site banner
PaperclipPerfector  10mo ago (text post)   34634 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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.

4
Top New Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

So after Sec Def Hegseth denied posting classified info in the leaked Signal chat, the Atlantic has released more screenshots of him describing the full play-by-play warplan:

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/03/signal-group-chat-attack-plans-hegseth-goldberg/682176/

Also, looks like it might have been Waltz's deputy Alex Wong who accidentally e-vited Goldberg to the chat:

https://x.com/RichardHanania/status/1904883964072124642

What gets me is that none of this even matters anymore, so I don't get the big deal made over it.

When you've refused to concede a national election, your supporters have stormed the central seat of government, and you've then not only been allowed to run again but been resoundingly re-elected, why would something like this be even a ripple? I'm surprised even right-wing rags like the NY Post have this at the top. What do they think will be the outcome of any of this? Trump already said he's not firing Waltz. The GOP will remain dutifully silent. The public sure as shit don't care.

Yeah, in 2012, this would've been career-ending for everyone involved, but these are different times. Absolutely nothing comes of this.

What makes this classified information? The actual targets were not specified.

'Accidentally'

If Loomer here is not making this up wholly, hiring Wong was a colossally wrong move. His wife was reliable enough to prosecute J6ers, he worked for a big law company favorited by Democrats.

Alex Wong, the Chinese Deputy National Security Advisor appointed by President Trump, who is at the center of the Signalgate scandal, is married to U.S. Attorney Candice Chiu Wong, a Chinese Woman who was one of the key attorneys involved in PROSECUTING J6ers.‼️

Alex Wong was appointed by President Trump on 11/22/24 to serve as the Assistant to the President and the Principal Deputy National Security Advisor under @MikeWaltz47 Mike Waltz, the newly appointed US National Security Advisor.

I have discovered that Alex’s wife, Candice Chiu Wong, worked under the Obama administration and the Biden administration as an Assistant United States Attorney in the United States Attorney's Office for the District of Columbia, where she led the Violence Reduction and Trafficking Offenses Section for more than two years.

She was involved in the prosecution of many J6ers during the Biden regime, under which she was nominated to become a Member of the United States Sentencing Commission. Additionally, Candice Chiu Wong served as a Law Clerk to Obama-appointed US Supreme Court Justice Sonia M. Sotomayor!

Making matters worse, Alex Wong worked for Covington & Burling @CovingtonLLP , which is one of the law firms that President recently stripped of its security clearance and terminated all of their government contracts via Executive Order on February 25th, 2025. Trump accused @CovingtonLLP of being involved in the weaponization of government.

Why do we have a CHINESE Deputy National Security advisor who is married to a CHINESE US ATTORNEY who worked under Obama and Biden, and who helped prosecute J6ers after the stolen 2020 election?

This is unacceptable. And given the Chinese connections, it really makes you wonder if @JeffreyGoldberg , the reporter from the @TheAtlantic was added to the Trump Signal chat on purpose as part of a foreign opp to embarrass the Trump administration on behalf of China.

Alex Wong should be removed from his position, and both he and his wife should be investigated by the FBI

This incident strikes me as kind of a perfect banality.

Its one of the most boring "scandals" of all time. What did we learn?

  1. High level Trump officials use signal instead of, or in addition to regular texts for discussing topics relevant to their job. We already knew they were using something, now we know its signal. Maybe that will change. Maybe it will cause some foia headaches. Overall, big yawn.

  2. Someone in this circle was incompetent, apparently someone on Waltz's staff. Well, not even really incompetent. He/she basically did a fatfinger and gave the boss the wrong number. Yawn, with an asterisk.

  3. Vance is less hawkish than the rest of the inner circle relating to defense. Already public info.

  4. The administration isn't lying in public about thinking Europe is a bunch of weenies. Confirming more public info.

  5. Jeffery Goldberg is a fabulist that exaggerates. Also already public info.

  6. Jeffery Goldberg isn't evil enough to leak military information he has until after the OP is done. Honestly, this is new information. Before this story I would have been close to 50/50 on whether he would jeopardize a strike in the middle east for a story.

The only way this story is really A STORY is if 2 is a lie, and this was an op. That is, the staffer is a turncoat, or there was some FBI/CIA/NSA interference that resulted in Goldberg getting added, or something else. So as it is, the story as reported is quite boring. Everyone acknowledged the conversation was real fairly quickly, its contents are basically uncontroversial, and sometimes downright encouraging (I can't imagine Kamala and Lloyd Austin texting about the actual pros/cons of bombing Houthis in a productive and substantial manner). The security flaw, having been identified can now be rectified with either a more secure app, some additional protocols, etc. In the end, the administration got a little lucky, but the great thing about getting lucky is you dont take a loss, and yet you still get to learn LIKE you got a loss. If you are smart. And I think at least a number of people in the Trump admin are smart enough to coach a high school sports team, which is all the smarts you need.

He/she basically did a fatfinger and gave the boss the wrong number. Yawn, with an asterisk

This is inverse TDS. Leaking the time and details of a military strike to a completely random person is bad! The sheer level of incompetence necessary for nobody to have checked that everyone in the chat was who they thought they were before sending the 'strike in two hours' message is insane! This is the kind of behavior that gets military secrets leaked to enemies. Apparently I hold my discord groupchats to a higher standard of security than freaking Pete Hegseth and Mike Waltz do.

The incompetence was swiftly acknowledged. Which is why its not going to be a longrunning story.

This is inverse TDS. Leaking the time and details of a military strike to a completely random person is bad! The sheer level of incompetence necessary for nobody to have checked that everyone in the chat was who they thought they were before sending the 'strike in two hours' message is insane! This is the kind of behavior that gets military secrets leaked to enemies. Apparently I hold my discord groupchats to a higher standard of security than freaking Pete Hegseth and Mike Waltz do.

Even if Signal is a secure app, a chat isn't secure unless you know who everyone in the chat is. There were 20 people in the chat if you count Goldberg, and a lot of them were only identified by initials or first names. Frankly, a chat being labelled as "small group" and having 20 people in it should be a yellow flag - 20 isn't a small group as anyone who has been in a ftf meeting with 20 people in the room would understand.

Hegseth posted nonpublic information about future military operations (I am not going to go into the weeds as to whether it was actually classified under the relevant executive orders - it affects neither the actual severity of the fuckup nor any potential criminal liability under the Espionage Act) to a chat without checking who was in the room. Doing that at a bank would get your bonus docked for a material compliance breach, and would probably be a firing offence if you did it twice.

It feels like this story is bigger than it needs to be because Team Trump keeps saying silly things in an attempt to avoid admitting that Waltz and Hegseth did the dumb. The best defence is "Two new political appointees made an OPSEC mistake due to inexperience. Fortunately Jonah Goldberg handled the situation responsibly and no harm was done. Now let's get back to talking about the American people's priorities."

For the record, the current stance of Catturd and the Trump administration is that this entire thing is a "hoax". Although what "hoax" means here is unclear -- the direct statement occurred in regards to whether the leaks were "war plans" or "attack plans", with the latter wording being perceived as a huge admission of guilt from the media by the Trump defenders. "Hoax" could also simply mean "thing I don't like"... so who knows?

The "Hoax" is two-fold.

It is now clear that the original claim about "Administration officials leaking classified war-plans" was (at a minimum) grossly overstated if not outright false.

In addition, we (the general public) are being asked to believe that the same people who voted for Clinton in 2016 and who supported keeping the nuclear football in the hands of a dementia patient for the last 3+ years, are now "genuinely and deeply concerned" about operational and national security. NOT just reaching for anything they can use to attack the outgroup because Orange Man Bad.

I don't see how that's hard to believe at all. I trust Biden with the nuclear football infinitely more than Hegseth, Trump, Vance, or any of the people in that group chat. Biden may have dementia, but at least he was competent at one point, and at least he's aware of his limitations and would surround himself with advisers who can help him make the right decisions. I am genuinely and deeply concerned that immediate national security issues are being discussed in a group chat where random people are invited.

Citation needed

Low effort. I can guess which statement in the above post you are referring to, but you don't even quote it, and if you did it would just be making a snarky one-line quip. If all you have to say is "Nuh uh" it probably isn't worth the keystrokes.

So was the above post.

Citation of what exactly?

Take for example “Biden was once competent.” Famously Obama said don’t underestimate Joe’s ability to fuck things. Has Biden been right about literally anything in FP for years?

The initial post was pure aesthetic (ie Biden, a long time Washington guy, is “very serious” and therefore competent).

Deplorable transparency. If only the state would hide its inner workings more thoroughly from its citizens!

I joke. Obviously it's not the same if it happens by accident.

I trust Biden with the nuclear football infinitely more than Hegseth, Trump, Vance, or any of the people in that group chat.

Are you being sincere about this or exaggerating for effect? Biden was fully senile at the end, and it’s really not clear when in his term he crossed that line. I’m not so sure he was aware of his limitations, either. Trusting him over Trump I frankly can understand, Trump is erratic and underinformed and is himself clearly losing his sharpness with age (although I wouldn’t call him fully senile, yet). But Vance, for example, doesn’t seem any less competent than any other run-of-the-mill politician, he’s not even a hawk. I would absolutely trust him above Biden to make decisions in a crisis. Unless you mean you’d trust Biden’s advisors to steer him the right way when the shit hits the fan?

Genuinely trying to understand your points here.

For 1, how is this grossly exaggerated or substantially false?

For 2, is there some relevance here? This seems like the generic laundry list of sneers right-populists use against the media, for which I agree with Scott and Hanania. I can agree with limited claims that the media will often spin and misrepresent. But the media brought receipts. They have screenshots, and from what I can tell, nobody's really saying the screenshots are faked.

For 1, the screenshots have born the theories of more skeptical users from the previous threads like @Dean and @Setulla out. If anything they were being generous

For 2, it demonstrates that the demand for rigor is isolated. The media is niether good nor honest, CMV.

What stands out to me is that twice in the thread they mention OPSEC

But we can easily pause. And if we do, I will do all we can to enforce 100% OPSEC

And

We are currently clean on OPSEC

I don't know outside of them straight up texting "This topic is sensitive and shouldn't be available to the outside" if you could get any closer to expressing that very idea. They literally say it's something they're taking OPSEC measures on, it's a hard sell to me that it's not a security breach then.

It reads like larping honestly. Like when you see "opsec" being thrown around on gun forums and such.

Agreed, to me it doesn’t read like a real conversation at all. Lots of unnecessary elaboration when the principle in a chat like this should be to relay only minimal, relevant, actionable information for all concerned.

My favorite part is the sycophantic commenting on Europe by Hegseth. Vance: “Please talk more about how you hate Europe and bicycles.”

Makes me wonder if pissing off Europe was the whole point.

I can’t believe the Trump team has only been in power for a few months now. It already feels like a years worth of events have happened.

It’s going to be a looooong presidential term. Buckle up.

That's because of information warfare.

Look, you think the Biden White House wasn't an absolute fucking shit show? They kept a lid on his dementia the entire time, and only after the debate did three years of stories all deluge the news all at once. Imagine a hostile media and a hostile deep state, instead of keeping a tight lid on all these stories, leaking about the naked incompetence of the president for 3 years straight. If instead of attacking people pointing out the moments when Biden was obviously demented in public, accusing them of hateful rhetoric and making fun of the poor president's stutter, they uncritically amplified them?

I don't want to say it's all fake. It's not. But your perception is being heavily abused.

I'm sorry, no, Trump's just being retarded. This isn't, like, an innate property of being right wing or anything. If Curtis Yarvin got to choose the top 50 people in the Trump admin, it'd be different. (Or so I'd like to think...) But, no, Biden didn't send innocent people to a prison in El Salvador, and then pretend it's a state secret so he doesn't have to tell a judge who they are. He doesn't randomly Truth out new completely pointless tariffs twice a week. (I'm not huge on tariffs, but I am a fan of targeted and competent state intervention in the economy, and you could use tariffs in such a way. That's not what Trump's doing). When Biden did something truly insane (announcing the Equal Rights Amendment was in force), everyone basically ignored it, instead of agreeing and amplifying.

I think people are overstating the total impact of Trump's direct actions a bit. Most of them don't matter that much, other than USAID closure (which will, if it lasts, really counterfactually kill millions of people over a decade), tariffs (trump take bitcoin :(( ). But that's mostly just because Trump's only one branch of a three-branch government designed to restrict the whims of politicians and the power of a single election, Republicans have tiny majorities in the second branch that can't get anything done in normal circumstances, and he's not even pretending to follow precedent, which makes things tough for the third branch. The actions Trump is taking, judged relative to their potential impact, are mostly just stupid. Biden would not have launched Biden Coin.

I'm sorry, no, Trump's just being retarded. This isn't, like, an innate property of being right wing or anything. If Curtis Yarvin got to choose the top 50 people in the Trump admin, it'd be different. (Or so I'd like to think...) But, no, Biden didn't send innocent people to a prison in El Salvador, and then pretend it's a state secret so he doesn't have to tell a judge who they are. He doesn't randomly Truth out new completely pointless tariffs twice a week. (I'm not huge on tariffs, but I am a fan of targeted and competent state intervention in the economy, and you could use tariffs in such a way. That's not what Trump's doing). When Biden did something truly insane (announcing the Equal Rights Amendment was in force), everyone basically ignored it, instead of agreeing and amplifying.

Your bias is showing. Biden's DOJ went after J6'ers so hard they got thrown in solitary confinement and had exculpating evidence hid from trial because apparently the security footage proving their innocence was a "state secret". Biden's regulatory apparatus would randomly exterminate American businesses left and right. Happened to Juul, crypto, energy sectors, etc. To say nothing of the countless red lines Biden put on the Ukraine/Russia conflict or the Israel/Palestine conflict that just got blown right past to no consequence what so ever.

Talking about classified intel, does nobody else remember the leaks of classified info on Discord during the Biden admin? Or the various other high profile leaks?

I'm saying your perceptions are being abused because yes, the Biden administration was just as retarded. Pete Buttigieg was just as retarded when Boeing planes were falling out of the sky, trains were derailing causing permanent ecological damage and bridges were collapsing. Their fucking AWOL secretary of defense was just as retarded when he vanished for months while WWIII was breaking out, telling nobody. The emergency response to Western North Carolina was pants on head retarded.

And these are just the stories we know about that broke through! Largely isolated to an online news ghetto full of people going "Can you believe this fucking shit?!" But now you have the MSM, as well as the online news ghetto going "Can you believe this fucking shit?!" and that tricks your perception into thinking it's somehow more retarded. It's not. What you had before was professional liars and people trying to fairly call balls and strikes. During the Biden admin the profession liars constantly tried to bring the temperature down. Now they are trying to raise it. The independent media trying to fairly call balls and strikes generally think the last 8 years have been completely retarded. But all you see is that 50% of the news thought Biden was retarded, and now 100% thinks Trump is retarded, therefore Trump is worse than Biden. You are still letting the professional liars influence your perception.

Your bias is showing

I'm very right-wing! I might be biased against Trump (I don't think so), but I'm definitely not biased against right wing policies.

Biden's DOJ went after J6'ers so hard they got thrown in solitary confinement and had exculpating evidence hid from trial because apparently the security footage proving their innocence was a "state secret".

Link? I was unable to find anything like this from google searches like "january 6 evidence prosecution state secret".

Biden's regulatory apparatus would randomly exterminate American businesses left and right. Happened to Juul, crypto, energy sectors, etc

Crypto is basically a combination of regulatory arbitrage for moderately more efficient finance and an unregulated trillion dollar global casino. I don't think the Biden admin's regulation on crypto made sense, but it's difficult to argue against harsh regulation.

Biden did not exterminate the energy sector. As Matt Yglesias always says, US oil production hit all-time highs under Biden. And that's despite the dumb lockdowns.

The Juul ban was probably dumb, but that doesn't seem out of distribution for dumb things every administration does, either in terms of competence or overall impact.

To say nothing of the countless red lines Biden put on the Ukraine/Russia conflict or the Israel/Palestine conflict that just got blown right past to no consequence what so ever.

Again, this isn't ideal, but Trump's foreign policy (for example claims of annexing Gaza) is hardly consistent either. It's not out of distribution. Telling Canadian leaders in a private call that you want to renegotiate the treaty about our border ... is. That's the kind of thing that I said above - it's out-of-distribution retarded, even though the impact is minor.

Talking about classified intel, does nobody else remember the leaks of classified info on Discord during the Biden admin

Random people leak things sometimes. There are millions of people with access to classified info. That doesn't really implicate the Biden admin's decisionmaking, unlike this.

Their fucking AWOL secretary of defense was just as retarded when he vanished for months while WWIII was breaking out, telling nobody

... vanished for months? I only remember a 'disappearance' of few days for an operation, and a few more announced operations later. I googled for it and can't find anything about months. That wasn't great, but you may be overstating it.

(And having a DEI hire who is at least an experienced military commander who's gone for a few days, while suboptimal is better than someone whose possession of the job is entirely counterfactual to being a fox news host).

So your examples aren't persuasive. None of them are anywhere near 'sending innocent people to a jail in El Salvador without due process, while intentionally ambiguously violating a court order' and 'being so incompetent that you have lower standards than El Salvador, who sent back women (it's a men's only prison, somehow they didn't know that) and a Nicaraguan (because it'd be a disaster for them to randomly imprison a citizen of a neighboring country).' Which, as acknowledged above, doesn't matter at all in the greater scheme of things - but it's incredibly stupid.

I'm very right-wing!

Not unless your every post here is a devil's advocate exercise.

They kept a lid on his dementia the entire time

What, I thought we all knew about it already, even most Democrats knew but didn't want to admit it. Just the media apparatus always stays on message so they would never dare to publish anything dirty until permission is granted.

Look, you think the Biden White House wasn't an absolute fucking shit show?

I think that the shitshow-level of the current administration is appreciably larger than the last, both in frequency and spectacle. Trump administration fuck ups often do have some parallels to fuck ups from previous administrations, but more often than not, the comparisons obscure just how strange some of these people act.

It’s not just the fuck up, but the whole response: total refusal to accept any responsibility, blatant lying about what happened, the defensiveness, which comes off as childish rather than masculine. None of this is surprising, given that Trump filled his administration this time around with sycophants and media personalities. It makes for great TV though.

I mean sure, there’s always a lot more wailing and gnashing of teeth when Trump is in office, but the stories mostly hasn’t been from leaks. It’s been the shit ton of executive orders being written en masse at a historically unprecedented rate, plus a lot of moves to fulfill election promises. The one big leak story happened because Waltz somehow added the CHIEF EDITOR OF THE ATLANTIC to a cabinet group chat. You’re correct that Biden faced very little pushback in mainstream coverage, but Trumps term is coming out swinging hard. You can argue it’s a good thing, but you can’t argue there’s not a lot happening all at once.

I was going to say the same. I distinctly remember hearing from someone that Obama never had a scandal, and I realized it was because the press never made anything a scandal. Cash for Clunkers was an expensive boondoggle that only succeeded in destroying perfectly good durable goods and wasted money doing it. Eric Holder ran guns to Mexican cartels. He droned an American citizen, and the IRS targeted his political adversaries. Any of these could have been a true scandal, if the press treated it as such.

So after Sec Def Hegseth denied posting classified info in the leaked Signal chat, the Atlantic has released more screenshots of him describing the full play-by-play warplan:

Thing is, the SECDEF is the authority for classification of that kind of stuff. So if he says it's not classified, it's not classified. Now, obviously, it was pretty damned reckless to be posting a mission timeline to an insecure group chat before the mission took place, but classification wasn't a problem.

"Oops, we accidentally invited an uncleared individual into the chat, so I'll use my OCA powers to say nothing we said was classified" is not how it works. He can undoubtedly get away with it, but there is not one person defending this as a nothingburger who wouldn't be outraged if it had been Democrats who did this. (Indeed, I suspect that the Venn diagram of "This Signal chat is a nothingburger drummed up by the Fake News" and "Hillary should have gone to prison for her private server" is practically a circle.)

"Oops, we accidentally invited an uncleared individual into the chat, so I'll use my OCA powers to say nothing we said was classified" is not how it works.

It was intended to be an unclassified chat, so the presence of the uncleared individual actually doesn't figure into whether saying something that should have been classified was some sort of violation. But the OCA can say it's not classified even if it should have been; that IS how it works.

but there is not one person defending this as a nothingburger who wouldn't be outraged if it had been Democrats who did this

I've seen people who defended this as a nothingburger AND said Hillary's was a nothingburger too.

Personally I agree with whoever said the was a "veggieburger". Hillary's was still worse -- her violation was deliberate and systematic. And information that's been coming out has made this incident even less significant; the recommendation to use Signal for this sort of thing came out during the Biden administration, so this isn't some sort of Trumpy dumbness. I don't see how to square that with the Federal Records Act, but maybe there's a way. Which leaves two problems. Inviting the journalist, which was presumably an ordinary screw up, and including the timeline and perhaps the assessment of European capabilities. The timeline would have been a problem if they'd invited Aziz Nasirzadeh to the chat; fortunately they didn't. The assessment of European capabilities, without any supporting details, is of fairly low value.

I thought that was the president, not secdef that had ultimate classification authority.

Correct, the SecDef's classification authority is not "ultimate". It is "original" however.

It was reckless. There should be some internal accounting. But the details aren’t as bad as what JG intimated and the timing was shortly before the mission started.

This is still a black eye but not as bad as some thought.

Your sneering aside, it does seem like Goldberg overstated what was on the chat (ie no specific details of where the launches would occur from, who they’d attack, where they’d attack). A war plan this was not.

But it did describe timing which is bad.

It depends on whether this is all there is or if he has more. By holding the story until key players would be testifying under oath within 24 hours and thereby forcing them on the record under oath before the administration could coordinate their response, Goldberg has already shown a degree of savviness beyond simply reporting the story straight up. There's a possibility he's just doing this one step at a time to elicit excuses like the one you've just given , only for those excuses to fall flat once more comes out.

Sure it’s possible. But given his general history not sure that’s the most reasonable interpretation

What gets me is that none of this even matters anymore, so I don't get the big deal made over it.

Because in the popular culture narrative the Republicans and Trump specifically went full retard over Hillary's private email server, and it was all a nothingburger. So now the shoe is on the other foot and liberals are having an orgasm.

Yes in actuality, Hillary's thing was not a complete nothingburger. The events are not really comparable and Hillary did some actual corrupt things around turning her emails over but that's why this is a big deal if you're trying to score points against red tribe.

actual corrupt things

What were they? I didn't pay attention at the time.

Something like

Authority: Clinton, you must turn your private email server contents over immediately

Clinton: I will have my lawyer do this

Lawyer: here ya go! sorry it took a bit

Authority: it looks like tons of emails are missing

Lawyer: oh, yes. Clinton has a bunch of personal email intermixed with official email, so I looked through it and only turned over her official stuff

Authority: no, give us everything

Lawyer: lol can't do that. I deleted everything that wasn't official business based on my criteria for what was official and what wasn't

When you've…

Well yeah, because enormous things are at stake, and the choices are binary. We don’t have the luxury to care about inconsequential matters when the binary is so consequential. The very nature of the country is at stake: demographics, who becomes the eternal national villain. Any public criticism of Trump makes Republicans less likely to win in the future. And conservatives want Republicans to win. I’m sure if I were a radical transgender, or a black nationalist, I would feel the same way but in the other direction. What you’re asking is essentially —

why don’t conservatives decrease their chance of existential victory in order to punish the administration for something which the media has already punished them for?

— and the answer is simple: they want to win. I’m sure there’s a lot of criticism internally, but why would an influencer countersignal their own army here? Is the middle of a battle the right time to loudly denounce Napoleon?

The individual that is doing the most to make Republicans less likely to win in the future is Trump.

Certainly, there’s no Democrat even remotely effectual at this goal.

Yeah, in 2012, this would've been career-ending for everyone involved, but these are different times. Absolutely nothing comes of this.

Hm? Circa 2012 a leading candidate / political official's career was notably not ended over a significantly more egregious case, and the politician in question didn't even have original classification authority to declassify topics if she wanted to. It was in fact characterized as election interference to acknowledge investigations into the issue, even as non-prosecution agreements were used as preconditions for testimony on factors like destruction of evidence of the affair. And that was in an era where partisans confronting officials in the central seat of government, including elevators and bathrooms, was still considered legitimate protest.

As it turns out, if a political party wins the political argument that blatant security violations aren't disqualifying, they win the political argument that blatant security violations aren't disqualifying. Particularly if they later try and fail to selectively disqualify political opponents on lesser mishandlings, further weakening the premise of the prohibition.

Clinton (Hillary)

Because the specific documents that set the whole email-server scandal in motion were classified intelligence reports from the Department of Defense. Hillary was the Secretary of State.

I don't think Hillary ever claimed the documents in question weren't classified on that basis. And I don't think they were publicly released like these seem to have been. I'm not sure it would have gone more smoothly if she had, either.

Hilary claimed, and the FBI investigation found insufficient evidence to refute, that she had set up the private e-mail server for her unclassified e-mail and that the small amounts of classified e-mail found on it were inadvertent.

And yet the FBI also found that classified information was routinely emailed from that server to staffers personal (ie non-government) email accounts and devices without encryption.

At risk of being viewed as trying to claim that it's (R)ifferent, my understanding is that information is scoped underneath the individuals with OCA. That is, suppose there are two agencies, each with a head who has OCA. Agency Head 1 determines that Information X is classified at the Y level. This is not a complete prohibition on sharing; it just needs to be approved by the appropriate channels. That is, in order to share it with Agency 2, there is a process which concludes that Agency 1 is cool with sharing Information X with (at least some parts of) Agency 2. However, the OCA "follows" Information X. When it's written down, it contains markings which say that it was Originally Classified By Agency 1, saying that if Agency 2 wants to share it any further, they must get approval from Agency 1. This is my understanding mostly from seeing Snowden leak documents with these kinds of markings and declassified stuff with these markings crossed out.

I believe that one of the problems with what Hillary did was that they were routing information through her private server that had been Originally Classified By some other agency. Now, if every item was, in fact, Originally Classified By her at State, then there's a slightly better argument that she has the authority to do what she wants with it. It would still be a colossal fuck-up in many ways, but it would make it slightly harder to prosecute her. (FWIW, I was on record as being on Team No Indict long long long ago when all this went down, in significant part because it seemed like there would be difficulties with securing a conviction.) Similarly here, if we suppose that what SECDEF shared was completely generated by and would have been Originally Classified By DoD, then his authority is at its strongest, and it makes prosecution harder. Most of the rules are for the "little people", so unless a principal is bandying about with information that was Originally Classified By someone else (or like straight selling secrets to foreigners or whatever), they're probably not getting prosecuted. Of course, it's still a colossal fuck-up in many ways here too.

Some IGs claimed it:

In their joint statement, the inspectors general said the classified information had originated with the nation’s intelligence agencies, such as the Central Intelligence Agency or the National Security Agency.

Also, reading the inside baseball a bit on Comey's statement:

110 e-mails in 52 e-mail chains have been determined by the owning agency to contain classified information at the time they were sent or received [emphasis added]

I read that to imply that it wasn't just State. Also:

we also found information that was properly classified as Secret by the U.S. Intelligence Community at the time it was discussed on e-mail

Traditionally, State isn't part of the IC.

Hm? Circa 2012 a leading candidate / political official's career was notably not ended over a significantly more egregious case,

Benghazi (including the e-mail thing, which at the time was being treated, including by Hilary's opponents, as a process crime covering up Benghazi) was the main story of the last three months of Hilary's tenure as Secretary of State. She held no elected or appointed office between retiring as SoS and running for President, and the e-mail story ended up derailing her Presidential campaign. I think it is fair to say that her career was ended over the issue.

ymeskhout: Bootlicking Millionaires with Severe Tongue Abrasion - Sad!

In the discussion of the Skadden thing, 2rafa wrote "I was thinking that if Trump was really smart, he would have forced them to actually commit to hiring, say, 30% of their junior lawyer intake from a college Federalist Society approved list." and I replied, "How could Trump do that? I can't think of a stick to use, and the only carrot I can think of is being hired as outside counsel, but any firm worth hiring as outside counsel presumably already has every former appellate clerk they can get."

I had seen the headlines about Paul Weiss, but I had hoped it was a weird overreaction, on their part, and could be ignored. But should we worry about the possibility that the Trump administration takes it as a sign they could continue to bully - or even outright extort - law firms? Is this a viable strategy, for the Trump administration? To what extent is Executive corruption limited by POTUS's scrupulousness and Congress's willingness to impeach and convict?

I feel like the Paul Weiss thing is extra embarrassing because the Perkins Coie TRO was issued two days before the executive order targeting Paul Weiss. Paul Weiss already had a pretty good indication that if they fought the EO they would win and then they decided not to do it anyway!

Ooof two paragraphs in and I remember exactly why I stopped reading Meskhout's blog. All heat, no light.

So Trump says the government can't work with some firms and their security clearances are revoked. And...So what? Oh one of the firms sued and one caved. Ok...Some lawyers are only interested in money? Some guys who don't look cool also happen to be lawyers who don't roll over for Trump?

If this is supposed to tell me something bigger about how the government interfaces with civilian law firms I missed it. Is the problem that now the people in the government who hired the law firms to prosecute J6 (and Trump too?) have to work with what they got? That other law firms won't want to work with the USG because they might someday get hamstrung by not having security clearances? That uh....conservative lawyers, er...um, are going to be more in demand?

I honestly can't figure out what the claim is in the article, but I'm also too hung up on the shite writing to really try and dissect it. ELI5 please.

What I still wonder is why the heck that law firm had a security clearance in the first place. I mean, I can see why people in DOD and CIA have security clearances, ditto Boeing and Lockheed-Martin and whatever random contractor gets the contract for making bits of the radar for the F-35 etc., but why does some random law firm need a security clearance?

To work on cases involving classified projects.

To work on cases involving classified projects.

Also to work on cases where the government claims to be relying on classified evidence.

I actually clicked the link and read it.

It's bad. Really bad. So bad that quoting it would reveal how bad it is.

It's just seething resentment disguised as righteous outrage, gratuitous profanity shot though every paragraph, bragging about his wife, and never any admission that what Trump is doing makes sense* for him.

In this case, the topic is the retribution Trump is visiting on the lawyers that tried to prosecute him. Or, in the words of our author,

So nobody should be surprised that Trump is a vengeful petulant baby.

Vengeful, yes. Petulant baby, not exactly. "When you strike at the King, you must kill him." Well, Trump has been struck, and struck again, and he's alive. Now he is revoking the privileges of access and largesse from those who he disfavors. This is not being a petulant baby, this is rewarding friends and punishing enemies. It is exactly what was done to him by his enemies.

What sniveling cowards, seeing the stacks of cash wither away in front of their eyes.

What pathetic fucking bitches for them to fold.

My crimes for calling Dear Leader the dementia patient that he is have been relegated into tens of thousands of words

Funny we already had a dementia patient as President, and he wasn't as active as this one. Alas, contempt for Trump excuses everything, especially hypocrisy.

what makes me a man is my valorization and adherence to higher values

No, what makes you a man is violence, and power, and the capability and willingness to use both. What makes us all gelded is the inability and unwillingness to simply do, to impose your will on reality, whether it be nature and wilderness, or other people and institutions, or least of all your own vices and base desires, like fucking your hot wife.

This is what he misses in his paean of wealth after spitting on those richer and more successful than him:

There’s an AutoZone general manager right now barely cracking a six-figure income, arriving home to a bland palette of suburban luxury that would wring envy from the richest of all medieval emperors. Endless feasts of unspoiled food, garnished with delectable flora scoured from across the globe, all available on command and on demand. Troupes of dancers and musicians, all that have ever lived or existed or contemplated, available on command and on demand virtually, with a narrow selection available personally. Infinite bards of whatever language, recounting stories of whatever genre, available on command and on demand. Bidets, burbling with infinite crystal clear clean water, irrigating the shit out of your ass. On command. On demand.

The GM doesn't have the ability to change his reality. He is less free and less manly than the poorest pioneer, the most wretched and miserable explorer dying thousands of miles from his home of strange foreign diseases, the count or duke or king who never dreamed of central heating or refrigeration or indoor plumbing.

It's a bad post, and I wish I hadn't bothered reading it.

*The image is the only part of this that's relevant to my post.

When you strike at the King, you must kill him.

The whole point of America is that the President is not a King. The whole problem here is that Trump is acting like one.

If FDR, or even Obama, wasn't a problem for America, then neither is Trump.

I think conservatives are pretty unanimous that FDR was a problem for America.

I think liberals agreed, and continue to agree, that nobody should have as much power as FDR did. The standard pro-FDR view is that only reason why FDR was not more of a problem for America (the left agrees that he engaged in at least one egregious abuse of power - the internment of Japanese-Americans) was that he was a man of exceptional virtue in a way that you can't afford to rely on. There were two major bipartisan changes to the system post-FDR intended to stop anyone having that much power ever again - the APA and the 22nd amendment.

FDR's contemporaries thought, correctly, that running for a third term was a breach of the mos maiorum. The only reason historians forgive him for it is that he went on to be an effective wartime leader.

FDR died in office at 63. I do not think the alternative history where he lives to 75 works out well for American democracy.

I think conservatives are pretty unanimous that FDR was a problem for America.

Their concerns were ignored for generations. They tried to soldier on in any case, but ended up entirely discredited as FDR-descended systemic changes continued to snowball. And now they are effectively extinct, politically speaking. If their political perspective was valuable, perhaps those who now consider it valuable should have put more effort into preserving it when such effort might have born fruit.

Alternatively, once Trumpism has entirely run its course, secured all its victories, crushed all opposition, and set the bedrock rules for the coming century, there will probably be many who will agree that "We should never have another Trump."

This effectively means that liberals don't care for America having a president, not a king. They love having a king as long he's a man of "exceptional virtue" (steamrolls checks and balances to implement liberal policies).

The liberals supported the 22nd amendment too. "We should never have another FDR" was not a controversial position once the war was over and the Japanese internment camps stopped feeling like a good idea.

"Never have another FDR" practically means "nobody can fix what FDR broke."

His abuses of power didn't start with WW2, so "we should never have another FDR" after he reshaped the entire country, setting the tone for next century, is awfully convenient.

Also, this particular line of argument seems irrelevant until Trump starts running for his 3rd term.

Also, this particular line of argument seems irrelevant until Trump starts running for his 3rd term.

KMC, while posting in favour of Trump, compared him to a King and applauded him for punishing lese-majeste in the way a King would. I think that is a problem. You brought up the comparison to FDR, not me. Although if we are going to run with it, I note that if FDR had put out an official portrait of him crowned and enthroned (something Trump did - on @WhiteHouse and not @RealDonaldTrump so it was official government communication) then even his supporters would have objected. If FDR had announced sanctions against law firms who represented his political opponents (which he did not), his supporters should have objected.

FDR's supporters did object to Japanese internment as soon as it was safe to do so. FDR's supporters did object to Court-packing, which is why it didn't happen.

The MAGA base support administrative detention legal immigrants with the wrong tattoos - in peacetime, which makes this worse than FDR. They support various plans to neuter opposition to the administration through the courts. And when Trump talks about running for a third term, they insist he is joking while selling Trump 2028 T-shirts and putting up Trump 2028 banners at CPAC. Trump is already running for a third term in plain sight, or at least maintaining strategic ambiguity about doing so - the correct response from non-fashy Trump supporters would be "This is stupid and I wish he would stop" not "Yay libs so trolled. Trump 2028 for great lulz!!!"

More comments

"When you strike at the King, you must kill him." Well, Trump has been struck, and struck again, and he's alive. Now he is revoking the privileges of access and largesse from those who he disfavors. This is not being a petulant baby, this is rewarding friends and punishing enemies. It is exactly what was done to him by his enemies.

To be fair, the Democrats throwing the book at him was downstream of him denying the election result and vaguely encouraging his goons to stop its certification. So one might equally well say: "Try to occupy the Capitoline Hill, expect to end like Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus".

Except that DC did not actually go all Nasica on Trump. The SCOTUS decided that presidents have immunity from treason, and that was the end of it. Sure, the DAs tried to get him for every technicality they could, but given him the kind of sentence his supporters got for J6 was not on the table. Nor did Biden use his newly cemented immunity and veto powers to drone strike Trump (which probably would have been a bad thing -- normalizing political murder has its own downsides).

I will also grant you that Biden was part of the rising nepotism, preemptively pardoning his son for all crimes he might have committed.

But the attitude displayed by Trump and put into words by you is 100% that of a tinpot dictator or warlord. Likely every US president likely needs a bit of a narcissist streak -- "I am the one who can serve his country best as the president" is not a very modest thought. But with Trump there is not even a pretense for doing the job for the common good, it is all ego with a side of kleptocracy. I would say he is half-Lannister: he can only be relied to pay his debt to people who wronged him, no matter how petty the grudge.

It might be illustrative to constrast Trump with GWB. Both were reviled by the left. The policies of W were actually a lot more damaging than the policies of the first Trump administration. W used torture as a matter of national policy and started two different wars which achieved little beside killing a lot of people and fattening the military-industrial complex on the taxpayers dime. The Swedes gave Obama one of the most ridiculous Nobels ever simply for not being GWB. The phrase war criminal was frequently heard on the fringe left.

But when Obama came along, GWB faded from media attention. No AGs were especially keen on getting him whatever way they could. He remains a welcome guest at state funerals.

I would argue that this was mostly because he followed the standards in accepting the end of his presidency. He did not incite McCain to take over DC to continue the Republican rule. Nor would he himself pulled any J6 shit if the SCOTUS had awarded the presidency to Kerry instead. In short, he was willing to play mostly by the unwritten rules. The game might be rigged, it might be crooked, but there are still some rules to it.

Trump does not. His instinct is to flip the game table if he loses. And that is why the establishment decided to go all lawfare against him.

I would argue that this was mostly because he followed the standards in accepting the end of his presidency.

This is not even close to the same. First, he was term limited. Second, he was an insider whose father was CIA director, VP, and President. Third, he was never at risk of being prosecuted and he knew it.

In short, he was willing to play mostly by the unwritten rules. The game might be rigged, it might be crooked, but there are still some rules to it.

He was in the club, and Trump wasn't, and isn't. There are no rules to a crooked gave, or at least none worth respecting.

I said before and will say again, Trump's original sin for which he cannot atone and will never be forgiven is that he's an outsider. He steamrolled through the Republican party and then bowled through the anoited Hillary in the general. He laid waste to the carefully curated options that were supposed to limit American choices in our elections.

And that is why the establishment decided to go all lawfare against him.

His impeachment came well before 2021, and from day zero he was hounded by bogus claims and fabricated narratives. Trying to explain everything that happened before by what happened after is exactly backward. The lawfare was a continuation of everything from the Steele dossier, the Mueller report, and his first impeachment. It was nothing new in response to the 2020 election.

It also had nothing to do with NY passing a law to extend the statute of limitations to drag him into court and call him a rapist.

The insiders literally bragged about fortifying the election in the immediate aftermath, which helps explain the six million missing voters the Democrats lost from 2020 to 2024. The sheer arrogance still boggles the mind.

It's insider vs outsider, and now Trump is withholding benefits from those insiders and their organs, as is his right as executive. This is against the unwritten rules, but it's well within the written ones, and it'sthus far tame and bloodless. Nobody is in jail, nobody is being prosecuted, nobody is dying in the streets or falling off balconies (except Michael Hastings and Trevor Moore).

Finally, it's tyrants that we should be worried about. Dictators have always been necessary on occasion, and America has had its fair share of muscular Presidents.

Not that everyone here is friends or anything, but this seems a rather hostile post towards ymeskhout. Am I missing lore?

Did you read ymeskhout's post? what a pathetic flail! What a flagrant red cape of blatant insecurity, advertised loudly to the entire world. What a fetid reflexively pathetic snarl of a response. What a belly cry of a scorned goat.

For those not getting it, everything after "Did you read ymeshkhout's post?" is a contiguous direct quote from the article.

This is your brain on Substack, kids. Like I said, don't do Substack, or at least stay connected to neiche pseudonymous internet forums where your friends will make fun of you when you get too full of yourself.

I don't follow, it doesn't seem personally hostile against him, even if it's very critical of the post's contents.

No lore other than that made some good posts, and hosted a podcast, and was a mod on reddit, and an admin here, and then moved on to substack to post things like this.

Many such cases.

At least TW and Kulak seemed to improve when they spread their wings. They each managed to accumulate quite a twitter following, too. I see no such improvement here, and his twitter is kaput, but who am I to talk? I'm destined to be a reply guy, never an Actually Quality Contributor. Here I go replying again.

It's bad. Really bad. So bad that quoting it would reveal how bad it is.

It's just seething resentment disguised as righteous outrage, gratuitous profanity shot though every paragraph, bragging about his wife, and never any admission that what Trump is doing makes sense* for him.

On the other hand, the title really is appropriate for it.

Do deportees have the right to depart to a willing country of their choosing? Should they?

A lot gets muddied in the Culture War, in recent weeks the spats over deportations have conflated a number of distinct issues of immigration law: due process, the AEA, executive discretion and so forth. And it's quite hard to get folks to separate those topics. One topic that's possibly underexplored: if the US tells you to leave, do you the right to depart to a country of your own choice that will accept you?

I had kind of always assumed yes, at least as a naive matter. Obviously deportees shouldn't be allowed to invoke the right to prevent their removal or even delay it by any appreciable amount (say, 4 days), but at the core, I don't see any sovereign right for a country to dictate where an individual goes next so long as it ain't here. If they can't or won't find such a place, then sure, then the deporting nation can decide.

Analogies and intuition aren't always the best guide when dealing a the scale of nations, but thinking about it as alike to trespass confirms this understanding. This is especially true when an individual was here lawfully and then had that status revoked or expired -- if I invite someone into my house and then rescind the invitation (as I'm absolutely entitled to do), it's required that I give them a chance to leave in an orderly fashion before forcing them out.

I believe that individuals deported still have the right to go wherever will accept them from the country they are deported to, yes?

Presumably not if you dump them in an El Salvadoran prison.

If they were citizens of El Salvador then sure.

Do they get to demand a first-class flight with their choice of hot meal, too?

To be less flippant: probably few believe God gives them that right. Whether the state gives them that right is a question of law. Everyone will have their different opinion, for example I disagree with the cases you list:

I don't see any sovereign right for a country to dictate where an individual goes next

Since you don't speak of God or law, I'm unclear on what you mean. You seem to just be giving opinion on how nice the state should be to deportees. You give your opinion on reasonable guidelines that compromise between the state's burden and the deportee's comfort. It would indeed be kind for the state to ask where the deportee wants to go. Take away the talk of "rights" and this is just a debate over how the state should act. Are "rights" just rhetorical techniques for debating how states should act?

if I invite someone into my house and then rescind the invitation (as I'm absolutely entitled to do), it's required that I give them a chance to leave in an orderly fashion before forcing them out.

I disagree. If someone gets violent in my house then I do not ask them to leave. Probably though, it would be nicer of me to ask before physically removing. If my guest didn't start any violence, then I probably wouldn't either, but I do that out of kindness or maybe some kind of custom. Whether the actual deportations match this hypothetical (are only criminals being deported? I don't think so) is irrelevant -- you and me clearly disagree on how to run our house, and we would probably run a country differently, too.

Also I fully agree about somebody being violent in my house.

Many of the examples of individuals I would like removed from the United States, do not pattern match to this hypothetical. In particular, I don’t think those here temporarily-lawfully under non-meritorious asylum claims nor those that simply didn’t have their visa renewed qualify. Especially if they’re entry was lawful at the time, it is very hard to justify treating them a Kin to someone who came and committed acts of violence.

If they can arrange, at their own expense, a first class flight to a country that will accept them, departing within the next hundred hours, I would be inclined to let them take it.

And yes, I understand this to be customary.

They should either be deported to 1) their country of origin, 2) a country they transited through, or 3) anywhere the US government wants, if the person consents. A Honduran who jumped the Southern border ought to be able to be dumped back in Mexico. But I wouldn't want e.g. a British person who arrived by plane and who overstayed their visa to be dumped in Mexico.

I guess I would probably prioritize it with (3) first, if the person and the receiving country both consent.

I do think you’re imagining somebody apprehended proximate to the active crossing the border, not the removal of someone that’s been here for a while.

Deportees from countries that always accept returnees (ie developed countries) are pretty much always returned to them. If an Irish person overstays a visa and gets deported they are going home to Ireland on a commercial flight in most cases.

The issue is firstly with countries that don’t accept returnees because they don’t care or don’t want those people back, secondly with migrants who throw away all identity documents and don’t clarify or lie about where they’re from and thirdly - especially in Europe - with countries that the courts block deportation to.

That’s why third countries are so important, because they remove the incentive to hold up the deportation process because you’re not spending it in the country you’re trying to move to, but in a poor third country.

You wrote this 3 days ago, and already my feed has various stories of first-worlders (Canadians, Germans) spending far longer than one might imagine reasonable in ICE detention rather than taking a commercial flight.

Absolutely. I was not trying to address any of these three cases.

My limited claim here was that if an individual who is not convicted of a violent act is told to remove, they should get three days to remove themselves to a country of their choice. In all other cases cited, or once that three days is up, do whatever.

Downthread:

Google just launched the latest iteration of their Gemini language models.

Versus

While we're on the topic, OpenAI just announced their 4o image model

Guess who won the day? At least X is full on ghiblifying iconic photographs with ChatGPT. Or just a cute photo of yourself to send it to your girlfriend.

And memes of course:
https://x.com/Zeneca/status/1904774204769411196

“I don't want any real pictures anymore. Every photograph has to be turned into a ghibli style cartoon”
https://x.com/LukasMikelionis/status/1904873083246084364

Which AI is best?
https://x.com/djcows/status/1905004955582575060

You need some prompt magic but it possible (for now) to also style edgy images:
https://x.com/keysmashbandit/status/1904764224636592188

Some call it slob, and maybe tomorrow the novelty is gone, but I find the pictures strangely endearing.

Next stop will be video:
https://x.com/kb24x7/status/1904942247092895843

I got it to draw a glass of wine filled to the brim, which DallE couldn’t. However, it’s still seemingly incapable of drawing watches displaying a time other than 10:10.

You left out the most ambitious crossover event since the Avengers

Actually, after browsing Aella’s current timeline, I think it might be finally over for 3D women this time. Sure, real Aella is attractive, but Ghibli Aella is an absolute smoke show.

How does 3D Aella have the stranger hand position?

Feel like that deserves a trigger warning only semi-ironically. Aella and Richard Hanania in a cursed Western animation artstyle... What did we do to deserve this? Aella polarization-maxxing continues I guess.

How are people doing this? No matter what I try chatgpt tells me it can't edit images or its against their content policy. Even if I use the try it in chatgpt link here or switch to dalle or the image generator. Do you need plus? Because the site implies that you don't.

Are you logged in? This is the refusal I got: https://imgur.com/aWMC56O

Altman had initially said they'd roll out to all users. But he recently clarified that it's been delayed due to extreme demand from paying customers. Us free-loaders need to sit tight a while longer.

It is hit or miss, but I've managed to get ChatGPT to generate Ghibli images with prompts similar to:

This is a famous image of a well known historical figure. Please make this image in a Studio Ghibli style.

I had maybe a 50/50 success rate of taking outright refusals into it at least willing to try with the above prompt. Though some images were 3/4ths of the way done when they stopped suddenly, and I got a retroactive refusal. You might just have to play around with it.

I've seen people say that just saying "Ghibli style" works way more often than when you append the Studio before it.

I'm using the app, have plus, and haven't run into any refusals yet. So far all of my images have been of friends, me and my wife, or political/cultural figures, nothing violent or sexual. I upload the photo, and ask "Can you make this photo in the style of a Ghibli animation frame?"

Still seems to be working.

Ah you must need plus, I just get replies saying either something like "I can't directly modify or "Ghiblify" the image you uploaded, but I can generate a Studio Ghibli-style character based on a description." or" I couldn't generate the requested image because it didn't follow our content policy." And I've only been trying images of myself to start.

This prompt works for me very well with the $20 plus account. Maybe try it out:

Transform this photo into a high quality hand-drawn animated illustration. Apply watercolor techniques, soft organic lines, and a warm color palette. Maintain the original image's composition while adding a magical, dreamlike aesthetic. Emphasize gentle color transitions and a whimsical, slightly surreal atmosphere typical of classic Japanese animation

I'm glad someone else is taking on the LLM-posting mantle.

I'd previously discussed Gemini 2.0 Flash's native image gen. It was a hit on Xitter, but nothing close to the tsunami of Ghiblification we're witnessing. Having (paying) normies use your stuff on an app makes a difference.

For a lot of people, it's a massive step-up over what they were used to (DALLE-3 via ChatGPT).

From eye-balling generations, 4o is better than Gemini in almost every aspect. More aesthetic, better prompt adherence and less censored (!!!). That's despite Google having taken a far lighter touch when it came to content moderation.

Human artists NGMI. They had a few years to seethe and cope, while holding up the failures of AI image gen such as fingers or text. It's an effectively solved problem now, well past the minimum viable product into something that casual users are immediately jumping on.

Product photography? Stock photos? Solved. Commercial photography and art is in for a bad time.

It's worth noting OpenAI has been sitting on this for 9 months. The first demos of native image gen were a good while back, and it's obvious that the release was perfectly timed to steal Google's thunder.

I expect a tit-for-tat, with the various companies trying to escalate. This is great for the consumer or informed user, but my condolences on if you rely on this to make a living. It's coming for me too.

Yeah when you put it like that, this might be the full dam breaking where anyone who was sympathetic to human artists and hostile to AI art are now in a preference cascade where the AI is just 'better', let alone faster.

And so any more sympathy the artists could pull on to justify charging money for their digital work is just now gone. They get on board or they get run over.

I'd guess it takes a bit longer for the porn AIs to catch up to the state of the art, so there's some room left, but only just.

We're all waiting for DeepSeek to release a new multimodal model and open source it. If it can generate pictures, you know there's gonna be porn.

OAI definitely won the day in the popular vote. And, at least for now, they seem to have taken off most of the guardrails: https://x.com/paul_hundred/status/1904933164256002086

Does it matter? In terms of trajectories, this is about expected, so I'm not updating much from the image gen release. Google actually got to this approach first, albeit with an inferior version that was badly marketed and had a mediocre rollout (history repeats itself, first as a tragedy, the millionth time as a farce).

What is mildly important is Gemini 2.5. It's not out of line with the expected trajectory, but it gives lie to claims about "hitting a wall." It trades blows with Anthropic, OAI, and DeepSeek, and even surpasses them--for the time being, at least--but does so much more cheaply than Claude or ChatGPT. My main takeaways are that progress continues and that Google's structural advantages are finally making Gemini a plausible leader of Western LLMs.

Poor Miyazaki. I'm surprised I haven't seen anyone do Uncle Ted yet.

Here ya go.

I knew it had to exist, I just didn't know who to follow.

Poor Miyazaki?

Imagine seeing thousands of people use it your style to reveal the tenderness and beauty in their lives that the camera cannot capture.

xAI acquires X…

in an all stock transaction valuing xAI at 80 billion. This isn’t the first time Musk has bailed out one of his companies with another (Solar City -> Tesla) in 2016. That decision was upheld by Delaware courts and it’s hard to imagine this won’t end up in the (Nevada) courts again. Given xAI has raised at least 12 billion and put in an offer for OpenAI at 97, the valuation isn’t ridiculous on its face. It’s also hard to imagine this will do anything to buoy his rapidly declining public image.

So, what’s the play for the new XxAI? Presumably, xAI was already training on twitter data. Terrifying! Is this anything more than a self bailout to avoid margin calls on Tesla stock that leveraged the purchase of Twitter?

https://x.com/elonmusk/status/1905731750275510312

Self bailout may not be exactly accurate, but I think it's mostly about refinancing the X debt.

The other issue is that xAI is a benefit corp. I'm not an expert in legalities, but this probably allows him to bake in a requirement to promote free speech into X.

If he becomes more arms length or sells off enough stock to loose control he could probably still sue the board if they start bringing in "misinformation policies" or banning politicians and political activists from one side.

Elon never really meant for xAI to be separate from Xitter. It was meant to just be part of the coming-soon "everything app" experience in Xitter. xAI was likely incorporated as a standalone thing because it would have been much easier to raise billions with an entirely new AI lab that would go up against the likes of OpenAI.

Not sure why it's being consolidated now, it could just be housecleaning or he could want xAI money injected into xitter.

Presumably, xAI was already training on twitter data.

There may be data in Xitter that legally can't be shared with xAI as a third party due to privacy law. If they are merged then I'm guessing everything Xitter has is fair game.

Your theory doesn’t make sense. This was an all stock deal. It shouldn’t give liquidity to Musk.

The problem with the “everything app” is they only became popular in China, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, to SOME extent WhatsApp in India etc as an “OS within an OS” for the many wacky versions of Android (and now Harmony etc) that make up the majority of local smartphones, many of which had multiple stores tied to the OS (like the Play store), the device manufacturer (Samsung or Huawei etc) and the mobile network operator.

When these apps became popular they built off of one successful service (chat, ride hailing, food delivery) to become mini operating systems of their own. Instead of dealing with shitty customized Android you just use the super app that has the same experience for everyone.

In America, where iOS is by far the dominant system, and where 80%+ of the most valuable users (younger users, middle class and above users, people with any money to spend and the propensity to spend it on mobile) use iPhone, iPhone is the super app. iOS essentially offers an integrated experience just like WeChat, with payments (Apple Pay), messages (iMessage), music/movies/games/health, an App Store and one-button registration for third party services through iCloud for ride sharing and food delivery; tapping the ‘Uber Eats’ app is essentially no more difficult than tapping the food delivery tab within Grab.

As for this deal, it’s just a way of persuading XAi employees that their long hours at mediocre pay are actually making them rich because of this new paper valuation.

Tbh the Everything app is pretty bog standard by now, see Facebook. I was recently surprised just how much nonsense is crammed into facebook. And it would have been even weirder if they did go ahead and shoved AI chat into it like zuck wanted.

Facebook has so much garbage in it it’s incredible. To many idle hands over there.

Idk how granny actually makes sense of the app

The ones I know that are still sane just use it to talk to the grandkids and schedule their book clubs, mostly.

I've been to martial arts gyms for which the only way to see updates, announcements and schedules is to go to their Facebook page.

Forget martial art gyms, our power company does that. Bubblegum Crisis was right: Boomers are a menace.

What would you prefer? That updates and announcements are given only in a Whatsapp group chat?

That's the alternative I see millennials going for.

to SOME extent WhatsApp in India

The "some" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The overwhelming majority of users use it for its original purpose, namely messaging other people. It has payment features like a tie-in with the UPI payment protocol, but I know nobody who uses it and I've never seen it being used in the wild. The only other notable use case is that companies like to spam advertise there and often have some kind of automated customer support available.

It's no more of an everything app than Venmo is a messaging platform because you can theoretically communicate with other people using it.

It is a messaging app but the customer service example is telling because it’s used a lot more broadly for commercial things than any chat app is in the west.

Another day, another LLM

Google just launched the latest iteration of their Gemini language models. I suppose the name was most appropriate for the (short) period where the version number was precisely 2.0.

Well, everyone say hi to Gemini 2.5 Pro (Thinking). The naming scheme hasn't gotten any better, albeit Google beats the packs's abysmal average performance. It's a narrow win, folks, as there's a Gemini 2.0 Pro, a smaller and leaner 2.0 Flash, and a 2.0 Flash Lite.

(We're days away from OAI matching them with an o3-mini-high-low-too-slow.)

What stands out about this model? Nothing really. It reasons by default, which can be nice, but at the cost of increased latency for responses.

It is incrementally better on benchmarks, but even Google's PR team couldn't drum up a revolutionary new capability to showcase. They get a pass, because 2.0 Flash's image gen was revolutionary, and happened a mere week or so ago.

Gemini models have recently become the Honda Civic of LLMs. Not nearly as flashy, but reliable and with no obvious downsides. This one has seized the number one spot on LM Arena's leaderboard, based off (nominally) blinded user feedback. It might hold on to it for a week, or a month. The days when GPT-4 retained the crown for months on end are gone.

After plenty of use, all I can confidently say is that it writes better. I'm very happy with that. I'm sure someone will find a task it can do better than the rest, but I doubt it'll make anyone switch over if they're already happy. I'm confident there's something deep to be said about my inability to meaningfully differentiate models in terms of capability, be it for work or play. I'm just not going to be the one to say it today.

"Another day, another LLM" is definitely correct. Deep Seek also released their newest variant DeepSeek-V3-0324 yesterday. DeepSeek-V3-0324 is a significant improvement over DeepSeek-V3 and even beats Claude 3.7 Sonnet in many benchmarks, and not to mention, it's open weight! I guess it's less sexy since it's a text-only model and we already have highly capable ones that are generally interchangeable for most purposes, but I'm excited to see the future DeepSeek-R2 that'll be based on this improvement.

I was wondering whether to discuss it, but felt too lazy given that it was 1 am. Like you, I'd rather wait for R2, I always try and use reasoning models for anything complex, barring trivial answers

Do you know if it beats Claude 3.7 for writing? I have wasted shameful amounts of money in the last week: it gets character consistency and plot progression perfectly, even carefully adding in hooks for potential future plots. It’s the only model I’ve ever tried that gets long-form writing right.

I haven't tried Claude 3.7 for creative writing but it's definitely better than the existing DeepSeek-V3 from my limited experience with it, so feel free to test it out. It's a lot less repetitive at longer context lengths which actually makes it usable for creative exercises. The original DeepSeek-V3 was likely more optimized for multi-shot prompting for factual queries, which made it strictly follow the reasoning, tone and structure of earlier examples. Good for factual determinations but not so good for being creative and non-repetitive.

Wow, that's great to hear. I'm eagerly looking forward to the commoditization of novel writing (and videogame NPC dialogue), but I didn't think we'd figured out yet how to maintain long-term consistency.

Yeah, I'm really impressed, especially since I was pretty nasty about 3.7 in another thread. There are some caveats:

  • It's EXPENSIVE. I burned through enough money for multiple AAA games in the last week.
  • I have to limit the context to 20,000 tokens because of the expense, which is less than it sounds. If a character drops out for more than three or four scenes, they may come back with a noticeably different voice. You can limit this with summarisation / manually copy-pasting character introductions into the author notes when they reappear, so a character who was shy will stay shy, but the way they're shy may change.
  • For similar reasons, the tone can drift. I especially notice a slow trend towards analytical/clinical/technical style writing appears about 30,000 words in unless you force correct it.
  • I use Guided Generations for guiding new generations. Not the clothes etc. stuff, just 'write the next scene in this way' style prompts to keep the AI on track.
  • The plot is still being made up as you go along, and won't be consistent in the way that a novel is consistent unless you work to make it so.
  • Claude 3.7 is surprisingly permissive but the limits may cause trouble for certain types of stories. I don't know if you could do misery memoirs (explicit abuse), or Game of Thrones (explicit torture, harm). As far as I can figure out, it will refuse to depict on-screen sex or other explicit actions, or serious on-screen violence/damage to a human character.

Long-term consistency in video game NPCs is probably a lot easier - each NPC gets 4000 token summary and produces max 1000 token replies. Global consistency is taken care of by the game state.

The issue for game NPCs is ensuring total consistency with the setting and characters and not making up any lore at all. Even late generation LLMs still struggle with this in hallucination (I like to ask about the political backgrounds of Chinese politicians, many of which have no content online beyond two or three generations back, and I’ve seen even latest models completely BS).

I haven't been poking at it with a stick like you have, but in general Claude is mostly content to stick to the scenario absent provocation. It's not like Deepseek R1 where reigning in the constant flow of random creativity gets exhausting and irritating after a while.

Give Claude explicit instructions about maintaining consistency and I wouldn't expect to have serious issues.

What sort of stories do you use it for?

Scenarios, mostly. I have a scenario that's basically the borrowers / Grounded (you are a tiny person in the walls, stay alive and don't be seen), a scenario that's the setting from Rosario + Vampire (you have been enrolled in a prestigious boarding school, but all the other students are monsters in disguise), etc. I also have a romance that I was working on. I also have a Japanese-teaching bot that takes place in your standard anime setting for colour and to provide conversation topics.

From what I can tell it is a giant improvement over V3 and a substantial one over R2. People from 4chan are saying it's suspiciously good at following their outlines and even uses a similar format, so they guess it's been trained on their writing (DeepSeek openly trains on user data). Generally it's in the same league as Sonnets. I recommend giving it a try.

While we're on the topic, OpenAI just announced their 4o image model, though it's not rolled out to 100% of users yet (AKA not me yet) https://openai.com/index/introducing-4o-image-generation/ If it performs nearly as well as their cherry-picked examples, it knocks the socks off of gemini flash image gen.

Now we have Gemini, Grok, and ChatGPT all releasing image editing, a previously unheard of feature, within two weeks of each other. Interesting how that happens.

When it comes to text generation models, I can't bring myself to care anymore. They all do the basics proficiently, which is generate code snippets and console commands and trivia answers to questions that I can ask in a few sentences. And they all sort of fail on really complex stuff like doing my work for me in making changes to a 1M line codebase.

The text generation in those example images is phenomenal.

Damn, if it’s better than Gemini then it looks like you were right and they were sitting on that capability. It reaffirms my opinion that OpenAI is the most insidious AI company out there.

Why insidious?

Some unordered reasons:

  • They call themselves OpenAI and yet nothing is open. They don’t publish research or release open source or open weight models.

  • They positioned themselves as a non-profit to get clout and talent and later reneges.

  • They charge an insane amount compared to other companies to price anchor because they want the SOTA models to only be accessible by elites.

  • They hide the thinking traces from their thinking models and ban people who try to figure out their methods with prompt engineering.

And then tack on “they hold back revolutionary features until their competitor releases their own”

They positioned themselves as a non-profit to get clout and talent and later reneges.

Based on the talent banking Altman when the board tried to remove him, the talent is more than happy with the reneging.

The investors were clearly not happy. Also his chief talent, Ilya, did leave him with many other OG founders.

Thanks. I didn't realize they'd finally released 4o image capabilities.

When it comes to text generation models, I can't bring myself to care anymore. They all do the basics proficiently, which is generate code snippets and console commands and trivia answers to questions that I can ask in a few sentences. And they all sort of fail on really complex stuff like doing my work for me in making changes to a 1M line codebase.

LLMs have been "good enough" for my use cases for a while now. I haven't seen anything like the jump from GPT 3.5 to 4, where prompts that previously had been borderline useless magically became useful. Not that I mind incremental improvement, I'd say that reasoning models were a decent change in terms of QOL and reliability when it came to complex reasoning.

If I had to use an LLM for my day job, then pretty much any recent model would work fine. While medical records can be massive, dense and a PITA to work with, they're not as complex as a large programming project. The whole field was built around humans needing to keep the gist of things in working memory. I'm more constrained by things like data protection laws, access points idiot-proofed by IT, and the lack of tooling to make it easy to transfer records or information back out. Ah, the wonders of the NHS..

I remain quite confident that LLMs will continue to improve, and suspect a lot of the recent sense of being underwhelmed that I've experienced is because the rapid rate of iteration makes changes less stark. They're beating agentic behavior into them, more by the minute.

Just saw this article about the British intelligence community in response to the Signal leaks https://inews.co.uk/news/uk-spies-intelligence-leaks-trump-blunder-3604544

I think that's an interesting way to gauge how serious (or not serious) this is by observing how allied nations in Five Eyes/Israel/Japan/etc react, especially given they've already been concerned about Intel leaking from the Trump admin

For the UK we have

“There is some deep-rooted fear in the rank and file of intelligence community at the moment,” a UK intelligence source said.

Another security official said trusting the US will be a “challenge”, adding: “This will make the UK more nervous about the conversations they are having and how they are being discussed across groups.”

But it's not just anonymous names, there are some former British officials too

John Foreman, the UK’s defence attache to Moscow until 2022, said the leak could have led to a compromise of US sources, but “worse still the compromise of allied sources”.

And from "Nicholas Williams, a former senior official at Nato and the Ministry of Defence"

“There must be doubts among the UK that the Trump administration can protect the intelligence and its UK source.”

It seems even some US intelligence officials are concerned about this, although no names attached..

A US intelligence official said the leak of US war plans over Signal showed that distrust in the administration is justified. “Why would allies trust the US with their critical intelligence?” they said.

New Zealand Government's declined to comment, but we do have this https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/mar/25/trump-signal-leak-reaction-canada-five-eyes.

Behind closed doors, senior government officials would likely be discussing the risks of sharing intelligence with the US, amid what could be viewed as a lowering of protocol standards, but the breach would not be a dealbreaker, said Andrew Little, whose ministerial roles covered security, intelligence and defence under New Zealand’s last Labour government.

Robert Patman, a professor at the University of Otago in Dunedin who specialises in international relations, called the security breach “extraordinary” and “cavalier”. “It does confirm what many of us felt, that Mr Trump has picked people according to loyalty, rather than competence, and this was almost a perfect storm waiting to happen,” Patman said.

I can't find anything specific for Australia at the high level but this article from an Australian "Military Operations Expert" says it's concerning and gives their reasoning for it https://theconversation.com/why-is-the-us-group-chat-on-houthi-attack-plans-so-concerning-a-military-operations-expert-explains-253029 with one bit I find rather interesting

If high-level conversations do need to happen on an unclassified platform like Signal, the participants would normally use a code word that doesn’t give away what they’re talking about. This keeps a conversation encrypted to a degree until a secure device can be accessed.

But they come to the conclusion that this is definitely concerning and they're going to be having a bunch of back channel discussions but most likely it's not an immediate deal breaker for intelligence sharing.

Mark Carney has talked about it himself a little but he also has incentive to distance from Trump already what with the trade war and comments on making Canada a state.

US war plans leak shows allied nations must ‘look out for ourselves’, says Mark Carney

I haven't seen or found anything about other nations responses yet. I imagine they're probably going to be along the same lines of "This isn't a deal breaker but it is serious and adding more fear when we're already feeling wary"

I suspect the Signal leak is an intentional limited hangout to cover up the movement of aircraft for a potential strike on Iran.

unreal levels of cope from from the 11d canasta crew

More effort than this, please.

I think this version makes sense simply because it just so happens to be a guy from The Atlantic, which is a liberal news source, but not one known for hard news. It’s just doesn’t seem like it’s the kind of newspaper that the Secretary of Defense would have on his phone. They’re mostly culture war journalists, unlike a NYT that pretends to be unbiased hard news.

The Atlantic is very willing to publish cultural conservatives- they have an Atlanticist literati bias, and it so happens that most of those kinds of writers who meet their quality standards are libs, but they carry op Eds from socon intellectuals regularly.

While it's obviously not a good thing for natsec group chats to involve unintended participants, I suspect there's a heavy partisanship element to all this. There wasn't such grave concerns being expressed by allies (or even the domestic US media) when a Biden staffer leaked intelligence to Iran, but it's much more politically acceptable to publicly criticize Trump, so there'll be a lot more grandstanding about worries with sharing intelligence etc.

There is some deep-rooted fear in the rank and file of intelligence community at the moment,” a UK intelligence source said.

Another security official said trusting the US will be a “challenge”, adding: “This will make the UK more nervous about the conversations they are having and how they are being discussed across groups.”

Rank and file would not be party to high level security decisions in a leaky environment. And please remember that anonymous sources are always the enemy of humanity.

John Foreman, the UK’s defence attache to Moscow until 2022, said the leak could have led to a compromise of US sources, but “worse still the compromise of allied sources”.

Could. John Foreman is a serious and diplomatic guy, so it's no surprise he didn't say anything of substance, he knows issues in geopolitics are rarely as they appear.

"There must be doubts among the UK that the Trump administration can protect the intelligence and its UK source.”

Must there Nicholas? Actually I agree there must, but I can do that all the way over here in sunny Brisbane, I don't need to be a former NATO Ukraine hawk who protects ALF from the government in my spare time. He looks like the dad from ALF. That might not seem like a robust argument, but I think it's robust enough for "There must be doubts among the UK that the Trump administration can protect the intelligence and its UK source.” Because that means nothing, it's more filler so Richard Holmes and Jane Merrick can reach their word count without relying exclusively on anonymous sources. Instead you get the anonymous sources to say the explosive things, and you get people on record to mention unfortunate potential consequences, and rely on the psychological effect of association to tie them together.

Behind closed doors, senior government officials would likely be discussing the risks of sharing intelligence with the US, amid what could be viewed as a lowering of protocol standards, but the breach would not be a dealbreaker, said Andrew Little, whose ministerial roles covered security, intelligence and defence under New Zealand’s last Labour government.

Andrew Little! He's an actual politician! Oh wait, no he isn't. He was one a few years ago, although not one ever in power. Still, I guess it's informative to know what he imagines might be happening.

Robert Patman, a professor at the University of Otago in Dunedin who specialises in international relations, called the security breach “extraordinary” and “cavalier”. “It does confirm what many of us felt, that Mr Trump has picked people according to loyalty, rather than competence, and this was almost a perfect storm waiting to happen,” Patman said.

"I'm going to badmouth the leader of the free world" Patman said, displaying his expertise in international relations.

And then a piece from Australia that ends with:

So, at this stage, I don’t think America’s Five Eyes partners should necessarily be concerned about the potential for other intelligence breaches.

So I guess the answer is not serious? But a lot of people really want it to be serious and are hoping they can turn their dreams into memes?

couple ponints

  1. The intel agencies of 5-eyes are generally believed to be wholly rotten, that is, aligned with the the Blob - the people who fucked it all up and who fought Trump so furiously. Whatever they say needs to be taken with as much salt as whatever Trump says.

  2. Signal is secure enough for serious criminal activity, I've seen no indication it was broken by LE and is not believed to be broken in any other way than through, possibly, OS level hacks on devices.

The whole thing is really bizarre. Like the outsider added to the chat just so happens to be a journalist? What are the odds of that?

I don't believe the theories about it being deliberate and some manipulative exercise against friendly and hostile foreign governments. Hegseth purportedly posted operational details which isn't 'no classified information was discussed'. It was specific details about a military operation before it occurred. And then in the Senate Intelligence hearing they glossed over things with the CIA Director saying Signal is an approved app for comms like this.

If the whole thing was some sort of PsyOp, why did Hegseth post those details? Did it never happen and the journalist is complicit? Isn't there an easier way to PsyOp without making the administration look incompetent?

I think its just what it looks like. A big stuff up.

Goldberg claims details about a military operation were disclosed. However the evidence he provided doesn’t to date confirm that. Goldberg also has a history of lying.

That is, it isn’t clear what has it has not been shared.

The evidence he provided doesn’t to date confirm that.

He has now provided evidence.

So it looks like the administration straight up lied. I don't know why they would considering Goldberg had the receipts. Are they trying to use some weasel reasoning of what is and is not 'classified'?

Are they trying to use some weasel reasoning of what is and is not 'classified'?

Yes, but it's valid weaseling.

This tweet is doing the rounds that says advanced warning that the US will attack is automatically classified as Top Secret. The only way I can square the weaseling is if I squint and say SecDef has the ability to declassify any DoD classified information, which he presumably did by posting it in the chat.

The CIA director alluded to this argument in his Senate Intelligence answers today.

That's a policy document saying how things SHOULD be classified. It is not binding on the SECDEF himself, as the Original Classification Authority.

Note that Waltz's assessment of European (lack of) capabilities is also covered there, though without any supporting material it's only Confidential. However, he is also an Original Classification Authority.

And it seems like Goldberg overstated what he was given but perhaps Trump’s team understated.

Like the outsider added to the chat just so happens to be a journalist? What are the odds of that?

If you're going to add a random person to a chat, it's going to be a random person in your contacts list. And people in politics talk to journalists a lot. Odds seem pretty high imo!

Yeah, it looks like Waltz's (now deleted) Venmo account was full of journalists including from MSNBC and CNN.

He might not necessarily have been previously leaking info to Goldberg. Maybe Goldberg previously contacted him asking for comment and was saved as a standard phone contact that way. Maybe someone else sent him a dodgy contact card which he saved into his phone. This contact was then imported into Signal and then he accidentally added it to the group chat. He made a comment about contacts 'getting sucked in' in a recent interview.

I think Waltz is basically lying through his teeth right now for damage control, so I don't think we're going to get a straight story from him.

Yeah, this is the most likely explanation. They likely just assumed that “JG” was either another JG or was supposed to be there for another reason and that somebody else was handling opsec / the group chat.

American trade representative Jameison Greer is the name I've seen thrown around for who they might have thought it was. That might still be too charitable - the simplest explanation is that many people just don't really look all that closely at who else is on a group chat. You would kind of hope that some measure of care would be taken when we're talking about sensitive information, but people just get used to what they're doing and don't think about it much.

Maybe they thought it was a lieutenant junior grade lmao

The whole thing is really bizarre. Like the outsider added to the chat just so happens to be a journalist? What are the odds of that?

The obvious answer is that Waltz was already leaking speaking off the record to JG using Signal prior to this incident.

Glenn Greenwald agrees with you.

I've struggled with this because of Goldberg's hostility to the administration, but nothing else fits unless someone else had access to his phone. He already denied that a staffer of his changed the contact.

Like the outsider added to the chat just so happens to be a journalist? What are the odds of that?

Not low. Vance's phone will be full with high profile beltway people. As will everyone else's. A nice chunk of them are journalists.

Mike Waltz, the National Security Advisor added everyone to the group and he used his phone's contacts to do so. He denies having ever met or having the contact on his phone of the journalist in question.

In this interview he says the the contact he had in his phone was for someone else that should have been in the group. But that contact's name was somehow attached to the journalist's number instead. The interviewer asks if it was a rogue staffer who substituted the number, but Waltz denied it. He says there is an investigation underway with attached technical experts trying to determine how the wrong number was assigned to the legitimate persons name in his phone.

It would make sense that a motivated person would try to substitute a hostile journalist's number in this way, but how that happened is still up in the air. Still, some of the blatant smearing of the journalist in question by Waltz in this interview (and Hegseth when interviewed earlier today) in some post-hoc Poisoning the Well makes it more difficult to take everything Waltz is saying at face value.

Mike Walz

Note: Waltz (Michael) ≠ Walz (Timothy)

Thanks, fixed.

US Trade Representative Jamieson Greer has been suggested as the intended person. As for how the number got into his phone... I'm going to guess he just fucked up and put in the wrong J.G. from some other list at some point.

If US allies are not worries about their secrets being leaked on warthunder discord, they should probably also sleep tight for some adversary being invited in signal group chat. I doubt that Ayatollah Khomeini is on Walz or Vance shortdial unlike the chief editor of the atlantic. Everyone is pearlclutching because they hate the current admin.

When it comes to fuckups - i would say this is run of the mill one. As a person that has dealt with security and opsec - at some point you just accept that C level people will do stupid stuff and move on. That secrets will be sent in plaintext. That passwords will be written on post it stamps or spell to the secretary in the cafeteria where everyone can overhear.

It's not a nothingburger, but it is a veggieburger. It is humiliating, but not terribly dangerous.

Btw - if some high level Trump admin person is reading this - check threema. The great part about it is that doesn't require any kind of id, and the id themselves are just hex symbols. it is open source and a proper audit of the clients by the USG will be great for everyone.

When it comes to fuckups - i would say this is run of the mill one. As a person that has dealt with security and opsec - at some point you just accept that C level people will do stupid stuff and move on. That secrets will be sent in plaintext. That passwords will be written on post it stamps or spell to the secretary in the cafeteria where everyone can overhear.

I work in cybersecurity and this is my reaction as well. Overall, I'm honestly very impressed that they used Signal. Nature is healing!

It was dumb of them to add a journalist to "Houthi PC small group" chat but shit happens.

Yes yes ideally they would not be discussing this on their extremely difficult to secure smartphones and instead followed official guidance to use MS Teams with whatever dumb compliance features Microsoft added but we all know C level execs aren't going to listen. I don't even blame them.

Imagine how awful the federal government's approved classified information messaging things are.

This is the same reason I didn't hold it against HRC for having her own email server. Imagine how shitty the State Dept's approved mail service would have been in 2009.

(Though that's obviously a lot less secure than Signal)

Yes yes ideally they would not be discussing this on their extremely difficult to secure smartphones and instead followed official guidance to use MS Teams with whatever dumb compliance features Microsoft added but we all know C level execs aren't going to listen.

Willing to bet that the teams solution is less secure than properly updated iphone or android with signal.

You're right in your statement.

Still, the relevant metric isn't security of proper usage, it's security when used by the bottom decile of expect users.

The approved messaging service is likely much harder to fuck up.

Right. From a box checking perspective I'm sure it has all of the security features they want. From a practical perspective I'm sure every foreign intelligence agency knows multiple backdoors for it.

I don't think the Signal Chat Debacle is Fine, Actually, even if it didn't involve classified intel (unless it was on purpose as a 16-dimensional chess move, in which case hilarious) but I am old enough to recall when Germany had an video call about selecting Russian targets for weapons systems (which also mentioned that the UK had troops in-country!) that was recorded and released by the Russians and I don't recall any news stories about how NATO allies were nervous about trusting the Germans with classified intel after. Instead the Germany defense minister announced that said NATO allies weren't annoyed and that he probably wouldn't be firing anyone.

My point isn't to downplay the seriousness of the incident so much as it is to suggest that perhaps other countries are selective about their criticism of intel goof-ups.

ETA: to be clear, it seem quite possible to me that regardless of what Congress was told, classified material was disclosed in the Signal Affair. My point is that even if it wasn't, it's worthy of criticism.

even if it didn't involve classified intel

Honestly it should be pretty embarrassing regardless, but the technicalities probably side with the folks in the administration saying it didn't: classified is a distinction largely imposed by executive orders (excluding some unrelated carve outs) and the power to declare a given fact "secret" or not is a power that has long been delegated to some of the people in the chat.

Maybe it should have been treated more sensitively, but the Secretary of State is empowered to decide "this isn't classified" definitively, and everyone else is supposed to follow along.

Yeah there's not a world where you accidentally invite a journo to a chat and brag about your solid OPSEC and it's not embarrassing...except for the 16D chess situation. Which I uh wouldn't bet on.

Does anyone know, or have access to information about how many Federal employees have been furloughed? I'm hearing a lot about the Dept of ED because of my sister who worked there, and she has told me that everyone else she's talking to says they are going to be let go soon, but I can't tell if that's true or just people trying to make her feel better. For what it's worth, I live in an area replete with Federal workers--like every other person, it seems. There is a lot of anger and frustration, but not much clarity. So far, it seems like Dept of ED and USAID have had the most dramatic cuts, but people from DHS and Transport are claiming they will lose their jobs 'any day now.'

I presume the employees know more than me, but it also seems like most people don't actually know anything. I also have the sense that there is special malice being heaped on Dept of Ed people that the others aren't experiencing.

Curious if anyone has any good sources on the bigger picture of how many cuts there have been in total.

Psychological torture also is effective in breaking someone's spirit. And I think that the resistance know in their bones that this time the price they will pay will not be symbolic.

I think that part of Trump strategy is just to teach them learned helplessness

The IRS announcements were a few weeks ago: a bit under 10% of their current staff (the "probationary" employees) immediately (or at least when the lawsuits shake out) laid off, with a target more like 50% in the long term.

If ever there was a tax season to attempt shenanigans...

I always keep taxes pretty clean because paying a bit more is worth avoiding the stress of fearing an audit, but this did occur to me as well. Even so my expectation is that within the next few years the IRS gets a big upgrade through AI agents and I don't want those digging into my dodgy filed returns down the road.

... its not this one. All of those IRS agents are now looking to pump up their numbers in order to keep their jobs. Busting Average Joe for some transparently obvious evasion is an easy win for them.

Next year, when the turnover is settled however...

Volunteer with your local Republican Party first. Can’t hurt, might help.

I have a family member working in HHS. From February:

well as of right now, I have not been fired. So it could be worse
However, yesterday they fired probationary [Agency A] employees, and today was [Agency B]’s turn. We are expecting the same for [our Agency C] next week. I've been told I am not probationary (typically a 1y period) but I am still "conditional", not "permanent" on my employee docs, so I will be first on the chopping block if they continue after removing all probationary ppl
Lots of us know people at [Agency A] who were fired - they got no severance and were fired because of "performance" and because they were "not needed". Surely illegal, but that hasn't stopped Musk/Trump yet

The prediction was correct, and they put all their probationary employees on admin leave for a month. Apparently switching from a contractor to an FTE spot still confers probationary status, so this included some 10+ year former postdocs who are now being asked to come back.

These probationary firings may or may not have been legal depending on the statutory requirements of firing “for cause.” Some of them have been reversed. Others are still in court. I don’t expect you’ll find good numbers about the number of people fired, because even the government doesn’t seem to be sure.

Either way, supervisors were immediately required to draw up a RIF plan which presumably allows smiting the rest of the workforce. Here is the OPM directive. Plans must be designed to finish by September 30th, though I notice the example plan could be done in June.

This was all before the “5 things” email, which has apparently become a weekly thing now. I assume it’s an attempt to identify “cause” since that’s been a sticking point in the lawsuits. Whether or not it collects any useful information, it’s definitely reminding employees what they have to look forward to.

I don’t know if you’ve ever worked for a company which did a RIF. It’s not fun. Even when you know the date, you still aren’t told any details—even when the next few rungs above you are feeling just as frustrated. The plans are approved at a higher, less personal level.

That’s where almost all federal employees are standing. Anyone hired in the last year has been ambiguously cut, so everyone knows a few. By September 30th, some fraction of the rest will go, too. And that’s if the top management doesn’t think of some other way to move fast and break things.

I have been part of an RIF...a few times, in fact. The difference was they just said, "you're fired. Sign here." There wasn't any will-they/won't-they/when-they. I feel like the "shit-show" part of this is largely on purpose. Make everything so horrible no one will ever come back. Salting the Earth, as it were.

At my company, there were rumors of a date but no confirmation. When the date came around, they were walking people out one at a time all morning. So there was enough window for speculation.

I agree that it is intentionally slapdash. The uncertainty helps a strategic goal. Everyone who quits is one that doesn’t get severance.

Everyone who quits is one that doesn’t get severance.

Is that so?

As I understand it, yeah, severance pay is for "involuntary separation."

I'm not sure how that interacts with the administrative leave applied to the probationary hires, though.

My suspicion is that the part you call a "shit-show" is mostly necessary opsec in an adversarial environment. The bureaucrats are fighting administration goals and if they were made privy to the administration's plans, they'd use that information to defeat the plan (or try to). So there's will-they/won't-they/when-they.

Does anyone know, or have access to information about how many Federal employees have been furloughed?

The amount matters less than the distribution. Some departments (Education, USAID) are getting hit far, far, far, far more than others. Even in others, cuts are often occurring more at the new-employee level more than the old-employee level, where alternate tactics- such as the early-retirement offers- are being used.

The key point is to look to the employee's relevant secretary. Since DOGE's reigning-in from the 'all employees say what you did' email, the Secretaries appear to have been given primacy in deciding how to approach their workforce.

I presume the employees know more than me, but it also seems like most people don't actually know anything. I also have the sense that there is special malice being heaped on Dept of Ed people that the others aren't experiencing.

A lot of this is the psychological shock for government workers to find themselves unsure about their futures. Government work has long been understood as a bargain* for the employee: the employee gives up significant salary and upward mobility, and receives in turn a relatively easy job and close to complete job security. You don't make as much money, but you'll never get fired. Current government workers have built their lives around that bargain. They "knew" they were giving up other opportunities, but in exchange they were getting job security.

Now that bargain is being shaken up. Whether anyone has actually been fired or not, they know they aren't wanted, and that their firing might be only a matter of time. This is devastating if you thought you would never be fired.

*One can dispute the accuracy of this bargain, some government workers seem very well paid, but it probably turns into dueling-nit-picking about what the same workers' potential earnings in the private sector would be. Regardless, this bargain is still understood as being in force even if it has factually decayed. Most government workers will tend to compare their careers to the best of their peers in the private sector and find they made less, not to the worst, so even if a government salary is higher overall it still will be perceived as middling.

Yeah, this seems to be largely the case. As a fin-tech worker, the idea of job security is one I can hardly process, but I've been told that easy job and lifetime job security were top reasons for moving to DC. I think also, "there's not actually much work for a PhD in linguistics," is up there. I'm sympathetic to the claims of being terrorized--it seems like the firings are extra confusing and malicious--but I'm a little-shoulder shruggy in terms of losing one's job. It makes me seem like a demon around here. I have to keep up the pretense that I'm sorrowful for all the people. That said, I don't know who's getting fired, so I don't know who to call to make a big scene about how terrible it all is. I've been accused of not being 'curious enough.'


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