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naraburns  nihil supernum  3yr ago (text post)   38347 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 28, 2022

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Via information from Twitter's Archives, Elon has released what he calls "THE TWITTER FILES" part one, via journalist Matt Taibbi.

And uh...

it's nothing?

So we learn the following events that I highlight because they seem important to me. If you believe I have omitted an important fact from the thread, feel free to point it out.

  1. There were ways for VIPs to report tweets to twitter staff in a way the average person couldn't. As an aside, all of the tweets in that image were nude images of Hunter Biden - not anything about the laptop story, or corruption exactly, just nudes of Hunter Biden, which are arguably prevented by any policy on revenge porn.

  2. Both the Biden Campaign and the Trump White House used these lines of communication. It is notable that only one of Biden and Trump was President in October 2020, and it was not Biden.

  3. It was biased to Dems because more dems work at Twitter. I'm kinda missing the causation here but sure.

  4. It seems like different teams at Twitter were not on the same page about their policy.

  5. Matt Taibbi sees no evidence of any government or intelligence agency having spoken to Twitter directly about the laptop story in any fashion.

  6. Twitter internally argued some more about whether this was good or bad

  7. Ro Khanna reached out to Twitter to tell them that they shouldn't be supressing speech.

  8. Twitter asked the opinions of 9 Republican and 3 Democratic House Staffers

  9. The house Dems thought there should be more moderation, said "The first amendment isn't absolute"

  10. Dorsey often intervened on high profile suspensions

Uh, this story contains the following actions from Democratic party officials who were either in office or affiliated with the government in some fashion at the time:

  1. Ro Khanna, house rep, said they should not censor the story

  2. Some Democratic staffers said that there should be more moderation in an informal bitching session

Nevertheless, Elon and others are treating this like it was some sort of horrid crime by the Biden administration, which was not in office, and when it had exactly the same capabilities as the Trump administration, actually in office had with Twitter?

And Taibbi confirmed that the federal government, FBI, CIA, etc., did at no time, for any purpose, contact Twitter directly regarding the laptop story, or tell them what to do about it?

I'm struggling to see how this is anything other than a complete repudiation of everything that was being said about the deep state colluding with Twitter to censor the news story. It seems that mid-high level staff at Twitter made a decision that about half of the company disagreed with, and they argued about it the whole time, and nobody in the Government ever told them to censor the laptop story?

Social networks are biased. News at 11.

Elon should turn the tables on Section 230 and use it against the the left, and then get it overturned or amended, and then resell the site , so he solves online censorship against conservatives at almost no cost . That would be a 4d chess move.

The emails make it clear the management at Twitter reflexively did not want the Hunter story to spread, and they either deluded themselves or made up the "hacked materials" excuse as a pretext to suppressing the story. In the end, the suppression likely became way bigger of a story than the story itself, to the point that even Democratic lawmakers were contacting Twitter to tell them what a boneheaded move that was.

When this story first came out, I was skeptical about the laptop in part because Rudy Guiliani was the source but since then I don't have any doubts that this was really Hunter Biden's laptop and emails. I still don't know how this was supposed to be such a smoking gun. Hunter is obviously a fuck up, and I think it's obvious that he only got executive positions because of who his father is, but the attempts to stretch this up the chain haven't really delivered so far, even an another two years after.

Tony Bobulinski personally confirming that Joe was offered to be cut in on (at least one of) the deals wasn’t enough for you? This story is from just a few days after the last linked post in your comment, btw, and it wasn’t hard to find either.

I don't think I was aware of that but no, that moves the needle very slightly but isn't enough. It seems plausible that "big guy" is indeed Joe Biden but the deal details he outlines are somewhat vague and it doesn't seem to have been consummated. I'm not exactly clear on what the accusation is here, is the idea that Joe Biden was exploiting his political position for monetary gain? We already know from the tax returns he released that him and his wife made $17 million in a year primarily just from public speaking and book deals. Is the idea that he made even more from influence peddling? That seems plausible, but an unconsummated deal vaguely outlined in an email is weak evidence.

Bobulinski was one of the people who received the email, so presumably he knows. And “moves the needle” with respect to what? All you said in the linked post was that no one had successfully “run things up the chain,” which seems like you’re saying no one had shown Joe to be directly involved. If that was all you were asserting, then this seems like pretty good evidence that he was.

Yes, the accusation is that a Biden was influence peddling. And the fact that Biden made a lot of money elsewhere says nothing at all about whether he’d want more. Rich people do bad things all the time to get more money, especially politicians. (E.g. the Clintons were making even more money pre-2016 and AFAIK it’s pretty widely agreed that they were influence-peddling too.)

Trying to influence-peddle and not succeeding is still intending to influence-peddle, and it’s still being directly involved with Hunter’s stuff. It’s perfectly strong evidence of that. I’m not trying to convict Joe Biden of a crime here, but his intentions and complicity are entirely relevant to his character and motives.

All you said in the linked post was that no one had successfully “run things up the chain,” which seems like you’re saying no one had shown Joe to be directly involved. If that was all you were asserting, then this seems like pretty good evidence that he was.

@Folamh3 helpfully pointed me to this recent Washington Post article about the CEFC deal:

James Gilliar, a business associate summarizing the allocation of the equity in Oneida Holdings LLC., in the email, wrote how four partners would get 20 percent each, except for Jim Biden, who would get 10 percent. He added a question: “10 held by H for the big guy?” One of the recipients of the mail, Anthony Bobulinski, has said that the “big guy” referred to Joe Biden and that “H” referred to Hunter. Bobulinski was a guest of Trump at one of the 2020 presidential debates.

But Gilliar told the Wall Street Journal in 2020: “I would like to clear up any speculation that former Vice President Biden was involved with the 2017 discussions about our potential business structure. I am unaware of any involvement at anytime of the former vice president. The activity in question never delivered any project revenue.”

Three days after the email was sent, a draft agreement setting up Oneida was circulated. It shows each partner would receive 20 percent, including Jim Biden. No mention is made of Joe Biden. The company agreement signed on May 22, 2017, had the same allocation. Oneida was to hold 50 percent of another corporate entity called SinoHawk. Neither Gilliar nor James Biden responded to requests for comment.

The Wall Street Journal said that it had reviewed corporate records and found no role for Joe Biden. The Washington Post, in an extensive report on the CEFC dealings, also did not find evidence that Joe Biden personally benefited from or knew details about the transactions with CEFC. The Biden campaign at the time denied he had any role.

So one guy involved in the deal claims that there was 10% of the CEFC venture set aside for Joe Biden, but another guy involved in the deal denies that, a draft agreement doesn't mention Joe Biden, the final agreement doesn't mention Joe Biden, and both WSJ and WaPo examined CEFC and saw no involvement or benefit to Joe Biden. The weight of the evidence here seems very one-sided to me, and it seems reasonable to conclude that Bobulinski is either lying or exaggerating. Do you disagree?

Yes, I do. “10 held by H for the big guy” literally means Hunter would be receiving 10% on behalf of whoever the “big guy” is. That entails that the “big guy” wouldn’t be getting it directly, so even if Joe were the “big guy,” that means he wouldn’t appear in the contract. So his not appearing in it is exactly what you would expect if he were being cut in after the fashion described in the email. That reduces Giliar’s statement to mere he-said-she-said, in which case Bobulinski is no less intrinsically credible than him. And in fact, Hunter getting 20% (10% more than Jim Biden) in the contract directly supports Bobulinski’s hypothesis (10% for him, just like Jim, then another 10% for Joe).

Would you still find Bobulinski's claim to be credible if he had a falling out with Hunter or was chasing a moment in the media spotlight?

Would you find his claim credible if neither of those were true? Are they even?

More comments

If this is the first time you heard the name Bobulinkski then the suppression worked on you. I heard about him, and his testimony, before the 2020 election, but I had to go looking in alternate sources to hear about it.

Seems likely that Bobulinski is either lying or exaggerating. See my comments above. And I don't know what you mean by "suppression" here.

I still don't know how this was supposed to be such a smoking gun.

Lee Smith's analysis may be informative:

These included communications regarding a deal with a Chinese energy company that earned Hunter $5 million, and his work with Burisma, the Ukrainian energy firm that paid him $83,333 per month to sit on its board. His father later boasted in public that he’d threatened to withhold a $1 billion loan guarantee to Ukraine unless the central government in Kyiv fired the prosecutor investigating Burisma.

...

Maxey says he also saw information on the laptop that has direct implications for U.S. national security. According to Maxey, this material includes documents relating to Pentagon cyber programs and others regarding former FBI Director Louis Freeh. According to a previously released email on Hunter’s laptop, Freeh worked with him to help a Romanian tycoon evade bribery charges. In April 2016, according to an earlier trove of emails, Freeh deposited $100,000 in a trust fund for two of Joe Biden’s grandchildren.

...

While [Joe] Biden said he never spoke with his son about his business abroad, a voicemail from another recently released laptop cache shows the president was being less than forthright. He knew about his son’s business with the Chinese energy firm and one of its top officials, Patrick Ho. After The New York Times published a softball article in December 2018 about Hunter’s work with Ho and other businessmen tied to the Chinese Communist Party, Biden left a message for his son saying, “I think you’re clear.”

Of course Hunter was clear: The FBI was watching over him. The bureau knew what he was doing because it had obtained a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant in 2017 on Ho, who Hunter called the “spy chief of China.”

...

Reports like the ones the Treasury Department is now withholding formed the basis of a September 2020 Senate Republican investigation by Sens. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin and Chuck Grassley of Iowa that documented Hunter Biden’s business with foreign officials and companies. It included his relationship with Burisma in Ukraine; the Chinese energy company, which also gave money to the president’s brother Jim and his wife, Sara; and Elena Baturina, the widow of a former mayor of Moscow, from whom Hunter received $3.5 million.

The Washington Post also reports that Hunter organised various trade deals with 10% of his fee earmarked for "the big guy", said to be referring to Joe Biden.

I don't know how damning this information is, but it seems at least as damning as Trump's various scandals (Trump University etc.). If Joe Biden was bribed by a Romanian tycoon in order to make criminal charges against him go away, I think he could conceivably be brought up on charges of corruption and perverting the course of justice.

Thanks for that link. I was intrigued by the passage "Freeh worked with [Hunter] to help a Romanian tycoon evade bribery charges". It links to a NY post story with more details. Describing Louis Freeh as "former FBI Director" seems a bit misleading in this context, because at the time that he talked to Hunter he was a partner in a law firm, not a government official. It's (unfortunately) common for government officials to cash in on the contacts they made to pivot into a lucrative private practice, and in my ideal world that wouldn't happen. But I read the email between Freeh and Hunter as just a referral in the form of "hey I have a client that could use legal representation with criminal charges he's facing", and I don't see anything wrong with that. The fact that Freeh gave $100k to Biden's grandkids shows just how much these people can rake in the cash, but referral fees are neither illegal nor necessarily unethical (I once referred a client to another attorney that was probably worth $1000 and the attorney sent me a $20 amazon gift card which was kind of funny).

It's obvious Freeh made a "donation" in 2017 hoping he could convince Joe Biden to get him more client referrals. That's definitely slimey, but I don't see where you claim that Joe Biden was "bribed" by a Romanian tycoon to make charges go away. The follow-up NYpost story says there was no evidence Joe Biden ever followed up with Freeh (probably because Joe Biden was planning to be president rather than a consultant or whatever).

The Washington Post also reports that Hunter organised various trade deals with 10% of his fee earmarked for "the big guy", said to be referring to Joe Biden.

I'm confused, did you read your own link?

James Gilliar, a business associate summarizing the allocation of the equity in Oneida Holdings LLC., in the email, wrote how four partners would get 20 percent each, except for Jim Biden, who would get 10 percent. He added a question: “10 held by H for the big guy?” One of the recipients of the mail, Anthony Bobulinski, has said that the “big guy” referred to Joe Biden and that “H” referred to Hunter. Bobulinski was a guest of Trump at one of the 2020 presidential debates.

But Gilliar told the Wall Street Journal in 2020: “I would like to clear up any speculation that former Vice President Biden was involved with the 2017 discussions about our potential business structure. I am unaware of any involvement at anytime of the former vice president. The activity in question never delivered any project revenue.”

Three days after the email was sent, a draft agreement setting up Oneida was circulated. It shows each partner would receive 20 percent, including Jim Biden. No mention is made of Joe Biden. The company agreement signed on May 22, 2017, had the same allocation. Oneida was to hold 50 percent of another corporate entity called SinoHawk. Neither Gilliar nor James Biden responded to requests for comment.

The Wall Street Journal said that it had reviewed corporate records and found no role for Joe Biden. The Washington Post, in an extensive report on the CEFC dealings, also did not find evidence that Joe Biden personally benefited from or knew details about the transactions with CEFC. The Biden campaign at the time denied he had any role.

So one guy involved in the deal claims that there was 10% of the CEFC venture set aside for Joe Biden, but another guy involved in the deal denies that, a draft agreement doesn't mention Joe Biden, the final agreement doesn't mention Joe Biden, and both WSJ and WaPo examined CEFC and saw no involvement or benefit to Joe Biden. The weight of the evidence here seems very one-sided to me.

I don't see where you claim that Joe Biden was "bribed" by a Romanian tycoon to make charges go away.

The fact that the tycoon in question made a $100k donation to Biden's family after the fact looks suspiciously like a bribe to me, even if it's technically on the level. Point taken that Smith was being a little misleading in his characterisation.

I'm aware that Joe Biden wasn't mentioned in the final agreement. I remember reading an article at some point in the last year or two which claimed that Joe Biden's 10% would come from Hunter's share "under the table", but I haven't been able to track the article in question down.

The fact that the tycoon in question made a $100k donation to Biden's family after the fact looks suspiciously like a bribe to me, even if it's technically on the level.

Maybe I'm missing something, but where is this mentioned? The $100k "donation" came from Freeh. I didn't see anything about the Romanian tycoon giving money.

Now I feel embarrassed, you're dead right, I misread that passage.

Nothing to be embarrassed about, it happens :)

the attempts to stretch this up the chain haven't really delivered so far, even an another two years after.

You're not wrong, but I'd feel a lot more confident in the lack of such a chain if there was a horde of serious journalists attacking the matter as ferociously as possible instead of insisting that there's absolutely nothing to see and no evidence of any problems at all, so they're not going to treat it as a real story.

Really though, I actually do think having a fuck-up, crackhead failson extracting millions in graft from various sketchy dealings around the world should be disqualifying for a Presidential candidate. Obviously, I'm not going to get my wish there (and the last thing that Trump enthusiasts would want is to apply that principle consistently), but I think it's entirely fair to demand that the democratically elected most powerful person in the world not have first-order family ties to a comical level of corruption.

Your first point is fair, and I don't really disagree with your second point. In an ideal world, there wouldn't be even a whiff of nepotistic graft anywhere near the highest position of the land, but that's never going to happen. Given how far we are from that reality, I sort of understand the general lack of interest on the topic.

You're right that there isn't anything substantially new here. Yes it proves that Twitter wrongfully censored a true news story, but we already knew that. What these revelations do show is that the previous Twitter administration was incompetent (which makes Elon look better by comparison).

they were malicious, not just incompetent

I'm struggling to see how this is anything other than a complete repudiation of everything that was being said about the deep state colluding with Twitter to censor the news story.

You don't need a formal conspiracy when interests converge. These people went to the same universities, they have like interests, they don't need to call a meeting, they know what's good for them, and they're getting it. The things that matter in this country have been reduced in choice, there are two political parties, there's two mobile phones and one desktop computer, there are a handful of social media companies, there's one email provider, but if you want a coffee you can get it any way you want because of the illusion of choice.

It seems that mid-high level staff at Twitter made a decision that about half of the company disagreed with, and they argued about it the whole time, and nobody in the Government ever told them to censor the laptop story?

It seems that Twitter worked actively for the Biden campaign by spiking a damaging story before the election, and they got their way when Biden won. Elon Musk spent $44 billion to show you clearly how the illusion of choice works, and you're choosing to say there's nothing to see. Extraordinary.

I don’t see how any illusion of choice is relevant here, choice between what?

The reference is to the George Carlin bit about how concentrated power makes people think they have choice by offering different coffee and bagel flavors, but not anything meaningful. I don't really know how the analogy is supposed to map though, I think @KMC might have jumbled their understanding of it.

The illusion is more that these things are independent and unrelated. OP fell for it when he says there was no proof, no conspiracy, no There there.

But yes, the money quote is the first sentence.

Thinking that's the best of the three possibilities is backward, IMO. If major communications networks are being strong-armed by the CIA, well, we can cut them a bit of slack. They're working as propagandists pro-bono, and you can't stop that without buying the company (maybe).

Which is why the media has taken the Musk acquisition of Twitter with such equanimity.

https://twitter.com/TaylorLorenz/status/1585838262173675520

On 5., I think you’re misinterpreting the tweet. Pretty sure he’s saying he’s seen no evidence of foreign government involvement in disseminating the laptop. As in, contrary to the “general” warning given by the feds prior to the laptop dropping. Not that there was no USG involvement in suppressing it.

I don't think FBI falsely telling a major social network that incoming story about Hunter Biden is foreign disinformation (which they very well knew isn't since they had the laptop in their custody) and asking to suppress it, and the social network suppressing it under excuse of "hacked material", which they freshly invented to protect their partisan interests, and which they had zero proof of, and which they never consistently followed, immediately before election in which Biden has been the candidate - is nothing. I think it's a collusion between partisans in law enforcement and partisans in social media to hide information from the public and thus influence the election - which was done to maintain plausible deniability (not using the words "New York Post laptop story" but talking in generics while perfectly knowing which exactly story is about to drop) - and which, according to poll data, worked.

I'm struggling to see how this is anything other than a complete repudiation of everything that was being said about the deep state colluding with Twitter to censor the news story

Very simple. Everything that was being said about the deep state colluding with Twitter to censor the news story is actually true, that's how. The government knew that the laptop exists and is genuine. They literally had it. They warned Twitter that some big story is about to drop soon (I don't remember the exact wording but you can find it), and as we learn now (not sure if Taibbi mentioned it) Hunter was specifically mentioned. They did not say "censor the laptop story" - they didn't need to. It was enough for them to say "we want you to be cautious - there would be some foreign disinformation dropping soon", knowing the laptop story is the one that is going to be dropping soon, and then, after it dropped, come out and say "this looks exactly like the foreign disinformation!". Twitter guys aren't idiots, they made their conclusions and knew what is required from them.

Another store that turned out completely true is that DNC told them who/what to ban and they routinely did. Yes, Trump admin did too, albeit more rare and reluctantly - somehow incomprehensibly, you understand it as an excuse. It's like you learned that a person robbed a bank, but also robbed a grocery store - and you think since he's not just a bank robber but also grocery store robber it's somehow better!

It's not an FBI agent demanding they take down the story or risk arrest, so in that sense it's not a 'bombshell', but the 'room temperature' here started with public statements that social media would face increased regulation if they didn't clamp down on misinformation, and a bunch of former and a few not-so-former intel people saying the story “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.” by the 19th. Having them also say it privately by the 16th is unsurprising, but it's also kinda scandalous even if not unconstitutional in any enforceable way.

That Taibbi didn't find direct contact specifically about the laptop story is pleasantly surprising -- as is the Dem congressional staffer with any interest in the First Amendment -- but it's not the only thing required for there to be a scandal, here, if a lesser one. I mean, that's especially the case given that it's already known that Twitter Safety people were meeting directly with the Biden team in non-e-mail approaches, but even if all of those things were never intimidating anything about this specific story or threats of future regulation, you still have other problems:

Since 2018, I have had regular meetings with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and industry peers regarding election security.

During these weekly meetings, the federal law enforcement agencies communicated that they expected "hack-and-leak operations" by state actors might occur in the period shortly before the 2020 presidential election, likely in October. I was told in these meetings that the intelligence community expected that individuals associated with political campaigns would be subject to hacking attacks and that material obtained through those hacking attacks would likely be disseminated over social media platforms, including Twitter. These expectations of hack-and-leak operations were discussed throughout 2020. I also learned in these meetings that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.

That's genuinely less bad than if the Biden administration called them up and said 'fuck the NYPost in particular', but it's still at a particularly ugly nexus of federal power and speech that's largely gone unexplored because no one with standing could challenge it. And the defense that this was the Trump ODNI, DHS, and FBI doesn't reduce the scandal very severely, for the same reason that Peter Strzok being part of the Trump FBI doesn't make Strzok's behavior less bad.

((And there's separate mini-scandals, here: the DNC was pointing at a RealJamesWoods tweet that... it's blurry as hell, and I don't really want to look at any politician's junk for very long, so I assume it's a dick? But it's also the man smoking crack. Note that the Twitter declaration above emphasizes the lack of coordination as a defense against electioneering claims. Yes, the media exception probably matters more, and yes, the RNC and DNC have long been political 'fixers', but even assuming every such removal was perfectly legitimate, it's still the DNC e-mailing Twitter and telling them to remove a private citizen's commentary on a matter of political interest. Not illegal! The DNC isn't a government! Probably not even unprecedented, given past cozy relationships to newspapers. But come on; people were raising concerns when federal campaigns said maybe Palin's involuntary biographer shouldn't rent the house nextdoor and stare at her backyard all the time.))

There's some 'charitable' explanations, here -- the FBI had a Hunter laptop well before the NYPost story and probably before the meeting warning about it, so maybe their concerns about hacks related to it were 'really' making sure none of their people leaked, for example -- but this is a pretty severe issue even if not The Worst Case.

Biden administration

You mean campaign?

Not every specific instance would break down that way, but I think it would be worse if it were someone who got hired into the early Biden admin in 2021, or worked as part of the team for that, even if not on the Biden campaign team during the 2020 election season. And, in turn, it would be even worse were anyone who held office or a Hill job at the time. Partly that's just the more direct ties to government force, but it also just feels closer to power than politics.

Now, as you point out, the Biden administration as a whole wasn't in office before the election, and it's not clear a lot of individuals who could have made those calls had other personal offices. So it's not likely, and without any specific evidence needs to be treated as purely imaginary. But it's the hypothetical a lot of people are motioning around when they say that the reveal here wasn't that bad.

What's odd is that Mark Zuckerberg has gone on the record saying he was contacted by the FBI about the laptop story being Russian Misinformation.

This is not true. What Zuckerberg said is that the FBI contacted him with a generalized warning about a potential "Russian propaganda dump" before the Hunter laptop story came out. Rogan asked him if the FBI specifically say they needed to be on guard for that story and Zuckerberg says "No, I don't remember if it was that specifically, but it basically fit the pattern".

That's fair. I wasn't intending to fog their statement and your interpretation is reasonable. The overall claim is still a bit vague, and there's no indication the FBI told Zuckerberg to do anything nor does he say if the FBI said anything about the veracity of this upcoming dump. After the Rogan interview, FBI said as much and Meta also said "“The FBI shared general warnings about foreign interference — nothing specific about Hunter Biden".

While it's Twitter and probably a separate meeting:

Since 2018, I have had regular meetings with the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Homeland Security, the FBI, and industry peers regarding election security.

During these weekly meetings, the federal law enforcement agencies communicated that they expected "hack-and-leak operations" by state actors might occur in the period shortly before the 2020 presidential election, likely in October. I was told in these meetings that the intelligence community expected that individuals associated with political campaigns would be subject to hacking attacks and that material obtained through those hacking attacks would likely be disseminated over social media platforms, including Twitter. These expectations of hack-and-leak operations were discussed throughout 2020. I also learned in these meetings that there were rumors that a hack-and-leak operation would involve Hunter Biden.

Still not about the specific story or about the laptop specifically, but specific about Hunter Biden.

((I'd be interested to know if Meta genuinely got different levels of specificity, or if it's legalisms.))

And Taibbi confirmed that the federal government, FBI, CIA, etc., did at no time, for any purpose, contact Twitter directly regarding the laptop story, or tell them what to do about it?

That's not accurate. He said he did not see anything like this in this subset of emails. He has no way of knowing anything that happened outside of these emails. This is like saying, "He confirmed God doesn't exist and has never existed," because there is no mention of God in these emails.

Let me put it like this.

A small Russian troll farm was enough to put a permanent asterisk on the Trump presidency as illegitimate.

Also, lets not forgot that Twitter taking down the article, banning all sharing of it, banning the NYPost and the White House Press account, essentially said "Anyone sharing this document is spreading Russian disinformation". "Good People^tm" were not supposed to traffic in it. On the debate stage, when asked about it, Joe Biden just said the whole story was Russian lies, and that was that. No follow up, no pressing him on it, nothing.

How many votes do you think that moved? Not just memory holing the story, but lighting up the Virtue Signal that if anyone tries to inform you of it, you should ignore and hate them.

If a small Russian troll farm with a small, though measurable, success at going viral counts as delegitimizing an election, Twitter's actions easily meet that goal post.

And this change in the story matters. Before people were somehow claiming it was an honest mistake. Just an oopsy. Now it seems nakedly obvious it wasn't. Activist at Twitter were on Team Biden, and their decisions were biased to the core. It was not a mistake, and especially not an honest one. We are finally allowed to claim, without being told we aren't being "charitable", that these are partisan liars who were out to swing an election. I don't need there to be explicit collusion where the FBI specifically told them to memory hole the story. The receipts we currently have are enough to damn them forever more in my eyes, and put just as much of an asterisk on the Biden election as there was on the Trump election.

Activist at Twitter were on Team Biden, and their decisions were biased to the core.

Wait just a moment. From what Taibbi said, the key role was played by Vijaya Gadde. What's the proof she's a Biden supporter?

https://www.opensecrets.org/donor-lookup/results?name=vijaya+gadde

It's not that hard. Straight (D).

I looked at her donations. Being straight D is weak evidence she's a Biden supporter (she donated to Harris). It seems possible that this is why, but very weak overall.

If that were my first conclusion, I'd not beclown myself with it in public.

It seems that mid-high level staff at Twitter made a decision that about half of the company disagreed with, and they argued about it the whole time, and nobody in the Government ever told them to censor the laptop story?

Through any of these communications. Ah-hah!

I don't think we need to get conspiratorial though. The absence of any direct communications does mostly confirm that the decision to censor the story based off the "Hacked Info" policy was kinda-sorta just made up by Twitter employees. We find out in the string of posts that previous implementation of the Hacked Info policy required authorities to say some content was h4x0r3d in order for Twitter to remove it. Had this occurred, and we had Twitter employees citing a statement from the WH as reason for censoring it, we'd have a much stronger case to say it was the result of government pressure with Twitter laundering a false statement.

It sounds like Twitter staff made the decision to censor the laptop story and suspend the NYPOST based on personal political leanings. This was in direct contradiction to company policy. I believe "not 2016 again" was mentioned by at least one exec in these communications. I'd be more willing to cite the thing if it was in a dang news article or substack.

"The first amendment isn't absolute" bit is a conspicuous wink wink, nudge nudge vote of approval. I agree it doesn't exude the air pressure. To characterize it as a coordinated campaign of governmental interference or conspiracy would not be accurate. One thing I thought about after seeing was the Moldbuggian Cathedral essence of it all. When you look at the event as a whole it's pretty convincing. It all worked swimmingly.

Truthful October Surprise smear campaign targeting favored party candidate gets censored by employees of the largest politically relevant social media platform in the world. No direction between between favored party and party loyalists required. My recollection is the "Hunter Biden laptop story = Russian hackers" narrative went on for some weeks as the premier explanation and deflection. The media cover for a Biden win was total, complete, and impressive. So impressive that Ro Khanna thought it was too impressive and not a good look.

Maybe that theory of decentralized coordination can't ever be disproven as a convenient explanation, or we can accept this result as a logical, realistic end in a string in decisions. Of course the Twitter staff wanted to, and then did, successfully censor the story! Why wouldn't they?

EDIT: Tangential, but I checked out of curiosity. NYPost was suspended on the 14th of October. The account was reinstated 2 weeks later on the 30th and Twitter made this announcement.

Had this occurred, and we had Twitter employees citing a statement from the WH as reason for censoring it, we'd have a much stronger case to say it was the result of government pressure with Twitter laundering a false statement.

By "WH" do you mean the Trump White House?

"WH" is a personal nickname I have for what can broadly be described as the Deep State. It stands for "Werm Hat."

Okay, that part is a lie. This could not be possible. The WH today could have possibly have strong armed Twitter so long as they had a time machine. Not a good or accurate sentence, yeah.

This is essentially why I think the 2020 election probably was "stolen" from Trump and there really isn't anything to be done about it.

There were too many people with motive and opportunity to break or bend the rules, and they don't need to be centrally coordinated or even explicitly communicate with each other. They all just need to be on the same team and know they're fighting against fascism. The cheating is going to be opportunistic, contextual, usually bending rather than breaking the rules. There isn't going to be a clear pattern or smoking gun, because this process exploits the local knowledge of motivated individuals in positions of responsibility who know what they can get away with in each circumstance.

Thia incident at Twitter is the kind of thing I expect to be happening everywhere, and most of the time it goes unimpeded or unnoticed. This also applies to the midterms and all elections going forward for the foreseeable future, because they learned their lesson in 2016. There is nothing that can realistically be done about this.

Chinese protests are a top story in Western news media. I don't think they're entirely organic. Some are likely intelligence agency ops.

Here's the first thing that made me think something was off: https://twitter.com/quanyi_li2/status/1596784472740937728

First, some of the signage doesn't look right. They use traditional characters instead of simplified. They also sometimes use pinyin, seemingly unable to recall the "qi" in "Urumqi," the biggest city in Xinjiang, even as they were protesting on Urumqi road. Mainlanders wouldn't do this. This is beyond mere misspelt Tea Party protest signs, I'd say it's akin to protesting against Biden with an English-language sign with Cyrillic characters accidentally slipped in. It's a clear signal of "not from around here."

Second, the protests don't make much sense if your goal is to reach other Chinese folks in China. You can't share such protests on social media, and news agencies won't cover them. However, contrary to popular narratives, demonstrations are allowed in China. You can't call for the downfall of the national government, but you can plea for the national government to come in and fix local issues. You can also take to the streets because you're really worked up about foreigners insulting China.

So, the intended audience is probably Western news media and consumers of such media.

Third, advocating against the national government and leaders is punished, and everyone knows it. It's unlikely that Chinese citizens would take such a risk when it's so easy to put on a demonstration that falls short of impugning the national government. I think it's likely that these were non-citizens, perhaps Taiwanese, or perhaps expats, that aren't risking their livelihoods. The use of traditional characters makes this more likely, only Hong Kong and Taiwan use them. Western media are unlikely to take note of such things, or to take note of Taiwanese accents.

This aligns with what we've seen before in intelligence ops.

We've seen evidence that intelligence agencies have helped along color revolutions in the past, including protest leaders in Hong Kong meeting with at least one state department official. Much of this is actually done in the open, with the National Endowment for Democracy sending money directly to dissident groups.

Note that an intelligence op doesn't mean that everyone involved works for the intelligence agency, or that they even know that the agency is involved. Every country has its collection of folks who would like to see the government fall. Intelligence operatives identify and befriend these folks, nurture their revolutionary sentiments, and help to remove hurdles in their way. It's the same tactic used to get a group of right-wing men to agree to kidnap the governor of Michigan, except that no one stops the plot from continuing to move forward.

I saw a twitter post of some fellow holding Friedman equations. Freedman, free man... This is possibly the most convoluted way to express a point. How many Chinese are going to see the equation, process it and appreciate the pun in a foreign language? I know China has a heavy emphasis on STEM but this is too much. Looks very much like something you'd do to attract foreign attention rather than sway the domestic audience.

https://twitter.com/nathanlawkc/status/1596842009364500481?

Possible. But it's just as likely that it's a false flag by the PRC as something Western instigated.

Maybe slightly more likely. Western intelligence agencies aren't hiring Iowa teenagers to make these signs; they have plenty of people capable of writing Chinese, and they know that the mainland uses simplified. This isn't exactly obscure stuff, and they're not idiots.

The protestors' behavior even fits better; participants in a false flag operation know they won't be punished, while absolutely anyone living in China (including Taiwanese and expats) knows that calling for national downfall will lead to a... bad time, regardless of any sweet talking by Western operatives, who can't do much to protect you anyway.

I'd rank "organic protest by idiots" as most likely, false flag as a bit less likely, and a Western operation as the least likely.

Why the hell would a dictatorial régime do a false-flag revolution? They risk making people believe that protesting the government actually won't get you killed, so lots of normal people will join the false protests... Turning them into real protests. The number 1 rule for a dictator is to prevent the creation of common knowledge about how many people don't like you. Any appearance of large scale protests is incredibly dangerous to this end.

The false flag here is the signs clearly not being written by literate mainlanders. CCP propaganda organs can take those photos and circulate it through domestic media to prove that any protests are just some Western operation as opposed to organic expressions of dissatisfaction with the regime.

I think what he's saying is that the pictures are produced by the Prc then debunked, feeding a narrative that the (real) protests are fake.

Here's the first thing that made me think something was off: https://twitter.com/quanyi_li2/status/1596784472740937728

If I saw an American holding a misspelled sign at a protest, the last thing I would think is that it must be a China. If there's any conspiracy, it'd be more likely that it is a domestic operation that is meant to make the protesters look stupid/uneducated. (I seem to recall, but I may be wrong, that some people holding up signs like "keep your government hands off my medicare" while protesting Obama were actually Democrats, but that was a long time ago, so I may be misremembering).

Don't get me wrong there are plenty of protests in China but a REAL Chinese protest tend to demand local official to step down and national government to intervene. They almost never call for a regime change. Even rarer to call the party leader to step down.

But the policies they are protesting are coming from the top. And even if they weren't, its not like people don't protest the feds when other levels of government are more responsible for the situation. The trucker protest in Canada was generally against covid restrictions, most of which were put in place by provincial governments, and a border vaccine mandate put in place by the US. But they still protested the Canadian federal government.

Those two things simply do not address the problem at hand. Demanding national leader to step down is a western thing because then they can vote in a new leader. It does not work in China. Strong sign of foreign funded operation.

I don't think I've actually seen many protests demanding federal leaders resign, because in the west we CAN vote in a new leader. So if you were protesting in China, it seems like demanding a resignation of the leader would be the only real option, since voting ain't going to do it. I guess in parliamentary systems, since the leader isn't directly elected, calls for leaders to step down are a bit more common, especially since elections are irregular.

the central government has extremely high approval ratings and it's usually the local ones that people have issues with.

But the issue with zero COVID seems to come from the central government. Changing local leadership isn't going to solve things.

Also the police stood aside keeping watch instead of clamping down immediately shows 制度自信. These people are lucky if only the police is investigating i know for a fact that Shanghai facial recognition software is extremely good.

You'd think if this was a foreign operation that the police wouldn't be twiddling their thumbs. "Nah, we only suppress domestic, organic protests. We'll happily allow the CIA to undermine our country, though."

I think this is more evidence in favour of the protests being encouraged, at some level, by the CCP. Maybe as an excuse to change policy. Maybe to expose dissidents (and CIA networks). Maybe to frame anti-lockdown protestors the same way the western governments have. As outsiders we look at these people and think 'heroes'. But in the west, the average person has looked at anti-lockdown protestors as loons. Maybe the average Chinese person looks at these protestors like they are retarded rednecks endangering the lives of everyone around them. Because China is much more, uh, collective than the west (especially America).

They use traditional characters instead of simplified. They also sometimes use pinyin, seemingly unable to recall the "qi" in "Urumqi," the biggest city in Xinjiang, even as they were protesting on Urumqi road. Mainlanders wouldn't do this. This is beyond mere misspelt Tea Party protest signs, I'd say it's akin to protesting against Biden with an English-language sign with Cyrillic characters accidentally slipped in. It's a clear signal of "not from around here."

Would any minorities in China do this? Minorities tend to be more likely to protest, since the majority tends to be well represented.

Didn't China pretty effectively dismantle CIA networks in their country a couple years back? Some conspiracy theories attributed it to Hillary's email server being compromised.

I could see the protests being any combination domestic and foreign, with the CCP leveraging them like politicians in any part of the world would. Could have been organic, and the CIA swooped in to fan the flames, and the CCP is tolerating it in order to gain intelligence on who is all involved and what their motivations are, and also trying to paint the protests as being astroturfed. Every team is in the game.

Hold on.

You say we’ve seen intelligence agencies fund and maybe even coordinate opposition in HK. And this is supposed to imply that the West is smuggling fake agitators into enemy territory to stage protests? And despite this devious, nigh-suicidal deployment of eager actors, they didn’t bother hiring you to proofread their signs?

It would be easier to fake the whole thing in Hollywood. Or in the offices of mainstream media. Or by seeding a bunch of pictures on Twitter.

I did not imply that people were being smuggled in.

Note that an intelligence op doesn't mean that everyone involved works for the intelligence agency, or that they even know that the agency is involved. Every country has its collection of folks who would like to see the government fall. Intelligence operatives identify and befriend these folks, nurture their revolutionary sentiments, and help to remove hurdles in their way. It's the same tactic used to get a group of right-wing men to agree to kidnap the governor of Michigan, except that no one stops the plot from continuing to move forward.

I think it's likely that these were non-citizens, perhaps Taiwanese, or perhaps expats, that aren't risking their livelihoods.

Motte, meet Bailey...

I think it's likely that these were non-citizens, perhaps Taiwanese, or perhaps expats, that aren't risking their livelihoods. The use of traditional characters makes this more likely, only Hong Kong and Taiwan use them.

Doesn't that seem just ridiculously dangerous for the people involved? Rather than risking their livelihoods or reputations, it seems as though they are risking their lives. Massacres of local citizens can't escape notice locally, "disappearings" of foreign nationals who aren't even supposed to be there can be concealed because they weren't even supposed to be there. Local citizens have few rights, foreign nationals have none.

I don't think China disappears foreigners. Other than a couple of unfortunate Canadians, I believe that China treats foreigners well. I've visited China a few times and all levels of law enforcement treated me well. Other than their extreme apathy and lack of will to let me register my residence one time. They were too disinterested to even track me the way they are supposed to track where foreigners stay.

I'm going to say that China is safe for visiting white westerners. Your punishment for violating their laws and norms is being kicked out and banned from re-entry.

Yup! But if foreigners infiltrate the country in secret, so that no one other than the CIA knows you're there, and you get disappeared, who does anything about it? What's being proposed here is that the protestors claiming they are locals aren't locals, they get arrested and their identities can't be verified, what happens to them then? The diplomats can't claim them without revealing they've been astroturfing anti gov protests, not an option. If they die, what can anyone say? He wasn't even there.

Other than a couple of unfortunate Canadians, I believe that China treats foreigners well. I've visited China a few times and all levels of law enforcement treated me well.

Were you publicly protesting Xi Jinping's policies? Seem a bit apples and oranges if not...

Unless you're unlucky enough to be targeted for retaliation in response to something like America arresting Huawei executives, I think foreigners are treated better than Chinese citizens in this respect. You'll probably be kicked out, not have your ability to travel or do business in your home country restricted, and certainly not massacred. No one is being massacred over this, not even citizens.

Unless you're an actual spy, then you'll be at least imprisoned.

Information controls are designed to prevent ideas spreading to Chinese citizens that the government believes to be dangerous. Kicking you out achieves that goal without causing diplomatic headaches.

From what I can tell China has a total of about 30 Americans in its prisons, and the State Department considers one of those to be wrongfully detained. It's hard to find resources on Chinese citizens imprisoned in America, all I found was this that says we had "no more than 400" in the mid-2000s.

If your idea of China is that you'll be whisked away to the gulag on the slightest suspicion, I think you need to update. Cultural Revolution China is not present-day China. Present-day China is also not Stalin's Russia. They aren't free to call for the downfall of the national government or its leaders, but the typical treatment I've seen for verboten speech starts with a police visit where they try to convince you to stop. For whatever reason I'm having a hard time digging up the articles I'd read on the topic. Search is polluted with recent results, and restricting my search to before 2020 yields 6 results on Google for "china speech visit from police".

My model of china isn't citizens being whisked away to Gulag. Rather my model is, if the US/Taiwan/etc infiltrate large numbers of Taiwanese or other foreign nationals into the Prc to pretend they are prc citizens, that rather precludes diplomatic intercession on their behalf. If the Prc disappears them, the USA can't intercede without admitting that they were there protesting to begin with.

There are lots of times foreign citizenship can be a protective shield, but not where you're standing up to pretend to be a local protestor. When they round up the "local protestors" no one will notice people who aren't supposed to be there not being there afterward. Too many risks, not enough reward. These protests will be as meaningless in China as they were on Long island.

too many risks, not enough reward

You could say the same for, uh, flooding Chinese cities with planted agitators. What’s the point, the expected impact? Where is COINTELPRO getting all these fake Chinese eager to piss off the PRC?

Edit: I realize this is the same point you were making.

See my last paragraph, I'm explicitly not arguing that the protestors are planted. The young radical Muslim who sets off a fake bomb the FBI gave him isn't planted. It's far easier to network and influence locals that already have a negative view of the government than to import actors.

There are about 400,000 Taiwanese nationals living in China.

Exactly, I'd actually find the full Alex Jones "These are actually filmed in downtown Pawnee, Indiana" type takes more logical than "They launched a huge infiltration operation while cheesing out on learning how to spell."

I wish western intelligence services were strong enough to incite anti-lockdown revolts in China, but you're making them sound way cooler than they actually are.

Why would western intelligence services decide, in 2022, to ignite the exact sort of protests they spent much of 2020, 2021 and 2022 trying to stop? Especially when it's already known that such protests have an awful habit of spreading across borders with copycat protesting, such as when the freedom convoy in Canada had copycats as far flung as Europe and New Zealand.

Why would western intelligence services decide, in 2022, to ignite the exact sort of protests they spent much of 2020, 2021 and 2022 trying to stop?

Because they have more than one priority at once? Western rivalry with, and distrust of, the Chinese Party-State is longstanding public knowledge. And when you have a big objective like that, any tool to hand looks attractive.

Are there any lockdowns left to protest in the West?

No, but trucker convoys do get used for non-lockdown related libertarian protests. A set of libertarian protest tactics used in China would presumably spread.

Ya especially with Europe's energy crisis coming, economic downturn, and the existing European precedent of the yellow vests and dutch farmer protests... anything anti-lockdown, but ultimately anti-government has the risk of pouring over into general international anti-technocrat class war...

but then the CIAs never been that smart with who they fund and what they choose to enable... they Ignored the Berlin wall protests and were actively shocked when communism fell at the same time they were pouring millions into funding Bin Laden to fight the soviets...

Why would western intelligence services decide, in 2022, to ignite the exact sort of protests they spent much of 2020, 2021 and 2022 trying to stop?

I'm skeptical of the idea that the CIA is behind these protests, but this a poor argument against it. The CIA is very much in the habit of sponsoring the same people abroad that other parts of the US government fight at home. Whether it is "moderate" Islamic extremists in Afghanistan and Syria, or drug traffickers in South and Central America...or reach way back into the Disney vault and remember when it was the choice between supporting Mussolini and allowing communists a chance to flourish that directed Anglo-American foreign policy.

The very fact that the USA is trying to quash these protests at home makes it more logical that they would try to force them abroad. If the deep state genuinely thought that lockdown/covid policies were good, then they would want to undermine China by preventing China from implementing them.

So, summing up your evidence: 1) one of the protest signs - one filtered through social media to look like that - is written weirdly. . 2) ... the protests don't make sense because "demonstrations are allowed, and you can plea for the national government to fix issues, but the news agencies won't cover them". Maybe they're doing that? 3) "protesting against the national government is punished". Yeah, it is in iran too, yet protests happened there. Protests happen a lot, including in countries they're illegal in. The long duration of covid measures is making people more willing to protest! Not to say that protests are human nature or anything, social phenomena like this are (somewhat) historically contingent and depend on a history of protests people learn about, but it's plausible they are protests.

This isn't enough to prove intelligence involvement. From the twitter thread:

Don't get me wrong there are plenty of protests in China but a REAL Chinese protest tend to demand local official to step down and national government to intervene. They almost never call for a regime change. Even rarer to call the party leader to step down.

The covid measures are by the national government, though. And most protestors aren't calling for regime change! I can believe western media is playing up 'regime change' as a component of the protest - but even they acknowledge it's a small fraction of protestors. From cnn:

As numbers swelled at demonstrations in multiple major cities over the weekend, so too have the range of grievances voiced – with some calling for greater democracy and freedom. Among the thousands of protesters, hundreds have even called for the removal of Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who for nearly three years has overseen a strategy of mass-testing, brute-force lockdowns, enforced quarantine and digital tracking that has come at a devastating human and economic cost.

Videos showed Urumqi residents marching to a government building and chanting for the end of lockdown on Friday. The following morning, the local government said it would lift the lockdown in stages – but did not provide a clear time frame or address the protests.

Some china watchers on twitter have also claimed media / twitter randoms were mistranslating vocal protests, swapping covid slogans for anti-regime/pro-democracy slogans, which is plausible. But all of that undermines her argument - if most of the protestors are just protesting covid, then your reasons 2 and 3 and her thread aren't relevant! And in the context of large protests about covid, a subset of them making more extreme claims becomes more plausible. From her thread again:

Those two things simply do not address the problem at hand. Demanding national leader to step down is a western thing because then they can vote in a new leader. It does not work in China. Strong sign of foreign funded operation.

the central government has extremely high approval ratings and it's usually the local ones that people have issues with. There are also foreigners in there chanting down with CCP in the video, they refer to the Communist Party as the "CCP" even though they're in China 🤭

This just sounds like the china-lover equivalent of 'americans would never vote biden because he is a communist subverter so TRUMP WON ' or 'america would never vote trump so RUSSIAN HACK ELECTION BOTS', tbh.

It's like the 'half of this board are feds' / 'half the twitter people who disagree with me are bots' claims (which was even less plausible pre gpt3, yet was about as common) - intelligence agencies exist and do things, but they don't do everything. Even if the CIA were involved in this, that involvement is very complex - even if the CIA ran 'protest-covid-china.cn', where the protestors downloaded pngs for their signs how much of a causal role in the protests does that actually have, might the protestors have used other signs otherwise?

You claim "I don't think they're entirely organic. Some are likely intelligence agency ops". Well, if 5% of the protests are 'ops' and 95% are 'organic', then how does that matter? Russia funds a bunch of leftist media organizations in the US that have a strong following on twitter (hence the 'russian state-affiliated media' tag). Does that make communism russian? Not at all.

This isn't to say US intelligence are 'the good guys' or would never do such a thing, not at all - this is much 'worse': In 2010, a new decade was dawning, and Chinese officials were furious. The CIA, they had discovered, had systematically penetrated their government over the course of years, with U.S. assets embedded in the military, the CCP, the intelligence apparatus, and elsewhere. The anger radiated upward to “the highest levels of the Chinese government,” recalled a former senior counterintelligence executive. ... Within the CIA, China’s seething, retaliatory response wasn’t entirely surprising, said a former senior agency official. “We often had a conversation internally, on how U.S. policymakers would react to the degree of penetration CIA had of China”—that is, how angry U.S. officials would have been if they discovered, as the Chinese did, that a global adversary had so thoroughly infiltrated their ranks.. But spies existing doesn't mean they're responsible for the car that just drove past your house.

The covid measures are by the national government, though. And most protestors aren't calling for regime change! I can believe western media is playing up 'regime change' as a component of the protest - but even they acknowledge it's a small fraction of protestors.

I'd argue that it is hard to underestimate significance of even small fraction of protesters demanding Xi Jinping or CCP being replaced. This NEVER happens in China, never. There was a precedent to this in form of famous bannerman protest in Beijing calling for end of Covid restrictions and calling for free elections as the National Congress of CCP was in sitting. This was immediately suppressed and censored and the bannerman AKA Bridge Man was promptly disappeared - probably with his larger network of friends and family also severely punished up to three generations. But his message still spread out in various forms including Apple Airdrop campaign, for which Apple caved in to CCP. That is the reason why you normally never see these things in China, and yet here we are.

Again, even if it is a small portion of the crowd demanding a change it cannot be compared to the Western protests. This is huge shift in sentiment of the population. If you actually have vocal voices willing to take such an incredible risk, there are bound to be much more people silently sympathizing but scared to voice their opinion.

Any time anything like this happens in China or Ukraine or whatever, it's always "foreign operatives" or whatever. The locals never have any agency of course.

From this video in Beijing (亮马桥 area), we can see：

  • first ~10 seconds: the first person (with masked) with the microphone is asking the crowd to be careful as there a foreign anti-Chinese forces among them (“现在，在我们群众当中，有境外反华势力，在我们周围“）

  • People start yelling "we are all Chinese people / citizens" (“我们都是中国人”）

  • at the 0:24 mark, a second person (shorter, no mask, glasses) now has the mic, who asks: "Are Marx and Engels the foreign forces you speak of? ... (crowd repeats) Is it Lenin?" (“请问，你说的境外势力是马克思和恩格斯吗？是列宁吗？”）

  • 0:33 mark: the first speaker responds (without the mic, with his hands up) that he will forever love his country and its people.

  • 0:40 mark: the first person continues that he also thinks the current policies have issues ("我也觉得现在的政策有问题，我真的觉得有问题“）before getting cutoff by the crowd for trying to change the topic ("不要转移话题“）

  • 0:51: "Question: was the fire in Xinjiang started by foreign forces?" (the fire in Wulumuqi that killed people) (“请问新疆的火是境外势力放的吗？”)

  • 0:56: "Was the bus in Guizhou crashed by foreign forces?" (”贵州的大巴是境外势力推翻的吗？” )

  • 1:01: person in white jacket takes the mic and asks in the most Beijing accent: "everyone, was I called here by foreign forces?" ("大家我是境外势力叫来的吗？“ ) - crowd: "no!!"

  • 1:05: "we can't even go onto foreign websites, how could we be foreign forces? How can foreign forces communicate with us?" ("我们连网都上不了国外的，我们哪儿来的境外势力？境外势力怎么跟我们沟通？“

  • 1:13: glasses guy takes the mic again: "we only have domestic forces that prevent us from gathering" (“我们只有境内势力不让我们聚集”)

Anyway you get the gist. The glasses guy was later interviewed by Japanese television, and his whole emphasis is "I could be the next Xinjiang fire or Guizhou bus crash".

First, some of the signage doesn't look right. They use traditional characters instead of simplified. They also sometimes use pinyin, seemingly unable to recall the "qi" in "Urumqi," the biggest city in Xinjiang, even as they were protesting on Urumqi road. Mainlanders wouldn't do this. This is beyond mere misspelt Tea Party protest signs, I'd say it's akin to protesting against Biden with an English-language sign with Cyrillic characters accidentally slipped in. It's a clear signal of "not from around here."

This seems cherry-picked. If you look at the videos from the 2am Wulumuqi protest, there weren't much signage at all. Most of the protests after have been using the blank A4 paper. You see that in the video I linked above.

Second, the protests don't make much sense if your goal is to reach other Chinese folks in China. You can't share such protests on social media, and news agencies won't cover them. However, contrary to popular narratives, demonstrations are allowed in China. You can't call for the downfall of the national government, but you can plea for the national government to come in and fix local issues. You can also take to the streets because you're really worked up about foreigners insulting China.

Just because they know censorship exists doesn't mean they never protest. Plus most of the protest isn't calling for the downfall of the government (tho some exists).

If you listen to the slogans, they aren't calling for the downfall of the government. They are saying stuff like 不要核酸要吃饭 不要封控要自由 (Don't wanna nucleic test I want to eat, don't want lockdowns want freedom).

(And yes I was at an anti-Japanese march in Shanghai a long time ago. It seemed ironic to be yelling anti-Japanese slogans as you walk near the Japanese Consulate, and then drinking your Kirin beverage (but that's just me))

Third, advocating against the national government and leaders is punished, and everyone knows it. It's unlikely that Chinese citizens would take such a risk when it's so easy to put on a demonstration that falls short of impugning the national government. I think it's likely that these were non-citizens, perhaps Taiwanese, or perhaps expats, that aren't risking their livelihoods. The use of traditional characters makes this more likely, only Hong Kong and Taiwan use them. Western media are unlikely to take note of such things, or to take note of Taiwanese accents.

In a country of 1.3 billion or whatever the number, there are weird shit that happens all the time. I can tell you with confidence that the 2am protest in Shanghai was majority local Chinese, mostly young people. This was in the former french concession (trendy place to live) so there were some foreigners there (I may or may not have been there), but all expat groups and group chats on wechat etc have been warned not to participate in these, precisely because you dont wanna be a random white guy photographed in the crowd and then used as "see, this is foreign forces!". And you don't wanna be deported and all that.

And by the way the twitter account you linked is ... questionable.

Any time anything like this happens in China or Ukraine or whatever, it's always "foreign operatives" or whatever. The locals never have any agency of course.

I observed this as well. I follow Daryl Cooper and he goes on and on how everything that happened in Russia since downfall of Soviet Union has imprint of USA. Russian economy was ruined by US corporations, their peaceful attempts such as Partnership for Peace was dashed by the likes of Allbright and Kissinger and their pawns like Václav Havel or Lech Wałęsa. Expansion of NATO basically forced Russia into hot wars, they had no other choice. Even recent analysis like Nordstream 2 pipeline explosion - Cooper's theory is that Biden was blackmailed by intelligence community to blow up the pipeline - because there is no possible explanation for why Putin or anybody else would ever do it, there is quite a remarkable absence of imagination regarding Putin and his convoluted gang of goons, given what convoluted stories Cooper can create when it comes to US actions. And my speculation is that even if Putin actually ordered it a new narrative would be created how it is ultimately just result of America's shady plays behind the curtain.

There is never any agency of 7.7 billion people in the World, everything that ever happens is orchestrated by this one nation of 300 million. It seems like a sort of strange and perverse version of American exceptionalism - yes we are the most powerful nation that ever was and we are behind everything, only we are the bad guys. Which is BTW a strangely common thread with the wokes, only they see immense power of Western White Males everywhere in the world throughout whole history. It is quite a weird fetish.

Also for everybody else, I follow The China Show podcast of two expats who lived in China for over a decade and who have a lot of contacts still in there. They covered the topic extensively during last episode, it is worth a watch.

I've always found it strange that typos or linguistically confused protest signs are considered evidence of CIA interference when that seems like one of the easier things for them to get right. Maybe it's hard to wrangle up a translator for obscure languages, but there's no shortage of people who know Chinese and you could even anonymously outsource the task to language learning sites and forums full of native speakers happy to correct you for free. It's easy to overestimate the literacy of the average person, but the typical protest sign is much closer to the level of yahoo answers than motte posts, with mistakes that to us seem glaringly obvious or impossibly absurd. This is even more pronounced in Chinese these days because hardly anyone hand writes characters anymore, using either pinyin inputs or one of the various autocomplete methods.

That actually seems like a relevant variable- if reports that tech censorship ramped up in China as unrest came into the picture are true, then the average chinaman being functionally inscripturate means we should expect to see a few protest signs written with Taiwanese characters or whatever- after all, Taiwanese writing apps are presumably not any more blocked than they had been.

And my understanding is that the ability to actually write in Chinese characters unassisted is like knowing Latin- it’s the product of the Chinese version of an expensive classical education, not something that stem lords or average joes would get(or indeed seek out), so the people protesting(who are almost definitionally not the elites who would know these things) are dependent on apps to produce Chinese characters.

The issue is that 乌鲁木齐 - the "qi" character (the last one) is very much a character you learn to write in like, 2nd grade if not first.

At the same time, this photo feels very cherry-picked to me. I didn't notice any such written signs in any videos.

I think the first question should be "Who is purporting this to be authentic?" The tweet you posted is just a debunking of the photo but it makes no reference to the source. Did the person who posted the tweet take this picture herself? Did it appear in Western media? I did a reverse image search and the only places I can find this on the web are from CCP apologists using this photo as evidence of CIA or MI6 or whatever involvement, which isn't a good sign.

I have a lot of sympathy (or maybe pity) for SBF. "Stole client funds" appears to have solidified as a meme much the same way "crossed state lines" had in the Rittenhouse case.

I think it's hard for people, including technologists who haven't worked as quants, to appreciate the level of technology risk that's present in quant trading. In most of tech your biggest risk is having all of your data destroyed, and you can address that with well worn improvements in backups. You also risk being hacked but those breaches tend to be embarrassing rather than company ending. Even Sony, which was pwned as hard as you could possibly be pwned, ultimately recovered. But an additional risk in quant trading is accidentally and irrecoverably giving all of your assets away in a few seconds.

Even companies that are following all of the rules and have the right number of members of the professional management class in their ranks can destroy themselves in a matter of minutes. Knight Capital Group destroyed itself in 30 minutes by (with some creative license) failing to follow heroic practices around retiring old flags in protobufs.

Alameda/FTX had a culture that resembled "move fast and break things". They grew extremely quickly. I'm highly skeptical they were able to stand up robust accounting and practices to mitigate technology risks in so short a time.

When SBF says he didn't realize they were leveraged due to accounting error, I believe him. It's not like you can just install the QuickBooks Enterprise Crypto Derivatives Exchange plugin. All of this stuff was bespoke, and in a hurry.

When you thought you had $30b in assets and minimal liabilities, you can spend a billion or two on indulgences, charitable giving and campaign contributions. Your can say confidently you're not investing client funds. If those assets are suddenly marked down 90% you look like a fraud and you're in deep shit.

That's the nature of the business and he knew the risks. But probably in hindsight I'm sure he wishes he had been even more careful.

This isn't to say that I believe he definitely didn't commit fraud. Rather this is me saying that as someone who has pushed code that I thought accidentally gave away $10 million of my employer's money (the gigantic exhale of relief came when we learned I failed to scale by 1000x in the reporting and not the ordering), I am defaulting to blaming it on stupidity before malice.

So, I also have worked in HFT Finance and am currently director of Operations for a (fully CFTC regulated) BTC futures/options exchange. I completely sympathize with losing scads of money in seconds ( my biggest hit was $70k because I misread a settlement value) and I was working the day Knight Capital imploded (I had met the VP a week earlier at a CME training session!).

Anyway, I guess my point is that there's some serious differences between running a trading firm and running an exchange and as stated below, the security of your customers' accounts is paramount, possibly more important that the actual functioning of the exchange. This is why US exchanges are required to use 3rd party clearing houses and a variety of other services to ensure the proper handling of margin, reserves, fees, open interest and settlements. We have industry wide annual disaster recovery tests, risk control evaluations and hundreds of other hoops to jump through.

I think this was a huge hit to the credibility of all things Crypto but if there's a silver lining, it's that companies like mine, who take the extra few years to not only align with CFTC regulations, but help to inform how they can be improved, will ultimately be preferred over foreign companies that lack these controls--if BTC can maintain it's value. I don't want to seem like a CFTC fanboy, but regardless of the extent to which you think they make good decisions ,their mere existence creates some sense of normalcy and safety and provides a history of precedent that is mostly transparent. (I'm not sure I'd say the same about the SEC, fwiw).

Of course the big question is what is all this stuff and what's it worth and is the value of Bitcoin actually reduced because of US government controls. I'm not sure and always wonder about what the future of this stuff will be but I feel confident in saying some sort of digital blockchain currency will perpetuate into the future.

As for SBF, it seems like there's a lot reasons to be upset with the dude and his team. They really screwed up (or maybe they pulled a fast one, I dunno). To me, this whole episode seems to be more reflective of the un-serious direction our civilization has taken where we consistently fall for the hype and never seem to do the boring research. We hand billions of dollars to kids because we feel they've been vetted by some university or other pedigree. I've spent a life surrounded by grad students and high IQ scientists, doctors and lawyers and can say emphatically: smart people are some of the dumbest people I know.

They really screwed up (or maybe they pulled a fast one, I dunno).

I think, with regard to what you say about regulation, that this was the space they were trying to exploit. Looking for unregulated markets to get that edge, with of course the attendant risk, and they couldn't keep up the promise of "we will make gazillions" because the exploit holes were getting plugged one after another, so Bankman-Fried had to take bigger and bigger risks to keep the appearance going of "this guy is a whiz who knows how to make a fortune overnight". His One Weird Trick with Alameda, exploiting the difference in the price of bitcoin between Asia and the rest of the world, only worked - and could only work - once. After that, to make the same kind of returns as fast, he tried setting up FTX

In 2017, when he was merely 25, SBF collapsed the so-called kimchi premium, an anomalous delta between the price of Bitcoin in much of Asia and its price in the rest of the world. It was a daring feat of arbitrage—SBF is the only trader known to have pulled this off in any meaningful way—one which quickly made him a billionaire and achieved the status of legend.

Because of the existence of regulations, he could only pull it off once:

SBF decided to create some accounts on different exchanges and see if he could execute the trade. He couldn’t. But, interestingly, it wasn’t because the arbitrage opportunity wasn’t there—it was. But there was so much red tape with the banking system and currency controls that it was a difficult trade to execute.

Another day of work dealing with the red-tape problem netted SBF a single round-trip trade—to Asia and back—for a $20 profit. That was it: the proof of concept. There was an opportunity to be had. SBF immediately put $50,000 of his own money to work. The first job was just getting the money into the system. The operational challenges were huge. Not just anyone can walk into a foreign bank and start wiring money out of the country every day. There are know-your-customer rules, caps on withdrawals, citizenship requirements. Even worse, to any normal bank, the constant zeroing out, then maxing out, of a cash account—with the money coming and going overseas, to and from fly-by-night Bitcoin exchanges—raised every red flag in the book. It looked like laundering. It looked like drug money. There were even monetary policy concerns: The liquidity of the South Korean won is sharply limited by the country’s central bank.

So in hindsight, the system was working as it should work, except that there was a loophole. He found the loophole, but eventually it was filled in.

With a goosed-up capital account, the money started piling up so fast that SBF placed what he refers to as “a market order for employees” to tend to the Rube Goldberg operation that kept the capital spinning. There were constant blowups with banks, which are wary of anything crypto. Crypto was so new that regulators in South Korea and elsewhere were constantly changing their mind about regulations—then making those changes retroactive. It was a swirling mess.

And that's when he seems to have decided to go for the dodgy (sorry, "risk-neutral") side:

The Bitcoin arbitrage didn’t—and couldn’t—last forever. The Japanese appetite for overpriced Bitcoin withered (or, more likely, another shadowy arbitrage outfit also found its way to the trade and collapsed it). Either way, the spread narrowed to almost nothing. But there were other trades to be had. The simple fact that crypto was new, and that the tools traders needed to handle it were still under construction, meant that there were market inefficiencies all over the place. And behind every market inefficiency is an arbitrage opportunity.

The biggest headache for Alameda wasn’t finding the opportunities, but executing the trades. At that time, when it came to crypto exchanges, the choice basically boiled down to Coinbase or Binance. Coinbase makes a point of being regulated by authorities in the U.S., but as a consequence, didn’t offer the kinds of options contracts and derivatives professional traders need to hedge their bets. Binance, on the other hand, offered the kinds of derivatives SBF was familiar with when he traded for Jane Street—but as a company, it was continually moving from country to country in an attempt to evade all jurisdictional authority. Neither exchange was particularly good to trade on.

“Everything was rickety—there was no avoiding the ricketiness. Obviously, the line between rickety and shady is a little unclear at times, but the places that seemed like they were going to steal customer funds outright, we didn’t touch,” Singh says. “Even the best players in the space were having big problems.”

At this point, mid-2019, SBF decided to double down again—and scratch his own itch. He would bet Alameda’s multimillion-dollar trading profits on a new venture: a trading exchange called FTX. It would combine Coinbase’s stolid, regulation-loving approach with the kinds of derivatives being offered by Binance and others.

Looking back with hindsight, the warning signs were already showing up, but everyone was so ready to believe in golden geese and magic beans when it came to producing huge fortunes out of thin air that they ignored them:

The problem, as Bailhe saw it, was that FTX didn’t appear to need any money. She was correct, but what she didn’t know was that SBF was starting to think about raising money anyway. Alameda had some unexpected losses due to so-called counterparty risk. Arbitrage is, in theory, riskless. But not when the rickety exchange you’re using to place your trades suddenly locks up and refuses to disburse your money. Or, worse yet, when two crypto exchanges can’t even agree on what a crypto transfer looks like, and so the act of sending crypto from one exchange to another results in tokens just disappearing into the ether. And don’t even ask about futures contracts that see their terms unilaterally changed mid-agreement: the dreaded “clawbacks.” Alameda was not immune to the exchange-level shenanigans that gave crypto as a whole its sleazy reputation. But FTX had an ambition to change that. It was built to be the exchange traders could count on. SBF needed to get the word out. He wanted FTX to be known as the respectable face of crypto. This required ad campaigns, sponsorship deals, a charitable wing—and a war chest to pay for it all.

...FTX did need money, after all. And it needed that money from credible sources so it could continue to distinguish itself from the bottom-feeders who came to crypto to fleece the suckers. So, in the summer of 2021, when FTX started to raise its Series B from a who’s who of Silicon Valley VCs, Bailhe and Lin hit the “Don’t Panic” button. “Embarrassingly, we had never tried to reach out to Sam, because we figured he didn’t need us,” Bailhe admits. “I thought they were just minting money and had absolutely no need for investors.”

Uh, yeah, about those charities...

Alameda Research, the company that generated the FTX grubstake, still exists, and its purpose seems to be to generate profits—on the order of $100 million a year today, but potentially up to a billion—that can be stuffed into the brand-new FTX Foundation. Similarly, even now, 1 percent of net FTX fees are donated to that same foundation, and FTX handles nearly $5 billion dollars’ worth of trades per day. The foundation, in turn, gives to a diversified group of EA-approved charities.

So was it all really a sham? They plugged EA as their reason for existing, but nobody from FTX ever actually showed up to meet EA people?

A cocktail party is in full swing, with about a dozen people I don’t recognize standing around. It turns out to be a mixer for the local EA community that’s been drawn to Nassau in the hopes that the FTX Foundation will fund its various altruistic ideas. The point of the party is to provide a friendly forum for the EAs who actually run EA-aligned nonprofits to meet the earn-to-give EAs at FTX who will fund them, and vice versa. The irony is that, while FTX hosts the weekly mixer—providing the venue and the beverages—it’s rare for an actual FTX employee to ever show up and mix. Presumably, they’re working too hard.

Bankman-Fried kept shifting FTX headquarters to countries deemed crypto-friendly and lax on regulations, precisely because although he needed the appearance of being solid and reliable, the real money-making was done through being 'shady' and 'rickety'. And of course, the entire house of cards eventually came tumbling down.

Do you think this should make me despise SBF less? If your summary is entirely accurate, it only serves as further confirmatory evidence that all of these enterprises are bogus, extractive scams.

The more I learn, and the more Bankman-Fried shoots his mouth off in interviews (I can't access that livestream from the NYT DealBook conference because frick me if I pay them a subscription just to watch that), the worse it all looks.

I started out thinking "well, magic beans, can't depend on them, he was foolish but could have happened to anyone". Now it's "yeah the guy was scamming from the very beginning, MacAskill et al. were just huge patsies that made his eyes light up at a way of getting rich quick by mouthing platitudes about charity. Sprinkle enough rationalist jargon into his pitch and they ate it all up".

Alameda/FTX had a culture that resembled "move fast and break things". They grew extremely quickly. I'm highly skeptical they were able to stand up robust accounting and practices to mitigate technology risks in so short a time.

When SBF says he didn't realize they were leveraged due to accounting error, I believe him. It's not like you can just install the QuickBooks Enterprise Crypto Derivatives Exchange plugin. All of this stuff was bespoke, and in a hurry.

Which is why one should not engage in seat-of-the-pants accounting when billions of investor dollars are on the line.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31239033

Some notes on the Knight Capital anecdote.

Look, I’ve been on the “FTX collapse is overblown” train since the news broke. But that’s because I start by assuming crypto is staffed by rug-pullers or outright scammers. It doesn’t really detract from the amount of damage done. The fact that he had plausible deniability means that people can feel a little less bad that they bought his magic future money, not that they can write it off.

Damning with faint praise. They failed to do the basic tasks of their entire purpose. They won a stupid prize from a stupid game.

This is the part that's sympathetic pitiful to me. Starting a business and failing at it badly enough that you lose customer money is just sad.

It's stupid, but not criminal. Unless you think criminally stupid is a thing.

I'm willing to bet that prosecutors will find a Rubicon moment somewhere in the chronology where SBF and whats-her-name decided to bail out Alameda with a quantity of FTX funds that would have been impossible to mistake for not-customer-money.

He didn't simply "lose" customer money, as though he were a factory owner all whose warehouses burned down taking his entire stock with them, leaving nothing to sell for the lucrative Christmas quarter and the enterprise up to its ears in debt and bankrupt.

He embezzled customer funds and funnelled them into Alameda in order to shore up his failing enterprise, just like any other common swindler who loses a packet on bad stocks or slow horses, and thinks that if he just 'borrows' that cash in the customer accounts and buys/bets on the sure thing he will make it all back and can repay and nobody need ever know.

That's stupid and where it crosses over into "criminal" is "taking money that is not yours to take and you know you shouldn't do this, or at least you ought to know".

He didn't simply "lose" customer money, as though he were a factory owner all whose warehouses burned down taking his entire stock with them, leaving nothing to sell for the lucrative Christmas quarter and the enterprise up to its ears in debt and bankrupt.

Permit me a moment to torture the analogy. Suppose you have warehouse full of valuable stuff that's been freshly manufactured ready to ship to buyers that have already paid for it. You spent all of the money the customers paid you (including profit) to build even more units than your customers ordered in anticipation of future demand. Right around this time your brother calls you up and asks you hey bro can you send me like a fuckton of units I've got a whale. You say sure. You look at your inventory list and ship only the extra units to your brother.

The units for your brother burn down in transit because of an accident. Nobody had insurance, because he was your brother and you both though you could manage the risk of casualty. Fuck. Well, I guess there's no profit but at least you can ship to your customers.

Then, while processing customer fulfillment someone looks at the accounting closer and realizes there was an error in inventory, you actually accidentally also gave away a huge portion of your customer's units to your brother too, which burned down in transit. Your warehouse is almost empty but still something like half of your customers got nothing. And you have no money to pay them back with.

Did you commit a crime? Or did you just flagrantly fuck up?

Did you commit a crime? Or did you just flagrantly fuck up?

At this point, I'm betting your brother was going to burn down the warehouses for the insurance and you thought you could improve on the scam by burning the units in transit.

"I thought you had insurance on them!" "No, I thought you had the insurance, it was your dumb plan in the first place!"

If you can't refund the customers the money you have 100% commit a crime in every legal system that has ever existed. That is textbook fraud. Incompetence is no defense against defrauding people of their money.

They failed to do the basic tasks of their entire purpose.

I hate to be dumping on EA like this and I've always thought the quokka meme was unkind and annoying, but it really does come down to 'everyone trusted Sam' and they did that because they were all EA and so of course they were all pure, high-minded individuals in this to do good for the world, right? Sam is one of us so we don't need red tape and regulations, his word is good enough, and he knows about iterated prisoner's dilemma, so he's gonna do right by us all:

Can Sun, FTX’s in-house legal counsel, tells me that his main job is to cement the many deals SBF makes on a handshake. Ninety-nine times out of a hundred, Sun says, the terms favor the other side. It’s another corporate policy derived from a rigorous logical argument: In an iterated prisoner’s dilemma, the best first move is always to cooperate. And, if the counterparty defects, “it’s better that I know this guy will screw me over now,” Sun says, “rather than later.”

Also the entire mindset around non-conventional morality/standards of behaviour. Whereas a dinosaur like me would be grimly insisting "yeah well these are the rules, so I am going to need more than a 'personalised emoji' to keep track of who's asking for money and for what, and who is granting it, so fill out these expenses claims forms IN TRIPLICATE" (I've worked/work in civil and public service, so the reason for all the red tape is to prevent shenanigans like this, and they do happen: boss guy waves through big lump of funding for personal friend/business crony and over-rides rules around it. Not when you have to fill out the forms IN TRIPLICATE, sir, I'm very sorry but them's the regulations).

I hate to be dumping on EA like this and I've always thought the quokka meme was unkind and annoying, but it really does come down to 'everyone trusted Sam' and they did that because they were all EA and so of course they were all pure, high-minded individuals in this to do good for the world, right? Sam is one of us so we don't need red tape and regulations, his word is good enough, and he knows about iterated prisoner's dilemma, so he's gonna do right by us all:

This but I'll raise you. Even if the reputation was well deserved and SBF didn't have a malicious bone in his body, it's still a bad idea to trust any one person so much. It wasn't just the EA community. VCs and other investors trusted him too. Nobody demanded a board seat? Nobody wanted independently audited financial statements? Everyone was smitten.

This is bad. Even if you're a genius and even if you're a saint, you cannot be perfect all of the time. You can still make catastrophic mistakes. Being challenged, having a process where you need to justify your request, out loud, to another human, is healthy. At the very least it's a sanity check.

Any company that scales past a certain size quickly learns that one person shouldn't have the admin password for every single system in the company -- even if they're qualified to do all of the things. Part of the reason is security, but it's also because by being the admin it's possible there's nothing in place to ever force them to go through the gatekeepers that the company has stood up for good reasons. They might not even know there are gatekeepers now!

Absolute trust is bad. I expect if Elon ever flames out spectacularly for technological reasons it'll be over something similar.

VCs and other investors trusted him too. Nobody demanded a board seat? Nobody wanted independently audited financial statements? Everyone was smitten.

That is the part I don't understand. Whatever about the EA community, where it seems his brother was part of it and brought him in that way (and hence people did trust him as "he's Gabe's brother"), these were allegedly hard-headed business people and he bowled them over with charm, though what charm he has I have no idea. He must be one hell of a persuader. Again, I have to quote the Sequoia article, because these were the people who after one flippin' Zoom call just threw money at him, and the writer of this article seemed to have contracted a massive man-crush as well:

As Covid-19 descended, Michelle Bailhe, a young gun at Sequoia Capital, and veteran partner Alfred Lin were starting to closely examine the crypto space. Lin, a no-nonsense workaholic if there ever was one, had little patience for the kind of utopianism that motivated the first wave of cryptopians. Lin’s intellect was tempered in graduate school at Stanford, where he studied statistics and price options, swaps, and derivatives. And when he thought about crypto, the question he asked himself was: What is it good for?

…Bailhe spent months researching the space full time, focusing her energies on the exchanges. She met with every founder and every company that would have her. And she built a map—a landscape, as such a document is called at Sequoia—of the entire market.

…FTX did need money, after all. And it needed that money from credible sources so it could continue to distinguish itself from the bottom-feeders who came to crypto to fleece the suckers. So, in the summer of 2021, when FTX started to raise its Series B from a who’s who of Silicon Valley VCs, Bailhe and Lin hit the “Don’t Panic” button. “Embarrassingly, we had never tried to reach out to Sam, because we figured he didn’t need us,” Bailhe admits. “I thought they were just minting money and had absolutely no need for investors.” Learning otherwise, they quickly contacted SBF and organized a last-minute Zoom call between him and the partners at Sequoia—at four California time on a hot July Friday afternoon. Bailhe was adamant, putting her reputation with the other partners on the line: “I’m like, ‘No, it’s worth it. Cancel your afternoon.’”

The Zoom went well for all concerned. SBF looked relaxed as he answered questions, talking, as he usually does, in complete paragraphs about topics of extreme complexity. Ramnik Arora, FTX’s head of product and another ex-Facebook engineer, remembers the meeting clearly: “We’re getting all these questions from Sequoia toward the end. He’s absolutely fantastic.” Arora locks eyes with me, and I am mesmerized. Arora is intense—calling to mind a Bollywood version of Adrian Brody. “Unbelievably fantastic,” he says, shaking his head.

Bailhe remembers it the same way: “We had a great meeting with Sam, but the last question, which I remember Alfred asking, was, ‘So, everything you’re building is great, but what is your long-term vision for FTX?’”

That’s when SBF told Sequoia about the so-called super-app: “I want FTX to be a place where you can do anything you want with your next dollar. You can buy bitcoin. You can send money in whatever currency to any friend anywhere in the world. You can buy a banana. You can do anything you want with your money from inside FTX.”

Suddenly, the chat window on Sequoia’s side of the Zoom lights up with partners freaking out.

“I LOVE THIS FOUNDER,” typed one partner.

“I am a 10 out of 10,” pinged another.

“YES!!!” exclaimed a third.

…“We were incredibly impressed,” Bailhe says. “It was one of those your-hair-is-blown-back type of meetings.”

…The B round raised a billion dollars. Soon afterward came the “meme round”: $420.69 million from 69 investors.

After my interview with SBF, I was convinced: I was talking to a future trillionaire. Whatever mojo he worked on the partners at Sequoia—who fell for him after one Zoom—had worked on me, too. For me, it was simply a gut feeling. I’ve been talking to founders and doing deep dives into technology companies for decades. It’s been my entire professional life as a writer. And because of that experience, there must be a pattern-matching algorithm churning away somewhere in my subconscious. I don’t know how I know, I just do. SBF is a winner.

But that wasn’t even the main thing. There was something else I felt: something in my heart, not just my gut. After sitting ten feet from him for most of the week, studying him in the human musk of the startup grind and chatting in between beanbag naps, I couldn’t shake the feeling that this guy is actually as selfless as he claims to be.

So I find myself convinced that, if SBF can keep his wits about him in the years ahead, he’s going to slay—that, just as Alameda was a stepping stone to FTX, FTX will be to the super-app. Banking will be disrupted and transformed by crypto, just as media was transformed and disrupted by the web. Something of the sort must happen eventually, as the current system, with its layers upon layers of intermediaries, is antiquated and prone to crashing—the global financial crisis of 2008 was just the latest in a long line of failures that occurred because banks didn’t actually know what was on their balance sheets. Crypto is money that can audit itself, no accountant or bookkeeper needed, and thus a financial system with the blockchain built in can, in theory, cut out most of the financial middlemen, to the advantage of all. Of course, that’s the pitch of every crypto company out there. The FTX competitive advantage? Ethical behavior. SBF is a Peter Singer–inspired utilitarian in a sea of Robert Nozick–inspired libertarians. He’s an ethical maximalist in an industry that’s overwhelmingly populated with ethical minimalists. I’m a Nozick man myself, but I know who I’d rather trust my money with: SBF, hands-down. And if he does end up saving the world as a side effect of being my banker, all the better.

Forget crypto, if someone can just figure out what Bankman-Fried has to reduce people like this to squeeing fanboys and then bottle it, that's a sure-fire fortune!

Also, I have to wonder what Michelle Bailhe is doing now; she's the one 'staked her reputation' and persuaded them to give Bankman-Fried a hearing, ouch!

Jane Street, the esteemed quant trading firm SBF and Ellison came from, have had their reputation tarnished a bit as a result. But on the other hand...

Forget crypto, if someone can just figure out what Bankman-Fried has to reduce people like this to squeeing fanboys and then bottle it, that's a sure-fire fortune!

SBF and Ellison apparently were not successful in convincing them to help build their rocket ship to the moon, so maybe they're much smarter than we thought.

Also, I have to wonder what Michelle Bailhe is doing now;

Still at Sequoia as a Partner in their Growth section. Privated Twitter around when things started falling apart. @Sequoia has been rather quiet for the last couple of weeks. They did post an update regarding their exposure to the whole mess.

Forget crypto, if someone can just figure out what Bankman-Fried has to reduce people like this to squeeing fanboys and then bottle it, that's a sure-fire fortune!

These insane asset bubbles are torture for professional asset managers obligated to deploy capital in related spaces. Sure, they can try to sit it out, but the crypto clown-car has been rolling for years now, with idiot 23-year-olds popping out as billionaires left and right. Andreessen launched a crypto fund and returned something like 5x in just a couple of years. Where's your return, investors and colleagues ask? What's your crypto strategy? How many years can you spend shifting uncomfortably in your seat and muttering "well, but, in the fullness of time..." before you make a move?

Yeah, but if your 20-something whiz kid replies, in answer to "so what can your shiny new bauble do?" that "you can buy bananas with it", then you should be smiling and closing down the Zoom window and muttering under your breath "waste of a frickin' afternoon", not going ALL CAPS I LOVE THIS GUY.

I suppose this is why I'll never be a millionaire!

Alameda/FTX had a culture that resembled "move fast and break things". They grew extremely quickly. I'm highly skeptical they were able to stand up robust accounting and practices to mitigate technology risks in so short a time.

When SBF says he didn't realize they were leveraged due to accounting error, I believe him. It's not like you can just install the QuickBooks Enterprise Crypto Derivatives Exchange plugin. All of this stuff was bespoke, and in a hurry.

The problem is that they didn't even try to have anything in place to handle what is basic practices in running any kind of a business. The bankruptcy filing is apoplectic about this, and sure, you can write that off as "old, out-of-touch guy doesn't understand modern new Internet" but even the adulatory pieces (like the Sequoia article which I keep coming back to again and again because you can pull so many plums out of it) describes how it was being run like a college dorm. And, uh, it keeps giving EA a black eye in the process, since it was via EA that Bankman-Fried met the likes of MacAskill and got involved with EA people and used them for labour and sources of funding to start him off. Bankman-Fried was making fast and (relatively) easy money off the "kimchi premium" but like all good things, that came to an end. So what next? Well, spinning up Alameda Research and FTX into a crypto exchange!:

The first 15 people SBF hired, all from the EA pool, were packed together in a shabby, 600-square-foot walk-up, working around the clock. The kitchen was given over to stand-up desks, the closet was reserved for sleeping, and the entire space overrun with half-eaten take-out containers. It was a royal mess. But it was also the good old days, when Alameda was just kids on a high-stakes, big-money, earn-to-give commando operation. Fifty percent of Alameda’s profits were going to EA-approved charities.

“This thing couldn’t have taken off without EA,” reminisces Singh, running his hand through a shock of thick black hair. He removes his glasses to think. They’re broken: A chopstick has been Scotch taped to one of the frame’s sides, serving as a makeshift temple. “All the employees, all the funding—everything was EA to start with.”

The HQ building is distinguished by a reception desk in the microscopic lobby. The door is unlocked. There is no receptionist. I peek around the corner and into the FTX command center—29 desks in a room designed to hold 8, at most. Every desk touches two or three others. There are no aisles. To get across the room, you have to wade through (and, at times, climb over) a sea of office chairs. Walls of wide-screen monitors—two, four, even six per desk—stand in place of cubicle walls. The screens erupt like palm leaves from aluminum uprights and are oriented willy-nilly: up, down, sideways. Some screens are mounted so high they seem to hang down from the ceiling. It’s office environment as jungle, and the oddest thing about it is that no one seems to be home.

At first blush, the scene is classic startup—the kitchen full of snacks and soda; the free catered breakfasts, lunches, and dinners; the company bathroom stocked with everything you’d need to actually live at the office: Q-tips, disposable razors, Kotex. In keeping with the fashion aesthetic of senior management, the dress code is marketing-swag-meets-utilitarian-merch: gift-bag T-shirts featuring the FTX logo, nylon athletic shorts, white-cotton gym socks.

So it was chaotic and disorganised, but that doesn't mean anything more sinister than incompetence and biting off more than they could chew, right? Except again, and this is going off bits and pieces I've read online but don't have bookmarked to quote as sources, there was something going on below the surface. One of the 'co-founders' quit in 2018 because of unspecified concerns about how it was being run, as in 'not 100% honest'. Another claim is that early on, when a bunch of people who thought they were co-founders or equal partners or however they had taken it on trust that FTX 'belonged' to them all, wanted to leave and cash out what they thought they were due, turns out that Bankman-Fried had registered everything in his name and was the sole legal owner of the entire kit and kaboodle. So there are indications that he wasn't simply over-eager and not able to handle this, but had basically good intentions.

There's an entire web of entities associated with the entire FTX/Alameda operation, and Bankman-Fried holds majority ownership of most of them (again, God bless the bankruptcy filing, Mr. John J. Ray III may be old-school but he knows how to track down what he needs to know):

For purposes of managing the Debtors’ affairs, I have identified four groups of businesses, which I refer to as “Silos.” These Silos include: (a) a group composed of Debtor West Realm Shires Inc. and its Debtor and non-Debtor subsidiaries (the “WRS Silo”), which includes the businesses known as “FTX US,” “LedgerX,” “FTX US Derivatives,” “FTX US Capital Markets,” and “Embed Clearing,” among other businesses; (b) a group composed of Debtor Alameda Research LLC and its Debtor subsidiaries (the “Alameda Silo”); (c) a group composed of Debtor Clifton Bay Investments LLC, Debtor Clifton Bay Investments Ltd., Debtor Island Bay Ventures Inc. and Debtor FTX Ventures Ltd. (the “Ventures Silo”); and (d) a group composed of Debtor FTX Trading Ltd. and its Debtor and non-Debtor subsidiaries (the “Dotcom Silo”), including the exchanges doing business as “FTX.com” and similar exchanges in non-U.S. jurisdictions. These Silos together are referred to by me as the “FTX Group.”

Each of the Silos was controlled by Mr. Bankman-Fried. Minority equity interests in the Silos were held by Zixiao “Gary” Wang and Nishad Singh, the co-founders of the business along with Mr. Bankman-Fried. The WRS Silo and Dotcom Silo also have third party equity investors, including investment funds, endowments, sovereign wealth funds and families. To my knowledge, no single investor other than the co-founders owns more than 2% of the equity of any Silo.

To my knowledge, Mr. Bankman-Fried owns (a) directly, approximately 53% of the equity in Debtor West Realm Shires Inc.; (b) indirectly, approximately 75% of the equity in Debtor FTX Trading Ltd.; (c) directly, approximately 90% of the equity in Debtor Alameda Research LLC; and (d) directly, approximately 67% of the equity in Clifton Bay Investments LLC.

Also, Alameda was making loans to several of the founders/executives of FTX, and whatever about Bankman-Fried's alleged austere lifestyle, what did he do with a personal loan of $1 billion?

Related Party Loans Receivable of $4.1 billion at Alameda Research (consolidated) consisted primarily of a loan by Euclid Way Ltd. to Paper Bird Inc. (a Debtor) of $2.3 billion and three loans by Alameda Research Ltd.: one to Mr. Bankman-Fried, of $1 billion; one to Mr. Singh, of $543 million; and one to Ryan Salame, of $55 million.

He definitely got in over his head, but it's looking like he was spoofing all along and was aware that he couldn't keep the promises he was making. He figured out a way to make a quick buck (the kimchi premium) but that was never going to last, and once it ran dry, it seems like he couldn't go back to being just another quant trader looking for his old job at Jane Street back, he liked the fame and praise, as well as the money, from being the bitcoin arbitrage genius and so he looked for more ways to make fast, big bucks off crypto.

EDIT: Whoops, how could I forget the "software backdoor"? That moves things from the "well-meaning but dumb" column to the "oh yeah shady as frick" column:

There was no daily reconciliation of crypto positions. A software backdoor “conceal[ed] the misuse of customer funds”. User keys and critically sensitive data were sent around the group by an “unsecured group email account”. Group payment requests went “through an online chat platform where a disparate group of supervisors approved disbursements by responding with personalised emojis.” A paper trail is largely non-existent.

I think the part that makes people read this more as "stole client funds" is the extravagant spending SBF was doing even while his firm was on the brink of collapse.

The ways to read this do not preclude that he was simply mistaken, but given that a lot of that spending seemed geared towards creating a friendly political and public relations environment to operate in, it sure looks premeditated on some level.

Oh right, there's the part where he presented himself as the "regulator-friendly" face of crypto exchanges vs. the much more libertarianish and Gov-skeptical Coinbase and Kraken.

And finally the reports coming out from the New CEO are giving me the picture that things were so horribly bad over there that it was either EXTREME amounts of negligence, or perhaps an intentional effort to keep the situation so obfuscated and insecure that malsfeasance

A) Would be harder to detect, and

B) Would surely look like negligence.

https://apnews.com/article/ftx-trading-former-ceo-d2c2b881dc0eb0ec37b454674f446b52

Which is ironic if he was supposed to be the one welcoming tighter regulation.

To me, there's a plausible hypothesis that sometime this year SBF became aware of how screwed they actually were, and whilst attempting to keep the house of cards from collapsing and attract new money he was also laying the groundwork to personally escape the worst consequences by acquiring political allies, getting PR puff pieces published, and getting deeply engrained in charitable giving via the EA community, so that he wouldn't look like your stereotypical corrupt exec.

Alas the full crypto-winter made things collapse faster than expected.

Why is this plausible? Because he admits to being openly misleading on at least some levels:

In an interview with the online news outlet Vox, Bankman-Fried admitted that his previous calls for regulation of cryptocurrencies were mostly for public relations.

“Regulators, they make everything worse,” Bankman-Fried said, using an expletive for emphasis.

Here's an interview where he's called out his previous claims about being excellent at managing risk:

https://twitter.com/Ringalls86/status/1598327159055159301

Well, what happened?

As the CEO, the buck should stop with him, regardless. I don't care much whether it was ignorance, inexperience, or greedy overindulgence that led to the outcome. Either we establish actual skin in the game for people entrusted with others' money, or we have yet another institution failing to protect the average person from the misbehavior of 'elites' and 'experts.'

Why is this plausible? Because he admits to being openly misleading on at least some levels:

Well, suppose we were talking about Pfizer instead of FTX.

“Regulators, they make everything worse,” Bankman-Fried said, using an expletive for emphasis.

Do you doubt that the CEO of Pfizer has said this aloud (and worse) about the FDA in closed door meetings with a handful of trusted people and definitely not in writing? Pfizer absolutely depends on being in the FDA's good graces to survive and they almost assuredly suck them off all day long and will never say a bad word about them in public.

Is this evidence of malfeasance from Pfizer? Or are they just playing this game and they and everyone know it's bullshit?

Or do you mean that as an EA courting nerd savant he's supposed to be above all of that and the fact that he sank to at least the level of normal CEO (in this limited regard) shatters the image and makes him somehow worse?

As the CEO, the buck should stop with him, regardless. I don't care much whether it was ignorance, inexperience, or greedy overindulgence that led to the outcome. Either we establish actual skin in the game for people entrusted with others' money, or we have yet another institution failing to protect the average person from the misbehavior of 'elites' and 'experts.'

At least according to his public statements he does not deny that he's not completely responsible for it. The question, IMO, is whether or not failing spectacularly at business is a crime you go to jail for.

Which is ironic if he was supposed to be the one welcoming tighter regulation.

From what I'm piecing together from online articles he was cosying up to regulators for (1) moving to a softer regulatory body (the CFTC not the SEC) and (2) as moves in his fight with Binance, which wasn't regulated. If that worked, then Binance either had to get regulated (so losing an advantage) or stay out (and get a reputation as untrustworthy and unsafe).

Binance really pulled a reverse uno trap card move on him if that was the case.

I don't know if Binance is on the level (it seems to be a bit sketchy itself and to have avoided a similar crash by the skin of its teeth) but you have to admit, Changpeng Zhao played a blinder in his on-off fight with Bankman-Fried. First he extended the olive branch and then pulled the rug out from under Bankman-Fried just as hope of a rescue seemed within grasp, including turning off any other potential rescuers with "Sorry Sam, after taking a look at it the entire mess is too terrible for us to take on, see ya!" Truly, revenge is a dish best served cold!

I don't know. The FTT collapse seemed preordained once the Coindesk article was published, even if CZ was the catalyst that toppled the house of cards. And I think pulling out of an acquisition was inevitable for the same reason that SBF's attempts to "fundraise" after the FTT crash were doomed: their balance sheet is a black hole, and no acquirer on earth with the resources to bail out their customers would come to any other conclusion after even a cursory look. SBF's whole "well played, CZ, you won" shtick looks delusional in hindsight.

If anything, CZ probably wishes that he had just quietly sold as much of the Binance FTT holdings as he could after the Coindesk article landed. The outcome would be the same, but he wouldn't feature in the headlines, and they'd have probably recovered at least $100M or so in the sale.

He transferred huge sums to Alameda, who then lost it gambling. Where would he have thought that money was coming from, if not customer deposits?

Alameda was always a clear scam. 15% risk free is always a scam proposition.

"Stole client funds" appears to have solidified as a meme much the same way "crossed state lines" had in the Rittenhouse case.

He legit stole client's funds though. They were supposed to be idle just sitting in cold storage. Instead the guy directly routed them to Alameda (For FTX US, the bank account that you would deposit your money to is Alameda's) and gambled with them by placing huge directional bets. And that's ignoring all the real estate and donations that he has done that also came from these funds too.

Yeah. It'd be one thing if Alameda was deep underwater but funds could be recovered from FTX balances, but Alameda tried to double-down on their bets with client funds

When you thought you had $30b in assets and minimal liabilities, you can spend a billion or two on indulgences, charitable giving and campaign contributions. Your can say confidently you're not investing client funds.

I don't think he could, even wrongly, make that claim with any level of honesty. He didn't have 30b in assets; his clients did. FTX's revenue was high but nowhere near high enough to justify his expenditures. And most of the paper value reflected paper that couldn't be plausibly considered anywhere near its claimed worth, either nonconvertible coins or other things that could not be converted to cash.

Does that number include unrealized gains? Crypto exchanges also provide broker-style services, unlike traditional exchanges. Bitcoin grew from $4,800 in 2020 to $69,000 each by 2021. Lots of cryptocurrencies grew on that scale. The brokerage parts of FTX were almost certainly exposed to this upside.

"Stole client funds" appears to have solidified as a meme much the same way "crossed state lines" had in the Rittenhouse case.

Is it? IIRC FTX was calling for funds to be wired to Alameda all along (I'm kind of baffled that this didn't raise flags in cryptoland. But, then again, Tether is somehow still a thing.)

That right there is all we need: that is bad practice to the point of being immoral and a lie given that FTX told customers their funds were separate from Alameda. That's damning enough.

But it gets worse.

When you thought you had $30b in assets and minimal liabilities, you can spend a billion or two on indulgences, charitable giving and campaign contributions.

Except a significant portion of that value was simply coins that FTX had minted or some other shady crypto company had done the same thing. It was funny money, pumping up the valuation. And SBF himself knew this, given the statements he's made about exchanges being insolvent (so their coins are worthless) and the infamous Ponzi scheme discussion with Matt Levine where he basically admitted a lot of this shit is worthless.

The rest was customer funds that he should never have been gambling with in the first place.

SBF did not believe he had $30b in assets the way a bank that held stock, bonds and real estate did. If he claims so I'm inclined to believe he's lying, or so stupid as to not be trusted tying his laces.

So, ultimately, it doesn't matter if they actually were hacked after shit hit the fan.

Umm... How did he accidentally backdoored the software of the exchange so he could wire without alerts. How did he accidentally exempted Alameda from the auto liquidation algorithms. How did he accidently tapped into customer accounts?

No - when running an exchange custody of your client funds is your most important responsibility. If you “misplace” them or misappropriate them that’s either intentional fraud or criminal negligence of the highest degree.

Yeah Corzine still pisses me off, he should have gotten a much much stiffer penalty imho.

When SBF says he didn't realize they were leveraged due to accounting error, I believe him. It's not like you can just install the QuickBooks Enterprise Crypto Derivatives Exchange plugin. All of this stuff was bespoke, and in a hurry.

I'm not buying your explanation here, like at all. Yeah there's not really any crypto-specific accounting software out there, but several of the issues FTX had would have been found in under an hour by any random schlub who completed a double-entry accounting course on youtube or skillshare. Having $3 billion in customer funds go into the bank account of an entirely different company (that is also owned by SBF) and never actually get transferred to FTX's accounts is beyond amateur hour. The worst accountants in the world could notice an issue that big. It was almost certainly fraud, and if it wasn't it was reckless and criminal levels of negligence.

The "accounting error" looks like "had no accounts or accounting at all". That is certainly a big error. (And what is this QuickBooks love, we use Sage at work 😁)

As for auditors, I can't do better than this gem from Mr. Ray And The Filing (at this stage, it's practically bedtime reading for me). Yeah, they had auditors, two sets of 'em even! Mr. Ray knows of one firm, but the other...

One of the firm’s auditors is “Prager Metis, a firm with which I am not familiar and whose website indicates they are the first-ever CPA firm to officially open its Metaverse headquarters in the metaverse platform Decentraland,”

I have a lot of sympathy (or maybe pity) for SBF. "Stole client funds" appears to have solidified as a meme much the same way "crossed state lines" had in the Rittenhouse case.

The FTX terms of service were very clear in saying that client digital assets belonged to the client, were the property of the client, were under the control of the client and were not to be loaned or traded out. "Title to your Digital Assets shall at all times remain with you and shall not transfer to FTX Trading. None of the Digital Assets in your Account are the property of, or shall or may be loaned to, FTX Trading;"

Caroline admitted that in fact they intentionally transferred/loaned these customer deposits to Alameda. That is straight up embezzlement, go directly to jail, do not pass Go, do not collect $200.

This is like a bank drilling into a customer's safe deposit box to take their gold, lending out the gold and then losing it. It's theft, not merely a trading mistake.

This is like a bank drilling into a customer's safe deposit box to take their gold, lending out the gold and then losing it. It's theft, not merely a trading mistake.

You're assuming there was a bank account called CLIENT FUNDS and another account called EXCHANGE FUNDS and they decided to raid the CLIENT FUNDS one to make bets.

What if there was actually just a gigantic intermingled account and the separation between client funds and exchange funds were records in an accounting system that, when they snapped it to reality, they realized the funds they had left were smaller than what they were liable for in client redemptions?

Someone better at financial accounting than me explain this, because it sounds like he was hiding funds:

Customer custodial fund liabilities are comprised of fiat customer deposit balances. Balances of customer crypto assets deposited were not recorded as assets on the balance sheet and are not presented.

This runs all through the bankruptcy filing when parsing the "balance sheets" provided for the various 'silos'. So whatever fund they were keeping as CUSTOMER FUNDS, they sure weren't keeping any separate records of "we took in $50 million of customer money that wanted to buy crypto and bought $X million of crypto with it, and here's a list of the customer accounts with who owns what".

That's going beyond carelessness. But if I'm interpreting it wrongly and there's an honest reason for doing this, go ahead and explain it to me. For instance, this is one of the "balance sheets" where the Customer Custodial Funds are the fiat balances, but whatever crypto assets they might have held aren't anywhere:

WRS Silo

Consolidated Assets as of September 30, 2022

Current Assets

Cash and Cash Equivalents $144,207

Restricted Cash $267,738

U.S. Dollar Denominated Stablecoins $68,035

Customer Custodial Funds $102,225

Accounts Receivable $2,978

Accounts Receivable, Related Party $71,563

Loans Receivable $250,000

Prepaid Expenses and Other Current Assets $21,448

Crypto Assets Held at Fair Value $1,026

Total Current Assets $929,220

Property and Equipment, Net $2,017

Other Non-Current Assets $429,428

Total Assets $1,360,665

(1) Amounts shown in thousands of U.S. Dollars.

(2) In the above table, assets shown reflect the elimination of intercompany entries within and between the WRS Silo and Dotcom Silo.

(3) Restricted cash at the WRS Silo is primarily comprised of approximately $250 million in restricted funds at non-Debtor LedgerX.

(4) Customer custodial fund assets are comprised of fiat customer deposit balances. Balances of customer crypto assets deposited were not >recorded as assets on the balance sheet and are not presented.

(5) Loans receivable of $250 million consists of a loan by Debtor West Realm Shires Inc. to BlockFi Inc. of $250 million in FTT tokens.

(6) Intangible assets (in the amount of $229 million) are not reflected above. These consist of values attributable to customer relationships and trade names.

(7) Goodwill balance (in the amount of $135 million) is not reflected above.

WRS Silo

Consolidated Liabilities as of September 30, 2022

Current Liabilities

Accounts Payable and Accrued Expenses $6,014

Accounts Payable, Related Party $124,221

Custodial Funds Due to Customers $102,225

Purchase Consideration Payable –

Loan Payable –

Lease Liability, Current $1,672

Crypto Asset Borrowings at Fair Value $1,737

Total Current Liabilities $235,869

Lease Liability, Non-Current $9,399

Deferred Taxes $20,185

Contract Liability $887

SAFE Note, Related Party, Non-Current $50,000

Other Non-Current Liabilities –

Total Liabilities $316,014

(1) Amounts shown in thousands of U.S. Dollars.

(2) In the above table, liabilities shown reflect the elimination of intercompany entries within and between the WRS Silo and Dotcom Silo.

(3) Customer custodial fund liabilities are comprised of fiat customer deposit balances. Balances of customer crypto assets deposited are not presented

So this is showing "We have $102,225,000 in customer funds (paper money) and we owe them that amount back" but nothing about "and we bought such-and-such amount of crypto as instructed by them", if I am interpreting this correctly.

It sounds like when you opened an account at FTX, wired them money, and then bought bitcoin with it, no bitcoin was ever necessarily bought. You just got a bitcoin-denominated claim on FTX assets.

That's where the shazam part comes in. It's not at all clear if (1) they took your money and told you it was invested but they spent it on personal loans and Sam's big nap time beanbag (2) they took your money and issued you their own tokens in magic beans (3) they took your money, bought bitcoin, and then wheeee! gambling! oopsies, lost it! never mind, try again with new monies!

Money was certainly coming in, and it was certainly going out, but the in-between part of whose money where when wasn't being tracked. Or at least, only Bankman-Fried knew where it was going. At least, that's how it seems.

The fact that all the dollars were sloshing around in a single big pool doesn't negate the fact that many of them weren't FTX'S dollars, but instead customer dollars. Instead, the act of throwing the money into a single big pool itself is evidence that FTX and SBF were extremely reckless with client funds, and didn't care that the money wasn't theirs in the first instance.

"Title to your Digital Assets shall at all times remain with you and shall not transfer to FTX Trading. None of the Digital Assets in your Account are the property of, or shall or may be loaned to, FTX Trading;"

And that is what he is relying on as a defence, or part of one. "FTX didn't do any of that! It was Alameda, which was totally separate!" Yeah, sure.

On November 13th, a prediction market was created on Manifold Markets asking if former Chinese president Jiang Zemin would die by the end of November.

He died today (November 30th). What could the explanation for this be?

...being 96?

Explanation for what? The prediction market? Comments on it indicate there were rumors going around about his death. There's also another market that was started back in September about whether Jiang would survive until 2024.

Explanation for his death? He was a 96 year old with leukemia according to the article. I don't know the exact numbers but I imagine the prognosis for that is not good.

Is there supposed to be an implication that the prediction market opening is related to his death? On the basis of what evidence? That they happened close in time?

Is there supposed to be an implication that the prediction market opening is related to his death?

Prediction markets can be used to hire contract killers. If you want somebody killed create a market on whether they will be dead by [end of next month] and offer lots of shares at a few cents each. A contract killer can buy the cheap shares, kill the person and collect his fee by cashing out since the shares are now all worth $1 each.

Sure, I'm happy to accept the theoretical possibility that prediction markets can launder contract killing, but what is the evidence that happened in this case.

This could make for a good film or an episode of a police procedural.

Manifold Markets uses play money though.

Manifold uses fake money so I doubt that's what happened here

The average 96 year old has about two years of life expectancy and he just happens to die within two weeks of someone making this market for no apparent reason. One commenter said there were rumours of his having already died, but that appears to be it. It doesn't look like it was publicly known that he was sick.

The apparent reason would be someone reading about the CPC conference and the Hu Jintao affair, remembering that Jiang Zemin is still alive, noting that he's a sickly 96-year-old, and conclude that he's probably at the death's door.

Meanwhile it seems like Jack Ma is alive and well in Tokyo after all.

Jiang Zemin

as Stefferi mentioned ,he was 96

As I understand it, he has not blocked a strike. The White House brokered a deal that was accepted by most, but not all, unions, and he has now asked Congress to vote to impose the deal on the holdout unions pursuant to the Railway Labor Act. But if Congress refuses, the strike will go forward.

If they refused to go to work, would they be arrested?

Why do you think blocking a strike by rail workers is woke? They're traditional blue-collar labour that always voted Democrat and have been left behind in the rush to appeal to the middle-class college educated. The woke (unless they're Marxist) won't care about a bunch of (allegedly) white lower-class cis males (I don't know the demographics of rail workers). Even the Marxists might prefer the government to be anti-workers' interests, in order to motivate the unions to abandon the liberals and go for the full-on Communist experience.

The woke (unless they're Marxist) won't care about a bunch of (allegedly) white lower-class cis males (I don't know the demographics of rail workers).

Grabbing one major rail company as a first pass:

  • Union Pacific has 30,960 employees.
  • 16% of Union Pacific employees are women, while 84% are men.

-The most common ethnicity at Union Pacific is White (65%).

  • 16% of Union Pacific employees are Hispanic or Latino.
  • 9% of Union Pacific employees are Black or African American.
  • The average employee at Union Pacific makes $58,205 per year.
  • Union Pacific employees are most likely to be members of the republican party.

They're decently racially representative of the country, but they're blue-collar, male, Republicans that are a lot more into class solidarity than racial grievance. These are not allies of the Biden administration.

Railroads have special laws where the government gets far more say than normal in defining when employees can strike due to their critical nature to the defense and operation of the country.

It goes against the general theory of Biden as controlled by woke interests.

Woke is not "anything leftist". Unions are left-wing to the extent that they are old style economic leftism aimed at benefiting the working class, which is very far from modern woke. Nobody got cancelled for being opposed to unions (short of the lizardman constant).

aimed at benefiting the working class

aimed at benefitting union members, which constitute part of the working class, at the expense of the rest (including non-union working class)

aimed at benefitting union members, which constitute part of the working class, at the expense of the rest (including non-union working class)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_unions_in_the_United_States#/media/File:Union_Membership_in_the_United_States,_1960-2020.svg

If union workers were exploiting non union ones, we would observe non union workers reaping great benefits during the decline of unions.

Do we observe it?

If union workers were exploiting non union ones, we would observe non union workers reaping great benefits during the decline of unions.

This is only true if the only two agents in the economy were union and non-union workers and the only economic activity were transfer of money from non-union to union workers. If that is not the case, then decline of the unions may result in any result with regard to non-union workers, because other economic agents and processes can intervene and have its influence at the same time.

As such, the terms "great benefits" and "non union workers" are too vague to give an answer. Some workers probably benefitted in some ways, but not in others - e.g. minority workers, traditionally excluded by unions, would have greater access to jobs but possibly lower wages and job security. Is it better to have less secure job than no job at all? For other workers, the effects may be different. Or, for example, if the union raised costs of production so much that the whole sector moved to another country and there's no possibility to compare the wages because there are no longer such jobs around, and the workers moved on (and/or physically moved) to other jobs - did they benefit or not? If the union membership then collapsed following this development, can we attribute this change to the absence of the union? I'm afraid without getting into the ton of the specifics it is impossible to answer such question in any satisfactory way.

Nobody got cancelled for being opposed to unions (short of the lizardman constant).

It wasn't exactly a long history of hugs and handshakes. I'm sure the fraction of victims was sub-lizardman on both sides, but that's surely true of the fraction of cancellations too. I'm no fan of modern cancel culture either, but strikers and strikebreakers weren't just risking their careers, they were risking high-velocity cancellations to the head.

First of all, the question was about cancellations of people opposed to unions, not people who support unions, so those examples are the wrong way around.

Second, this argument is about the woke, so I shouldn't have to spell out "cancellations by the woke". Aside from a single attack by Nazis in 1979, the last example there is 1959, and the last example before that is 1940. There weren't any woke around at the time. And in modern times, when we do have woke, the woke attack people for "racism", "sexism", being anti-trans, but not for opposing unions. Unions are not a big thing for the woke.

1: Labor isn't woke

2: Railroad crewmen aren't particularly woke

3: Biden's been shitting up the shipping infrastructure for two years and can't afford another fuckup. The midterms are over, but he's up on the block again in two.

1: Labor isn't woke

Yeah, this can't be emphasized enough: wokeness is itself a response to the collapse of leftist broad labour politics.

In places, it may even be directly hostile (e.g. arguments against unions on the grounds that seniority replicates the times when they were systemically racist or the imposition of HR overlords and their speech codes over the average worker)

I'm pleasantly surprised Biden blocked the railroad strike. It goes against the general theory of Biden as controlled by woke interests.

How? I don't think that basic labor union activism has ever been counted among "wokeness". If anything the narrative is that wokes are corporate-friendly and have turned their back on the traditional left-wing working-class base, no?

Railroad workers are the kinds of blue collar males that may not be consistently conservative but are most definitely not progressive and very much not woke, and Biden isn’t really blocking a strike, he’s trying to get a deal in place ahead of time(which is what everyone in any administration would do).

Election fairness seems to be an increasingly contentious topic in the U.S., with many on the right alleging that democracy is being undermined via election fraud and many on the left alleging it is being undermined via attempts to disenfranchise people and throw out legitimate election results. Meanwhile, independents and supporters of alternative parties see a system that has long discriminated against them. Here are a few proposals for maximizing election fairness and security that don't just side with the left or the right:

• except for voters out of the area (e.g. overseas) or disabled (e.g. bedridden), voting should be done in person on Election Day

• voting should not require government identification; rather voters' fingers should be dipped in ink to deter repeat voting in the same election, as is done in some countries

• all candidates should have the same number of words in voter pamphlets to present their platforms

• candidates should not be charged any fees for ballot access or to have their statements published

• all party-based ballot access restrictions should be abolished

• all write-in votes should be counted, with the name of each such candidate published in the results with the number of votes received

• electronic voting should be abolished, and all ballots hand-counted (computers too subject to hacking or biased programming)

• custody of ballots should be videotaped and the video streamed online from the moment a ballot is submitted to the moment it is counted

• all candidates should be included in official debates and given equal time

• all government-funded media should be required to give equal coverage to each declared candidate

• multi-round elections and debates should be used to winnow initially large numbers of candidates that would presumably result from the implementation of some of these reforms

• seats in legislative bodies should be allocated on the basis of proportional representation as is done in some countries (e.g. a party whose candidates receive 5% of the votes gets 5% of the seats)

it would make it very easy to tell how many people voted

I read this as "very easy to tell what number of people voted" instead of "very easy to tell many individuals' voting preferences", and was wondering what you thought the point of voting to be.

except for voters out of the area (e.g. overseas) or disabled (e.g. bedridden), voting should be done in person on Election Day

How does this increase election fairness or security? If it is secure enough for the distant or disabled to vote via mail, is it not secure enough for everyone else?

Edit: Just to be extra clear, I am not making a claim on whether mail in voting is good or bad. In my view, the threat of voter fraud by mail in ballots remains regardless of who its restricted to. Therefore there are only two reasonable options: 1) Disallow mail in ballots entirely; 2) Accept the risk and allow mail in ballots entirely.

• except for voters out of the area (e.g. overseas) or disabled (e.g. bedridden), voting should be done in person on Election Day

Assuming the provision about doing it in person, what does having it be all crammed onto one day do for either fairness or security?

Why not everyone votes in person at a secure location (e.g. city hall) and voting is open for 10 days before election day to spread the load. That doesn't make it less fair, nor does it materially impact security under reasonable assumptions.

If you can do the entire election in a single shift (probably more than 8 hours, but that's a minor problem), then security becomes much simpler. If there is an observer who can vouch for the security of the ballots for the entire time between the first vote and the last report, then it becomes much harder to diffuse responsibility: "one of the dozen pollwatchers in the past 120 hours missed some misconduct" is a lot harder to fight than "Bob Jones missed some misconduct".

(I think it's actually a step back for fairness because a personal emergency is much more likely to last a day than a week.)

Bob gets a lunch break anyways though.

Honestly, FPTP is inherently non democratic, and voting for politicians is likewise kinda stupid.

Ideally, we would have some sort of de-personalized voting for policy slates instead of an idiot popularity contest where being good looking or tall has a greater statistical effect on a given candidates victory than anything else.

What I would like to see in this type of analysis is how much each measure could improve either fairness or security. Otherwise, it's a grab bag of ideas, some of which may do nothing, while a few could potentially even be harmful.

That said, I'll argue against a specific one because I often see it presented as an unalloyed good while, in reality it's a trade off between two sets of negative consequences:

• seats in legislative bodies should be allocated on the basis of proportional representation as is done in some countries (e.g. a party whose candidates receive 5% of the votes gets 5% of the seats)

This actually works in the opposite way than how it's intended to work, ie. it gives an disproportional amount of power to some parties. Consider an election between three parties: A, B, and C. Both A and B obtain 48% of votes. C obtains 4%. Now, in order to form a government, either A or B needs to find a way to persuade C to join them, which means that party C holds, in this moment an incredible amount of power. Actually, it will continue to hold, despite accounting for only 4% of voters, an incredible amount of power because it can, at any moment, decide to break up with either A or B, leading to the break up of the government.

There's also another problem, in that assembling coalitions out of smaller parties necessarily entails going against what each party's voters voted for.

Re-using the A, B, and C example, imagine that party A is pro-X while B is anti-X, while those who voted for party C don't care about X. If party C were to assemble a government with one of the other parties, it will add its weight to the pro- or anti-X side, thereby betraying its voters' "don't care about X" stance.

(Note that I'm basically summarizing Karl Popper's thinking on this problem).

Personally, I think the two-party system works better in the US because of its dynamic, diverse culture. I would be curious if it would introduce some dynamism into other countries.

voting should not require government identification;

I am so baffled by American debates about this. Why the hell don't you want to use IDs to vote? Anyone too stupid to get an ID shouldn't vote.

The charitable take is that this supposedly disenfranchises vulnerable communities who might have difficulty obtaining government IDs.

The realistic take is that all the other government programs designed to help these vulnerable communities (such as subsidised housing, food stamps, medicaid, etc) all themselves require government IDs, and even in countries like India which have far greater challenges to providing voting access to all their citizens still require IDs. At this point, I'm pretty convinced its just a bargaining chip for Blue Tribe to offer up at some future legislation, because the alternative is there is a non-trivial amount of fraud being enabled by the lack of ID checks, which would be a whole different kettle of fish.

• voting should not require government identification; rather voters' fingers should be dipped in ink to deter repeat voting in the same election, as is done in some countries

This fails to address voting eligibility. Not all persons present in the United States are eligible to vote.

There is one thing I tend to see as a vulnerability that I never see addressed: reporting the results as a race. When the votes are cast and the counting begins, the result is already decided and it's just a matter of finding out what it is, I don't see any utility in gradually reporting partial counts as if it were a race, and I think that creates a vulnerability in that it tells a potential malicious actor exactly how many votes they need to add in order to flip the result without being too obvious. The longer the counting takes, the more of a vulnerability this becomes.

Now, if results were reported after the counting was done, a potential malicious actor would have to accurately guess beforehand how many votes they are going to need, and that is much more difficult to do.

This seems like an obvious fix, and would also maybe save us from tedious Election Night coverage that all the networks do with reporting every single miniscule change in the race over the course of hours and also racing to 'call' an election as quickly as possible. Would be nice to just be able to tune in once at like 11 p.m. when outcomes are known and just get a brief report reflecting said outcomes, and which are still in flux.

Although I admit that the 2016 election was amazingly high quality entertainment for me as the unexpected Trump win became apparent through the slow tally of the votes.

I'd guess, but I do NOT know for certain, there's probably some kind of rules around gov't transparency that requires results to reported as quick as possible, even piecemeal ones, so this probably will not change.

But as you say, avoiding these periods where some outcomes are known, some remain uncertain, and there are brief windows in which malicious actors can attempt to flip an outcome once they know how many votes they must fabricate would really shore up faith in overall election integrity.

I just doubt there's any way to ensure that all states get their counts done at approximately the same time, and having periods where some outcomes have been determined but not reported yet while waiting on others to catch up can make it look like there is something being hidden anyway.

government regulation

I hadn’t thought of that. It seemed obvious that the media circus was business as usual for American stations. But it’s quite plausible that there’s something pushing early reporting.

Look upon them, and weep.

Recently @2rafa responded to a jannied comment of mine on Reddit saying that within 80 years, my homeland and her homeland would still exist and have roughly a similar character to what they currently do but England would not, as its people and its traditions slowly get replaced by les peuples outremers. The original character of the towns and cities of the UK would slowly be gnawed at and eaten away while the institutions, traditions and social fabric dissolve in the alkahest of multiculturalism. She mentioned that it isn't surprising that the native population would fight against it as this replacement basically severs the link between the them and the future.

I agree with that sentiment and I absolutely agree the original character of what made Great Britain truly Great has been lost. But this loss didn't happen thirty or forty or whenever the immigrants started to come in big numbers years ago, rather it happened in the aftermath of the Second World War when the UK dropped its long standing traditions of Classical Liberalism, "an Englishman's home is his castle" and the Anglo developed system of limited government, preferring to go for the expansive and nannying welfare state model instead.

There is a saying that tradition is like a legacy codebase, half of it is deprecated stuff you can get rid of safely while half of it is absolutely mission critical to the project functioning and it's very difficult to tell exactly which bit is which. The UK had over the centuries since the enlightenment created both a social and legal system based on individual rights centred on liberty and freedom and built on a bedrock of Christian values where it was expected that the government would minimise it's interference with what you do with your personal property and take steps to ensure other people also couldn't interfere with it. Charity and helping the less fortunate was very strongly encouraged and the Christian values indoctrinated in everyone since birth meant that lots of people with the means to do so gave away a large portion of their income/wealth to the needy, but crucially it wasn't forced onto anyone. Indeed income tax was first introduced as a temporary measure to fund the British armed forces during the Napoleonic Wars, an existential threat to the country and most definitely not the "lets use it to pay the rent of those who don't have the skills to earn enough to stay in London otherwise" racket that's going on at the moment.

This system generally functioned extremely well, but like all systems there were edge cases where it failed. In a severely misguided attempt since the end of WWII (and continuing until the present day!) successive governments tinkered with this system and slowly removed the things that made the system work (e.g. The Town and Country Planning Act 1947 which gave locals extreme levels of say into what you could build on your own property and is the prime culprit for the UK's current housing crisis), while if anything amplifying the things which were peripheral at best originally and now have become burdens upon society (e.g. how poor people renting in London effectively have the right to get to stay in of one of the only two alpha++ cities in the world and the taxpayer will fund their rent if they can't afford it themselves).

At the point the immigrants started arriving "Great" Britain was already in the process of dying. The things that made it great were being removed slowly the the British themselves. Plus new fads that were counterproductive like the destruction of the nuclear family were being adopted wholesale. It was only a small matter of time before things degenerated to the point where it was necessary to either import immigrants to make up for the collapsing birth rate or accept extreme economic pain for the vast majority of people. Britain choose to do the former. Indeed as Kipling warned a good thirty years in advance:

On the first Feminian Sandstones we were promised the Fuller Life

(Which started by loving our neighbour and ended by loving his wife)

Till our women had no more children and the men lost reason and faith,

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said: "The Wages of Sin is Death."

What remains of the original culture of the UK are not the things that made it great. Much like how a cadaver (initially at least) still looks like the person when they were alive but has lost that divine spark that made it more than just a heap of flesh and bones what we have at the moment is little more than a poor caricature of what the Great Thinkers of the Enlightenment envisaged the perfect society to be like. It is an ersatz, cargo cult imitation where things as fundamental as the right against double jeopardy are no longer respected (see the Criminal Justice Act 2003).

Now admittedly the specific cases behind why this right was abolished were quite clearly where a guilty person had been acquitted but was clearly guilty after new DNA evidence was discovered and so their retrial led to justice being delivered (and equally, the family of Emmett Till were denied justice due to the Fifth Amendment which protects against double jeopardy in the US) but at the same time this change showed that another fundamental enlightenment ideal, that "you should not create laws based upon a few specific examples, but rather upon general principles" was no longer respected.

As such, the rot had already set in on the inside well before immigrants started coming over in large numbers and changing the outward, visible character and appearance of British society. Hence what they are now replacing is not a culture with hundreds of years of history, but a thoroughly modern creation that for most of its existence has had mass inward migration. This bastardised culture is not worthy of the protection that should have been granted to Enlightenment Liberalism, but unfortunately that is dead and has been long buried, and no amount of effort will ever bring it back. Indeed as a crude mockery of what I consider to be the best societal system discovered yet by man I would prefer if it disappeared as soon as possible. I see modern British culture as belonging to the same class of objects as smallpox and polio - something to be eradicated post haste - rather than that of the Giant Panda and the Snow Leopard - valuable diversity that should be protected by humanity and nourished.

Just yesterday ethnicity estimates for the 2021 UK census were revealed. As expected the percentage of the UK that is white British fell from around 81% to 75% since 2021. Given the continuing high migration that this country is now basically reliant on - the recent budget depended on very high levels of inward migration to be balanced, lower migration than expected in the next few years will create a short term fiscal black hole that will be very painful to British society, see what happened when Truss and Kwarteng tried to borrow with abandon- and the higher birthrate of immigrants it is practically a given that the Replacement is going to happen come hell or high water. British culture and the country character will continue to change over the coming generations and it will be best for the natives themselves if they just go with the flow rather than trying to fight an inevitability.

This is exactly the kind of post we don't want. "I can't wait to see you get lined up against the wall" (no, you didn't explicitly say that, but this is clearly the message you are trying to send) is nothing but antagonistic.

It has not escaped our notice that @BurdensomeCount is trying to push buttons. Consider not rewarding this behavior by telling him how hard he's pushed yours.

Too late: the Brahmins are coming. Bangladeshification imminent! Learn to love your humble Varna and Jāti, fellow Aryan – and you, too, may hope to reincarnate into the upper class.

– t. ex-Goldman Sachs employee

Funnily enough while I'm not a Brahmin (as a non-Hindu I'm technically outside the caste system) I do have the light skin/height that's indicative of being a Brahmin and if I had to pick a caste I think I'd fit there more than anywhere else.

I don't get all the Brahmin hate though, especially from westerners who were never made to serve the Brahmins. Just because they're at the top doesn't mean they need to be brought down a peg. And while Varna may still be important Jati really doesn't matter too much if you're in the west. And this too is just for marriage, for friendships etc. anything goes.

He's an /r/dramanaut doing an uno-reverso on white nationalists, and getting off on the responses. The moderation style here has the unfortunate effect of letting obvious trolls wreak havoc, as long they post in a certain style, so it is up to you to not take the bait.

One must leave open the possibility of a non-self-respecting dramanaut.

In this house we believe that effort is a virtue unto itself.

And the "pedofascist" is deliberately edgy, but his position is coherent and makes sense – it's not far from what Peter Thiel preaches. He could have opted not to edge so hard and not call himself, well, a pedofascist, taboo squared, and he'd have sounded rather anodyne.

True, it's a bit derivative I agree and poor fashion. I shouldn't have included it and I would still have made effectively the same point.

Some of us are déclassé enough to appreciate it; I thought the reminder that some in the UK already saw the connection was well placed. And if it introduces somebody new to The Gods of the Copybook Headings, that's great too.

I am going to disagree. I've been hanging around the Motte a long time now, and this is literally the first time I've ever seen the poem. I don't think it is as common as you're asserting, or else I would've seen it at least once before.

If we want to talk Kipling quotes which get used a lot, it has to be the Danegeld quote.

Really?

I’m not sure I’ve seen it from this community, but much like Catcher, it came up in high school English.

My pick for most overused would have to be “If-”:

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you...

It’s just chock full of reactionary bait noble, masculine sentiment.

I haven't read Catcher in the Rye either, it didn't come up in high school for me. I did have some Kipling, just not this particular poem.

Are you right wing and looking for some poetry? Come on down to Rudyard Kipling's Poetry Palace! No matter what kind of right winger you are, we have a poem for you!

Drifting rightward because your wife just had a son and you are worried about the influence modern society has on masculine development? If- is the work for you!

Right wing because you oppose the racial spoils system we seem to be implementing and consider it a failure to understand the dynamics of negotiation? Dane-geld is now 50% off!

Consider both of those bad, but more symptoms of living in a society which has forgotten the most important lesson of history - that those who don't learn from their mistakes are doomed to repeat them? This weekend buy one copy of The Gods of the Copybook Headings and get a second free!

Gone full on conflict theory, and convinced the left are satanic pedophiles trying to exterminate white people? The Beginnings is now available, with a special introductory price!

So come on down to Rudyard Kipling's Poetry Palace for some hot, hot stanzas today, and remember our price match guarantee - find your poem cheaper elsewhere and you're a better man than I am Gunga Din!

You missed The Old Issue

All we have of freedom, all we use or know—This our fathers bought for us long and long ago.

Ancient Right unnoticed as the breath we draw—Leave to live by no man’s leave, underneath the Law.

Don't forget "The Wrath of the Awakened Saxon", that's a popular one about how the right wing will eventually have enough and rise up.

I've referenced it a handful of times, and seen many more. Purported contemporaneous politics aside, it's a potent admonishment to remember your basics and common sense in the face of utopian promises. The usefulness in the rationalist community feels obvious.

I'm surprised someone managed to end up at the Motte without having read Meditations on Moloch, which quotes from "Copybook Headings" extensively.

I have read it, though it has been a while so I reread (well, skimmed) it to see if I had forgotten details. I think you and I have very different ideas of what "extensive" means. The Kipling poem gets a few mentions in one small section of a much larger piece. Granted that I apparently had seen the poem before, but it is so insignificant within Meditations on Moloch that I'm not at all surprised that I didn't remember it.

I also do not recall this poem being mentioned in Scott’s blog post, but it is a pretty concise reminder of why conservatism tends to increase with life experience, now that I’ve looked up what a copy-book was.

The difference is that the poem is good.

But this loss didn't happen thirty or forty or whenever the immigrants started to come in big numbers years ago, rather it happened in the aftermath of the Second World War when the UK dropped its long standing traditions of Classical Liberalism, "an Englishman's home is his castle" and the Anglo developed system of limited government, preferring to go for the expansive and nannying welfare state model instead.

Well, if you want Limited Government then I hear Somalia is a great place. You can even buy arms in open air markets with minimal regulations. Perhaps you can sense my dripping sarcasm, but I have little patience for these kinds of arguments. Taxes can go up and they can go down, but what - or rather, who - made Britain were the Anglo-Saxons.

This type of argument is the right-wing version of the blank slate.

  • -12

Well, if you want Limited Government then I hear Somalia is a great place.

Singapore is actually a great place and their government is significantly more limited on the tax and spend side (well, they have a ton of social housing, but that's a good thing). The UAE is also pretty good with a very limited government, Dubai has effectively run out of oil and they still do extremely well because of government fees on transactions. You don't have to choose the literal worst option.

Singapore is actually a great place

Yeah, and it's also a place that is 75% Han Chinese, thereby proving my point. Demographics will always trump whatever laws is on paper, libertarian or not.

Total overstatement. I feel the need to drag out the trope of East/West Germany and North/South Korea.

Don't know about Korea, but at least for Germany there were some notable differences even before the split after WWII. To name a few:

  • the east was much more agrarian than the west, although there were of course many industrial centers like Halle, Berlin or Breslau/Wrocław but these were much more spread-out than in the west

  • politically, the east was dominated by the protestant Junker class, the descendants of the feudal nobility that conquered/colonized the east, while in the west industrialist families like the Krupps had the most influence, with a much more mixed religious background overall, as most German Catholics lived in the areas that were to become part of West Germany

  • in terms of cultural history, the west was largely congruent with the core German territory since the first time there was something like Germany, while the east was a colonial conquest taken from the territory of the relatively unorganized Western Slavic tribes like the Sorbs or the Pomeranians that were stuck between Medieval Germany and Poland. Go back in history far enough and I guarantee that anyone whose ancestors have lived in Eastern Germany for a while will have a lot of Slavic ancestry, this is completely unusual for Western Germany outside of regions that have received heavy Polish immigration in the Industrial Age

I can't find a good map to illustrate this, but the most notable political thing about the territory of DDR - and I mean the specific territory - was that even during the pre-WW2 times they were the strongest area of support for the left parties, ie SPD/USPD/KPD combined. In the West German territories the Centre was a force, while the areas annexed by Poland were the ones where the Nazis had their most hardcore base of support, but the left dominated most of the territories that would end up forming the DDR.

(also @Syo)

Maybe these maps help: SPD, USPD, KPD; for comparison NSDAP, DNVP (monarchists, revanchists and hard conservatives), Zentrum (Catholic centrists and conservatives).

Looking at these, I agree that there is a trend, but it's not that strong and centered less on East Germany as a whole and more on Saxony* in particular, especially for the KPD votes. Both Nazis and DNVP were pretty strong in Brandenburg, Mecklenburg and Pomerania, all three of which would become part of the DDR.

*Funnily enough, my parents always called the Saxons the 5th occupying power (besides Russia, the US, France and the UK), because chances were high when talking to a representative of state power like a policeman in East Berlin you'd be spoken to in Saxon dialect. EDIT: I just found this article from the early 60s that investigates this cliché via a statistical deep dive quite like the debates about Jewish overrepresentation elsewhere in this thread. The result: while strongly overrepresented among the chief leaders of the DDR, Saxons are actually underrepresented in various important committees and positions.

I can't make out the territory which would in 1945 find itself behind the Iron Curtain, on these maps of results of German elections from 1920-1930.

China is over 90% Han Chinese, but I far prefer Singapore to it (and the Chinese state has higher taxes and government spending etc.).

I don't actually know. LKY was a great man (far far greater than me, if I could achieve the level of greatness he had in his pinky finger I would die happy) capable of performing magic tricks well beyond mere mortals. One factor that may have contributed is the onerous fines for public littering. I've been to plenty of houses back home that are really clean on the inside but are on a very very littered street so it's not like South Asians are hardwired to be dirty (equally I've been in plenty of unclean dwellings back home, but these were usually the homes of the middle class and below) but I feel it's more of an mentality thing where people see the outside as "not their property, not their problem" and either freely litter or don't agitate to create a situation where street cleaners come by regularly/people are educated to not throw their rubbish away. Plus the lack of public trashcans can be a contributing factor, here in the UK there's like a trash can every 100m in most cities while back home you can spend an entire day out without seeing more than two or three, which means people are just naturally more inclined to throw their trash on the street since the alternative is carrying it the whole day.

You find similar clealiness in Hong Kong Indian markets.

People tend to adapt really well. There's nothing unirradicable in Indian culture or DNA that makes them inclined towards bad hygiene.

How many Singaporeans do you actually know, and have you ever been there? I can't comment on the tax situation, but it seems to me that in pretty much every other domain Singapore is close to being the opposite of a small government, and rather like the perfect pervasive micromanagerial state. (Most recently, they were basically location-tracking everyone at all times under the pretext of COVID contact tracing.) Moreover, they manage their ethnic patchwork by mandatory quotas in government and even public (in Singapore, this is a sizeable chunk) housing, and by less outside-legible policies that seem to be directed at gradually whittling down the ethnic identities of everyone to food, dress and a handful of festivals. Hardly the Anglo right-winger's paradise it is made out to be.

I've been to Singapore and count quite a few Singaporeans among my close friends. The UAE is also quite micromanegerial as a country, to start a business you need to pay thousands in fees (fees like this are how they fund themselves given that there is no income tax) and of course there is the whole Islamic morality thing you have to adhere to (not an issue for me, may be for some westerners).

My point on limited government was geared towards the taxation aspect, Singapore is pretty damn big in the social control aspect of government (chewing gum bans, car licences costing 10s of thousands of dollars, mandatory military service, mandatory forced saving for medical bills etc.), but that isn't really something I mind too much when the policies align reasonably well with my personal views.

Hardly the Anglo right-winger's paradise it is made out to be.

Correct. It's most definitely not an Anglo liberal paradise, but that's fine. It was meant to be an example of a place where you could have small (taxation wise) government but still be very successful. I still wouldn't mind spending my life there because at least they have a coherent, consistent vision for society that doesn't depend on extracting wealth from a small productive class and spending it on everyone else.

My point on limited government was geared towards the taxation aspect, Singapore is pretty damn big in the social control aspect of government (chewing gum bans, car licences costing 10s of thousands of dollars, mandatory military service, mandatory forced saving for medical bills etc.), but that isn't really something I mind too much when the policies align reasonably well with my personal views.

Places like Singapore are also really easy to enter or leave, so if you don't like how the government is doing things, it is easy to go to somewhere else. That's one reason why so many people and businesses have been relocating from Hong Kong to Singapore recently.

Singapore is like a country club. It tries to attract rich and talented people by rules for being clean, pleasant, and orderly. Shame about the horrible weather.

Taxes can go up and they can go down, but what - or rather, who - made Britain were the Anglo-Saxons.

And who unmade Britain?

It seems like we should pay attention to the arguments those Anglo-Saxons were having amongst themselves, and explain the making or unmaking of Britain with a focus on the political questions they saw fit to focus on, like that of taxes. After all, one Anglo-Saxon's vision of the desired society can be radically different from another's.

Well, if you want Limited Government then I hear Somalia is a great place.

Somalia-the-meme was a civil war between a half dozen competing governments, many of which were fundamentalist Islamic. And that was still an improvement in most QoL measures over the previous socialist government.

And that was still an improvement in most QoL measures over the previous socialist government.

Interesting, have you lived in Somalia during this period?

I believe the situation was that the Islamic fundamentalists defeated the powerless, corrupt, ‘democratic’ government which did nothing but accept bribes from warlords, brought meaningful improvement to the public for a few years, and then were overthrown by Ethiopian military intervention.

I’m not sure where anyone’s getting that it was an improvement over the previous socialist regime; it seems clearly to have been an improvement over the ‘democratic’(read US backed and corrupt) regime which replaced it.

I frequently see Somalia trotted out as what a limited state might look like, but surely you can see why people who prefer a limited state don't find that compelling? Setting aside that the reference is outdated and Somalia has a government with explicit power over just about everything, "limited government" and "collapsed government" are not synonyms. Outside of the most fringe libertarians, people that favor limited government are not suggesting that there be no government to enforce contracts and maintain general public order. Rather, the claim is that governments shouldn't have the powers flexed during Covid or shouldn't be reallocating half of the economy.

Regarding blank slates, I'm inclined to note that the demographics of Somalia aren't what some of us would consider conducive to being the sort of place I'd like to live. I might even go so far as to note that I expect any local unit that has a sufficient number of Somalis to become the sort of place I would not like to live in short order.

Are you talking about supporters of "limited or small governments" or just anarchists? There isn't any sort of unified state over all of Somalia, small or otherwise.

Also, I don't think that someone like David Friedman wants a transition like Somalia in the early 1990s. I think he'd say that, under those circumstances, a small but effective government would be better.

Well except there are countless examples of very limited government and places succeeding. I’m very unfamiliar with communist countries not be totalitarian hellholes.

Warlordism might be a fair critique of David Friedman but…not of classic liberals who see a vital role for the state but one that is heavily limited.

What are the best examples of very limited governments succeeding?

I certainly agree that there have been governments which didn’t provide much in terms of social welfare but grew the economy quickly. But AFAIK most of the examples of libertarian success stories were not actually libertarian, they were just pro-business.

United Kingdom, United States, Swiss, Hong Kong, Netherlands, etc.

They might not all be that way today but they they all at different times experienced significant growth under a classically liberal framework.

I interpreted "stronger sorts of libertarian" to basically mean right-anarchists.

"Warlordism" is another term for "autocratic government that isn't internationally recognized". It's not as if warlords can't take your money and call it taxes.

It's a frequent critique of anarchocapitalism (anarchocommunism, too, for that matter) is that their systems just reinvent the government expect with some different characteristics (enough to allow ideologues to term it "not government) and in a worse format.

I have my issues with limited government types (namely that they're frequently hypocritical or at least self-deluding), but this is really only a critique of the far end of the spectrum. Most people who want limited government don't want a government that limited - they still want publicly funded police and fire departments, infrastructure they use, courts, schools, etc... When they object to "big government", they're generally objecting to the welfare and regulatory state (or at least parts of it) and infrastructure they don't use.

Reductions to the welfare and regulatory state might increase social disorder to some degree, but there's clear historical example that it's not enough to render states nonviable.

I would describe the Soviet Union as a much more central example of "communism" than Somalia of "limited government", but I suppose the problems we'll bump into are the exact definitions of things like "communism" and "limited government". I would be more than satisfied with a United States federal government that took approximately the fiscal role of 100 years ago, and I don't buy that this involves a swift descent to total anarchic collapse.

Well yes, because the federal government could disappear outright and most of the population is not looking at a total anarchic collapse, although interstate conflict might mean some people are in for a bad time and the poorer states would probably have a declining standard of living.

I'm not sure if this is intended as argument or addendum. Yes, part of the reason that I think the federal government is excessive is because American states are already large, powerful entities that can handle the vast majority of governing problems themselves. The federal government should handle external-facing issues and internal coordination problems between states, but generally take a hands-off approach to policies and spending that are intrastate matters (in my view, of course).

Maybe I'm misreading others, but I think this is much closer to the median position of American people that would describe themselves as favoring limited government than Somalia or Ancapistan or something.

A little of column a, a little of column b. The patchwork that replaces a disappeared federal government is unlikely to be predominantly libertarian(major land powers usually aren’t), and the federal government retrenching wouldn’t cause the same issue but as California shows, states are perfectly capable of overregulating, overtaxing, and overspending all on their lonesome.

Most states aren’t Florida or Utah. Federal regulations will just get replaced with state regulations that are more obviously one sided if anything.

I’m wondering- do you think a society that’s 80% Utah Mormon or Japanese or whatever other high performing group, and 20% Somali, would be a bad place to live?

I mean, based off the demographics, I’d expect it to be a pretty nice place to live, but probably with some neighborhoods to avoid.

Probably fine in the short run. I just looked at my current Census tract and a couple neighboring tracts and found that they're approximately 80% white, 10% Asian, and a scattering of everything else. If that shifted to 20% Somali over the next few years, I would take it as a strong signal to sell and relocate - I would not like the odds of the neighborhood retaining the characteristics that made me select it with that population shift and I would expect the population to continue shifting further. Currently, there are no neighborhoods to avoid within walking distance of me, so a shift to some neighborhoods to avoid is a noticeable worsening.

Let’s assume this is a stable society- some town in Oregon or whatever that’s had those demographics for 20 years. Does it seem like the sort of place you’d be willing to live in, assuming your work offers you a transfer with relocation assistance and you have the ability to make friends there or nearby.

Sure. I'm kind of skeptical of the sustainability of the arrangement, but I would not rule a place out based on a large Somali population. Minneapolis remains one of my favorite American cities despite their issues with Somali corruption (and more American-based violence).

Well, if you want Limited Government then I hear Somalia is a great place.

"If you like to keep warm, you can jump in a bonfire."

It worked for Sam McGee.

Since I left Plumtree, down in Tennessee, it's the first time I've been warm."

Who among us hasn't wanted to, on some cold winter day, sit in the fireplace and let the flames lap at our flesh?

You've done an excellent, high-effort job of trolling here. You got several people to lash out at you in a way that required warnings. Well done.

Now stop this. This has been your schtick for a very long time, and while we more or less gave you a clean slate with the move here, this kind of supercilious baiting will not continue. Make well-crafted culture war arguments and talk about how awesome and superior your culture is - fine. But we are not blind to what you're doing here (trying to see how many people you can goad into losing their shit while you are technically abiding by the rules). You are not immune to having the wildcard rule applied just because you use lots of words.

There should be a word for the kind of situation where people who profess their love for intellectual diversity in practice prove incapable of perceiving any viewpoints outside of a narrow range as legitimate.

From what I know of the Count, including private communication, he was pretty much sincere here, at least in the "I contain multitudes" sense. If that triggered someone that's entirely on them; and especially given the everpresent concerns about our intellectual diversity the administration of this forum probably shouldn't strive to protect the feelings of the white supremacist-adjacent users in particular.

There should be a word for the kind of situation where people who profess their love for intellectual diversity in practice prove incapable of perceiving any viewpoints outside of a narrow range as legitimate.

If there is, find a situation where it's applicable, which this is not. If I were "incapable of perceiving any viewpoints outside of a narrow range as legitimate," I'd have banned him and the white supremacists.

We value intellectual diversity. We do not value trolling. BurdensomeCount may indeed actually believe what he's saying, but that doesn't mean he's not expressing it in a manner calculated to be flamebait. Just like the white supremacists who are able to stick around manage to do it without dropping pointless n-bombs and 13% memes, and the ones who aren't... can't.

You know at this point i'm not actually sure if your a troll. Your posts here, the other place, /r/drama, and the old place are so consistently truimphalist. What you're saying basically matches up with what your average muslim believes but you could also be a troll that's just commited to the bit. You know exactly where the line is and just how genocidal you can be without being dismissed. Some of your posts, if you are a troll, are outstanding. But i'll bite.

British culture and the country character will continue to change over the coming generations and it will be best for the natives themselves if they just go with the flow rather than trying to fight an inevitability.

Roll over and die: Or else!

Or else what? You'll carry on doing what you're already doing and what you always planned to do? A fate worse then a fate worse then death? That sounds pretty bad.

The fundamental isssue your people (and your paedophilic religion that you desire to force upon the west) have is that you don't build functioning societies. For all of your talk about saving the west through islam, it doesn't seem to be saving muslims living in the west who similar reputation around women as Africans, and a much worse reputation around children, who cannot seem to stop themselves joining gangs, who are hugely overrepresented in basically every voilent crime stat, and who are much more likely to live off the labour of others then any other group (the behaviour of Somali muslims in the benefits system is famous across Europe).

Your demands of acceptance already require massive, overwhelming campaigns of propaganda, censorship and social engineering and it is still only mildy successful.

I see modern British culture as belonging to the same class of objects as smallpox and polio - something to be eradicated post haste - rather than that of the Giant Panda and the Snow Leopard - valuable diversity that should be protected by humanity and nourished.

Maybe you are right. But the issue you will find, is that given the choice between living with us or you, everybody chooses us - Including your own people!

The fundamental isssue your people (and your paedophilic religion that you desire to force upon the west) have is that you don't build functioning societies.

Not acceptable. No, we don't have a rule against criticizing Islam here. We do have a rule about not making inflammatory statements about broad groups of people. Stop taking the ragebait.

stay in of one of the only two alpha+ cities in the world and the taxpayer will fund their rent if they can't afford it themselves

What on earth does this even mean? Is the other one NYC? You don't think any other cities on earth have a "alpha"? They're the largest Financial hubs, I won't dispute that and as that's your business I'm sure that looms large in your view. but there are other industries and plenty of places that are booming with them. Hollywood/LA don't have alpha? Silicon valley, no alpha? Hell, I think there are multiple cities in Texas alone that can be described as having alpha.

There's a think tank called Globalization and World Cities Research Network which basically ranks cities periodically based on how important to the global economy they are. They rank cities in terms of Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Sufficincy where cities are less important as you go down the list. Also alpha,beta,gamma get +- signs based on where they fall in their category. You can find their most recent rankings here (naturally there is a lot of subjectivity):

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

And my bad, I misremembered London and NYC are alpha++ in their rankings, not alpha+.

Hollywood/LA don't have alpha?

LA is an alpha city in their rankings. SF is alpha-.

Other city ranking thinktanks do exist, but GaWC is one of the most used ones and they all have London+NYC at the top of the world.

Ah, it's a measure of interconnectedness, this framing does color the complaint of being unable to live in an alpha+ city a little differently. I suppose the foreign influx of cities that are particularly connected to the rest of the world might reasonably increase the demand and thus make supply of housing more scarce for natives, but I'm not sure this makes me more or less sympathetic to native claims to the right to live in their own society's greatest city over foreign claims. It's essentially the same reasoning behind denying their claims that is used to advocate for open borders, "This is more economically efficient and you have no rights over the more naturally talented foreigner". On the flip side I am generally not sympathetic to people who feel entitled to live in expensive cities for more mundane reasons.

Can’t say I really understand this system. For example, how is Boston ranked higher than Houston? Houston has either the busiest or second busiest port in the US depending on how you measure it, Houston is just way larger than Boston in terms of population, Houston has a higher GDP than Boston, and it’s a major city for the energy and finance industries.

Don't ask me, I didn't make it, and as I said it's very very subjective once you get below the first few top cities. You can find a summary of rankings from many different organisations here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_city#Summary_of_rankings and they pretty much all have NYC+London as the top two.

how is Boston ranked higher than Houston?

Boston's top universities

Houston's top universities

Boston also beats Houston on GDP per capita $80k to $63k, and is often known as the most educated major city in America (thought I don't know the stats on it outside of Harvard and MIT being nearby). Also the Red Sox and the Patriots have been annoyingly good for years, and the Celtics are young and good; while the Astros cheat and the Texans and Rockets suck. On the other hand, Houston has Meg while Boston hasn't produced a great band since This is Boston Not L.A. came out. But the Boston Pops are legendary, while I don't know of anything out of Houston.

Point is there's more to city quality than GDP and population.

while the Astros cheat

I mean, so do the Patriots.

True, but I've forgiven the Patriots, since they had the decency to lose to Philly.

The list is very weird. I can't really fathom why LA is not in the Alpha+ tier. It just seems obviously more like those cities than any of the cities in regular Alpha.

And the Gods of the Copybook Headings said

Ouch, this dreary poem again, the poem everyone loves and no one knows what is it about.

This poem was written in 1920, and it was not meant as timeless wisdom for all times and places, but as a commentary about current events.

What were the current events?

If you lived in UK 102 years ago, there were three major issues that split the country, issues that everyone politically aware had to take a stand on.

1/ Military. Should UK negotiate with other great powers to limit armaments, or should it strive to be greatest power ever at any cost?

This is what "the Cambrian measures" of the poem mean.

If you thought that what the country needs right now are more battleships, the bigger and shinier the better, congrats, you are Kipling.

2/ Social question, especially eight hour working day.

"the Carboniferous Epoch"

If you thought that workers and miners already live high on the hog and do not need any handouts, congrats, you are Kipling.

3/ Votes for women.

"the Feminian Sandstones"

If you thought that the country has already too much democracy, congrats, you are Kipling.

Now, what happened? Did the country followed Kipling's advice?

No, it did not.

The British establishment negotiated Washington Naval Treaty, let women over age 30 vote and even gave some concessions to the working class.

Were it good choices? If instead they engaged in massive military buildup and crushed the uppity mob with iron fist, would it make Britain great again, greater than ever?

It certainly didn't work out for them when they didn't do that.

Yes, what the Brits were doing was not working for them.

For example, when they taught the "wogs" English and invited them to study at their universities, and then strongly reminded them that they are wogs and never will be anything else.

This would not happen in ancient Rome or other serious empires of the past.

Want to be world spanning empire that lasts for centuries and is remembered for millenia? Behave like one.

Eh, for the same reason death of the artist seems like a good idea I think we can separate works from their time and let people of new generations take from them what they will. It's a catchier version of Chesterton fences for folk wisdom and I think accurate captures the spirit behind a kind of fundamental pillar of conservatism's distrust of too good to be true if socially popular claims. When the modern economists tell you that you can print as much money as you need and cite piles and piles of self referential research to prove the fact it's good to have some more ammunition to protect yourself.

MMT is a fringe theory. If you want to argue against it, you can just point to the consensus among mainstream economists. A highly specific modern interpretation of a hundred-year-old poem is not a good argument against anything.

If you thought that the country has already too much democracy, congrats, you are Kipling.

I feel seen, but that is a post for another day...

Were it good choices? If instead they engaged in massive military buildup and crushed the uppity mob with iron fist, would it make Britain great again, greater than ever?

Who knows? Do you? I don't. Alternative history provides an endless canvas to imagination. But I'm fairly sure that, were this program to succeed (despite structural reasons to the contrary), we wouldn't have heard anything about «appeasement», nor about Operation Sea Lion or The Blitz, and plausibly the Third Reich itself would have been relegated to footnotes of history. And the Empire might have lasted a great deal longer, and perhaps @2rafa wouldn't have any sordid tales of post-War collapse and sudden impoverishment of London elites to tell, and – just maybe! – @KulakRevolt would be fuming about the global kraken of perfidious Albion exploiting American vulnerability under the false guise of allyship, rather than the other way around.

The human and materiel losses incurred might always have let America sweep ahead—but I suppose that’s what you meant by “structural reasons.”

just maybe! – @KulakRevolt would be fuming about the global kraken of perfidious Albion exploiting American vulnerability under the false guise of allyship, rather than the other way around.

The only constant in every timeline is a man named kulakrevolt fuming about something.

higher birthrate of immigrants it is practically a given that the Replacement is going to happen come hell or high water.

Immigrant birth rates always normalize to the local level within a generation or two.

Supposing you ever stop immigration. Which is, I'd say, not very likely.

In 1945 90 percent of the British were opposed to immigration. Now a slight majority support it. It’s possible for attitudes to change

I believe the standard response here is muttering something about Cthulhu. If one takes as an axiom that public opinion only swims left, then immigration must grow in popularity so long as it remains left-coded. You’d have an easier time giving an example that hasn’t leaned left.

Then just have anti immigration code left. It’s not as if that’s impossible. You can make a leftist case for being anti immigration.

Considering the stranglehold anti-white and pro-immigration extremists have on media, the possibility is irrelevant. In the UK not even a large-scale gang rape scandal involving possibly tens of thousands of children spanning decades could wake the people there up. By the unlikely time the attitudes of Europeans in the UK change, their political opinions will be irrelevant.

Or, immigrants and children of immigrants support immigration? One in six foreign born, remember. More than likely even more foreign-descended. Seems to me like it's the bad argument cousin of "areas with more immigration have people think more positively of immigration" -- no shit.

Do immigrants actually support immigration? My intuition would be that immigrants are for it to the degree that they're in the social sphere that profits from immigration and start being against it as they accumulate wealth.

Seems like many of the migrant communities in the UK hate each intensely though.

Yeah, it's great living in the front rows of the no holds barred knock down drag out ethic grudge match arena. :|

I mean; kinda yeah. Conflicts can be entertaining when you hold no stake in the outcome

It was only a small matter of time before things degenerated to the point where it was necessary to either import immigrants to make up for the collapsing birth rate

As an aside this is a total bollocks position. Most immigrants that go to the uk are family reunification migrants which means they are mostly middle aged or elderly and since most migrants don’t have that many kids anyway, the net effect is a wash on fertility. It just leads to more entitlement spending, resulting in net negative gdp growth

Most immigrants that go to the uk are family reunification migrants which means they are mostly middle aged or elderly

Wait, what? That goes against my understanding of the age range of immigrants, unless you're talking about a specific channel.

https://migrationobservatory.ox.ac.uk/resources/briefings/family-migration-to-the-uk/

According to the Annual Population Survey, in 2019 there were an estimated 9.4 million foreign-born people living in the UK. Of these, an estimated four million said that the main reason they originally moved to the UK was to join or accompany a family member. This means that 45% of all the foreign-born in the UK are family migrants, equivalent to 6% of the UK’s population of 66 million.

Looks like I was slightly off. It’s roughly half of all foreigners are chain migrants

Given the continuing high migration that this country is now basically reliant on - the recent budget depended on very high levels of inward migration to be balanced, lower migration than expected in the next few years will create a short term fiscal black hole

Do you have evidence that immigrantion is beneficial to the British? Danes ran the numbers and discovered that non-western new-comers are a net negative on the fiscus. This is true even after excluding refugees.

There's this article from the Telegraph about the budget situation:

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2022/11/17/why-jeremy-hunt-relying-surge-migrants-boost-britains-flagging

Archive link: https://archive.ph/f0rEW

In the short term the migration of workers is necessary to boost tax revenue. Long term the migrants might even be net negative, but short term since they all come over with jobs and you can kick them out in the first 5 years if they lose their job they are net contributors which helps with the current cash flow issues.

I've long thought that the rationalist and adjacent communities were full of, to be frank, a sad mix of quokkas and leering american PMC sociopaths rapacious and hungry to consume all that is good in the world in a metpahorical orgy of neoliberal greed, but thanks for expanding my horizons.

I'll add 3rd worlders who hate my people and wish us exterminated, our culture destroyed, and our nation wrought asunder to that list shall I?

I do not wish extermination upon any peoples, I just want you to see the light and reject the degeneracy that has taken root in your countries over the last few decades. Break free from the shackles and we can all come together as brethren.

Thanks for clarifying that. I have already seen the light, but one candle cannot burn at the bottom of an ocean.

There is only one brotherhood.

Peace through power.

I'm not sure if I really buy that migration is good for government finances. Maybe the UK handles it a lot better than my own country, but here in Belgium non-EU migration has been a net negative. Our national bank did a study on this a few years ago.

Unfortunately it does not have a handy chart showing the net cost per place of orgin like this Dutch study has on page 76, but I imagine the numbers would look even worse here for non-EU migrants, since our welfare state is infamously easy to just leech of for life if you can't be bothered to work. The EU migrant numbers would probably look better due to all the highly paid eurocrats in Brussels.

Especially MENA and subsaharan African migrants are notorious for being a massive cost sink in pretty much every western european country they settle in en masse. I find it hard to believe that the UK alone has somehow managed to turn say Morrocans into something resembling a desireable citizen, given their horrendous performance in the rest of Europe. Mind you, then we haven't even gotten into the other problems importing an underclass from the third world brings with it. Of our prison population, 48% flat out doesn't even have belgian citizenship. I would not at all be surprised if >80% of our prison population had a migrant background. Then we also have the terrorism issue, but credit where credit is due that has improved in the last couple of years, we haven't had a serious attack with mass casualties in a while now. Either our secret service has seriously stepped its game up or the defeat of ISIS has made comitting an attack a less attractive prospect. Perhaps both, hard to say.

but here in Belgium non-EU migration has been a net negative. Our national bank did a study on this a few years ago.

This is a 244 page document, can you point to where this is shown? Ctrl-Fing for 'GDP per capita' seems to contradict your claim:

Summing up results from the different impact channels, recent immigration has a positive impact on GDP, pushing it up by 3.5%. The effect is positive for both origins with a 2% increase from EU immigration and a 1.5% rise from non-EU immigration. Evidently, immigration also induces an increase in the population. Nevertheless, it still leads to a 0.7% rise in GDP per capita

And the Dutch study isn't loading for me.

I'm not sure if I really buy that migration is good for government finances. Maybe the UK handles it a lot better than my own country, but here in Belgium non-EU migration has been a net negative. Our national bank did a study on this a few years ago.

We don't, it's just fudged. Stats that could paint migration in a negative light are ignored or massaged until they don't. Messaging prefers to use total GDP as a measurement to say that migration improves it -- not GDP per capita, which would expose the lie. Earn a single pound working at a hand car wash? Congratulations, you've increased total GDP! Messaging also prefers to say things like "immigrants are a net benefit to the tax take on average" while omitting that no immigrant becomes a net contributor before earning about 35k. This stat is misleading because it means a few top band high earners (and so high tax contributors) can "pay for" a load of useless layabouts in this statistic.

This stat is misleading because it means a few top band high earners (and so high tax contributors) can "pay for" a load of useless layabouts in this statistic.

How is that misleading? Admittedly this suggests a third option of "only accept immigrants likely to contribute lots of taxes", but it's surely relevant to the question that between "current immigration" and "no immigration", the "current immigration" option still leads to higher sum tax revenue.

In a severely misguided attempt since the end of WWII (and continuing until the present day!) successive governments tinkered with this system and slowly removed the things that made the system work

I want to post a rather long quote that suggests this happened earlier, going back at least as far as WW1:

Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman.

He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission. He could exchange his money for any other currency without restriction or limit. He could buy goods from any country in the world on the same terms as he bought goods at home. For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police. Unlike the countries of the European continent, the state did not require its citizens to perform military service. An Englishman could enlist, if he chose, in the regular army, the navy, or the territorials. He could also ignore, if he chose, the demands of national defence. Substantial householders were occasionally called on for jury service. Otherwise, only those helped the state who wished to do so. The Englishman paid taxes on a modest scale: nearly £200 million in 1913-14, or rather less than 8 percent of the national income.

The state intervened to prevent the citizen from earing adulterated food or contracting infectious diseases. It imposed safety rules in factories, and prevented women, and adult males in some industries, from working excessive hours. The state saw to it that children received education up to the age of 13. Since 1 January 1909, it provided a meagre pension for the needy over the age of 70. Since 1911, it helped to insure certain classes of workers against sickness and unemployment. This tendency towards more state action was increasing. Expenditure on the social services had roughly doubled since the Liberals took office in 1905. Still, broadly speaking, the state acted only to help those who could not help themselves. It left the adult citizen alone.

All this was changed by the impact of the Great War. The mass of the people became, for the first time, active citizens. Their lives were shaped by orders from above; they were required to serve the state instead of pursuing exclusively their own affairs. Five million men entered the armed forces, many of them (though a minority) under compulsion. The Englishman’s food was limited, and its quality changed, by government order. His freedom of movement was restricted; his conditions of work prescribed. Some industries were reduced or closed, others artificially fostered. The publication of news was fettered. Street lights were dimmed. The sacred freedom of drinking was tampered with: licensed hours were cut down, and the beer watered by order. The very time on the clocks was changed. From 1916 onwards, every Englishman got up an hour earlier in summer than he would otherwise have done, thanks to an act of parliament. The state established a hold over it citizens which, though relaxed in peacetime, was never to be removed and which the second World war was again to increase.

  • A.J.P Taylor, English History 1914-1945

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