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Understanding the Real Epstein Files
One of the things that pisses me off the most about conspiracy theories is that the people who are often most invested of them have done very little actual research into the known facts. For all the JFK conspiracy theorists out there, I reckon no more than a handful have actually read the Warren Commission Report. If you're going to question the official narrative, it helps to know what the official narrative actually is, and if you're going to allege a conspiracy theory, it helps if it isn't directly contradicted somewhere in the 26 volumes of supporting documentation. Public understanding of the Kennedy assassination, though, is much better than that of the Epstein scandal, which is surprising since the Epstein scandal has much more contemporary relevance. Over the past week or so, with the discussion on here, I've seen numerous people, including those whose opinions I normally respect, make certain statements that suggest that they have no actual understanding of the events in question. I'm not going to name any names or cite any specific examples, because it's not going to do any good, and I don't necessarily disagree with the conclusions they've drawn, but it seems like various aspects of the case have become conflated, and certain interpolations have entered the public consciousness that no reasonable person would make if they were familiar with the actual facts as they are known.
This is especially relevant in light of the recent (February) tranche of documents that has been released concerning Epstein. There was widespread disappointment that the documents didn't reveal anything that wasn't already known from various court filings. The real reason they were disappointing is that they didn't directly implicate anyone who wasn't already implicated. The public has created a narrative that has little relationship with the facts, and they're completely ignorant of any information that doesn't support that narrative. I've spent the past several weeks reviewing the Real Epstein Files, i.e. what's already been publicly released, and will attempt to describe relevant facts relating to two popular Epstein-related conspiracy theories: The widely-known theory that Epstein was murdered, and the more recently popularized theory that he was a Mossad agent. With respect to the second one, I'm going to specifically focus on the idea that the Sweetheart Deal he got in 2007 was the result of his status as an intelligence agent, because recounting the story of what happened in the US Attorney's office has the added benefit of providing a detailed description of what he was actually accused of, and, more importantly, what he wasn't accused of.
A Recounting of the Events that Led to Jeffrey Epstein's Initial Prosecution
In February of 2005, two high school freshmen got into a fight in gym class. Earlier that morning, Jane Doe had confided in her best friend that a rich guy had paid her $300 to giver him a massage over the weekend. The friend spent the rest of the morning telling other people, and by gym class it seemed like the whole school knew. Jane was not happy about this, and the two girls got into an argument, which resulted in a trip to the principal's office. The principle asked to search Jane's purse, where she found the $300. She claimed it was from her job. She claimed it was from selling drugs. The principal said she already knew where it came from. The girl talked.
Once Jane's parents found out, the incident was reported to police in Palm Beach. Another girl at the school had told Jane she could make a lot of money giving a rich old guy a massage, no experience necessary. When they got to the house, Mr. Epstein had Jane strip to her underwear while she gave him a massage. He was naked. He held up a vibrator to her crotch. Jane then watched the other girl do the same thing, except this time he masturbated, and fondled the girl with the vibrator while her panties were down. Then she was paid and asked for her phone number, and told she could make money any time she wanted, and would be given $200 for each girl she recruited to work for him.
The police launched an investigation, eventually identifying 29 victims in all. The stories were more or less the same: He's recruit teenage girls to give him massages, during which he would masturbate and fondle them. Sometimes the girls were clothed, sometimes they were naked. With some girls, he'd eventually offer more money for oral or vaginal sex. Some of the girls had only been there once, others were there dozens of times, and admitted to recruiting other girls for Epstein. It's worth noting here that there was no evidence at this point that Epstein had sex with anyone under the age of 18, and there is no evidence that any of the girls were coerced or threatened. Indeed, most claimed they were told at the outset that they wouldn't be expected to do anything they weren't comfortable with. While the details varied, there was an obvious pattern of behavior.
Police in Palm Beach brought the case to the State's Attorney, and were initially given an enthusiastic reception. Then the shit hit the fan. In a bid to halt the prosecution, Epstein's attorneys hired investigators to dig up dirt on the accusers. They marched into the State's Attorney's office with reams of information they had gathered. Social media posts evidencing alcohol and drug use, social media posts evidencing promiscuity. Behavioral problems. Minor criminal convictions. The witnesses would have credibility problems. That is, the ones who would actually testify. Most didn't want to participate, and the original complainant retracted her allegations. Epstein hired an attorney who worked for the same firm as a prosecutor's spouse, causing that prosecutor to be removed from the case. Epstein had evidently been tipped off to a search warrant police executed in October, as the computers connected to the house's hidden camera system had been removed. And if all this weren't enough, the girls had been paid, at a time when Florida was still prosecuting girls as young as 14 for prostitution, making it hard to prosecute Epstein without prosecuting the witnesses.
State's Attorney Barry Krischer wasn't sure how to proceed, as there wasn't much Epstein could be charged with, from a legal perspective. He was offered a misdemeanor plea for 5 years probation. He turned it down, insisting on a no contest plea. Typically in Florida, the State's Attorney will directly file charges by way of an information, bur Krischer decided to prepare for a grand jury, intending to charge Epstein with a single count of solicitation. Meanwhile Chief Reiter of the Palm Beach police was growing impatient. He felt that the State's Attorney wasn't taking the allegations seriously, and he waved away the credibility issues that Krischer was concerned about. He talked to a friend in the FBI, who put him in touch with Ann Marie Villafaña, an AUSA who specialized in crimes involving exploited children.
Making a Federal Case Out of It
In May, 2006, Villafaña opened up a case on Epstein. Reiter had expressed concerns that the scorched earth approach of Epstein's attorneys had caused the state prosecution to stall, as the debate at that time was between charging Epstein with a misdemeanor and not charging him at all. Villafaña then took the unusual step of involving Alex Acosta. The concern was that Epstein's attorneys were so aggressive that what happened in Palm Beach could happen federally. It was a complicated case involving numerous victims and multiple states, but she was willing to put in the time and the FBI was willing to put in the money. She didn't want the whole thing to be wasted, though, due to last-minute legal shenanigans. She wanted to make her case to Acosta to get his word that he wouldn't back down to pressure, though she really wanted to inoculate him to the reality that Epstein's lawyers would be knocking on his door. At this point, neither Acosta nor anyone else in the US Attorney's office had heard of Epstein, but Acosta gave her the green light. His office had just successfully prosecuted Jack Abramoff, and wasn't worried about Dershowitz or anyone else.
In the meantime, a grand jury in Florida indicted Epstein on a single count of felony solicitation (solicitation being a felony in Florida if done on three or more occasions). Villafaña feared that the Florida State's Attorney planned on using the indictment as leverage to get Epstein to plead to a lesser charge. Had Epstein done so prior to the USAO formally initiating an investigation, this would have created significant barriers for a Federal investigation, since departmental policy only allows for Federal prosecution of crimes that have already been handled in state court in extraordinary circumstances. Villafaña formally initiated the Federal investigation on July 26, 2006, making the notable decision not to inform the Palm Beach County State's Attorney, as she was concerned his office would leak the investigation's existence to Epstein's attorneys. The FBI soon began looking into the matter, and was beginning to identify more victims.
Villafaña's concern about a leak notwithstanding, Epstein quickly learned about the investigation, as the FBI was interviewing his employees and demanding documents. His attorneys reached out to Villafaña in October, requesting a meeting, but Villafaña declined. Epstein hired attorneys with contacts in the USAO. The case at the time was being supervised by Andrew Lourie, head of the West Palm Beach branch office; Matthew Menchel, Criminal Division Chief; and Jeffrey H. Sloman, First Assistant US Attorney, along with Acosta. Epstein's new attorneys bypassed Villafaña and requested a meeting from Lourie, which he granted.
The First Cracks Appear
I'm going to pause for a moment to explain some of the legal niceties of the case, as they will become relevant later when examining Acosta's actions. As most of you know, garden-variety crimes are generally handled by state courts, with the Federal government only getting involved with cases that either cross state lines or offend some other Federal interest. When Villafaña agreed to take the case, she did so because she believed the following Federal interests were involved:
That Epstein had victimized minors through the facilities of interstate commerce, namely airplanes and telephones
The large number of victims
The cameras in Epstein's residence suggested the possibility that he had been producing child pornography
The possibility that the state investigation had stalled due to political pressure applied by Epstein's attorneys
I would note that these weren't necessarily all things that Villafaña saw as the immediate basis of Federal charges. These were things that, based on the evidence the PBPD gave her, that she though a Federal investigation might uncover, and that, had they been uncovered, would have been the basis for Federal charges. With respect to the first item, there was no substantial evidence at this point that Epstein transported a minor on his airplane. The Federal nexus was that Epstein, not a Florida resident, used his airplane to travel to Florida for the purpose of engaging in sexual conduct with minors, in violation of various Federal statutes.
Another issue at play here is the appropriateness of a Federal prosecution. As you probably know, there can be substantial overlap between state crimes and Federal crimes. While there is no constitutional bar for multiple prosecutions for the same conduct involving different sovereigns, the Justice Department does not wish to subject defendants to repeated prosecution. Since 1960, DOJ has followed the Petite Policy, which states the following (from the US Attorney's Manual):
Villafaña was vehemently opposed to meeting with Epstein's attorneys. At this point in the investigation, Epstein hadn't been charged, and she felt that they requested the meeting as an attempt to get the prosecutors to tip their hand as to what they planned on charging him with. She felt that having a meeting that early was something you did with white collar criminals who were likely to admit to specific conduct but dispute the nature of the charges. As Epstein was being charged with sex crimes, however, he wasn't likely to admit to anything. Lourie was of a different opinion. He believed that since the defense had reached out to them, they must have something to say, and since they haven't drafted an indictment yet, they may give away their defense strategy ahead of time. Therefore, they could gain an advantage by drafting the indictment to head of defense arguments at the pass. On February 1, 2007, Villafaña and Lourie met with Epstein's attorneys, who anticipated charges being brought and put forth the following arguments against them:
Villafaña's concerns aside, the meeting achieved everything the prosecutors could have hoped for. The defense told them where they were going to challenge, and they were able to tailor their case to those arguments. Villafaña prepared a draft indictment and memorandum, with the intention of filing on May 15. Lourie took a look at it and agreed with it, but wanted to take a more conservative path. The charges, if proven, were damning, and would see Epstein facing somewhere between 15 and 20 years in prison per the sentencing guidelines, with the conduct so egregious that it would call for an upward adjustment. Once indicted, any plea deal would require judicial approval, and, after seeing the scope of Epstein's misconduct, no judge would agree to a deal that involved substantially reduced or dropped charges. They felt the case was solid, but not a slam dunk, and were worried that an indictment would force them to take the case to trial, since they would have no flexibility with respect to a plea. Lourie wanted to arrest Epstein and charge him pre-indictment. He would be detained, and the prosecutors would be in a position to negotiate on their own terms.
More importantly, Lourie felt that he should let his superiors in Miami review the indictment before going forward. He and Villafaña had gone out on a limb involving Acosta early, and he didn't want to sign off on anything without running it up the chain. Menchel and Sloman reviewed it, but they wanted Acosta to take a look at it as well, and he was on vacation and had 700 other things to do once he got back. In the meantime, Eptstein's attorneys wanted another meeting, this time with a list of contemplated charges provided in advance, and with Acosta and other senior USAO managers present. As Lourie put it "they want me to tell them the statutes we're contemplating so Dershowitz can tell us why they don't apply". Villafaña, of course, was opposed to another meeting altogether. This wasn't a white collar case where they were negotiating the details of a light sentence, but a serious crime with substantial prison time at stake. She had already heard from Epstein's attorney's, who characterized their position as 1. The Petite Policy precludes Federal prosecution, 2. This shouldn't be a Federal offense, and 3. The victims were all complicit so they shouldn't be prosecuting. Ergo, the only reason for the meeting was for Epstein's attorneys to convince them to drop the case, and unless they were willing to do that, there was no reason to meet. She felt like the same thing the PBPD warned her about was happening again.
The USAO agreed to another meeting, though Acosta was not present and they weren't given the charges in advance. Dershowitz made arguments that certain charges shouldn't apply, with the overall theme that this was a state matter that shouldn't have any federal involvement. Epstein's attorneys walked away thinking they had convinced the Feds to drop the case. This wasn't true, but prosecutors were concerned about the travel issue. Specifically, the prosecution would have to prove that Epstein traveled to Florida specifically for the purpose of engaging in sex with minors. Dershowitz argued that Epstein had other reasons to travel to Florida, though nothing particularly compelling or specific. The prosecution felt this was their biggest weakness, but they were able to buttress it with the argument that he had created a network of high school girls willing to give him massages, and that it would be very difficult to recreate such a network in another place. Things were still going fairly well for the prosecution, but Villafaña became increasingly concerned with the glacial timeline her superiors in Miami were using to make a charging decision. Villafaña's initial charging memorandum was dated May 1, and Lourie submitted it to Miami a few days later. But the initial May 15 target date had come and gone, and the meeting with Epstein's attorneys was on June 26. She had been informed that it wouldn't be approved quickly, but this was excessive, and it's still unclear whether Acosta even read it himself before making a decision.
Down the Primrose Path
In early July, Acosta made a fateful decision that would define his role in the case. But we can't understand why Epstein got off with such a light sentence without understanding the difference of philosophical opinion that existed between him and Villafaña, and between the Miami brass and the West Palm Beach branch office more broadly. To Villafaña, the issue was pretty clear: Epstein had committed Federal crimes and should be prosecuted for them, the same as any other criminal who had committed Federal crimes. That was the end of the story, and she wasn't going to treat his case any differently than any other sex offender. Acosta saw things differently. He was under the opinion, shared among many posters here, that Federal authority was too broad. He didn't like the idea of his office trying to gin up an interstate nexus just so that they could prosecute what would traditionally be a state crime. He was uncomfortable with the idea of his office getting involved in a local prosecution because they didn't like how the local authorities were handling it.
To Acosta, the role of his office in the Epstein case was to act as a backstop to an injustice that a local prosecutor was allowing to happen. He appears to have strongly felt that yes, the State's Attorney was allowing Epstein to get away with reprehensible conduct, and his office had a responsibility to prevent that from happening. But he didn't feel that the risk of a full-blown federal prosecution was worth it if an alternative could be arranged. The way he saw it, it wasn't fundamentally a sex trafficking case, but a prostitution case, and solicitation of prostitution is traditionally a state concern. Furthermore, he wasn't sure a jury would view it as a sex trafficking case, either, and they might acquit on that basis, regardless of the technical wording of the statute. There was also the witness credibility problem, which hadn't gone away.
Thus, Acosta made the decision that the best way to get out of this was to use the threat of a Federal indictment to induce Epstein to plead to state charges. He wanted a deal that involved three things: Jail time, sex offender registration, and victim compensation. In his view, if local prosecutors had credibly threatened Epstein with charges that would result in those three things, the PBPD would never have reached out to Villafaña. With these goals in mind, the USAO began negotiations with Epstein's attorneys.
The attorneys did not act like they were being offered a gift. They took Acosta's minimum demands as a starting point for negotiations, which they continually frustrated. Their initial counteroffer was that Epstein wouldn't register as a sex offender and accept home confinement in lieu of jail time. And also that certain state procedures would be used to ensure "maximum flexibility" in sentencing. The defense team engaged in the time-honored tactic of agreeing to a term in principle and moving on to the next one, and then, when it appeared they were getting close to a deal, backtracking on the proposed terms or proposing alterations. They would agree orally to certain provisions, and when it looked like an agreement was about to be finalized, they'd send out a draft with wildly different terms. At one point they proposed a "hybrid" plea that would encompass state and Federal charges, only to reject it after the USAO drafted a proposed agreement. They tried to do various end arounds involving the State Attorney's office. The history of this period is frustrating to even read, and must have been a nightmare to be involved in. As various internal deadlines approached, Villafaña was ready to throw up her hands and file charges, but was overruled by her superiors, who were convinced the finish line was in sight. Finally, on September 26, after Acosta had made it abundantly clear that this was the final deadline and charges would be filed if a deal wasn't reached by 5 pm, Epstein agreed to the NPA. He would serve 18 months in a county detention facility, with no possibility for early release, followed by one year of home confinement, would register as a sex offender, and would provide restitution for victims under provisions of Federal law.
The End of the Beginning
Popular reporting would have you believe that, having gotten off with a slap on the wrist, Epstein quietly served his sentence and then disappeared into private life until the story was blown open at the end of 2018. This is not the case. While prosecutors were initially relieved to have completed the deal, their problems with Epstein's defense team were only beginning. In fact, the NPA had actually improved Epstein's position, at least temporarily, because it eliminated the threat of Federal prosecution. Almost immediately, Epstein's attorneys began collateral attacks against the terms of the agreement, insisting that they be interpreted in ways favorable to them. The major sticking point was that the victim compensation provision, which allowed victims to file claims under Federal law, was inappropriately being applied to state charges. They attacked this provision repeatedly from various angles, in an apparent (and successful) attempt to delay sentencing. They made repeated requests to eliminate or renegotiate terms that weren't even at issue. It got so bad that Acosta threw up his hands at one point and offered to mutually rescind the deal. If you don't like it, we don't either, and you can take your chances with an indictment. No, Acosta was assured, Epstein wanted to keep the deal in place, they were just working out some small details.
These collateral attacks delayed Epstein's sentencing for months, and resulted in an addendum to the original NPA being executed resolving the issues. Some people in the USAO wanted to take the position that, in light of the stalling and attacks on the agreement, they should just find that he was in breach and indict him on the Federal charges. Others realized that this would only be playing into his hands, as such a breach would be challenged, and the ensuing litigation would only drag things out longer. Complicating the situation was that the NPA did not include a firm date by which Epstein was to be sentenced.
Even after the addendum was executed and the collateral attacks stopped, it didn't end Epstein's quest to avoid prosecution. Running out of options, his attorney decided to attack the Federal prosecutors themselves. They commissioned opinions that assessed various improprieties in the investigation, and sent letters to Acosta accusing Villafaña and the office as a whole of misconduct. Villafaña wasn't worried about the ethics accuasations, but she had another concern—the case was growing stale. The NPA had been executed at the end of September. As the year was coming to a close, and it still wasn't clear when, if ever, Epstein would plead. If he were to draw this out much longer and reneg, there might not be a case left for them to indict on. So now she had to take the unusual step of reinterviewing witnesses to prepare them for a grand jury in a case that had supposedly settled.
Unsatisfied with Acosta's refusal to budge, Epstein's attorneys then took the matter to Washington. They had repeatedly threatened Acosta with this action if he didn't agree to material changes to the NPA, but he simply told them it was their right to seek a departmental review. The review went nowhere, but it did delay Epstein's sentencing for another five months. The most interesting thing about this is that it is the first time any of Epstein's high-profile friends were mentioned in connection to the case. However, it's not in a context one would expect; Ken Starr—yes, that Ken Starr—co-authored a letter to Deputy AG Mark Filip that in part alleged that the prosecution of Epstein was unfairly motivated by his personal association with Bill Clinton! Oh, if Starr had only then realized how ironic such an assertion would seem 15 years later.
That summer, Epstein finally pleaded guilty and began serving his sentence. This still didn't end matters entirely. First, he was evidently staying in the "stockade" at the sheriff's office instead of the county jail. Evidently, the NPA only specified "a county detention facility". Then he was granted work release for a position that hadn't existed before he was sentenced. 12 hours a day, six days a week at his attorney's office. Well, the NPA said that he would actually serve the 18 months, but it didn't say anything about work release. The USAO insisted that numerous emails between counsel indicated that he was actually expected to be in a physical jail during this period, but the defense disagreed. Work release was within the purview of the Sheriff's department, and they were just treating him like any other prisoner. And if he were denied, the matter would be litigated. There was little the USAO could do at this point. Though by this point, things had changed. Menchel had left the USAO for private practice the previous summer, as negotiations were going on, and his successor wasn't involved in the case. Lourie had taken a position in Washington, and he left South Florida shortly after the NPA was signed (though he did occasionally involve himself thereafter). Acosta was on his way out as US Attorney and had accepted a position in private practice which required him to recuse himself from the case. Villafaña and Sloman were the only two left at this point, and Sloman had been the least involved of the five.
So What Does This Have to Do with Anything?
The foregoing, as long as it is, is the Reader's Digest Condensed Version of the entire affair. There is a lot of detail I left out, so forgive me for, in the future, referring to facts not in evidence, as it were, but at least you understand the broad strokes of what happened. That being said, considering the obnoxious level of detail with which I have familiarized myself for this case, I can't help but laugh when someone suggests that Acosta said he was told that Epstein had something to do with intelligence and to leave the matter alone. First. the claim that he said that is dubious. To be clear, Acosta never said that publicly; a journalist for The Daily Beast reported that she was told by a Senior Trump Administration Official that during his interview for Labor Secretary he gave that as a response when asked about why Epstein got the deal he did. At best, that's double hearsay with an anonymous intermediary. At worst, it's a Washington rumor being reported as fact because it came from the right person; we don't even know that the official in question even heard the alleged remark.
I'm not going to defend the way Acosta handled the Epstein case, because it's clear that he exercised terrible judgment. But there's nothing in the record to suggest he left it alone. He gave the initial green light. He did nothing to impede the actual investigation into Epstein. The FBI was actively investigating the case all the way up to the point that the NPA was executed. They were still identifying new victims, including ones in New York. He stuck to his guns regarding his minimum requirements for a deal, even through defense shenanigans, and made it clear to his subordinates that they were to indict if a deal couldn't be reached by the deadline. There's no inflection point in the timeline where Acosta obviously decided to call off his dogs. If he had indeed been told to leave it alone, he could have done a lot more than spend months hammering out an agreement and even more months defending that agreement from collateral attacks. He could have simply said "This is a state matter. I'm not going to bootstrap solicitation of prostitution into a Federal sex trafficking charge just because some police chief doesn't like how the local prosecutor is handling the case. Furthermore, the evidentiary issues are real and they are just as real for this office as they are for the State's Attorney. I'm not going to second-guess his judgment here."
Such a theory also doesn't explain how other people acted during the investigation. If Epstein knew he was getting a sweetheart deal in exchange for his silence, he sure didn't act like it. His attorneys dragged out negotiations longer than necessary with little apparent benefit. They continued to fuck around for nine months after the agreement had been entered into, most of which was a complete waste of time. One can argue that it was all part of some big performance to make it look like Epstein was getting seriously punished, but it was a performance that nobody was watching. If there had been intelligence concerns, it certainly doesn't explain why the Deputy AG gave Ken Starr the bum's rush when he asked for departmental review. Sure, it stalled the case for five months, but that's all it did. Mark Filip basically told Starr that if he wanted them to look at the case he could get in line, and at that they would only do a limited review of certain issues, not the full review that Starr had requested.
So What Happened?
Acosta executed poor judgment, plain and simple. But it was ultimately a failure of management. Villafaña had informed him of the issues with the case from the beginning, but by involving senior management early on, senior management became more involved in the case than they should have been. The decision to charge Epstein would have typically been Lourie's, but he now felt obligated to run things up the chain to Miami for their opinion, and the people above him in Miami felt the need to get Acosta's opinion on how to proceed. The situation arose where Acosta was making all the important decisions, but was far removed from the actual work being done on the case. He was simultaneously too involved and not involved enough, and it was a recipe for disaster.
After reviewing the charging memorandum and draft indictment, his own understanding of the weaknesses of the case combined with his prosecutorial philosophy led him to make the decision to pursue a pre-indictment plea deal to state charges. Once he was convinced that this was the solution to the case, he refused to waver from this position, and he was too far away from the actual negotiations to have an understanding of why it might not have been a good idea. When Villafaña expressed her frustration with the process to Menchel and requested that everyone, including Acosta, sit down for a meeting, she was rebuked and told that she wasn't going to get a meeting with the big boss just to tell him she disagreed with his decisions. Acosta, for his part, thought that he was simply setting a broad policy that his subordinates were executing.
The best example of how this led to poor decision making is the question of the missing computer equipment. If you remember way back at the beginning, the PBPD had executed a search warrant and computers hooked up to a taping system were missing. Around the time negotiations started, the FBI had discovered the name of the person holding the computer equipment. The FBI had information suggesting that the defense team had examined the computers. Villafaña requested that the defense turn it over. They refused. She filed a motion compelling them to turn it over. She wanted to condition negotiations on getting all of the requested documents, including the computers. Negotiations went ahead anyway. The hearing on the motion ended up being indefinitely postponed because of the negotiations.
One gets the impression that everyone assumed that since a deal was imminent there was no point in worrying about the motion or getting access to the computers. Acosta charted a course and followed it to the exclusion of all other options. It never once seemed to occur to him, or to anyone on the team save Villafaña, that the computers could contain evidence that would strengthen their negotiating position. It certainly never occurred to him that they could contain evidence that would strengthen their case to the point that he'd be able to ditch the negotiations and proceed with the indictment. It was also around this time that the FBI became aware that Epstein had photographed an underage girl at his home in New York. It was clear from the arrangement of the cameras that they would have captured sexual activity inside the Florida house. Most child predators possess significant amounts of child pornography. Had prosecutors discovered evidence that Epstein had transmitted images of underage girls between New York and Florida, it would have obliterated any Federal nexus question the defense threw at them.
But that's just speculative. More importantly, Acosta's insistence on a state charge made the prosecution completely dependent on a state office whose inaction led to the Federal investigation in the first place. Federal prosecutors did not have a good enough understanding of Florida law to realize how Epstein would be able to rig the system in his favor following conviction. Hanlon's Razor warns us not to attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence. But this isn't even incompetence. Acosta was facing a difficult case with determined defense attorneys, and in a normal case his strategy probably would have worked as intended. But this wasn't a normal case; the defense attorneys were skilled enough that they were able to sense the managerial dysfunction in the USAO. They knew that Acosta was committed to the plea deal and that they could keep throwing up roadblocks because he didn't want to indict. They knew he wasn't supervising the case directly, and that they could yank on the chains of his subordinates without affecting his position. It wasn't until after the NDA, when the collateral attacks started, that Acosta became more involved and ran out of patience, but by that time there was little he could do that wouldn't make things worse.
What's Missing
I don't want to get too into the weeds about specific allegations that were made about Epstein outside of the context of the initial investigation and prosecution, but it's worth noting what didn't come up. First, there was no mention of any prominent connections. None of the people involved knew who Epstein was prior to the investigation, and if it was subsequently discovered that he kowtowed with prominent people, this wasn't mentioned anywhere. None of the victims ever alleged that anyone other than Epstein had abused them. Prosecutors couldn't find any evidence that any victim had traveled interstate with Epstein, or indeed that they were abused anywhere other than his house in Palm Beach. This is despite desperately looking for such evidence, as it would have made the Federal prosecution a lot easier. The 2019 indictment of Epstein is limited to his abuse of three girls between 2002 and 2005. The indictment of Ghlisaine Maxwell is based on the abuse of two girls between 1994 and 1997. Maxwell's name didn't come up in the 2006/2007 investigation, and there's no evidence that the prosecution was even aware of her.
The idea that Epstein was running a whorehouse for the rich and famous that was really some kind of extortion operation, or even that powerful men were banging girls Epstein procured, is based on allegations made in civil lawsuits filed after the initial investigation ended. I haven't done a comprehensive examination of the materials involved in these lawsuits, because, well, this post is long enough as it is. Suffice it to say that only a few victims have ever alleged that they were abused by anyone other than Epstein. Bradley Edwards, who represented over 200 of Epstein's victims, including Virginia Giuffre, explicitly disavowed the notion that the girls were there for anyone but Epstein. He contends that a select few girls may have had sex with a select few of Epstein's associates, but that the vast bulk of victims were only abused by Epstein. The situation most of the conspiracy theorists envision is that which takes certain allegations raised by about 1% of the represented victims and spins it into a typical scenario, and at that it goes far beyond anything Giuffre actually testified to. None of these theories are based on facts, just conjecture.
Epstein's Death
I don't want to belabor this point, since I've been pretty vocal explaining how preposterous the idea that Epstein was murdered is since before the body was even cold, but there's one point that I would like to make. No one ever mentions the findings of the medical examiner. Forensic pathologist Michael Baden, who Epstein's brother hired to observe the autopsy, got publicity for stating publicly that he thought Epstein was murdered because his hyoid bone was broken, and that is indicative of manual strangulation and not hanging. Conspiracy theorists seized on this as evidence of murder. But, as I've said, more important is what Baden didn't say. The ME presented numerous findings that were indicative of hanging and not indicative of strangulation: The ligature pattern, the pattern of neck bones that were broken, the pattern of petechial hemorrhaging, the plethora, the presence or absence of other types of hemorrhaging, etc. And of particular importance, the absence of any defensive wounds whatsoever.
To me, regardless of the other evidence, this is the absolute showstopper. For Epstein to have been murdered, the assailant would have had to know how to do the job in such a way that it would cause certain things to happen but wouldn't cause other things to happen, and do it while Epstein didn't fight back at all. Baden focused on the hyoid bone, because it was all he had to go on. He hadn't seen a broken hyoid in a hanging in over 40 years of practice. Well, the literature estimates it happens in about 25% of hangings, and is particularly likely in older individuals. Baden didn't question any of the ME's other findings, even though he was there to observe the autopsy. He never felt the need to issue his own report, or conduct an independent autopsy, that listed the cause of death as homicide, or even undetermined. The medical evidence that Epstein was murdered is effectively zero. The non-medical evidence is nothing but a series of coincidences. There isn't any reason why any rational person should conclude that there was a conspiracy to have him murdered, when there's no evidence that he was even murdered.
Postmortem
About a week ago, a user here posted that Epstein's status as a Mossad agent was pretty much an established fact at this point, as sure as the sun rises every morning and sets every evening for anyone with half a brain, and then linked to a 5 1/2 hour compendium of Daryl Cooper podcasts to placate anyone who doubts this. There's only one problem: Daryl Cooper is full of shit. As I was writing this, I was intrigued to see what the other side of the story was, but I didn't have six hours to kill, so I pulled up the Tucker Carlson interview on YouTube and clicked to an arbitrary location. After listening for I while, I heard him say this:
If it isn't blindingly obvious by now, practically everyone involved in the case, especially the lead prosecutor, was heavily involved in the negotiation of the plea deal from the very beginning. Acosta, for what it's worth, was among the least involved in the whole process. Of the six meetings prosecutors had with the defense team prior to the agreement being signed, he was present at exactly one. Later in the process, after one of Epstein's attorneys attempted to reach Acosta directly, he directed Villafaña to return the call and told Lourie that he didn't want to open a backchannel. When the same attorney emailed Acosta asking for a phone call, Acosta said he would be happy to talk, but his staff would have to be on the call. Furthermore, the characterization of the NPA as a "done deal" is laughable, as it wasn't a done deal until nine months after it had been signed. And Acosta didn't even sign it; Villafaña initially put his name on it because she disagreed with it and expected him to own it, but he told her to put her name on it since she was lead prosecutor and it wasn't his role to be signing these things.
This information has been public knowledge for years. If Cooper wants to make bold claims about Epstein, the least he can do is look at it, and if he doesn't agree with its contents, explain the evidence he has to contradict it. I don't need to listen to any more Daryl Cooper. For a guy who claims to be a historian, he can't even get verifiable facts straight, and evidently isn't immune to making shit up if it doesn't support his narrative. More than likely, he had his narrative down and believed whatever media characterizations were made of the story without giving it a second thought. Then he repeated this without giving it a second thought because that was the public perception and who wants to read a bunch of boring emails that don't even contain any juicy information? He says a bunch of other shit that is equally factually incorrect but I don't have the time or the energy to dedicate my life to debunking Daryl Cooper conspiracy theories. All I ask is that anyone making claims like this take a look at the actual official sources before shooting their mouth off.
"Your conspiracy theory conflicts with these official reports" as if the official reports are some objective source of truth is such a weak argument. Giving a bone to the truth while slipping in falsehoods and lies is a staple of getting away with a cover-up to begin with, we would expect the official documents to conflict.
This is something especially true when it comes to sensitive matters. Half the point of an intelligence agency is spreading lies and misinformation! I don't believe there's much evidence linking him to being an intelligence agent, but it's not so easily dismissed either.
And when we have plenty of bold faced lies happening even now around Epstein, my trust is greatly diminished. Why are they lying about the "raw footage" that was clearly edited? Why did the Trump admin officials continually claim there was a list that they were gonna be releasing beforehand? Trump is claiming his letter to Epstein is fake, but there's tons of evidence that the birthday book is real and hes even had other birthday books done for him! It's a tradition!
He says he never wrote a picture in his life, meanwhile he would send off an autographed doodle every year for charity.
Why say he was never on Epstein's plane when we know he was on Epstein's plane?
They're lying and lying and lying. It seems like they're either innocent people trying to make themselves suspicious for ??? reasons, liars addicted to lying for the hell of it or there's something deeper going on.
Just as a linguistic aside, "bold-faced" lie is not incorrect according to some dictionaries but is probably the wrong word; the original is "bald-faced" (or the less common "barefaced") and meaning unconcealed, as opposed to "bold-faced" which meant impudent. It's been mutually confused for long enough that most won't call it wrong, but IMO it properly still is.
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Because he stoked the flames of this conspiracy while campaigning, and his government is a mixture of incompetent true believers and cynical yes men.
Because Trump is a habitual liar and says whatever he thinks will benefit him.
The demand for such footage outstripped supply, so they embellished what they had. The "clearly edited" parts I've seen are the missing minute and file metadata indicating editing software involved, both of which could be irrelevant technical details of how the security system works and how the file was produced. Neither are definitive evidence of tampering. Of course, tampering is still possible even in a "Epstein wasn't murdered" world if They are sufficiently worried about the mob.
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I think it’s fair to question the official report, you just need to be clear about what it is you doubt and what evidence points to the conclusion.. If I think the ME is wrong about the hanging, I better be coming with statistics and medical evidence and so on.
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Which of the statements I made above do you think are falsehoods?
Because Trump tells his base what he wants to hear and doesn't expect to have his feet held to the fire. He knew damn well all along that there wasn't any evidence that would satisfy whatever wild fantasies his base harbors, so he figured he could make empty promises and then forget about them when it came time to deliver. Except he hired morons like Pam Bondi who might actually be true believers and who like him don't know when to shut up, and all of the sudden people were actually expecting him to release stuff that would blow the case wide open, and the whole thing has turned into quicksand where the more Trump tries to wriggle out the deeper he sinks.
Honestly, I don't really give a shit about Trump's role in the whole thing. Believe me, there's nothing I'd like more than for his entire presidency to be destroyed, but I don't see any actual evidence of malfeasance. I think Trump has a reflex where he tries to automatically put as much distance between himself and anything he thinks will hurt him, to the point where he never stops to consider that there may be definitive contradictory evidence. Then again, maybe he just has a horrible memory. It was the same thing with the Billy Bush pussy tape, where he initially claimed to his staff that he wasn't worried about it because it never happened, and then the tape came out. This is a guy who said that of course he didn't rape E. Jean Carroll because she wasn't hot enough for him to be interested in, only to mistake her for his wife in a photograph. If you're going to ask me for a logical explanation of why Donald Trump or certain people in his administration do things, I don't have an answer for you.
I just don't extend that same level of skepticism to anything that came out before January of this year. Previous administrations, including the first Trump administration, seem to have been run, at least at the "deep state" level, by professionals who largely knew what they were doing. I don't have any reason to believe that the Justice Department Office of Professional Responsibility was, in 2019 and 2020, filled with partisan hacks looking to effect a coverup. I have no evidence that such is the case even now. I haven't seen any "official" evidence that contradicts any unofficial evidence of the same caliber. If you want to argue that something is incorrect, then I welcome your argument. But you can't just dismiss everything out of hand because you don't like the people in charge.
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Because people lie when you accuse them of something that makes them look bad. It's practically a universal response.
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If the medical report is real and evidence-based. You can just write a fake medical report. You can just release fake documents, or misleading documents, or documents that lack the key facts. Official sources release fake documents all the time, there's no need to believe government data on potentially embarrassing topics like unemployment, military intelligence, espionage or whether politicians actually did commit a scandal. They can produce masses of evidence for why a policy has been a success, that doesn't make it a success.
I want to see camera footage of Epstein killing himself. If no such footage is provided, then it didn't happen. Footage of corridors is not a substitute. There's no excuse for 'oh we lost the camera footage, my bad'.
Having a camera or a guard or a cellmate or anything watching a high-profile prisoner (a prisoner so high-profile we are still talking about it today) is not an optional extra. The US is a rich enough country to have at least one prison cell with a camera that works.
What makes you so sure that Epstein is even dead? The whole hanging thing could have been the perfect ruse to get him out of the jail and never seen again, while all you rubes focus on conspiracy theories relating to his demise. That would make more sense than what everyone seems to be proposing.
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There are two problems with that proposal.
One is privacy. Traditionally, prison was not a panopticon, and turning it into one would alter the character of a prison sentence. Of course, this privacy cuts both ways -- most guards would likely prefer not to watch prisoners jerk off in front of the camera.
Another is that while a prisoner is unlikely to disable a camera in the corridor, they could easily disable a camera in their cell. There is not a ton of stuff which you can legally do to coerce a prisoner who is already in solitary to stop them from smearing shit on the camera lens. (Sure, you could place a glass ceiling and have a movable camera above it, but that sounds really expensive.)
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Besides that, not allowing prisoners to kill themselves (easily) is SOP. Epstein should not have had the tools to hang himself. I am not very surprised that he had them, from the post it seems clear that his legal team was very resourceful, and prison guards are less vetted than CIA employees. If you have unlimited money, finding a prison guard who has a family member on which you have exclusive dirt or who is in the kind of trouble which could be solved with a quick 100k$ in cash is likely not all that hard.
However, a chewing gum to stick on the lens of the cell camera is not a very difficult item to smuggle in. If his guards were not in on his suicide, "camera in cell 5736 went dark" seems much a lot less likely to prompt an urgent response than "that guy in cell 5736 is hanging in an noose".
The only reason why Epstein would have left the camera running while killing himself would have been to make it public knowledge that his death was suicide. I do not think that he wanted that. He did not write any suicide letters (afaik), and his brother casting doubt on the circumstances of his death was likely acting in his best interests.
So in short, if there had been a camera in his cell, then both the suicide theory and the murder theory would predict that there was no usable footage of his death.
What if you conceal it in a mirror or somewhere non-obvious? Neither Epstein nor the average prisoner is a secret agent with bugfinding tools.
Another option is to put the camera in the hall outside positioned so it can see inside the cell.
As you practically said yourself, this is spy-novel stuff. You are almost certainly greatly overestimating the budget and technological sophistication involved.
Besides, much of the purpose of such things is to serve as a deterrent. Hiding them works against that. (As well as being able to maintain or replace them easily, not that this was a high priority in this case on anyone's version of events.)
How hard is it to buy a hidden camera? If Korean perverts can hide them in toilets or suspicious husbands can use them to watch their wives, a large institution like a prison should be able to come up with some. Cameras/mikes would be useful since prisoners often talk to eachother about their crimes and some useful evidence could be gleaned. The Allies did it to German POWs with 1940s tech.
Also, there is still the outside-the-cell looking in approach.
Furthermore, high profile prisoners should be especially watched, isn't this a natural inference?
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The prison system broadly does not give a shit about the lives of inmates, guards are mostly on the take, and having done prison maintenance before the standards are extremely low.
I think allowing Epstein to kill himself would have cost less than $30k- and thats taking into account New York being more expensive than Texas.
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Yeah exactly, "your conspiracy theory conflicts with these official reports" as if the official reports are some objective source of truth is such a weak argument. Giving a bone to the truth while slipping in falsehoods and lies is a staple of getting away with a cover-up to begin with, we would expect the official documents to conflict.
This is something especially true when it comes to sensitive matters. Half the point of an intelligence agency is spreading lies and misinformation! I don't believe there's much evidence linking him to being an intelligence agent, but it's not so easily dismissed either.
And when we have plenty of bold faced lies happening even now around Epstein, my trust is greatly diminished.
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This is the part that boggles my mind. Just incredible incompetence not to seize and search the computers. The kind of mistake a first-year prosecutor would make. And to be clear, I think it was incredible incompetence, not a conspiracy.
Also true with those same (or at least potentially the same) computer items resurfacing in NY when his apartment was searched and the FBI failing to secure them.
To clarify, when police searched Epstein's house as part of the initial investigation, the computers had already been removed. Later, the FBI learned that they were in the custody of a certain individual, and the USAO requested that they be turned over. Epstein's attorneys initially agreed to produce them by a certain date, then asked for an extension, and on the extension deadline they took legal action to prevent having to turn them over. By this point negotiations were underway, and in the course of negotiations the USAO agreed to postpone the date of the hearing, which was then rescheduled for late September. By this point, the self-imposed indictment deadline was nearing, and the parties were close to a deal, and they agreed to postpone the hearing indefinitely, Once the deal was signed the matter was dropped.
I agree with you that they should have pushed the computer issue a little harder, but I can understand why they didn't. The idea that they would contain evidence that improved the prosecution's position was speculative. I wouldn't call it incompetence so much as poor judgment. If the computers contained video of Epstein engaging in the sex acts that they already knew about, it would improve the case, but not by much. They could have been a game changer, but that was conditioned on them containing child pornography, or worse, containing evidence that he transmitted CP over the internet.
We need to step back and consider what they were likely dealing with. This was 2005, and the taping system probably wasn't brand new. You were looking at 480p tops, compressed, taken with a wide angle lens. I don't have any information about the camera equipment that the police discovered, but they did mention that the cameras were hooked up to the computers for recording. Epstein could certainly afford commercial-grade recording equipment, but most such equipment would have recorded to disc at the time, and not a PC. So we're likely looking at webcams. In either event, though, any video would have been low-resolution and recorded from a fixed vantage point. Webcam videos from 2005 weren't great, and commercial surveillance video wasn't much better. There would have been problems authenticating the video and identifying the victim as a minor.
I think that Acosta's plan was stupid and ultimately ineffective. It's certainly not what I would have done had I been in charge. However, once they were committed to that course of action, I don't think that yielding on the computer issue was a huge mistake. A mistake, yes, but not a huge one. It's pretty clear that the defense strategy was to draw out the process as long as possible. If the prosecutors had insisted on sticking to the September hearing, it would have required postponing the indictment deadline again, since they'd need to give time for the defense to turn over the computers and for the FBI to analyze them, and then to figure out what what to do with the information. The defense holding back could have just been a ruse to get another extension. I personally think that once they became aware that the defense had the computers they should have put everything on hold until they got them, but Acosta was hell-bent on state charges and thought a deal would be easy. I think Acosta just figured that the indictment was ready to go and if they made a deal he'd be happy and if they had to indict there was plenty of time to get the computers. I don't think he wanted to delay things based on the speculation that there might be evidence of other crimes. It was a bad decision but it was understandable.
That's such a huge game changer, and should be painfully obvious to any prosecutor with experience. Possession of CP triggers all kinds of mandatory minimums that increase the prosecution's leverage by absurd amounts (federally, anyway. I don't know if Florida law has mandatory minimums for it). Even a 1% chance of the computers containing it dramatically changes the case, and it's a tiny mental stretch made by prosecutors every day to say, "hey, we're investigating this guy for sex crimes, perhaps he's a CP collector, too."
You could be right that his homemade videos at the time would be worthless in strengthening the case against him with regards to the known victims. But the chance of finding CP has had every prosecutor I've dealt with jumping at the chance to seize every single electronic device possible from suspects. Proving a hands-on offense with a victim with credibility and reliability issues is tricky; proving possession of CP doesn't have those problems. I don't have training materials from USAO from that era, but even in 2005, I have a hard time believing it wasn't common knowledge that finding CP on a suspect's computer was the "easy win" button.
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In our previous conversation, Rov dismissed my argument saying if there was a conspiracy, the entire DOJ would have to be in on it. Isn't arguing for this level of incompetence effectively arguing that no, you just have to get the guy on the top, and the rest of the apparatus will be happy to bumble along, no matter how absurd their decisions are?
There are many ways that Epstein would know about the investigation ahead of time. Given the entire high school knew, chances are one of the girls just told him long before police came knocking.
I'm not sure where you're going with that. That Epstein prepared himself by hiding / deleting evidence? Isn't Rov's point in this post that one way or the other, there was more than enough to lock him up, and it was only due to Acosta's poor judgement that he got off easy?
And again, what was his re-prosecution based on then, some decade later, with even less physical evidence, and witness testimony even more dubious? How was Maxwell sentenced for so long?
Or am I misunderstanding your argument, and you meant something else entirely?
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What actually gets me is a different question: Why the hell is the US attorney even making calls like that? My general takeaway is that the US Government would greatly benefit by following the process most local prosecutors offices have: Police investigate crimes, sometimes they come to the prosecutors for things like subpoenas, search warrants, and legal advice, but largely they investigate cases on their own. THEN they present findings to the prosecutors who decide which charges best apply to the case. The prosecutor then files those charges and gets a grand jury to indict it (or very rarely they will deliver a no true bill, at which point the case is dead). This whole situation of prosecutors actively participating in the investigation of crimes and negotiating with defense counsel before investigations are concluded and charges are filed is just begging for corruption to enter into the process.
No, that is bad and stupid. They should not be meeting with defense until after charges are filed. If defense convinces you that the most serious charges are legally insufficient, you can move to have them dismissed and proceed on the lesser charges instead. This happens as a matter of course in state trials. A defendant may be charged with First Degree Murder, and then plead to 2nd Degree, or Manslaughter in exchange for dismissal of the higher charges. The US Attorneys seem to have tied themselves into knots with odd self-imposed regulations that seem to only serve two purposes: 1) Enable corruption; and 2) Keep their caseloads low by refusing to prosecute cases they might lose.
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I think you could have a more charitable take where the government isn't sending a lot of resources and doesn't have a lot of leadership buy-in (because the crimes are ironically not very sexy, ultimately pretty small, and it is somewhat sketchy that it is federal at all) and the person they are prosecuting is throwing every last financial resource at it because he doesn't want 20 years in jail.
This can easily result in the prosecution being tired, busy, buried in paperwork with minimal resources and therefore forgetting things that now seem brain dead obvious.
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Hey, I wanted to say thanks under our other Epstein conversation, but I'll do so here. I appreciate your correction on Acosta's alleged statement in particular, and taking the time for writing your response in general.
I don't know when I get the time to read through this one, but I'll try to go through the whole thing as well.
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I admire your willingness to deep dive. I mostly accept the government's account of the Epstein story because I'm a normalfag and also I'm not going to put in anywhere near the effort required (like you did) to form an opinion on this. There's just no alpha in trying to figure out what actually happened given the work involved, and absent that, going with the government's explanation is probably a good heuristic.
What can one learn about how to get away with serious crimes from this? Perhaps, obviously, hire extremely competent well-connected bulldog attorneys? Because actually the government kind of sucks, and leaves a lot of stones unturned, and exists in a political economy with finite resources and competing interests and you can make life extremely annoying for them?
A friend of mine, who did not have any money at all and had a public defender the whole time, eventually arranged for a work release from a county jail where he'd spend 12 hours a day at a strip club and smoked weed managing their web site for minimum wage. He was just really gregarious and met lots of people inside and outside of jail. So my assumption already is if you're not stupid and not utterly reprehensible you can make going to jail a lot more comfortable than you'd think from cop dramas.
Very little. This isn't about a man getting away with serious crimes, it is about the fact that elites don't consider sexual abuse of chavettes a serious crime. It's a nothingburger when well-connected celebrities do it, it's a nothingburger when Mirpuri Pakistani gangs do it, and it's a nothingburger when Mum's new boyfriend does it.
After the Acosta plea deal and Epstein's "release" from "jail", he returned to being a star of the Manhattan social scene despite everyone knowing he was a sex offender. Nobody who mattered cared - apparently Neri Oxman's female graduate students were upset at being drafted into being part of a dog-and-pony show being put on for Epstein as a major donor to the MIT media lab, but Oxman's boss expected her to shut them up with the normal tools used by senior academics to discipline junior ones, and she did.
Less true, he still knew a lot of powerful people but became more reclusive and increasingly met them only at his home after 2011. Maxwell and him also appear to have stopped being so close, she moved onto another relationship and other work. He mainly cultivated relationships with people outside the Manhattan social scene, tech people and academics.
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Did you read the effortpost? At this time Epstein's known victims were 18+ish girls who willingly sought him out to fuck him for money. He doesn't sound like a good person but I can see how it might be hard to get the legal system fully fired up over this. Seemed like the feds couldn't even convince themselves to get involved, understandably.
Also, third paragraph in my reply. My own friend was not a well-connected celebrity and had the softest jail experience imaginable. He was poor, but what he had going for him was that he was likable and not dysfunctionally insane and his crime didn't fit neatly into reprehensible crimes like murder or assault with a deadly weapon.
I think it is an error to believe the legal system will by default inflict the appropriate amount of suffering fit for a crime, especially if the accused has any shred of sympathy and resists at all levels and can pull the right strings.
I think people miss how foul tempered the vast majority of "real" criminals are. Half the patients I treated in prison felt entitled to call everyone a faggot then demand thirty different types of controlled substances. If you make at any attempt at all not to be a huge asshole than the system is extremely more likely than not to go extremely soft on you.
Sure - it isn't guaranteed too, but I met guys who committed incredibly heinous murders and because they were nice they were treated like they committed a white collar crime.
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Uh, the victim that originally came to the law’s attention was 15- everyone knew that epstein’s victims were younger than 18.
That being said, thé law doesn’t get too worked up about Randy the trucker’s activities with teenaged prostitutes either.
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I've only skimmed so far. If this is the case, what was his re-prosecution based on? How was Maxwell sentenced to 20 years? Was she railroaded?
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Just for the protocol: 4 weeks ago 2rafa effort-posted that it is very implausible that Epstein was propped up by Mossad or that Israeli Intelligence was using him to blackmail people:
https://www.themotte.org/post/2240/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/345489?context=8#context
This is the polar opposite of an "effort-post;" this might actually be the Platonic ideal of "Reasoning From First Principles" being nothing more than Rationalists making wildly invalid assumptions, insisting they're the only logical position to have, and adamantly refusing to verify if the conclusions accurately reflect reality.
The notion that intelligence agencies would ever say "why bother, these guys are already in the bag?" is profoundly stupid; even if one's only experience with intelligence is exclusively through fiction, one would not say something so incredibly clueless, yet hewre we're holding it up as proof "Epstein was Intelligence" is tinfoil-hat territory?
For decades, some of the most successful (and aggressive) intelligence operations against the US are run by our allies; Japan, South Korea, France, Israel, and Taiwan in particular have consistently been labeled as tops threats by the U.S. National Counter Intelligence Center. Most of these efforts are focused on obtaining business, industrial, and technological secrets, but no small amount also goes into gauging just how sincere America's commitment is to our alliances. Anyone raising their hand and saying "why worry about blackmailing this rich and powerful man, he's already on our side?" would be quitely assigned to work nothing of any importance, with "advise" to their immediate supervisors to find any pretext to fire them, that wouldn't result in any problems.
Not if you wanted any chance of your intelligence operation working.
Again, "Reasoning From First Principles" being utter nonsense. Yeah, you'd like them to not do that, but if they're successful - and it is a known-fact that Epstein was named as a middleman for various African and Middle Eastern deals - you're gonna ignore that problem, until such time as you no longer can. "I can't believe X would do Y, because that would be stupid" should not ever be something that occurs to you.
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Thank you for this, it really explains what happened when at the time of the alleged "sweetheart deal". But the above makes me wonder - the initial girl (Jane Doe) was 15, yes? So if there is evidence (or at least accusations) that he got 15 year old girls to strip down to their underwear, 'massage' him while he was naked, and he used vibrators on them and/or jerked off in their presence, then paid them - surely that is something more than "well he did a little bit naughty in paying for a massage from an unlicensed person"?
I get that the girls weren't credible (all the dirt the defence dug up on them) and it really was 'he said/she said' but that only makes the computer evidence, if any, more urgent: get the computers, see if there are recordings of him doing what was claimed, or doing more.
If the state prosecution was slow-pedalling on all this because they weren't sure what they could charge him with, then the rest all falls into place, but I do have to ask why they were slow-pedalling at the start: naked man with semi-naked fifteen year olds and money changing hands is surely enough to bring a charge?
I agree that the Ken Starr/Bill Clinton connection is hilarious, and even more hilarious in this context: all the accusations that Trump is a paedophile (for true! proven!) and that this is why he's covering up the papers, and it could come out that Epstein got a soft punishment in Florida because of Clinton's influence 🤣
I'll preface this by saying that I don't have access to full transcripts of OPR interviews with the people from the State's Attorney's office, and while the grand jury transcripts have been released, I can't find anything specifying what charging options were presented. But my speculation based on what has been released is this: The State's Attorney was concerned about the ethical implications of charging Epstein with prostitution-related offenses without charging the prostitutes themselves. Krischer had previously charged girls as young as 14 with prostitution, but he clearly recognized that the girls here had been taken advantage of, and the office was uneasy about charging witnesses who came forward.
I think that more importantly, though, Epstein was already offered a misdemeanor plea he refused, and if he tried to nail his ass to the wall he'd be looking at a trial that would be a fucking mess. You mention credibility issues, but it's not just a matter of whether the jury believes the girls, but whether the jury believes they were abused. Remember, this was a time when the public was sneering at kids like this on a daily basis, as Maury Povich sending incorrigible teens off to boot camp was mainstream (if lowbrow) entertainment. It wasn't so much that a jury wouldn't believe what happened, but that they wouldn't be able to view the girls as victims. Adding to the problem, the case hinges on the girls testifying to all of this bad behavior in open court, and even if you can keep some of it out, the fact still remains that they have to admit to prostituting themselves, some on multiple occasions, and to recruiting other girls to do the same thing.
These days juries are much more sympathetic to the idea that kids in these kinds of situations often have serious problems, and it's easier to paint a guy like Epstein as someone who recognized how vulnerable they were and took advantage of them. But it wasn't clear yet in 2006. Federal prosecutions require a grand jury indictment, but in state court the normal procedure is to file an "information", which results in some kind of preliminary hearing in front of a judge to determine if there's probable cause to go to trial. Grand juries are only used in unusual situations; they can be investigative tools since witnesses can testify under subpoena, and they're often used for complicated cases involving organized crime, public corruption, etc. I think that the decision to take the Epstein case to the grand jury was a consequence of the State's Attorney's uncertainty about how a jury would react to the evidence, especially in the face of an aggressive defense. It would give them a chance to defer the charges to somebody else, rather than filing the charges police wanted them to file and taking the chance that the case would fall flat.
As I said, I don't know what charging options the grand jury was given, but for the sake of argument I'll assume that the charges the police were pushing for were among the options. After the transcripts were released last year, prosecutor Lanna Behlolovick was criticized extensively in the media for apparently sandbagging her case by only having two girls testify and bringing up all the bad behavior. I disagree with this assessment. I think she knew that the defense was going to bring it up at trial and she wanted to see how a jury would react. One difference between grand juries and trial juries is that grand jurors have the opportunity to question witnesses, and the questions asked by the grand jurors don't evidence much sympathy. Some of them made glib comments to that effect. This was especially the case when a detective presented the evidence of other girls who had been abused (hearsay is admissible in grand jury proceedings), and they weren't at any risk of offending the girls directly. If they were offered a full slate of charges but only indicted on the solicitation charge, it's evidence that the case was a loser. There's also evidence that the grand jury's unwillingness to indict factored into Acosta's decision to seek a pre-indictment plea, since a Federal jury wasn't likely to be any better on that front. Having immersed myself in this whole mess, it causes me to wonder what the public reaction would be now if Epstein had been charged with serious crimes but acquitted. Would this even be something we're talking about now?
Yeah, that was probably it. Same as with Rotherham - in some instances the police tended to go "well these are trashy little slappers anyway, how can you say they're being abused when they probably ran off with their older Indian/Pakistani boyfriend of their own free will?"
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How much of what was admitted to was actually illegal at the time? It’s not illegal to show people your underwear, even if it will likely result in being asked to leave a public place- but had these girls went to Walmart like that they would have been charged with trespass, not a sexual performance or whatever. Masturbating in front of the girls and touching them with a vibrator might legitimately have been loopholes in the law- it’s entirely possible that the girl would have had to have touched his penis to trigger statutory.
Yeah, I can see the prosecution problem (is this prostitution? so are we gonna charge a 15 year old schoolgirl for being a prostitute? that's not gonna fly with the public) but it's also the kind of thing where if a father learns what some guy has been doing with his 15 year old daughter, at the very least someone's nose is gonna get broken.
Epstein was probably smart enough to get the kind of girls that were already into sex with boyfriends, even if underage, and drugs and the rest of it - that's why he used them to recruit other girls as in the Jane Doe anecdote. He wasn't out there debauching nice respectable girls by getting them drunk/high, he was targeting the kind of girls who were already colouring outside the lines, as it were. That's what gave his lawyers the edge in digging up dirt to discredit the victims and witnesses - after all, the girl had already tried to claim that the $300 was drug money, how could she be any kind of credible witness or complainant?
Still sleazy as hell, but it doesn't automatically mean he was running a literal paedophile ring. I think if he scoped out some potential partygoers were also interested in 14 and 15 year olds, he'd have been happy to hook them up (and record all the blackmail material) but I don't think he was doing that as a full-time service, too risky in the long run (as it turned out anyway). Plausible deniability would have been the name of the game: parties and events that were must-attend attractions for high society where he hosted attractive young women (the girls enticed in with promises of getting them started on modelling careers, and he had legit connections there with the Victoria's Secret CEO: "Epstein often attended Victoria's Secret fashion shows, and hosted the models at his New York City home, as well as helping aspiring models get work with the company") who may have been on the young side but were assumed to be of legal age, and if they were happy to be friendly with the attendees, and maybe if a pretty girl and a rich guy hit it off and they got intimate, well sex is no longer confined to marriage only and that's their own business, right?
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See also
I could go on with all the Florida statutes he could have been charged under, but I don't have all night.
827.04 Contributing to the delinquency of a minor seems to apply to dirty old men offering teenage girls cash for sex-adjacent acts.
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Personally, I am not unconvinced of the murder theory based on priors. Epstein's testimony wrt any clients of his would likely not have convinced any jury. I would basically have expected him to accuse everyone up to the pope and the holy spirit if it means that he got to spend another day in a courthouse instead of his cell.
He would only have been more than an inconvenience for his murderers if he had more evidence besides his testimony, such as videos of his clients abusing minors. But the way digital storage works makes it unlikely that he had a copy of that evidence on him when he died, and even more unlikely that it was the only copy.
That guy was obviously not stupid. Even if he literally had nobody whom he could trust (which I doubt), schemes to set up a dead man's switch are not that hard to set up. For the purpose of anyone which was blackmailing him, he could have set up any number of horcruxes, and killing him before you have found all of them would be fatal. Sending a letter to a random attorney with 1000$ of cash and instructions to forward an encrypted message (or the decryption key) to the media in case of your death is something which could work and will be very hard to find even if you are closely observing someone.
From a game theory perspective, this seems like a scenario where the best interests of both Epstein and any blackmailed high level government official would be to cooperate. If your opponent has the power to murder you (or even influence in what prison you end up), then cutting a deal with the prosecutor (which would likely not have greatly reduced your sentence) would have been a bad idea. And if there is a 20% chance that your blackmailer will be able to leak the dirt on his death, then offing them seems like a terrible risk. Much better to meet in the middle where he tells the prosecutor that only he fucked anyone, and then gets quietly moved to a facility where he does not face the risk of prison rape, and perhaps gets pardoned after a decade or so.
--
Of course, if he was a full-time Mossad agent, then it is plausible that he did not have unfettered access to any incriminating video material, or anything incriminating Mossad. Killing him would then be a matter of tying up loose ends and avoiding embarrassing if unsubstantiated accusations.
I do not believe this theory for other reasons. It is not like supporting Israel is so icky in American politics that only someone who was blackmailed would possibly even consider it. Your average congressman is happy to vote in Israel's interest in exchange for AIPAC support. Running an underage sex ring would threaten this status quo (which is great for Israel) if it became public knowledge.
The risks/rewards would be different if it was an intelligence op by a country which the US generally hates, like Iran or North Korea. Blackmailing a dozen officials into being inexplicably reluctant with sanctions would be valuable, and if the op becomes public knowledge, the relations between the US and the country can hardly get much worse -- nobody is going to invade Iran over an underage sex blackmail ring.
Still, I think that any country who ran such an op would put someone more reliable than Epstein in charge.
To the lawyers in the audience: are random requests like this common? I realize direct anecdotes might be subject to confidentiality, but are these sorts of things heard of?
No. This is Frederick Forsyth novel stuff.
The most likely outcome from doing so would be that the weird letter would be reported to the police/fbi/whoever.
I would just keep the money and forward whatever they sent me to whoever the instructions said to send it to. More likely, I'd look at it and give the scoop to a local TV producer I know. That way, in addition to the big story, there will be a sub-drama of how a guy who mostly did sports stories for a station in Pittsburgh managed to break the story of the century.
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Excellent deep dive. Probably mostly wasted, alas. I could have predicted the weak conspiratorial rebuttals. "Well...I just don't believe it. Because we know They're lying!" It's all unfalsifiable. You see exactly this same rejoinder to anyone who does a deep dive on JFK, or 9/11, or Elvis. "Okay, yeah, that's what the 'official reports' and the 'evidence' says, but of course we can't trust it."
There's always a They with unlimited evidence-manipulating powers.
Every narrative will have holes you can poke in it with enough motivated reasoning. Some people can cast doubt on the color of the sky. Once they become attached to a theory that properly identifies a nefarious They, nothing is going to convince them that reality is actually mostly tawdry and just what the evidence says it is.
Or Imane Khelif, oh wait, they were right about that one, let's pretend it never happened. Oh, how about the Lab Leak? What, it's gaining mainstream mainstream acceptance? Quick, pretend we were only deboonking the bio-weapon people!
It's not unlimited, but two cameras going out, and two guards taking a nap simultaneously, is pretty impressive, no?
It may suggest foul play rather than coincidence, but that foul play could more parsimoniously be "his lawyers bribed guards to let him commit suicide like he wanted" or similar. Murder is only the obvious theory if we accept the premise that Epstein was a prolific pimp with dirt on a metric ton of people in high places, and that is what OP's post pretty successfully disputes.
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Not really, no. Prison guards are not America’s best and brightest, are mostly on the take, and do not consider sex offenders worth protecting.
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It's only impressive if the base rate is cameras have 99.999% uptime and guards never ever sleep through shifts.
What if cameras being in a general state of disrepair and guards routinely falsifying records because "they didn't see nothing"
is the norm and you generally never know because usually this huge gap in accountability never counts against, and in fact is to the benefit of the corrections officers?
No, at those odds it's not "impressive", it actually starts leaning towards "unlimited". Even, if the chances of each failure (either camera, or either guard) is as high as 50%, you end up with a ~93% chance of some part of the system catching the incident.
Now, you can argue that a 7% chance is nothing to scoff at, but aren't conspiracy theorists the ones being accused of picking the less likely option for ideological reasons?
Also if the rate of these incidents is so high in that prison, at some point you have to start questioning the decision of sending Epstein there to begin with.
What do you mean that prison? I'm certain they're all alike because they all have the same incentives.
Epstein is like the 1 in 10,000,000 prisoner that society didn't want to wind up dead in his prison cell with no surveillance.
That is an interesting question: to what extent is "suicide watch" in a prison actually taken seriously, versus as a rubber-stamped "well, we tried" box to feel better about ourselves without substantially changing things. It's a somewhat dark thought, but I guess not surprising.
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If you can't see a qualitative difference in those theories, well, you make my case for me.
No.
It's a nice trick to pretend like I just cosigned the Elvis / JFK / Moon landing conspiracies, but it's dishonest.
You made an unqualified claim about conspiracy theories, if you want you want to qualify it now feel free. If not, at least don't misrepresent me.
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I'm still sympathetic to the pro-conspiracy responses' general conclusion ("something weird is going on"), but what confuses me is how some attempt to defend that conclusion.
If it was strictly a matter of saying, "yes, Rov_Scam has reduced the apparent probability of there being a conspiracy by undermining some folk narratives, but there are still discrepancies x, y, z which may still outweigh the anti-conspiracy evidence" then I wouldn't be aghast at it (as someone who has absorbed the Epstein death conspiracies through osmosis I'm still on the fence about the security camera issues but don't feel confident staking out a position) but some of the responses almost sound like a parody of conspiratorial reasoning, taking it as a given that Epstein was murdered and then discounting evidence against it per the anticipated conclusion.
Exactly so.
Some "conspiracy theories" do turn out to be true, but you won't get there by reading the motivated and frequently unhinged takes from people who already made up their minds based on the players involved.
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FIRE's new lawsuit challenging the Trump admin's deportation policies over speech is pretty interesting. The press release is pretty convincing too IMO. It's not the government's job to be deciding what is and isn't "acceptable" speech outside of the obvious dangers like the true threat limitations we already have.
One thing that also concerns me when it comes to censorship efforts from the government is the chilling effect it places on speech and voiced opinions. People here legally can agree with the Government Approved Viewpoint all they want, but you're screwed if you dissent.
This is especially concerning when American politics can shift so much. Government Approved Viewpoints in the Trump admin might not be the same Government Approved Viewpoints from the next president. Criticize Israel today? Bad speech. But maybe the next administration says praising Israel is the bad speech instead. At this point you might as well be saying that you simply don't get to have or voice an opinion of any kind in the country, even if you're a lawful resident who doesn't commit any crimes.
And there are lots of great people who are lawful residents/vistors to the US. Even many celebrities! People like Keanu Reeves, Celine Dion, Ryan Gosling, Hugh Jackman all essentially told to not have any opinion on anything ever in case a future admin decides their opinion was a bad opinion.
Also FIRE so far has also been an interesting insight into what principled beliefs look like. Often on the internet I'll see from both left and right wingers an excuse that it's ok to violate their claimed principles because "the other side did it first" (even though interestingly enough they often can't seem to agree which side did it first, reminds me of something else), but at that point it's hard to say it's a principle if it's abandoned so readily.
Meanwhile FIRE has been pretty consistent in criticizing both the left and right, and even defending their opponents right to speech. It's like the early ACLU protecting the rights of KKK. There are times where I think they overreach on their criticism, I believe that strong free association rights of private individuals and groups are just as fundamental to free speech as the speech itself and restrict more to government actions but even then I still respect that they're consistent.
This attitude seems certainly praiseworthy. The principled org willing to piss off people on both sides of the CW is much more credible than any organization which only cares about their pet issue when it benefits their side.
Also, calling a freedom of speech organization FIRE (in caps) is brilliant naming.
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I would argue that the Trump administration is not abusing the statute, at least in the case of Khalil. The statute specifically allows for deporting people for protected speech, and Mahmoud Khalil -- a "student" who seemingly did not come to the US to study but rather to stir up trouble on campus for the purpose of affecting US foreign policy -- is the exact sort of person it was meant for.
I'd be fine for the statute to be declared unconstitutional on its face. I suspect it will not be, however; the First Amendment protects citizens and probably permanent residents, but possibly not those on temporary visas.
The text of the First Amendment specifically binds Congress: "Congress shall make no law...", while other amendments say "the right of the people...". Courts have generally read the First pretty broadly with respect to free speech protections. Excluding the no-longer-binding Schenck, I can't think of too many cases the speech advocates have lost. On the other hand, I can't see anyone reading it as preventing a ban on literal propaganda from foreign enemies. Limitations on issued (or renewed) visas for foreign nationals on the basis of their speech seems rather borderline.
I don't think the Founders intended to require letting in visitors who call for, say, the violent overthrow of the US government --- citizens doing so are already barred from security clearances, for example, without too much fanfare.
Since it's a statute at issue, Congress is implicated; Congress can not delegate the power to throw out people for speech to the Secretary of State if they do not possess that power in the first place. But yes, unlike the Fourth (or the Second, LOL), "the right of the people" isn't implicated and e.g. United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez doesn't apply directly.
Indeed, which why this case will probably end up at SCOTUS.
Yeah, the distinction there is pretty subtle, and I can't think of a case in which it's ever actually mattered. Maybe we'll see that in the lawsuits over White House press pool access: is there a relevant act of Congress establishing that at all? But it generally seems to be considered to apply to the government as a whole.
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Why? This seems to be myopically focused on the 1st Amendment, while ignoring the Congress' clearly delineated plenary authority to regulate immigration. The 1st Amendment should not even come into discussion - Congress is perfectly free to impose any limits on non-citizens to enter/remain on American soil, and eject them for any - or even no - reason.
The First Amendment is a limit on all of Congress's powers, including Congress's power to regulate immigration.
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This is true for American citizens, but the fact that we're even considering applying it to non-citizens shows just how much the concept of "citizenship" has decayed. It also, incidentally, shows how little anyone actually means it when they say America is a "creedal" or "propositional" nation. If citizenship is not a matter of ethnic belonging (i.e. an intersection of familial and cultural ties), it must then be ideological, which necessarily means exercising discretion and control over the ideologies of people allowed in or, at the minimum, allowed the rights and duties of citizenship.
As I've quoted before, GK Chesterton wrote about how this used to work in America, before our imperial phase:
The Spanish Inquisition may have been admittedly Inquisitorial; but the Spanish Inquisition could not be merely Spanish. Such a Spaniard, even when he was narrower than his own creed, had to be broader than his own empire. He might burn a philosopher because he was heterodox; but he must accept a barbarian because he was orthodox. And we see, even in modern times, that the same Church which is blamed for making sages heretics is also blamed for making savages priests. Now, in a much vaguer and more evolutionary fashion, there is something of the same idea at the back of the great American experiment; the experiment of a democracy of diverse races which has been compared to a melting-pot. But even that metaphor implies that the pot itself is of a certain shape and a certain substance; a pretty solid substance. The melting-pot must not melt. The original shape was trace on the lines of Jeffersonian democracy; and it will remain in that shape until it becomes shapeless. America invites all men to become citizens; but it implies the dogma that there is such a thing as citizenship. Only, so far as its primary ideal is concerned, its exclusiveness is religious because it is not racial. The missionary can condemn a cannibal, precisely because he cannot condemn a Sandwich Islander. And in something of the same spirit the American may exclude a polygamist, precisely because he cannot exclude a Turk.
"What I saw in America" 1912, pgs. 8-9 (boldface added for emphasis).
This remind me of a thought i had watching the most recent superman movie. DC's Earth dodged a bullet when Kal'El was found by a conservative midwestern couple as opposed to literally anyone one else. As much as James Gunn, the people of Metropolis, and to some extent theMotte like to sneer at Smallville, Smallville is arguably the reason that Superman is a force for good instead of an existential threat.
This idea has been played with. Personally, I liked the resulting comic series, but YMMV.
It's pretty good, as is the movie; Soviet Batman is awesome.
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Besides general American values, how do we address the issue I mentioned of idealogy changing constantly? Plenty of Americans shift beliefs given the back and forth between parties. Lots of idealogical goals even within parties change, the republican and democratic party of today looks drastically different then just twenty years ago!
Speak up against Israel now and you're anti American. Speak up for Israel now and it's ok. But every four years it could be completely different. Speak up against Israel in 2029 and you're fine, speak up for Israel and you're anti-American.
Against gay marriage in 2010? Perfectly normal American values. Against gay marriage in 2020?. Anti American values.
Legalize marijuana? Countrywide abortion access? Legality of sports betting? Support/don't support the Iraq war? Edit: here's 2016 Trump saying trans people can use whatever bathroom they want so even with the same person in charge you could be perfectly fine idealogical agreement one day and wrong the next.
Evidence indicates that we fight, with ever-increasing viciousness, over unilateral enforcement of our tribally-preferred ideologies, and the devil take the hindmost.
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This is the price we pay for being a propositional nation; the proposition changes as the populace does...when the melting pot itself melts and Jeffersonian democracy wears away to nothing, there's a fight over how to replace it. And like most fights, there's swings back and forth until a new consensus emerges.
This presumes that "consensus" remains an unbreached scaffold. What do you do when consensus itself melts, and all that's left is a Will to Power knife fight?
Er?
Like I said...there's a fight. And whoever wins, wins. That's not a tremendously happy answer, but I think it's fairly descriptively accurate, no?
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This is a false dichotomy. There are a lot of other possibilities around which to organize citizenship. In the Roman republic and empire, it was for example build around collective military aid: polities on the Italian peninsula which were subjugated by Rome and fought side by side with the legions were eventually granted citizenship. In the French foreign legion, it is individual military aid: mercenaries who are willing to die for French interests get French passports for their service. Or a lot of cultures were willing to integrate women who married their citizens, willingly or otherwise. In Tír na nÓg , citizens and immigrants share a metatype. In Israel, immigrants and citizens (mostly) share a religion (which is only an ideology in the widest sense of the word).
Of course, if America has an ideology, it is the ideology of the American dream. The idea that an immigrant who arrives with little more than the clothes they are wearing can through hard work thrive in the land of capitalism and freedom. Having opinions about which group should murder which somewhere in the old world seems pretty orthogonal to that.
Some rights are clearly citizen rights -- the right to vote is a clear example. Some other rights are basically human rights, and should naturally apply to any human under the power of the state. The right to free speech, freedom of religion, due process, confront their witnesses, or the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishments are examples of the latter.
Ideally, I would not want the government to change people's immigration status based on any actions which are not actually criminal (or at least narrowly concerning immigration, such as "lying on your visa application"). A world in which each free country has an LLM which searches if visa applicants have made any statement the ruling party does not like and automatically rejects them is not a freer world than one where no free country does such a thing.
It’s hard for me to see this as other than a placebo ideology – an ideology against any common ideas, a standard against standards. It has no unifying power except that of money. Upward mobility for immigrants is a great thing. But it is not the only thing, and it shouldn’t replace the American heritage.
I remember a clip of a TV interview with a black Alabaman and member of the Sons of Confederate Veterans during the George Floyd protests. He was counter-protesting demands that Confederate monuments and symbols be torn down. He had been adopted by a white family; their heritage became his heritage, and he was defending it. He’d become a true member of a family into which he was not born. But it’s not as though he had somehow ceased to be black. I think about this often as an analogy for immigration.
Some nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century immigrants went further in this direction than I could ever ask – for example, refusing to pass on their birth tongues once they’d learned enough English to raise their children in it; I don’t think I could or would have done the same in their shoes. Or consider the spirited embrace of Columbus Day in some Italian-American communities, because it emphasizes the intersection of the Italian and American heritages.
We could do worse than to prioritize those immigrants willing to respect the culture and heritage of the society they are joining.
This was quite different back then than it would be now. If you live your entire life in one neighbourhood and there are a dozen other ethnicities living there, soon enough everyone will adopt a common tongue. To have separate communities you need a certain amount of space between them.
Nowadays, every Arab youth in Europe is on Arab TikTok, and people don't speak to their physical neighbours anyway, no matter if they share a language or not. With the disappearance of physical barriers, it's the language barriers that define the communities.
Except that's not true. New York had significant yiddish, italian, bulgarian, lithuanian, greek, etc. communities, where those languages were spoken alongside, or even to the exclusion of, english in the early 20th century. Chicago had polish, ukranian, etc. Los Angeles today has several areas where spanish is predominant, as well as several suburbs that are at least duolingual with many/most advertisements in mandarin, vietnamese, etc. Up until WWI huge swathes of the midwest spoke german, usually as a second language, but in some areas to the exclusion of english.
Immigrant ghettoization is extremely common, and tends to preserve language use.
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This is a deep and incorrect elision of the same process - the denigrating and hollowing of republican citizenship into imperial subjection - that I am arguing is happening here, today. The socii did not participate in the roman centuriate assembly or plebeian councils, did not serve in roman offices or have any say in roman foreign policy, despite making up at times at clear majorities of roman armed manpower; in fact, the original premise of their becoming socii was that rome would not interfere in their cities' internal affairs at all, in exchange for a territorial guarantee and military mutual aid. In practice, this confederal relationship broke down and Rome did indeed start meddling in the internal affairs of the socii, and the legal distinctions between the various cities began to chafe as rome grew prosperous off war proceeds while the socii were left having to deal with trade barriers that blocked their ability to share in those rewards. By the time of the principate and empire, roman "citizenship" was a very different, much diluted thing.
Of your other examples, it's telling that two are entirely inapposite - one isn't a country but instead a quasi-penal military unit, another is entirely fictional - and the third literally has a religious requirement for naturalization (at least of the type you're discussing). Far closer to my point than yours.
The term "American dream" is itself an artifact of the modern progressive era, with basically no resonance at all before that (with the exception of a tiny little bump in the years immediately surrounding the founding).
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Libertarians are most of the reason I no longer have principles. When I was younger, libertarian principles sound awesome. And it's easy to believe that the world would be a better place if everyone followed them.
Unfortunately, like most belief systems, they splatter against the real world, and my entire adult life libertarians have proven themselves to be among the many ratchets built into the system which paradoxically keeps the boot on my neck. It's not their fault. They simply don't understand the world they live in.
Part of this is that "Left Inc" as I've heard it coined, has done such an amazing job of laundering it's soft and hard power outside of any "bill of rights" framework. So you'll often see libertarians defending Corporations, Universities or NGOs for trampling your rights (It's a private entity, it can do whatever it wants!), while they condemn the government for doing the same. Or they'll be a feckless speed hump against the expansion of the welfare state, and crucial allies for open borders, ensuring we get the worse of both worlds.
Their idiosyncratic principles about the increasingly illusory distinctions between public and private actors in practice have left me at the mercy of people who hate me, and offered no succor or relief, or even a theoretical path. So I have discarded them as worse than useless, more akin to an infohazard.
Now, generally I support the causes FIRE has taken up. They've been fighting the good fight against Title IX overreach. To virtually no effect what so ever I might add though. They've helped students here and there sue for damages, but I've never seen them make a university cave and change policy. It took Trump winning the election and cleaning house at the DOE for that to happen. And wouldn't you know it, now they don't appreciate how Trump has attempted to extirpate DEI language and practices from Universities. It leaves one wondering if they actually want the Title IX policies fixed, and what methods of actually fixing them would be acceptable to them. Because their lawsuits sure and shit did nothing.
But that's libertarians in a nut shell. Their world view is that you can ask nicely for people to stop hurting you, but you aren't allowed to infringe on their "rights" to make them stop.
They shuttered the entire "bias response team" of the University of Michigan just a few years
And just recently won a policy change at George Mason University.
Anyone who has said free speech would be easy to defend would be a liar, but anyone fighting for free speech knew that from the start. You don't win by being perfect everywhere at once, you win by taking it on battle by battle.
That's crazy, the idealogy around limiting government and protecting individual private liberty primarily wants to limit government and protect private entities. At this point it might as well be a generic "they don't agree with me about everything, I like it when they're allies but hate them when they're opposed" complaint.
Your whole comment comes off like you're against principles just because those principles sometimes come into conflict with your desires
I think the complaint is more one of prioritizing the letter of those principles in a short-sighted way, that undermines the reasons they were thought to be desirable principles. Like, if your speech rights can be trampled almost as much as if you lived in the old USSR as long as it's not government directly doing the dirty work, even if government played a large role in creating the conditions that made that possible, and libertarians are mostly standing by and letting it happen, that doesn't sound like a very libertarian world to me.
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To play devil’s advocate(and to be clear I am not a libertarian, even if I don’t like the government very much)- a lot of the reason corporations and universities are on one side of the culture war in particular is due to government policy making it hazardous to take the other side. Theoretically in a libertarian world conservative universities wouldn’t be limited to small religious liberal arts colleges.
If that Libertarian world were less than completely theoretical, or if the Libertarian movement gave any indication that they had a method of getting us there, this might weigh heavier of the deliberations of former libertarians.
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I think politics is the place where principles go to die most certainly, and tbh, it’s a big reason why I just am reaching the point where I don’t even want to be involved in any of it. Let me grill or read books or watch sports or hike or fish and let someone else decide what we’re going to do about the problems.
It's a curiosity because without principles, what makes someone choose any particular side to begin with?
Values lie below principles and give rise to them. Principles crystalize in particular environments, and whether they are worth having is dependent on how well they enable the execution of values in that environment.
Both environments and values shift over time, but the point of principles is that they do not shift. Because they do not shift, they are sheared away under sufficient values/environment drift. This does not greatly complicate choosing sides, because that is better done for values reasons anyway.
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Familial/tribal/ethnic loyalties? Nobody is born into a void, into the "view from nowhere"; we're all born into a particular place, a particular family, particular conditions; embedded in a specific social context, full of unchosen bonds and obligations, which indelibly shape who we are.
You (generic/rhetorical "you," not making any assumptions here) love your family not because they're "the best family" according to some prior metric, you love your family because they're yours. Much the same with patriotism. To quote Chesterton, "Men did not love Rome because she was great. She was great because they had loved her."
I'm curious what family, tribe or ethnicity have to contribute to considering the effects of certain economic policies like price controls, or law regarding the environment, or political and institutional design.
Would you say your family, tribe or ethnicity has helped you determine the answers to the above?
See e.g. the British Corn Laws. Those lined up very clearly with the aristocrats (who owned the land) and the farmers (who worked it) in favour of tarriffs on imported grain, with merchants / importers / speculators and urban industrial workers against.
Self-interest, life experiences and priorities often line up along familial, tribal and ethnic lines.
"What will the effect be of this 50% tariff?"
"I don't know. Are we talking about Hutus or Tutsis here?"
You can see how un-illuminating this is pretty quickly.
Because I don't know anything about either of those groups. I guarantee you they would be affected differently by tariffs.
I can look it up though:
The years following independence saw repeated massacres of Tutsis. There were also attacks on Hutus by Tutsis, who saw themselves denied political representation as the nation became a one-party State. Tutsis were denied jobs in the public service under an ethnic quota system which allocated them only 9% of available jobs. Tensions were further inflamed by increasing pressures on the Rwandan economy, resulting in rising levels of poverty and discontent.
So the Tutsis were a minority group that had been in charge in the early half of the 20th century and were then overthrown. When bad economic times struck Tutsis were hit by a double whammy of discrimination from the Hutus government and scapegoating from dissatisfied Hutus. Meanwhile the Hutus are likely propped up by the government and have more access to land and government support.
I strongly suspect that Tutsis would be hit very badly by 50% tariffs and the resultant economic problems. I also suspect that anybody who has serious business in Rwanda thinks about this kind of thing on a constant basis. The failure of foreign hegemons to consider very delicate inter-tribal dynamics in favour of academic theories about what should be important is a recurring complaint since the 1800s.
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Read my reply more carefully. You asked why people choose a side. That is the question I answered. It's not about "economic policies like price controls," it's about whose side am I on.
This is pure Carl Schmitt — that the essence of politics is the friend-enemy distinction: who is my ingroup, and who is my outgroup.
It's something I see often among the leftists on Tumblr — they don't have considered positions on issues, or even fixed principles, they have a side. They support whatever their "tribe" currently supports, because their tribe currently supports it, and if that changes, they change with it.
People significantly choose what side they're on by considering the effects of what they believe to be facts beyond subjective self-interest or family ties. They demonstrably spend time researching "the facts" and the "science."
Even this notion of tribal loyalties determining political outcomes is supposedly a disinterested value-free view from above, about human behavior.
We apparently know very different sorts of people, because that's not my experience with most people IRL, unless by "researching "the facts" and the "science"" you mean watching Fox News.
Most people I know determine their positions on "ethnicity have to contribute to considering the effects of certain economic policies like price controls, or law regarding the environment, or political and institutional design" by "what does the Republican party support" or "what does the Democrat party support."
IIRC (I don't recall where I saw the data) most Americans partisan identities develop in their early 20s, and then generally just keep voting for the same party the rest of their lives.
What you describe as how "people" behave is simply alien to my experience.
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Politics is always compromise between the need to get things done and the need to uphold principles. Quite often because those principles lead to paradoxes and contradictory answers depending upon the questions at hand. The principle of free speech is not infinite, you can’t talk about weapons on an airplane or in an airport, you can’t urge the commission of crimes, you can’t, rather famously, yell fire in a crowded theater (unless of course there actually is a fire), and you can’t lie about a product you are selling. Why? Other very important public goods: public safety, prevention of fraud, etc. need to be protected and cannot be if free speech is absolute.
And on it goes. Policing is a necessary evil, and using force is a necessary part of policing because criminals tend not to respond to polite requests to please stop robbing, raping, murdering, or selling drugs. That doesn’t mean you don’t have rules against overreaching, but one man’s police brutality is another man’s stopping those criminals terrorizing his neighbors.
And balancing this stuff, all these balances between two things that are goods in themselves, or at the very least avoiding some form of known bads, gets complicated very quickly. I’ll be blunt in saying that most people are unqualified for this kind of stuff because they don’t understand the issues involved. Most political conversations are vibes based bleating not even willing to engage in the entire argument, quite often undertaken by people who don’t bother to find out how things work. I put myself there, I have no idea where the highway should go, where the lines of public decency vs degenerate behavior should be drawn, how exactly to police a community without unnecessary brutality or excess permissiveness. And as such I think that politics would go much better if more people tuned out and dropped out and let people who know deal with the problems without me telling them that their solutions are not aesthetically appealing to me.
Certainly you can talk about weapons on an airplane or in an airport. And that rather infamous "fire in a crowded theatre" case -- it actually concerned people distributing pamphlets protesting the draft as a violation of the 13th Amendment -- is not good law and has not been for a long time. The current law is Brandenburg v. Ohio, the famous "imminent lawless action" test.
This misuse of the "fire in a crowded theatre" incidentally demonstrates the disingenuous of those who use it to justify restrictions. Because on the close order of zero people have gone from "My new proposed restriction is OK because fire in a crowded to a theater" to "Never mind" when it is pointed out that Schenck v. U.S. has not been good law for over 50 years.
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I mean, for me, it was the realization that principles mean nothing. A sufficiently motivated adversary will find some way of maliciously using your "principles" against you, and then chiding you for defending yourself. You see it with free speech, and malicious actors doxing the families of "free speech absolutist". Congratulations edgelord, you found the edge. Nobody doubted you could.
I think if you grew up in a high trust society, you take for granted that principles are just another part of the social contract. As it descends into a low trust hellhole, where there is no social contract what so ever, principles just amount to handing your daughters over to literal roving gangs of barbarian rapists and sitting idly by because you wouldn't want to step out of your lane and violate the state's monopoly on violence. If you want to stick to your principles, you must allow savages to repeatedly rape her.
As civilization crumbles around us, we repeatedly see what our "principles" are earning us, and it's suicide.
Not an OP in this chain, but I think that's where we disagree. I'm somewhat friendly to the idea of high vs low trust societies, but I don't think that trust is inherently entropic and decaying or else we wouldn't ever have high trust to begin with. I also don't think technological or social movements from the last century or so are inherently corrosive to trust either (maaaaybe algorithmic-driven news but I am hopeful this will self-correct). I think any variation contributed by immigration is within the variation that already exists in the natural ebb and flow of trust insofar as it exists, it's not inherently directional. As an example, some immigrants might even raise institutional trust because they have a vision of America that is more rosy than Americans themselves believe. Or, of course, sometimes they bring prejudice with them, but it's not some broad brush, and it's not some inevitable march to decay. Civilization is not dying, and although history never repeats, I feel like the rhymes are there to justify humanity's continual adaptation and loose progression. As clarification, I think the 'global march of progress' narrative often parroted on the Left is super-duper wrong, but civilization itself has a stubborn tendency to stick around. Empires, of course, do not; mind you don't mistake the two!
Contra MaiqTheTrue, I think I draw the opposite conclusion from similar facts. Even though many individuals may not have full awareness or be capable of navigating balances and tradeoffs and knowing the fine details, we can still accomplish positive and clever execution because the intensities of belief act as "weights" on the system as a whole. Work tends to happen in the middle near the fulcrum, and directional pressures - even if vague by themselves! - lead to a convergence on a balance point actually quite close to the ideal in many cases. The more lower-d democratic a system is (caveat: actually a degree of representative government is also needed, policy is written by individuals after all), the better this tends to work. That is, I think wisdom of the masses theory is broadly true, and that even intelligent individuals in power often respect these counterbalances, even unconsciously, more than is often appreciated. A local administrator might tell you plenty of superficial rationales for choosing certain zoning restrictions, for example, but ultimately there is a lurking calculus of the big players in the city and what kind of things the voters like that has more often than not pre-determined the smaller range of plausible outcomes before they even start drafting them up.
Under this model of the world, even cynical, loud, and evil people who wield principles like a weapon and view politics as a blood sport often act more as weights on the scale than actual participants. Moving the Overton Window and living on the extremes provides a degree of additional leverage, this is true, but that's not a bug it's a feature! The 'intensity of belief' should affect the balance of things (and even pure cynics are downstream of this intensity, not the actual upstream source). Furthermore promoting more lower-d democratic behaviors helps quite a lot, indirectly, to expose them for what they are, and re-weight the balance over time.
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See I think we largely agree that absolute principles do not work in the world of actual humans simply because at bottom, everyone is going to be working in their own favor and cooperate only to the point that doing so advances their interests, and the trick is to get pro-civilizational behaviors is to make benefits from society dependent on being beneficial to that society. But of course this is difficult, and probably more so with the hyper-individualism that the west suffers from that says you can do whatever with no regard for others and quite often very few social or legal consequences.
I don’t know how to get there, but I’d love for America to have social cohesion like in Asia and a Scandinavian economic system.
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The most locally concerning precedent being set in immigration cases is the requirement that all social media be set to "public". This is essentially leaning towards the abolition of internet anonymity.
I don't see how one classifies "social media" in a way that doesn't include a place like Reddit, TheMotte, or MetalArchives, or my comments on BleedingGreenNation about Nick Sirianni, or the comments from Carolinian politicians on NudeAfrica. No more usernames, everything must be posted publicly.
And while they might only be talking about Facebook or instagram or Twitter initially, and during the visa process they probably won't be extensively cross-referencing non-public information to figure out your anonymous usernames, let alone utilizing stylistic analysis or correlating personal information to doxx you, the catch-22 is potentially really bad: if you lie on your visa application, you have now committed a crime.
And if they want to get rid of you, all they have to do is utilize the various methods available to a government to doxx you, find the comments you made on BloggingTheBoys about how Jerry Jones needs to get his head out of his ass, and boom, they have you.
Redditor is a unique designation, in that hating redditors tells me instantly that you are, in fact, a redditor. I'm not aware of any similar grouping of humans. Chris Rock might rail about the difference between "Black people and Niggers" but he clearly understands himself to be in the former category. Jews might mock their own foibles, but so does everyone else. Only Redditors complain about Redditors.
Maybe in general, but not in my case. A few years back, after a long downward pattern of less & less use, I copped a permanent ban on absurd grounds, and had my appeal rejected.
I had been for many years, as early as 2016, been slowly enjoying the app less and less. Just took it as a sign that my time was done, deleted my profile, deleted the app, never reinstalled it again.
Every once in a while I’d get a link from somewhere else and just reading the comments for a minute before I inevitably closed it, I’d felt like I’d roll my eyes so hard they were about to pop out of my skull.
We are having this conversation at TheMotte.Org , whose very existence is proof of how shitty Reddit is and has been for a long time.
It’s been clear to me for years that Reddit is mostly just a botnet & super astroturfed influence peddling platform that’s been shrinking itself into an irrelevant echo chamber. It’s honestly incredibly boring.
Claims not be a redditor. Used reddit from somewhere prior to 2016 until a couple years ago. Appealed the ban to try to keep using reddit.
Yeah, dude, you're a redditor. Albeit maybe an exiled one. One wouldn't say that an American living abroad has ceased to be an American, and a Catholic who stops going to communion is always just a lapsed Catholic.
I’m as much a redditor as I am a Digg user, or a 4chan User, or a SometingAwful user (goon), or a MySpace user, or a Facebook user.
Which is to say, not at all. I don’t use any of those things much at all anymore, even if I have a still active account.
You’re projecting since you’re still using Reddit. I probably spend less than an hour a month on Reddit, only reading it when shared in some other context on some other site. Or when I do a search and the other results are Reddit. Been that way for 3 years at this point.
It got boring. I appealed my ban in a sort of weary indifference, mostly out of curiosity. I knew it wouldn’t work, the site was too far gone and had been that way for years.
When I finally copped the ban I was using it maybe 2hrs a week when I was very bored, I simply didn’t enjoy it much anymore and most of the good communities had long ago gotten zapped by the eye of Sauron. I knew it was just a matter of time before there was literally nothing of value left so I pulled the plug early.
Just like Digg; not with a bang, but a whimper.
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Yes I would. Sure, it depends on length of time - someone who lives in another country for a few months or even a few years does not cease to be an American that quickly. But when that person has been in the other country for a few decades, I think it's fair to say they aren't American any more. And I think @MaximumCuddles case is more analogous to the American living overseas for a few decades - if he hasn't had an account in 9 years, that's an eternity in Internet time.
He said he stopped liking it in 2016, he stopped using it when he got banned "a few" years back, which I'd normally read as 2-3, giving at minimum double the amount of time of using Reddit as having left Reddit.
Given that it takes five years of residency to be ready to apply to become a US citizen, I'd say leaving for 2 or 3 years isn't enough to shed it. Certainly if one lived in the United States for 20 years, leaving for ten isn't enough to stop being American, you probably never quite stop being American at that point.
I'm curious what the linguistic or philosophical category is for a statement where I would say that someone can't claim something as a positive status, but can't argue against it as a negative status. Like if a teen boy has only received a handjob, one is probably precluded from claiming to be a virgin in the positive sense of being chaste, but probably can't brag to his buddies about having lost his virginity. Or a corporate lawyer who does some pro-bono work for woke causes; he can't claim the positive status of being in public interest because he's a corporate sellout, but neither can he avoid the negative accusation of working for the woke blob.
So the question is, is being a redditor (or an American) more like building a bridge, or fucking a goat?
My bad, I misread the timeframe. I agree that significantly changes the discussion such that it's reasonable to say "you're still a redditor".
Thank you for writing this, it cracked me up.
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It hasn’t been quite that long since I’ve deleted my account, only a few years, but I’d put the probability of me using Reddit again on any substantial level again around 5%. It would take a miracle to get me to use it again even on a weekly basis.
It’s joined a bunch of other sites in the dustbin of things I don’t use. Might as well be Friendster or Snapchat at this point.
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During the Furry Wars of the 00s it was a common understanding that people who were really obsessed with hating furries were probably furries themselves, or at least felt the call of the fur in some way.
...What were the furry wars?
Starting in 2000-2004, the furry fandom became visible to people outside of the fandom to a much greater degree than before. This also coincided with a lot of social media sites with a large focus on pointing out and sneering at people they thought were weird, with the most famous being SomethingAwful.
This went about as well as a house on fire.
I don't know much about the SA-internal side of things, outside of there just being several purges of people suspected of being furs from their forums (tbf, SA purges people from the forums as a fundraising effort, or just because Lowtax thought it was funny). But from the furry side, it was pretty common for fairly small furry spaces to just randomly get swarmed by twenty trolls out of the blue.
Some of this was tongue-in-cheek or self-deprecating. But a lot of it was just point-and-look-and-the-weirdos, and sometimes surprisingly mainstream. There's a Daily Show skit called To Boldly Gay where furries were a good part of the punchline, and I'm not going to link it because it didn't censor the smut sketch it was making fun of, and that was cable television. CSI's Fur and Loathing is probably the most infamous.
(Sexual politics of the time, given the broad gay-or-gay-adjacent bits of the fandom, probably had an impact, too.)
One of the joking-not-joking responses is that while the media reporting was probably just the standard Jerry Springer stuff, the trolls, at least, sure seemed to spend a lot of time and attention scrolling through art or writing that supposedly made them violently ill. And just like the then-prominent gay marriage debate proposed that the people most strongly opposed to gay marriage were really closeted, after a few high profile (if not very-well-proven) examples, a lot of furries took some cases of user overlap between CrushYiffDestroy (a furry-self-critical forum) and the SomethingAwful forums as evidence that many of others were really using the movement to
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Congratulations on not being a furry (I also, don't know what he's talking about, what're the odds there's a Kiwifarms thread about it though lol)
Furries remain something that I can't, quite, accept that they exist.
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It doesn't seem like there is such a thread on the Kiwi Farms. I think the topic is sufficiently old (from the 00s apparently) that nobody has explored it yet.
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Nobody makes fun of weebs more than other weebs.
Huh, interesting. I mostly hear weebs made fun of by Asian girls who want to complain about fetishes.
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Having gone through the permanent resident process for my wife, there were a lot of things that were potentially disqualifying that would have been protected activities for citizens. Being a member of the Communist party*, advocating for the overthrow of the American government, etc.
Does permanent resident status confer the right to participate in those activities that could have prevented you from getting that status in the first place?
* This came up and it seemed like not a big deal if the situation was "everyone has to participate in communist activities in China."
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My take on this is that the US is somewhat unique in being a nation founded on a proposition rather than blood, soil, or some historical what-have-you. To that end, i believe it is in the US's interest as a nation to vet those it let's in on the basis of whether or not the are "on board" with that proposition.
Free speech is a human right, residence in the United States is a privilege.
This depends on whether you consider the UK and USSR to be nation-states, or whether you think they are multinational proposition-states. The process of creating a "British" identity on top of the English, Scottish, Welsh, and Protestant Irish national identities (all of which are conventional land-ethnicity-and-culture national identities) in the 18th century was deeply propositional, with anti-Catholicism being the most normie-friendly part of the proposition at the time. Likewise the only thing that makes Lithuanians, Khazaks, Russians etc. "Soviets" is a (mostly fake) shared commitment to Communism.
My experience is that most normie Brits call England, Scotland and Wales "nations" and "countries" and call the UK a "country" but not a "nation". "National" normally implies UK-wide though. We are confused about the issue. The question "Are you an English ethno-nationalist, a British ethno-nationalist, or a British civic nationalist?" is mild kryptonite to nationalists in England. (British nationalists in Wales and Scotland are either unassimilated English migrants or uncomplicatedly civic nationalists)
The unusual thing about the US is that there isn't a set of subordinate ethnic-national identities that the civic identity is built on top of - the only state that is plausibly a nation is Texas. So civic nationalism is the only American nationalism that makes sense.
Another corner case is France - at the point it became necessary to turn Bretons, Gascons, Provencals etc. into Frenchmen quickly in order to get them to fight together, some but not all of the way Napoleon did it was propositional - France isn't just the land of baguettes and Moliere, it is also the land of liberte, egalite and fraternite.
To me there seems a noteworthy difference between the idea ‘proposition nations’ and ‘collective identity’ nations. If two towns merge - join their municipal councils, share local tax revenue - that doesn’t make them a ‘proposition town’ that any third town can necessarily subsequently join.
A national identity might be built on a shared ethnic or cultural relationship, friendship or heritage that precludes a third-party from joining even it the polity itself is heterogeneous. Different peoples can become American is not the same as anyone can become American. That a Welshman and a Scot can both be British doesn’t mean anyone can, although in the age of mass immigration, I suppose the distinction is moot.
The next obvious question then is, if some people can join together to become another people (ethnogenesis, or if you prefer collective identity formation) then what are the lines of demarcation which define in-group and out-group? In the British case, the factors seem to be:
But an upper class Indian from Calcutta also fits many of these. They were subjects of the Crown for 300 years (and are still members of the Commonwealth), they speak English, and their own mother-tongue is an Indo-European one. If they're of a certain milieu, they read a paper called the Times, they definitely play cricket, and they might even be Christian. At the very least they're familiar with Shakespeare and Kipling. And of course this person might have grandchildren who are third-generation British born. So they could satisfy the 4th condition.
And yet that 5th will never be satisfied, until intermarriage and mixing occurs. Until recently the vast majority of people in Britain would be willing to acknowledge this hypothetical individual as British, just British (Indian), like British (Welsh). But I suppose something has changed recently, as the previous imperial identity breaks down, and the Anglo identity reasserts itself. In my view this is predominantly down to cascade effects and critical masses. The grandson of the chap from Calcutta might be British (Indian), but does the guy who just flew in from Bihar, who speaks terrible English, who thinks of Manchester, Melbourne, and Milwaukee as interchangeable places that are functionally the same, does that mean that he is British Indian? "But look, people who look like me can be British!" Perhaps, but not you. And then people start to notice that these people who are definitely not British (but who they're told are) actually seem to be pretty similar to these people who they thought were British before.
But back to the question. If e) is important then how come the two "founding stock" Americans are as diametrically opposed as possible? Anglo/NW Europeans and West Africans. Well frankly its because time changes things- most namely it means there's a whole load of "intermarriage" (or, Jeffersonian style encounters) and if the South African Coloureds count as having some commonality with the Europeans, then so do African-Americans. This also solves for sticky identities which persist over time despite consistent marriage with their neighbours, e.g. the Ashkenazi. A Christianised (or secularised) Mischling in say southern France or Italy is of such minute difference to the local population that it's hardly worth differentiating.
The long and short of it is that until extensive mixing and partial homogenisation occurs, collective identity cannot (or at least, it won't stick). The migrant populations must become hyphenated, and hyphenation is not just a matter of paperwork. This hyphenation cannot occur when the numbers are too large OR too concentrated (as there will be the possibility of insularity), but given time, can become a new part of the nation.
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Well that would be the point under contention wouldn't it?
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Alaska.
You're probably right about that one.
More specifically, I would say that those Texans who see themselves as a nation would include most of Oklahoma and parts of New Mexico in that separate nationhood. Maybe parts of Louisiana, Colorado, Arkansas as well- but definitely not all or even most. Alaskans would not have this idea of honorary Alaskan-ness for anyone else. Assimilating requires moving to Alaska.
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Hawaii?
My impression is that Hawaiian nationalism is only for indigenous Hawaiians, who are <20% of the population - in other words Hawaii isn't plausibly a nation with its current demographics.
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Not really. Well, this is historically wrong... obviously in the present day this is pretty clearly correct. Besides Texas of course, and for a while Utah to some degree (and maybe also Vermont? It never joined the Articles of Confederation and took a few years to join the United States too, although a lot of this was New York's stubbornness denying them. I don't think my native Oregon Territory makes the cut though), you only have to look at the Civil War and the decisions made by many individuals there to discover that some people did in fact consider other identities as not even necessarily subordinate but even superceding that of full nationality. Robert E Lee as a classic example notably considered allegiance to Virginia as supreme to that of America. However, it's worth noting that this really only applied to the original 13 colonies and weakened substantially over time. And of course every war in particular was a major impetus towards nationalism.
Still, I get what you're saying. There was a sort of "purpose" and consciousness behind the creation of the US that many other [Western] nations lack, at least so quickly. It's nonetheless difficult to say what exactly generalizes and what does not, because historians well know that nationalization somewhat paralleled technologies that facilitated internal movement (e.g. the railroad), internal mixing (e.g. educational and literacy trends), and led to increasing national mobilization in the military realm (post-Napoleonic warfare). The US is also a bit of an aberration in the sense that it has limited history (in a Eurocentric sense, and thus fewer pre-existing loyalties) so it's not an easily extensible template.
I agree that the Confederacy could have been a nation-state if it had successfully seceded, but it didn't, and I don't see a separate nation there in 2025 - the whole point of the "Red Tribe" meme is that the White South now sees its own grievances against the DamnYankees as a part of a broader small-town vs big-city and periphery vs core rebellion against a corrupt establishment. To its supporters, that rebellion speaks for, and deserves the support of, all patriotic Americans. It doesn't want a separate country, it wants to fix the one that exists.
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Topics like this are where my nativist impulses collide with my remaining lolbert ones. Recently, some of the foreign national speakers appear to trying to drag the U.S. (further) into their ethnic battle on the other side of the planet, and I would be quite happy to have far fewer of those types around. Other speakers are criticizing the U.S. for being the Evil Colonizer Empire or the Great Satan, and while they might have their valid points, if America is so bad, then they need to go back whence they came and make those arguments from their home country.
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I linked this blog post in a reply at the bottom of a long comment chain, but it occurs to me that it is probably worth discussing in it's own right.
According to all known laws of physics and aviation there is no way that a bumble bee ought to be able to fly. The bee, of course knows nothing of this and insists on flying anyways.
Wikipedia has an entry dedicated to the phrase “Thank God for Mississippi” because for the last 100 years or so, no matter how bad off your state may be in a particular way, you could typically take solace in the idea that Mississippi had it worse. "Yes, our health outcomes suck..." the the people in Wyoming and Alaska may tell themselves "...but at least we aren't Mississippi".
In my experiance shitting on the South Eastern US as an embarassing, degenerate, cultural backwater, is not only tolerated in blue and grey tribe spaces but venerated and encouraged. Of course the south sucks, that's where Mississippi is. If you are from that region and you are persuing a degree at a school like Stanford or Cal-Tech you quickly learn to hide your accent and claim to be from somewhere else if you want to be taken seriously and graded honestly by your professors.
According to all known laws of of demographics, economics, and reason Mississippi shoud not have good schools and yet...
The "Missisippi Miracle"
In 2002 the second Bush administration signed the No Child Left Behind Act into law. Educational standards and reform had been had been a big part of his 2000 campaign platform, his wife Laura being a grade-school teacher, and one of the provisions of this act was a a mandate that "Public" (that is tax-payer-funded) schools would participate in the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) originally established by the Johnson administration in 1964. As a result we now have standarized test data for almost every state and municpiple school district in the country going back over two decades.
For those outside the US, US school system is typically broken into 3 4 year long blocks. Kindergarten/Elementry School, Middle/Secondary School, and then High School. Specific names and implimentations vary from state to state but as a general rule the idea is that a child will enter the public school system at the age of 5 or 6 and graduate at the age of 18. The NAEP tests students for reading and mathematical proficiency at grades 4 and 8, IE upon entering and exiting Secondary/Middle School.
In 2003 Missisippi 4th graders where ranked near to last in the nation for reading comprehension, with an unadjusted average of 203. Only DC and Puerto Rico ranked lower. As of 2024 thier score is 219, representing a lttle over a standard deviation of improvement and placing them just shy of the top 10. This on it's own would represent admirable progress, but where things start to become unhinged is when you look at the "adjusted" figures. NAEP and various outside NGOs apply various adgustments to the raw scores in an attempt to control for things like demographics, socio-economic status, and spending per-student. When these "adjustments" are applied, Mississippi schools are not just performing better than they were 20 years ago, they are performing better than any other state school sytem in the nation. This is the alleged "Miracle".
Now a number of liberal commentators ranging from Friedliche DeBoer (of the South African Boers perhaps?) and Kevin Drum to Steve Sailer and the LA Times have all tried to debunk the so-called "Mississippi Miracle". The arguments generally fall into three broad categories. The first is that the mainstream media, academia, and establishment politicians are all prejudiced against liberal coastal blue-coded states like New York, Massachusetts, California, and Oregon, in favor of southern states like Mississippi. I find this claim laughable on it's face for reasons stated in the opening of this post. The second is the significantly more defensible claim that the NEAP's "adjusted" scores do not accurately reflect ground level truth. I believe that this is a fair critique, but the people making this critique often explicitly refuse to acknowledge that the unadjusted scores also saw an marked improvement (casts side-eye at Sailer and DeBoer) and that even when comparing like to like, the average Black student in Mississippi reads at a level about 1.5 grade levels higher than the average Black student in democratic strongholds like Illinois or Wisconsin.
Finally there is the claim that Mississippi is effectively "gaming the system". In 2013 the Mississippi State Legislature enacted the Literacy Based Promotion Act (LBPA) which required kids to pass a reading test to be promoted from elementary to middle school or else be held back or forced to repeat a year. The argument as it is, is that 4th graders in Mississippi are actually 5th or 6th graders by any other state's reckoning. If that were true one would expect to see a substantial age difference in the class cohorts, however that is not what we see, the average age of a 4th grader in Mississippi is only 0.01 years (or just under 4 days) above the national average.
To all appearances, and against the most ardent protestations of our resident Boer it would seem that having standards and enforcing them may actually matter.
How is this possible
I have a cynical answer that I expect to get me in trouble with the moderators, because I am about to take a stand in defense of Bulverism. Ad Hominem may be a formal fallacy, but in the real world it provides real value. Whether or not someone has an ulterior agenda is absolutely something you should be thinking about when you are trying to decide whether or not you are going to believe them.
I expect to be accused of "lacking charity" but the words are going to be theirs not mine. At some point all the experts in the blue and gray tribes seem to have decided that teaching kids to read was too much trouble and that not teaching them to read would be just as effective at promoting literacy as not doing so because demographics matter more than basic competency or engagement. Why would they do that even as they admitted that “For seven years in a row, Oakland was the fastest-gaining urban district in California for reading,”. The answer is in the following line "And we hated it."
By claiming that standards matter i am effectively take taking a shit on the foundational beliefs of Steve Sailer, Friedliche DeBoer, and a number of users here including at least one moderator.
Mississippi accepts your hate and Volleys it back. Ideocracy may be coming for America, but its coming for you, the blue tribe, not for MAGA country. We will teach our children Shakespeare Kipling and Twain, and you will not, and in 20 years we will see who has come out on top.
It's crazy that this is considered cheating. You can't seriously let someone into middle school who can't read. What are they going to do there? Certainly not learn anything if they can't read the textbooks.
In the Netherlands it's normal to be held back if you haven't learned whatever you had to learn in a year.
The goal of the US public school system is not necessarily education. Employment, local sports, social engineering all come before and all pale before the true goal- spending money.
I hadn't considered ranking the non-educational motives before. My guess would be:
This one is the most important priority by like, a factor of 10
I agree with this. Every time I watch a board meeting, they're pretty explicit about it. It's what people were actually upset about during Covid.
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Flip 1 and 2, and reverse the order of 4-6 (for one thing the whole structure surely pushes against individualism), and you might have the beginnings of something. But your #2 is clearly #1 and it's not close.
Re. 4: Does public school teach that you should make sacrifices for the common good? Do public school kids have to take a stake in their school by cleaning the classrooms and serve each other lunch? All I remember is stuff like "ANYONE can be president, even YOU" and "America is great because of freedom to do whatever you want and the right to the pursuit of happiness (cf. "don't yuck my yum," "different strokes," etc.)" I think many Americans underestimate how individualistic America is. It is alive and well in America.
R. 6, if it was a higher priority there would be more time ensuring basic competency instead of pushing the barely literate out the door with a diploma.
Re 1 & 2, I'm not so sure. If the daycare function were curtailed (say, only half days or something) I am quite sure that they wouldn't cut half the teaching staff. Public school employees are heavily entrenched, and they can always trot out thought-terminating expressions like "investing in our future" and "funding education" and "helping people of any class achieve the American dream" or whatever that American voters are seemingly helpless against.
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Yes, the Oklahoma legislature spends a ton of money on jobs programs for leftists and progressive indoctrination.
Correct. A long and running complaint of the conservative base about their elites.
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Well, the purpose of a system is what it does.
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Is this true in a sense other than those which are true for unions and government agencies in general?
Yes, the usual iron law reasons are enshrined ideologically.
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It's only considered "cheating" when it is framed to make progressives look bad. It's considered a perfectly valid solution when framed as a solution for groups progressives hate.
LOL, you just want to stop that guy when he starts talking about brain development of teenagers and say "SAT-M".
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I’m in full agreement that it should never happen that a kid who can’t read and do math on grade level should not be moved to the next grade. The problem lies in the vested interests that almost everyone involved in public education have to bury systemic educational failures. Schools lose funding and prestige if kids don’t at least appear to be learning. Teacher and administrator pay are tied to kids being able to go to tge next grade and kids passing standardized tests. As such the pressure to cheat the system at tge expense of the kids is high. Once you add in the irate parents who will storm the school if little Johnny gets held back and you can pretty much expect “social promotion” to happen with the tests fudged to hide the evidence.
There's also demographic concerns to keep in mind as well. Like discipline, a school absolutely does not want a situation where a legally protected demographic does worse than a cohort.
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A school near me has one of the highest reading test pass rates of any school in the state. I recently got into an argument with a parent whose children attend the school. She is adamant that the scores are fake and that the school is just cheating—in precisely the same way that Mississippi is “cheating”—by holding back any students who don’t pass the test. Like you, I think that argument is insane, but I know a sizable minority of parents disagree with the school’s approach.
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It's viewed as a form of juking the stats by some people, since the point of standardized testing is typically to measure the performance of teachers, schools, school districts, etc. If there are differences in policy on grade promotion, that makes it harder to do a fair comparison.
Just as a really simplified example, let's say low-performing students in state A learn approximately 0.7 of a grade level each year, while in B they learn 0.6. State A has social promotion, while state B holds students back a year if they are doing poorly. So in grade 4 standardized testing, the low-performers in A would be working at a grade level of 2.8 (4x0.7) while in B they would be working at a grade level of 3.0 (5x0.6). Someone just looking at the aggregate stats would assume B has more effective teachers, when the opposite is true.
This probably has a pretty minimal impact since the number of students held back is in the low single digits, but it is a confounding variable.
The bigger problem in my opinion is that standardized testing really emphasizes getting the bottom 10-20% over the bare minimum bar, while ignoring the top 10-20%. These inter-state comparisons are really just measuring which states are better at handholding the remedial students enough to just barely feign competence.
Depends on how you measure efficiency. Which school is better? With functionally illiterate students released in 3 years or one that releases students actually capable of reading and understanding in 5 years? (obviously in reality that applies to small sample, also threat of being held back encourages to take it more seriously)
I second this approach of thinking, at the end, the goal of school is to pump out students actually capable of reading and understanding. Pumping out illiterate students contradict the function of school, school is NOT day care facility and we should not treat them as such
A school pumping out illiterate students should do worst on stats, State A's school (0.7/year) in @odd_primes's example is a worst school than State B's school (0.6/year), even though State B's school has less effective teachers
Just like a company, the administration stucture matters, it might increase or decrease the overall profitability of the company, and State B's school's administration makes their school more functional at their goal, depite less effective teachers
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Partially. It's also just used on an individual level to see if the children are learning. If one of the kids doesn't pass the reading test, you know he can't read well enough and needs more effort. For example by having him repeat the year. If none of the kids pass the reading test, there's something wrong with the school.
Ultimately, the difference is between teaching the kids to read (even if for some kids this takes longer than average), or not teaching the kids to read. Surely we can all agree that the first option is preferable, and if that also leads to the statistics looking better, that just means the measurement is valid (for once).
Getting the bottom 10-20% over the bar (even if this takes extra effort) is by far more important. You need to be able to read to participate in modern society. If the bottom 10-20% of people can't read, you get huge societal problems.
The geniuses can save themselves - they're smart. Ideally you have tailored education for everyone, but that's not possible.
At the risk of sounding unfair, this seems like a rationalization for equality or “fairness.” I don’t see the huge societal problems. I assume most people who can’t read are not very smart, so reading won’t help much.
OTOH, geniuses can use what they learn more effectively. Competition and markets lead to them generating consumer surplus they cannot fully appropriate. Therefore, we should focus on them first.
Except our education system is so bad, I am sure we could fail at that and ruin the geniuses.
People who can't read are more easily taken advantage of. In A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, the narrator's grandmother saved up enough money over decades to purchase a plot of land to build a home. Once she thinks she's saved up enough, she hands over the money and signs a piece of paper that she thinks is the deed to the land. It wasn't.
It's difficult to overstate just how shitty the general atmosphere can get when you have a huge percent of the population that can be easily exploited like that. Increase the number of easily exploitable people and you increase the number of people exploiting them. Actually, I think anyone who's against low-skilled immigration can grok what I'm saying here. There will always be an underclass, but not every underclass is the same. I would prefer the kind that work hard and live in a high-trust way. Someone who can tally up money when the register is broken. Someone who can read through the terms of a lease. Someone who views smiles positively instead as a warning sign.
Geniuses are doing just fine. In many states, if you have a genius IQ you can actually qualify for an Gifted IEP and get a bus to another school district if they have a gifted program that your local school lacks. There are AP classes in most high schools, there are community college options, anyone can skip ahead an elementary year at any school in the country.
The ones who aren't doing just fine are the 120 IQ people who are too smart to need to learn how to study, not smart enough to seek out additional learning opportunities. They end up being bored in school and never develop the skills needed to get ahead.
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Schools are supposed to be assessing learning on a more thorough, ongoing basis. If a student can't read at their grade level, that should be made very clear to the parents repeatedly throughout the year. The point of standardized testing is to keep the schools honest and get information on relative performance between schools or districts.
With respect to the bottom 10-20%, spending huge amounts of resources to get someone from a grade 4 reading level to a grade 5 reading level won't help them avoid getting swindled by someone with a law degree. Also, I suspect that there is a very significant overlap between the people who cannot read a basic contract, and the people who would not understand such a contract even if it were explained to them. The latter category cannot function independently in modern society and likely need some form of assisted living arrangement to help them navigate daily life.
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Honestly, the ideal way to measure it is buy tracking an individual student through the system and using something like “median student improvement per year” as a way to evaluate the school itself. A school system where students improve by 0.5 a year is objectively a bad school, no matter how the class behind them does.
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Doesn't seem like a real objection anyway -- data can always be adjusted by birth year or held-back status. The school obviously has the data, even if it's not currently being collected in a way that would enable it being used.
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I think the blue tribe ideological reason for not teaching reading don't have much to do with the idea that it's racist. It's an ideological fixation with teachers always being right. Teachers don't like phonics and self-proclaimed education experts say it shouldn't work- these things may be related, but they're both there and they're both more important than whether it actually works. To these people 'educating kids' isn't really the point of public schools- although it's ideal- public schools exist to spend an ever-increasing amount of money, provide jobs for college educated women, and separate kids from their parents. It's unsurprising that red states who care more about the kids learning than about using the public schools for evil can close the gap rapidly when discovering techniques that work.
No, DeBoer is just Dutch for the farmer(the South African Boers were originally named this to refer to their supporting themselves by farming, in contrast to east india company employees). It's not a particularly uncommon surname and Dutch names are scattered throughout the US white population from either small waves of immigration or original settlement.
We need a term for the set of things that people and movements push for in practice after all the social dynamics have been accounted for, as opposed to the things they want in principle. Revealed preferences is close, but it comes bundled with a theory of mind I reject. (Revealed preferences are not preferences.)
The only item on your list of goals that anybody would support in principle is separating kids from their parents, and only some would endorse that. But as a practical matter that movement ends up fighting for the whole list.
It seems related to the discussion from a couple of months ago about "The Purpose of a System is What it Does".
I agree. But the various steelmen Scott got in reply convinced me that there's no way to rescue that framing that lets you discuss intended and actual consequences at the same time, let alone different levels or stages of intent. There's got to be a better set of terms to discuss those ideas.
That would probably be useful.
I felt irritated about the assertion above, but didn't bother spending energy responding to it, because it's basically just boo outgroup. People being motivated by making money is a fully general complaint, and it was two of the three complaints. As for the third claim -- I provide childcare, you are an overeducated babysitter, she is separating children from their parents.
To be clear, my claim is that the education system exists to employ college educated women to make home-makers more of an odd one out than they already are, thus suppressing their numbers further, and that this is an ideological opposition to female domesticity rather than a program to pass out economic benefits.
I don't think this claim is insane on the face of it; education workers are probably a double digit percent of working women who would prefer to be- and could reasonably expect to be if their job was eliminated tomorrow- housewives, and not a particularly low double digit percent.
I don't think it's insane, necessarily, but I can't think of any way to test it off the top of my head, either.
There is a strong case for elementary schools, specifically, and even very conservative communities generally have them. Apparently the Puritans had them, the Amish often have them, Catholic parishes, etc. People who can't do reading, writing, and arithmetic really are at a huge disadvantage, and homeschooling is pretty niche. Even historically, sometimes housewives would also educate their own children to the same standard as a school, but often not. Even Muslim countries have to be very strict indeed to stop sending little girls to elementary school. Sometimes very conservative communities specify only unmarried women can teach, though.
Calling elementary school teaching a jobs program for women doesn't make any more sense than calling policing departments a job program for men.
Elementary special education and the various specialty positions that come with it is largely misguided, in my opinion. But they are not very attractive jobs, as evidenced by the many, many unfilled openings, and the average woman is not very well suited to filling them. Teachers are upset when asked to transfer to SE, and complain about it constantly. There are two sides to that: the low function/high needs self enclosed classrooms, and the inclusion kids on IEPs. The former is probably a function of better healthcare and smaller family units, and is extremely staff intensive, but also extremely draining for the women staffing those positions. Not only the kids themselves (there are a decent number of women suited well enough to that when they're small enough not to be physically threatening), but the compliance paperwork. The overlap between the legal skills and the care work skills is pretty low. Schools are a bit embarrassed about how many SE employees they have, and struggle to hire for those positions.
Junior high and high school are more controversial, but also include more men as workers.
To be clear, historically Catholic schools were staffed by nuns(unmarried women) and in the United States other schools were staffed by literal teenaged girls(unmarried women). Now high school teachers require more subject matter expertise(and this probably extends into many middle school grades/subjects) so it seems like this was always a college educated job. Agreed that even the taliban allows preadolescent girls to go to school with no special conditions, and that modern special ed, flawed as it is, is genuinely a skilled profession that is likely an improvement over previous systems. But the fact remains that a bright sixteen year old can teach a 'normal' third grade classroom, elementary school teaching as a career track- and at least a large portion of the administration growth in schools- is about pulling middle class women who love children into careers. Absent that ideological push 'elementary school teacher' would be similar to 'lunchlady' or whatever, where a college degree isn't necessary.
It's also important to note that elementary school used to be much shorter, with less demand for teachers. My own parents remember kindergarten being treated as advanced preschool(and regularly skipped), with no such thing as preK and first grade having a loosey-goosey attitude to attendance, sometimes first and second grades were combined. While not doing this obviously requires more teachers it's not clear that it's better.
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There is a Dewey-esque impulse among many education reformers to use the schools to shape the next generation into something their parents would not approve of. Nineteenth-century opponents of Roman Catholic education were in that vein, as was Pedagogy of the Oppressed. I think that's what he was getting at.
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How about revealed (or implicit) tolerances? Downgrades the intentionality of wanting implied by "preferences" to simply "acceptable results" .
The class of ideas I’d like to name is more intentional than that.
Consider feminism as a set of ideologies versus feminism as a political movement. Different feminist ideologies are quite varied, but the political movement is more or less united by the idea of increasing individual women’s freedom of action.
If you ask in the abstract, “What should family law look like?” then different forms of feminism will give very different answers. But if you want to know whether the feminist movement will support or oppose a given change to family law, you can simply ask whether it will grow or shrink individual women’s freedom of action. Likewise, pro-life types of feminism are often closer to other forms than those forms are to each other, but opposing abortion runs against this principle and so gets one labeled an enemy.
I think that increased school funding is a similar rallying point for a different coalition. Depending on the issue, money may or may not address it. But money is always a socially acceptable reason to give for the problem, rather than criticizing your allies, and it’s something the coalition wants anyway.
People legitimately support school funding or women’s freedom as they understand it, so it’s more than toleration. But it’s not necessarily their terminal value, either. It’s more of a means that has been elevated by social dynamics to the status of an end.
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I think for three years I watched Robby Suave at The Hill tee off on the Teacher's Union for fighting against phonics based teaching, despite all the science and decades of outcomes showing that whole language teaching is a miserable failure. But teachers hate it, because it's rote and boring, and they insist on narcissistically avoiding all unpleasant aspects of their job. Despite being responsible for the education of our next generation. So their union fights phonics based teacher curriculums tooth and nail.
At least that's what Robby's reporting showed consistently over the years. It was a bit of a hobby horse for him, and an area where his libertarian brain really found a nit to pick with the "trust the science" blue team.
The point I'm drifting towards is that this is really a proxy battle against teachers. The profession is overrun with activist LARPing as educators, their union is controlled by a lesbian activist, and to whatever degree education is occurring, it's haphazard and inertial based on decades of diminishing institutional knowledge. It's a low pay, highly political profession, and increasingly only true believers are attracted and willing to stay in the profession. The ones that treat the trials and tribulations of the profession as a test of faith for their activism are the only ones that thrive.
The median teacher is a normie. Mathematically, this must be true- there are simply too many of them for it not to be.
But to be more specific, teachers are very very conformist women who are at least moderately good at school. If, going through a 'standard' American education system, you uncritically do what the system recommends at every point(and are smart enough to do so, but not smart enough for someone to recruit you out of it), you will probably wind up as a teacher. This is not a recipe for pushing back against retarded activist union bosses or doing hard work that your coworkers doubt the value of.
So no, Miss Smith, second grade teacher number three at literally who elementary that used to be named after a well-known but now problematic individual, does not bear responsibility for this proxy battle. It's hard to see how she even could. She took the job because she didn't think the default path pushed on her through very well, would rather go home after her shift than engage in politics but doesn't know how to say no. She probably likes believing that she's helping the kids in her classroom; she certainly likes the kids. She probably doesn't like her admins or union bosses but does whatever they say with no pushback- because she has never pushed back against anything in her life, ever. That the teaching profession is populated, on the 'grunt' level with the normiest, most submissive women in existence may not be good, but it is a failure of all of society rather than of those teachers themselves.
Unhappily, the most vocal and most online ones are the Mx. Smiths in a polycule who were highly indignant over not being able to tell their eight year old pupils all about their sex life as a queer non-binary folx because some repressive, probably MAGA, parent snitched on them to the administration about what was really being taught instead of readin'/ritin'/'rithmetic.
I occasionally dip into the Reddit teachers sub-reddit and sometimes there are sensible posts (e.g. violent students being able to beat up teachers and other pupils with no consequences, and the administration doing nothing) but equally there are "now today I was highly disturbed because I failed to inculcate into one of my 15 year old male students that Patriarchy Bad, Toxic Masculinity To Blame For Everything, and Men Bad, White Men Especially Bad, what can I do to steer him onto the right path?" posts.
(In case you think I'm inventing the polycule teacher, nope, that's a real example from a few years back).
It's worth remembering how extreme Reddit is when you see stuff like that. For example, the board gaming subreddit is extremely woke (as the forum discussed a few weeks ago), but in real life very few people I have encountered are that way. Similarly, the observation that Reddit teachers are crazy does not necessarily show that the wider group of teachers is that way. They may be, I don't have experience or evidence to say otherwise... I just think one needs more data points than Reddit because of how overall crazy that site's users have become.
Oh, I agree, but the ones most online are the most vociferous, and they that shout the loudest get heard most. So the extreme positions get pushed because the majority are silent or don't know the shenanigans going on until it's too late.
It's also worth noting that the median post on /r/teachers seems to be perfectly ordinary discipline or dealing with admin problems with canned answers that often boil down to 'yeah that sucks'. It's just stuff like 'I had a fight break out in my class' and 'my students won't keep track of which pronouns I use which day of the week' that gets the most attention for reasons that seem obvious.
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You weren't kidding about that subreddit. Just browsed a thread where they were complaining about having to hand the ten commandments in the classroom, and a commenter literally recommended hanging the 7 tenets of the Satanic 'faith'. You can't make this stuff up. https://old.reddit.com/r/Teachers/comments/1miopbb/its_over/n76x3d5/
I mean, I strongly oppose public school teachers being required, or even permitted, really, to hang the Ten Commandments in a classroom. Public schools should not endorse an establishment of religion.
The point of the Satanic Temple stuff is as a protest against religious impositions on public spaces — you say you’re just endorsing good morals, well here’s ours, how do you like it? It’s a good troll, and I think it makes its point.
You also have to separate the Satanic Temple people — who are trolling atheists, from the LeVeyan Satanism people — who are somewhat more trolly atheists who admire Satan as a literary figure (he brought the light of true choice to man!) while not believing in the literal existence of Satan, from the actual, ritual and sacrifices to Satan people. The latter are considered dangerous even among practicing occultists.
The Satanic Temple stuff is just a more edgy version of the Pastafarians trying to wear pasta strainers in their drivers license photos. I think they need to be careful, because yelling “hail Satan” as they like to do sometimes is both upsetting to normies and spiritually stupid, but based on my experiences with the type they’re just edgy atheists and their personalities aren’t much different.
I don’t like any of them, and my view on existing religious references in public spaces is to roll my eyes at people making a big deal of them, but the teachers have a legitimate constitutional complaint that being required to hang religious texts in their classrooms is inappropriate.
Someone once described the first two groups as people “who worship Satan by pretending to worship Satan.” As an assessment it depends on Satan’s existence, but if you accept that it describes the situation well. It’s still worth distinguishing them from those who deliberately and unironically worship Satan, of course.
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This boils down to banning public schools when you look at it at all. Every school teaches a religion, it just depends what flavor.
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I have mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, they are a foundational part of our civilization, and it's good for people to know about and consider them, so I would certainly address them in the curriculum at some point. On the other hand, they're kind of appropriate as actual classroom rules.
Clearly inappropriate for American public schools.
I don't think religious people even agree about what this means, and also not appropriate for American public schools.
They get Saturday and Sunday off, anyway. It would be an improvement on playing Roblox all weekend, but not seriously taught in public schools.
Good advice. Public schools like to focus on the dishonorable parents, with messaging like this Mother's Day, think about all the women who are unable to be mothers, or are estranged from their mothers, and how sad they are. This would probably be a net improvement.
Schools are very serious about this one.
Inappropriate for school aged children to discuss.
Schools are and should be serious about this.
Schools should be more serious than they are about this.
Inappropriate for children.
Schools should be much more serious about this, and especially about flaunting your goods at your neighbor to try to bait them into covetousness.
So I guess that's half of them, where the Commandments and schools align, though they probably wouldn't be comfortable mentioning the possibility of murder, even.
Well of course, they first have to figure out their gender identity and sexual orientation and position on polyamory before they can even begin to contemplate ethical non-monogamy. How repressive to tell eight year olds that adultery is sinful!
There's little overlap between the schools discussing gender all the time and the schools posting the Ten Commandments.
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IIRC schools in USA keep holding shooting drills intended to make subset of "You shall not murder." harder
(in effect cause more damage than shootings themselves, but that should obviate "wouldn't be comfortable mentioning the possibility of murder" anyway)
Elementary schools are a bit paranoid that someone out there might be a murderer, and might come to their school, but I haven't heard any I've been in suggest that their students themselves might become murderers, and should instead choose not to.
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Except they do not have different morals, they do not believe in the tenets of Satanism, they are trolling? Petulant trolling no less since I would bet they agree with the morality of most of the ten commandments, usually they're just having a 'fuck you dad' reaction to at least one of the first four?
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At one point this may have been true. After vaccine mandates and pronoun mandates, the activist have more or less gotten the last of the conscientious objectors out of the profession, and the normies have been indoctrinated.
Yes thé normies are indoctrinated- because they’re, you know, normies.
Ok, so we're back to all teachers being the problem then?
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There's about 4 million primary and secondary school teachers in the US, compared to about 260 million adults. That leaves plenty of room for non-normieness among teachers.
It's the teaching colleges and the universities. I saw the same when it came to newly-minted social workers: they had been stuffed to the gills with (slightly outdated by that time) theories of value-neutral, non-judgemental, the rest of it. So completely unprepared to deal with the types who were cunning, gaming the system, and knew exactly what buzzwords to use when spinning a tale to wrap the social worker round their finger and get them to advocate for "more gibs!" (that handy phrase which the job could have used back then) when interacting with authorities on their behalf.
The Pedagogy of the Oppressed is decades old by this time, and it's still being referenced, for one.
I haven’t encountered all that much of that, in the course of getting an education degree, among other things. There’s a lot of “we have the kids we have, not the kids we wish we had,” which is literally true but often used as an excuse. Lately, the higher ups have been going on a lot about “data” — academic data, behavioral data, data to get kids in trouble, data to get higher staff ratios, and so on and so forth. I don’t like it, much of the data is just a more onerous way of documenting opinions, but it’s certainly getting pushed hard.
Yeah, I think a lot of this is top-down, not grassroots. Unfortunately, the people going through the universities and the training get this imposed on them. So even if they're not progressive themselves, they are being taught "this is how you do it" and not given alternative tools.
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That's a meaningful improvement over the training some friends of mine went through. Are they still teaching Gardner's multiple intelligences? And a few years ago, the district where I had gone to school adopted a commitment to achieving the same outcomes for all students regardless of their gifts or circumstances.
An acknowledgment that not all children are the same, and that their different gifts cannot be made to produce the same outcomes in the classroom, is actually a big deal.
I haven't heard about the multiple intelligences lately. It's been a lot of Science of Reading, High Quality Instructional Materials (apparently this has a more specific meaning than I had initially assumed), uninterrupted Tier 1 (basic curriculum) minutes in ELA and Math, and interventionists for elementary schoolers, including adding Math Lab, STEM, and SEL (social emotional learning) to the elementary specials rotation.
I have a relative who's starting a licensure program this year, so perhaps I'll find out what the current educational zeitgeist is.
What's your take on this? I remember some pitchforks and torches raised a few years ago by socially conservative parents of grade-school kids that it amounted to a program of socializing students into the teacher's ethics while framing it as a skills thing. I haven't looked into it enough to understand it.
I do remember when a bunch of placards sprang up in my early '90s public elementary school listing all the traits they expected to develop in students. It read like a list of virtues as conceived by a committee of bureaucrats.
My reaction was more or less, "What qualifies you to teach me virtue?" I must have been a very humble child.
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I think this is probably largely true. My kid's teachers have all been pleasant types who are passionate about helping kids and who do not seem overly political, but I can't help but be pulled away from your claim every time I pop open Facebook or any social media site and see, on my feed, some of the few random "friends" that I acquired through acquaintances in college (some who are now teachers) start talking about the patriarchy while simultaneously demanding that they and their districts receive more funds. The one thing they have in common is that they are all college educated, middle to upper middle class liberal-progressive white women.
The online world probably skews my perception of reality when it comes to the actual percentage of teachers these types represent, but they are so loud, passionate, and irritating online that it starts to feel like they are the majority simply because they take up the majority of the conversation online. Not sure what can be done about these squeaky wheels other than just waiting for the continued vibe shift brought about by regular people finally having had enough and insisting that these women shut the fuck up and that no one cares about their personal vendetta against the toxic masculine white man.
For me personally though, this group has become the most annoying group on the planet. To clarify, I'm not saying they're the worst people. It's just the combination of them dominating the online conversation and acting offended (either over something that happened to them or on behalf of someone from a marginalized group) while also having the cultural momentum to impose and enforce all of their bullshit rules and policies that makes them exhausting to endure.
I’ve had to unfollow a couple of people I used to be friends with and like well enough in person for this, though I think it may be decreasing. In person they’ll read the body language of people around them, but only positive reactions are allowed on most social media, which was a mistake. There’s probably no solution, women have been spurning each other on moral grounds forever.
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Luckily I went to school before the "whole reading" thing kicked off (indeed, I was able to read before I started school) but I was there for when the New Maths kicked in, and oh brother.
I think they did to English what they did to Maths: don't teach it the old boring rote way, be the guide helping children discover for themselves, draw out of them what is naturally there.
That's fine for people who have talent for maths and can figure out on their own from first principles. For the likes of me, it meant I understood nothing of what was being taught and scraped along with barely passing. The old "rote learning" would have worked a whole lot better for me, rather than "now we'll just write this on the blackboard and you can all figure it out for yourselves". Even the teachers were stuck at times! They couldn't follow the methods in the new textbooks and were reduced to "just look up the right answer in the back".
For kids who got thrown in at the deep end with "just look at the shape of the entire word and take clues from the context and then you'll figure it out", that must have been a nightmare if your parents weren't teaching you how to read at home.
I'm so sorry. I truly don't understand how anyone can have a functional use of math if they didn't at least learn basic arithmetic by rote. These alternate ways I see of doing addition, subtraction, division and multiplication out of common core are bonkers to me, because of how intensive they are in terms of the number of steps they require, or how much scratch paper you'd need for all the intermediate parts. They look more like academic proofs of how basic arithmetic works than how a person should be expected to functionally work with numbers in the spur of the moment.
I mean shit, just yesterday I was playing a game, figuring off the top of my head what the odds of a single 5 or 6 were off rolling a pair of dice. Came up with 20/36 in fairly short order. Although I will be marginally embarrassed if my off the top of the head work turns out to be wrong after all that.
I'm so bad at memorization that I never learned the multiplication table by heart. If someone asks me what 7 x 8 is, my mental process goes: Okay, I have no idea what 7 x 8 is, but that's the same as 14 x 4 (multiply the 7 by 2 and divide the 8 by 2). Then I can just:
Which only takes me a few seconds, even in my head.
Likewise, I never memorized most of the trigonometric identities. Instead, I memorized cos x + isin x = e^ix and rederive them at need. When I took the ABCTE math exam, I even practiced using Feynman's notation to make this faster. And the only reason I know the common derivatives is because of this song.
The one math quiz I totally bombed in high school was when our teacher gave us a list of squares and cubes to memorize and then deliberately did not give us enough time to calculate them, to check if we had indeed memorized them.
Personally I just remember the 10 times table and get everything from that.
7x8 is just 70 with a couple of 7s taken away, ie 70-14.
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See, that's the kind of 'innate understanding from first principles' that my brain just does not have for numbers. I learned my times tables and I'd be lost without them.
I look at that and go "but why pick 2? Why not multiply the 7 by 3 and divide the 8 by 4 if you're doing it that way?" Not getting the underlying patterns means I'm blind as to why "this number rather than that number, this of course is the quadrant of the circle for cos" etc. It's like trying to explain to someone tone-deaf that of course this note from hitting this key on the piano is not the same as this note hitting that key. (I'm bad at that as well, I love music but in music classes at school when we had to identify 'what note was that?' I bombed).
You have to pick the same number for the multiplication and division, but other than that 2 is picked just because it's a small, easy number to do division and multiplication with. (You could think of it as "taking" the number out of the one you're dividing and then "putting it back in" to the one you're multiplying, so the whole problem has the same numbers in total, just moved around.) Since 8 isn't divisible by 3, 3 isn't very useful - unless you really like fraction mathematics, I guess - but 4 works equally well:
Or, for the way I would do that last line in my head:
that still requires you to know that 4 x 7 = 28 and to me it's just as fast to learn all the times tables in that case.
I was just using it because you'd brought up "why not pick 4" - and, as demonstrated it's perfectly valid to pick 4! It would work fine. It's just that multiplying and dividing by 2 is usually easier for people, so that's what erwgv used.
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I swear, if it wasn't for my late-Victorian educated granny teaching me how to do long division the old-fashioned way, I'd never have learned the way it was taught in school.
The Tom Lehrer (God rest the man) song is funny but acute if you're old enough to have gone through the process when schools were switching from the old way to the new way, and teachers weren't adequately trained yet in the new way.
same here, only it was my "learned calculus with a slide-rule" engineer dad who got so fed up with what the school system was trying to pull he just sat me down and long-handed it out with me.
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The base 10 "new math" in that song isn't THAT new (that is, it wasn't introduced with the post-Sputnik "New Math") -- that sort of subtraction (which I believe remained standard up to common core) dates back to 1821 in the US. The "old math" (for people under 35 who went to public school) in that song is indeed considerably older, and incidentally works better on a computer because the borrow only propagates one way. I don't know about the under-35 or private school variant.
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I got hit by the tail end of the new math. The way I was taught to do subtraction is definitely closer to Tom Lehrer's second method than the first; we would say that the two "borrowed" a one from the four, so the four got crossed out and replaced by a three while the two became twelve, and twelve minus three is nine.
I... like it? It makes a lot more sense than the first method. We didn't get taught that the four is actually four tens, since it's in the tens place, and that you are substracting ten from the forty and adding them to the two, but hearing him say it makes it obvious in retrospect that's why the algorithm works.
Tom Leher says "the important thing is to understand what you're doing rather than to get the right answer" like it's a joke, but I actually agree with that. As my calculus teacher said "your only advantage over the machine is your ability to think. Once you lose that, I prefer the machine. Calculators are faster and make no mistakes".
Anyway, we also did simple sets in elementary school. No non-decimal bases, though; I learned that on my own reading about computers, because binary and hexadecimal.
“It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. Operations of thought are like cavalry charges in a battle — they are strictly limited in number, they require fresh horses, and must only be made at decisive moments.”
Your ability to think matters because it enables you to get the right answer. The only problem with students who don’t understand is that they won’t be able to get the right answer in more general situations. An athlete doesn’t need to understand the physics of his sport or the biology behind his movements.
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I find this a little strange. Yes, rote memorization is a good idea. But every time I see someone criticize the common core methods it just seems like how I naturally learned to think about numbers? You definitely can truncate most of the steps, the point is spelling it all out. People will say the squares are pointless when you can just carry the one, but the whole point of the squares is to show how carrying the one works mechanically and how it works the same way with multiplication .
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Steve Sailer doesn't think that education has no value, only that biology is the most important factor:
Here is a summary of his extended take on the Mississipi miracle: https://www.stevesailer.net/p/naep-test-scores-mississippi-miracle-search
I don't accuse you of lacking charity to Sailer, I think you just haven't read what he thinks about this at all and were going off vibes. He makes basically the same limited argument you're making 'Mississippi is doing a better job of education' without the extension of 'hereditarians are wrong' which doesn't necessarily follow.
Likewise, in terms of sub-Saharan African countries, Botswana is fairly well run. But being well-run can only get you so far. The wealth comes from the mining industry rather than broader industry and development, there's a very high poverty rate. But they haven't cocked it up, which is better than can be said for Nigeria or many others. The best-run African country is still poorer per capita (and presumably much poorer in real terms, minus diamond mining wealth) than the worst-run European country (Ukraine) which is also in a major war. If Botswana was white, it would be an absolute disaster zone, most of the population are basically subsistence farmers, 1/3 of the adults have HIV, no significant manufacturing.
While Mississippi may be teaching more efficiently, what actually matters is the unadjusted scores. US White progressives can afford to indulge in dumb fads. It'll hurt to be sure, it's squandering enormous amounts of wealth and talent. But there is wealth and talent to squander. There's a higher baseline and that is the most important factor in just about any equation.
That's true, but raising the waterline for the less able and less talented is going to be good for the nation as a whole. Better to have literate, functional (as in "learned how to pay attention and behave, not wreck the classroom"), blue collar or working class kids than criminals-in-training. Sure, they'll never get jobs at Bear Stearns, but they won't be clogging up the jails either.
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The unadjusted scores are still quite good; perhaps they're not as good as Massachussets but leading the second quintile ain't bad.
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Iirc Botswana’s purchasing power per capita is higher than Ukraine or Moldova. Not high bars to clear, but it’s achieved solidly normal Latin American economic success that the two worst white countries do not have.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_(PPP)_per_capita#Table
Seemingly not as of 2021, though it depends whose measures you use, IMF or CIA. Perhaps it's the case today but even then Botswana would be poorer in a real sense than Ukraine. If the economy is diamond mines and a bunch of subsistence farmers it rather stretches the limits of what GDP PPP per capita is supposed to mean. Ukraine has minerals but also produces drones, guided missiles, tanks, jet engines, software, video games...
That's real extreme poverty, about $3 a day, that basically does not exist in white countries. The GDP figure is high but much of the rest that one expects to come along with the GDP isn't there.
https://www.worldbank.org/en/country/botswana/overview
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Working link: https://www.stevesailer.net/p/naep-test-scores-mississippi-miracle
Wow I really cocked that one up didn't I? Good catch.
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(emphasis mine)
anon, I…
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On substack, he calls himself Freddie deBoer, while WP calls him Fredrik deBoer.
"friedliche" would be a declination of the German adjective meaning peaceful. If this is a honest mistake, please fix. If this is meant to mock him, I do not think it will land for most people.
Too late- Amadan banned him on suspicion of being Hlynka and thus ban evasion. Not this post, just ban evasion.
Seems like evidence against TBH -- Hlynka is/was a man of many mansions, but weird German puns (?) didn't ever strike me as part of his oeuvre?
The question mark is justified. What would the pun even be? It's obviously just autocorrect on the Fritz.
You want more weird German puns? This is how you get more weird German puns...
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I don't recall his sense of humor ever being to refer to himself as a "Brown-skinned Fascist MAGA boot-licker" either, but that's what the TequuilaMockingbird profile says.
I mean, if anything that's more my joke.
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I don't think it was intended as a German pun, just to mock his name and imply he's foreign.
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I am fairly sure that even Bryan Caplan, when he makes his case against education, is not referring to primary education but to secondary (high school level) and post-secondary education. There is little doubt, IMO, that most people simply will not learn to read and write unless actually taught, and there are better (phonics) and worse (whole word) ways of teaching reading English. Same goes for arithmetic, though I suspect less so. Part of Freddie's "Education Doesn't Work 2.0" article is weaker than that; it is basically claiming education does work to larn you stuff but not to make you smarter, and thus doesn't change your relative position in society. Of course, even granting Freddie's thesis, this becomes false if Mississippi is doing the right thing and Illinois and Wisconsin are not; if that's true the Mississippi students will change position relative to Illinois and Wisconsin students.
Freddie does go on to say that no educational interventions work, and the Mississippi experience argues against that. But most of his evidence concerns older students. And it's quite likely the interventions he's referring to don't work. The reductio of the claim that educational interventions don't work is the claim that not teaching at all works as well as teaching, and that is clearly false -- but it does not mean that lesser claims are not true.
I’ve always read Caplan as mostly talking about college specifically, not really anything K-12. And I agree to a large measure, that the current model of
Is flawed for a number of reasons. It doesn’t work for those kids incapable of attaining the diploma. It encourages the dumbing down of educational standards to allow the stupid to get on the path toward a diploma, and allows banks and schools to get rich financing this. It creates a ratchet for the actual talent who now must get ever higher degrees to prove “no im not just here because I paid tuition I actually learned something worthwhile in school”. And it wastes lots of time that could be put to better use.
I argue that at this point higher education credentials are a fetish. They are not worth something for their intrinsic value, but because both the holder and the person reading about the diploma on a resume believe it means something. It doesn’t.
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To be fair to Freddie, I don't think he's claiming "education doesn't work". He's claiming "some kids are academically stronger, some kids are academically weaker, and all the interventions in the world are not going to magically give Susie a six point IQ leap up to the same level as Theophilus if she doesn't have that originally".
It's the push about "all kids must go to college" where experience at the coalface has shown him that some kids are not college material and would be better served being educated for a different path. But if the 'cure' for poverty or getting out of your original social class is being pushed as "more college! college for all!" then you are faced with (a) be honest and some kids won't get into college, any college at all (b) go along with what the government and everyone else is telling you, fudge the figures, lower standards, and graduate kids to go to college who will then drop out in their first year because they are not able for it.
I think Freddie sees (b) happening and thinks that is worse for everyone: schools, parents, the kids, society itself.
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It's a little strange to read a polemic against X, Y, and Z without links to the writings of X, Y, and Z that we are supposed to think are wrong. Well, it's not that weird in general, but it's weird for this forum.
This post is a kind of anti-Bulverism where you wish that we assume you are right and fill in the argument (and the supporting evidence) post-hoc. Are you really shitting on the foundational beliefs of the above named? Would they be surprised to learn that "standards matter" is shitting on their foundational beliefs?
Also, the German name is "Friedrich".
Y, and Z may be missing, but he did link to deBoer.
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I may misremember things, but AFAIK they replaced failed way to teach reading by older boring one that works? (AFAIK the bad one is named "whole word")
You're thinking of "whole language".
It's also called "whole word". Amusingly, the Wikipedia page on it currently starts with a little editorializing in the opposite direction that you'd expect for Wikipedia:
"Discredited" dates back to May 2022. The citation goes here, which is clearly a biased source.
There's another citation to Jordan Peterson:
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Good for them.
I haven't read the others, but as I recall Freddie's position is explicitly that, yes, there are better and worse teaching methods, and that teaching can and sometimes does improve. And that's good! More kids can read when teaching improves! But to the extent that the improvements are important and sustainable, everyone else will pick up on it fast enough, and then everyone will be back in their relative positions again, but now with more people able to read (again: good and worth doing).
The test for that is whether in a decade, (assuming people still care how many kids can read and haven't just switched to voice interfaces for a large chunk of the population) Mississippi ends up exactly where you would expect them to be, based on their demographics. They already have to adjust for demographics to look really impressive. Tenth is good, but not groundbreaking.
You can also get programs that are good but not sustainable, like KIPP. It's sort of sustainable, because New York schools in general are able to absorb all the burnt out teachers leaving there, and supply a constant stream of new, talented, excited teachers. But it's not sustainable at scale, you can't just replace all the normal schools in a state with KIPP schools, because in addition to teacher burnout, you have to have family buy in, which is a limited resource. I suppose whatever Mississippi is doing is reasonably sustainable, or they would have flamed out by now.
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It could be explained idealogically, but there's a simpler answer that also explains "why did Mississippi fail so hard for so long then?" and "why is Mississippi the standout and not all the red states?"
That explanation is human nature. It's the idea trap
People don't like change so they're opposed to mixing things up even if it's better. People don't like to admit they made a mistake, so they keep treading down the same path out of denial. These changes were largely pushed by Carey Wright, an educator and superintendent with little connection to the terrible education decisions made by her state level predecessors. Mississippi has been bad for so long that many of the original people who made it bad don't have much influence anymore and this allows more political pressure to try something else without tons of people in power having to swallow their pride. The main meat of Mississippi's reputation comes from the late 20th century, some of the issues as far back as the 70s!
Some of the states like California are now stuck here. Superintendents, principals and education heads who simply can not admit they made a major mistake. They all huddle together unable to swallow their pride, convinced that it must not have been a mistake at all then and something else must be going on.
It's why you see things like, antivax parents whose kids die of preventable diseases doubling down in the community. One way says "oh god I killed my kid" placing a lot of moral shame and guilt on them, the other way says "I did nothing wrong", and people pick the latter. An abuse victim often goes further into the relationship. Many of the UFO believers double down when the prophecy doesn't happen. It's a hit to our ego to admit fault, especially mistakes that can't be rectified.
The top of the Urban Institute list for 4th grade reading is Mississippi. Number 2 is Lousiana, number 3 is Florida, number 6 Kentucky. Mississippi isn't the only Red State doing good; it's not even the only standout. Mississippi is most notable because it was the worst before.
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Tangentially relevant sequence post: Evaporative cooling of group beliefs
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[citation needed]
(The person who wrote the script didn't know very many laws of physics. He was trying his best, okay?)
Anything can be a UFO is you're bad enough at identifying flying objects.
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Citation needed?
Know your meme.
It's an old meme, with a 1947 debunking.
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oh, so this time it was intentional joke
(you would be surprised how many people actually believe it)
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There's a major confounder here that prevents a straightforward liberal vs conservative spin on things: "Science of Reading". As the now-famous (in education circles) Sold a Story podcast helped reveal, a lot of American teachers got suckered into a new teaching methodology for reading that just doesn't work as well (oversimplified: a de-emphasis on phonics). This spread in liberal circles partly through network effects (e.g. the Columbia Teacher's College was a major promoter). It just so happens that Mississippi as part of their reforms made sure to emphasize better practices and follow the neuroscience and good quality research.
Contextually, though I could elaborate, one of the most prominent examples of the trendy but poorly-backed programs was originally focused on reading interventions. However, these interventions sometimes did more harm than good. Infamously you'd get some teachers actively encouraging students to guess an unknown difficult word based purely on context clues and pictures. While that's a good strategy for, say, a high school student encountering a genuinely rare or unknown word, it's a terrible strategy for kids first learning how to read encountering a word that they eventually will need to know. Furthermore, one of those intervention programs had a classifier that was objectively broken. They did a study and found that their assessment of whether a student was actually one who needed help (behind level) or not performed little better than a coin flip compared to more established methods... but kept using it! Ironically, this low-effectiveness intervention program was usually the one well-meaning reading advocates at the time would adopt (or even adapt for general learners, similarly unhelpful there). Notably, Mississippi not only required individualized help for students behind but also required that help follow better, more scientifically validated methods, and so very specifically dodged this issue that plagued the rest of the country.
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Not for this, but for unmasking yourself. Someone else finally pointed out the obvious, and I am kicking myself for not seeing it.
Hlynka, I have told you this before, but I am hugely disappointed that rather than taking your ban like a man, or asking us to reinstate you, you keep creating alts. Good job that you managed to run this one for months and being actually rather flamingly obvious about it in retrospect and not getting tagged, but you're done now. We don't exert much effort to catch alts and some people think they are clever, clever little people bragging about how easy it is to recycle an alt every time you get banned, but it just shows you have no integrity and place no value on your word or reputation. You're there to troll, to shit up the place, to giggle and get your digs in before the mods swat you and you reboot. Hoorah, a winner is you. Yes, it's easy to do this. Eventually, however, everyone regresses to their mean.
ETA: In case anyone doubted my judgment, he confirmed it in modmail.
Both @Belisarius and I speculated four months ago that @TequilaMockingbird may be the return of Hlynka, but my confidence was fairly low then and remains a bit shaky even now. The “Steve Sailer is actually a liberal” thing is so inexplicable a delusion that it’s tough to believe two people could arrive at it independently, but I guess it’s plausible, given a certain set of intellectual priors (and generalized mistrust of urban Californians) which Hlynka and TequilaMockingbird might just happen to share.
I support the ban because anyone who peppers their post full of “dude I’m totally gonna get banned for this one, the mods are gonna be soooo pissed” ban-baiting deserves to get what they’re asking for. This can be true even if he’s not truly a ban evader.
Can you explain why? Similar to you, I also thought that it was Hlynka four months ago, but with much higher confidence. What convinces me then as now is the last point from my post: TequilaMockingbird talked in the way someone deeply familiar with this forum, its history and connection to Scott Alexander would.
There plausibly are many other people with beliefs similar to Hlynka, so TequilaMockingbird having exactly the same views (and rhetoric! seriously, the Steve Sailer thing isn't the first time he's let his old ticks shine through) on every single issue as him isn't dispositive. The fact that an account with such beliefs is created three months after Hlynka's ban and immediately participates in discourse as an old regular would, even calling out specific users' post histories and ideologies, is though, especially when no other well known long-time poster was missing/banned at the time. It was very, very obvious that he was Hlynka from the start.
This forum has a ton of lurkers and users who at some point switch from only posting sporadically to suddenly becoming more active. It’s very plausible that TequilaMockingbird is one such user, and that seeing Hlynka banned inspired him to “take up the mantle” of defending the cultural/ideological corner that Hlynka had previously occupied. There has always been a contingent of users here who (bizarrely) found Hlynka’s posts profoundly insightful and important, and who thought he was fighting the good fight against the (imagined) “Blue Tribe” consensus of the community.
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I mean it depends. Getting one or two of the same data points — knowing post history, or having a similar political profile, sure, I can see that as coincidence. Once you add in posting style, knowing the history of the forum, knowing the SA connection, etc. after you hit 4-5 unique features being tge same, im generally high confidence in believing that it’s the same person. Writing styles are especially important because they’re both hard to fake and hard to mask, especially in multiple writing samples over time.
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Was this when we were all nostalgic for Hlynka and he was joking that Hlynka might be JD Vance? Because I thought he basically came right out and said it lol. I thought everyone else had already figured it out and known for ages.
To be clear, I have never been nostalgic for Hlynka and have been glad he’s gone since the second he caught his ban.
K. I meant the royal we, there was a thread a while ago where
everyonemany people were reminiscing about Hlynka, in which I thought Tequila basically came right out and said 'yeah gang, it's me!' in different words. Andeveryonemany people reacted so nonchalantly that I thought it was already well known and I was just oblivious.Got a link handy? I must have missed all the drama, this ban came as a total surprise to me. Even in hindsight, the main commonality I recognize is atrociously bad takes on AI.
I found it - it's not so obvious now that I reread it, but after reading @Hoffmeister25's post about his suspicion, this post struck me as such classic hlynka in style and tone and proud sense of humour, plus the overt familiarity with the motte's inner workings, that it felt obvious.
Hah. I remember thinking at the time he was very sus, but for some reason he just didn't trigger my radar. Well played, I guess.
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Out of the loop: can someone give a short explanation who Hlynka is and why he is banned? (I am a long term regular, but I don’t often (almost never) give attention to user names.)
He was a user who predated the Motte even on reddit. He stood for a particular kind of Ur-American conservatism and that made him stand out somewhat from all the Dissident Right people, but ultimately he was an evangelist here to save the lost sheep rather than a debater here to chew the fat. Like most of the evangelists we get here, he ended up eventually flaming out in fury that most people didn't want to buy what he was selling.
We should really let him back; we have a lot of libertarians and alt-right types but not so many God-'n-guns-but-not-George-III Red Tribers. He added color to the place.
I have no problem with his beliefs, though I don't also share them. The problem was that he was so totally certain of the rightness of his own beliefs and the wrongness of everyone else's that he had absolutely no interest in genuine discussion. He didn't bother trying to understand anybody else's objections to his arguments, and even asserted multiple times that he knew what his interlocutor thought better than they did. Any effort made trying to engage with him would never be returned and I stopped bothering. I think that attitude is more corrosive to the Motte than overt shitposting.
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The cuckservative kind mostly, boy did he blow his lid at the effective deployment of that term vs his chosen neoconish internationalist bullshit.
You know, your record is pretty awful too, and for exactly this kind of low-quality growling and contempt. The discussion was "Who was Hlynka and why was he banned?" not "Take free shots at Hlynka because he's banned."
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Hlynka was a mod from back on reddit who took care of troublemakers and had a bit of a chip on his shoulder from growing up poor (like most of us who grow up poor) that he used to fuel the zingers he would level at troublemakers. But being the enforcer made him bitter (like it does to everyone who assumes that role) so at some point he stopped being a mod, but his former mod status gave him leeway to continue making zingers. But people were less willing to tolerate it when he wasn't using it for the good of the community and people started to feel like he got special treatment (he did). But I think to him he just felt like he was being the same person he'd always been, and it just kind of made him angrier and eventually he flamed out.
Point of clarification, he didn't merely resign, the other mods removed him. I think that's unprecedented in all of Motte history.
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Eh, more like jaded.
He did get "special treatment" but we never hid that; we have always given more slack to people with a positive record. However, that slack is not infinite.
If I'm right and it's all above board then uh, why are you qualifying special treatment? I'm not trying to imply anything, just confused.
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He was a former mod, greatly respected by many members and absolutely hated by many others. He was eventually removed as a mod for being too antagonistic towards people he despised, and then when he wouldn't amend his behavior, he was banned entirely.
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Looking at that thread you linked, I am more leaning towards the theory that @hydroacetylene is KulakRevolt, based on politics, the particular style of deflection when they want to deflect, and most of all the curious dedication to the idea of frustrating stylometry/basilisks with artificial tics (Kulak's forwards-from-grandma punctuation, hydroacetylene's "French autocorrect").
I’m not offended, more genuinely curious- what makes you think my politics are similar to Kulak’s?
To elaborate, Kulak wants a violent overthrow of the existing system to be replaced by ‘?’. He doesn’t have any particularly consistent reasoning for this; he can be a white identitarian, an ancap, a fascist, ultra-mysogynistic, etc. The common thread is that he wants short term violent action. He’s also some kind of pagan but not in the sense that he, like, believes in literal gods(I believe in his gods more than he does- specifically, that they are demons who at one point convinced Northern Europeans to worship them as gods). There is a bunch of historical fan fiction that he uses to tie this in with his generic pro-terrorist vibe and AFAIK he is a Canadian who makes his money entirely through internet media- whether this is from people finding him interesting or genuine believers.
I am a rad trad Catholic in the sense of actually, literally believing in my own religion. And I believe that the existing system will collapse under the weight of its own degeneracy without the need for violent action; the important thing is to be building parallel societies which grow by functioning better, to enable a slow replacement of existing power structures with patriarchal, religious, virtuous ones. I expect this to proceed as existing power structures shred their human capital through things like low fertility rates and retarded equity pushes which force them to rely on functioning parallel societies more and more. I believe a set of conspiracy theories about apocalyptic prophecies which guarantee that this will actually take place so long as me and my tribe do our part; the cathedral likes indoor plumbing a lot more than it hates rum millet, even when that rum millet is slowly overtaking it. Violence is thus counterproductive.
Where did you come upon this idea of the pagan gods? I recently learned of it from the Lord of Spirits podcast, but it's the only place I've ever heard it before.
It’s in the Bible.
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No. Hydro has been around for a long time, and he and Kulak are entirely different people.
Did Kulak eat a ban? I must have missed that, I just thought he got really involved on X / Substack and drifted away.
He didn't eat a perma-ban, but he did try to flounce IIRC.
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He made a big post about how The Motte was pointless because the time for debate was over and it was time for violence. Got a 3 day ban and never came back.
Shame; I really liked him. His Rhodesian catgirl bit was funny, and he made some genuinely good points. I still follow him on Twitter and Substack.
Had a look at the Substack link, tried reading what he believes as a pagan, and my impression is "cut-rate Gibbon". Too occupied with "and here is why it's the fault of Christianity that our empire is declining!" and not enough "as a pagan this is why I do things the way I do". I doubt he makes any offering to his picture of Athena, or to Wotan, or any of the rituals pagans would engage in. When he was going "and a real pagan of the past would never do this thing", I was going "Dude, that was exactly the thing they were doing".
He hates Christianity because Christianity places importance on concepts like "mercy" and "forgiveness" and not hating, which he despises. I don't think it's much more complicated than that, and certainly not theologically deeper.
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this impotent whining for violence is hilarious
I wonder whether it is his actual belief, trolling or just grifting in niche they found. I would put my guess on trolling supported by financial extraction they managed.
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As I recall, Kulak had a flame out post where he basically said "if you guys are gonna be that way [I forget what his grievance was], then just ban me". I can't remember if he did get banned but he did get modded to some extent or other, and I haven't seen him back since.
His grievance was that we talk about things instead of planning to murder our enemies and burn it all to the ground.
He got a timeout for his screed, but he's not banned currently.
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I would find that extremely surprising, given my interactions with Kulak and my observations of his personal interactions with others. (There are places other than TheMotte where he dwells, and I’ve also been known to dwell in some of them.) Mostly I’d just be very surprised to learn that Kulak has a second, way less strident, persona. I’ve watched him have embarrassing and quite personally-vindictive crash-outs over relatively minor disagreements — something which I’ve never seen from @hydroacetylene.
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Definitely not.
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Never understood this concept. In Paths of Glory, when they decide to execute three soldiers at random, one of the condemned starts whining and dragging his feet, saying it’s so unfair and he doesn’t want to die, and his executioners and their priest tell him to show courage and die with dignity …. But why should he help them to commit an unjust act?
That quivering mess is the only honest man there, and moreover he’s morally correct. You want your “comrades” to have nightmares for years where they see you begging for your mother – their conscience torturing them is good. You don’t want them to commit a grave crime, then eat breakfast like it’s tuesday.
When you make it easy on them, you are cooperating with defectors. In modern parlance, by acquiescing to your own destruction, you become a cuck.
I mean, sure, but, we're talking about being banned from the Motte.
Yeah, one is banned from the digital world, the other from the analog world. Astral plane, mortal plane. Hard to tell which one hurts more to lose, soul or body.
If you consider being executed in comparable to being banned from themotte.org then something went horribly wrong
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Hlynka doesn't come remotely close to meeting that description. He basically forced the mod team, many of whom called him a friend (beyond me what makes them do that) to hold the gun to his head. He then began yelling "shoot me if you dare, motherfucker". I do not recall if there was time for a surprise Pikachu face when he got shot.
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I agree that if you're about to be literally executed, then the dignified thing to do (or, one of the dignified options you have available to you, at any rate) is to fight to the last breath. Although I think there are some important dissimilarities between that sort of situation and Hlynka's situation (assuming this really was an alt account of his).
To continue to attempt to surreptitiously use TheMotte after you've been banned from TheMotte means that you simultaneously derive value from the community, while also disrespecting the rules and procedures that allow the community to be what it is and generate that value in the first place. It comes across as selfish and confused. You should either respect the site as a whole, or not. (Of course, this is the problem that Socrates considered in the Crito, where he refused to escape from prison and from his own execution because he felt that it would be unjust to violate the laws of the community that had, up until that point, provided him with life and sustenance. In that case I would disagree with Socrates, perhaps because I somehow view "society" and "the state" as being more separate than "TheMotte" and "TheMotte's moderation" are, and also perhaps because I view the right to one's own life as particularly sacrosanct, but, in any case...)
Hlynka will always remain as one of my all time favorite Mottizens, but if he is creating alt accounts without asking the mods first, then that would be quite disappointing.
We know for a fact he's done it repeatedly. I am only 95% sure this was him.
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They're not going to have nightmares or be tortured by their consciences. They're just going to remember you as a whiny, blubbering coward. If you can't change your fate, then facing it with dignity is better than making yourself pathetic. You aren't helping people do what they are going to do anyway.
Banning people from a forum, of course, is nothing like executing them, and I feel no remorse for banning people who deserve it, so arguing that it's "cucked" to refuse to accept a banning just means you think there is some virtue in being an undignified annoyance. There isn't.
That was the ending of the James Cagney movie Angels with Dirty Faces: the childhood friend, now a priest, of the gangster Rocky asks him to beg for mercy on the way to the electric chair so the gang of juvenile delinquents who idolise him will turn away from the criminal path:
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Agreed. I would think stating eloquently that they are evil while at the same time dying with dignity will have more affect compared to a man who seemingly is weak.
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Pure vanity. A grave injustice and your life hang in the balance, this is not the time for such superficial concerns. If morality requires you to cry, you cry. If your duty requires you to die despised, then you swallow your ego and holler like a bahamian.
Btw, I don’t know, and thanks to mods’ I won’t know, but I’m pretty sure that Hlynka, as the NCO law-order-honor-type, would not back my defense at all, which I find amusing. As is tradition, since I’ve always maintained he should not be banned, even though he himself was the most pro-censorship of the mods.
The object level is important. Geeks have an easily exploited habit of trying to make rules that are agnostic to circumstances.
What's a good way to treat criminals? Put them in jail. What's a good way to treat accused criminals? Figure out if the accusation is correct, and put them in jail if they are. What's the best way to treat accused criminals if you don't want to figure out if they're correct? There isn't one. Anything you do has to have the step "figure out if the accusation is correct".
If Hlykna is unjustly accused, almost anything he does in response is okay. If he's justly accused, almost anything except submitting to jail is wrong. If he's justly accused and thinks he isn't, that doesn't change what responses are right and wrong, which depend on the true situation, not on what's in his head.
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If you really believe that begging might save you, there is an argument for it, but otherwise, no, I can only despise the "morality" you advocate.
Also, your example is of someone being unjustly and arbitrarily executed, not someone being justly punished for his actions.
You expressed skepticism earlier that it would inflict guilt-ridden nightmares upon the executioners - but supposing it provably did, would your stance change? Or what if your death is to be witnessed by the public? If you think you're being unjustly put to death, it stands to reason you dislike the regime doing this to you, and want to use what little agency you have left to raise the odds that it'll be toppled or reformed. This is to say, it stands to reason that you want to make yourself a martyr. All else being equal, making as much of a stink as possible when they drag you to the gallows increases the odds of your death having consequences for your killers, whether it makes them second-guess themselves or drives public opinion against them.
Notably, this needn't take the form of whining and blubbering; you could also try and make an impression on the basis of fighting spirit, struggling and cursing your murderers until your last breath, to try and inspire others to show the same rebellious courage - even if you have ~0 odds of actually freeing yourself or injuring your captors. Much manlier, but also very different from "facing death with dignity".
I guess it depends on what kind of role you have the look of. e.g. if you're a nebbish-looking student protestor, or a woman, you'll probably make a more memorable martyr if the cameras capture you as a weeping victim slaughtered by merciless monsters. If you're a big strong guy, going out as a fiery revolutionary might be inspirational and make you look the bigger man, while a sobbing breakdown, rightly or wrongly, might indeed look pathetic.
(To be clear, none of this is about Hlynka's behavior, I'm just curious about the meta-argument.)
Well, now we're deep into hypotheticals having nothing to do with the original example.
If I knew that undignified groveling and blubbering would make my killers feel bad, but not save my life, would I do it? I like to think not. If it would serve some instrumental purpose - like making a martyr of myself that would stir public pity such as to prevent future killings? Assuming I was capable of making such a rational and strategic decision in such a moment, maybe?
Fighting them and cursing them seems much more dignified than begging and crying. At least I wouldn't die ashamed.
and I would do
I would prefer to be able to take actions earlier (when they would be more effective) but in such situation I expect that my priority would be to cause whatever damage I can do, even if i would be only a minor annoyance to them
+1, though not on shame reasoning but because I guess it would be a bit more effective
(hopefully I will not have reason to apply it in practice - but I will not reduce my opinion about someone being unjustly executed and begging/crying/etc, though I would harshly disapprove of offering to turn traitor at last moment)
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You've said that begging here CAN save you, even rescue you from a permaban. Which encourages begging, which is why you shouldn't do it.
That is not what I said. You did not misunderstand me. You are pretending to misunderstand me. Stop doing that.
I did not misunderstand you, nor am I pretending to. I am merely seeing the issue from a perspective you don't share. If you permaban someone and they go away and never come back and never contact you again, they remain permabanned; this is what "permaban" means, of course. If they go to you and request to come back and promise they'll be a good boy, you might let them come back. You don't want to call that begging, but I can't see how it is anything else; you're saying the only way back is through the supplicant's door.
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On what grounds? Your idea of 'manlyness'? You're generally liberal, but the sex stuff is your achilles heel.
Right, but I don't think Hlynka thinks he's been justly punished for his actions. Personally I don't consider most of the permabans the mods hand out justified.
That's a general problem with the old liberalism. Men are still supposed to act traditionally, but then accept worse results for it. A man who stands up for his rights in court will just get slapped down and get a tougher sentence than one who pleads guilty and begs for leniency, and liberals applaud this -- but still despise the latter man.
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I don't even know what you mean by "sex stuff" here. I despise cowardice, weakness, and lack of dignity and self-respect.
Actually, he was pretty straightforward about his disagreement with Zorba and acknowledging that this disagreement necessarily led to his being removed as mod and then banned. We had many conversations with him: I don't know that he necessarily agreed that he was "justly punished" (obviously he wanted to keep doing what he was doing and he did not want us to make him stop) but he knew what he was doing and at the time seemed to accept the consequences.
This does not surprise me.
I think you know what I mean – there’s a tension between liberal egalitarianism which you generally support, and your traditional view of manhood as special protectors and providers, paying for everyting before going to the gallows with a smile. You foist plenty of duties on men you would never foist on women. They’re not even allowed to make a fuss on their last moments on earth when they’re wrongfully executed. By contrast you indulge women their tears in every situation, and tend to view them as innocent victims, like your idol feminist JK rowling (I’m not talking about the "anti-trans" stuff, which is fine and compatible with liberalism).
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I suppose you're right, because no one else would refer to Steve Sailer as a liberal (except maybe Dreaded Jim). But both Bulverism and Ad Hominem being a formal fallacy but a practically useful idea are things I refer to often enough, and I'm definitely not him.
(Also, creating alts to get past a ban doesn't mean you place no value on your word or reputation, at least if you did not give your word not to. It merely means you don't respect the authority of the moderators. Suggesting you'd be willing to reverse a permaban for things other than error in imposing it, however, does cast doubt on your word.)
Yes, it does.
We have always been willing to consider granting amnesty to someone who contacts us and asks for reinstatement, with the important proviso that they promise to stop behaving in the way that got them banned in the first place. I pointed this out to Hlynka when he first started coming back with alts.
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Man, if you're right and this is HIynka then that explains some things, but it makes me feel like we're losing out. There were meaningful insights in his post, but they were buried in a structure that prioritized flame-counterflame rather than laying the groundwork (which was mostly in the post!) first and then discussing the arguments clearly if passionately.
If the style and structure of this post had been within a standard deviation of peak Hlynka, it would have been excellent. Why did the mods switch from year-and-a-day bans to permabans? Were too many folks returning in the style of Darwin, with the bone to pick dominating everything else? Hlynka, when he could discuss his experiences openly and not be cagey about ongoing disagreements, was usually better than this. Yeah, there is a risk of spiraling again – we're all human, and he has a temper. But peak Hlynka was irreplaceable.
Clearly I don't follow meta-level Motte issues the way mods do, so maybe I'm missing something obvious. Call this a tentative request to reconsider permabans in general and his in particular.
given they got Quality Contribution for long pile of misleading claims about LLM, with lies about supposed credentials as a bonus (OK, maybe credentials were true but worthless), I am less sure about this
they also suddenly had no time to respond to people pointing out falsehoods, and when they replied it was still with LLM-tier hallucinations. Or worse, LLM typically switch to whatever was claimed or at least a novel hallucination.
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I don’t want to publicly accuse anyone (especially since I didn’t make the connection myself), but isn’t Darwin still with us under another alt?
That would be weird, since his last alt was never banned.
It was, however, permanently shamed, and to a degree that if Darwin ever tried to reuse the GuessWho account, they'd be constantly challenged to pick up the topic they flopped out on. It'd be like if Tracing came back and wanted to pretend that their flounce and denunciation of the Motte never happened- they'd regularly be hounded for it.
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I don't know. There was a peak Darwin, too, and if he's back in a constructive way then that's worth celebrating, even if the ban evasion isn't.
I'd take that as another argument against permabans, although perhaps a mixed one given the reëstablishment of old beefs when his ban expired. But if he was already on an alt by then, maybe the productive discussion was continuing there and the main was just for fighting? I'm just a nerd on the Internet, probably not the best to analyze forum dynamics. But, for that reason, I'd like to welcome good folks back without needing plausible deniability or cloak-and-dagger nonsense.
(I know that sometimes even un-banned folks choose to rotate usernames. And while my life might be a bit nicer if they didn't, I acknowledge that there can be legitimate reasons for that.)
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I did, so good job on the radar calibration.
I do have a question though -- I thought you guys were operating more on the "Mission fucking Accomplished" paradigm for ban evasion? IIRC darwin was doing the same thing for some time in a very obvious way, eventually admitted to it, and still has an active account?
So, like -- who cares? The post in question seemed OK; why are you banning based on (admittedly well-calibrated) vibes at all?
Darwin was never actually banned here. When we moved off of reddit, everyone started with a clean slate. Darwin and Hlynka and everyone else had a blanket amnesty.
While we will sometimes let someone we suspect of being an alt stick around if they are behaving themselves, we're still going to whack ban evaders when it's obvious, because we don't want people to think they can just spin up a new account and carry on like before. (Some people do this anyway, but they at least suffer the minor inconvenience of having to keep creating new accounts and being unable to establish any kind of reputation or history.)
Also worth noting that Hylnka did not exactly come back "reformed"; @TequilaMockingbird was temp-banned three times and warned many times even before I clocked him (and this was not his first, second, or third alt).
And it's also worth noting that you did not ban TequilaMockingbird for past posts, or even any rule breaking aspect of this post.
It's fine if we have abandoned the 'Mission fucking Accomplished' paradigm on this site, as long as we're clear of the change of paradigm.
No. In order for the mission to be fucking accomplished, you have to accomplish the fucking mission, which is to reform sufficiently to go unnoticed.
TequilaMockingbird had already drawn attention repeatedly for being antagonistic and obnoxious. If Hylnka actually managed to create a new account, behave himself for a year, not get repeatedly modded for being his usual jerk-ass self, and then say "By the way, it's me," well... we (mods) would probably discuss it.
Same for any past troublemaker who actually comes back and shows better behavior. It is not (as @The_Nybbler keeps dishonestly claiming) that we want to see someone "hat in hand" and begging, but that we'd want to see evidence of change.
You can't create a new account, be your old antagonistic self, and then make a pikachu face when you're banned as soon as we realize who you are.
Quoting this because this was what was present and being responded to before your edit.
Heavens no. The Mission fucking Accomplished paradigm was established precisely to defend not banning recognized ban evaders who were noticed, but weren't breaking the rules on decorum to the degree to warrant another ban on those grounds. It was the returnees compliance with the decorum, not their ability to not be detected, which was the accomplishment. Were it the later, the defense of non-moderation wouldn't have had to be made in the first place.
To be honest, I don't actually recall any instances in which someone we knew to be a previously permabanned member came back, was identified, but was behaving well enough that the mods decided not to ban the new account for ban evasion. Possibly it happened before I became a mod, but as far as I know, it's kind of like the case of "We'd consider it if a permabanned member petitioned us to unban him": to date an entirely theoretical policy.
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Are you sure it's Hlynka? It's easy for someone to tell you "Dude, I think this is him" but if you didn't catch it before, then maybe it's not?
I dunno, I can't identify posters as easily as others on here claim to be able, so if it is him, okay.
95% sure. The report made me look back over his comment history and previous warnings.
We do frequently get reports claiming someone is an alt, but we usually don't find them particularly credible.
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Ahhh, you know, this makes perfect sense. His AI-skeptical post here, which had serious technical errors but somehow got a QC, matched very well with the arguments I've had with him before. Even down to the dubious (and prideful) claims of technical expertise. And the comparison of AI to animal intelligence (one heron, one orangutan).
You too? My condolences.
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This explains so much. When I said "We've had the same issue with Hlynka", I should have focused on this thought instead of getting triggered by the usual Hlynka rhetorics. In a sense, it's impressive how he did basically nothing to obfuscate his identity, exactly the same cocksure loquacity glossing over substantial flaws, and could rely on good faith alone.
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You know, I genuinely didn't suspect this was a Hlynka alt. Well-played to him, if true. I suppose my anger at people who write bad takes/highly faulty explainers about AI extends to both his incarnations.
Hmm.. What else?
A pathological inability to accept that they're wrong, or acknowledge error? I suppose that's Bayesian evidence. I, @DasIndustriesLtd, @rae, and probably several others wrote detailed explanations of why he was factually incorrect on so many points regarding the function of LLMs, and heard only the chirping of crickets (I will grant that he made an 'attempt' to address some criticism, but at the cost of only revealing even more fundamental confusion in the process)
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As a Millennial Southerner who grew up in crappy white rural schools (aka. north Alabama) where ~20% of the kids exited middle school more or less illiterate my non-ideological take is that some mix of the Bush/early Obama era Republican takeovers and/or old-fashioned generational turnover likely flushed out a bunch of shockingly old-fashioned/complacent educators/administrators (aka. dead wood) such that schools actually started giving a shit about literacy. Are we going to surpass Massachusetts? I doubt it, but I bet there was still a lot of low-hanging fruit to be gathered as late as the 90s and the Southern states just started to grab it.
I don't want to get into wall of text territory, but I am retrospectively appalled that I was lavished with resources by our local school system (however misguided they may have been) because I was a non-compliant pain in the ass while my middle sister was allowed to skate through silently struggling to read because she didn't cause trouble. I'm smarter than she is, but not twice her ACT score smarter.
The past poor literacy is a very real thing. I work for a trucking company whose driver pool mostly draws from MS, AL, and GA and many of our Gen X drivers (who are otherwise successful owner-operators, aka. not stupid) are incapable of writing a basic incident report without requiring heavy editing from management to produce something intelligible in English. Likewise, many of our white-collar office staff (again, I'm picking on the Gen Xers) are barely capable of using computers. If anything goes wrong they just hit the buttons harder and start swearing. They can memorize how to do this or that but don't really grasp how to navigate an interface to find something they want. I would rate my computer skills to be marginally above-average by mid-millennial standards (I can install and use an easy Linux distro and that's about as far as my skills go.) and I'm treated like an IT wizard for what I can do.
On an amusing side note, I vividly remember No Child Left Behind because suddenly my teachers became very friendly during the annual standardized tests and worked to ensure that I was filling in the answers correctly (They were confident that I had the right answer and less confident that I was bubbling in the scantrons correctly.).
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I don't think this degree of victory lap is earned just because Mississippi taught its poor black kids to read better than California's. Also, there might not be a better way to catch a state's attention than by rubbing Southern success in their face.
Mississippi is supposed to be dumb and backwards. Ipso fatso anything that contradicts this is due to unfair, fraudulent, or underhanded tactics. You can't just spend $32 more per student to teach an entire state of inbred hicks to read more better. Oh, they're making fake would-be 5th graders take the test? That explains it.
A good way to keep kicking the same dumb dog with a finger in each ear, but I don't think it's one that can last. Involved parents prefer effective education more than they do values that say holding kids back is emotionally damaging or mean. Involved parents vote with their feet. Uninvolved or uninterested parents might prefer their illiterate kid get failed upward than the hit to their pride, but that's the school's problem. The schools have lots of problems and seek the path of least resistance, but the school can always point blame above.
California legislature tried at least once already to push science of* reading. They failed. There's another go so it will be interesting to see if it fares any better. This story got a lot of press. States can choose to teach kids to read, but only if they have the power and wherewithal to say, "Tough luck, toots. Teach the program." I, for one, hope we improve education for kids. But, if shame fails to sufficiently motivate, then there is always honor to be found. You may keep your Kipling, Shakespeare, and Twain. They may keep their compassion and progress. Who has the honor culture then?
I don't know if this was deliberate, or a typo/autocorrect, but if it was the former, then hats off for a clever turn of phrase.
As with all funny but obvious malapropisms bored children's TV show writers did it before the internet did.
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How did it go again?
"You are allowed to ping me if you like? You know that right?".
You are, of course, at liberty to disclose which moderator you're talking about. In fact, I actively encourage it. Don't worry, we don't bite. You are very unlikely to get banned for talking shit about a mod, we actually tolerate quite a great deal. Now, I have a sneaking suspicion of who that moderator in question is, but it's always good to have clarification without jumping to a conclusion.
Please, go on. But I must note, if you strongly suspect that a post of yours will get you in trouble with the mod team, that is a good reason to not post that. You might even DM us and ask us if it looks okay.
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