual criminal" laws, and RICO cases usually involve state predicates. Neither of these is exactly on point, but they are indicative of the idea there isn't any problem with the cross-jurisdicational aspect of the case. I'm not entirely sold on the idea that there isn't an argument here, so if you have one, I'd love to hear it, but nothing I can think of off the top of my head suggests that this would be a problem.

I think those things are different. The first is using prior convictions (ie things adjudicated) as opposed to one sovereign substituting its opinion for the other. The second is also different in that federal law is a higher authority (within its limited scope). This is the opposite and I think that is important.

First, there is the preemption issue. Congress explicitly made the FEC and the DOJ the sole enforcers of FECA. This makes perfect sense because FECA governs national elections; not local. While most federal elections are local (1) the presidency is not and (2) the race in a particular race can have a big impact on the overall make up of the national body. Trying to have uniform rules makes sense because the rules implicate national elections. So this is a core federal interest and one congress spoke explicitly about. This makes for a very strong preemption argument. You could have NY take one view as to what is an unlawful contribution and another state take a complete opposite view colorable (hell there was a debate within FEC). So a candidate could be in a literal catch 22.

There is also the problem that here FECA is an incredibly complex set of laws bereft of a large body of caselaw to elucidate it and ride with first amendment issues. No wonder almost al action is civil in nature! Note this is even worse than it appears since a state judge will maybe encounter FECA issues once in a life time while FEC and DOj have special units dedicated to it. This is one where the experts in the law should be deferred to (ie another argument for preemption).

Third, unlike other cross border issues (where another state Supreme Court can issue an advisory opinion) there are no advisory opinions that can be issued by federal courts.

Fourth, Andy McCarthy makes a really good argument that the NY state constitution forbids incorporation by reference — especially in the context of non NY law. Andy also asks “where is the limiting principle — if NY can enforce another sovereign could the prosecution be based on sharia law.” Related to this I think (but could be wrong) the FECA law passed after this NY law was enacted. So we really think it was reasonable to believe NYS legislators incorporated federal election laws that didn’t exist at that time?

Fifth, there is the due process issue here of whether anyone was on notice that unlawful means h include federal law. There is a related (though somewhat disticint) rule of lenity issue.

Finally, I think these fears were borne out in this litigation. The experts passed but the partisan hack amateurs took it up. They really hid the ball that a criminal FECA violation requires willfulness (ie knowledge that it was wrong — no where did the prosecution even come close to that) but the judge decide not to explain what willfulness is as distinct from general intent. They also arguably badly mangled what a contribution is and didn’t properly explain when the reporting would occur (ie if you read everything in favor of the prosecution Trump allegedly misstated financials to win the 2016 even though he would not have to report a campaign contribution until after the election — try to make sense of that!). We could say these are errors. Or we could believe they are partisans tools of a blue state going after a red. In either case they upset the federal interest in having uniform election campaign laws and enforcement of those laws. The federal interest is massive while the state interest is relatively minor. This makes for a compelling preemption argument.

The thing that you and a lot of Trump supporters seem to miss when discussing the case is that you assume that the prosecution had to prove that Trump had to have committed the FECA violations himself in order to be criminally liable. That's not true; neither party disputed that the law applied to covering up misfeasance by someone else. Here, they had Cohen testify that he knew the payments were illegal at the time he made them, and that Trump reimbursed him through phony invoices for nonexistent legal work. That's the prima fascia case right there. Cohen was investigated and pleaded guilty (though his plea couldn't be used as evidence in Trump's case), so there's nothing controversial about whether a FECA violation actually occurred, unless you want to talk theoretically, which is pointless since Cohen isn't going to appeal.

Whether or not the case is preempted is a trickier matter, but New York didn't charge Trump with any campaign violations. He was charged with creating fraudulent records. In fact, the fact that this law has never been applied to FECA violations before actually tips the needle against preemption. If the law isn't aimed at regulating elections but at preventing fraud generally, then it's harder to argue that it's intruding on the policy goals that congress reserved to the Feds. Courts have already ruled that consumer protection issues relating to campaigns aren't preempted, even though they're directly related to campaign violations, so it's less likely that anyone would do so here. Not that there isn't an argument to be made, it just isn't as strong as some think it is.

I'm not an expert on the NY constitution so I'll leave that question to the Court of Appeals, who have the final say. I will say that whether or not Sharia Law applies in and of itself is a moot point. I imagine Sharia Law prohibits theft, and I don't think you'd have too much of a cross-jurisdictional issue if the predicate offense was theft in a country that has Sharia. If it's one of the things we Americans find more offensive, then prosecution would likely be barred on the grounds that it's contrary to public policy. It's an interesting question but crimes in other jurisdictions being used as the basis for related charges in others isn't exactly unheard of.

Cohen was investigated and pleaded guilty (though his plea couldn't be used as evidence in Trump's case), so there's nothing controversial about whether a FECA violation actually occurred, unless you want to talk theoretically, which is pointless since Cohen isn't going to appeal.

This is a non sequitur. Dumb people and people trying to get a good deal for other, real crimes, plead guilty to things that aren't actually crimes all the time. There is no logical way to bootstrap that to get to "nothing controversial about whether a FECA violation actually occurred". There may be all sorts of statutory, agency interpretation, and even constitutional defenses to the claim that a FECA violation actually occurred that Cohen simply did not pursue, but would nevertheless win the day in a court of appeals.

More comments

I think this post is wrong on many levels.

Cohen was dead to rights on much more serious tax violations and taxi medallion schemes. They threw in the FECA violation late and he plead to it (lesser crime). There is very much a dispute as to whether Cohen violated FECA and whether Trump knew about FECA.

Second, obtaining an NDA is legal work so hard to see how it is non existent. Moreover even if it were the sole person tying Trump to it is Cohen. Cohen stole 60k from Trump which Cohen viewed as “self help.” This guy would clearly lie, steal, and cheat if it could help him in any way. You don’t convict based on a guy like Cohen.

Third, FECA requires willfulness. Trump and Co had to know it was wrong; not just intend to do the actions that are prohibited. Your theory of the case then is that Trump and Cohen knew that by Cohen doing it that it was a FECA violation even though if Trump did it himself it would not be a violation. Since Cohen was solely acting as a middle man he wasn’t key to the scheme. There was no need to go through all this “scheming” to protect Cohen when Trump could’ve just done it himself. Trump has been looked at for years and they haven’t found crimes despite being a NY real estate developer. Do we think he knew option A was criminal and option B was not, both would get him what he wants, and he choose A? It just doesnt make sense.

More comments

He used a state crime - New York Election Law Section 17-152. That charge itself refers to influencing an election by "unlawful means", and the unlawful means referred to in this context are violations of Federal election finance law,

You are incorrect. Bragg did not actually specify in the filing which charges he was using to upgrade from misdemeanor to felony. That's what was novel!

They invented a new legal theory to overturn the 2020 election using competing slates of electors

I will repeat myself a million times if I have to that "overturn the 2020 election" presupposes your side of the argument as the only legitimate one.

Besides, the competing slate of elector scheme is not nes or novel: it was used in 1876, and JFK submitted alternate electors in his dispute over Hawaii.

The actual escalation was a 10-year push to legalize racial discrimination against the country's ethnic majority, with no evidence that this would do any good for society, or ever stop.

This is an Iraq War tier screw-up. If Democrats were facing an actual world-historical political genius instead of a WWE character, they would be utterly fucked.

All of these actions are meant for one purpose - to avoid necessary reform.

Back in the 1970s, it was still early, and the exact amount by which the racial gaps could be closed was still speculative, so implying that they could close the gaps was speculation rather than a lie. As late as 2010, they still had relatively serious academics like Roland Fryer, or people studying lead exposure, who were able to show some modest results, and they weren't trying to do "race conscious" policy, so they didn't need the higher standard of evidence that explicitly racial policy requires.

Since then it's been wall-to-wall accusations like "there are too many white and asian men at Google" based on numbers that are completely made up, and attempts at racially discriminatory institutional and government policy that has to be stopped by the courts.

They have been lying to their base since 2014 about what is feasible for them to accomplish, and expecting everyone else to just take the heat.

January 6, a political riot following a year of weaponized political rioting, is not important. Democrats either do not believe that Donald Trump poses any significant risk of a fascist takeover, or they believe that being racist is more important than avoiding risk of a fascist takeover. If it were otherwise, they would simply stop being racist.

If you think you're facing down an ultra-fascist, then you capitulate to moderates and give in to their demands in order to push the potential fascist power base below 50%. You do not double down on weird HR-ified collective inherited racial guilt for the majority of the population.

Russian disinformation accusations are irrelevant. Russian collusion accusations are irrelevant. There is no reason to believe either of them from a party who are so desperate to be racist for no other reason than to selfishly gain and preserve power. Again, the stuff they support is not based on science. Kendi and DiAngelo are not scientists. Collapsing all of race into "W vs BIPOC" doesn't even match regular stats, it's just nasty in/out racial coalition politics.

If you disagree, then you can explain how this garbage, which would be recognized as far right if it were occurring in the other direction, gets stopped.

There’s also option c)- democrats are delusional and think their race/gender agenda is popular.

There’s some support for this- democrats who acknowledge that CRT and trans is unpopular tend to be begging their fellow democrats to shut the fuck up about the topics.

Further evidence for this comes from Hollywood and other businesses - organizations addicted to making money but seem incapable of not leaving money on the table by fucking with their customers etc because of obviously unpopular woke politics.

A lot of those woke movies also suck as movies, though. I think a lot of it is shoveling woke in to try to shield the directors/writers from criticism.

If someone is actually smart and self-aware, and then bans all research into like, aircraft development for some reason, then they will integrate the knowledge of that ban back into their information system.

If you ban aircraft research, then you know that you do not know aircraft capabilities, and will adjust your thinking accordingly.

Failing to reintegrate their information control back as uncertainty is not an argument in favor of Democratic governance.

No, it isn’t. In fact I explicitly called democrats delusional. I simply disagree that anti-white racism is a major part of their motivation, even as it clearly has some place in their coalition.

I'll remind you that the vast majority of the actual escalation has come from Republicans.

This is extremely incorrect - the vast majority of the actual escalation has come from the intelligence community. It wasn't the Republicans who set up crossfire hurricane or ginned up the fraudulent Carter Page warrant. Those were the actual attempts at "democracy-proofing our institutions" and they began before Trump even took office.

EDIT:

To avoid duplicating reply chains, I saw you make this comment later on.

The origin of the Trump-Russia investigation is shrouded in bias, just like the investigation into Biden's son was. But in both cases it was clear that there were actual problems there. Not problems that reached up to the highest level, but problems nonetheless.

No, it wasn't! There was no real or serious attempts by the Russians to get Manchurian candidate Trump into office. The only role played by the Russians in that election (apart from posting a few BLM memes on facebook) was to provide the HRC campaign with a bunch of fake dirt they could use (via the Steele dossier) to have the Trump campaign spied on.

And of course there is zero evidence Russia conspired with the Trump campaign or Trump.

There was no real or serious attempts by the Russians to get Manchurian candidate Trump into office

This is incorrect, or as you would hyperbolically put it, "extremely" incorrect. Trump wasn't a total puppet, but Russia was definitely helping him. The activities of the Internet Research Agency are now public knowledge after Prigozhin died in a fireball after missing his shot at the king. Campaign staffers such as Papadopoulos met with RU intelligence agents to arrange for embarrassing email leaks from people like Podesta, lied about it several times, and was sentenced to prison. Many other individuals such as his campaign manager(!) had suspicious links to Russia, and there has been plenty of additional evidence that Russia was trying to influence the election. Some of it was just to delegitimize democracy, while much of it was to prop up Trump. Is this really hard to believe? Russia has been interfering in US elections since the Cold War, and history has shown how much friendlier Trump has been to Putin compared to Biden or Hillary.

  • -14

Campaign staffers such as Papadopoulos met with RU intelligence agents to arrange for embarrassing email leaks from people like Podesta, lied about it several times, and was sentenced to prison.

Papadopoulos was ambushed by FBI agents who pretended he wasn't under investigation, asked him questions until he got a detail wrong, and then charged him with lying to the FBI. They had to invent this process crime because they had no other crimes to charge him with. But they did leak stories to the press that made it seem as though Papadopoulos had been up to sinister Russian collusion schemes, because this is how they made what they were doing seem defensible to a gullible part of the public.

Many other individuals such as his campaign manager(!) had suspicious links to Russia

Manafort lobbied foreign governments without being registered, which was a technical requirement widely unfollowed in the industry until the FBI prosecuted Manafort over it. Again, there was no actual Trump-Russia collusion, so the argument has to rely on vagueries like "suspicious ties".

The activities of the Internet Research Agency are now public knowledge

I'd already mentioned this - I don't think their posting a bunch of BLM memes was enough to have any kind of measurable impact on the results of the election. I'll take concerns about Russian influence on American elections seriously when they get to the point of having a 10th of the impact that the Israelis have.

Campaign staffers such as Papadopoulos met with RU intelligence agents to arrange for embarrassing email leaks from people like Podesta, lied about it several times, and was sentenced to prison.

This ties in to the corrupt origination of crossfire hurricane - like the Carter Page warrant and Alexander Downer's involvement etc. If you want to talk about this incredibly complicated and opaque topic it will take an entire thread to hash out all the details and points of agreement.

Many other individuals such as his campaign manager(!) had suspicious links to Russia, and there has been plenty of additional evidence that Russia was trying to influence the election.

Wikipedia is worse than useless for this and the page you've linked even debunks some of the claims made in the article. The DNC and Podesta leaks were almost definitely not the result of Russian action, for instance. The US intelligence community can't actually be trusted on this topic - we know they were actively lying to deceive both when they made the Carter Page warrant application, and when they released the letter condemning the Hunter Biden laptop.

Russia has been interfering in US elections since the Cold War, and history has shown how much friendlier Trump has been to Putin compared to Biden or Hillary.

No? Hillary was literally buying fake kompromat from the Russians in order to attack Trump, and I can't see any indication that he was acting in Russian interests except coincidentally - there's some undeniable overlap in the policies that both Trump's base and the Russians support (like ending the forever wars and not purposefully starting a proxy war against Russia) but that isn't really a meaningful argument.

If memory serves it was in the small 7 or 8 figure spend. It was dwarfed by orders of magnitude what Clinton spent. If the Russians are that effective….then maybe they deserve it!

No the simple explanation was yes there were some Russian troll farms but they had a negligible impact on the election and there is zero connection with Trump.

I don’t think it’s the slam dunk people have been treating it as. For Trump to be colluding, he’d have to know about and approve of the things Russia was doing. Other than one televised statement that could arguably be a joke, nothing he did seemed to point to him knowing about any of it. Maybe he didn’t say anything, but given that he couldn’t help himself in the middle of a presidential debate, I don’t see it. If he can’t tell the proud boys to leave his campaign, how does he do so easily in the case of Russia?

The Russians were trying, as are the Chinese and Indians and Mexicans and whatever other foreign agent out there. It just so happened that the Russians found a receptive party in Trump who is uniquely predisposed to liking Russia because of Trumps stupidity, admiration for Strong Daddy, and predilection for blonde fuckdolls that look like his daughter. Trumps 2016 election success on his own was assisted by Russia as much as it was by disgruntled DC czars with a bone to pick with Hilary or Berniebros pivoting away.

The success of Russias objectives through Trump is a sign of Trumps own policies happening to dovetail with Russia, not Russian success in subverting Trump. Nevertheless, as Ben points out below, it remains true that Russia was constantly trying to find ways to subvert the USA and its election processes. The commies actively funded the Black Panthers, the Internet Research Agency blackpills bodybuilding.com on St Floyd.

  • -22

It just so happened that the Russians found a receptive party in Trump who is uniquely predisposed to liking Russia because of Trumps stupidity, admiration for Strong Daddy, and predilection for blonde fuckdolls that look like his daughter. Trumps 2016 election success on his own was assisted by Russia as much as it was by disgruntled DC czars with a bone to pick with Hilary or Berniebros pivoting away.

Not a single part of this is true. "Blonde fuckdolls that look like his daughter"? Trump was not some "receptive party" to Russia -- after one joke about wanting Russia to release Hillary's emails, years of investigations could find no collusion between Russia and Trump. The amount of Russian interference into the 2016 election was near-zero.

The success of Russias objectives through Trump

This is a lazy cliche. How did Russia actualy benefit from Trump's presidency?

Trump's campaign chair was literally convicted of acting on behalf of a foreign government which he received millions of dollars from. Granted, it was the Putin flunky Yanokovych rather than Putin himself, but still.

  • -12

People do this all the time, as even Wikipedia admits:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Agents_Registration_Act

For most of its existence, FARA was relatively obscure and rarely invoked;[8] since 2017, the law has been enforced with far greater regularity and intensity, particularly against officials connected to the Trump administration.

Paul Manafort got convicted for something that is commonly done that nobody was ever convicted for, until they wanted pretexts to jail Trump's people, which then gets lazily conflated into, "Trump-Russian collusion". Ten years on and there is still no evidence that anyone on Trump's campaign colluded with Russia in any way, but this pretext can't be let go of because it sounds much better than admitting that new standards were invented to prosecute Trump's people, and only Trump's people.

The natural conclusion of this is that Trump was a victim of the Russian government's actions. Just like how when Pelosi's driver turned out to be a Chinese spy, she was a victim of the Chinese government's actions.

Sinister-sounding quotes like "controlling the flow of information" and "democracy-proofing our institutions" but nothing actually out of the ordinary in terms of real actions.

In that such sinister actions are perfectly ordinary, yes. Leaning on social media companies to suppress inconvenient stories, wiretapping the opposition campaign, fabricating evidence of Russian collaboration by the opposition, etc.

I'll remind you that the vast majority of the actual escalation has come from Republicans. Remember J6? Remember "the election was stolen!!!" 70% of Republicans still believe that crap.

So the Democrats have a whole bunch of riots, then steal an election, and when the Republicans have one riot and complain about the election being stolen that's the vast majority of the escalation?

So the Democrats have a whole bunch of riots, then steal an election

Once again, there's no evidence the election was stolen. Just an endless gish gallop from Trump, and his supporters motte-and-bailey'ing him with vastly weaker claims when pressed (e.g. "the election was stolen because the media is biased against Trump") before going right back to assuming the strong claims were true when they weren't being pressed.

  • -10

Look at you, escalating by claiming there's no evidence. There was that Georgia water main break. And the Pennsylvania election law changes.

Note the leak had nothing to do with the counting pause 14 hours later (as can be verified by watching the unedited footage released) and that the PA mail in laws were passed prior to Covid by Republicans with the stated aim to help their turn out in rural areas. The fact this shot them in the foot a few months later because they didn't predict Covid and that using mail in ballots would become a partisan issue is unfortunate for them, but can't really be held to be evidence of rigging the election against Trump. They were trying to change the laws to HELP their candidates.

The Georgia incident wasn't a water main break, it was a leaking toilet. Nobody was instructed to leave the ballot counting area. No ballots were impacted. This has been documented already.

Nobody was instructed to leave the ballot counting area.

NEW: The election department sent the ballot counters at the State Farm Arena in Atlanta home at 10:30 p.m., Regina Waller, the Fulton County public affairs manager for elections, tells ABC News.

Alright, you and @Ben___Garrison are getting two things confused. The water leak was earlier in the morning and had nothing to do with anyone leaving. At around 10 pm the Fulton County people decided to call it for the evening and began packing up. They finished around 10:30 and people started to leave, including the media and observers. When they told the Secretary of State's office they were told that they were to continue counting through the night, at which point they went back in and began counting. The water main break only ogt into this story through journalistic sloppiness, I'm guessing because someone with a news outlet Tweeted a rumor they overheard and it got reported as news. Either way, I don't see what this has to do with any evidence of fraud. I'm guessing the argument is that they wanted to get the observers out of there so they could pull all those fake Biden ballots they had hidden under the table and count them, but there's no evidence of this. It's pretty clear from CCTV footage that the ballot boxes they pulled out from under the table at 11 pm were the same ones they pushed under the table at 10:30. I don't know how the observers present would have been able to tell a fake ballot from a real one. I don't know how you can convince dozens of election workers (who are usually county employees and generally don't want to be there) to commit blatant fraud without any of them giving up the whole thing. I don't know how you could convince a Republican state government to go along with the fraud and the subsequent coverup. I don't know the mechanism for how fake ballots are supposedly generated. This entire theory makes no sense. Even if the accusations of the county phonying up a water main break to get observers out of there were true, you still have to prove the fraud.

At around 10 pm the Fulton County people decided to call it for the evening and began packing up. They finished around 10:30 and people started to leave, including the media and observers. When they told the Secretary of State's office they were told that they were to continue counting through the night, at which point they went back in and began counting.

The facts as you present them, regardless of the water leak claim, is that vote counting continued after the observers, having been told that counting was finished for the night, left. That's substantively identical to the complaint that counting which dramatically flipped the result continued without bipartisan observation, no?

I'm guessing because someone with a news outlet Tweeted a rumor they overheard and it got reported as news.

One might further guess that the rumour got started because that's what the observers were told, if we're guessing here -- I think some of them have said so publically. This would still fit with facts on the ground -- certainly it was reported on various traditional media live on the night of.

Interesting. Somehow I follow this place pretty closely, skim the headlines most days and was nevertheless completely unaware of the full facts of this story.

Did you read my original source? It covers this:

"The Secretary of State's Office opened an investigation into the incident at State Farm Arena. Our investigation revealed that the incident initially reported as a water leak late in the evening of November 3rd was actually a urinal that had overflowed early in the morning of November 3rd, and did not affect the counting of votes by Fulton County later that evening."

The affidavit also states, in part, that "observers and media were not asked to leave. They simply left on their own when they saw one group of workers, whose job was only to open envelopes and who had completed that task, also leave," the affidavit said.

Yes, yes, the crooked officials investigated themselves and found they did nothing wrong.

More comments

Federal officers were lazy and/or incompetent in their court filings, and tapped the phone of some minor "advisor" (often a minor role used to burnish credentials) who barely even worked for the Trump campaign. They tapped him after he left the campaign. That's hardly some deep conspiracy. Oh, but the FBI also chatted with a few campaign aides. Oh nooooooooooooo

Yeah, at least this claim about wiretapping the opposition campaign is total bullshit. All the evidence I've seen of actual government official interactions with social media companies was similarly quite tame and also not conspiracy-level. There was some sus stuff going on tone-wise about the Hunter Laptop thing, sure. That's a little worrying. But it wasn't a total hit job either, it wasn't like suspicion was entirely partisan and contrived. A lot of reasonable people at the time thought the whole thing was a bit weird and sketchy.

Unless you have a more specific "actual government official leans on social media to suppress unfavorable story simply because it was unfavorable" evidence to share? This is the standard I think is appropriate. Non-officials can do whatever they want as part of the normal but imperfect media landscape. For example, it's important to note that even the laptop group letter was signed by FORMER intelligence agency people!

  • -14

OK, now do Watergate under your prior that everything is fine.

Almost no one seriously thinks Watergate was fine, including myself. I'm saying that nothing that has happened in recent years comes close. Your language makes it sound like we are still in the J Edgar Hoover days. Which is a pretty fringe claim that doesn't match with what we know.

J6 is an escalation over what? It hardly was an especially powerful riot. It was at a legitimate place of protest. And we've now long known that the main failure was a lack of staffing which is currently at the point where the question is, "Were McConnell and Pelosi stupid, or intentional?"


What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats