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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   34703 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 24, 2025

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'Many things are happening, so many things are happening at once that sometimes I have no idea what's going on.'

This is likely an apocryphal quote misattributed to Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian in March 2025 via the memetic slop factory. It's one of the factory's better creations and it captures my feeling this afternoon.

The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans

Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor-in-chief for The Atlantic, publishes the above account regarding his participation in a special kind of Signal group chat 15 days ago. In this chat strikes against the Houthis were planned, out in the open, with Jeffrey privy to it all. According to the account he gives in the article, Jeffrey was invited by national security advisor Michael Waltz. According to Jeffrey, he was confused, skeptical, and suspicious of this chat.

Seriously, you should read the whole thing.

It immediately crossed my mind that someone could be masquerading as Waltz in order to somehow entrap me...

I’ll say it anyway—that I have never been invited to a White House principals-committee meeting, and that, in my many years of reporting on national-security matters, I had never heard of one being convened over a commercial messaging app.

This group chat led to another group chat-- "Houthi PC small group". If true, I am sure Jeffrey's concerns about entrapment and imprisonment grew as he was, allegedly, joined by the Secretary of Defense, Vice President Vance, Tulsi Gabbard. In total, "18 individuals were listed as members of this group, including various National Security Council officials" as they discussed, coordinated, and monitored strikes against Houthi rebels in Yemen-- and presumably some other things.

We [Atlantic staffers] discussed the possibility that these texts were part of a disinformation campaign, initiated by either a foreign intelligence service or, more likely, a media-gadfly organization, the sort of group that attempts to place journalists in embarrassing positions, and sometimes succeeds.

I had very strong doubts that this text group was real, because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans. I also could not believe that the national security adviser to the president would be so reckless as to include the editor in chief of The Atlantic in such discussions with senior U.S. officials, up to and including the vice president.

Nonetheless, as Jeffrey fretted over his strange-getting-stranger position in a Signal chat group among, allegedly, the highest officials in US public office, these individuals were discussing what to do about the Houthi problem. Jeffrey identifies JD Vance's chat avatar as a cautious, moderating voice on the 14th of March:

The Vance account goes on to state, “3 percent of US trade runs through the suez. 40 percent of European trade does. There is a real risk that the public doesn’t understand this or why it’s necessary. The strongest reason to do this is, as POTUS said, to send a message.”

“I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now. There’s a further risk that we see a moderate to severe spike in oil prices. I am willing to support the consensus of the team and keep these concerns to myself. But there is a strong argument for delaying this a month, doing the messaging work on why this matters, seeing where the economy is, etc.”

Jeffrey Goldberg, in addition to relaying the above and other interactions that went on in the chat he was in, also posted screenshots as receipts-- just in case you thought he was crazy.

In Jeffrey Goldberg's words: "I was still concerned that this could be a disinformation operation, or a simulation of some sort. And I remained mystified that no one in the group seemed to have noticed my presence. But if it was a hoax, the quality of mimicry and the level of foreign-policy insight were impressive."

According to the lengthy Hegseth text, the first detonations in Yemen would be felt two hours hence, at 1:45 p.m. eastern time. So I waited in my car in a supermarket parking lot. If this Signal chat was real, I reasoned, Houthi targets would soon be bombed.

After the chat, bombs get dropped, Jeffrey confirms the timeline matches what he saw planned, and the chat goes wild.

Some things to talk about as mentioned in the article:

  1. Journalisms. Jeffrey surely had a responsibility to leave this group chat when he figured this was a real thing really happening and he wasn't supposed to be there. As in, legally he shouldn't be privy to classified stuff. On the other hand, if true, this is what journalists are for. If Jeffrey had simply left the chat and reported it as such there's no story. I'm not sure how much I buy the "I'm just a lowly journalist who couldn't believe his eyes if this is real or not" shtick, but also can't really fault the guy for staying in the chat. After all, he was invited.

  2. Security and legal concerns. If the Trump admin is conducting official business on an open-source platform that is supposed to scrub its history this seems probably illegal. It is possible these messages are documented some other way, but it's possible they are not. Just as it is possible Signal is a totally secure, encrypted messaging program, but it's possible it is not.

  3. Goldberg highlights the dialogue that focuses on concerns of US-Euro relations. Wish I could read the full discussions. It seems fine to give Europe a carrot of engaging Houthis -- helping to secure their trade in the Suez -- in addition to the stick as they move to rearm. I don't think the American public has much love for Houthi rebels, though escalating involvement is a concern. I think this supports the idea that this administration is closely wedded to the news cycle rather than strategy or vision. Consideration of what this does for Europe should be second to deterring disruption to global trade-- which should have been priority from the beginning. We are missing lots of context.

  4. What if Elon Musk was gas lighting and trolling journalists with the power and resources of the United States Government behind him?

The level of ineptitude in OPSEC failure for this article to be real is staggering. It blows my mind. Which, as Jeffrey also suspected, makes one wonder if it wasn't intentional. Maybe Jeffrey was invited to one chat to be leveraged for something else, then accidentally invited to the Houthi PC chat. He might have been supposed to be in all those chats to leak it all. Comparisons to Crooked Hillary and her e-mail server abound.

To end, VP Vance reportedly typing “a prayer for victory” after a course of action was decided upon. Followed by two of our nation's best adding "prayer emoji" reactions. All of it is a bit on the nose for Clown World Simulation theory. Exciting times!

Jeffrey surely had a responsibility to leave this group chat when he figured this was a real thing really happening and he wasn't supposed to be there. As in, legally he shouldn't be privy to classified stuff.

Not really his problem if he didn't have a clearance. The SECDEF shouldn't be sending out classified stuff over Signal; they shouldn't be doing government business over Signal at all, for that matter; the comparisons to Hillary are reasonable here. It appears the person who set up the group (Michael Waltz) intended it to be for unclassified discussion, but trying to discuss the same thing at one level of detail via an easy-to-use unclassified system and at another via a pain-in-the-butt classified system never works.

It appears the person who set up the group (Michael Waltz) intended it to be for unclassified discussion

So Waltz set it up for interfacing for unclassified stuff like with journalists and forgot about it. So-and-so made a group chat, so-and-so invited so-and-so, and next thing ya know Jeffrey Goldberg is the only journalist in a Signal chat with the nation's leadership as they plan a military action?

This appears like a level of brazen, incompetent comfort that suggests to me they're probably using Signal for all sorts of coordination. Of which the only reasonable thing I can land* on is: other forms of communication are suspected compromised and they have an immediate need. But it's much easier for me to believe a sloppy disregard for procedure is commonplace.

  • Or Signal has been okay'd for this use and we don't know?

The boring answer is that "the official channels" require badging through a few locked doors to log into a desktop computer in a windowless room to check email, which isn't very responsive if you're trying to move very quickly across several tiers of organization.

That is a poor excuse, but it seems the most likely one to me. Either that or concern about opsec was minimal given the adversary's technical prowess, but that also strikes me as a poor excuse.

While agree there must be some level of incompetence or just a screw-up, I really don't see which of the various chat apps would be better than Signal. AFAIK, it's the most secure almost to the point of being a problem for things like FOIA, as once the app is deleted all the message history is gone.

Anyway, I"m not sure I agree with the 'bad ops-sec' here and tend toward 'if you message the wrong person, you can't claw it back.'

Anyway, I"m not sure I agree with the 'bad ops-sec' here

If you are unsure of this despite the fact this article exists, then what do you consider an example of bad OPSEC?

chat apps would be better than Signal... as once the app is deleted all the message history is gone.

If there is no inhouse Signal equivalent, then it's about 20 years past due. I bet there is and I bet it sucks and that's why they use Signal.

Wiping message history without recording keeping is a problem, because all text messages about official acts from federal agencies must be preserved. I guess politicians across the spectrum have decided this is not actually an important accountability feature in democracy nor are historical records important enough to bother. Fair enough.

If there's an inhouse Signal equivalent would it be cleared for use on your garden-variety cell phone?

(Anyway yes I bet it sucks either way).

Wiping message history without recording keeping is a problem, because all text messages about official acts from federal agencies must be preserved. I guess politicians across the spectrum have decided this is not actually an important accountability feature in democracy nor are historical records important enough to bother. Fair enough.

I have a bit of a rant about this but TLDR;

  1. I think this is a very common problem and suspect "using Signal with messages set to delete" is fairly typical even at lower ranks, and
  2. Modern records are made at a MUCH faster rate than dated records-keeping laws anticipated. Arguably either all records-keeping laws or associated technology needs to be completely revamped to account for modern electronic messaging capability.

Sorry, 'ops-sec' is not the correct term. the 'Ops-sec' was the failure. I think I meant something similar but specifically with the technology...Tech-sec or something.

Signal is the correct app to use if you're going to do these things--at least from what's on tap.

I think people are shocked that they didn't all assemble int he 'war room' to make the weighty decision to drop some bombs. The halcyon days of Dr. Strangelove are over, my friends.

I wonder if we'll even remember this happened in 3.75 years. Things are so whackadoodle, I can't tell if this is actually a scandal or not. Seems...not?

almost to the point of being a problem for things like FOIA

What a happy coincidence.

This appears like a level of brazen, incompetent comfort that suggests to me they're probably using Signal for all sorts of coordination.

Now that the US's rivals know this, how possible is it for them to compromise Signal's servers for some Man in the Middle breach? Is it true that even the Signal company themselves can't read user comms?

Signal is e2e encrypted so this isn't an issue.

So what should they use? Slack? Google Messenger? Facebook messenger? AIM? Does the USG have its own private, secured messaging app? TBH, Signal actually seems like the best option if you need to have a group discussion with people all over the world and with conflicting schedules.

I mean...I'm open to alternatives, but what are they?

Are you kidding? The official, encrypted, auto-record keeping email system the government has used for the last 40 years.

The one they undoubtedly can't access from their private iPhones, because allowing that would be an obvious, glaring security flaw.

So they should have used email to decide to bomb Yemen and that would have been acceptable? Too slow, for starters.

I'm not really sure what the actual offense is here. I think it's accidentally adding an unrecognized phone number to a chat group, others think it's using the chat group in the first place.

Are you kidding? The official, encrypted, auto-record keeping email system the government has used for the last 40 years.

Are you seriously proposing that people use e-mail for instant messaging? What is this, 1993?

The one they undoubtedly can't access from their private iPhones, because allowing that would be an obvious, glaring security flaw.

“Security” is just a jobs programme for people who couldn’t get into the real police. They did it this way and what happened? Did the heavens fall down? No. Quod erat demonstrandum.

“Security” is just a jobs programme for people who couldn’t get into the real police. They did it this way and what happened? Did the heavens fall down? No. Quod erat demonstrandum.

So the argument we're going with is "OPSEC is for suckers who can't even make it into... the police?" Uninspired trolling.

Are you seriously proposing that people use e-mail for instant messaging? What is this, 1993?

Yes. Emails are messages, and they are instant. Easy to lock down access, easy to encrypt with code 100% under your control. Decentralized, robust, fail-safe. Add rudimentary mailing lists if you need your "groups" organized, done. Millions of people have conducted complex discussions like that for decades.

How many planes did the Houthis manage to shoot down due to this “failure of OPSEC”? Zero. Therefore, the level of OPSEC that you want them to deploy is evidently unnecessary. OPSEC is not reducing military casualties; all it’s doing is giving “security personnel” a paycheck, and conferring no actual military advantage.

This is OPSEC’s “The emperor has no clothes” moment. All OPSEC’s recommendations were disregarded, and nothing bad happened. This proves that OPSEC is stupid, not that its violators are stupid.

I would also like to point out that anyone who condemns this “security breach” without in the same breath condemning Hillary’s e-mail server is double-standards-ing HARD. It’s OK when Dems do it?

How many planes did the Houthis manage to shoot down due to this “failure of OPSEC”? Zero.

Have you noticed that America's adversaries are not all nomadic camel herders with temporary access to Iranian missiles?

When the top ranks of the US government all conduct their business using some app on their private phones (as I assume they all do, the carelessness to invite a journalist by accident suggests group creation on signal is an every day rote task for them), it's basically guaranteed that foreign adversaries have access to much of that information.

At the very least Israel has enough expertise (via NSO Group's Pegasus) to have rootkit access to arbitrary smartphones. I'm 100% confident China has similar capabilities, and Russia and Iran might not be far behind (snatching the physical phone is always a realistic low-tech option, though). I have low trust in the EUs capabilities, but honestly, they might just be able to buy the tech as SAS. iOS and Android are extremely vulnerable, period.

And this is absolutely catastrophic, even if not a single aircraft is shot down - ever. Imagine going into negotiations with an adversary that knows your true goals and what arguments support them, and what pain points you want to mitigate.

I would also like to point out that anyone who condemns this “security breach” without in the same breath condemning Hillary’s e-mail server is double-standards-ing HARD. It’s OK when Dems do it?

Of course not! She was grilled for months on that, and for many good reasons. Might have cost her the election, even (probably not).

it's basically guaranteed that foreign adversaries have access to much of that information.

“Basically” seems to be doing a tremendous amount of work in this sentence. You’re constructing an entire catastrophic narrative from one piece of evidence where nothing catastrophic happened. Here’s an alternative take that fits the evidence just as well: when they’re discussing adversaries who have more hacking capability than stone-age Yemenis, they stick to more secure channels.

If this had been discussing China or Israel I would be more sympathetic to your concerns, but it’s bombing a group of people who have never seen a computer in their lives, not bombing 1337 h4X0rz. The Pareto frontier of convenience vs. security is placed in a very different location when Yemen is your foe vs. when China is your foe.

More comments

I am sure there are internal secure messaging apps both on the classified side and the unclassified side. They might be terrible however.

I’m confident they have one. I’d guess Teams.

Still no bueno for classified information, but if what Gabbard says is true, this chat was perfectly innocent on that front. :)

It is indeed Teams, which is another reason there will never be any prosecution.

Prosecutor: And is it true that you used Signal, a non-government communications method, to set up a group chat at the very highest levels:

Waltz: Yes

Defense Attorney : Mr. Waltz, what is the official government communications method for the Department of Defense

Waltz: Microsoft Teams Chat

Defense Attorney: Your honor, defense moves to dismiss with prejudice.

Prosecutor: Err, um, err... no objections

Confirmed. It doesn’t surprise me. A honeypot this elaborate, and with no obvious enforcement mechanism, would have made even less sense.

Sharing classified information is not generally a crime. Not unless you’ve signed the corresponding SF-312 and accepted the obligation to protect it. What are the odds that anyone in this chat had done so?

In any other administration, this would be a perfectly respectable scandal. Perhaps a little higher up than usual. It’s normally staffers who mishandle communications. Today, though, I don’t expect anything to come of it. Let me make a quick check of which step we’re on in the narcissist’s prayer. Yup, we’re still on “…and if I did, it wasn’t that bad.”

20% that anyone from the group chat faces a criminal charge.

Sharing classified information is not generally a crime. Not unless you’ve signed the corresponding SF-312 and accepted the obligation to protect it. What are the odds that anyone in this chat had done so?

Everyone in the chat except Vance and Goldberg should have done - everyone in the Executive Branch, no matter how senior, is subject to the executive orders regarding classified information except the President (who doesn't have to obey his own orders) and the VP (who is kinda sorta part of Congress as honorary President of the Senate).

Although in this case that doesn't matter for criminal liability - if the disclosure of military secrets to an unauthorised person was wilful, it is criminalised by the Espionage Act, which predates the modern system of classification and doesn't rely on it. If it was negligent, then it is an employee discipline matter and not a criminal one in any case.

Radical transparency. We're in a new golden age!

This seems like too big of a fuckup to put in just "whoopsie we made a mistake" territory. If a journalist can just get accidentally added onto it without them constantly doing security checks then what about all the highly motivated and talented bad actors from foreign nations?

China or Russia isn't going to tell us "Oh yeah we have eyes on X and Y private conversations because they're incompetent and don't actually check things." They're gonna sit there and eat their free lunch and just like seeing one cockroach means you need to be ready for more hiding around, one basic security mistake is a strong reason to worry about others that haven't been revealed.

And it apparently being done through improper channels is even worse because it incentivizes people who fuck up to keep silent about it cause they just don't have the fuck up to contend with but their own improper choice they have to answer for as well. It's also the complete opposite of any smart Cover Your Ass strategy because now any failure is on you because you went around the proper and official path.

This seems like too big of a fuckup to put in just "whoopsie we made a mistake" territory. If a journalist can just get accidentally added onto it without them constantly doing security checks then what about all the highly motivated and talented bad actors from foreign nations?

I figure this only happened because Goldberg was already in Waltz's contacts and he selected the wrong name by mistake. Maybe had a brainfart and mixed him up with somebody else who did belong in the chat - maybe just clicked the wrong option in a slide. Who knows. Either way, not that big of a security concern unless there are foreign spies on Waltz's speed-dial.

A career government employee who misclicked in a way which resulted in classified information being unintentionally shared with a journalist would lose their job and security clearance. I expect MAGA would be calling for criminal charges, although they wouldn't stick because the Espionage Act has a mens rea requirement.

"Lol I misclicked but no harm no foul" doesn't cut it.

I'm not saying it's all good or that the guy shouldn't get heat over it, just that in practical terms this isn't necessarily a massive security hole that Chinese spies could walk into by the dozens.

I strongly disagree. If this guy was stupid enough to let in not just a journalist, but one part of an organization that is an ideological enemy of the administration, who's to say he can't be spearphished by an adversary with a passing knowledge of the English language?

It is an enormous fuckup.

A career bureaucrat has one primary job: follow bureaucratic process, so yeah, of course they would be fired for that. Top-level officials by nature must have a lot more flexibility in their jobs and they can't be sitting at a SCIF all day long and following processes is not their primary job requirement or part of their life-long training. (This is among the reasons why I didn't think Hillary should have been charged for a crime). And this goes five-fold for officials who were specifically selected by the American people for being outsiders.

It doesn't necessarily matter how it happened so much as that it happened and speaks to a wider failing in OPSEC procedures. They're sending sensitive information across the internet without even verifying who the recipients are.

The most likely explanation is that they just fucked up. There is no possible benefit to deliberately leaking the info to Goldberg that would make up for the embarrassment of him going public with how he obtained the information.

To end, VP Vance reportedly typing “a prayer for victory” after a course of action was decided upon.

To me this is kind of funny given the enormous discrepancy in power between the USA and the Houthis. It's kind of like if a grown man prayed for victory just before getting into a fist-fight with an infant.

Have you considered that a prayer for victory Is Just What You Do?

To be fair to Vance, the historical track record of Operation Bomb Dirt is quite poor. Seeking divine intervention in the hopes that the next round of desultory air strikes will be more productive than in the past is not so unreasonable.

To me this is kind of funny given the enormous discrepancy in power between the USA and the Houthis. It's kind of like if a grown man prayed for victory just before getting into a fist-fight with an infant.

The Houthis need to be lucky only once for the US to have a massive egg on their face. People are still talking about the downed F-117 in Serbia. Also realistically I would bet that if a carrier is sunk quite a lot of the people on board would drown. There is air of invulnerability over US Capital ships so some of them being lax on evacuation procedures training is not unthinkable.

The grown man failed to win in the last fist fight. We already had the whole 'Houthis fucked around and now they're gonna find out' arc a year ago where everyone thought the combined might of NATO and the US fleet would quickly crush them. But Red Sea shipping remains 50% below what it was and we got all these articles about how the ships were firing million dollar interceptors at drones costing 100th of the price.

The old quote comes to mind.

"Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?" - Axel Oxenstierna

Parts of the article made me laugh out loud. The emojis!

Jeffrey surely had a responsibility to leave this group chat when he figured this was a real thing really happening and he wasn't supposed to be there. As in, legally he shouldn't be privy to classified stuff.

Hard disagree. Both morally and (I think) legally responsibility to keep classified information classified rests with the people who have security classifications. Private citizens should not commit illegal acts to obtain classified info (unless there is a moral imperative to let the public know, as with Snowden), so if he had hacked Waltz phone, then he would be in the wrong. Also, Washington leaks classified info to the press all the time, and journalists generally report on it.

Him not tweeting about it before the bombs fell is already going above and beyond what would be reasonable -- normally you negotiate confidentiality boundaries before you give a journalist info. Of course, there is no way to authenticate the chats as real, it could also just be one insider playing with sock puppets.

Putting aside the colossal screw up and perhaps criminal negligence, the actual content of the conversation was surprisingly exactly what I might have expected. That itself is rather alarming because I shouldn't be in a position to form accurate expectations about how these conversations should go, right? I appreciate the transparency of the Trump administration, but this is a bit much. Heads should roll. Although we're unlikely to get an honest explanation for why Signal was been used for these communications, I would really like one. Worst case scenario is that they don't trust more official channels.

This really drives home why the Republican Party has been making inroads with blue-collar workers. These guys aren't acting. They talk about bombing the Middle East like it's the group-chat for subcontractors installing a new HVAC unit.

And they got the unit installed right on time too!

“Hegseth HEAT and Plumbing: We Deliver Worldwide”

It makes sense in the modern age that a signal type app would be very useful for this type of coordination. What doesn't make sense is that some dept like the NSA hasn't developed one already.

Also, there are some conversations that should still be reserved for SCIF's. Hegseth should not have sent any operational details for instance.

Still a huge screw up, but rather than fight the tide the government should create its own app for executive comms like this.

I don't think the Trump admin would trust using a secure message system developed by the NSA.

I wonder if that's exactly why they're using a standard-issue commercial app.

This is exactly my thought. Building an encrypted message chat with superior data retention and querying capabilities for real-time comms like this is... not optional?

Why are they spawning off special chats for this one operation, for instance? That alone is a security/ops hole. My org has an entire policy to ensure our real-time messaging stays meticulously organized to ensure leaders and doers aren't overwhelmed with threads, context is maintained, the whole nine yards. Yet the executive branch has to hack with something like this?

The hypocrisy of Hillary's email whining is a bit strong. But it begs the question of how exactly government officials are supposed to communicate in real time, given the inadequacy of email as a format.

No discussion yet of this nugget, apparently from Vance?

I am not sure the president is aware how inconsistent this is with his message on Europe right now.

Vance and Trump usually seem pretty united publically. Is there an interpretation I'm missing here that doesn't show a rift between them? This doesn't just say, "hey there will also be these other consequences." This says the president is inconsistent and is not aware of his own inconsistency. And further implies Vance can't just bring it up with Trump for clarity either. And that this group he's messaging (or the group he thinks he's messaging) already knows that.

Combine this with Vance steering Trump during the televised Zelenskyy debacle. I think Trump is really just governing based on raw emotional energy—these Houthis are causing us trouble, so let's fuck 'em over. And then it falls on Vance, Hegseth, etc to figure out how to actually do that. The details don't concern the big man.

I enjoyed all the direct quotes! Very fun.

Is there an interpretation I'm missing here that doesn't show a rift between them? This says the president is inconsistent and is not aware of his own inconsistency

Could be. I don't think it is impossible that Trump, at some level, recognizes he benefits from some brakes, and he may find Vance suitable for this role. I don't think these quotes suggest some massive rift rather than topic disagreement or the reality of their different roles. In the sausage factory is one thing, but the misalignment going public is another matter. The media is already trying to drive a wedge. Now Trump doesn't like being seen as undermined, so Vance may now have to grovel a bit to not be seen as embarrassing the big man.

Vance advocating for taking some more time to build up a narrative-- Trump wants it done if it can be done. If Vance is considering a 2028 run, then ideally he maximizes all the positive Trump association while minimizing the negative Trump association in order to grow his support. This would make some disagreement desirable. If Vance was worried about narrative and optics, as he is quoted, then I think he was wrong. US bombs dropping on Houthis was overdue. Putting Suez back into full business is also overdue, but who knows if that's achievable with bomb droppings.

JD's phrasing is exactly how an underling should disagree with his boss before a final decision is made. I've used similar phrasing before, even to my boss's face and it is entirely appropriately to do so in private (sausage factory) communications.

It isn't disrespectful, it provides an alternative point of view ('have you considered these ramifications..?') and he was very clear that he would support the consensus decision. This is exactly the type of thinking you want in committees like this.

Consider the alternative; pure Yes-manning. Would a leader want a sycophant in his camp? Ok, Trump might, but not in a position like VP. If Vance was like that behind the scenes, trump would not respect him and not delegate power to his VP in the way that Vance has been assigned this administration.

I agree. I suppose it doesn't matter - the NPCs are going to read a headline instead of the conversation, and I doubt any of them have functional relationships with their bosses. But this seems like a total nothingburger. No way Vance actually shits on the president with 17 of his other closest advisors.

As a purely practical matter, if Trump makes dire threats to the Houthis and bombs them without achieving results then that seems clearly worse than doing nothing

The bombing is a result. If you engage in piracy you eat bombs. This should be the expected result of engaging in piracy. It's the least you can do. This might be insufficient to dissuade these particular Islamic martyrs from engaging in piracy. They may require some other demonstration or diplomacy, but they should receive no exemption from the first expected result. It may also be a valuable demonstration for other non-martyrs that might consider piracy.

What if getting bombed is the goal? So far the only thing bombing has achieved is making the Houthis look indomitable and costing the American taxpayer several billion dollars.

Yes, they want to impose costs on the rest of the world which includes the costs of bombing them. That's fine. There is still risk of escalation, but if we want to bomb them in perpetuity and they want to impose costs on the rest of the world in perpetuity so be it. If this is the reality then we live in world that's a little less functional. So be it. It won't be in perpetuity I hope!

I would not describe Houthis as indomitable, although they do have a very high tolerance for eating bombs. The alternatives are to refuse to engage -- which does cost less money with no boats in Red Sea -- or formally accept a new status quo. Or, if you take them at their word, make Israel do something? The world could also reward them with some sort of official designation and hope that buys them off, but I agree with the global order here. You don't get rewarded with shooting and looting civilian ships. Not without some pain or, in this case, the lives of their martyrs.

They are the big dog in Yemen. Woof! They dislike Jews, Sauds, UAE, the US, and they like Iran. Great. These are unpleasant people that would happily lob my head off. Bombing theocratic Islamic fundamentalists, or most any other dedicated piratical states is a reasonable thing to do in response to their piracy. That's a sensible world.

So to sum up, American taxpayers must fund several dozens of fully furnished hospitals or schools worth of munitions to blow up some fanatic who eats one piece of dirt per day with no prospect of stopping said fanatic's friends from doing what they would have done anyway because, uh, something something global order?

If the "global order" is what you care about then the far simpler solution for America would be to crack down on Israel, a country currently invading half of its neighbors and flagrantly defying every post-war international institution which also happens to be entirely dependent on American support to sustain said invasions. We don't need to "take the Houthis at their word" because there have been two ceasefires and in both cases the Houthis ceased fire, something that can't be said about the Israelis.

A sensible world would be one where we don't waste billions of dollars on a strategy we know won't work when we could save billions on one that we know would work

You said no prospect, not me. It is true the US could have considered imposing costs on Israel in response to her and Europe's arms being twisted by America's (mutual) adversaries. I think this would likely encourage further arm twisting and also doesn't seem quite as simple as you say. You sound very certain that America could have easily ended Israel's incursion into Gaza and lifted Israel's decades long naval blockade from Gaza (was also a demand I'm not sure if they dropped that one) and avoided [this] cost. Perhaps American limitations do not end in the Red Sea with the Houthis. The US might be unprepared or unwilling to bomb Israel hard enough to appease requests of a ceasefire. Maybe sanctions of arm sales aren't heavy enough to stop a response in October, November, or December of 2023.

The Houthi's grand humanitarian mission started on the 19th of October, 2023. It has involved hundreds of ballistic missiles and drones being fired at Israel. They have attacked some 100 different merchant vessels. I don't know how many times they've fired at American warships, but probably a few.

Coordination requires understanding. "Don't do a piracy to twist my arm" is a pretty good understanding. "Don't invade other countries" is also an understanding, but at least when Israel invades other countries these days it is mostly its neighbors and doesn't tax Italian and Egyptian shipping. It's unfortunate Houthis are only in a position to play one card, are beholden to the interests of larger nations, etc. We all face limitations.

I'm not really interested in litigating Israeli's war justifications, US obligations to Israel or vice versa, or to which great honor we can bestow on Houthis or Israel. Or America for that matter. It's been done a million times. You can consider any or each as evil and duplicitous as you wish. You'll read smarter people than I. I am but a simple, sensible ""global order"" (double scare quotes, double scary--- if I go triple you're donezo) enjoyer.

I don't think you should trust any nation or, at least, take any nation's stated justifications at face value. Least of all Iran, Israel, or Islamic fundamentalists. It'd be nice if we could trust each other not to shoot at merchant shipping and agree to punish people that defect from this agreement. That's all, really.

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Vance said that he was out doing an economic event in Michigan in the group chat. So it seems more like he just didn't have the opportunity to bring it up with Trump.

Something I found more interesting is speculation as to why Waltz had Goldberg already added in signal. Seems possible he might've already been leaking to the press and accidently added the journo instead of opening a chat with him. He's probably the least "team Trump" member of Trump's administration other than Rubio.

Vance is smart and EHC, and it's likely that he understands Trump is a total buffoon who needs to be shepherded to reasonable goals. His reaction to Trump back in 2016 was his genuine opinion. Eventually he decided that sucking up to Trump was better to gain power, but he still sees Trump as an idiot.

I think Trump is really just governing based on raw emotional energy

Correct. Always has been. There is no plan, only vibes. This is what the American people demanded.

What does EHC mean in this context?

There does seem to be much more talk this time around about vibes and less talk about 4D chess.

Elite Human Capital. Hanania has written some posts about it, and has a full book coming at some point. He's the type of person who could have started an anonymous substack and had it do reasonably well. He could come on to a place like this and hold his own in a discussion. If e.g. Trump tried to do either of those things, he'd fail pretty miserably.

This is such a big screwup I have to wonder if it isn't intentional. I mean Yemeni goat herders aren't going to be listening in to group chats and they can't exactly stop the bombs if they are.

They can, however, move out themselves and their stuff out of the blast radius, which actually does make a difference.

Meh. Was the strike intended to kill people or to make a point?

We've been bombing the Houthis to Make a Point; it would seem charitable to assume that these strikes were intended to inflict material losses, not simply remind them that we still have airplanes.

A strike that doesn't kill the people it's aimed at doesn't make a point (or at least, it doesn't make the point you'd want to make by launching it).

The US/UAE/Israel droped a tactical nuke on a Yemen city a few years back ( yes complete with camera CCD scintillation ). So at this point anything's possible.

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Could you please Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.?

The atmospheric detonation of nuclear weapons is impossible to hide from any industrial nation which chooses to investigate or any number of NGOs. Any theory which claims a nuke was dropped on the Houti would also need to explain why this did not lead to Iran and Russia making claims to that effect, and why fricking Greenpeace as well as dozens of other Western NGOs decided to sweep it under the rug. By the time you have added all the required epicycles, you might as well claim that the nuclear strike was coordinated by lizardmen who were combating space aliens.

Also, scintillation is a process in which ionizing radiation excites (roughly visible wave-length) photons in a material. What happens in CCD sensors is different, you get pixel noise as gamma rays, neutrons or charged particles produce electron-hole-pairs in the pixels which lead to a depletion of the charge of the pixel, just as light does. The camera acts as a semiconductor detector.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=6LDFD02-Utc

https://youtube.com/watch?v=9QSi0R2HEcs

Can't find the exact videos with the little dots as the explosion happens, some of the ones I had saved seem to have been scrubbed from youtube. Belive me. It was there, I was watching that shit as it unfolded and videos were posted on 4chan and other sites. The little dots were hitting the cameras, the artefacts centered around the explosion point.

Edit: Specifically, there was a video from much closer to the explosion, with a woman wailing that showed the little particles striking the ccd at and around the center of the explosion.

What?!

Seconded. This sounds like bullshit.

I think the proposition that the US and allies secretly used a tactical nuke in combat (on a mostly-civilian target, in the 21st century, with no outcry from the UN, Russia, China, watchdog NGOs, or anyone else) falls firmly in the realm of “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.” So, let’s see it. Because on its face this claim is ludicrously implausible, to put it mildly.

On line I find stories which claim this. Some claim there is CCD scintillation... but none shows it and there's at least one which says it's there and then that it isn't. Whether the people claiming this could distinguish radiation effects from plain overload from too much light I doubt also.

Yeah, I think conventional explosions could still cause blindness, assuming sufficient yield, no neutrons necessary.

Context please.

[citation needed]

Particularly with the UAE having a nuke- I have no doubt that the UAE, Saudi, etc could buy a paki nuke for money, but the likelihood they would do so to use against some goat herders is low. Israel, likewise, had no reason to care about the Houthis until recently. And while the USA sold Saudi weapons, we weren’t involved in the war.

...

Yeah, I think it was intended to reach the euro literati.

...

This situation is comically stupid, even by the established standards of the Trump admin. I don't even really see much of a problem with them using Signal for sensitive communication, in theory (it's not like they were using Telegram); yes, the government should have its own internal secure platform for something like this but I would not be surprised if, in practice, that secure platform is just "email" which would be such a pain in the ass as to make me sympathetic to the signal-using officials. But, good lord, literally inviting a journalist into your government chat? What??? How did none of them notice he was in the chat? Clown world indeed.

Honestly, I don't buy the theories that this leak was intentional (or at least that the leak was intentional on the part of the Trump admin as an entity, it could've been intentional with the goal of embarrassing them) -- what would they stand to gain? They just look like a bunch of idiots. And the "intentional leak to embarrass the cabinet" theory doesn't make sense either since the invite came from the goddamn National Security Advisor. Therefore I have to conclude that this comes from simple gross incompetence. Defenses of this from sympathetic right-wingers are pretty weak as well, just compare it to the (justified) furor about the Hillary Clinton email server... this might not be worse in terms of practical effect, but that's mostly because the journalist himself chose not to do anything with the information he received until after the strikes took place. I'm a little surprised there isn't even more outcry from Democrats but I guess they don't tend to get riled up about national security the way Republicans do.

If I were President in this situation I would, honestly, fire the guy who invited the journalist on the spot. Everyone else involved here is breaching protocol, yes, and they really should have noticed that "hey, one of these guys isn't a government official", and sure, it's just one simple mistake -- but fat-fingering the invite for a group chat such that you leak the details of an upcoming military operation to the press seems to me to be so profoundly dumb (and utterly oblivious to any notion of OPSEC) as to disqualify you outright from serving in any sensitive position. If he had done it intentionally, this would arguably be treason.

If nothing else, it's terrible PR for the administration. I will be surprised if Waltz keeps his job longer than the next few days, especially given Trump's reputation for turnover.

My conspiracy mind wonders if there’s some secret switch in Signal which only gets enabled (by who?) for journalists, so they can view chats unseen in “spectator mode” for reporting purposes. This would explain why nobody saw JG in the chat. If true, Signal would need to be dumped ASAP by everyone.

Less sensationally, there may be another Jeffrey Goldberg [or (JG) generic user icon] who Waltz meant to invite, perhaps someone with top secret clearance in an intel agency who wasn’t expected to weigh in, but was supposed to stay informed. J is the most common first initial in America, and G is in the top ten last initials: https://blogs.sas.com/content/iml/2011/01/14/two-letter-initials-which-are-the-most-common.html

there may be another Jeffrey Goldberg [or (JG) generic user icon] who Waltz meant to invite, perhaps someone with top secret clearance in an intel agency who wasn’t expected to weigh in, but was supposed to stay informed

Yeah, I think this is plausible. I recall seeing that there is, in fact, a reasonably-high-up intelligence official with initials JG who could perhaps have been an intended invitee, although I can't remember the name off my head. Even so, that's still a very stupid/sloppy mistake to make given the subject matter.

Signal is probably at least as secure as everything else the government has in its toolbox. Moxie is the real deal.

I'd bet it's not as secure as an in-person meeting in a SCIF.

You are absolutely correct. But if you want to gather

Secretary of Defense, Vice President Vance, Tulsi Gabbard. In total, "18 individuals were listed as members of this group, including various National Security Council officials" in a room,

you will have a single meeting for the whole term of the president.

True, however, at least one person was in this group that really didn't need to be. There were likely others.

IDK I don't actually think a very large portion of the US security apparatus actually cares about or follows the ostensible security protocols, and SCIFs are only as good as said protocols.

It's very schizophrenic. A coworker of mine told me a story about a base he worked on. To finish a step in acquiring your clearance to work there, you had to log into a secure system. You could not log into the secure system because you hadn't completed all the steps in acquiring your clearance. Therefore, someone who was already cleared had to log into the system for you, so that you could finish all the steps to get your own clearance. This itself was a violation of the rules for both the person who logged you in, and yourself.

Nobody cared. Everyone knew the system was bullshit.

But it's hard to imagine having to break the rules to get inside the circle of trust a clearance represents doesn't input a certain fundamental disrespect for said circle of trust.

Yeah that sounds about right, and I 100% think it nudges (in the mind of the practitioners) OPSEC out of the category of "important to prevent people from dying" into "more of this dumb bureaucratic paperwork stuff."

Which is really bad if it's actually important.

One part of the CIA triad (which sounds like some kind of military secret, but I’m told it’s just a cool-sounding cybersecurity acronym) is Availability — users should have access to everything they need to do their jobs without undue hurdles. If the government is violating that principle, it invites a cavalier attitude towards security and damages it in the process.

This Signal chat situation sounds like a particularly pernicious case of Shadow IT, as much as I dislike the term. But I’m very much curious how government officials are supposed to communicate with each other, particularly with how interconnected the world is now.

Yes - I appreciate the invocation of cybersecurity principles (which I know little about) here, but yeah I think that's right, and a real problem.

I've certainly heard this opined about high-level political types. In my experience the contractors and low level folks take it pretty seriously, and I know there was a lot of annoyance from those groups in particular about Hillary's email server, for example. There is (perhaps rightfully) a pretty strong view of a two-tier system there.

ETA: I've also heard rumblings that different departments within the government handle things like this very differently too.

I've heard extremely hair-raising anecdotes set both inside high-level Pentagon circles and big military contractor circles where high-level political types probably weren't a problem (although political correctness might be). Think things along the lines of knowingly improper access controls on HUMINT or phone calls to foreign countries placed in secure areas.

We take it seriously because we’d get absolutely reamed for fucking it up. Even if it were something mild/unintentional enough to avoid criminal charges, if I triggered some sort of audit, I wouldn’t expect to keep my job.

That’s the other thing about the various “improper storage” scandals. Responsibility was diluted. Sure, the government could find out who dumped files in Joe’s garage, but they elected not to spend the money. Not when there was no actual leak involved. This case doesn’t have that excuse.

With how many neocons are still infesting the admin and how leaky they tend to be it actually might. Not if you invite random journalists though.

Evidently, in the hands of the White House it is not very secure.

Signal security was not compromised in any way. And moronic endpoints are a flaw in any messaging system.

Using non secure messaging platforms is reckless, adding people to the chat they shouldn't have access to is incompetence. There is difference.

I know what you meant. I'll take your word for it that that Signal's communications are as encrypted and secure as anywhere else. I don't see why not.

It is not properly proofed against the dumb people that use it. Which, as all the security folks have told me, is a salient failure point of all systems. A single Nigerian phishing scam cannot compromise the White House network because POTUS clicked the wrong e-mail. We hope, at least.

A single Nigerian phishing scam cannot compromise the White House network because POTUS clicked the wrong e-mail. We hope, at least.

They prevented one Hilary from becoming POTUS.

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

Any system with good enough opsec doesn't have the needed throughput to be useful.

Imagine Mark Zuckerberg now. Facebook implemented Signal-type end to end encryption, with PFS and OTR and everything, and also Zuckerberg very much bends the knee and kisses Trump's ring, and still the people in his administration organize their illicit, leaky chats on the open source nerd niche messenger instead of the mainstream one run by his all-American megacorp they probably had preinstalled to talk with their buddies.

Also, technically, I think that the NSA is at least as competent as Moxie. The main problem with them is not that they have a massive conflict of interest, because their day job is breaking encryption to spy on Americans and everyone else. The probability that the security community would roll out backdoored encryption to spy on an administration might not be larger, but it certainly seems much higher than the probability of Signal being a NSA operation.

Is this really a big deal? I mean, by a competent administration it would certainly be, but this is well within the bounds of buffoonishness we've come to expect from Trump and those he employs. I'd say the long-term damage Trump has done to US foreign policy is a far greater issue, although I suppose R's can squint and say "that is helping us, actually, it's 4D-chess" for all that, while accidentally inviting reporters to your classified meeting is more plainly indefensible.

Still, this is really blowing up in ways I didn't expect. Even Hillary has been risen from the dead to opine on it.

but this is well within the bounds of buffoonishness we've come to expect from Trump and those he employs

It's honestly hard to tell because the goalposts move at lightning speed whenever a new form of buffoonishness is unleashed.

Still, this is really blowing up in ways I didn't expect.

Is it blowing up with anyone whose opinion might sway the administration or their supporters? In a normal administration, Hegseth and/or Walz would be going under the bus for this (in a normal administration, Hegseth wouldn't be SecDef), but that sort of thing is mostly driven by intra-elite norms and the only norm Trumpist elites care about is in-group loyalty. The general American electorate (and especially Trump's base of support) is too disengaged and too prone to facile cynicism to care about something as niche as bad opsec or the implications of senior political leaders working through Signal.

It's blowing up sufficiently that somebody might get fired over it. One of the big unwritten rules of the Trump administration is "don't cause bad headlines on cable news", and while I haven't watched Fox specifically, the fact that I keep seeing this all over the news sites I watch on day 2 is indicative that it's something that Trump could get pissed over. Mike Walz's ass could be on the line, and Hegseth and even Vance could be in hot water to some degree. That's a pretty significant level of disruption for a scandal in the Trump admin.

I'm sure we'll probably have forgotten about this in a month, though.

Seems like the real screw-up here is that USG does not actually have an encrypted secure internal chat that they can use for cross department collaboration. With USG's intelligence budget, that is absolutely inexcusable. Goldberg in the article says that they should have used a SCIF which they all have installed at their home. That is utterly impractical, trying to coordinate two dozen officials to all be home or at the office in their SCIF at the same time is just not going to be possible. So if the option is 1) communicate over something highly secure but imperfect and with a lousy UX that makes it hard to quickly see who everyone is and that mixes internal and external contacts or 2) simply don't communicate at all, it's not actually obvious to me that 1) is worse. Ultimately, even as bad as this mistake was ... nothing actually bad happened as a result of accidentally adding Goldberg and so it's not clear to me that it would have been better if these officials had simply never had the conservation at all.

It was leaked on purpose to show European 'powers' that the administration is not just publicly making noise about big needed changes but genuinely dissatisfied

If it wasn't gross incompetence, and I personally will not rule that out, then this is the motive I'd expect. Even if you take this as sincere incompetence, then the similar sincerity of Euroskepticism in the chat is as much / more concerning than the use of the chat.

Why? The Euroskepticism was perfectly appropriate, unlike the use of Signal. The Euros probably already know that's how the Trump administration (and honestly, likely Democratic administrations as well) think about them. Releasing it makes the mutual knowledge into common knowledge (that is, it's saying the quiet part out loud), but Trump doesn't seem to care about that in general even if it wasn't on purpose here.

One fact to support this theory is who is doing the leaking. Jeffrey Goldberg is an editor who has been at The Atlantic a long time. He did a bid in the IDF as a young pup and written articles such as "Is It Time for the Jews to Leave Europe" in response to terror attacks. It is unlikely Goldberg would want to help the Houthis or hammer the admin on Houthi beating. Which he doesn't. He is seasoned and at least partly aligned on the topic of discussion. Both of these make him more likely to understand (or suspect) what his role is here despite the confusion and it appears he is carrying out his duties. This would be big 5D chess if unnecessary and reckless.

Why not just leak stuff the good ol' fashioned way? This form of leak probably maximizes the amount eyeballs, but are those necessary? Perhaps foreign parties have reason to doubt how tapped into the admin the media apparatus is as the admin seems keen on beating on it rather than filling it with juice. Might be that Trump doesn't like his cabinet using the Fake News traditional messaging apparatus, so this is technically a way to work around that. Wading into pure conjecture any which way. I'm not sure if there's a more sensational way to leak stuff if that is what occurred here.

This leak makes Hegseth look like a fool, and his crying about it afterwards and suggesting it wasn't real even after the White House confirmed it made him look like a clown. I don't think he (or any other politician in his position) would be willing to do that just to make a more convincing leak.

This suggests that Hegseth didn't know and did not consent to it, but that doesn't necessarily mean it wasn't set-up by someone else. I'd guess Waltz is most likely since he sent the invite. But yeah, there's a large number of less embarrassing ways to leak information to journalists to write a story. I'm not at all convinced on planned or intended. It's a remote possibility. Bad practice and incompetence is leading the race for me.

But if it is understood as being leaked on purpose then it becomes just more public noise.

It seems like this was obviously “leaked” on purpose. Nothing they’re saying here is in any way secretive and it sounds like regime taking points, not planning.

"I, however, knew two hours before the first bombs exploded that the attack might be coming. The reason I knew this is that Pete Hegseth, the secretary of defense, had texted me the war plan at 11:44 a.m. The plan included precise information about weapons packages, targets, and timing."

Were the journalist to report things not described in the article as he learned of them -- times, dates, places, and targets before the action was carried out -- do you think it would have been no big deal? I would consider it a very big deal, a major breach of OPSEC, and probably treasonous. These do not seem like the kinds of things you tell journalists prior to a military strike.

It would be unwise to tell journalists these details even with an explicit understanding not to report on these details until after the plan is carried out. Which doesn't seem to have occurred here. It would be extra reckless to only have a tacit understanding with a journalist as to what or when he can report on the things he learned of. Which, by his account, doesn't appear to have occurred either. This was a journalist accidentally learning things he should not have known and, wisely, not reporting them. These are the kinds of things that, if the enemy learns of them, can get men killed.

The journalist says he has these, but what are they, specifically?

“We could probably hit them with a $big_cock_american_missile as earlier as tomorrow morning given that the USS American president is off the coast of goatherdistan” is specific timeframes, weapons packages, etc. and doesn’t say anything that isn’t also publicly available.

Call me skeptical.

It's ridiculous to expect a journalist to publish specific military plans that would probably get him jailed for publishing. The fact that he didn't publish them isn't evidence that he didn't see them.

and doesn’t say anything that isn’t also publicly available.

What do you mean? None of this was publicly available until today. It's only available now, because a journalist reported it. In my opinion, a journalist should have never been in a position to report this story or any details they did not report on. I do not find solace that the journalist either chose not to, or was unable to, report precise mission details to the public. If I was an adversarial journalist writing a story about this administration in these circumstances, then I would also not print mission details.

A contribution to the successful mission was the journalist, who should not have been there, didn't go to Twitter and scream from the rooftops that JDAMs were falling on Target 3 in Aden from 15,000 feet at 12:00PM local time. This was good for the journalist, because the journalist would be in jail most likely. I would not expect detailed flight plans or powerpoint mission briefings were shared by the Secretary of Defense in a big group chat, but it seems very reasonable to me that targets, times, weapons were shared with these individuals, and it seems reasonable to me that these are things you do not want to go public. Since journalists have a job to make things go public officials should be careful what they share with them. It does not seem like they were particularly careful in this instance.

For myself, "we probably could not have been hurt that bad from our colossal fuck up" is about as comforting as "well nothing bad happened so it's fine." Procedures are created to minimize colossal fuck ups and bad happenings. Next in line is "well the enemy is small and weak and can't harm us anyway." I think this is a stupid, dangerous mindset to humor when doing something as serious as warfare, and there are many historical examples of this mindset contributing to defeat.

But it doesn't say that. In fact, when they talk about any actually sensitive military planning type things, they explicitly refer anybody in the group to an appropriate channel:

At 8:05 a.m. on Friday, March 14, “Michael Waltz” texted the group: “Team, you should have a statement of conclusions with taskings per the Presidents guidance this morning in your high side inboxes.” (High side, in government parlance, refers to classified computer and communications systems.) “State and DOD, we developed suggested notification lists for regional Allies and partners. Joint Staff is sending this am a more specific sequence of events in the coming days and we will work w DOD to ensure COS, OVP and POTUS are briefed.”

That's how they started out. But the article later says people (including SECDEF) are posting clearly sensitive info, including the exact time of the strike. Which is a known hazard of trying to discuss unclassified parts of classified things in an unclassified environment, which is why in general that's discouraged (though political appointees in particular probably do it all the time).

Well today we had congressional testimony where they claim there was nothing secretive shared, and that signal was approved for the type of use they were doing.

So maybe everybody is lying. Certainly everybody involved here has an incentive to lie.

As others have pointed out, several of the people in the chat (including the SECDEF) are the original classification authorities for the informations shared, so in some sense if they say it isn't classified it isn't, even if it's the sort of thing that would typically be classified. But that's a technicality; it may make it legal (as far as classified information goes) but it doesn't make it not-stupid. As for using Signal, my understanding is that's a violation of the Federal Records Act (because it doesn't keep records), but I'm not familiar enough to say there isn't a loophole.

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Even if there wasn't anything classified on its own (despite the reporting certainly suggesting there is), a lot of information can still be sensitive if you gather it in one place because it can allow foreign agents to build up and intuit the classified info from context. Known as classification by compilation Likewise insight into how they make plans and act on them can be useful tools for our enemies.

The more little bits of information you can gather and the more context you can put them in the more dangerous a piece of information becomes, even if on its own it might be public knowledge.

And you'd be surprised how many seemingly unimportant details get tracked by journalists and foreign agents, pizza deliveries going up during big news (people were staying later than normal or celebrating or whatever else was a trend noticed back in the 90s. All because it's just one tiny little hint helping to build up context.

"Adolescence"

As I was giving my brother a lift on Saturday, he asked me if I watched anything new recently. He told me that there's a new netflix series that everybody's talking about, about a murder in a high school, and that in typical netflix fashion there's been a race shift. However since the character in question is a murderer, the shift has been in a direction opposite from the often memed one.

Later that day, my wife told me that everybody's talking about a new series, and it's about a teenage boy getting radicalized by the far right. I acknowledged nearing about it, and she gently mocked me, saying that she can hear from the tone of my voice that I instinctively recoil at the premise.

Yesterday, I saw my high school geography teacher, now the headmaster of said high school, recommending the show on facebook. This was my final cue that it in fact reached some critical mass of normie recognition. I started reading up on it, saw that it was an UK production, and that gave context to the tidbits that I heard while jumping channels in the car on the weekend, with people on the (Polish) radio talking about violence against women in England.

I won't paste the whole synopsis from Wikipedia, but the tl;dr is that it's about a 13 year old who gets radicalized by The Manosphere, asks out a classmate who had her topless photos revenge-posted about someone else earlier (thinking that she'd be easy), she rebuffs him, later insinuates that he's an incel, the boy get cyberbullied, eventually he finds a kindred radical, and stabs the girl. The plot proper is in the aftermath of this, with various authorities questioning the 13-year old Jamie, and parents wondering how it all went wrong. In the end, Jamie decides to plead guilty.

Adolescence has been widely praised by critics. On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, Adolescence has an approval rating of 99% based on 72 critics' reviews, with an average rating of 9.3 out of 10. The website's critical consensus reads, "Stylistically bold and beautifully acted from top to bottom, Adolescence is a masterclass in televisual storytelling and a searing viewing experience that scars." Metacritic calculated a weighted average of 90 out of 100 based on 25 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".

Writing in The Guardian, Lucy Mangan stated that Adolescence was "the closest thing to TV perfection in decades", singling out the acting by Owen Cooper and Erin Doherty for particular praise. Anita Singh of The Daily Telegraph found the series to be "a devastating watch" and the acting to be "phenomenal", although she said that the single-take filming technique could feel "like a gimmick". However, Sophie Butcher of Empire praised the continuous shooting, stating that it was "the most dizzying TV feat of the year" which served to enhance the on-screen emotion.

Anneliese Midgley, a Member of Parliament, called for the series to be screened to Parliament and in schools, arguing it could help counter misogyny and violence against women and girls. Prime Minister Keir Starmer backed the call.

I tried to find something about the inspiration for the series, to corroborate my brother's info, and it turns out it was inspired by three cases of stabbing. The only one named by showrunners is the case of Brianna Ghey, a 16 year old transgirl stabbed by two 15 year olds, white girl and white boy. Possible speculation about the other two cases include Ava White (12 year old stabbed by a 14 year old "not named for legal reasons" 🤔) and Elliane Andam (15, black girl stabbed by 17 year old Hassan Sentamu). The filming started in July 2024, so Axel Rudakubana's spree couldn't have been an inspiration.

So, my first, second, etc. thoughts on all of this were unbecoming of this forum.

My nth thought can be summed as: the absolute audacity of them.

Yes, knife crime, and other violent crime, and crime in general is on the rise in the UK youth. But the unacknowledged elephant in the room is that the current UK teens are a dramatically different cohort from teens. The optimistic take would be that the "adults in the room" are recognizing the problem, and are laundering it as a white issue to make it more palatable for left-lib sensibilities. But I don't believe it. This is another in the long list of wild swerves trying to address anything but the root of the problem. Knife bans! Pointless knives, as suggested by Idris Elba! Illegal memes! Starmer would rather release hundreds of actual violent criminals to have more place in prisons for the "white supremacists".

Cf. "stop asian hate", where assaults perpetrated by other demographics were also presented as if it were the whites' fault. We get the usual kvetching about radicalization, Andrew Tate (ignoring the fact that he fake-converted to Islam, which suggests that his core viewer demographic probably isn't white British nor white American) and whatnot. Are white boys in the UK actually radicalizing? I don't know, probably not, the first pass suggests that in every place that isn't South Korea the boys/young men stay roughly where they were politically, while the world shifts from under them. But if they are, that's a reasonable reaction to the world that tries to scapegoat them for things outside of their control and treats them only with suspicion.

(Yes, I am aware that the perps ih Ghey's case were in fact white. But even there, the girl perp was probably the main instigator of the murder, a far cry from the fictionalized version.)

P.S. (From the synopsis: "Katie used this form of encoded language to accuse Jamie of being an incel". At age 13? I sure hope he was.)

Writing in The Guardian, Lucy Mangan stated that Adolescence was "the closest thing to TV perfection in decades"

This statement alone should make everyone rather suspicious about the series.

On a different note I'd like to mention that Brianna Ghey's murder had nothing to do with either transphobia or misogyny, as the Wiki article makes it clear.

Also Matthew Shepard's murder had nothing to do with him being gay. People tend to get mad if I say that. Don't drop that fact on reddit.

The Manosphere hasn't been a thing for quite sometime. It's like referring to Suffragettes rather than Feminists. Once it became clear that the term had outlived it's usefulness, individuals splintered into a decentralized ether of male self interest and self development.

Adolescence is just another focus for the usual groups to assign blame for anything and everything to white boys men. Red pill knowledge is framed as something that causes murder, hate and involuntary celibacy. If only boys behaved more like.. well, girls, then we wouldn't have this problem. Lets force boys in schools to watch this series so they can feel even more demonized. I'm sure that this won't have the complete opposite effect of that which the Karens would wish.

I'd better stop here. I've been noticing misandry against men in Western culture for quite sometime, but now it looks like boys are targets too, which makes me a bit upset.

I've been noticing misandry against men in Western culture for quite sometime, but now it looks like boys are targets too

Arguably the primary targets are boys just becoming men. From an example published a few days ago:

not a single white American man born after 1984 has published a work of literary fiction in The New Yorker (at least 24, and probably closer to 30, younger millennials have been published in total).

(after similar anecdotes about 9 other prestige outlets)

The chief editor of the New Yorker is still a white American man, mind you. He replaced a woman in 1998 (back when that was still more unremarkable than Problematic) and he's probably still safe there today. If you try to take away an old man's job then you're certain to engender conflict with a powerful man. If you take young men's jobs before their careers really get started, the young men tend to just go away and find a different career. It might take a decade before people even start to notice.

Arguably the primary targets are boys

I'd even just stop it here. Feminists like other critical theorists have done their own march through the educational institutions. I haven't really seen any pushback in Western public school systems and when I do it ends up as a cautionary tale..

I'd better stop here. I've been noticing misandry against men in Western culture for quite sometime, but now it looks like boys are targets too, which makes me a bit upset.

In addition to @DiscourseMagnus' reply, consider the following: What is an attack on men if not an attack on boys? For what else should boys aspire and expect to be?

Well now they have the option of becoming women.

I'd better stop here. I've been noticing misandry against men in Western culture for quite sometime, but now it looks like boys are targets too, which makes me a bit upset.

Always have been.

Once it became clear that the term had outlived it's usefulness

I'd add that the Manosphere was clearly able to exist as long as it did due to a very peculiar cultural milieu where Blue Tribe feminists were ramping up the culture war, but the Trump phenomenon, the alt-right, the meme wars, Gamergate etc. did not yet exist.

The Manosphere hasn't been a thing for quite sometime.

How would you describe Andrew Tate? What subculture is he a part of?

Andrew Tate was able to make a name for himself precisely because he obviously took detailed arguments that were posted on Manosphere sites that have been defunct for many years, repackaged them and dumbed them down, and presented as his own in short videos and whatnot. His followers believe him because they don't know any better, because again, those sites are no longer accessible. He's exploiting the death of the Manosphere.

Some kind of fractured derivative of the Red Pill. Not that he would identify as that (which is kind of my point). Do you think Tate would go 'I'm part of the manosphere'?

The optimistic take would be that the "adults in the room" are recognizing the problem, and are laundering it as a white issue to make it more palatable for left-lib sensibilities. But I don't believe it. This is another in the long list of wild swerves trying to address anything but the root of the problem. Knife bans! Pointless knives, as suggested by Idris Elba! Illegal memes! Starmer would rather release hundreds of actual violent criminals to have more place in prisons for the "white supremacists".

The pessimistic take is that the government likes redirecting anger at actual problems onto the faux-causes so it can justify the policies it actually wants. Since 2020, that mostly means censoring the internet so it can silence dissent. The most extreme example of this is the murder of David Amess, an MP, by an Islamist terrorist in 2021. This was subsequently used to justify laws around "social media abuse" and "online anonymity", despite neither playing any role in motivating the terrorist, or the murder itself. It just happens that the government wants people who dislike it kicked off the internet (hello, I am one of them).

Andrew Tate (ignoring the fact that he fake-converted to Islam, which suggests that his core viewer demographic probably isn't white British nor white American)

Andrew Tate is also mixed-race. While white British probably make up a plurality of his viewing demographic (I'd need to crunch some numbers to tell), they are underrepresented.

What happens when you age adjust? There are notably few boomers following him, after all.

Black and Asian people will be overrepresented regardless of the population distribution, because of those surveyed, a greater percent viewed him positively. As for whether there's still a white majority or plurality among those who view him positively, that's what I mean by I'd need to crunch some numbers to tell.

Yes but are they overrepresented in the age group that likes Andrew Tate? Andrew Tate fans skew young and younger generations in Britain, as elsewhere, are more minority heavy.

When you adjust for this, are white youths more pro-Andrew Tate than minority youths?

No, you misunderstand. It's already been adjusted because the raw figures of how many people they surveyed aren't included.

The survey asked X black people, of which 0.41X said they viewed him favourably.

The survey asked Y white people, of which 0.15Y said they viewed him favourably.

When you adjust for population, by dividing by X and Y respectively, you get 41% and 15%, so minority youths are more pro-Andrew Tate.

The political and educational establishment and those who share their views fail to adequeately diagnose the problem. This is primarily because they can't understand the experience of being young men and have zero interest in doing so. Indeed, every "men are doing badly" talking point is always discussed from perspective of its negative second order effects, mostly in relation to women. Starmer's gushing over this is indicative of naive confidence. He thinks the essence of the problem has finally been captured, and so do all the left of center opinion pieces on this show that were written shortly after its release. Frankly, it all feels a bit coreographed...

I have written about this before, once three years ago and once last year and I haven't seen anything to suggest that they've learned a single thing since then. There is nothing new to write about under the sun. I want to volunteer myself as a consultant to the government on the manosphere and how its influence might be curbed, purely because I cannot handle the unending nonsense coming from my computer screen and I would like it to stop.

I do think they want to fix the problem. It’s really hard to find a group of people who insist on doing the exact opposite of what everyone who works with young men is screaming for them to do and not eventually come to the conclusion that the problem is “they just can’t figure out what to do.”

What has worked for pretty much all of human history is a purpose, a sense of responsibility, and feelings of competence. There are ways to do this, it’s not even that hard. Get them out doing useful things, competing in sports or other activities. Give them male only spaces. They’ll be fine. And if you pay attention to what kinds of messages young men gravitate to, it’s messages exactly like that— calls to purpose, to doing hard things and building something worthwhile. They eat up Jordan Peterson, Jocko, and other similar figures.

With the correct direction so obvious, I find it weird to think that all of the phDs worried about young men have absolutely no idea how to make them healthier. I don’t see it, I see people who look at boys as failed girls and men as failed women and goes about trying to turn the young men into women. It’s doesn’t work, but I’m not convinced it was ever supposed to make men more mentally healthy. It seems more about making sure men are in a sense as domesticated as women are by nature— willing to sit down, shut up and do as he’s told.

Get them out doing useful things, competing in sports or other activities.

But that is not Safe.

Give them male only spaces. They’ll be fine.

But that is not Equal.

And if you pay attention to what kinds of messages young men gravitate to, it’s messages exactly like that— calls to purpose, to doing hard things and building something worthwhile.

But that will mean men will think themselves entitled to the fruits of that labor rather than paying women their fair share.
That is not Consent.

If you worship these things as Goddesses, and many do- you don't generally get elected without professing your belief in these things- you cannot fix this problem. Only by rejecting these Goddesses can you solve the problem.

Yeah this is just another piece in the endless stream of propaganda blaming all social ills on violent white boys and men. Not even very interesting or a new take.

Fails to have any nuance into the root of the problem it seems, basically just blaming the kid for being gullible enough to fall for evil propaganda. Boring.

The real crime here is that this agitprop tripe is being celebrated as art and forcibly shown to highschoolers. But even that is as old as the trees.

So, one thing I keep wondering about, is does the US have a massive cultural divide with the UK over pornography, or is UK media completely unhinged and unrepresentative?

Like, in the US, it's currently a minor flashpoint that conservative state governments are requiring age verification for pornographic websites, and the websites are choosing to block access from those states instead of implementing age verification. Liberals seem to be low key against this? At least I've seen liberals like Krystal Ball act like Republicans are harming people's sexual health by "banning" pornography in her state of Virginia. It's not exactly a hill they'll die on, but they'll spend some breath on it from time to time. Like liberals seem to be pro pornography, or at least in some sort of weird hyperposition between being pro some abstract form of pornography that's good for sexual self discovery, and against some abstract for of pornography that degrades women.

I know... I know... just.... moving on.

So anyways, a lot of US left coded Narrative following shows seem to be very laissez-faire about pornography, especially with lots of "safe horny" scenes of diverse peoples and sexualities having sex on screen.

A lot of what I can only assume are left coded Narrative following shows produced or co-produced in the UK (Broadchurch, Inside Man, Black Mirror) have as their central conceit that pornography is the singular corrupting force behind evil patriarchy and violence against women. The consumption of pornography repeatedly leads to a chain of events where men rape and/or murder women.

Is this actually a view that the UK public holds? Or is it just more of the same top down forceful lies that gets pushed in the US media, totally out of touch with the people who watch it?

is does the US have a massive cultural divide with the UK over pornography, or is UK media completely unhinged and unrepresentative?

Both.

Like, in the US, it's currently a minor flashpoint that conservative state governments are requiring age verification for pornographic websites, and the websites are choosing to block access from those states instead of implementing age verification.

Mindgeek (i.e pornhub) doesn't oppose age verification for pornography. They just oppose that they've not been given a lucrative monopoly on age verification via a law perfectly designed to match the system they've already made for it. It happens to be strategically useful to blame this on Rethuglicans to rile up Democrats in opposition, but there's no political commitment here.

A lot of what I can only assume are left coded Narrative following shows produced or co-produced in the UK (Broadchurch, Inside Man, Black Mirror) have as their central conceit that pornography is the singular corrupting force behind evil patriarchy and violence against women. The consumption of pornography repeatedly leads to a chain of events where men rape and/or murder women.

The problem is, the cultural divide isn't genuinely over pornography. It's over censorship of the internet in general, because, rightly or wrongly, the current and prior British government, and their client media, view free expression online as a major threat to their continued rule. They are obsessed with introducing laws to ban it, and will reach for any tool available as a justification to do so. Porn is on the weapon rack, so it gets used. It would be trivial enough for governments to introduce legislation specifically banning porn. In practice, it only tangentially hits porn as part of laws that fire broadsides at online dissidents, who are the true target. Anti-porn activists get rolled out in situations where, before, they'd have been shut out as too religious and too conservative, because they are temporarily useful.

It would be illegal to operate this website in the UK post the Online Safety Act, for example, because it doesn't meet Ofcom's takedown requirements for content our government doesn't like.

Or is it just more of the same top down forceful lies that gets pushed in the US media, totally out of touch with the people who watch it?

The UK public simultaneously doesn't specifically oppose porn, but loves randomly banning everything. A significant percentage of people will support permanent bans on all kinds of activities for no discernible reason.

British writer Louise Perry, in one of her podcast discussions after her book "The Case Against the Sexual Revolution", made an observation about this. And she noted, basically, that her conservative critiques about the sexual revolution weren't interpreted as being tied to regressive evangelical Christianity in Britain, because that wasn't a movement with any particular force there. So it meant she was free to make something like a secular argument for a return to older Christian ethnics, and for it to be received that way in Britain. Whereas in America, because of the contours of the culture wars (and honestly because of the physical contours of the country, with evangelical Christianity often being coded as a Southern thing, meaning racist low-educated poor losers of the Civil War etc etc etc), that kind of argument is automatically slotted into a pre-existing fight. And I think she had the sense that it was much easier to advance that sort of argument and have it be engaged with in Britain as a result. In a way, it reminds me of the Charles Murray argument that a lot of well-credentialed American progressives of a certain sort seem entirely unwilling to preach what they practice; in their personal lives, they are thrifty and monogamous and live up mostly to a 1950s-ish life script (once they admittedly exhaust a non-martial serial monogamy phase in their 20s), but they're largely unwilling to advocate those positions more broadly.

Liberals seem to be low key against this?

Which liberals?

If you mean progressives, they hate it. The claim it devalues women is trivially correct and everything progressives do is downstream of this.

Actual liberals are generally too busy watching porn to comment.

Just generally, non-US serious feminists have a dim/skeptical view of pornography because it’s not exactly politically correct.

Im very curious about the people who rant and rave about the show. What psychologically is the source of their enjoyment? Obviously it does not conform to some previously unexpressed trauma of white boys murdering classmates. Is it possible that these libs are just as freaked out about POC violent youth, but also need a way to express it, and White Boys reputation is just an acceptable cost? If they already understand themselves to be left wing, and know that everyone to the right of them is generally aware it’s not white Boys doing it, potentially they feel they’re engaging in a society wide esoteric communication.

I don't know if you remember being a kid, and had somebody fuck with you (steal your toy, punch you, cheat off you during a test) and then to add insult to injury they also successfully lied and got you in trouble for it?

That's all this is. It's virtually inconceivable these people don't know who's really committing the rapes and knife crime in the UK. This is just the victory lap of their conquest, presaging how'll they'll write the history of the genocide of the Anglo-Saxon's.

These people are very concerned about Andrew Tate. That’s it. They’re concerned about sexism spreading among adolescent boys(and to be fair, I don’t like the spread of Andrew Tate sexism among adolescent boys either- even if it seems to be much less pronounced than the literati like to claim). That Andrew Tate fans are almost certainly less white than the general population is immaterial; specifying ‘white’ just makes their concern socially acceptable to themselves.

My completely baseless speculation based only on reading the OP and skimming the Wikipedia page:

The series isn’t actually about violence, at least not thematically. The series is about sexualization, and the violence of the framing narrative serves as a grand metaphor. The series is cathartic because it validates the “ick” that women feel at unwanted sexual attention as being homoousian with physical violence.

IIRC when women are surveyed about what they mean by 'the ick' it's typically behavior in wanted or desired parters which falls short of an ideal.

I agree with some other replies, most likely the fans think white boys are a concerning problem. They probably have a blind spot preventing them from seeing it any other way. Other fans likely hate low-status (white) men and the show is like a minstrel show - legitimately entertaining as a sneer.

But, the writers could have more principled worries and know this is the only way to express it. By comparison, The Handmaid's Tale is actually inspired by Muslim theocracy, not Christian theocracy. The two stories are not completely comparable since THT I think is more of a cautionary "it could happen to us" and AFAICT this show is not meant to be a hypothetical -- it seems to be a show about current social issues.

I agree with some other replies, most likely the fans think white boys are a concerning problem.

In the vein of my previous comment, that maybe there is more similarity between me and the liblefts than I previously thought, I wonder if there is an aspect of racism of low expectations here. Maybe liblefts have essentially given up on shaping POC boys, and they view decent well behaved white boys as a last bastion that cannot fall to the distinctly vulgar and uncivilized Andrew Tateism. Maybe they view conservative whites as a part of a functioning political ecosystem, and see it collapsing with their slow disappearance.

They believe it captures the lived experience of young men who enter the alt-right/manosphere/incel pipeline for whatever reason and thus provides the antitode to that way of thinking. It doesn't for a whole host of reasons, the primary one being that the main character is 13 years old and most fears young men have about their social status and manhood kick in from around 15-16 onward after maturity has hit.

The plot gives me 'progressives talking about sex instead of having it' vibes. I mean you also see that with progressives addressing lots of other things, it's not a super-specific problem. But progressives live in a world with functionally no one under about 20; not understanding what would be normal-if-bad behavior for a teenage boy and what would be extremely abnormal is expected behavior. The 'plot to get laid' aspect seems like something out of an eighties movie about actual highschoolers, not the real behavior of thirteen year old boys(who are much earlier in puberty than people who only deal with adults tend to believe).

To add a point of anecdata, when I was thirteen I wanted to touch some tits. Getting laid, let alone constructing a psychological profile of a potential "weak" girl to do so, was somewhere in the realm of strange vaguely gross things that didn't seem so appealing.

Yeah, when I was 13(maybe more like 13 1/2) I probably would have had sex if suddenly confronted with a willing woman, but going out of my way to get some seemed like weird alien behavior. There were girls I liked but picking one on the basis of ‘more likely to be willing to have sex’ wouldn’t have occurred to me.

"Men and boys, from a very young age, are influenced by hardcore online pornography and The Manosphere(tm) to [among other things] see women merely as sex objects" is a vital component in the origin story progressives tell themselves.

And indeed, most men have "been exposed to hardcore online pornography" (translation: they, or someone they know, typed "boobs" into the Internet) by this age. They're not going to tell you that, though; it's one of those things adults are weird about, and they know that.

No mechanism for how this actually happens is ever expanded on beyond mumble mumble sexual novelty, but whether or not it actually makes sense is generally irrelevant.

I don't think it's that deep. I think the normies, especially internationally, don't have the first idea about the state of the UK. Mentioning the crime discrepancies between demographics is the taboo in the west right now, so no, they're not freaked out about "POC violent youth", because they hardly have a concept of it. Fwiw, it might be a well directed show, possibly tugging at heartstrings of the parents in a "this could happen to you[r kid]" way. I wouldn't know.

Black people are over-represented in knife crime (6% by population, 14% of knife crime) but that is mostly concentrated in London (47% of knife crime is by black people in London, 36% by whites for comparison), in most of England, particularly the North where the show is set, the vast majority of knife wielding offenders are from the almost entirely white underclass. About 70% of knife offenders are white throughout England. In the North that is likely to be well over 80% just due to demographics.

The UK is not the US, the difference in demographics of crime and the underclasses in general is much less pronounced and is concentrated in very different ways. And given most black knife crime is intra-ethnic, most white English people who have any contact with knife crime it is going to be with white offenders.

If you are white in England, the chances of being a victim of white knife crime is hugely higher than by black knife crime. 1) Because black people are only 6% of the population and 2) Because violent knife crime is usually intra-ethnic.

White people in England probably have no need to be freaked out by "POC violent youth" at all. Or really violent youth entirely. The homicide rate overall is a fifth of that in the US, and close to a quarter of what there is in a single city, where the bulk of both victims and offenders are not white.

The UK is not the US, the difference in demographics of crime and the underclasses in general is much less pronounced and is concentrated in very different ways.

Going by the murder rate data from the government, black overrepresentation is actually slightly worse than the famous 13/52 in the US. The issue as a whole is way less pronounced because there are fewer murders per capita from any ethnic background, sure, but the relative differences are pretty much the same.

And given most black knife crime is intra-ethnic, most white English people who have any contact with knife crime it is going to be with white offenders.

That's most likely not an inherent property of crime though, but of geographical racial segregation, at least in the US. That's obviously a fairly trivial observation, as an environment gets more diverse you'd also expect the ethnic backgrounds of murderer-victim pairs to be more random, but the discrepancies are still pretty stark, e.g. in 26% black South Carolina about half of all white murder victims are killed by a black perpetrator. Since roughly 2020 this holds across most states in the South too, with Hispanics chipping in in states like Texas with fewer black people, while interracial murders are rising as a share of the white total nationwide as well.

In other words: as a white British person, your protection against black knife crime isn't your whiteness, it's most likely your physical separation from statistically more violent groups. As places like Newcastle or Leeds become more demographically similar to today's London, even Northerners living in their supermajority native towns and cities might get caught up in that.

In other words: as a white British person, your protection against black knife crime isn't your whiteness, it's most likely your physical separation from statistically more violent groups

Not just geographical separation but crime related too, much of the knife crime in the UK (and gun crime in the US) is between gangs, or drug related. If you aren't involved in those your risks are much much lower. And also if you aren't a young male of course.

Especially in the UK with those factors the average white adult in the north is very safe. They don't have to worry about a POC violent crime wave (which was the OP's point) because they are never going to see it . And given homicide is dropping overall after the Covid spike I don't see that getting worse.

Looking at your homicide stats, that is for victims not offenders. Black people are 17% of victims despite making up 4% of the population, while whites are 82% of people but only 71.4% of victims. That's the flip side of 13/52. Only 4% of the population but 17% of those killed. For the US that would be 13/54.

The average white person in America is pretty safe, the average white person in the UK is really really safe.

It’s pretty clear they aren’t all that concerned with BIPOC knife crime since their government just released sentencing guidelines that call for different “tiers” of sentences depending upon the race of the offender

Is it possible that these libs are just as freaked out about POC violent youth, but also need a way to express it, and White Boys reputation is just an acceptable cost? If they already understand themselves to be left wing, and know that everyone to the right of them is generally aware it’s not white Boys doing it, potentially they feel they’re engaging in a society wide esoteric communication.

I described something similar here, a Straussian reading of a novel I haven't read and don't intend to.

...the iron fist in the rainbow glove

I like this. I'll probably steal it and use it the next time I get in a political argument.

Thanks, an interesting read

I had a pretty surface level comment about this kind of narrative pushing in the last thread. The scope of my comment leaned more into journalists latching onto stories that fit their narrative, but your comment talks more about these streaming services pushing a narrative which I find to be just as important, maybe even more important. A lot of these newer shows produced by these platforms are really just delivery mechanisms for socially approved moral instruction, particularly when it comes to social issues. It's a pipeline of content designed (whether intentionally or not) to reaffirm progressive narratives, not challenge them.

I haven't seen the show, but I just read the CNN article about it. Like you said I think there is a recognition that there is a problem. They really try to explain its roots being mostly due to social media, which I agree is a major contributor, but they sort of leave out the passive, yet continued attempts at the feminization of the males in our society so that their violent tendencies can be increasingly shifted to the more indirect emotional and psychological kind. In this show, the female utilizes her ability to maximize psychological harm without being too direct, while the male causes direct harm. One is socially accepted and media-protected, the other is criminalized.

What is the message? Based on the article, it seems like the show creator is trying to strike some balance between the two types of aggression (direct-masculine and indirect-feminine) and how social media (which empowers feminine aggression) is a major problem. No disagreement there. He really does seem to want to help the younger generations, but seeing how we all have to tip toe around certain realities, it makes addressing the male "problem" a difficult one.

The optimistic take would be that the "adults in the room" are recognizing the problem, and are laundering it as a white issue to make it more palatable for left-lib sensibilities. But I don't believe it.

I do believe this except I find this delivery method to be unacceptable, and, based on Western countries' current voting trends, I'm not the only one. People are becoming quite tired of whitey being the face of certain negative trends, and that has been expressed many times (see Brexit and the elections of Donald Trump).

I think that this is being used as the reason du jour to Have a Conversation about teenagers and social media. Back in my day it was personal information, sexting, and cybersecurity. We didn’t have the words ‘revenge porn’ and ‘doxxing’ but the designated cool grownups giving us talks about responsible internet use would have recognized the concepts quite easily.

The filming started in July 2024, so Axel Rudakubana's spree couldn't have been an inspiration.

I saw more than one meme claiming that Adolescence was Netflix's adaptation of the Southport stabbings, but assumed that couldn't possibly be the case given how recent it was. Good to know I was right.

I must admit, as an English Lit guy, it irritates me quite a bit that all of the commenters on this forum feel comfortable judging an artistic work by reading a basic synopsis and reviews from people they dislike (if anyone actually watched the show I'm happy to be corrected but it doesn't seem that way from how people are talking). I haven't seen the series either and I can't say that it's good, but there's a reason why we have the saying about the book and it's cover and all that. It's lazy and can hardly be called analysis at all.

I often read or otherwise experience works that I know I won't get along with! I have much to say about e.g. Glass Onion's excellent lighting and camerawork, even if describing its plot would take me another 800 angry words. Last year I've read Babel just so I could critique it fairly. (And I hardly ever see it reciprocated, there aren't many leftists queuing up to read, I don't know, Camp of Saints.)

And then the Charybdis to your sentiment's Scylla is that I'm getting asked by wife and friends why the hell am I doing it to myself, why read something only to rant about it. Can't please everyone.

And then there's often a conclusion from lefty social media users that if someone reads/watches an Important work, but doesn't take the intended moral lessons from it, that it's a failure of Media Literacy on part of the reader. And this one makes me even more disinclined to bother. If the conclusions are supposed to be preordained, if it's all just a morality play, can we assume that I've taken all the lessons and skip the 'experiencing' part?

(Just to be perfectly clear, because this kind of sarcastic hypothetical often transfers badly across writing - yes, what I'm proposing here is a horrible way to engage with art, but reducing works to one-dimensional anvilicious Messages welcomes it.)

In that case I commend you for practicing a forgotten art. I also read Babel last year (not knowing much about it going into it). I actually quite liked the historicity and worldbuilding of the book, it was pretty different from what I normally read in that sense and a good change of pace, but ran into a headache with the sections that were maybe to the most unsubtle degree I've come across in modern fiction so overtly didactic and earnest about the reader getting the point. Like, we get what you're trying to say, you don't have to try so hard. Still glad that I read it.

I agree that there's no way to please everyone, but there's also no reason to attempt to. Read what you want and comment however you like on it. If someone thinks you missed The Point or are wasting your time but you found it a valuable reading experience, they can get bent. If it wasn't, then you can reevaluate whether you want to continue those reading habits. It just irks me when people will dismiss something so completely out of hand because the wrong people like it. It's one manifestation of the brainrot you see everywhere these days where people don't want to bother taking the time to form their own critical opinion of something, so they'll regurgitate what some content creator said about X or Y or judge it on the most surface level of details.

Though on that note, I also agree with you that works which are striving to be summed up into one didactic surface level message invite bad takes. Still, I don't see how (from the summary that was given) this show would qualify necessarily. The original comment even qualified by saying that even IF young white men are radicalized in a way that the series shows, then that's reasonable. "it's not happening, but if it is, that's fine." So you don't have a problem with the possible reality of the content, you have a problem with the perceived message that this is promoting about young white men I guess?. But without watching the show, we have no idea what the message of the show might be, what conclusions it might draw about how much race/social media/drug use/gender dynamics/parent responsibility or anything else play into the narrative.

The original comment even qualified by saying that even IF young white men are radicalized in a way that the series shows, then that's reasonable. "it's not happening, but if it is, that's fine." So you don't have a problem with the possible reality of the content, you have a problem with the perceived message that this is promoting about young white men I guess?

And here we see the problem with the disparate cultures. My reading of the op, ideologically aligned as I am, is that it is fine to make tv shows about paths to radicalisation and youth crime, but ALL of the media that does this suggests the problem is little white boys and that doesn't reflect reality at all. That there is nothing brave or courageous about telling a story about the path to radicalisation and knife crime when you refuse to confront the ethnic reality of who actually falls onto that path and who actually commits most of the knife crime. And this is taking place in a media environment where being white and male is already setting you up for antagonist status, so it is no wonder the (ideologically aligned) media is lauding it and will do so regardless of its quality. That is not "it's not happening, but if it is, that's fine." it's "you are still crying wolf".

The overt, propaganda use of a text can be significantly distinct from its artistic merits (eg: Triumph of the Will, which is both noisome NSDAP propaganda and beautifully shot)

For most of us, the precise contents of a work of fiction tend to be secondary to the effects of those using a work of fiction as a basis for policy changes.

The primary focus I see here is the propaganda angle, we don't need to watch the show to know little white boys aren't The Problem. Also this criticism would sting more if woke media wasn't always so fucking generic. If safety and inclusivity and ad-friendliness didn't dull creator's creativity even before they get around to making the story advance the same insipid globohomo agenda every fucking thing else is advancing.

Also that attitude privileges positive criticism over negative criticism. Nobody gives a shit if you gush about a show before watching it, in fact that is a significant part of most media's promotional strategies. And you can spin up all kinds of lies about a movie you haven't seen if it codes right wing. Therefore it is the duty of every good, right thinking person who doesn't want globohomo corpo-friendly slop jammed down their throats to loudly and repeatedly badmouth anything that even looks like it. This is the world progressives apparently wanted, it would be unkind not to give it to them.

You do need to watch the show to know if the show is saying little white boys are the problem. Anything else is laziness disguised as politics.

Is any show that depicts a young white male murderer implying that young white men are The Problem? I want an actual answer to that, because it seems like you're saying yes to that if you feel this comfortable shitting all over something you have the barest passing familiarity with. If no, then I don't understand your reasoning.

My attitude privileges nothing, it is simply the fact of the matter that people will spend hours and paragraphs shitting all over something they have no idea about. The reverse is usually not true. When it is, I also find that distasteful.

Your attitude of treating every artistic and cultural object as a missile to jam down the throat of the other political side without any of your own analysis is both lazy and sounds incredibly tiresome and unrewarding. I prefer analyzing things on their own merits. What you describe is certainly not the world I want, nor is it the one I find myself in.

Your attitude of treating every artistic and cultural object as a missile to jam down the throat of the other political side without any of your own analysis is both lazy and sounds incredibly tiresome and unrewarding. What you describe is certainly not the world I want, nor is it the one I find myself in.

Then you simply aren't paying attention. It is not the world I want to live in, it is the world I fought hard and impotently against, and I remain adamant in my belief that the only way out is consequences. One side of the debate - whether you accept it or not - spent the past 15 years shoring up their vise like grip on the zeitgeist to the point they now control not only coverage, but to a large extent distribution of all non-independent (in the classic sense, not the neoliberal sense) media. They block media they don't like politically from being seen or purchased. They flood the news with negative reviews before a right wing product even launches, because they gatekeep the authorised critic pool. When people complain they declare them nazis or incels or gamers. When people watch it and write their own reviews for metacritic or opencritic or Google, they call it review bombing. When people then stop watching they double down on blaming the audience. Or they blame 'fatigue', which is a mod on blaming the audience. Funny how dumb nerds like me talked about star wars and comics all day every day from 1985 to 2015 and then suddenly got fatigued huh?

And no, you can say that you personally don't hold that attitude to privilege positive coverage over negative coverage, but of course boosting positive coverage and chilling negative coverage privileges positive coverage. That's why review bombing exists as a concept, why every now and then we get think pieces about how you can't trust user scores, and why we have the 'don't yuk someone's yum' meme. That wasn't the case before marketing executives realised they could game user impressions that hard. Positive reviews should be treated as dishonest by default these days, as they are part of the machine and thousands of people's livelihoods sometimes rely on the product scoring a high enough percent on review sites to count as success.

And so the answer to your question is no of course not. It's a Venn diagram of overlapping concerns, like adjacency too globohomo, where and by whom it was produced and the marketing campaign used to push it. And while white boys is one of the two main ones in this instance, the other necessary element is the chattering class thinking it's very important and we need to put it in schools. I doubt we'll see anything that important and iconoclastic (because that would be a necessary component, you don't need to show school kids shit they have jammed down their throats all the time) from a traditional media source ever again. Setting aside there being nothing new under the sun, there are too many competing and conflicting interests involved for nuanced arguments to take hold and far too many ways for people to pass the buck.

There is of course an experiment we can do here that will settle whether adolescence thinks little white boys are The Problem or not. You could watch it, and you will immediately be able to rub my face in how wrong I am. I would genuinely appreciate it if that was the case, because I have met Stephen Graham and he is really smart and friendly and just all round awesome, but I have kicked at that football way too many times to trust Lucy now.

I'm not sure who you think you're talking to. I am not a faceless representative of the political side that you so clearly despise. I am an individual who has provided my personal view on how media should be commented upon.

You are conflating a ton of things. There are some things people will call review bombing, will flood with negative reviews, etc. There are also people (like you) who will do all of the same negative behaviours and think they're justified for some reason? Sure, those things happen (I also think review bombing is a term that points to a distinct phenomenon, albeit with a negative connotation) and are sometimes bad. How much water do you think the 'I'm going to blame the general audience for my show being unpopular' argument really holds with the public? Is this a thing you think all "globohomo woke" people believe, or is it something you saw a few people say on twitter and now you're repeating in your deluge of spite?

"And no, you can say that you personally don't hold that attitude to privilege positive coverage over negative coverage, but of course boosting positive coverage and chilling negative coverage privileges positive coverage". Umm...yes, privileging positive coverage privileges positive coverage. I said that I didn't boost positive coverage. And I also don't think it's common to do so with coverage from people who don't know what they're talking about. Anyone who posted a video to social media where they gushed for 5 minutes about a movie that they announced throughout the video that they had no knowledge of would be roundly mocked in most circles. "Think pieces" Again, why are you letting what a couple random people online write about dictate your entire artistic life? If you asked the general public, what do you think trust in user scores would show?

Your 2nd last paragraph is a bunch of motivated excuses for laziness in not attempting to appreciate the artistic work as a cultural object. From everything you have said, I would have to reply that the world you describe does seem to be the world you want to live in, since you seemingly make no attempt to do anything other than perpetuate it. You'll never know when something "important and iconoclastic" really does come along because you'll never have given anything a chance.

This whole time my point has been that you should not proudly proclaim a positive or negative opinion on art that you have basically no knowledge of. I have no interest in watching the show myself because my point is not that it definitely does not say what you think it says, my point is that you simply don't know if that's the case. Neither do I, and neither does anyone else on the forum apparently. I'm not inclined to do someone else's homework if they want to take the leap of making proclamations about a show they haven't seen.

For my part, given the topics involved and the kinds of people insisting it's Very Important, I'm pretty much willing to let my assumptions ride. I'm not turning off my pattern recognition ability because you think it's unfair.

This whole time my point has been that you should not proudly proclaim a positive or negative opinion on art that you have basically no knowledge of. I have no interest in watching the show myself because my point is not that it definitely does not say what you think it says, my point is that you simply don't know if that's the case. Neither do I, and neither does anyone else on the forum apparently. I'm not inclined to do someone else's homework if they want to take the leap of making proclamations about a show they haven't seen.

Lmao ok, well given the way you talk to me I don't give a shit what you think. You say you aren't a faceless representative of the other side, but that's exactly how you behave. You demand empathy from me even as you insult and misrepresent me, you dismiss everything I say as not even worthy of consideration, and yet as far as you know nothing I said about the show is incorrect, you are simply uninterested. But I am intellectually lazy for my lack of interest you say, based on three posts, the first of which was clearly playing on the irony of just desserts, and the second one you seem to be ignoring because it's too nuanced to sneer at. But I know I'm right, so I have nothing to prove. The only reason I engaged you is because I like talking about this.

Your 2nd last paragraph is a bunch of motivated excuses for laziness in not attempting to appreciate the artistic work as a cultural object. From everything you have said, I would have to reply that the world you describe does seem to be the world you want to live in, since you seemingly make no attempt to do anything other than perpetuate it. You'll never know when something "important and iconoclastic" really does come along because you'll never have given anything a chance.

It doesn't matter if you think I'm lazy, I know I am simply avoiding demoralisation and adding a straw to the camel's back that is mainstream media, and that's good enough for me. I am perfectly content to let others who feel compelled to discover the actually important and iconoclastic stuff - remember how I said that to you and asked you to watch the show and tell me it was good so I could go watch it? Word of mouth is my method of discovery, it's actually worked well for most of human history.

"And no, you can say that you personally don't hold that attitude to privilege positive coverage over negative coverage, but of course boosting positive coverage and chilling negative coverage privileges positive coverage". Umm...yes, privileging positive coverage privileges positive coverage. I said that I didn't boost positive coverage.

No bud, you said "My attitude privileges nothing" so you can tuck that condescension back up your sleeve, your attitude privileges positive coverage.

And I also don't think it's common to do so with coverage from people who don't know what they're talking about. Anyone who posted a video to social media where they gushed for 5 minutes about a movie that they announced throughout the video that they had no knowledge of would be roundly mocked in most circles. "Think pieces" Again, why are you letting what a couple random people online write about dictate your entire artistic life? If you asked the general public, what do you think trust in user scores would show?

Yeah, it works even from people who don't know what they are talking about and from random strangers the audience doesn't even know. That concept is a core part of advertising. And I don't just mean in the age of tik tok (although even more so now) it has been known for decades. And almost any kind of advertising can work for any product, but different types can work better than others. For gadget advertising you want a spokesperson to provide the product with authority. For appliance advertising you want an extra who looks like a classy but normal person to imply the user will gain prestige from owning the appliance. For car advertising you want sexy people to imply the car will make you sexier and get sexy people to hang out with you.

And media advertising comes in two prongs - you want famous people attached promoting it and you want regular people gushing about it. It used to be that you just wanted regular people talking about it, good or bad, the point was to ensure it is part of the national conversation. But after the 2011 writer's strike that changed and advertisers were given a lot more power during production as producers needed the additional funding provided by sponsorships and product placement. People were only really tolerating product placement in reality shows though, so they had to pivot, but they learned they could get similar gains through hype. That was when the astroturfing began in earnest. Now it's all about promoting positive engagement and chilling negative engagement. But since you won't believe me, ask an advertising executive. They'll dress it up in convoluted obfuscating language, but they are usually happy to talk about it.

If you don't give a shit what I think, I recommend stopping the engagement. This will be my last comment given this fact. I do find it a bit hypocritical to complain about the "way you talk to me" when you like to throw in some "LMAO"s and "Bud"s and openly don't care about what I say, yet accuse me of condescension as I clearly state my opinions, but alas.

"You say you aren't a faceless representative of the other side, but that's exactly how you behave." You think that's how I behave, because you seem to have flattened everything in the world of cultural and artistic appreciation that you either have no interest in understanding or cannot understand into the bucket of 'globohomo woke' and the cultural left. Case in point, my argument, which you have repeatedly misunderstood, as below.

"yet as far as you know nothing I said about the show is incorrect". Yes....if you read my last paragraph, i stated that this was the case and that that wasn't my point. It is very tiresome to have your argument misunderstood over and over again despite stating it in plain terms.

Yes, I do in fact believe your practice of consuming artistic and cultural objects is intellectually lazy. Writing some text about why you think this is not laziness doesn't change that fact.

Am I supposed to take your comment regarding "irony of just desserts" as saying that your first comment wasn't serious? Or was it? If the former, then it seems a mistake to engage on this forum in that way. If not, I don't see why this should be some new understanding for me if you still support what you said there in earnest. That's not irony. I think calling it the irony of just desserts when the the behaviour in question is really just trusting negative reviews from people who don't know what they're talking about to spite people you dislike is dressing up the behaviour a little bit to make it more presentable and sound more sophisticated than it really is.

So you say word of mouth is your method of discovery. That would be fine, except for the fact that your word of mouth supply chain seems to also consist of people who don't consume or know much about the things that they positively or negatively recommend. So you're not getting much value there if the posts in this forum were sufficient evidence to stay away from this show. I stand by the fact that if there were something important and iconoclastic in this or other shows, you would be extremely unlikely to come across it given your artistic consumption habits.

"No bud, you said "My attitude privileges nothing" so you can tuck that condescension back up your sleeve, your attitude privileges positive coverage." So I said essentially a synonym of what I said that I did, with about the same meaning, and you have chosen to not believe me. Fair enough. Again, the only reason you seem to think that my attitude privileges positive coverage is that you think other faceless people do this and that I'm one of them. That's what happens when you treat individuals (and artistic objects) as if they're all in a bucket that you despise.

I will disagree that this concept is a core part of advertising. I stand by what I said, if someone admits ignorance of the thing they're reviewing, they will be roundly mocked. Reviews rely on the perception the reviewer knows what they're talking about. These people may in some cases be paid to say those things, but the outward message is that they have consumed the thing and are recommending the thing. Advertising from the company that makes a product itself or makes money off of it can be heavily discounted, and indeed I think most consumers understand this and are not deceived that the sexy person in a Lexus commercial has some intimate knowledge about cars and prefers a Lexus. This does require some intelligence and intuition on the part of a consumer to separate what the company wants your perception to be of the product and the reality of the product given marketing expenditures, but that's why there is a vast information ecosystem you can use to make this determination, and independent reviewers exist. Refusing to do this legwork and instead throwing out the baby with the bathwater is what I would call lazy.

I didn't speak down to you until you started doing so to me. That's what I do when people speak down to me. And you are still conflating refusing to stop talking about media I haven't watched with refusing to watch media I don't agree with politically. Ideally I would prefer the motte not acknowledge that kind of show at all, but since it was brought up, talking about it is the point of the forum. By your standards the only way to have a conversation is after giving the media the views they need, but hate watching pays just the same as watching in earnest.

That was what I meant about the irony in my first comment - you assumed I was seriously insisting we should all be loud dicks about anything we suspect we won't like, but I was exaggerating for comedic effect. I was actually the first person on the motte to vociferously argue for watching everything - even propaganda if you are in the right state of mind, although I have been reconsidering that lately. But you don't have to watch it in ways that profit the lazy and unscrupulous. Stereotypes only have significant value in impersonal interactions - for seeing the shape of the world, the pattern. When you are directly interacting with someone stereotypes can point you in the right direction, but individual elements of the pattern can and do behave erratically.

This is the culture war thread after all. If there wasn't a culture war angle to this, it wouldn't even be here as a post - it is relevant because UK media and government figures are obsessing over the show, insisting it is vital to understanding young men and should be shown in schools, etc.

I saw someone make a comparison to the film La Haine. That film provoked plenty of discussion in its native France, was shown in a government meeting (IIRC), much like Adolescence. La Haine is now widely regarded as a classic film, but I don't think this reputation would have any bearing on a talk of whether it was relevant for the French government, or whether it had any lasting impact on policy and so forth.

That's well and good if that's what you want to talk about, but the OP has 2 sentences which relate to the series being discussed by MP's. The rest is their own analysis of the plot, its supposed real life references, and some non sequiturs about knife bans and asian hate, which as far as I can tell have nothing to do with the show, they're all just getting lumped in as things that people that OP dislikes are promoting.

If the culture war angle relies on what the message of the show is and not just who is talking about it, then I would simply repeat my comment that I find it irritating that people will decide what the message of a show is based on a review from someone they dislike. It is simply lazy.

I haven't watched it, but is this your brain on partisanship? Incel violence isn't right coded, and manosphere also isn't beyond the fact that it rejects feminism. Numberically it may be true that underclasses commit the most stabbings, but people don't care about those. On the other hand there are high profile incel cases such as Elliot Rodger that people know about.

Also for this kind of thing, the perp/hero is also supposed to be sympathetic to the audience. If it's a gangbanger or jihadist who doesn't look like you, then the killer just becomes a flat boring character that nobody will care about. Anyways incel violence is categorically different from thug or secretarian violence.

the case of Brianna Ghey

If you really wanted a partisan story, adapting this more directly would do the job. Two seemingly ordinary white kids are actually sadistic, cold blood killers and they murder a trans just for fun. The killers are just plain evil and they kill someone at the top of the liberal victim hierarchy.

Incel violence isn't right coded

It isn’t? Online on Twitter it seems to be. That’s the go to insult among the left for a right wing guy. Even Elon Musk got called incel by his estranged son. Jordan Peterson is supposed to be king of the incels if my TikTok comment section is to be believed

"Incel" is just a catch-all term for "dissident"; it makes far more sense in this context.

The killers are just plain evil and they kill someone at the top of the liberal victim hierarchy.

That's the motte; "man bad" is the bailey. If you have the power to fight in the bailey, why retreat to the motte?

Incel violence isn't right coded

That's news to me. I believe it is right coded, in the minds of the kinds of people who dunk on incels.

In the minds of everyone who unironically uses the term, I think.


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