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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   29284 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 12, 2022

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Just as an FYI, we just deployed a major performance improvement for this site. It also might be buggy. Please report any issues you run into, especially those involving the display of the front page or comment threads (like this one).

(At the same time we're currently working with a significant performance degradation because of a library bug. Hopefully we'll get that one solved soon too.)

Edit: So far there are 414 janitor submissions, y'all are great, I was expecting to have to wait a week or two to get a good chunk of useful data but nope this is going fast.

(one post is considered one submission, not one set of posts)

Hmm, can you give me screenshot examples of those? I think this is the first I've heard of either, for the record.

Could we also see how many child comments a particular comment gets when collapsed?

I think this may actually be difficult, we don't track that info anywhere. But I'll add a task for it.

Today I learned there are lines indicating how replies are nested in the light theme on mobile! I have been using dark theme since launch and while I thought I remembered lines at one point, collapsing threads without using the minus next to a user name has always seemed like a random crapshoot when I tapped to the left of a comment. As another Johnny Bench I think double tapping would be light years better (and an option to remove the collapsing function of the lines if possible (oh and make the lines visible in dark theme please.))

Huh, I like the "double-tap to collapse" idea. I don't actually use mobile so I'm sorta in the dark on what people want there :V

Task added!

The volunteer/janitor page has a link for the rules which should https://www.themotte.org/rules instead of localhost/rules.

Oops, not my finest moment. Should be fixed now, thanks!

The janny volunteer popup dialog seems to be in light theme even if you're using dark theme.

Sigh, I admit the themes are an annoying amount of work. I'll fix this one though.

I didn't actually realize there was a 'dark' theme until this comment. White text on dark background is my preferred look, so I switched over. However, I'm pretty sure there's a bug with the dark themes ('dark', 'midnight', and 'tron' all share this issue), where the interface doesn't register if you've clicked the upvote or downvote button, it stays the same color regardless. Any chance this could be fixed as well?

The problem is that I've been making serious changes to the base theme but not wanting to invest the time on fixing up the other themes. I think I might:

  • Change TheMotte to light

  • Fix up dark a bit

  • Rename the other themes to include (unsupported)

  • Remap users to light or dark as appropriate

  • Send a message to everyone who was using an unsupported theme saying "your old theme is kind of deprecated and may look crummy, we've changed you to a supported theme, you're welcome to change back if you really want or volunteer to fix up the theme"

I should also do a check to see which themes are most popular.

actually lemme just do that now, I need to get into the DB anyway

TheMotte: 1477 (obviously a lot of these are "I just left it as the default")

reddit: 98

dark: 96

midnight: 74

dramblr: 27

coffee: 23

4chan: 19

win98: 15

tron: 7

light: 4

transparent: 1

I am one of the people using "reddit". It actually doesn't resemble Reddit very much; it's just a nice theme: dark, but not too dark like the actual "dark" theme. (The background on "dark" is apparently literally #000000, which no one ever does!) It seems "midnight" is basically just "reddit" but worse (the contrast is terrible), so if you combine the two, "reddit" is the de facto dark theme and therefore it should, in my totally unbiased opinion, become the official dark theme.

The "transparent" theme has something to do with custom backgrounds, which are non-functional, so I think you can just remove it completely. I can't even get it to work, no idea how that one person did it.

The background on "dark" is apparently literally #000000, which no one ever does!

OLED display users (mostly mobile, but not all) do.

>phoneposting

Edit: Oops, just noticed you said there are non-mobile OLED displays. My bad. Anyway, would it be too much to have a "dark", renamed from "reddit", and "OLED" or "superdark" or something, renamed from "dark"? Or perhaps rename "reddit" to "light dark"? Again, I am very biased, but "reddit" is the most popular non-default theme.

My suggestion would be for default theme to use the prefers-color-scheme @media query to switch the base colors to bright-on-dark-gray if you have your browser/OS set for dark mode. "Dark" would be moved to "OLED black".

Personally, I use "coffee".

Per Transtellung's comment I just switched to the 'reddit' theme, and already I can tell it is much better. It does leave the big 'The Motte' site name in the upper left black (unreadable against the background), but now all links are clearly highlighted in blue, and upvotes and downvotes are clearly visible as orange and light blue respectively. Very much support his recommendation to turn 'reddit' into the official dark theme.

EDIT: it appears that the 'reddit' theme does not highlight unread comments in the same way as the 'themotte' theme does. So if I had one other suggestion, it'd be to incorporate that change into this theme. Thanks!

Works fine so far. Thank you for your efforts.

You might be jannies, but you're our jannies. <3

I got a popup asking to rate a post.

My too. Just some random comment. I rated it.

I also accidentally fat finger upvoted it. That should probably be disabled when rating comments.

Excellent! It appears to be working.

I have almost two hundred new notifications over the last 17 hours. It looks like I'm getting a notification every time someone comments on this thread.

Did you hit the "subscribe" button with the eye next to it?

I didn't think I did. But I just unsubscribed. Thanks.

NY Mag published a piece defending Yoel Roth from Musk's "smears", declaring that Musk "falsely implied" that Roth had advocated for normalising child sexualisation in his old tweets.

Turns out, he's apparently a Zionist too! Wonder how this will sit with sections of the left rigorously defending Roth knowing that he probably lobbies for an apartheid state, or the rigorously pro-Israel right exposing his bizarre tweets. And I doubt Musk is in any way interested in exposing the Israeli lobby.

What worries me is that some of the voices I like on twitter are departing (Popehat, Coding horror). Left leaning but usually worth paying attention to. Those are the type of users (unlike journo-s) that twitter can't afford to lose. Not sure if network effects will be that strong.

Musk should probably tone down the things a bit to at least try to boil the frog.

Popehat hasn't been the same for a while, sadly, at least to my mind.

True. But while he is gone full blown sjw since adopting the kids, when it comes to his area of expertise - law he is still pretty solid.

While some of the accounts on Twitter can be replaced with Markov chains for popehat you need at least chatgpt.

he is gone full blown sjw since adopting the kids

Huh, usually it is a bit other way. Was it coincidental or there is some reason to suspect causation?

They are Korean and he suddenly started seeing systemic racism and bigotry everywhere and racism suddenly started becoming Really Bad Thing.

Am I correct in assuming he sees anti-asian bigotry in precisely the opposite of the places it actually festers?

cc-ing @Smok IIRC a lot of Vox and Dickinson's(?) lads were calling him a psycho jewloving cuck race-traitor in all his replies back in... 2015(?), because of the whole mental breakdown and adopting foreign kids thing. I can see how that would send someone up the wall.

The alt-right guys never learned how to bully people into actual submission the way the other side is so good at. They mostly just pissed people off and made permanent enemies of them.

were calling him a psycho jewloving cuck race-traitor in all his replies back in... 2015(?), because of the whole mental breakdown and adopting foreign kids thing.

After that I would consider being extreme Zionist SJW and fund Mason lodge and reptilarium out of pure spite.

If an area is over a threshold of progressivism then becoming a family man actually solidifies progressive opinion, because you're more institutionally invested and it's vital to keep up appearances among friends of friends and whatnot. My married friends or more woke than my unmarried friends. I'm in California.

Dynamics could be completely flipped in Alabama.

Those are the type of users (unlike journo-s) that twitter can't afford to lose.

On what basis?

You might like esoteric lawfare longform posts, but in that I don't think you're the median Twitter user. Popehat's departure would cause, what, at most perhaps a 3-digit number of people to decide that Twitter is no longer worth being on? He's hardly a load bearing fixture there.

Twitter's market value is in connecting journos to each other and the cancel-mob. Popehat and his devotees aren't in either of those groups; he's exactly the kind of user Twitter can afford to lose.

I don't want Twitter to turn into right wing echo chamber. So you actually need the lefties that show at least some sanity to stay.

They're not leaving.

Practically every account that says they're 'leaving' gets back in the next days.

Really? I thought his whole niche was writing snarky lawspainers promoting blue positions on a level journalists could understand, with quotable sneers the cancel mob could chant without understanding.

A public intellectual in the Hayekian sense.

I'm shocked Ken is capable of leaving Twitter. Terrifying to think what he'll end up like in an even more radicalized echo chamber.

Roth may be the scariest person I have ever come across in my entire life. A straight out of comic book QANON casting Jewish Gay Grooming Pedohpile who actually controls all speech proclaiming that his type doesn’t exists.

I don’t know if he’s actually a groomer; I do feel very confident that he’s completely out of touch with most America. Lots of negative kid vibes. Maybe he just writes and tweets a lot so easy to dig up something but he still seems to be not representative of society.

Musk should probably tone it down some and not risks alienated users. It would be better to maintain a strong platform.

In my view, 50/50 he has committed criminal sexual acts. He posted a lot of very edgy jokes on Twitter.

And logic dictates when you put someone somewhere to censor content, you want someone who will be easy to handle, hence, a guy whom you know to be a nonce is the logical choice.

Meanwhile, FBI has about 16 ex* employees working at Twitter in various senior positions.

*I'm not sure people ever 'leave' such agencies, same way as people never really leave the Mob without disappearing entirely.

I covered this I think here the other day. The problem with the FBI (or CIA etc) being at twitter is the alphabets have become extremely color coded. They are viewed as blue tribe captured.

I have no problem with fbi guys taking their pension and finding a $250k twitter job focused on child porn or all the actions that most of society still disagrees with. It’s their training. The issue happens if their doing moderating tribal speech battles.

They are viewed as blue tribe captured.

With reason, no ? As I understand most of the people who have been tied to the Trump dossier scandal were FBI alumni.

Similarly, FBI seems heavily involved in J6, with the person who was in charge of investigation retiring recently., perhaps to make it less likely that he could be asked awkward questions such as why Ray Epps was not arrested or investigated despite there being videos of him organising the event and urging people to enter the capitol.

I believe so for reason but didn’t want to state it that way. I assume the FBI at lower to medium levels still has some red tribe members and their not completely extinct yet.

I've seen rumors of bad morale and people bitching about being re-directed from investigating criminals into investigating "online hate", but nothing substantial.

I covered this I think here the other day. The problem with the FBI (or CIA etc) being at twitter is the alphabets have become extremely color coded. They are viewed as blue tribe captured.

All of these agencies very heavily employ ex-military. Also, Mormons for some reason gravitate to the three-letter agencies.

Is there a lot of blue-tribe HR bullshit in all federal agencies? Yes, but it's not as "captured" as you think.

You have to realize to a segment of online people, "Blue Tribe" means being opposed to anything Trump or anything adjacent anti-woke people do. At this point, Mike Pence is 'Blue Tribe' is some because of his actions on 1/6.

Nah, blue tribe means "laptop class" and adjacent. the sort of person who pays more attention to what's trending on twitter than what's going on with their next-door neighbor

Sounds right to me and I said below I bet lower levels are more mixed. Since the 50 agents thing and Hunter Laptop interference the alphabets at the top have lost any red tribe respect.

Also, Mormons for some reason gravitate to the three-letter agencies.

Bc. Mormons have compulsory missionareeing (ah, my English, fix it), often in another countries, so which has a lot overlap with what three-letters do. Also Mormons missionaries work in pair and each reports to superiors on the other one. Perfect!

"Edgy Twitter jokes" is not the same as "has sex with 14 year olds". If all of us were judged by everything we've ever said on social media, we'd be in a lot of trouble.

Edgy jokes that imply the person who made the joke is watching sadistic pornography featuring children ... are pretty weird.

Or is this some sort of 'typical minding' and I'm the only one who can't easily confuse usual porn sounds and infant crying ?

/images/16708706411712267.webp

I mean, not to tell on myself or anything, but...haven't you ever come across excerpts from japanese AVs? Lots of high-pitched nasal squealing that, through a wall, could plausibly be confused with an infant. Or at least enough for comedic purposes.

That's about the only remotely innocuous explanation.

It's a reason why years ago I stopped trying to pirate Japanese porn; no matter how hot the actresses might be, the whole thing inevitably gets kind of rapey and also, the weird squealing.

But why would a gay man be familiar with how Japanese straight porn sounds?

Or is Japanese homosexual pornography also heavy on high-pitched nasal squealing ?

But why would a gay man be familiar with how Japanese straight porn sounds?

For the same or similar reason that I know what some gay porn clips look like - if you spent any time on 4chan or similar borderline internet sites during the past couple decades, you were gonna see all kinds of weird shit regardless of whether or not you, personally, are into it.

People posted JAVs to 4chan? TIL. Wouldn't that be on the straight board though, which it's not likely a gay guy would be hanging out on?

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But would brief exposure create the kind of familiarity that leads you to confuse a common sound - crying infant, with an uncommon sound -something you heard once or twice online and didn't care for it at all ?

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But why would a gay man be familiar with how Japanese straight porn sounds?

Because he read about it on internet? I know quite a lot about a lot of stuff that I never personally experienced or seen first hand, for start I never visited Venus. (not that visiting it would allow me to survive long enough to learn about it)

Or is Japanese homosexual pornography also heavy on high-pitched nasal squealing ?

No, I suspect it's more along the lines of OH MY SHOULDER

Or is Japanese homosexual pornography also heavy on high-pitched nasal squealing ?

Not just present there, not as constant, and both Japanese 'normal' gay porn and yaoi's got a slightly different form of obnoxious vocalisms, but yes. Both the obnoxious bottoms overselling how hard they're taking it, and the tops either have a kink or a script for aaaAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA.

But why would a gay man be familiar with how Japanese straight porn sounds?

Probably for the same reason most people who watch YouTube videos know how a particular straight porn sounds (volume warning).

This isn't the only example, but it is the most infamous.

The fucking joke is that it shouldn't be hard to tell the difference between porn and a baby crying! That's why it's an awkward moment, because nobody ever wants to be in a situation where they can't tell if their neighbour is watching a crying baby or watching porn that sounds like a crying baby.

You mean, the joke was supposed to be he can't tell whether his neighbor is watching child porn ?

Yeah sort of, but it is more like "there are some very strange noises coming from my neighbour's place, but they are too loud for me to ignore. But they are so strange that I can't tell if I should rap on the wall and tell them to turn down the volume of their porn or feel sympathy for them for the baby they are having trouble calming. I definitely don't want to rap on the wall and tell them to shut up their baby, nor feel sympathy for their loud and revolting sounding masturbation session, so I am in an awkward spot."

As you said elsewhere, it's edgy. It's supposed to be transgressive and shock you by breaking taboos. Assuming it is a sincere expression of interest in pedophilia is like assuming an edgy 14 year old is a nazi because he scrawled a swastika on the bathroom stall door.

If all of us were judged by everything we've ever said on social media, we'd be in a lot of trouble.

Is that necessarily a bad thing?

*I'm not sure people ever 'leave' such agencies, same way as people never really leave the Mob without disappearing entirely.

Yes, federal employees absolutely leave their former agencies and are no longer bound by anything but (in the case of those who held security clearances) their lifetime obligation not to disclose classified information. US federal agencies do not in any way "own" former employees, nor they do they make them "disappear."

And you do believe this unironically ?

Yes. I have factual reason to believe this. What is your basis for believing otherwise?

Yes. I have factual reason to believe this. What is your basis for believing otherwise?

It's generally not true in other countries. People get attached to the their classmates, former companies and so on.

It's generally not true in other countries. People get attached to the their classmates, former companies and so on.

Well, first of all, the United States has very different norms, and stricter regulations, about federal service.

Second, people getting attached to their classmates and former companies is not the argument you made. Of course ex-feds maintain a professional and social network that typically includes other current and former feds. But you were claiming something much different, that they constitute in effect a "Mob" that they not only do not but cannot really leave, and that their former agencies can still compel them to do work for them after they've left. This is flatly untrue.

Well, first of all, the United States has very different norms, and stricter regulations, about federal service.

Strict ? You have generals retiring and then getting cushy board or consultant positions at defence contractors.

There's the infamous 'revolving door' problem at all kinds of agencies.

that their former agencies can still compel them to do work for them after they've left.

I should've been more clear- what I had in mind was more that these are special jobs that confer life-long status by association, and that people who've gone through them typically have a specific outlook and set of contacts that make them unique.

However-

We know feds compel people who fucked up to serve them. They're called confidential informants.

Is this a practice that cannot be used on agents who messed up ? Say, some boss 'misplaces' a crucial piece of evidence, agent is exonerated.

Retires, but knows he'll be asked to do favors for feds, unless he wants that piece accidentally found during an unrelated investigation..

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No one is bound by anything and no one claims they are. The claim is that the employees, current and former, become an influence network where it is in the interest of the participants to prioritize their reputation within the network over their fiduciary duties.

Moreover, this stuff is generally handled via implicit escalation. "Ok I'll crack down on the beheading videos and build a connection with people still on the inside." "Ok, I guess advocating for beheading is pretty similar." ... "Advocating for Trump is basically the same as the previous step."

No one is bound by anything and no one claims they are.

Indeed, @No_one claims they are.

The claim is that the employees, current and former, become an influence network where it is in the interest of the participants to prioritize their reputation within the network over their fiduciary duties.

It's an interesting claim, but where is the evidence for it?

It's no more true than the network of ex-military, ex-police officers, etc. They might feel a sense of affinity for others who worked for the same organization, which may manifest in hiring decisions and the like, but considering the size of the federal workforce, it's a much weaker "network" than, say, Yale grads.

Moreover, this stuff is generally handled via implicit escalation. "Ok I'll crack down on the beheading videos and build a connection with people still on the inside." "Ok, I guess advocating for beheading is pretty similar." ... "Advocating for Trump is basically the same as the previous step."

When you say "this stuff is generally handled via implicit escalation," you appear to making a statement of fact, based on knowledge. Which you followed up with a very specific scenario. Do you have any knowledge this this is how "this stuff" is actually handled, or only conjecture? Because it sounds like you are building a conjecture around a statement you made with certainty but no actual knowledge. It sounds like "Well, it makes sense to me that this is how people would go from banning beheading videos to banning pro-Trump statements," but I think you are making this up and just assuming "that's how it works" because it fits your worldview.

I cannot reveal the anecdata on which I've based this without being either super vague or alternately revealing details which are likely traceable to a small set of people. The tl;dr; is that someone I trust was briefly involved in a situation of this sort on the periphery, hated it tremendously, but described the process to me.

Feel free to dismiss it as you see fit.

I cannot reveal the anecdata on this without being either super vague or alternately revealing details which are likely traceable to a small set of people.

Feel free to dismiss it as you see fit.

Given that I too have first-hand knowledge that I cannot reveal without doxxing myself to win an Internet argument, yes, I will dismiss your anecdata.

I don’t know if he’s actually...

QANON casting Jewish Gay Grooming Pedohpile who actually controls all speech

If you’re going to assume the worst, pretending you’re not sure is just a fig leaf.

Oh come on, I don't know the guy or his politics but "grooming paedophile" based on the items quoted is very much off the mark.

deleted

Yep, agreed. I think Yoth is a fuckhead and I wouldn't spit on him if he was on fire, but this is donglegate levels of reaching for offence.

At this point so many conspiracy theories have been shown to be at least partially true, I'm ready for straight up lizard people. Followed by endless gaslighting about it being a rare skin condition and we are all just bigots.

Roth makes powerful jokes:

/images/16708573621213224.webp

He had a not-very-secret horny alt

/images/16708575253362129.webp

And on the not-very secret alt that's been scrubbed, he allegedly tweeted this:

It might still be on web.archive.org, but that site is owned by the left, so it might get scrubbed like Taylor Lorenz's old tweets.

/images/16708576106884437.webp

And here's something he allegedly posted on an alt:

/images/16708669206028364.webp

Well, that one just sounds like the gay version of women talking about how hot guys with a child are even hotter.

Do they do that ?

I mean, gays have feminised brains, up to a point. But Roth is quite confused, he speaks about his dislike of children quite often.

I guess that's why the "inexplicable" is there.

The optics, however, are really bad given all that's happened in the recent past. Note that the word 'chicken' to refer to underage, is not new.

/images/1670871043506448.webp

gays have feminised brains

I was read to jump on this as unsourced, but...apparently it’s true. Or at least as true as any attempts to correlate a couple dozen brain scans.

I'd say it's apparent from their interests and personalities.

It's far from universal as the latest 'dog soldiers' US military scandal shows, but the stereotypes of gay caring about feminine things exists for a reason.

/images/167088330515108.webp

Sigh... Why do we need to do "It's the Jews!" literally every week? It's tedious and boring, given how much of a numerical minority they are if you don't like all the control they have then you should blame your own people for being weak, not them for their strengths.

Numerical minority, but overrepresented in upper strata of society.

Billionaries, media personalities, media managers and so on.

Hence, a lot of flak caught.

Because if the Jews aren't to blame, society's losers - either genuine or just self-hating ones - might need to do some introspection. Since that'd hurt, it's much easier to decide others are to blame for where you are.

Such a pattern of thought is quite common. At least anti-semites haven't get gotten so deep in blaming the outgroup for their own failure, as to have entire university departments conducting research with the assumption that "Judeoarchy" is real or searching for evidence that "Jewish supremacy" is real and harms gentiles.

Indeed. The constant bitching about men and white people is no less pathetic.

Bingo.

If you're a academically inclined progressive type who's drunk the kool-aid of Id-Pol and the sanctity of victimhood, etc... but have the misfortune of being a member of the oppressor class (IE straight and white) some greater "true oppressor" must be invented if one's ego is to be preserved. Jews are just the oldest and most obvious target, but I think that a lot of the visceral hate you'll occasionally see here for "Breeders", "Normies", Mormons Et Al... comes from a similar place.

I'm unsure whether or not I'm parsing your post correctly, but 'academically inclined progressives who have drunk the kool-aid of ID-Pol' describes approximately 0% of the userbase here. I'd also be shocked if any significant fraction of holocaust deniers or JAQers were academically inclined progressives, so unless your definition of anti-semitism extends to people who express doubts about Israel's treatment of Palestine, I'm not sure I follow your point.

I'm unsure whether or not I'm parsing your post correctly, but 'academically inclined progressives who have drunk the kool-aid of ID-Pol' describes approximately 0% of the userbase here.

I'm not so sure. Just as an example, the use of "Zionist" as a pejorative as something of a tell. As it's not something you're likely to encounter outside the context of academia and other explicitly progressive blue/gray-tribe spaces. I don't know if they constitute a "significant fraction" of the total, but I would say that the vast majority of holocaust deniers and JAQers that I have interacted with fall into that category. This isn't to say that there aren't non-progressive racists and anti-semites, just that it tends to manifest in different ways. The casual racism of the old south (and sunset north) has a distinctly different flavor from the sort of "you're a race traitor if you don't validate me" that seems to typify the average internet JAQer/Holocaust Denier on the internet.

I mean, that would be my first inclination if I were allowed to just do me. But I'm not, I'm subjected to endless struggle sessions in hobby spaces, work environments, education environments and civic environments about my "whiteness". I don't get to just go "Well, maybe black people need to figure out why they suck so much". Especially in the current environment where all it takes to make generally accepted claims of discrimination is to point out uneven outcomes, with zero evidence, or even a proposed theory, about how it's the fault of "whiteness".

I don't make the rules, I just know when I'm on the receiving end of hypocrisy dense enough to spark a gravity singularity.

The term, Zionist, simply means a proponent of Zionism, which simply is Jewish nationalism, just like other types of ethnic nationalism,* such as Kurdish nationalism, or Basque nationalism, or, for that matter, Palestinian nationalism. It is not a synonym for supporting Israeli policies toward Palestinians, as there are many on the left in Israeli who are both Zionists yet oppose those policicies.

*By which of course I mean this, rather than its common use as a near-synonym for patriotism.

PS: To be clear, this is not a defense of Zionism, since I generally oppose all forms of ethnic nationalism.

It's not like Musk, specifically, has a history of insulting people by calling them pedophiles, right? It has been fascinating watching certain parts of right wing politics re-invent a Satanic Panic about Pedophilia over the last couple years.

That guy doesn't have a corpus of work about adult-child sex relations.

Here is Roth's dissertation, available for free for download.

Here's the abstract of the paper:

Since its launch in 2009, the geosocial networking service Grindr has become an increasingly mainstream and prominent part of gay culture, both in the United States and globally. Mobile applications like Grindr give users the ability to quickly and easily share information about themselves (in the form of text, numbers, and pictures), and connect with each other in real time on the basis of geographic proximity. I argue that these services constitute an important site for examining how bodies, identities, and communities are translated into data, as well as how data becomes a tool for forming, understanding, and managing personal relationships. Throughout this work, I articulate a model of networked interactivity that conceptualizes self-expression as an act determined by three sometimes overlapping, sometimes conflicting sets of affordances and constraints: (1) technocommercial structures of software and business; (2) cultural and subcultural norms, mores, histories, and standards of acceptable and expected conduct; and (3) sociopolitical tendencies that appear to be (but in fact are not) fixed technocommercial structures. In these discussions, Grindr serves both as a model of processes that apply to social networking more generally, as well as a particular study into how networked interactivity is complicated by the histories and particularities of Western gay culture. Over the course of this dissertation, I suggest ways in which users, policymakers, and developers can productively recognize the liveness, vitality, and durability of personal information in the design, implementation, and use of gay-targeted social networking services. Specifically, I argue that through a focus on (1) open-ended structures of interface design, (2) clear and transparent articulations of service policies, and the rationales behind them, and (3) approaches to user information that promote data sovereignty, designers, developers, and advocates can work to make social networking services, including Grindr, safer and more representative of their users throughout their data’s lifecycle.

Can you tell me, in what sense is the paper "about adult-child sex relations?"

I read the section you're describing (it starts with the last paragraph on page 246 of the thesis, PDF page 259) and I don't think it's accurate to characterize Roth's statements as dismissing the concern as "impossible/problem on privacy grounds." Rather, while acknowledging the possibility Grindr may be "too lewd or too hook-up oriented to be a safe and age-appropriate resource for teenagers" he's worried that underage users may still use the platform to network with other peers in ways that don't involve having sex and removing this platform for them to have those discussions. To which point he recommends Grindr take steps to separate the lewd/hookup purpose of the app from the more general discussion platform it enables. One illustrative page:

These accounts echo many of the classic tropes of online child safety narratives: the essentially dangerous nature of new media; the need to impose strict, top-down controls on how minors use the internet; a digital reincarnation of “stranger danger” in the figure of the older male sexual predator; and the importance of raising children to be safety-savvy and highly private. Yet, absent from these discussions is even a cursory recognition that the new medium of gay-targeted social networking may be a crucial social outlet for gay, bisexual, and questioning youth. While gay youth-oriented chat rooms and social networking services were available in the early 2000s, these services have largely fallen by the wayside, in favor of general-purpose platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat. Perhaps this is truly representative of an increasingly absent demand among young adults for networked spaces to engage with peers about their sexuality; but it’s worth considering how, if at all, the current generation of popular sites of gay networked sociability might fit into an overall queer social landscape that increasingly includes individuals under the age of 18. Even with the service’s extensive content management, Grindr may well be too lewd or too hook-up-oriented to be a safe and age-appropriate resource for teenagers; but the fact that people under 18 are on these services already indicates that we can’t readily dismiss these platforms out of hand as loci for queer youth culture. Rather than merely trying to absolve themselves of legal responsibility or, worse, trying to drive out teenagers entirely, service providers should instead focus on crafting safety strategies that can accommodate a wide variety of use cases for platforms like Grindr — including, possibly, their role in safely connecting queer young adults.

I'm also curious how this makes him a hypocrite.

Not a hypocrite, necessarily, but the three cases of sexual assault he discusses, which were facilitated by Grindr, are:

(1) Threesome arranged by two adult guys with under-18 (doesn't say how much under 18 so could be 17 year old)

(2) HIV-positive guy had sex with 15 year old

(3) Guy sexually assaulted 14 year old, met on Grindr

Roth makes the point (that every sex ed promoter makes) that even if Grindr does try to keep it over-18s there are probably younger gay guys using it, and that they'll be having sex with strangers anyway, so all Grindr can do is try and be aware that there are under 18 users and make it easier and safer for them (and also, yeah, it's up to the parents etc. to keep their kids out of trouble).

That's not necessarily advocating for "sure, adults should be able to hook up with 14 year olds" but like I said, it's the same pro-sex ed message: the kids are gonna be doing it anyway, so all you can do is make sure they know to use condoms and birth control, even if legally 12 year olds should not be having sex.

I'm more surprised you can get a doctorate in philosophy just for writing a paper on a hook-up app. We're not exactly talking Plato's Academy, are we? (or maybe we are, if the attendees of the Academy were also hooking up with younger guys for sex).

I quoted Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance last week and had to look up the exact wording. It was, in fact, Plato arguing for (and against) the special relationship between boy and lover. The broader context is...still incredibly gay.

So, yes.

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There's a lot more space in gay communities for the concept of a friend that you like, have fucked or could fuck, but aren't especially sexually compatible with, sometimes to extremes. And Grindr's long pretended it wasn't just a hookup app, but also a local community social media app; I don't know whether this was to avoid getting booted by Apple or a genuine marketing approach, but cfe here for someone complaining that they found more Facebook friends on the platform than fuckbuddies.

There's also an issue that's broader than just finding friends, but broader communication. There's a lot of things that... while not easy for straight people, have broader social transmission of knowledge, in ways that a lot of gay people don't. As bad of romantic advice or that any romantic comedy or agony aunt might be, having Dan Savage's weekly notes is worse. Some are only weakly romantic, and even some of the non-platonic ones aren't very sexual, but there's a lot of awkwardness in any puberty. Worse, a lot of norms for gay stuff are highly regional: the extent it might be appropriate to discuss someone's orientation or gender identity without them having explicitly said they were out in a given context is drastically different from Massachusetts to California to Florida to Kentucky. Many of these are difficult to communicate in mixed-orientation communities or even mixed LGB communities (trivial example: "how do I let down a girl that's hitting on me, possibly without having to come out?").

I agree that Grindr's especially poorly-suited for such purposes, but I think (while poorly written) in that paper "including", here, is meant to modify "services providers like" rather than Grindr, specifically. And while Roth overlooked a few SFW gay-focused online phpBB-style groups that do exist, the high difficulty of maintaining such services in a Discord/Twitter/so on world is pretty hard to overstate.

That said, I'd go further to suggest that Roth is incredibly blithe about the issues such networks face, both obvious and not-obvious. Even non-sexuality-focused social networks face serious challenges (eg: this was the explicit purpose behind the recent report-to-Mojang function for Minecraft). I think Bernd overstates some of the problems the furry fandom has, but they definitely exist, and perhaps worse they exist as much or more in SFW-specific spaces because predators can tell that such a larger percentage of common users are younger. Fighting to keep division of NSFW content from a FFXIV free company's discord is a constant battle. And I'm starting to see signs of a similar-enough pattern happening or having happened in and around VR spheres.

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The idea of using a hook-up/dating app for finding friends is... bizarre to me, to say the least, but well maybe it happens. I can see how maybe it's a thing in the gay community, but I still find it bizarre.

I am told by straight friends that they do this too. Many women seek social interactions on tinder with the lure of possible sex to rope guys in.

I also know of one very hot but socially awkward straight guy who does this. Step 1: display abs and do hookup. Step 2: friends with benefits. Step 3: some of the friends with benefits become genuine friendships. Or maybe he's just buff nerd bodybuilder with a harem, I can't tell.

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More comments

Just that there has been a satanic panic once doesn't mean there can't be a pedophile-using organisation that uses allegations of a satanic panic, or directly whips up a satanic panic as cover for its operations.

The more low-IQ conspiracy theorists are around some topic, the worse is the signal to noise ratio.

A frequent ways spies recruit people to do things is ask them to do something relatively innocuous for them. Once you have done that, you're forced to cooperate, because they can threaten you with revealing the cooperation.

Pedophiles are ideal; once they find out someone is a pedophile, they can get them to cooperate just by asking.

No need to get them to do them a favor, thus implicating them.

They don't even have to spell it out.

"Why are you asking me to risk so much for you?"

"You damn well know why. Now be a good boy and get to it. We'll pay you, don't worry."

It's interesting how this particular manner of writing is common among people who are vaguely "conspiracy theorists", or who are vaguely but ominously musing about dark, shadowy conspiracies.

Very frequent line breaks, jumping from topic to topic, a narrative/story-like flow, vague hints.

[not saying this as evidence your points are wrong, good points are sometimes made with weird modes of speaking, but association is strong]

Where am I being "vague" ? The existence of pedophiles wasn't invalidated by there having been a panic about them.

Neither does panic about a non-existent nonsensical conspiracy make actual conspiracies less likely.

There's been at least two elite pedophile conspiracies that have come to light that are rather .. solid- the Dutroux affair, and the Pedophile Information Exchange / MI6 thing.

The former is well known, and seeing as secret service leadership is 'elite'. In the 1970s, the deputy head of MI6 being a pedophile is significant.. During the same time frame, the head of MI6 was Oldfield, who in late 1980s admitted to having had sex with 'houseboys' in the 40s and 50s.

In retrospect, the leadership of MI6 during the 1970s included a pedophile deputy director, and at least a homosexual director.

As pedophilia and homosexuality are both rather rare, it seems very unlikely that they did not know about each other, and got into these position by complete accident.

There's nothing 'vague' about saying people on whom blackmail material exists are more easily influenced either.

There's been at least two elite pedophile conspiracies that have come to light that are rather .. solid- the Dutroux affair, and the Pedophile Information Exchange / MI6 thing.

sure. but 'some elites are pedophiles' isn't surprising. there are a lot of elites. hundreds of thousands at least, certainly if we can look to the past and any area of significance in any significant country. There's gonna be some pedophile rings in any randomly selected group of 200k people. I mean, there have been "12,421 individuals" in the US Congress since the US's founding! that's just one specific very important institution!

As pedophilia and homosexuality are both rather rare, it seems very unlikely that they did not know about each other, and got into these position by complete accident.

this is vague. "unlikely got into position by accident". it's not actually saying anything. it's vaguely implied pedophilia somehow makes one elite.

There's nothing 'vague' about saying people on whom blackmail material exists are more easily influenced either.

yes, that is very vague and ambiguous! "people on whom [what] blackmail material exists are [how much] more easily influenced [by whom, to what, for what purpose]"

As pedophilia and homosexuality are both rather rare, it seems very unlikely that they did not know about each other, and got into these position by complete accident.

pedophilia and homosexuality aren't independent here, for actual pedophiles (in the sense of 'wanting to molest 12yos) 95% aren't "straight". Also, yoyoel's thesis is discussing "16yos using grindr", which is very different than "i want to molest 12yos".

sure. but 'some elites are pedophiles' isn't surprising.

The people in question were director (certainly homosexual, possibly a pedophile) and deputy director of MI6 (almost certainly).

Positions to which people are not appointed without having undergone serious vetting.

Positions that have perhaps seen, during the entire 20th century been held by only 20-30 different people.

So these people have either kept their homosexuality completely secret, despite being in a position, where they were supposedly vetted, or they were part of some homosexual conspiracy in the secret service. The former seems rather less likely than the latter.

yes, that is very vague and ambiguous! "people on whom [what] blackmail material exists are [how much] more easily influenced [by whom, to what, for what purpose]"

Nonsensical objection. Having covert influence over a person in an influential position is of interest to every conspiracy out there, from simple criminal organisation, to foreign spies, etc.

Head of secret service is one maybe top 10 most important posts in a nation.

Also, yoyoel's thesis is discussing "16yos using grindr", which is very different than "i want to molest 12yos".

One of the people in question, Hayman, was investigated because he lost a large amount of pornographic pedophilic material and it was traced back to him.

Positions to which people are not appointed without having undergone serious vetting.

This was the UK though; that vetting consisted of asking his Oxford/Cambridge schoolmates if he was a good chap. Which backfired on them quite often when all the guy's buddies and professors were fellow members of the communist-homopaedo/theatre club who were all working for the Soviets too.

Positions that have perhaps seen, during the entire 20th century been held by only 20-30 different people.

the idea is that there's lots of different positions, and if instead of MI5 director as pedo the DCCC chair or army general were pedos that'd be your evidence instead

So these people have either kept their homosexuality completely secret, despite being in a position, where they were supposedly vetted, or they were part of some homosexual conspiracy in the secret service. The former seems rather less likely than the latter.

you swapped 'homosexual' for 'pedophile'? homosexuality isn't illegal in current_year, and in the '50s you could keep it secret by just not telling anyone. How is 'not telling anyone you're gay' less plausible than 'secret service homo conspiracy'

Nonsensical objection. Having covert influence over a person in an influential position is of interest to every conspiracy out there, from simple criminal organisation, to foreign spies, etc.

your claim is a "pedophile secret service conspiracy". there's a profound difference between 'one secret agency head was a pedo' and 'there is a world-spanning pedo conspiracy enforced by blackmail'. If head of "secret service" is '10 most important positions in a nation' ... and there are 10 nations ... 10x10 is 100, 1 in 100 people are pedos, nothing to explain!

you swapped 'homosexual' for 'pedophile'? homosexuality isn't illegal in current_year, and in the '50s you could keep it secret by just not telling anyone. How is 'not telling anyone you're gay' less plausible than 'secret service homo conspiracy'

The secrets "weren't really kept", if you were to read the links, at least one of these people had nasty rumors swirling all around him. And iirc, the British counter-intelligence service filed on Hayman all but concluded he was a pedophile.

If head of "secret service" is '10 most important positions in a nation' ... and there are 10 nations ... 10x10 is 100, 1 in 100 people are pedos, nothing to explain!

You're making the unwarranted assumption we know about all of these conspiracies. It's far more likely most of such networks are never exposed, so we only ever know about few of them..

With Dutroux, we don't even know who was in on it, though given the cover-up it must have been someone important.

Who is Roth, why should I care what Elon says about him, and why on YHWH’s green Earth does it matter that he’s a Zionist?

There’s people in this world who don’t care about your fixation on the Jews.

Roth was head of moderation on Twitter. Guy who bragged about meeting with FBI so he could take orders on what to delete.

Helped bury the Biden scandal, apparently. Is being blamed for CP takedowns being slow on twitter.

Also has a suggestive twitter account, a now-deleted pornographic alt (otterriffic) , and a thesis about getting fucked on grindr, which includes some unfortunate musing about how to accomodate teenagers on that particular sex app. (excluding them would be unfortunate in his view).

/images/16708672255544415.webp

To be fair, I think the screengrab is taking the full thesis a little out of context. For the full paragraph:

These accounts echo many of the classic tropes of online child safety narratives: the essentially dangerous nature of new media; the need to impose strict, top-down controls on how minors use the internet; a digital reincarnation of “stranger danger” in the figure of the older male sexual predator; and the importance of raising children to be safety-savvy and highly private. Yet, absent from these discussions is even a cursory recognition that the new medium of gay-targeted social networking may be a crucial social outlet for gay, bisexual, and questioning youth. While gay youth-oriented chat rooms and social networking services were available in the early 2000s, these services have largely fallen by the wayside, in favor of general-purpose platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Snapchat. Perhaps this is truly representative of an increasingly absent demand among young adults for networked spaces to engage with peers about their sexuality; but it’s worth considering how, if at all, the current generation of popular sites of gay networked sociability might fit into an overall queer social landscape that increasingly includes individuals under the age of 18. Even with the service’s extensive content management, Grindr may well be too lewd or too hook-up-oriented to be a safe and age-appropriate resource for teenagers; but the fact that people under 18 are on these services already indicates that we can’t readily dismiss these platforms out of hand as loci for queer youth culture. Rather than merely trying to absolve themselves of legal responsibility or, worse, trying to drive out teenagers entirely, service providers should instead focus on crafting safety strategies that can accommodate a wide variety of use cases for platforms like Grindr — including, possibly, their role in safely connecting queer young adults.

((Grindr argued at length that it wasn't 'just' a hookup app at this time, probably more to avoid getting Apple'd than anything else.))

I think Roth treats the problem of minor access to adult services a little too blithely for his role, but I think there's a more plausible read where he was arguing in favor of either a Grindr-run non-adult service, or (preferentially) a different party running strictly safe social content available for younger people. The latter has a lot of problems, both the obvious and the not-obvious, but sites like that have existed in ways that didn't immediately devolve into hookup forums; they largely just didn't make the transition from phpBB to modern social media well if at all.

I'm leaning more towards Roth being a horny, not very smart guy who fucked up and was thus deemed safe enough to be used for an important job, rather than him being some sinister sicko.

But who knows.

Really highlights the importance of "not being horny on main", had he simply completely segregated his horny stuff, he'd not have to worry now much apart from perhaps having to run away from Israel over the censorship issue.

If 15 year old straight boys had a large population of pretty adult women who would probably fuck them if they could plausibly pretend to be 18, I guarantee that most of them would lie, cheat and steal to do so. Denial of these facts is denying basic observed male sexuality.

And of course this is a who/whom issue. Milo got cancelled for openly discussing his own experiences with this. Dan Savage did not. Now the media is defending Roth for the same.

I will also suggest - based on my own personal experience - that useful insights can be gained by reading old greek literature. In the locale I lived as a teenager, gay sex was illegal until 2018. In my view I benefitted from a relationship with a considerably older man - he was a bit of a mentor and taught me quite a bit about bodybuilding, sex and navigating non-PMC Indian life as a homosexual. This seems to have been common and accepted by the Greeks - it's a part of gay relations that I don't think has much of a straight analogue.

By "non-PMC Indian life", I mean that the experience of a civil service guy in what is now Telangana will be quite different from that of a techbro in Bangalore.

I also think Roth is just wrong. Provided there is a culture where older bodybuilder + teenage twink relations are treated as necessarily being a mentor/mentee type relation, they are definitely superior to two teenagers smelling each other's farts. However my general impression of gay culture in the US is that there's absolutely no way this culture could be built. It fundamentally conflicts with the leftist "anything that sounds bad is good" culture that has fully colonized gay America.

Dan Savage did not.

I thought a lot of the younger set of LGBT people didn't like Dan Savage anyways.

By "non-PMC Indian life", I mean that the experience of a civil service guy in what is now Telangana will be quite different from that of a techbro in Bangalore.

Ah, this reminded me of a conversation I had with a classmate of mine back in med school in India:

"Ah, SMH, isn't it so fucking annoying when you get felt up by old men on the bus?"

"- I can't really say that's been my experience on the bus."

Then he went on for quite a while about how difficult public transport is for him, what with all the randy old goats who try and cop a feel of his ass on a regular basis.

I was floored when he pulled out his phone to show me his DMs, they were flooded with hundreds of messages, you'd have thought he had an OnlyFans from the sheer number and horniness. Apparently in India, or my parts of it, the moment you sleep with a gay guy, your number gets shared with every single other gay person in the state.

I wonder if he's out of the closet now. Not that even my atrophied gaydar couldn't tell, he just looked gay.

What Roth then argues is that protecting children from abuse and exploitation requires admitting this reality and then maybe working to provide younger gay guys with safer spaces where they won't be preyed on by older men, but where they can still meet guys their age. That also seems reasonable

Depends on how you spin it: "A new Sodom has been opened in our town where the so-called progressives invite our children to try gay sex with each other!"

Yoel Roth is newsworthy, and clearly Culture War material, but what point are you trying to make by dredging Twitter to find evidence that he's a "Zionist"? This looks like a clear example of booing your outgroup and waging the Culture War.

Elon got harshly booed on stage with Dave Chappelle, and I am absolutely baffled. I thought the people who still enjoyed Dave's comedy post-The Closer (when he got deemed transphobic by left-wing activists) would be indifferent, if not positive, towards Elon Musk. But people who like Chappelle and not Elon are not only common, but the majority of the people in this audience. Did I miss something?

This surprised me as well.

I was thinking of trying to analyze the potential political motives, but that is probably pointless. With a small enough crowd you can have a single table swing the mood of the entire room. And a "boo" isn't the clearest signal. They might be booking him because he booted Kanye off Twitter, or booing him because he allowed Trump back on Twitter, or some parochial issue like not enjoying his presence in Austin. Or all of the above, because you don't need to coordinate with others on why you are booing someone.

They might just find Elon Musk an annoying, faintly ridiculous figure, and not certainly someone they are interested in hearing about when they've come to see Dave Chappelle, a figure who (unlike Elon, generally) is consistently funny and tells good jokes.

They might be booking him because he booted Kanye off Twitter,

Of all of the reasons they booed him, this is not among them lol. Probably they would have booed Kanye too.

Probably because Elon is just another version of orange man bad.

It was in San Francisco. Not exactly that surprising.

This was my interpretation as well. If the show was in LA I think it would have gone differently.

And yet San Francisco was happy to see notorious transphobic TERF and mild anti-Semite Dave Chappelle.

Maybe his opinions on the trans thing are less unpopular than the screeching media wants you to think. Or even: they screech precisely so no one can sit and have a sober moment to reflect how popular this opinion is. Instead the hope is that the media cacophony is loud enough to convince you it isn't and so you get cowed into silence.

Again: if the audience isn't bothered by Chappelle's trans stuff, then what could possibly bother them about Elon?

  • His shitposting.

  • His buying of Twitter

  • The report about him settling sexual harassment lawsuits

  • His weird breeding fetish

  • His oversaturation and the way certain types really praise him? (This might have actually gotten weaker recently, as he's gotten more polarizing)

  • Him proposing dubious projects like the hyperloop

  • Him taking over a social media site and firing a bunch of people in what many people (who don't give a shit about business reasons) could find off-putting.

  • The general "unblue" vibe he seems to have picked up recently (or was imposed on him)

  • The media told them he Did A Thing That Was Bad but it was something they actually care about as opposed to the trans issue.

  • Perhaps the simplest and already stated above: Him not being a comedian, which is what they paid for? People don't necessarily want to pay money to help a rich millionaire comedian live out his culture war skirmish and fete his new allies.

Yeah, the last thing I think about in relation to Elon is trans issues.

That said, these days I'm mostly just disappointed in Elon. I wouldn't boo him, but I wouldn't cheer him either.

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The expansion is that western civilisation is fucked.

To expand the expansion further: around the gay marriage debates of the 2010s, a losing rearguard argument was put forward by the anti side that I nonetheless think was sound. It goes: expanding the concept of marriage such that it could include gay couples without self-contradiction means changing what all marriages are about. Or more precisely, affirming a change which had been underway in high Western culture since the 60s/70s.

This was the change whereby marriages went from being a cradle for families and child-rearing, to being a site for self-fulfilment and self-actualisation. Marriage's telos was to be fulfilment, and a right to marriage therefore follows from enlightenment rights to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness". No-one within the thinkable window in the 2010s was going to make the argument that gay couples couldn't pursue happiness and shared fulfilment as effectively as straight couples, so excluding them from marriage became artirary, a relic of an earlier belief system. A 1950s vision centred on nuclear families ironically began to look a bit camp (the sincere concern with flower arrangements! A man's wedding is the absolute zenith of most straight men's concern with flower arrangements).

There's a pretty direct line from no-shame divorce to gay marriage. The internal logic leads naturally there, as was pointed out many times by both pro and anti sides (Jon Stewart voice: "What sanctity?? [Republican] is already three-times divorced, and my great aunt Ethel is dancing her tuchas off at over-70s singles nights at the [conservative place]. What are gays going to do to this institution that you haven't done already?)

Anyway, back to the West being fucked: in a context where marriage is a thing that some people like to do because it's fulfilling (and self-fulfilment is high status, marriage is decreasingly for the hoi polloi, who probably are fulfilled by like nativism or something idgaf), then there's only a weak vestigial pairing between pairing and rearing. At this stage the link between the two is like having English mustard with steak; some people like it and it's a traditional combo, but others find [the continuation of the human species] a bit uncomfortable and that's okay.

This is the sense in which, post-2010s, all marriages are gay marriages. "If you don't like gay marriage then don't marry someone of the same sex!"

Too late, Jon Stewart from 2010: I'm now gay-married to my straight spouse.

Hence, together with the brittle crystalising of sexuality taking place in modern culture (you may have one of several dozen/hundred sexual tastes, that's consumerist liberation, but your predilictions must be ordered and legible. Disordered, messy, dangerous sex goes back in the "problematic" box) it follows naturally that the act of sustaining the human race becomes kink #312a, and a rather outré one at that.

It's funny in a late 20th century UK sitcom way; the empire shrinks and crumbles, we are reduced, but there are bleak gags to be had.

A final note: the reason why this "kink" is a bit outré is due to demographic anxiety in whites, which by the way both isn't happening and is A Good Thing. I've never heard anyone criticise a profoundly fecund NBA player as being possessed of a breeding kink.

(Not trying to rebut you in particular here. This is a rant I've had building up for a while, and you provided a lead-in.)

Him proposing dubious projects like the hyperloop

It's funny: I'm having trouble remembering when he proposed something that didn't strike lots of people as highly dubious. I'm most familiar with SpaceX among his companies, so I'll use examples from there. Some of his absurd ideas:

  1. A private space company without lots of legacy engineering expertise, many billions of dollars of government money on cost-plus contracts, and so on. This was considered somewhere between unlikely and impossible -- Everybody Knows that space is the exclusive domain of governments and their closely-affiliated contractors. (I was online at the time, and I remember the ridicule!)

  2. Lots of people were dunking on the idea of propulsively landing Falcon 9 lower stages -- on tiny barges in the ocean, of all things! -- and the jeering intensified when the early landing attempts kept turning into an entertaining procession of explosion videos. Then one day they stopped exploding, and kept on not exploding at least 9 times out of 10, with reliability improving over time.

  3. A satellite internet constellation in low-earth orbit?! The dumber critics complained that it would have horrible ping times (because they got LEO confused with GEO), and the smarter critics thought that launching thousands of satellites that you have to replace every 5 years would be so ludicrously expensive that it would be a complete non-starter. Today there are more than 3000 mass-produced Starlink satellites in the sky; cost estimates look surprisingly good now, and are set to become much better with Starship launching. They're also trying to turn it into a military-contracting cash cow by offering the US DoD some capabilities that it badly wants, with their very-dramatically-named Starshield program.

  4. Speaking of Starship, it has been ridiculed quite a bit, though the specific contents of that ridicule have been forced to change over the years. At first the problem was that they were trying to make a high-performance methalox engine of a type that had never successfully been made before -- but between some fancy new alloys and GPU-aided combustion chamber modeling, they managed to make the engine work. Then people were laughing at the idea of making the body out of steel plates welded together by guys whose previous job was water tower construction -- but it turned out to work really well in practice. Now people are scoffing at the idea that the $/kg to orbit could be anywhere near as low as SpaceX is predicting... and we'll see how that goes.

Over the years one starts to notice a pattern here. Musk has proposed a lot of things that ended up changing after being found unworkable or suboptimal, but in general, I'm wary of saying that any of them are obviously not going to work. If nothing else, he employs engineers who are capable of doing back-of-the-envelope calculations.

Elon's "transphobia" isn't the only thing that he gets heat for. There's a classism aspect as well, where the mere fact that he's the richest man on Earth makes him disliked by a lot of people, and his irreverent shitposting on Twitter on top of that exacerbates things, regardless of the contents of his shitposting. Chappelle himself doesn't tend to touch on class division all that much in his comedy, but it wouldn't surprise me if his audience tends to skew a bit on the working class side, given how much of his comedy tends to poke fun at the upper class. They might not have the burning hatred for Elon that so much of the upper class does, but having someone you just know primarily as a rich pompous twit - the richest pompous twit - come out when you just wanted to get some laughs from the funny man you paid likely hundreds of dollars to see is probably not the most pleasant surprise.

For a couple years before the twitter thing, I was starting to see verbal skirmishes between journalists and Elon. Given that he codes grey-tribe tech and the general hitpieces that have been done on him for awhile, the real reason people are bothered by Elon is just that he is the enemy. It has nothing to do with trans issues. Any lists that someone gives (e.g. Breeding kink) is not a reason to hate him, but those items do work as nice excuses.

It might be petty but honestly I've always found his 'how do you do fellow zoomers' shtick kinda cringe. The thing where he pretends to be down with the kids and all their epic dank maymays, y'know? For some people maybe that's enough to tip the scales against him. Then of course there's just the fact he's the richest man on Earth, people might feel he's mishandled Twitter or some of his other ventures, that moment he called a guy who rescued a bunch of trapped kids a paedophile for no good reason, maybe other stuff I haven't heard of. Honestly I'm a bit confused by the notion that if you're anti-woke you apparently have to like Musk.

It’s totally possible that the blue tribe just doesn’t like Elon musk for reasons that aren’t directly related to his opinions on trans.

Identity, personal history, his personal behavior, take your pick.

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Well, probably no republicans in a chappelle crowd in San Francisco, at least- he’s reasonably popular among the red tribe elite.

Callous treatment of tech employees, especially politically active ones -- I'm sure there were a bunch in the SF audience.

Blue elites may have developed a disdain for Chappelle. For the rank and file (and anybody who grew up with his old show), Dave still has the cultural cachet of being the 'the GOAT' and for his BLM sympathies. The trans stuff is at most slightly unfortunate in their eyes, but not enough to tip the scales.

Dave Chapelle is generally funny and Elon Musk is generally not.

nah. This is entirely related to twitter , if I had to guess.

Judging from the clip, the boos started as soon as Elon was introduced, before he had the opportunity to say anything that would get booed.

If I was at a show to see a comedian and some unfunny nerd took the mike, I'd probably boo as well.

I mean, I wouldn't, I was raised to think talking in the theater would lead to immediate divine retribution, but I can easily see why someone would (especially given that comedy show audiences have a tradition of heckling if they think you're not funny).

I thought the people who still enjoyed Dave's comedy post-The Closer (when he got deemed transphobic by left-wing activists) would be indifferent, if not positive, towards Elon Musk.

I'd be interested to hear why you think this. I get the impression that there are loud voices on social media opposed to both Musk and Chappelle but I'm not sure that implies the converse, that people who like Chappelle must like Musk.

People hate Musk because he wants to allow transphobic (and other hateful) speech on Twitter. People hate Chappelle for being transphobic. People who like Chappelle are willing to tolerate his transphobia, so I figured they'd also be willing to tolerate Elon's.

Not that I consider either of them transphobic in any meaningful sense. The point is that the media views them as transphobic for having insufficient reverence towards trans people.

Right, but if neither Musk nor Chappelle are transphobic then transphobia isn't a metric people will use to judge them. So maybe despite what the media says, the average person agrees with you that neither of them are transphobic?

I remember going to a punk show during the height of "rock against Bush" or whatever circa 2005-2007. Half way through the show, the band stopped playing, lowered a screen, and started projecting an anti-Bush video. Despite probably 80+ percent of the crowd agreeing with the politics, there was almost a riot. People immediately started booing and throwing things as the screen until the venue turned it off.

People really, really hate feeling like their status as a captive audience is being abused.

One of the reasons the wokening of sportscasting yielded lower audiences. Humans who feel constrained will either prefer to struggle against their shackles or accept them on a fundamental level and say they deserve them.

I hear some very loud boos but it doesn’t sound like most of the audience is booing.

Yep. All I really hear is a loud din, and the actual balance of cheers/boos probably going to be influenced by where the person filming was seated.

And that's assuming the audio wasn't tampered with.

The short answer is that Musk has positioned himself as red tribe or at least anti-blue-tribe, whereas Chappelle has positioned himself as more like heterodox blue tribe.

The average view I hear about Chappelle from blue tribe people I know is something like "his latest stuff has been in bad taste and his quality has gone downhill lately, but he's still a comedy legend and Chappelle's Show was amazing." This type of person would still go to a Chappelle standup show, in the same way someone might go to a Paul McCartney concert even if they don't like any of the music McCartney has put out since the 70s.

The average view I hear about Musk from blue tribe people I know is "he's a narcissistic rich manbaby whose family owned slaves or something." In other words, just uniformly negative.

So I think there's a decent sized slice of the blue tribe that likes Chappelle but hates Musk.

I represent as sample of that population.

I think Chapelle is too in his feelings about people not liking his trans jokes, but he's still DAVE FUCKING CHAPELLE. Shit, I even liked most of his trans material, it's his bitching and moaning about being "cancelled" on his 73'd netflix special that's cringe.

Musk is just pure cringe top to bottom. I miss just thinking "his fans are lame as fuck but dude is launching rockets and popularizing electric cars and making long bomb bets on innovative manufacturing techniques" instead of "Oh, that insecure guy who called a recue diver a pedophile 'cause he didn't want his stupid submarine and who did all that Hyperloop snake oil bullshit and who did all that boring company snake oil bullshit and and and". Dude needs to take up boxing or mma or something and work up some self respect.

I'm not sure the responses at a single comedy venue are a good stand-in for culture war attitudes, people might just think he's an asshole and not like him.

Regardless of that his response is deeply pathetic: https://i.imgur.com/jRyHIK2.jpg

He's doing the Boo-urns thing, talking like a dweeb "It's almost as if" and is way more insecure than the richest man in the world should present himself as.

“Pretty sure they weren’t booing; they were just shouting ‘Go Brandon’.”

Musk acts like an eight year old and I don't care that he's poking people I don't like; it's just embarrassing to be so rich and still be a tantrum-prone child

talking like a dweeb

Maybe he just is a dweeb? He's shown himself to be thin-skinned and frankly pathetic on other occasions (accusing a guy of being a pedophile for criticizing his suggestions)

The "RL Tony Stark" image only held when he kept his mouth shut.

Have you ever seen any of his Tesla unveilings? He seemed like a gigantic dweeb on all of them, especially when breaking the unbreakable window he was showing off.

How is that boo-urns? He's not pretending nobody is booing him, he is saying why he thinks he got more boos than usual. Is he just not supposed to say anything? Because this actually seems pretty reserved for Musk on twitter I think.

Well the obvious go-to snarky response would be something along the lines of "If you San Fransisco losers are booing me I must be doing something right." (https://youtube.com/watch?v=UgCK8PnFK_Y) Beyond that the response doesn't really matter, but the fact that he's trying to argue on twitter about the percentage of people cheering for him is just pathetic.

Oh it's definitely pathetic, I just think it's business as usual for Musk. My model of him is "nerd who became extraordinarily popular and has no idea what to do with that."

No mention of Bayes yet?

SF has so many progressive people that you will still end up with mostly progressive crowd at an event (Chappelle) that is slightly less progressive coded.

As a bit of anecdata, I've always liked Chappelle and always disliked Musk. From the start, I have viewed Tesla as part green grift and part cult of personality - I've enjoyed making fun of people that buy them for as long as the company's been around and that impulse hasn't left me disappointed so far. I do give Musk a lot of credit for how he's approached businesses, but I'd probably join in on the booing just because it's pretty funny. That he seems to be so thin-skinned and approval-seeking makes it significantly funnier.

This is funny or sad ,depending on how you look at it

US Justice Dept Mulling Criminal Charges Against Binance Founder CZ: Report https://decrypt.co/116961/us-justice-dept-mulling-criminal-charges-against-binance-founder-cz-report

Imagine you're CZ. You just exposed one of the biggest fraudsters ever. And now the DOJ wants to investage...you. Meanwhile, the actual fraudster is still free, giving interviews. Yeah, the DOJ has been looking into binance for years, but it shows the unfairness of it all I guess.

Yeah, the US regulation on the crypto space has just been embarrassing imo. 10 years after crypto was created, we still have basically 0 regulatory framework and only one major exchange. It's like the financial institutions aren't even trying.

The U.S. barely has a decent regulatory framework for social media, which is pushing 20 years.

None for Crypto, which is 10 years old.

AI regulation is going be implemented approximately 40 years after the singularity, at this rate.

Inept regulation may have also made institutional players feel more comfortable about jumping into crypto, which could have made situations like the FTX collapse worse.

Meh, there isn't really a need for a regulatory framework for crypto. Its just ForEx. ForEx is overregulated already.

While it would surely be emotionally satisfying to arrest and indict Sam Bankman-Fried the reason the DoJ moves slowly is that after you bring an indictment there are avenues for the defendant to challenge further investigatory actions and there is a constitutional right to a speedy trial so you also face time limits in how long you can defer from the indictment to the trial (unless the Defendant consents). This creates a bias towards making sure you gather all the evidence you reasonably can before bringing an indictment.

Frankly, the investigation(s) into Binance seem good to me. Surely it's better to stop the fraud while it's occurring (and before funds have been lost) than let it continue and steal more from people.

Frankly, the investigation(s) into Binance seem good to me. Surely it's better to stop the fraud while it's occurring (and before funds have been lost) than let it continue and steal more from people.

I disagree even though I still think crypto is a bad investment . I don't even think a fraud was committed in the case of binance, unlike FTX. Unless they are stealing money from people like in the case of SBF/FTX, I don't care what they do. Money laundering seems like a BS reason so the US can enforce its monopoly/reach on global finance. It's like "We don't like your business. Because some shady money was occasionally passed through it, we will try to shut it down even though your businesses otherwise did nothing illegal and customers are happy."

What evidence makes you think fraud hasn't been committed in the case of Binance? Does this evidence differ from evidence we had about FTX one year ago about whether they were committing fraud? Frankly, given the number of large volume crypto exchanges that have turned out to be frauds I kind of think "this exchange is committing fraud" is a pretty good prior.

Frankly, given the number of large volume crypto exchanges that have turned out to be frauds I kind of think

It's not as many as you probably assume . MtGox, FTX, maybe some others...out of hundreds of exchanges. The reason why fraud is not more prevalent, i suppose, is because running an exchange is quite profitable, without having to resort to fraud, such as fees. Odds are Binance is not fraudulent. An exchange being hacked and customer funds being lost is not the same as fraudulent (unless it was an inside job, I suppose).

Here's a list of ~450 (by line count) exchanges which failed: https://www.cryptowisser.com/exchange-graveyard/

75 exchanges closed down in 2020: https://cointelegraph.com/news/75-crypto-exchanges-have-closed-down-so-far-in-2020

51 in 2020: https://news.bitcoin.com/cryptowisser-51-crypto-exchanges-dead-in-2022-exchange-deaths-down-40-despite-crypto-winter/

https://coinjournal.net/news/42-percent-of-failed-crypto-exchanges-vanished-leaving-users-in-the-lurch/ lists 94 in 2020 and 81 in 2020... Higher than the others. From my work, there are more than a few which certainly weren't listed in the above. (Some 0 years when quite a few scams occurred.) Note, 42% disappeared without any justification at all.

shutting down is not the same as the exchange not making its users whole due to fraud.

not making its users whole due to fraud

And that's half the instances.

Lot of which failed to really launch/aggregate large amounts of volume, though.

¿Por que no los dos?

I don’t really see a problem with an investigation of a second fraud. It’s not like CZ is behind bars. So long as both get justice served eventually.

Oh, and it looks like CZ and SBF are having a slapfight over Tether too. Maybe they’ll both incriminate themselves further?

What makes you think that CZ isn't himself a fraudster?

CZ sent texts to SBF complaining about him selling 250K of Tether and how it might cause a depeg. If Tether has a $60billion market cap and people redeem all the time and it wasn't fraudulent (as it almost certainly is) then why does CZ think $250K would seriously impact it?

Beyond that: why is he even texting a competitor about his specific trades?

Beyond even that: after what happened with FTX CZ and everyone else in the crypto space has an incentive to appear transparent, yet he refused to do an actual grown-up audit.

Instead, like FTX and Tether (again: two almost certainly fraudulent things) he basically circles back round to "take our word (or this random attestation that isn't an audit) for it". I believe this is cause he can't, just like SBF (who also reassured everyone hoping to avoid a bank run). I think it's the same scenario playing out in slow motion.

tl;dr: I think they're all crooks and CZ stabbed SBF mainly due to SBF trying to amass political power and throwing shots at Binance/CZ with it. It was imperial court intrigue, not altruism. I think they're all playing the same game (except maybe Coinbase, which iirc is public and thus regulated) so I'm not surprised that CZ was able to "expose" SBF. SBF's problem was just hubris in breaking the code among thieves.

This makes SBF look bad

Mr. Zhao was concerned that Mr. Bankman-Fried was orchestrating crypto trades that could send the industry into a meltdown. “Stop now, don’t cause more damage,” Mr. Zhao wrote in a group chat with Mr. Bankman-Fried and other crypto executives on Nov. 10. “The more damage you do now, the more jail time.”

Tether is not run by binance. "Tether Limited is owned by the Hong Kong-based company iFinex Inc., which also owns the Bitfinex cryptocurrency exchange. As of July 2022, Tether Limited has minted the USDT stablecoin on ten protocols and blockchains."

Tether is not run by binance.

No, but there seems to be incestuous, mutual relationships between these exchanges and Tether, just as these exchanges are trading each others coins (or apparently helping each other strategize on trades...)

CZ clearly thinks that Tether is necessary for the crypto space ( to prop up the price of bitcoin by pumping fradulent "backed" USDT), they are apparently in a mutually dependent relationship given his concerns.

Where is the evidence for Tether being fraudulent? Everyone seems to imply that it's a fraud, but where is the proof?

Tether is ancient by crypto standards. It's the oldest and biggest stablecoin. It has defied at least five years of doommongering and considerable stresses in the 2017 crash, the COVID crash and the most recent crash. There are occasionally brief depegs, where it might go down to 0.99 cents or lower. So what? It's a live system, it's not living in the banking world of 'oh it will actually take us three business days to move your money (which purely exists in our spreadsheet)'. I highly doubt most banks could deal with an 80% share price crash, they'd need a bailout. Most banks don't have anywhere near the reserves tether does, proportionate to liabilities. That's the nature of fractional reserve banking.

Things like Luna and FTX are young and new by comparison.

If you go to their website they have some accountants describing their reserves, are you saying they're lying? Given that much of their holdings are US treasury bonds, they'll be making some decent returns there as interest rates rise.

https://tether.to/en/transparency/#reports

I remember reading this and bookmarking it a while ago, no idea how accurate it is (original author got banned from medium): http://web.archive.org/web/20210904210829/https://medium.com/nerd-for-tech/greatest-scam-in-history-by-tether-76ac059b9550

tldr: He indeed thinks that there's far less backing tether than they claim, based on not performing an independent audit, and its primary use is gassing up the price of bitcoin.

For some reason that link isn't working for me, it just keeps refreshing the page every 3 seconds so I can't read it. I guess it rather backs up webarchive begging for funds.

I know Scott also posted a link to a convincing sounding anti-Tether essay too. But consider how much misinformation there is in the crypto-sphere, by nature of rumors moving markets very quickly. There are a lot of people who'd be happy to see Tether fail, since they can make a lot of money shorting it at the right time. It's difficult to profit from a stablecoin staying stable.

I haven't/can't actually read the medium article. But don't you think that if he got banned, then something might be suss about it? I'd imagine Medium has some kind of rule against impersonation or propagandizing. If Tether isn't backed, how come people have been able to take about 20 billion out of it? The marketcap has fallen a lot since May 2022, that means coins are being removed from circulation by redemption back to USD.

https://coinmarketcap.com/currencies/tether/

Maybe someday it will collapse. But I've gotten so tired of the seemingly never-ending story of Tether going under. There were supposed to be revelations coming out years ago about this. People have been panicking about it for so long now.

It's entirely possibly he was bullshitting. I also couldn't load the article, so I just ctrl+c ctrl+v'd it into notepad and scrolled down to the text.

Tether's story went from "backed 1:1 to dollars" to "holding various tokens" to "we mostly have Chinese corporate paper" all along fighting or failing audits by state regulators and redefining what it's backed by, while printing billions a month without relative inflows.

Where is the evidence for Tether being fraudulent?

Surely you're joking? Google "Tether scam" and there's a deluge of proof, including successful investigations against Tether, which led to Tether providing new reserve definitions.

we mostly have Chinese corporate paper

According to whom? A majority of their reserves are US treasuries according to BDO as of September 2022.

If you take a quick look at the market cap, about 20 billion Tether has been redeemed for USD since May 2022. You're giving the 2021 argument but we've moved on since then. Now that it's not printing billions a month but actually had billions withdrawn the last few months, does that invert your conclusion?

BDO:

Our opinion is limited solely to the CRR and the corresponding consolidated total assets and consolidated total liabilities as of 30 September 2022. Activity prior to and after this time and date was not considered when testing the balances and information described above.

They just confirmed that Tether claimed they had so and so assets on paper - not whence and why. It's literally meaningless. But sure, avoiding an audit for 5 years, and changing their claims of holdings many times is totally a string of bonafide grade-a deeds of trustworthiness!

If you collate redemption events with outside events, it's rather clear most is just drawing numbers down entirely. SBF's plots alone involved billions of Tether which were wiped off the books without fiat appearing. Tether created the tokens out of nothing and then wiped them later. Now, I don't just mean a few billions. Alameda and Cumberland received 70% of all Tether. There are concrete examples like 3 Arrows "redeeming" more than 2x the Tether it supposedly had accumulated around May. Now, in March it continued receiving more Tether - but directly on exchanges instead of its historical wallets.

There are many fun treatments like: https://protos.com/tether-papers-crypto-stablecoin-usdt-investigation-analysis/

Are you saying it wasn't a scam on the 30th of September but it was before and after? Or are you saying they just took Tether's word for it?

From the end of page 1, halfway down through page 2 it lists all the things they did. They checked over the blockchain records, they got confirmation letters from banks, looked for the collateral in the loans... Not what I'd call 'confirming that Tether claimed things'.

Or are you saying they just took Tether's word for it?

Yes.

Learn some accounting. They go through significantly more scrutiny when you buy a house. Tether has been shown to double or quadruple count assets in the past. Tether has been shown to literally make things up. Plenty of other friendly actors move 10x the assets into an account then remove it the day after.

From the end of page 1, halfway down through page 2 it lists all the things they did. They checked over the blockchain records, they got confirmation letters from banks, looked for the collateral in the loans... Not what I'd call 'confirming that Tether claimed things'.

That was a hit piece against Tether you know. They investigated it and found large amounts of bs and contradictory flows, not BDO.

In 2017 https://ag.ny.gov/press-release/2021/attorney-general-james-ends-virtual-currency-trading-platform-bitfinexs-illegal

Tether published a self-proclaimed ‘verification’ of its cash reserves, in 2017, that it characterized as “a good faith effort on our behalf to provide an interim analysis of our cash position.” In reality, however, the cash ostensibly backing tethers had only been placed in Tether’s account as of the very morning of the company’s ‘verification.’

It disappeared the same day.

In march, Tether claimed 4.96 billion in "other investments (including digital currencies)" when the crypto market was over 2 trillion. After it dropped under 900 million a few months later, Tether claimed 5 billion. The numbers they claim are verifiable bullshit.

Tether's story went from "backed 1:1 to dollars" to "holding various tokens" to "we mostly have Chinese corporate paper"

Specifically: after it settled a court case in NY with the attorney general stating that Tether wasn't backed 1:1 to USD.

They just stated that they did no wrong doing and were vindicated, updated their story to holding commercial paper and other things other than USD and continued on their day. As the saying goes: the market can stay irrational for longer than you can stay solvent, so I'm not particularly moved by the fact that Tether is old.

Lying about 1:1 USD backing is enough imo. Why would anyone trust them after that when, upon pressure, suddenly we get a different (less problematic) story once they run into trouble? Especially since they continually refuse to do an audit and, iirc, refused to be clear about which paper they held last time they were questioned on CNBC.

I think it's fair enough. Binance is shaky itself, CZ just managed in time to pull the rug out from under FTX to do down his rival before anything happened to his own house of cards.

Bankman-Fried is running his mouth off enough that I imagine some kind of criminal charges are in the works, but I also have an idea that the Justice Department is holding off while the receivers are in charge to try and let them recover some assets for the creditors. Once that has been sorted out as much as it can be, then jail time (even if a short period) for Bankman-Fried etc. is not impossible. I do think they have to sort out who knew what and can be held responsible, because of the messy, tangled way FTX and Alameda Research were run; should Singh and Wang and Ellison, for example, all be held equally responsible as Bankman-Fried?

I have also seen some online speculation that Ellison is maybe in the US talking to the Justice Department to cut a deal about giving evidence against Bankman-Fried in return for some sort of plea bargain, but that's all only speculation.

I think it's fair enough. Binance is shaky itself, CZ just managed in time to pull the rug out from under FTX to do down his rival before anything happened to his own house of cards.

So many variables here: did CZ expect to pick up FTX for cheap after crashing it to shore up his own position and then discovered SBF had been even more profligate than he thought?

Now no one has confidence and people keep asking him to audit (I assume, since he keeps tweeting deflections).

I think there were politics at work. Bankman-Fried seems to have represented FTX as the better alternative to what was out there - let me quote that invaluable Sequoia article once more:

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.

...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.

He was also cosying up to politicians and regulators, even writing his own set of suggested regulations (which seem to have been widely panned) and part of that was badmouthing rivals like Binance. So there was bad blood there and no love lost and it seems to have hit a peak when FTX bought out Binance's investment in it in 2021.

I think, but this is only my own personal view, that Binance 'riding to the rescue' when Bankman-Fried was begging for investors to keep FTX afloat was nothing more than a way of making sure the entire thing collapsed. Revenge and profit in one!

I think simpler is pyramid schemes need a large infeed / network effect. He killed off a competing pyramid, so more people to feed his base.

The FBI has operated as a political hit-squad for the Democratic Party since the days of J Edgar Hoover. Bankman-Fried/FTX was the Democratic Party's second largest individual donor. TINACBNIEAC.

They spent the 50s hunting Commies, the 60s blackmailing civil rights leaders, and the 70s getting grilled for COINTELPRO. Burn down one compound and I suppose that’s water under the bridge.

You mean they spent the 50's helping the Democratic party establishment keep it's radicals in check, the 60s blackmailing civil rights leaders on behalf of segregationist Democrats, and the 70s fighting a rear-guard action for the "deep-state", after the splitting of the Democratic party between segregationists and anti-segregationists handed the Republicans a pair of decisive victories in 68 and 72.

I'd like to ask this question to both you and @netstack , then: what about the 80's and 90's? Besides some shootouts and Waco, anyways.

Do you remember the FBI agents from Die Hard? Do you remember how they were portrayed as a pair of vaguely clueless trigger happy cowboys who didn't really care about saving the hostages? That was(is?) the mainstream/normie impression of the FBI through the 80s and early 90s.

I remember growing up on Tom Clancy novels in the 90s, where the FBI and its agents were portrayed as unfailingly competent, loyal, and incorruptible. I'd say Tom Clancy was pretty normie, no? I'd be lying if I didn't admit that my media diet shaped my political perceptions.

Then again, Tom Clancy himself was very much establishment GOP, but it seems to me that there was a time that our currently evident cleavages weren't quite so glaring.

Granted it's been over a decade since I've read any of the books other than Patriot Games and Hunt for Red October but my recollection is that Clancy's DoJ-alligned characters (Clark, Chavez, Oreza, et al) had a bit of the Dirty Harry vibe going on, wherein they tended to save the day in spite of the chain of command rather than thanks to it.

Clark in particular had a fair amount of that. Without Remorse, his origin story, has him completely outside the law, but it also has Jack Ryan's dad as the detective attempting to catch him, and a lot of the point of the novel is about how what he's doing really isn't okay. Particularly on the military side of things, there's a great deal of grousing about what we might term REMFs; Clear and Present Danger and The Sum of All Fears both hinge on jackass politicians fucking things up for the honest servicemen under them, and there's more of that in the other books as well. Still, especially at the level of the Feds and the Military, there's a whole lot of emphasis on following procedure and getting authorization, not engaging in cowboy shenanigans. The big exception is Clear and Present Danger, which now that I think of it has a whole bunch of faintly horrifying breaches of protocol, multiple incidents of threating criminals with murder if they don't spill, and a bunch of cops arranging to scuttle the case against a pair of murderers, provided they kill two other murderers, who are going to walk because the Coasties who caught them held a faked execution to coerce confessions. Every part of that sequence is portrayed as morally acceptable, if perhaps not terribly advisable, which in itself should probably give the reader pause... but absolutely did not when I was reading it as a youngster. None of that ever involves the Bureau, though.

The FBI is represented mainly by Special Agent Dan Murray, Jack Ryan's best friend, who's basically a carbon copy of Jack Ryan, only not the main character. Clear And Present Danger initiates its main plot when the incorruptible, courageous, and universally-lauded Director of the FBI is assassinated by Columbian drug cartels, and things follow that general take for the preceding and following books. FBI agents are significant characters in pretty much every book, and they are never portrayed with anything but a halo. I think I recall J. Edgar Hoover being mentioned as being the distant past, and the Bureau Doesn't Work That Way Any More, but beyond that the books get to engaging with real-world discontents with the FBI is in one of the later books, when some white supremacists try to build a huge truck bomb to blow up the white house.

Shootouts.

I was going to suggest Heat instead of Die Hard, but a quick check tells me that’s just the LAPD. Still, that’s the impression left after two decades of tough-on-crime policy intersected with a historically laissez-faire agency. I’d say they were viewed as wannabe cowboys until grabbing a piece of the general authoritarian pie in the wake of 9/11.

They spent the 50s hunting Commies, the 60s blackmailing civil rights leaders

The Democratic party has always been anti-communist and it was especially anti-communist in the 1940s to 1960s.

The Democratic party was split on civil rights leaders in the 1960s.

Didn’t it take years after the bankruptcy for charges to be brought for Enron? My completely unfounded guess is that the DoJ is working to get a high level executive to work against SBF in order to prove intend on fraud (vs negligence if they can’t prove intent). That process could take time to establish. I would be shocked if SBF ends up not being criminally charged eventually.

I agree too. There are two competing camps here. Those who think the government is not doing enough or is going to let him off the hook due to his democratic party connections, and those who think he will be punished.

Ironically Enron is a good example on the political donations side as well. The top brass at Enron was extremely well connected with the Bush family. IMO SBF is a big fish (much bigger than Elizabeth Holmes who got serious time) and the DoJ is going to aggressively pursue him. Justice just works slowly.

You were saying? https://twitter.com/tier10k/status/1602446984090107905

Binance Withdrawals Surge as Concerns About Its Reserve Report Spook Traders

The outflow was the highest for Binance since Nov. 13, two days after FTX filed for bankruptcy protection, according to data provided by blockchain data platform Arkham Intelligence.

CZ's victory may appear pyrrhic in the long-term.

But the really interesting thing is that the US government may be effectively doing to Binance what CZ did to FTX: fomenting doubt amongst customers leading to a pullout. In this case, by announcing vague considerations of charges against CZ and Binance. Always a bigger fish.

Binance released a report by auditing firm Mazars last week claiming that its bitcoin (BTC) reserves are overcollateralized. Industry experts and recent reports flayed the document for its narrow scope

Between that + their inability to provide an actual audit and CZ tweeting like he's Hitler in his bunker...I'm betting on Binance not being long for the world.


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