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PaperclipPerfector  9mo ago (text post)   24570 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 24, 2025

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Between dream and reality

People say life is like a book. Isn't that a very apt comparison? Everything fits perfectly. People are the characters and the history between them is the plot. But isn't that comparison backward? People and their lives exist first. Only after a while did books come. And after books, films. And after films, video games. Each an imitation of life. Yet each becomes a mold that shapes life

Books were not humans' first attempt at simulating life. Before it there were stage plays and songs. Actors moving, audience watching. A festive atmosphere where people laugh and cry together. Stories were very much alive. And just like life, they are always changing. When the audience rebukes the bard, telling him the development is nonsense, a new version shows up. When the audience complains, bemoans having to listen to the same thing again, a new version shows up. When the audience listens to another bard, a new version shows up. A story lives many lives.

But with the introduction of books, stories can now be singular. There can be just one author and one version. The pages remember. The beginning is set. And so is the ending. The story is already finished before you read it. Life comes before books. But life is like books. I see life as a book. Books have a determined end, so life has a determined end. One life, one book. As many books as there are lives. The books are stored in a library, surrounded by fog. Rumors said it contains all books in existence. The books were there before I came, and it will be there after i'm gone. I see books but see no authors. I see effects but don't see causes

Is life a book? Or is it a film? To read a book one needs to be literate. To watch a film, one also needs to be literate. Film literacy is a thing. In the book Gutenberg's galaxy, McLuhan presents the case of the Africans and the chicken: where when shown a slow-motion health-education film (a sanitary inspector demonstrating how to clear standing water), many viewers only reported seeing the chicken that flitted into a corner of the frame — not the man or the broader narrative. He writes "African audiences cannot accept our passive consumer role in the presence of film". The African audiences see the events, but not the plot. The illiterate man sees a dirty stack of paper, but not a book. An educated man sees a book, but not a dirty stack of paper. The stack of paper has been hidden. Likewise, an educated man sees only the plot and not the events. Outside, to live, a living being eat, and sleep and shit. In films, characters eat and sleep and shit in service of the plot. He is drinking milk! This shows he is a psychopath. He is shitting. His son will come in and shoot him to death. This shows even the mighty one can meet such a lowly end. Life comes before films, but life is like films. The educated man sees not the events but the plot. Every action becomes a statement to the invisible audience. What you eat, what you play, who you meet, where you go.... in 1998, Truman could rebel against the show and move to reality. But where would modern humans go, when reality is a film now?

Or is it a game instead? Books and films, there are no places for you there. You can't influence the plot, you can't influence the outcome. Just a passive observer. But in games, it's different. You are the player. You can act. The only being that can, in fact. Salvation or destruction, it's all up to you. Yet the story is still not yours. The player is not the protagonist. You merely inherit his or her fate. How would the game look like from the perspective of the protagonist's friends and family? How would it feel to wake up one day to see your friend changed, doing one impossible task after another. Yeah, it's good that the world is saved. But that being, is it still your friend? If a game has no choice. Then it's the same as a book or a film. The future is not yours, for you have no said in it. But even with choices, you don't decide everything. Before you arrived, some choices must have been made. The choices were not made by you, so it must have been made by another being. That being vanished when you arrived, leaving you with a past that you did not create. What makes you you? Is it the past or is it the future? Do you even want to be you? A common pondering. Isn't the popularity of transmigration, regression, reincarnation, multiverse... stories the proof? Life comes before games, but life is like games. One life, one game. Holding one, I yearn for another.

One can read many books, watch many films and play many games. Yet one can have just one life. How then should such a life be led?

It would be uncharitable of me to simply point out that you're being sloppy in your thinking and leave it at that. But unfortunately, as far as I can tell, that is true. There is a kernel of truth here, but it's not a particularly new or non-trivial observation, and the bulk of it doesn't stand up to scrutiny when we going from playing word-games to considering what those words mean.

Let me explain:

You seem to think that the medium really is the message. Or, to steelman things, that media shapes our perception of our lives. Uh... That bit is true? I strongly wish I had a copy of that meme where some Twitter wag points out that when humanity invented the wheel, we imagined the universe as a wheel, when we invented clocks, the universe became one of clockwork, and when we invented computation, the universe became increasingly interpreted as one of computation.

Edit: Here you go, found it. https://old.reddit.com/r/sciencememes/comments/1jh25uw/5_minutes_after/#lightbox

Here's the central confusion, and it's worth stating it plainly: you keeps mistaking "X is a metaphor for life" with "life is literally X."

For a start, the "paradox" isn't paradoxical. The essay keeps returning to this idea that it's weird or significant that "life comes before books, but life is like books." This is only strange if you forget how similes work. Of course the thing being compared to comes first! We compare unfamiliar things to familiar things, and we create the familiar things from the unfamiliar template.

The fact that we can say "a neuron is like a computer" doesn't mean neurons are secretly running Windows 11 in your basal ganglia. It means we have computers now, and they provide a useful conceptual model. Your "paradox" is like saying: "Whales existed before nets, but now we say 'the net is like a whale's mouth and its filter feeding.' Isn't it strange how the whale came first but now the net defines our understanding of the whale?" No. That's just how language evolves.

I get the feeling that you consider this a deep ontological discovery when it's actually a banal observation about metaphor. You can tell because you never actually derive anything from this "paradox." There's no syllogism like "Books have property X; life is like books; therefore life has property X." Instead, there's just a vague sense of spooky symmetry, like discovering that the word "dog" spelled backward is "god" and deciding this reveals something about canine theology.

The bit about African audiences and the chicken is doing a lot of unearned work here. Yes, film literacy is real. Yes, different cultural contexts produce different ways of seeing. But the leap from "Africans in mid-century educational films noticed different things than Western audiences" to "educated modern humans are trapped in a film-plot prison and can't see reality anymore" is what I can only call an exceedingly ambitious framework.

First, the McLuhan anecdote is more complicated than presented. The original context was about audiences unfamiliar with cinematic conventions, not some profound statement about Western alienation from reality. When you show someone their first movie, they don't yet know the grammar. They don't know the significance of close-ups, cuts, tracking shots. They're seeing moving images, not narrative. This is a literacy issue, not evidence that literacy itself is a prison.

(I would bet my net worth that the flourishing African movie industry in the present day is not plagued by an epidemic of utter incomprehension. They watch movies just fine. Literacy is an acquired trait.)

But here's another problem: the essay uses this as a Just-So story about naive perception versus educated illusion. The African audiences see events (a chicken!) while the literate see plot (sanitary education!). That is really not how things work.

First, if you show me a boring instructional video and there's a random chicken in the corner, I will probably notice the chicken too. Not because I'm "film illiterate" but because the chicken is the only interesting thing happening. My "literacy" doesn't make me stop seeing the chicken; it just means I can also track the intended message. The dichotomy is false.

The implication is that these poor naive Africans, untainted by literacy, see the real world while we educated Westerners (for a very generous definition of "we" or "Western", given that this is my critique) are trapped in our symbolic prisons. This is just noble savage mythology with extra steps. Maybe the audiences were bored. Maybe they were resisting missionary-style health propaganda. Maybe McLuhan was just wrong. You don't stop to ask such questions, you're just using them as a prop for a point about how education = blindness.

But with the introduction of books, stories can now be singular. There can be just one author and one version. The pages remember. The beginning is set. And so is the ending. The story is already finished before you read it. Life comes before books. But life is like books. I see life as a book. Books have a determined end, so life has a determined end. One life, one book. As many books as there are lives. The books are stored in a library, surrounded by fog. Rumors said it contains all books in existence. The books were there before I came, and it will be there after i'm gone. I see books but see no authors. I see effects but don't see causes

The universe, and thus life itself, is deterministic at macroscopic scales, or close enough that I don't care about the difference. But just because events and their outcomes are pre-determined doesn't provide any additional power to alter them, or change the subjective experience of being a computationally bounded agent working under conditions of uncertainty.

A sorting algorithm still has to sort the array. That task gets no easier even when we know precisely how it works, or what the sorted outcome should be. Your mind can't just skip to the end either.

You seem to think there's a library somewhere (the fog is a nice touch, very Dark Souls) where "your life" is already written, and this is somehow proven by the existence of libraries with books in them. But this is just more spooky existential poetry. You've come to a correct conclusion with an invalid argument, or rediscovered the Library of Babel. You could equally say "Life is like an improv show; improv shows are unscripted; therefore life is unscripted." The metaphor is not the territory.

An educated man sees a book, but not a dirty stack of paper. The stack of paper has been hidden. Likewise, an educated man sees only the plot and not the events.

This is framing predictive processing as a delusion. Our brains are prediction engines. We ignore the "dirty stack of paper" (the raw sensory data) to perceive the "book" (the meaning) because that is computationally efficient. You're treating this efficiency as a tragic loss of contact with reality. It’s not. It’s the only reason we aren’t catatonic from sensory overload. We don't see "plot" because life is a movie; we see "plot" because brains are causal inference machines.

Or, in another sense:

The educated man sees both. He acknowledges the stack of paper (the medium) but possesses the additional software to decode the symbols upon it (the message). For most practical purposes, the message really is more important. Both of us are engaging with written text, as opposed to parsing the specific arrangement of pixels on a screen.

Every action becomes a statement to the invisible audience. What you eat, what you play, who you meet, where you go.... in 1998, Truman could rebel against the show and move to reality. But where would modern humans go, when reality is a film now?

Reality isn't a film. That aside, behaving like you are being watched is a rational response to actually being watched! Gen Z in particular lives and dies through their phone and social media, we've got better panopticon surveillance than the Truman Show did. Curating one's personality and behavior makes sense, given that the thoughts and opinions of others can meaningfully impact your life. The only issue is going overboard and becoming a slave to public perception. But becoming some kind of schizoid who doesn't give a fuck what they're recorded as saying or doing is just a mistake in the opposite direction.

Before you arrived, some choices must have been made... That being vanished when you arrived, leaving you with a past that you did not create. What makes you you?

This is just a description of being born. Every human being "arrives" in a world where choices were already made (by parents, history, genetics, some butterfly farting in the Mesozoic). You inherit a genetic "past" you didn't create. Framing this as a unique failure of the video game medium ("The future is not yours"), when it’s actually just the fundamental condition of existence is a tad bit unfair. God knows I'd love it if video games were truly open ended with maximal player agency, but that's a possibility for the near future. You can't really draw any real conclusions from noticing that the medium is restrained by the limitations of human effort or even computational feasibility on existing hardwares and budgets, any more than them once using 8-bit graphics says something of real importance about the human condition.

"People like stories about transmigration and regression, therefore they must be unhappy with their own identity." This is a speculation presented as a proof. People also like stories about murder, but even the average True Crime Wine Mom doesn't actually want to be murdered. The popularity of a fantasy genre might indicate escapism, sure, but it might also indicate good marketing, or cultural trends, or just that reincarnation is a cool magic system. The essay treats the most surface-level pop culture observation as deep psychological evidence.

Life is not a book (it has no author). Life is not a film (there is no external audience, only peers). Life is not a game (there is no win condition, only continuation or cessation).

You're staring at a map, noting that the map is made of paper, and then worrying that the territory might be made of paper too. It’s a poetic thought, but as a rigorous analysis of reality, it’s hopelessly confused. We don't need to worry about whether we are "literate" enough to read the plot of our lives. We just need to realize that the "plot" is something we invent in retrospect to make sense of the little bit of signal buried in all of that noise.

(This is why I'm a card carrying member of the Rationalist community, and why I refuse to read Continental philosophy. It helps to be immersed in a tradition where one's expected to speak plainly, and to refrain from the use or abuse of simile and metaphor any more than strictly necessary. Otherwise it's easy to end up making superficially striking connections and tie yourself into a knot)

Replying only to let you to let you know you're responding to a filtered comment.

Thanks for the heads up. I've let it out of the cage.

I strongly wish I had a copy of that meme where some Twitter wag points out that when humanity invented the wheel, we imagined the universe as a wheel, when we invented clocks, the universe became one of clockwork, and when we invented computation, the universe became increasingly interpreted as one of computation.

Found it in video form.

Thanks! Funnily enough, I'm already subscribed to Burial Goods, but didn't know he'd done voice work for this specific meme.

deterministic at macroscopic scales, or close enough that I don't care about the difference

Nitpick, since I don't think it matters for your philosophical point, but the difference can be huge. I know the "butterfly farting in the Mezozoic" thing sounds like a silly metaphor ... but it's not silly, and it's not even a metaphor. Microscopic perturbations changing macroscopic weather (in weeks of time, not just eons) is a straightforward consequence of "chaotic dynamical systems exist" (not in a two dimensional state space or lower, but easy to prove with three dimensions) and "the weather is a chaotic dynamical system" (not actually proven, but Lorenz's first three-dimensional system demonstrating chaos was something of a simplification of the real sextillion-Avogadro's-number-dimensional system, and we're pretty confident the more complicated one actually is more complicated). A butterfly changing the course of a tornado was literally an example Lorenz used in his talks. Chaotic systems can be deterministic (except in the sense that we can never accurately determine their output because the cost of doing so increases exponentially with simulation time), but if you combine a deterministic chaotic system with a stochastic initial perturbation, that perturbation grows exponentially until it's the size of the attractor and the whole macro state depends on it.

I want to briefly talk about the massive Somali fraud network in Minnesota. UPDATE adding a more reputable source. Apparently Somalis have committed welfare fraud at least half a billion, maybe more, over the last couple decades. Much of it going home to Somalia to fund terrorist groups.

The surprising thing, looking into it, is that this seems to have been a bit of an open secret? Independent journalists were reporting on it for a while, and nobody seemed to care.

I think this story represents an overall change in the cultural climate, where this sort of information is finally becoming more popular to discuss. I'm reminded of the Rotherham scandal in the U.K. as well. Where there has been a major scandal involving mostly minority/immigrant groups that was covered up or just not really discussed, due to the Problematic nature.

I'm curious if this trend will continue moving forward, and we can perhaps have a more honest conversation about immigration and assimilation? We'll see...

I'm curious if this trend will continue moving forward, and we can perhaps have a more honest conversation about immigration and assimilation? We'll see...

No.

I mean, once again, look at the rape gangs in the UK. Despite there being "more open conversation", all that's really happened is the UK is arresting people for having that "more open conversation". Turns out after decades of the UK pleading that they simply lack the state capacity to stop immigration, or the rape of their children on an industrial scale, they somehow found the state capacity to start locking people up for twitter posts. And they'll even let the rapist out of prison to make room for it!

I expect much the same will happen in the US. Congress will do nothing, Judges will stop all executive enforcement, the state and local government is already captured racially/ideologically. In 10 years people will behave like this was always the case. Like if you live in Minnesota, you just should have known better. You know, back when your parents birthed and raised you back in the 1990's and the notion that Minnesota would get conquered by Somalia was nothing but a Buchananite fever dream.

Wouldn’t be the only thing coming out of Minnesota. Sigh. Reactions are as one would expect.

The political class will continue to do nothing until the problem lands on their doorstep. Western countries have no idea how to integrate people. Nor do they have a desire to.

This country needs a radical transformation of the immigration system with a simplified (albeit still strict) pathway to citizenship. I actually have a friend of sorts who works in tech and previously used to work doing malware analysis for the NSA. At one point in his life he lived in Mongolia and did work there.

One thing he told me was that the very hard and industrious working Mongolians frequently emigrate out of the country leaving the more complacent and indolent workers who are content to sit around and do whatever their thing is from within the country. He never told me where the ones who moved often went to, but a preferential policy of selecting for and seeking the best and brightest who are willing to work should at the very least be given priority in that regard.

That article immediately veering from introducing the identity borrower into 'wah wah wah red tribe making it harder for immigrants' is kinda hilarious tonally. Then the guy kills somebody in a traffic accident after being deported 3 times.

Also the deliberate brain drain thing does come up a lot, especially now in 2025 that diffusion of technology and the messiness of a lot of spots in the West means that the QOL gap between 'nice part of developing world' and developed world is pretty damned close. I moved from Australia to SEA a year ago and whilst I do miss a few things from Australia there really isn't some massive development chasm between where I'm at and where I was. Plus everybody with half a pulse/brain from the developing world immediately fleeing to the West to attempt to commandeer random laptop jobs and do-nothing middle class neutral-sum bureaucracies doesn't really do anything useful for anybody.

The worst is that I actually can feel for the ID thief. It sucks that he probably does have his ducks in a row now and that he has dependants yet can't get a stable, legal status to support them.

The problem is that the solution was decades ago, when he should have been prevented from moving in, prevented to work and prevented from coming back when deported. Or even earlier, by Reagan not making that amnesty deal, not giving illegals hope that their situation will eventually be regularized. He would be working and taking care of his dependants in Guatemala, and if he's as good a guy as the journalist tries to make him out to be, would be making Guatemala a slightly better place by his presence. But now, unless you're giving up any pretention to controlling immigration, the damage from regularizing this guy's situation now would be felt 10-20-30 years from now by the people enboldened into sticking their heads into the same trap by his outcome.

The worst is that I actually can feel for the ID thief. It sucks that he probably does have his ducks in a row now and that he has dependants yet can't get a stable, legal status to support them.

I do feel for him on some level but his presence in the USA also directly led to an innocent bystander dying (and even if he wasn't at direct fault I'd be quite surprised if his car were at the absolute pinnacle of maintenance standards). He's trying his hardest to have a 'better life', though it's not like Guatemala is an active warzone at present

That article immediately veering from introducing the identity borrower into 'wah wah wah red tribe making it harder for immigrants' is kinda hilarious tonally. Then the guy kills somebody in a traffic accident after being deported 3 times.

Reading that article Sunday, I thought it was pretty solid "vibe shift" evidence that the Sunday Times was willing to make its front page about an illegal immigrant doing actual, understandable harm to a very sympathetic American citizen. The article was largely about the harm done, the bureaucratic nightmare committed against the citizen, with comparatively less effort put into the alien.

One thing he told me was that the very hard and industrious working Mongolians frequently emigrate out of the country leaving the more complacent and indolent workers who are content to sit around and do whatever their thing is from within the country. He never told me where they ones who moved often went to, but a preferential policy of selecting for and seeking the best and brightest who are willing to work should at the very least be given priority in that regard.

This is absolutely not a significant numerical draw, but for a while Mongolians have been absolutely killing it in Japanese Sumo.

With Russians and the ‘stans bringing up third place, interestingly enough.

Positions for non-Japanese are very strictly controlled and the Mongolians have got most of them (entirely through interest and merit AFAIK), and are killing it as you say.

It appears the senders aren't deliberately funding the terrorist groups, but rather the terrorist groups are getting a cut.

I think this story represents an overall change in the cultural climate, where this sort of information is finally becoming more popular to discuss.

It's just political, with a Republican administration willing and even eager to offend a local Democratic power center.

Indeed, this welfare fraud scheme is funding both sides of the Somali civil war in question.

but rather the terrorist groups are getting a cut.

Through osmosis or? Surely somebody has to send them said cut.

They aren't exactly a terrorist group like you're probably thinking, hidden with cells.

Somalia is in a civil war. Al-Shabaab is an Islamist faction in that war that commits terrorist attacks and is affiliated with al-Qaeda.

A lot of the Somalis in the west were refugees because they were supporters of Siad Barre before his government fell in 1990. Somali naming conventions are somewhat opaque to outsiders, so it was easy for colonels to just say they were teachers. The Barre government is hard to pin down ideologically, it was allied with the Soviet Bloc and also Islamist groups that opposed westernization.

So a lot of American-Somalis have family aligned with al-Shabaab due to tribal loyalties, support for Islam, local family strategies, etc.

Okay. I'm fairly intimately familiar with 'the men behind the wire' and whatnot.

You're essentially saying that they're sending remittances to Somali-residing family, who are then aligned with the terrorist groups and then possibly funded by those family members, but not direct transfer?

Yes. They probably couldn't do direct transfers even if they wanted to, it'd be too easy for the US Government to shut down. They probably do know that some of the money is ending up with al-Shabaab.

I would note that the fraud at issue here isn't welfare fraud in the popular sense of people lying on application forms to get an extra $367/month from the government or whatever, but a more sophisticated form of white collar crime that is both more damaging in terms of total dollar amount and harder to detect. A lot of public services aren't provided by the government itself but are in essence contracted out to private companies and nonprofits, who are reimbursed for their services at fixed rates. The fraud comes in when these providers submit reimbursement claims for fictitious services.

At one extreme, this scam doesn't involve the provision of services at all. One can simply rent an office, buy a bunch of personal information for the demographic you're targeting, and start submitting reimbursements for services you never provided for clients who may be entirely fictitious. This is cheap and easy to do, but is necessarily limited, as one can only keep it up for so long before someone starts asking questions, at which point the entire operation falls apart because you can't credibly claim the charges were legitimate. At the other end of the spectrum, the fraud can exist as part of a legitimate organization that actually is providing most of the services it claims it's providing. The upside to this is that if anyone investigates your operation looks perfectly normal, with offices full of clients and invoices for relevant expenses. The downside is that you actually need to go through the process of providing services, which involves incurring expenditures that you may not be compensated for, including employees who may be inclined to blow the whistle when they start wondering why they're seeing reimbursement bills for services they know weren't provided. One upside, though, is that in the event that an investigator does find something untoward, it can be explained away as an administrative error or the consequence of a legitimate dispute.

Which end of the spectrum the fraud falls on usually depends on whether the fraudster intended on the whole thing being a sham from the beginning or if he realized he could pad his income by committing a little fraud on the side. The frauds in question here lean more towards the former, though they weren't quite as blatant as the first example I gave. They created enough of a front that the fraud wouldn't be obvious through a casual inquiry, but would be easily uncovered by a dedicated investigation. I would note that one thing that's misleading in both the Post article and the post itself is that these weren't "open secrets" that were only covered by independent journalists but actual scandals. The biggest fraud, the Feeding Our Future fraud, broke in 2022 and was covered in local media, including both major newspapers in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area, local television news, and the local NPR affiliate. And even that scandal, in which Feeding Our Future bilked $250 million from taxpayers, wasn't exactly due to incompetence on the part of the government.

Feeding Our Future was founded in 2016 but was denied government grant money due to concerns over the group's administrative practices. In 2020, with a ton of COVID money available, they decided to sue the Minnesota Department of Education over these denials. The nonprofit was allegedly applying for grant money that would be used to feed hungry children (MDE was administering the grants as part of the school lunch program). In the face of the suit, MDE approved the grants in November, but slow-walked the disbursements and demanded additional documentation. The matter went before a judge in April 2021, who effectively ruled that MDE's suspicious were not enough on their own to justify a denial of payment or the imposition of conditions that wouldn't apply to other organizations. The matter was complicated by the fact that MDE had by this time referred the matter to the USDA for a Federal investigation. The judge didn't order them to make payments exactly, but ruled that the withholding of payments had been in proper and that Feed Our Future was owed $20 million in back payments. MDE felt they had no choice but to resume payments. The whole thing came to a crashing halt in January 2022, when the FBI raided Feed Our Future's offices and MDE stopped making payments. To date, over 70 people have been convicted in the fraud.

In the aftermath of the FBI raid and the revelation that $250 million had been stolen, there was a lot of finger pointing over who was responsible (aside from the scammers, of course). Republicans blamed the Democratic state government for being incompetent, Democrats claimed their hand was forced by the judge, Tim Walz called for the judge to resign, the judge claimed he never technically ordered MDE to make payments and they were made voluntarily because they didn't appeal, MDE claimed that realistically they had no choice and the matter was out of their hands due to the Federal investigation, etc. In the end, though, it's hard to blame anyone in particular for what happened, and the idea that Democrats were covering up massive fraud to protect Somali immigrants doesn't really stand up to scrutiny. MDE smelled a rat from the beginning and tried to withhold payments, but were prevented from doing so by a judge. The judge may have not had a choice in the matter, since it's unclear what evidence MDE had at the time, and what they were able to actually argue in court in light of the ongoing Federal investigation. The Feds, for their part, had to contend with the fact that frauds like this are hard to prove, and even in a relatively straightforward fraud such as this it still took them a year to gather enough evidence to be confident in obtaining convictions.

I don't know much about the other scams, but what's concerning about them isn't so much that they say anything about the character of the Somali people as it does how much more money could have been stolen if they had been either a little more sophisticated or a little less brazen; the only thing really that surprising about these is that they were able to steal so much money while being under an investigative microscope. When scams at the other end of the spectrum happen, where the scammers are using fraud to pad the income of legitimate businesses, the totals can be truly staggering. Historically, the most prevalent frauds of this category have been for Medicare and Medicaid reimbursement. While there are some cases of these frauds existing with sham patients, it's unusually easy for a legitimate healthcare provider to slip in bills for reimbursement for services that weren't provided. This is especially true in the case of older patients, who go to the doctor so much they can't remember every test they have, or hospitals, that charge for so many things it's unlikely an individual patient can say whether something is legitimate or not. Hospital Corporation of America operates numerous real hospitals and paid nearly 2 billion in settlements stemming from such fraud that occurred in the 1990s, though the total amount of fraud remains unknown. This wasn't incidental fraud, either; there was an entirely separate set of books documenting the real profits the company was making (and not paying taxes on) as opposed to the public books that showed reimbursements for services that presumably cost them money to provide. It was, at the time, the largest Medicare/Medicaid fraud case in US history, though such fraud still costs the American taxpayer tens of billions annually.

I can't take the Post or any other conservative publication or individual conservative seriously when they talk about this kind of crime, because the only time they seem to care about it is when they can use it as ammo against a group they don't like. In the eyes of a Republican, the only crime the Somalis involved really committed here is that their scheme wasn't sophisticated enough to succeed long-term and that they didn't properly insulate themselves from criminal repercussions. The CEO of HCA and the founder of the parent company was forced to resign when the fraud was discovered, but he never faced any criminal charges personally, or had to pay back any of the money himself. After all, it was the company that committed the crimes, not him, and by stepping down he was "accepting responsibility" for what happened on his watch. This acceptance of responsibility came with a $5.1 million cash payment ,$300 million in stock and options, and a $950k/year consulting position. He would later run several other healthcare companies before becoming governor of Florida and United States Senator, a position he holds today. But I have not yet heard anyone in the Republican party or conservative media criticize Rick Scott for being responsible for one of the biggest scams in US history. Instead they give full-throated defenses of how he was somehow a victim of circumstance and how, contrary to what witnesses said, he was totally unaware that providers were upcharging almost every expense. And I somehow doubt that a few Somalis bringing this kind of issue to national attention will lead to any kind of reckoning and calls for Scott to resign. So please, if you're going to look for a reason to denigrate Somali immigrants, don't cry crocodile tears about how bad fraud is, at least unless you're willing to have an equal amount of concern when rich white people do it.

crocodile tears

I was aware this term existed but I've seen it several times the last couple days. Frequency illusion or did a software update go out about how to discuss these things?

at least unless you're willing to have an equal amount of concern when rich white people do it.

Okay, I'll bite that bullet and say all fraud is bad, and everyone involved should have the book thrown at them.

There was an article in last week's Reader's Digest called "Increase Your Word Power" that included a bunch of vocabulary words and underused expressions, and that was among them. /s

Maybe Baader-Meinhof phenomenon?

The actual psychological l term for that is Frequency Illusion, the term used here.

I'm going to channel my inner Peggy Hill and say this is you agreeing with me.

I would say I do have a huge concern with fraud in general. Problem is many rich white people, for cultural reasons, feel morally justified in setting up this sort of fraud scandal at large for poor immigrant groups.

I'm definitely outraged with this sort of welfare fraud, period.

In the end, though, it's hard to blame anyone in particular for what happened

I feel like the part that is missing here is that groups can be entitled to government payments at all; unless I'm misunderstanding, the whole premise of this case is that Feed Our Future was able to (successfully) sue because they felt like they were owed government money, and a judge agreed with them.

Like, correct me if I don't have this right, but the sequence of events you laid out appears to be:

  1. Government is giving grants for (charity related purposes).
  2. NGO feels that they can apply to the grant, so does so.
  3. Government says "no".
  4. NGO sues, and judge says "they're owed the grant money".

Why can't the answer just be "the government doesn't owe grant money to anyone?" (And before you tell me its an anti-discrimination effort; like, duh, but I don't doubt that if it had been an obviously right wing group applying, the judge would've found that they were not eligible).

On a related tangent - has anyone else been getting the feeling that a lot of the complaints that are being attributed to the swamp, or the ruling governmental party, or really just anything political are actually problems with the judiciary? I hear a lot of leftists talk about how the supreme court is corrupt and in Trump's pocket; by the same token, a lot of right-wingers mention the ninth(?) circuit court as being unusually corrupt and blocking the right-wing government from accomplishing its goals (sorry, Canadian, I don't actually know the US court system super well). Up here in Canada, we have judges that rule that immigration status modifies a party's guilt (specifically, if you are sentenced to 6 months, it will affect your immigration claim; hence, a lot of judges rule that even severe crimes like assault warrant 6 months less a day).

I'm beginning to get the feeling that having a group of individuals, who are appointed for life, paid generously, and who are basically impossible to remove may have been something of a mistake.

Great question. I think the main source of your misunderstanding is that your conception of the kind of grants involved are different from those that are at issue here. Most people's idea of a grant is some fixed sum of money that's available for a specific purpose that the government awards to a specific group, and that's true of a lot of grants relating to things like the arts, scientific research, local government, etc. These each have their own criteria that vary, and I'm not going to get into that here because it's not really the point. The grants at issue here aren't for specific sums of money but are reimbursement for services that the government is paying for. Think of something like Medicaid—a qualifying individual who seeks medical treatment will have the cost of qualifying care covered by the program. It doesn't really work, though, if you just ask doctors to apply for $500,000 grants that they can use to provide free care. There are a lot of people who are going to need a lot of services and we can't really identify the particular amount each person is going to need from a particular provider, and we want as many providers as possible to participate in the system so that there won't be as much friction.

So the way it works is that every provider who wants to participate gets qualified and once the permission is granted they submit bills from qualifying patients to Medicaid for reimbursement, which they're paid based on a fixed schedule. To be clear, not all providers participate, but most do, and when you're aiming for coverage to be as wide as possible you make it so any provider who meets the criteria is eligible. What you can't do then, legally, is deny the ability for a provider who meets the criteria to participate based on you're own prejudices. You need a concrete reason.

Feed Our Future was a group that was purportedly providing a similar service, which would provide meals to children who qualified. Since they couldn't say in advance how many kids would show up each day, they would keep records and submit them for reimbursement. So say if one location served 100 meals per day on average, and the government reimbursed at $10/meal, they'd send a bill at the end of the month for $30,000. The state had denied them grant money for years based on their perception that they were shady, which was probably based on legitimate reasons. The problem was that in 2020 they were applying to participate in a COVID-era Federal program that was being administered by the state, and the Feds set the eligibility requirements. So while they may not have met the requirements the state had set in the past, the state couldn't use that as a justification to deny them Federal money distributed under a different program. So it was ultimately the Federal government who prosecuted them, not the state, as they had stolen Federal money.

Okay, that makes a lot of sense - thank you!

I wasn’t impressed last time people were suddenly interested in minnesota, so my expectations are pretty low. Just flipping through the Post article intermingles a number of claims. It’s relying on the City Journal report, anyway, so let’s go there.

  • Minnesota has been investigating >$300M in welfare fraud, mostly by Somalis.
  • One Terrorism Task Force detective says that al-Shabab gets “a cut” of any money making it back to Somalia.
  • A separate contractor, investigating the 58 Americans who joined ISIS, insists that “the largest funder of al-Shabab is the Minnesota taxpayer”.

So numbers basically evaporate as we move from fraudulent charities to overall remittances to al-Shabab’s cut. Not surprising. But anything related to terrorism still operates on homeopathic principles: diluting it makes people take it more seriously.

(Man, peeling back the calendar, reveals the year: 2001)

I don’t know why you would expect a “more honest conversation”. You’re going to put off anybody who has the cultural antibodies to deal with this flavor of criticism. You might as well accuse Somalia of hiding WMDs. It’s not going to convince anybody new.

deal with this flavor of criticism

Would that flavor be "doesn't trust the NY Post" (fair, ish) or "thinks all immigrants are fully above reproach" (the Tim Walz special)?

More “assumes it’s the undead hand of Dick Cheney.”

Though there’s also a subset who would endorse “can’t free Palestine without breaking a few eggs.”

I don’t know why you would expect a “more honest conversation”. You’re going to put off anybody who has the cultural antibodies to deal with this flavor of criticism. You might as well accuse Somalia of hiding WMDs. It’s not going to convince anybody new.

Hmm I mean this is much less an argument for war or anything, more an argument that immigrant groups on the whole likely commit a lot of fraud / have more problems than is immediately apparent?

I agree about the source and updated it.

Okay, I guess I fumbled that metaphor.

There was a period after 9/11 when mentioning terrorism basically won any number of debates. American politics adapted, and now the risk of a terrorist link is kind of priced in. Very few of the people who weren’t already moved by the outrageous fraud are going to be moved by this addendum.

It might be a different story if Somali Minnesotans directly funded a known terrorist attack, but up until that point, it’s largely academic.

I’d differentiate between different types of immigrant groups. Minnesota, IIRC, has the nation’s largest Hmong and Karen (not Karens, but the Karen) populations and doesn’t see the same kinds of issues that it has with the Somalian expat community.

The Somalis are far more insular. You have clan loyalties solidified by cousin marriages. And also, Islam. Thinking aloud, the Hmong also have clans, but aren’t insular and have integrated fairly well. It helps many of them love fishing and Minnesota is the Land of 10,000 Lakes.

The Somali-associated government fraud is bad. To steel man, set aside the Feeding Our Future and housing stabilization fraud schemes, and focus just on the autism assistance scheme. Compliant doctors were found to diagnose Somali-American children at a rate three times that of other Minnesotan children, multiple fake LLCs were set up to assist lower income parents with their supposedly-autistic children, and these LLCs paid kickbacks to the parents out of the state and federal funds they were getting and pocketing. In what is much more of an indictment of the Somali-American community in Minnesota than particular fraudsters who are Somali-American behind the other schemes, in the autism assistance fraud, numerous families where shopping among the LLC fronts based on how large of a kickback they were offered by each, and switching between them. This in particular is widespread corruption within the community.

But also to steel man, the original report cited by the NY Post doesn’t fully make the case in the way Rufo frames it for maximum offense. It didn’t actually track any specific funds. And cites only retired feds. It just notes there was massive fraud, and remittances going on at the same time. And as /u/DradisPing points out below, Somali is so fucked up, and its civil war run through family/clan ties, that Al-Shabaab is going to get a taste of pretty much any money than reaches those clans sympathetic their half of the civil war. And as /u/hydroacetylene added, the other half of the civil war is probably, also.

Welfare fraud is rampant in the US. Given the scope of IRS's surveillance, welfare fraud looks like an intended loophole rather than a egregious crime.

How does welfare fraud work ? My understanding is:

  1. Minor fraud - Household composition misreporting. IMO, this is called smart accounting when done by billionaires. A person would have to be making just slightly over the limit for welfare, to massage their house hold composition to fit into welfare limits. That's okay.
  2. Major fraud - Not reporting income. This has been a major issue even outside welfare fraud. If the IRS truly cared, then tips, employment and gig-economy work would be more strictly surveilled. It would be trivial to implement from a technical perspective. Definitely an intended loophole, similar to illegal workers employed by farms and hospitality businesses around America, much to my chagrin.

I followed links in the article, and the sources are weird.

The first link points to a Pandemic relief fund scandal.

$250 million in pandemic relief funds. Aimee Bock, the 44-year-old founder of Feeding our Future, was found guilty on federal charges of wire fraud, bribery and conspiracy for recruiting a network of people and organizations to operate as many as 250 fraudulent meal assistance sites throughout the state

The primary culprit is a white lady who used pandemic relief funds to fraudulently route money to for-profit restaurants and live a lavish lifestyle.

Abdullahe Nur Jesow had become the 56th defendant to plead guilty in the $250 million Feeding Our Future fraud scheme.

Based on another link (which I had to chase down separately), there are many Somali secondary defendants, but the primary perpetrator was a white woman.

The 2nd link points to election integrity concerns. Nothing to do with fraud.

Republican Minn. gov candidate blasts Tim Walz on election integrity: ‘fraud capital of the country’

Finally, the 3rd link gives us something useful

The HSS program paid $104 million in 2024. On August 1, Minnesota’s Department of Human Services moved to scrap the HSS program, noting that payment to 77 housing-stabilization providers had been terminated this year due to “credible allegations of fraud.” Joe Thompson, then the Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of Minnesota, went even further, stating that the “vast majority” of the HSS program was fraudulent.

On September 18, Thompson announced criminal indictments for six members of Minnesota’s Somali community.

Ok, finally, we're onto something.

Somalis have committed welfare fraud at least half a billion, maybe more, over the last couple decades. Much of it going home to Somalia to fund terrorist groups.

I believe your claim has validity, but all the linked articles take many leaps of logic and rounding of numbers to reach this specific conclusions.

Yes, on the balance, around half a billion in funds were used in programs that had fraud. It is not clear than 100% of those funds were fraudulently used. It is not clear that 100% of the fraudulently used funds were used by Somalis. It is not clear that 100% of the Somalian fraud had to do with sending money back to Somalia. It is not clear that 100% of the money sent back to Somalia was sent to terrorists.

If you 50% at each step, it is still many millions being sent to Somalian terrorists. I also agree with your wider point, that integration of ghettoized tribal societies should not be taken for granted. But, the eventual sum sent to Somali terrorists is likely less than $100 million.

In cases like this, I'd prefer if we shared the more reputed sources (City Journal) instead of rage-baiting sources like NY Post which add nothing to the original [City Journal] sources.

Thanks for the thoughts and the link, updated the OP.

The surprising thing, looking into it, is that this seems to have been a bit of an open secret?

This article doesn't bring it up specifically, but it's been speculated the incredible increase in autism centers, and support costs is also related to Somali-organized fraud.

The NY Post links to A Somali-American former investigator: why you’re hearing about fraud in my community, which may have been a better starting point for discussion.

How is a Rufo-coauthored article better than a Rufo-sourced article?

Members of my community must cease the leveraging of race and religion to avoid accountability,

I have some doubts about this part of his proposed solution.

"Must" != "I have confidence they will"

I'm curious if this trend will continue moving forward, and we can perhaps have a more honest conversation about immigration and assimilation? We'll see...

I don't see why it would. We haven't had a national conversation about fraud in the Orthodox Jewish community and there are still hebrew signs in the Hudson valley; or any conversation at all about fraud among Baptist churches.

Here's a bonus case with a pastor who stole someone's identity, defrauded the military through fake education funds, and then abused a minor girl at the church.

The problem is really that any high trust group can defraud the government pretty easily.

In general, trusting your family is a pretty major hack against the American legal system. The entire system is built around not trusting your family. Being high trust enough to put income, properties, or businesses in the name of your family members can get you out of taxes, into subsidies, and boy does it make for a fun divorce to untangle. Immigrants of all kinds are notorious for this, as are small family businesses. Combine the two and there goes your week.

A Russian with a small business is a nightmare in a divorce case. The house is half in his name and half in his mother's, but the down payment was supposedly lent to him by his brother, but no one has any documentation of that money ever being transferred. The business is a partnership with an uncle, and no one knows where the money came from or where it goes.

A local family, our local feudal lords around here, when one of the sons got divorced, his wife was surprised to find out that while she was under the impression they'd been living a normal upper middle class life with a house and two cars, actually they had almost no assets, that the house and the cars belonged to his father and they had effectively no equity in anything.

Another local family filed tax returns for family members who never worked for the business, for income that the family members in question never actually received, in order to distribute income taxes around in some way or other.

Anyone who looks around will have similar stories. If you can trust each other enough to count on getting what's yours later, then the government has a lot of trouble pinning you down.

It's hard not to be horrified of all that goes on. The government tax incentives and welfare schemes that slosh around are insane.

Counterpoint: trusting your family also creates some of the most unhinged legal drama.

One branch of my family has a bit of a “trailer park slum lord” thing going in the Southeast. Buy foreclosed lots, rent them back to the former owners, clean out the ones who can’t or won’t pay.

That branch includes one brother who is very much not welcome in the family business. He’s a scammer who’s known to show up and claim property when anyone near the community dies. Sometimes he even waves a convenient will. He’d happily file a few lawsuits if he thought there was any chance of getting a payout.

There is zero chance that the family business can pull those kind of accounting tricks, because they know their brother would come ruin it. And that’s for quite literally clannish behavior!

Trusting each other works until it doesn’t. There’s a reason that bigger institutions accrue more and more guardrails.

The real lesson, as always, is 'coordination problems are hard'. The son of the local feudal lord, in that case, was kept in line by economic dependence on the family patriarch(he didn't own anything), who just had to pick a stool pigeon smart enough not to bite the hand that feeds(that is, to never disobey, ever, for personal gain) and treat them well. The Orthodox Jews believe they have a divine commandment to obey their rebbe. Albanians stab each other in the back all the time, but they keep the drama in-community- informing on their shady dealings is the one sin that gets you cut off. The mafia enforces their no-defection policy lethally.

I suspect your slumlord kinfolk lack the ruthlessness of the albanians and mafiosi, and the central coordination point of the feudal lord, and the genuine belief of the Jews.

The son of the local feudal lord, in that case, was kept in line by economic dependence on the family patriarch(he didn't own anything), who just had to pick a stool pigeon smart enough not to bite the hand that feeds(that is, to never disobey, ever, for personal gain) and treat them well.

Weirdly, it might have been done precisely to keep assets in the family in case of divorce. "Oh, sorry honey, you thought you were going to get 50% of everything? In fact I don't personally own anything, it's all family trust/business assets, so good luck with that!"

(I'd been binging a lot of dumb Youtube 'revenge stories' and a couple of these have that exact set-up: wronged wife gets wind that hubby intends to leave her without a penny, steal her assets, and set up with new snookums so she lawyers up in secret and transfers everything into a trust/years back before they got married put everything into the business name so the house, cars, etc. are all technically business assets that they have the use of).

Local feudal lord arranges it so blood kin have the use of houses, cars, bank accounts and so forth, but if greedy spouses try to despoil them in a divorce, they end up with nothing since technically the married kids own nothing. Kids know that when Father kicks the bucket, they'll inherit, so they have no incentive to go against this arrangement. If they do end up getting divorced, they know they'll lose nothing.

wronged wife gets wind that hubby intends to leave her without a penny, steal her assets, and set up with new snookums so she lawyers up in secret and transfers everything ...

For some odd reason, I suspect that a husband wouldn't have as much success with that strategy. I've heard of a few alimony/child support cases where the court is less "pay to the extent of your ability" and more "die broke in a gutter".

Yeah but they've still fundamentally got to come for the property of the divorced. They can't easily reach out to third parties

They can't easily reach out to third parties

Not the court's problem in those stories: Pay up or get punished for failing to pay.

If you already own nothing and work for your (shady) dad, the available punishments are quite limited though.

More comments

The problem here would be that alimony is based on the income of the partners, not any expected inheritance. Assume for this hypothetical that I am "Worth" $200k/yr after taxes.

Scenario A) I work for a law firm where I am payed $200k/yr after taxes, I live on $100k and save the rest.

Scenario B) I work for the family business, I receive a salary of $100k/yr after taxes, I save nothing, the rest remains within the family and either benefits me indirectly or will come to me as inheritance eventually.

If Mrs. FiveHour left me, alimony and property settlement would be calculated based on my income and assets. Under Scenario A, that would be based on $200k/yr in income plus splitting the savings. Under Scenario B, it would be based on $100k/yr and there are no savings to split. A divorcing spouse can't reach speculative inheritance.

The "trick" is in trusting my folks to manage the money for me for decades before I see it.

Child support is a little different, as it ought to be.

It serves numerous purposes, and the divorce one is probably low on the list.

The primary justification given to family is vague "tax advantages;" which I'm not sure ultimately pay off in every case. Maneuvering who makes what money and who or what has title to which asset can be useful, but when it always comes up "daddy controls everything and you get what little he wants to give you;" well then I doubt that it's all about the tax advantages.

Knowing the family dynamics, the biggest reason was that the patriarch wanted to keep everyone enslaved to himself, totally dependent on him for their livelihoods. This extended through other family dynamics: he had numerous children, and none of them went to college, and he managed their work lives such that none of them ever built easily transferable experience. You worked for the family business until he died or you died, and as long as you worked for the family business you lived in luxury, but if you left you were out in the cold with no assets and no easy transition to another job that would pay anything like the same total compensation. He underpaid his kids for the work they did, but made up the difference by paying for their housing and cars, their vacations to family properties, company employees doing domestic labor at their homes, etc. But this in turn means being a 40 year old man with kids, and living where daddy tells you and driving the car your daddy agrees on and never going against his will.

The break up daddy was worried about was between him and his kids, not his kids and their spouses. That's just a side benefit of the arrangement.

That's clear, then.

Sure, I'm not saying the execution is perfect every time or that it's an unbeatable cheat code. But I am saying it's a wildly common situation, and it often allows a high-trust grouping to evade taxes and other legal issues by using informal agreements.

Yep, I remember a high profile case of Moroccan soccer player who got out of divorce settlement worth $70 million, as apparently everything was owned by his mother.

Say what you will about the people of Boston, at least most of the money they were funneling to terrorists came out of their own pockets and not the taxpayer’s.

From my personal perspective, the fact that every bit of meaningful news coming out of Minnesota is related to migrants behaving badly or the Politicians doing insanely self-destructive stuff has been ridiculously radicalizing on the immigration question.

Before, the literal only thing I 'knew' about Minnesota was the Movie FARGO and the accents. Never been there, but the people I meet from that area are unfailingly polite and stable if a little weird to my southern sensibilities.

I viewed it as a quaint little slice of Midwestern rural charm. A bit of cultural crossover between the U.S. and Canada, maybe.

I've since learned that for NGOs and the Obama and Biden administration, it was viewed as "Free Real Estate."

And if you asked me to define the precise polar opposite of the Minnesotan cultural archetype, I'd probably say "Somalia".

So naturally a whole bunch of Somalians with zero cultural connection and from an area with a completely incongruous environment got shoved into Minnesotan towns and given every single piece of governmental assistance possible to try to ease their transition... and now the full implications of that are unavoidable. The existence of Ihlan Omar alone is enough for me to balk.

All the more so because as far as I can tell the Minnesotans were never asked, nor do they currently have much of a say. That is what really makes the situation feel 'unfair' if you ask me. The FedGov, through cooperation with NGOs (funded by FedGov) can instantly and irretrievably change the entire character of a given town without technically violating anyone's rights or needing their direct approval.

We've seen how well off communities react to this (Remember Desantis' Martha's Vineyard stunt), but these towns probably have little political clout and not much wealth to speak of.

All the more so because as far as I can tell the Minnesotans were never asked, nor do they currently have much of a say.

Unfortunaltely, Minnesota, for some reason or another, is incredibly liberal relative to its demographics. The non-africans voted for billions of africans, and they continue to vote for billions of africans for the forseeable future.

It’s not actually incredibly liberal relative to demographics, it’s full of secular urban northern euros.

I don't think they voted for them all to be slammed down into the same jurisdictions granting them instant majorities and almost zero demand to truly assimilate.

Hell, if they had been spread around the country rather than specifically creating ethnic enclaves with outsized political power, I would find it less objectionable.

Yet the minnesotan whites who just had a million somalians dropped in their small town will still vote blue no matter who

Biden and Obama
got shoved into Minnesotans were never asked

Wait, how do you think they got there?

The current refugee regime dates back to Carter’s presidency. It integrated the efforts of existing VOLAGs, which are probably the NGOs you have in mind. Not exactly a new invention.

Minnesota has a bunch of NGOs, including some of the VOLAGs. Global Refuge is Lutheran and USCCB Catholic; both denominations are well-represented in the state. Historically, they’ve literally volunteered to take refugees. I believe they’re ending up in the Twin Cities more than individual towns, but I don’t have a source for that.

Somalis specifically started fleeing their civil war in the early 90s. Omar got here in ‘95. There was definitely a surge around 2012 coinciding with a new push in the war; that accounts for about 6,000 Minnesotans. More stats here.

Point is, the Somali population mostly pre-dates Obama and definitely pre-dates Biden. There’s been plenty of support from native Minnesota institutions, largely downstream of a strong Christian presence. The national involvement was hashed out before there was even a Somalian civil war, and continued for decades without today’s wailing and gnashing of teeth. I don’t think you can write it off as nonconsensual Federal airdrops to random towns.

I'm not saying they were hiding it.

The process was definitely transparent in that they will straight up tell you how many they brought in.

I just note that somehow, the Sub-Saharan Immigrant population was about 1.3 million in 2010, and is listed at 2.5 million in 2024, so almost doubling.

Do I have to point out who the sitting Presidents were during the majority of that time period?

And the included map shows that a huge number of them were indeed dropped off in Minnesota, to the point they're around 3% of the population in the Minneapolis area.

The part that hasn't become so transparent until lately is exactly how much aid these folks were receiving, and, likewise, how much fraud and crime many were involved in.

If the Minnesotans start to disapprove of this situation, what's their recourse, precisely?

...

The main problem isn’t the drones, it’s the massive imbalance in tube artillery. HIMARS systems are neat but they are vulnerable to counter-battery fire and can’t substitute for Russia having ten times as many standard howitzers. NATO’s main advantage is air power, which is politically untenable to deploy and logistically untenable to give to Ukraine.

What makes them more vulnerable? Aren’t they supposed to be “highly mobile”?

This is a genuine question. I don’t fully understand how they’re utilized compared to traditional artillery. I know the U.S. is converting some howitzer battalions to HIMARS; they cite improved long-range lethality, which makes sense for the intel-heavy approach to fire support. But that’s not really a privilege enjoyed by Ukraine, is it?

What makes them more vulnerable? Aren’t they supposed to be “highly mobile”?

The fact that most of your artillery strike capacity is reliant on the survival of four vehicles. You lose one of those, now your strike capacity is down 25 percent (not a perfect figure since the Ukrainians do have some tube artillery of their own too, but you get the idea).They used to be pretty resistant to counter-battery fire due to their mobility, but the Russians developed better ways of tracking and eliminating them after a year or two. That’s why you don’t hear a lot about them anymore. There are only about 400-700 HIMARS systems in existence and the rumor is Ukraine has gone through about 75-100.

HIMARS ammunition capacity is a problem too. Plus the Russians got better at distributing logistics so there aren’t as many huge ammunition depos within strike range. HIMARS only carry about 4-6 rockets, and are best suited for strikes against a few large key targets, not doing 40 artillery strikes a day against small infantry positions for weeks at a time. French Caesar systems and other similar systems have the same issues. Intel isn’t much of a problem since they get live satellite coverage from US systems.

The few sources I saw showed closer to a 1:1 ratio on replacement. I’m not sure what effect that has on volume of fire. Sure, the HIMARS are only tossing 6 rockets each, but they’re much larger warheads than even the 155mm shells.

I agree that they’ve got to lose out on sustained fire, especially given the cost per round…but that’s a separate issue from vulnerability to counter-battery fire. Shoot and scoot should be much safer than setting up one of those monster cannons, right?

Shoot and scoot should be much safer than setting up one of those monster cannons, right?

Sure, for each individual unit. But Russia has 4-5 thousand individual artillery pieces in the field, including around a thousand to fifteen hundred that are also self propelled (though not as accurate). Ukraine has 1500 tube artillery plus a handful of western MRLS systems. So individual Russian artillery pieces and systems get destroyed too, but it’s not going to change the overall disparity in volume of fire.

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Shoot and scoot

I'm not an expert, but it sounds like this isn't meta anymore in this war

  1. counter battery radar seems to not be as strong/precise as "you have 2 minutes after you shoot before the place you shot from explodes". This could be a "lol Soviets" issue, or maybe a limitation of the systems in practicality. I also wonder if emitting as a counter battery radar is dangerous. So there isn't profound pressure to move after firing.

  2. scooting is really really dangerous. The prevalence of ISR drones means ripping down a road is very dangerous. They might not find you if you pop out, fire, and pop back into your hide sight. It's much more likely they'll find you on one of the handful of roads in the region, which they're likely watching regardless. Plus your hide site can be hardened against drones.

What makes them more vulnerable? Aren’t they supposed to be “highly mobile”?

Drones. Russia has finally been able to amass enough recon drones that HIMARSes have to keep well away from the line of contact. This subtracts a couple tens of kilometers from the GMLRS range, allowing Russian logistics to edge closer to the line of contact.

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Ukrainian drone forces commander claiming Russians were using several times more last year.

I can't find anything on this, and I severely doubt the Ukrainians would state this.

very gamified Ukrainian drone ecosystem one isn't up for scaling sufficiently.

The contents of the article don't corroborate the claim made in the caption of the hyperlink. Do you have any evidence to support the claim that Russians had several times more drones in 2024 or that the Russian drone program is "overwhelming" or that anyone on Ukraine's side actually claimed this?

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Has anybody covered the whole proposed ceasefire situation at present on the Motte? Can't remember seeing it in last week's thread

There was some discussion. I think the consensus was that it was a joke, and people were arguing over which side ought to take it seriously.

More discussion from last month. Personally, I think that analysis still holds.

There’s also the Transnational Thursday threads to consider.

Probably not going to happen. The European proposal is delusional. The Russians probably don’t have an actual interest in ending the war at this point and their own proposal is only being made because they know that Ukraine will refuse.

Why is it delusional? What I mean is, what has the state of the war to do with Europe's willingness to concede anything? Say countless Ukrainians are dead, and the Ukrainians are nearing collapse. Not Europe's problem. I wouldn't even give russia a guarantee that Ukraine not join nato. All the pressure is on ukraine, and russia. Europe will just go along with ukraine’s decision. All the leverage europe has over russia (sanctions, confiscated assets) has been gifted to ukraine, to do with as they please. I have no idea why everyone acts like europe is the one who gets to decide to keep fighting.

Not Europe's problem.

It is Europe’s problem, or at least they feel it is. That’s why they got involved in the first place. There’s a big strategic difference between Russia controlling Donbas, and Russia controlling Ukraine all the way to the Polish border.

All the leverage europe has over russia (sanctions, confiscated assets) has been gifted to ukraine, to do with as they please.

But why?

Anyway, I don’t think Europe was thinking about this as logically as you are, I suspect they just don’t know how bad things really are.

I assume the Ukrainians know more about how much more they can take than us comfortable westerners.

This is what the EU should say, according to you: "Okay, Ukraine, thanks for all your sacrifices defending our sphere from an aggressive rival power, heroic stuff, but based on our 2000 km away expert analysis, you're going to lose everything momentarily, and this hypothetical outcome would be embarrassing for us. So to give you the proper motivation, we're going to cut off aid until you sign a terrible deal where you keep some rump state."

Does that make sense? Or does this EU sound like it’s being fed lines by russia?

All the leverage europe has over russia (sanctions, confiscated assets) has been gifted to ukraine, to do with as they please.

But why?

Because the better the deal ukraine gets, and the least russia gets, the better it is for us. While we do care about the well-being of ukraine, we also care about damaging russia, because russia is an enemy and a threat. If ukraine wants to keep on fighting, and russia takes some more losses, that is fine with us. We're certainly not going to pressure our vassal to sign a deal favourable to our enemy; that's not how any of this works.

Everybody kinda conspires to ignore the agency of the ukrainians; trump and the americans always have main character syndrome, while putin’s entire ideology, and his main reason for the war, dogmatically depends on ukraine’s lack of agency. So Putin keeps trying to talk to trump, who doesn’t care besides the vanity boost of ‘ending another war’ and certainly doesn’t control zelensky, or the europeans, who have no concession to give to him because they are not hurting, and also don’t control zelensky.

No, what the EU should say is: "it looks like the amount of aid we're giving you is not enough to stalemate Russia completely. We don't want to give more, so tell us which option you prefer: we can just let you keep on grinding and waiting for a black swan or you tell us how much you're willing to give up to stop the war sooner and we'll try and get Russia to accept the smallest amount of concessions possible. It can't be 'nothing', because that's just the first option in disguise".

Instead, it's always the first option is disguise, which makes the EU look either idealistic, stupid or callous, depending on how you want to interpret this.

Should we increase aid to Ukraine? I think so, but I'm not in charge. So based on current realities, I can… still not do anything. Again, what are you suggesting I do, concretely? That I ‘advise’ ukraine? Fine, I will tell them that based on the august opinion of russian and american commenters, a total collapse of their frontline would be bad for them.

And having been so informed, what am I supposed to do if they prefer continuing the war to accepting russia’s terms? Force them against their will, ‘for their own good’, to accept the terms? Withdraw support, threaten war maybe? How much am I supposed to sacrifice to harm my own ally so that my enemy can get good terms?

we'll try and get Russia to accept the smallest amount of concessions possible.

I'm all for that. But this is achieved by increasing pressure on Russia, not Ukraine. For example, we could be far more open to threatening putin with war, like sending 'peacekeepers' to lviv, for 'security purposes'.

But I appreciate the chutzpah of a russian trying to reframe europe’s unconditional support for ukraine as somehow morally responsible for ukrainian deaths at the hand of russia.

Maybe after we threaten to withdraw support and zelensky tells us to go fuck ourselves, putin will decide he wants all of ukraine anyway, which is far easier now that ukraine has less equipment. I don’t believe putin wants peace. I don’t even believe he wants peace on the terms he just proposed. It’s all a charade for trump’s benefit, putin and zelensky playing hot potato.

Well, here's a quick summary:

  • there's a 28-point proposal, prepared by Witkoff, Vance, then Dmitriev from the Russian side and possibly Umerov from the Ukrainian side
  • it's very Trumpy in style, light on the details, largely follows the Anchorage one, the key points are:
    • Ukraine has to withdraw from Donetsk oblast in exchange for Russia withdrawing from Sumy, Harkov and Dnepr oblasts
    • no NATO membership and permanent neutrality of Ukraine, some security guarantees
    • frozen Russian funds are not given directly to Russia or Ukraine, but are split between a Ukrainian-American and Russian-American joint investment funds
    • anti-Russian sanctions are relaxed quickly
  • Trump makes happy noises that a peace treaty can be signed quickly, urges Ukraine to sign
  • EU leaders are shocked, Zelensky makes unhappy noises, but appears to be not completely against
  • Rubio is not happy that he's been bypassed again, supported by hawking Republicans
  • Z and his EU friends quickly prepare a counterproposal that mostly follows the original EU idea that Russia must be the side that is the bigger loser
  • Trump not happy that his FIFA peace prize is again eluding him, demands that Ukraine signs by Thanksgiving
  • Rubio forced to moderate his rhetoric not to upset Trump
  • Putin makes noncommittal noises
  • various leaks show that everyone was aware of the proposal before it was published (except Rubio lol), so the shock and indignation were mostly performative
  • an urgent meeting is convened in Geneva, with Zelensky, Rubio and various EU politicians participating and modifying the proposal in Ukraine's favor

That's about where we are. Right now, all we know is that it's a 19-point proposal now and the question of frozen Russian assets has been dropped from it. Presumably, the most sensitive points (Donetsk oblast withdrawal and NATO (non-)membership) will be discussed between Zelensky and Trump.

The most likely outcome is that Trump is once again not able to get off Mr. Bones' Wild Ride: he can't force a ceasefire through but can't wash his hands of the war either. A few more Ukrainian towns are turned into rubble, let's meet again in three months.

Yes, either Zelensky/Rubio will be successful in convincing Trump that completely unrealistic demands on Ukraine's behalf should be added, in which case Putin will reject it and the neocons will push Trump for more sanctions. Or Z fails and Trump has an excuse to finally bail and pull intel and support, dumping it on Europe. Either way the war continues and the outcome is the same, just the timeline changes.

The Czech instructor, a veteran of peacekeeping missions in Afghanistan, Yakub (name changed), was most interested in drones. Together with him, "Eighteen" decided to conduct training: Czech paratroopers were supposed to storm the positions of the Ukrainian military. The "maviks" were supposed to help them defend themselves.

"After their first assaults, Yakub approached me, says: "Do you hear, can we remove the "maviks"?" – says the major.

In the photo, a military man in camouflage controls a drone in the field. He stands on a path amidst dry grass, holding a control panel, and a small reconnaissance drone hovered in the air in front of him. Around — autumn nature: trees with yellow and green leaves, gray-blue sky with clouds.

"Why, Yakub?" – he asked in response.

"But you just draw us very quickly with your maviks, and we cannot approach you, you find us on the approach to your positions", answered the Czech instructor.

"I say, Yakub, unfortunately, we are preparing for war".

Crude translation but this is pretty brutal. I swear I've been reading articles like this for the last year where the NATO trainers go 'drive around the minefield lol' or similar. Nothing seems to be learnt, it's very slow going. Later in the article they say 'oh the Ukrainian command never said anything was wrong with our training, we totally include drones' but it's always the military officials talking, not the soldiers journos are speaking to on the ground. It is warming me to the '140 million population Russia poses a threat to 600 million population Europe' idea we see so much.

Inertia is definitely proportional to the size of the bureaucracy. Be glad that NATO hasn’t discovered Agile methodology.

On the other hand, the Russian MIC hasn’t covered itself in glory. They’ve got a significant head start. I would expect that to disappear within a few months of an open (non-nuclear!) conflict with Europe, if only because of massive casualties leading to rapid NATO turnover.

Be glad that NATO hasn’t discovered Agile methodology.

If I was NATO enemy I would pray for them to discover Agile. They would defeat themselves before reaching the battlefield.

So far the whole Agile/Scrum and similar silver bullets industrial complex is roughly split into 3 parts - grifters, useful idiots and just idiots. Sorry - there is tiny sliver of people that work in small companies and teams - but there agile comes naturally.

I feel we end up talking in circles discussing casualty estimates that are wide apart, but I'm always interested in the pro Russia (Ukraine skeptic? How would you define it?) side.

Based on the above, would you suggest Putin should sign up to Trump's deal?

Sounds like everything is going all to plan for him based on your assessment, NATO support totally failed to help Ukraine and so annoying the US doesn't move the needle on the conflict, and the Ukrainian army is basically gone based on the estimate above if true: why accept a deal today (even if you're going to break it soon) if you'll win tomorrow?

Of course, Putin could be not really serious about the negotiations and is just running the clock/trying to drive a wedge between the US and Ukraine (which is my opinion too). But based on the pro Russia narrative, the USA doesn't have the power at this point to do much to Russia? US stocks of relevant systems are depleted or earmarked for a fight against China, sanctions aren't working, and past shipments of kit did little. Is that about right?

What would you suggest to Putin? Hold out till you can roll all of Ukraine and dictate terms? What should they be? One poster a few weeks ago suggested annexing everything Ukrainian east of Poland as a demonstration of Russian power, do you think that's the most credible outcome based on the fact that Ukraine is on the ropes in your assessment?

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I actually do think that a million Russian dead is clearly too high for the same reason that half a million dead Ukrainians is too high: we would see the evidence everywhere in both economies if that were true. For example, this interview with Russia's former deputy energy minister was a year ago but seems credible where he pushes back on Russia taking a million people out of the economy not being likely at that point https://frontelligence.substack.com/p/war-deficits-and-the-russian-economy . No disagreement there, where we differ as I understand is that I would guess Ukraine is taking 1 casualty for every 2 Russians (which could be an issue, given the 1:3 pop ratio), and you assume it's actually something like 10:1 in favor of Russia? For example, I think this is fairly credible https://frontelligence.substack.com/p/desertions-and-loss-ratios-trends, which was in spring this year, and estimated that Ukraine was trading at 1:1.8, which in itself is not enough to be a central theory of victory for the same reason, they need Russia to run out of money or will or something else before men at that rate if Russia can keep recruiting. Not sure what @Dean 's opinion is, I do not want to put words into their mouth.

I actually do bet on Polymarket, and have been making good money versus those bullish on Russia by putting bets on "no" across a spread of markets where Russia takes city X by date Y. When I win I roll the original sum over and take the winnings, some I lose when the point eventually falls but I'm $5k up on $5k in just over a year thanks to Russia under performing their expectations. https://polymarket.com/event/will-russia-capture-all-of-pokrovsk-by-september-30?tid=1764080674035 Pokrovsk has been particularly good so far, so close but so far for so long. There isn't a market for casualties exactly because it's kind of impossible to resolve (our problem here), plus possibly Polymarket thinks its too spicy, but I would be very interested if there was one. I might bet.

Thanks though for your thoughts on the war, it is very interesting to hear, we disagree but I would guess fundamentally we're all just observers trying to understand. I find this conflict interesting from a cultural perspective: there are two narrative bubbles that are often a bit surprising, and we will have to see where the chips land in the end. I would personally would be surprised if Russia takes Kharkiv or anything past the Dnieper full stop even if the war runs through 2026, and would bet on Polymarket to that effect, but lets see.

Side note, how do I embed links? I look like my father using emails here.

Same as Reddit: surround the hyperlink text with [square brackets] and immediately follow it with the (URL in parentheses).

Embed with [text](link): text.

Nice post, too. I always appreciate it when someone plays the adult in the room market rationalizer on predictions.

Thanks a million, that makes a lot of sense.

Speaking of Texas in your tagline and the Ukraine conflict, did you hear that Mary from Texas Oblast may not actually be from Texas? If twitter always showed locations I bet the bot/shill account founders would have used VPNs and they would all be US/European, not showing locations and then suddenly changing it created the perfect storm of hilarity.

A million dead Ukrainians is too high: we would see the evidence everywhere in both economies if that were true.

The articles about stunning and brave Ukrainian girlbosses taking over the coal mines and shipyards because all the men were... uh.... somewhere else started popping up like a year and a half ago.

https://www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/npr/g-s1-40964/in-a-workforce-transformed-by-war-ukrainian-women-are-now-working-in-coal-mines

https://www.economist.com/europe/2023/11/12/as-ukrainian-men-head-off-to-fight-women-take-up-their-jobs

Ukraine's workforce is clearly under pressure, but adding 5% of women to a mine/industry (from what I read in your article there) is entry level mobilization shit surely? In the UK in WW1 or WW2 we would call that a Tuesday, and the UK wasn't under a manpower collapse in either war.

Again, Ukraine is clearly under pressure, but if 1 million were out of action from deaths/wounds it would look like the Ukrainian military not existing and Russia strolling forwards, which is not the case (Pokrovsk has been contested for over a year now, and within walking distance of the pre war lines).

I actually do think that a million Russian dead is clearly too high for the same reason that half a million dead Ukrainians is too high: we would see the evidence everywhere in both economies if that were true. For example, this interview with Russia's former deputy energy minister was a year ago but seems credible where he pushes back on Russia taking a million people out of the economy not being likely at that point

I wonder if we're seeing the sort of issue that historians have in assessing ancient wars, where a lot of people just stop being counted in the official population numbers. That doesn't necessarily mean they're dead. I imagine there's a lot of men, especially on the Ukrainian side but also in Russia, who would prefer to not let the state know that of their existence right now. Obviously it's better overall that not as many people are dying, but from the state's cynical view it's sort of the same whether they're actually dead or just unreachable.

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Not sure what @Dean 's opinion is, I do not want to put words into their mouth.

Thank you. I appreciate not being assigned a position I've never taken.

My position for some time (years) has been neither side is running out of manpower in an absolute sense. The somewhat less than 2-to-1 in favor of Ukraine is reasonable-ish, with emphasis on swings on which part of the front when. When Ukraine does localized counter-attacks over time, such as trying to delay the fall of defense line that has gotten supply-interdicted by fires (drone or artillery), it's worse. When Ukraine is doing 'generic' line defense, it's higher. Per-capital casualty rates of national populations aren't really relevant, since neither side is being limited by the size of the population per see, but rather political considerations for accessing significant parts of it.

In Ukraine, this limitation the political willingness to draft the younger age cohort to fill the infantry with more fit bodies. This is bad, and people can feel free to add more emphasis if they like, but it's not the 'there is nothing left' metaphor either. Every year of the war, an entirely new year of potential conscripts leaves the protected age bracket, and when you compare that number to casualties per year, the number of potential 'new' conscripts far outnumbers the casualties by a large degree in absolute terms. The issues are separate about opportunity costs and so on, so the decision on what to prioritize is a political / policy decision, not a physical limit. Bad politics or policy can and do lead to bad results. But this is also not as bad in the same way / to the degree most people might conceptualize, because the Ukraine War- and particularly the drone dynamic- has changed what sort of 'fit body versus support force' ratio actually is, in ways that military science, let alone social understanding, haven't caught up with. A few years ago, a 'healthy' infantry-drone balance might have a drone user per platoon, with X platoons for Y amount of territory. Now we are looking at multiple drone operators per squad, with Z squads per Y' territory. Whatever the ratio 'should' be, the amount of infantry 'needed' for a certain level of frontage is changing. Ukraine can simultaneously not have enough, and people have outdated / over-inflated assumptions of what 'should' be.

In Russia, the limitation is the economic willingness off older age cohorts to take volunteer enlistment bonuses. Russia tried to leverage its population via a conscription model in the first year of the war, and it went so badly that somewhere between half a million to a million Russians left the country in the first year, and Putin preferred to pay significant other material and other costs to avoid a reoccurance. This works as long as the Russian volunteer base is willing to take the offered salaries, but the issue with market-rate enlistment bonuses are you actually have to pay them, and any model that relies on pre-saved money to fund deficit spending to avoid other issues will, eventually, run out of pre-saved money. Market-rate military expenses are fickle as well as fiscal, and are prone to spiking when shortages occur, such as if fewer people want to volunteer because parts of the contract bonuses (such as regional government bonuses) are cut for fiscal constraints. Difficulty does not mean absence, and Russia has already gone through various long-term costs to provide the short-term funds to meet needs, but shell-games come with tradeoffs and the functional recruitable base is not a simple total-population-size ratio between Russia and Ukraine.

This all matters because much of the discussion about casualty ratios is applied to total population sizes (Russia is X times bigger, so Ukraine needs an Y kill ratio to compensate). This misses the manpower limitation on both sides, and that casualty ratios matter more as a factor of the relative recruitable bases, which are far less clear / even less consensus.

which in itself is not enough to be a central theory of victory for the same reason, they need Russia to run out of money or will or something else before men at that rate if Russia can keep recruiting.

This is approaching my position, but with a whole lot of context / framing that would take a rather long post in and of itself.

In so much that I present a definition of 'victory' for Ukraine, my inclination has generally leaned towards 'terms that are sufficient to allow Ukraine to deter yet another continuation war by Russia.' As a result, my general stance since the first two years of the war have been that victory in the war is more about the final terms than the terrain.

(The 2022 invasion is arguably the 3rd continuation war since the 2014 Crimea incursion, which was followed by the Nova Russia campaign and then the direct intervention when that failed.)

By this standard, the 'peace terms' offered by Russia in the first month of the war would have been a loss as they were basically disarmament demands that would have reduced the Ukrainian army to fewer tanks than the Ukrainian army lost in the next year or so of actually fighting the war. The Ukrainians would have 'won' more land in the short term, but at an extremely high risk of Russia just reorganzing and launching another mechanized invasion that Ukraine would likely have been unable to resist without a reoccurance of the 2022 fuckups, which would have led to the strategic defeat. By contrast, while Ukraine has taken [insert McBigNumber] casualties in the three years of war since the invasion, in the process it has largely depleted the Soviet strategic stockpiles of tanks / ammo / etc. that were what allowed Russia to replenish mechanized formations. Now those reserves are largely gone, and so even if Ukraine loses all of the Donbas and the fortress belt fighting rather than merely turning over uncontested, it's still a 'better' [victory] than if Russia still had the perceived mechanized invasion capacity it had a few years ago.

Similar points exist in other aspects of deterrence credibility. If the war had not continued, the limits of the Russian ammunition stockpiles (since supplemented by purchased North Korean munitions) would not have been so clear to all, and thus strengthened the Russian negotiating leverage were Russia still at 10-to-1 artillery advantage as opposed the more contemporary 3-to-1 estimates. If the war had not continued past the first month, Russia might still have had a unilateral advantage in terms of its long-range strike capability of operational stockpiles of cruise missiles, and Ukraine would not have gradually increasing its own long-range strike campaign credibility to the point where it now routinely hits highly-visible, and budget-significant, Russian infrastructure. Had the war ended sooner, when Russia was still aggressively using Soviet AA missiles against everything it could, the deterrence narrative might have been stuck on the question of 'has Ukraine / the West run out of air defenses,' rather than flip that to 'if Russia struggles against these drones, how safe is it against NATO airpower?'

None of this is to say that Russia hasn't advanced its own capabilities in various areas over the war. Drone warfare is absolutely a thing. But deterrence isn't about 'can the attacker win,' but rather 'can the defender make it not worth the cost.' And in that sense, and for that purpose, increasing Russian costs now, in the present, shapes Russian future cost calculus later, when Russia (particularly Putin) might try again.

This is an attritional struggle, but it's not an attritional struggle to 'win' this war in terms of 'Russian military collapses and Ukraine regains territory.' While I'm sure the Ukrainian public would love it if some sort of Russian balance of payments default led to the Russian army leaving the field or mutinying in mass and marching on Moscow, that's neither likely or necessary. Rather, the war is an attritional struggle that seeks to add enough military and economic and political-will costs such that even Putin will think about starting another invasion, and go 'I'd rather not.'

And in that context, the attritional goal for Russian infantry and such isn't 'there are literally not enough men to fight,' but rather 'future!Putin does not want to pay the costs he'd have to to get enough men to fight.'

That could the direct economic costs to the Russian state budget and fiscal planning if he has to pay market costs. That could be the political costs if Putin in this war has to supplement the volunteers with conscripts. That could be the material costs, if Russia feels it needs to replace the stuff it already lost in this war before it tries again. That could be reconstitution costs, if the survivors of this war decide they'd rather not join the next war because they got their signing bonus and intend to live with it. It could be any or all of these, so long as the sum-total is enough that Putin, when he's out of sunk-cost-fallacy mode, would rather not try.

But all of this framework derives from a theory of victory that doesn't really define victory in this war in terms of territory lost or gained, or even Ukrainian casualties.

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That makes an awful lot of sense from my point of view, and I would update my position wherever it differed before to what you've just said - that was a really good summary.

One thing we have discussed less in these threads is the economic pressure Russia is under - selling gold reserves, burning through its foreign currency, losses to its refining capacity and tightening sanctions all seem to be having a rising impact, though it's really hard to judge exactly how much. Putin seems willing to pay a very high cost to make this invasion seem a victory to the domestic population and pro Russians worldwide, possibly as the consequences of embarrassment are possibly deadly, but like you say the really important thing is if the costs are high enough to swing his calculus for another round.

I also find it really interesting how Russia's tank storage is basically empty, Uralvagonzavod is cutting employees by 10% despite the presumably desperate need for equipment, and there have been several strikes on Russia's airforce this year and even this week, hitting vital airframes that they no longer even produce (some of the industry was in Ukraine for a start).

Ukraine is definitely proving a tougher nut to crack than anyone thought, and it's already one of the strangest and most embarrassing wars for what claims to be a major power that I've ever known. 0.2% of NATO GDP spent annually in a proxy war to wreck pretty much the entire stockpile of Soviet equipment would be paid in a heartbeat by the Reagan era Republicans I assume, from my point of view the Ukrainians can keep the change if they want to keep fighting.

Well, if you like a contribution enough, you know what to do with it.

I will carry your point about NATO GDP a bit further, though. The economic implications for NATO go beyond even that. It isn't '0.2% on top of normal.' That 0.2% spent going to directly shape what the new-normal in the future is, since future defense spending will have to adjust to what is needed, not what used to be needed. Any critique of 'it's unreasonable to spend so much to help Ukraine fight Russia' can be fairly asked to state a position on 'how much spending is reasonably needed to fight Russia without Ukraine.'

A lot of the NATO defense spending discussion is framed in media in terms of 'Europe needs to spend more to catch up to Russia.' There is truth there, but it's not the entire truth, just as another refrain- 'we need to create capabilities the Americans may withdraw' is a part-but-not-whole of the truth. An additional element is that a lot of the NATO spending European states need to is to just dig themselves out of the hole of the post-Cold War defense cuts that lowered their various institutional, not just military, capabilities. Resolve deficit capabilities in things like administration, communication architecture, procurement agencies, legacy system commitments, and so on, and then you can better modernize the actual hardware in inventory and try to train new people to actually match the Russian threat once ignored / discounted.

But if part of spending requirements is 'resolve the deficit' and another part of 'match the adversary,' how much you need to spend to match the adversary depends on, well, the adversary's capabilities. Which, a half decade ago, included a Soviet Union's worth of stockpiles of ammo, reactivatable vehicles, and weapons. 'Reasonably sufficient' defense spending to reasonably counter such a threat had to be able to match / overcome both [ongoing Russian military industry from the current economy] and account for [the vast reserves of Russian reserve material]. And that was a huge amount of capacity, the sticker shock of which contributed to the European defense spending paralysis, since it's easy to be dwarfed by the magnitudes involved. Russia lost more tanks in the first year of the war than most of the major EU NATO members had total. To 'match' that, you'd be talking trippling or quadrupling tank orders.

But that's if you have to match the Soviet stockpiles. Now that much (though not all) of that Cold War inheritance is squandered, Russia is increasingly dependent on [modern economy funded production], as opposed to [inherited mountains]. And Russia's [modern economy funded production] is far, far, far more practical for the European states to match or keep up with. When you take away Soviet stockpile reactivations, which is how Russia gets 'more than 1000 tanks produced* a year' over the war, back in 2020 Russia was producing around 200 new tanks a year.

It takes a lot less NATO expenditures to overcome 200 tanks a year compared to 1000 tanks a year. Or to overcome 10,000 missiles that have been shot rather than still could be shot. Or suppress a black sea fleet that's already on the sea floor.

None of this means there isn't a great deal more spending to be done, or that the NATO countries can coast without spending. The Europeans have decades of investment deficit to make up for, everyone needs to modernize for drones, and that's without other competing priorities. The Russians may have a smaller economy than many European nations, but they have a significant head start in certain relevant sectors.

But it is magnitudes easier- and cheaper- to keep up with someone who can't out-spend you rather than to try and catch up with someone with a seemingly insurmountable lead who still continues to spend.

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they can keep killing Ukrainian soldiers at a favorable ratio until Ukraine agrees not to be a US proxy, which is their goal.

If the Russian goal was 'Ukraine isn't a US proxy' then they could have just not invaded in the first place. The idea that the invasion of Ukraine was really Russia defending itself against the US is a bizarre fantasy. The goal was conquering Ukraine to eliminate it as a sovereign state, and to eliminate the identity of the Ukrainian people as distinct from the Russians. Putin literally wrote an essay on why the invasion was justified, it's nothing to do with America.

Russia is against Ukraine joining NATO because NATO membership might prevent Russia invading again once it has built up more strength.

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What do you mean by that? Can you elaborate?

More comments

It's no more bizare a cope than the idea that refinery repairs are a trifling expense in the midst of a war that was draining reserves even before primary income sources started going boom, or that progressively smaller relative material advantages negate manpower limits.

Side note, how do I embed links? I look like my father using emails here.

Comments here, like on Reddit, follow Markdown formatting.

I'm still overwhelmingly globohomo, but let me channel the other side.

What is the realistic amount of success Putin can expect? Even if Ukrainian frontline finally collapses, the rate of Russian advance reaches 10km/day, Zelensky is deposed and the provisional government capitulates, it's super easy for the EU to recognize some Ukrainian government-in-exile and keep Russia under sanctions.

Is this better or worse than a negotiated peace? Depends on its terms. Every article in a peace treaty should be viewed through a very specific prism: how is it enforced, what will happen if one of the parties violates the terms of the treaty? It's like buying drugs from a dealer you don't trust.

Anything that goes "will be determined via additional negotiations" is a massive trap. Given that Russia currently has the initiative, any ceasefire agreement has to be sweetened with something concrete and immediate.

In general, if I could guarantee the original 28-point agreement would be implemented by all parties in good faith, I would suggest signing it. It's not a massive win, but a massive win is already impossible. But since it will be interpreted in bad faith, to the letter of the agreement, by all parties, I would advise examining every letter of the agreement with a magnifying glass first.

One of the consequences of propaganda culture that I think is not discussed enough is how having too effective control of public opinion in your camp can actually work against you in contexts where treaties have to be made. Similarly to the concept of "right to be sued" I have seen in the context of trade agreements, being able to assert that some party will judge and appropriately punish you should you violate the terms actually gives you more freedom to offer terms. In the case of international agreements, when the world police (US) has a stake in the game or is aggressively indifferent or both, the only one that could stand in judgement whether a treaty is being adhered to is public opinion (which could enforce its judgement by boycotts, protests or simply non-cooperation when a treaty party needs the general public to cooperate e.g. by enlisting to fight in the military or maintaining social exclusion). However, this does not work if a treaty party has the part of the public it is sensitive to (usually its own populace) around its finger to the point that it will always be able to convince it that it is in the right. In this way, Russia has crippled itself long ago, and the collective West has by now followed suit.

I’d say one destructive consequence of the Versailles ‘Treaty’ is that the notion of any great power terminating a war through a just and negotiated peace treaty has become a laughingstock. It’s no wonder no great power has ever waged war under such delusions since 1919. Everyone fights to win or to the death. If neither option is on the table, you get a trainwreck of a ‘settlement’ like that in Korea.

The historic critiques of the Treaty of Versailles regarding Germany were themselves derived from the terms Germany imposed on France beforehand. If there's any historical denunciation to be had for ruinous reparations as a way to peace, it well predates WW1.

First - no ceasefire ever. Just work on the treaty. Hammer Ukraine until they relent on this point. Second - take only majority Russian territories. Third - Ukraine is forbidden to be in military alliances, but allowed to have whatever and how much they want of conventional forces. No foreign peacekeeping force, but are allowed generous amount of observers/trainers as long as they are not affiliated with NATO. Also allow security guarantees. Fourth - give USA and EU the frozen assets to reconstruct Ukraine in trade for sanctions lift. Not Ukraine. They are allowed to draw for them for paying EU and US companies that do work there. Fifth - Create international company that gets ownership of the gas transit infrastructure of Ukraine with ownership split between Germany Italy and couple of other countries. Ukrainians will squeal like pigs, but bribing parts of EU is always a good idea. Sixth - offer Ukraine discounted hydrocarbons for couple of years. Seventh - make Ukraine take blame for Nordstream and make them pay reparations to Germany that will be used for rebuilding it. There is not a chance in hell of Ukraine having the money to pay, but a nice pressure point.

For casualties - I would say probably parity. Ukrainians having favorable ratio before 2025 and giving more from Kursk onwards.

Russia is hurting now so it actually needs peace.

That is ... not exactly BS, but somewhat distorted. The only reason the war in Ukraine is as it is - is because no air superiority exists on the Ukraine side. In a large scale conflict Nato vs Russia we will have orders of magnitude more jets than Ukraine has and probably enough to make sure that Russian airforce won't be able to lob KABs at their leisure, their Geran launch sites will be exposed, their fiber drones C&C will be easier to neutralize and we will be totally free to conduct as deep strikes in russia's territory as we feel is needed with whatever weapons we have in our arsenal.

So don't rush drawing a conclusions about what the nature of the war is. Ukraine has been fighting with limited resources, some of them with strings attached and Russian airforce is far cry from the USSR numbers - and russians don't seem to be able to mass produce them.

And completely automatic jets are at least some years away.

...

they'd launch tactical nuclear weapons at American air bases in Europe

Hey, at least we'd get a chance to test my personal conspiracy theory that the US has at least 10x as many counter-ballistic missiles as it has advertised.

I have literally no evidence of this, but it seems like it'd have been a pretty obvious good idea to have done quietly years ago (and not a good idea to advertise the end of MAD), and would maybe explain why we were so open to using them in Israel earlier this year.

This was the only thing that made sense to me given:

  1. The cost of nuclear war approaching "nearly everything" and the benefit of American Ukrainian policy being quite nebulous. Even if the nuclear war chances are miniscule the benefits would have to be some sustantial portion of "nearly everything" for risking it to make sense.
  2. Continued investment in hypersonic delivery platforms by Russia and China

I don't know, is the NATO:Russia air advantage much bigger than the Russia:Ukraine air advantage? Being able to lob KABs is one thing, but Russia at no point dared overflying Ukraine freely, because the economics and optics of losing even one manned plane every now and then because an AD launcher was successfully hidden in a nondescript warehouse somewhere are too painful. The dynamics of a hot war with the involvement of the entirety of NATO would of course be different, but despite everything it seems implausible to me that they would look like the comfy desert turkey shoot war that NATOcore acolytes live for.

(I would also expect that the opening move after a NATO entry into the war is that at least all the NPPs in Ukraine - and quite possibly also everything in Europe east of the centerline of Germany - get blown up, since the only thing that kept them safe so far is Western sensibilities. As for what effect this would have on warfighting capabilities, I honestly can't tell - do we have contingencies to maintain our economy if there is actually no energy grid? Would the sudden need to cook on an open fire in your block's courtyard shatter Europe's heiwa-boke and result in rapid return to WWII-era buff doge form, or a quick noping out and licking of wounds?)

The critical difference is the ability to assert mutual air denial via active air defense systems.

The Russian airforce dared to overfly Ukraine for about a weak, but stopped because even the rare active-detection radar system was enough to get good aircraft shot down, while Russia lacked the sort of EW / counter-emitter capabilities to suppress those air defense systems. However, this was a mutual paradigm- Russia couldn't intrude, but Ukraine couldn't either, and both stayed behind their lines in the air-defense bubble.

The issue is that NATO has a lot better tools to conduct suppression of enemy air defense (SEAD), most notably stealth aircraft that aren't so vulnerable to that sort of 'pocked AD' strategy. You turn on that sort of active radar, you (generally) still don't detect the aircraft for a weapons lock, but those weapons it has can lock onto you. Once high-altitude air defense systems are cracked, you can 'simply' fly over the lower air defense systems, use the gravity advantage to extend the range of your strikes, and progressively widen your air operation area to progressively strike more things.

It's not as absolute or one-sided as that, and it's certainly not a turkey shoot setup. Russia has absolutely invested a lot in mitigating those sort of stealth investments. But the Soviet anti-air concept that Russia inherited was much more of a 'buy time for the ground forces to win' model, as opposed to 'we have nothing to fear.' With time, you can take care to gradually peel back a defense envelope and act within the safe margins, which is exactly what we see in the current environment with the Russian glide bombs. However, the NATO countries have much better air penetration options, and air munitions, than the Russian airforce whose design purpose was to keep the NATO aircraft delayed by days/weeks/months so the army could run over the ground defenders and then get entrenched.

This one is going to be long, so I'll probably break it up into two halves for easier reading.

We hear a lot about “Transgender Day/Week of Remembrance” and hate-crimes/murders affecting transgender people. Figures get reported uncritically in the media and, more importantly, on social media. But how accurate are they?

I’m going to go through a 2024 report from the Human Rights Campaign Foundation, where they call it an “epidemic of violence”. Then I’ll list the names they give of transgender people who were killed in 2023/2024 and what I’ve found online reported on the deaths.

That will let us see, at least, if people really are being murdered wholesale simply for being trans, or if it’s simply for the same reasons people have been murdered throughout history.

Make up your own minds. I’m not doing this for any agenda pro- or anti-anything, except for having accuracy (as much as we can get it) as to who is getting killed and for what reasons (if there are reasons to be established). (I like this new phrase, “gender expansive”. Must remember that is the correct term to use in future).

Several of these cases are to do with “victim was sex worker/may have been engaged in sex work/may have had criminal ties”. Several are “current/former romantic partner”.

The Epidemic of Violence Against the Transgender & Gender-Expansive Community in the U.S.
The 2024 Report
Human Rights Campaign Foundation, November 2024

The epidemic of violence against transgender and gender-expansive people is a national tragedy. Each life stolen from us in this way is the result of a society that demeans and devalues anyone who dares challenge the gender binary. This year, we’ve seen an explosion of violent and hateful rhetoric aimed at the LGBTQ+ community—words that make both physical violence and discriminatory legislation more palatable for those in need of a scapegoat. This is one of many reasons why, last year, HRC declared a State of Emergency for LGBTQ+ people for the first time in our over 40-year history.

Since the day after the last Transgender Day of Remembrance on November 20, 2023, at least 36 transgender and gender-expansive people have been killed in the U.S.

So this is everyone who was deliberately murdered solely for being transgender, no other reason? Well, no:

Between January 2013 and October 2024, the FBI recorded 16 fatal hate crimes committed against trans and gender-expansive people, including bias-motivated deaths categorized as murder, manslaughter, or negligent manslaughter, far fewer than the 372 deaths recorded by HRC.

The discrepancy is due to the fact that ‘hate crime’ carries a legal definition—albeit one which differs between jurisdictions and across state and federal regulations. In addition, not all jurisdictions collect and report hate crimes data to the FBI, meaning that the FBI’s database is not exhaustive.

A case does not have to be categorized as a hate crime to be included in our reporting. Rather, we include those cases where bias, hate, and structural violence and stigma played a role in the killing of individuals, including indirectly through fostering the conditions in which the death occurred (e.g. if a person was killed while engaging in survival sex work, after being pushed out of the formal economy).

So basically – if you were trans/gender non-conforming/cis gender non-conforming and you died by violence, you get counted in the list of “anti-trans hate”. Yes, even if you got whacked in gang-related crime or were shot by a random shooter who was in a quarrel with a completely different person or got knocked down in a hit-and-run:

Victim Identification

We do not include every death of a transgender, gender-nonconforming, or non-binary person. To be included:

• The death must have occurred in the United States, including Puerto Rico and Outlying American territories.
o Deaths that occur in other countries, even if the victims are Americans, are not included.
• The death must have been committed by another person, either directly or through contributions to the circumstances that resulted in the death.
o This means that suicides and death from illness and substance use are not included.
• The cause of death must be confirmed by authorities to be a homicide and/or caused by another person.
o “Authorities” includes official statements (or press reports of official statements) from law enforcement and/or lawyers and advocates involved in the case.
• Violence, including structural violence, must also be a component of the circumstances, even if the perpetrator did not set out to kill the victim.
o Thus, deaths due to robbery/burglary, hit-and-run and vehicular homicide, and deaths which occur at the hands of the police/while in police or law enforcement custody, are included, in addition to deaths from homicide and manslaughter.

…Identification of cases
We include victims who identify as transgender, non-binary, gender-expansive, or some other non-cisgender identity at the time of their death, or who were gender-expansive in their gender presentation, or who were cisgender but presumed to be trans.

…Expanding our inclusion criteria – inclusion of non-trans victims
As noted above,this year’s report now includes people who are cisgender and gender non-conforming in their gender expression/presentation, as well as those who were presumed to be trans and whose presentation or the presumption thereof was a motivating factor in their death. The decision to expand our inclusion criteria was made in acknowledgement that these victims lost their lives to the same transphobic forces, and thus should be memorialized and included in discussions of the epidemic of anti-trans violence.

…Data collection

The information presented in this report reflects the most recently available data on all included cases, as identified to the best of our ability.

Data on each case are gathered daily through review of news reports, police reports, case records, and discussions with local advocates and loved ones of the victims.

All information is then recorded in an internal database and reviewed on a quarterly basis to confirm accuracy and update with emergent information as available.

Because new details may emerge as cases work their way through the justice system, and as law enforcement agencies release new information, data in this report may not always reflect what was noted in original reporting, or what may emerge in the future.”

I’m putting the descriptions in quotation marks because I’m taking them as-is from the website, sometimes the people involved used different names or gender identities.

Deaths that occurred in 2023:

Amiri Reid “a Black trans woman” and Kejuan Richardson “a gender-expansive gay Black man” (I’m putting these two together because they happened at the same time). Shot while driving around by Jorezno Philips. Motive: unknown, suspect committed suicide before he could be arrested. Could be personal quarrel with either or both, could be crime-related, could just be ‘picked a target at random and started shooting’. Hard to say it is specifically anti-trans hate crime unless he knew either or both of them, and we don’t know that.

Jean Butchart, “26 year old white transgender man, fatally shot in a mobile home park duing a series of violent incidents”. Exactly what it says there, except the shooter didn’t specifically go after Butchart: he got into an “altercation” with a resident of the park, came back days later with a gun and started shooting at them, and Butchart appears to have been collateral damage.

Savannah Ryan Williams, “38-year-old Cuban and Native transgender woman”. This one probably is trans-related, because the killer’s defence was “trans panic” (after having sex, he shot this person).

Meghan Riley-Lewis, “57-year-old transgender woman”. This one is odd, because it might be? Or might not be? Lewis was shot by a food delivery driver who claimed he acted in self-defence because Lewis attacked him for misgendering her. Yeah. This one is a toss-up.

Amber Minor, “40-year-old Black trans woman”. Investigation is ongoing, since the deceased was found shot dead in the driveway. Most coverage is about the police department deadnaming her, so clearly it wasn’t immediately obvious this person was trans. So with no arrest, no idea what the motive was.

Deaths that occurred in 2024:

Kitty Monroe, “43-year-old Latine transgender person”, went by male birth name as well as female trans identity. Killed in fatal hit and run. Sister claims Monroe had been attacked previously for their gender identity. Motive? Unknown: “Family members said police have informed them Lugo was accidentally struck by multiple vehicles after a black Ford F-150 appears to have purposely hit him following a fight near the Casa de Licores liquor store.” So maybe revenge for the fight, maybe for being trans, who knows?

Righteous “TK” Chevy Hill, “35-year-old Black transman”. Mother alleges it was a cousin who shot him, so probably that was the motivation (you have to read down a bit in this article, but the cousin seems to have been a deadbeat that Hill was helping out, but pushed his luck too far and Hill told him to get lost and that kicked it off).

Diamond Brigman, “a Black 26-year-old trans woman”. Killed while standing on the side of the road by a guy who drove up, got out, and shot her. Arrested but no motive given. So was it for being trans, did the suspect know her, what?

Alex Franco, “21-year-old transgender man”. This one is sort of sad but again, more likely to be stupid gang shit than transphobia. Victim knew or was ‘friends of friends’ with these kids, was allegedly going to buy a gun off them and they allegedly intended to rob him, and ended up shot dead.

Meraxes Medina, “24-year-old Latina transgender woman”. Murdered by unknown suspect who is wanted for murder of two sex workers. So again, more to do with streetwalker prostitution being dangerous.

África (Emma) Parrilla García, “ 25-year-old transgender woman”, found shot on street in Puerto Rico, deadnamed at first so very scanty details. No idea as to who or why behind the killing.

Tee “Lagend Billions” Arnold, “a 36-year-old Black transgender man”. Shot outside bowling alley at 1:30 a.m. Female suspect who knew him is wanted. Might be for reasons to do with disputes/quarrels, as he claimed there was a price on his head.

River Nevaeh Goddard, 17 year old white non-binary person (she/they pronouns). Seems to have been killed in a domestic dispute by boyfriend with mental health issues. Another sad story but you can’t call it anti-trans or hate crime.

Andrea Doria Dos Passos, “a 37-year-old transgender woman”. Homeless at the time, beaten to death while sleeping on the street. Guy who did it clearly a loon of some sort, motive unknown.

Sasha Williams, “36-year-old multiracial transgender woman”, stabbed in the street by a guy later arrested and charged. Mental health issues on his part, no motive known.

Starr Brown, “a Black transgender woman” but who also seems to have gone by/been known by birth name. Shot by co-worker while driving home after work (passenger in co-worker’s car which was later found crashed with the body inside). No motive given but it’s unlikely to have been due to transgender identity.

Kita Bee, “a 46-year-old transgender Black woman”, killed in hit-and-run. Seems to have been ordinary traffic accident, no other reason.

Reyna Hernandez,” a 54-year-old Latina transgender woman”. Killed by an allegedly abusive ex-partner after she called on him to finalise the breakup; he shot her then drove the body to Mexico and left it tied to a tree in a cemetery. Again, good old-fashioned domestic violence rather than trans hate crime.

Brandon “Tayy Dior” Thomas, “a 17-year-old Black transgender girl”. Another murder by boyfriend.

Michelle Henry, “a 25-year-old Black transgender woman”. Killed in her home by a “female suspect”, but unknown if this was roommate, partner, what, who was later released.

Yella (Robert) Clark Jr, “ a 45-year-old Black transgender person”. Serving life sentence in Angola prison, killed in an “altercation”. Being trans possibly had something to do with this, because prison, sexual assault, had killed an inmate previously for allegedly raping them, the whole nine yards. PRISON IS NOT A SAFE PLACE TO BE, IT'S FULL OF VIOLENT CRIMINALS AND THUGS.

Jazlynn Johnson, “an 18-year-old transgender teenager”. Another sad story, shot by friend while they were in the car. Probably accidental, the reports don’t indicate he intended to do this.

Liara Tsai, “a 35-year-old white transgender woman”. Body found in crashed car, ex-girlfriend (who, again, likely has mental health issues) was convicted for the stabbing.

Pauly Likens, “a 14-year-old transgender girl”. This one is bad. The child (14 is a child, don’t give me none of your lip) went missing walking home from a friend’s house in the late evening/early night. Dismembered body later found in reservoir. Guy charged with the murder claims to have met the kid on Grindr but suddenly developed a poor memory as to what might or might not have happened. Seems they met up for sex, then our charmer here killed them and disposed of the body. Let me go off on a tangent here about 14 IS TOO GODDAMN YOUNG and maybe the kid was gay not trans and THIS IS WHY AGE VERIFICATION ON SEX/PORN SITES YOU MAROONS YOU MAY NOT LIKE IT BUT THIS IS THE HELL WHY.

Shannon Boswell, “a 30-year-old Black transgender woman”. This one is a bit of a mystery; initially, it was thought she was killed by a hit-and-run, then it turns out she was shot as well. No idea who or why as yet.

Kenji Z. Spurgeon, “, a 23-year-old Black transgender woman”. Shot on the street in the early hours of the morning, it’s unclear what happened as police are still looking for a suspect. She was found lying on the ground after police responded to reports of gunshots in a car park.

Monique Brooks, “a 49-year-old Black transgender woman”, found shot beside her car in a factory parking lot. Someone was arrested but motive is unclear; it might have been a targeted job over drugs or God knows what, Brooks may not even have been the target.

Dylan Gurley, “a 20 year old a transgender woman”. Found stabbed, was homeless at the time. Suspect is guy who was living in the squat with her and probably thought she stole money from him.

Tai’Vion Latham, “ a 24-year-old Black transgender woman”. Found shot dead in an alley. No suspect as yet, so no motive.

Vanity Williams, “a 34-year-old Black transgender woman”. Found shot in the lobby of her apartment building, suspect allegedly knew her but nothing more is given, so no idea as to motive.

Redd (Barbie), “a 25-year-old Black transgender woman”. Again, another bystander victim; a couple of groups of people were hanging out on the street, a guy came up to talk to a woman in a different group, left, came back, and started shooting.

Kassim Omar, “a 29-year-old Black trans woman”. Shot by two teenagers in her apartment building (who had previously been “harassing her due to her gender identity and sexuality”), left paralysed, died two years later and so the teens have been charged with murder.

Honee Daniels, “a 37-year-old Black trans woman”, killed in a hit-and-run while walking home.

Santonio “San” Coleman, “a 48-year-old Black gender non-conforming person”. Found critically injured on a trail. First thought to be a homicide, now it might be an accidental fall. So not sure if this even counts as death by violence for their statistics.

Quanesha Shantel (“Cocoa”), “a 26-year-old Black trans woman”. Shot and killed by ex-boyfriend. She wanted to break up, he didn’t, so can you say he killed her out of transphobia?

There we are: 36 deaths, but how many of them would you count as genuine anti-trans hate crime violence epidemic? I'm not trying to deny transphobia and hate crimes exist, just point out that the next time you see "X trans deaths! our society is homophobic and transphobic, this proves it!", that may not be the exact motive for murder instead of the traditional ones of greed, lust, revenge, etc. that happen to straight white cis people too.

I thought it was fairly accepted amongst those who look semi-critically that the majority of anti-Trans violence was brought on by some mix of streetwalking, gay panic and the like. Which these seem to just about align to for the most part. It is pretty striking how high a proportion of the victims are Black.

It is pretty striking how high a proportion of the victims are Black.

I presume it tracks the murder rate by ethnicity among US population as a whole.

The interesting thing seems to be that for the trans population as a whole, while it's the white people who make the most noise about it, the majority are going to be BIPOC and poor(er) and hence the sex work. Rather the same dispute as about gayness (wealthy white men are presumed to be the majority, this is not so) or feminism (the whole breaking away of mujerismo, womanism and black feminism in response to the same complaints about 'middle-class white women are not representation').

We're not supposed to notice that, and if we do, it's the fault of Society:

we include those cases where bias, hate, and structural violence and stigma played a role in the killing of individuals, including indirectly through fostering the conditions in which the death occurred (e.g. if a person was killed while engaging in survival sex work, after being pushed out of the formal economy).

But indeed, a lot of the "and the victim was standing on a street at one o'clock in the morning" or "found dead in alleyway/parking lot" do sound like sex work, which is and has always been dangerous, whether you're gay, straight, cis or trans.

I hate wokists and people who lie with statistics (but I repeat myself rimshot) as much as the next mottizen, but "trans-identity is associated with major risk factors" doesn't really undermine claims it's a vulnerable population, just the simplified rhetoric.

The HRC Foundation is an explicit advocacy group for LGBTQ+ people. Of course one would expect them to take the broadest definition possible when tabulating hate crimes against their advocacy group. The SPLC routinely does this manner of thing as well, to the point where even the ADL thinks there's half as many Klansmen in the US than the SPLC seems to think. If the ADL thinks you've lost the plot that's really saying something. And does anybody really think a prisoner getting stabbed over drugs is "right-wing violence" just because the perpetrator has Nazi tattoos?

I don't think people who parrot these types of statistics are truth-seekers. They're 'arguments as soldiers' types. The point is to win and to use those wins as political leverage to get extra protections for their group. Confront them with the more salient facts and what would you expect to get as a response? "Gee I guess hate crimes against trans folks isn't as big of a problem as I previously thought" or "The only reason someone like you would even question these statistics in the first place is because you're transphobic, and I'm not having a conversation with a bigot"? The percentage of people who might be moved one way or another by this kind of digging into the data is small, perhaps very small.

I don't expect to convince anyone, just blow some of the smoke away so we can see how big the fire is. The ones where it's (for instance) the 14 year old are very sad and again GODDAMN IT GRINDR HAVE SOME STANDARDS EVEN IF YOU ARE A DEPRAVED HOOKUP SITE FOR PERVERTS but there's always going to be the problem of kids pretending to be older than they really are in order to get around restrictions.

Really, it's just "no, there is not in fact an epidemic of violence out there". 'Former partners kill their female partners' has been going on forever and a day, this time it's just 'even if it's trans female' nowadays.

Liara Tsai, “a 35-year-old white transgender woman”. Body found in crashed car, ex-girlfriend (who, again, likely has mental health issues) was convicted for the stabbing.

In at least this case (and probably several others), the perpetrator was also trans, which in a sane world would rule out "anti-trans animus" as a motive:

An autopsy determined that Tsai died from multiple sharp-force injuries, though it’s unclear when she died. Lewis, an acquaintance of Tsai’s who was visiting her from Boston, has been taken into custody in Olmstead County and charged with a felony count of interfering with a dead body and second degree murder, according to local outlet KTTC. Olmstead County Sheriff Kevin Torgerson told MPR that there was no indication that the killing was motivated by anti-trans bias, as Lewis is also trans.

Ah, that's the update I didn't get. Yeah, a lot of these cases can't be "the victim was killed for being trans" because one, at least, the aggressor was upset because he didn't want the relationship to end and already knew the person was trans. Several of them are former partner, so again it's "knew the person was trans".

What boggles my mind is the hit-and-runs. Someone gets knocked down in a routine kind of traffic accident such as happens hundreds of times, but this is judged societal forces of violence that disproportionately affect minorities or something? I do not get any rationale behind including these, apart from "the demand for hate crimes outstrips supply" so they need to pump up the numbers.

"Two people murdered for no reason but being trans" over two years is a lot less impressive than "thirty-six people killed!"

Crime does disproportionately impact minorities, though, including trans people. If you're poor or mentally ill, you're far more likely to be a victim of a crime than if you're not.

The issue is that the HRC apparently thinks press releases about how bad abstract "systemic" transphobia is is a more effective way to address the disparate impact of crime than increase policing and enforcement policies in the most victimized communities.

I honestly don't see how "trans woman killed by her boyfriend" included in stats about anti-trans/hate crime are going to do anything. Same for the traffic accidents: will we get lessons on how not to drive like a transphobe? The only reason there is to inflate numbers.

Indeed, and that's the issue. Moreover, as much as you're not going to learn how to drive from a vacuous press release, the people actually responsible for the crimes are even less likely to. These types of studies serve essentially no purpose but to distract from the real causes, and they only get any credence because people are too afraid to call them out or think about calling them out.

Crime does disproportionately impact minorities, though, including trans people

As @sarker points out above it appears that crime does not, in fact, disproportionately impact trans people.

@sarker was specifically arguing that murder does not disproportionately impact trans people, and I think the data bear that out. I'm agnostic on the question of whether crime disproportionately affects them.

Why would it? Is there any reason to believe trans are more subject to crime than average?

This report from 2021 claims that trans people are over four times more likely than cis people to experience violent victimisation, based on data from the 2017 and 2018 National Crime Victimisation Surveys. As it's based on survey data rather than police reports, the usual caveats apply.

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CW is that (holding quality of trauma care constant) murder closely tracks other violent crime, but is measured more reliably.

If the motte is that property crime disproportionately effects trans people, then it isn't connected to the bailey that the "trans day of remembrance" crowd are trying to occupy.

From @sarker's comment:

18 / 3M = 0.14 homicides per 100k

CDC reports 6.8 homicides per 100k Americans in the general population.

So, trans people are fifty times less likely to be murdered than a random American? That doesn't pass the smell test.

As @FtttG points out below, trans people are substantially more likely to report being the victim of a crime, though that comes with obvious caveats. But some basic sanity checks: trans people are also disproportionately non-white, particularly black and Hispanic. They are disproportionately poor and young. These are all groups that face high rates of crime victimization, and you'd expect that, even if trans identity itself doesn't affect victimization, they'd be more likely to be victims of crime. Beyond that, my bet is that trans people spend time with other trans people; trans people commit more crimes; and so even accounting for race and income, you'd still see elevated rates of victimization.

None of this means buying into the HRC's framing that there's a systemic trans genocide going on, except insofar as our public policy choices let criminals run rampant in those communities.

That doesn't pass the smell test.

Then you must accept either a much higher number of trans homicide victims (surely HRC has squeezed all the blood from that stone) or much lower number of trans people in the country. Thing is, I went through the trouble of scrolling a little further down Google, and HRC itself estimates 1.6M trans people 13+ in the US. So we're looking at a homicide rate of 1.2 homicides per 100k (apologies, I fucked up the math in the original post, corrected) if we simply take the HRC's numbers at face value. About 1.6M is the lowest estimate I could find on the front page.

To match the genpop homicide victimization rate, you'd need there to be only about 260k trans people in the US. And this isn't even counting the "gender expansive".

HRC is being pulled in two different directions: one, to maximize an estimate of the number of reported trans people; two, to maximize the number of trans murders. The former is a much easier task than the latter, because the same amount of work can get you any estimated number you want. The latter is much harder, because (AFAIK) most places don't report the gender identity of victims; so instead, they have some intern trawl through news reports and flag the ones that explicitly list the gender identity of the victim.

So, although I think the HRC estimates of the number of trans people countrywide are significantly inflated, the bigger factor is that the HRC is not capturing most of the number of trans victims.

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Crime does disproportionately impact minorities

That is, non-Asian minorities commit a disproportionate amount of crime, which affects the people they know and/or the people around them, who tend to be but not always are non-Asian minorities.

That's a true clarification, but I doubt many people here are unaware of the demographics of criminals.

In my experience, trans people tend to lead rather unusual lives, in many ways. That makes it hard to draw any clear chain of causality.

In particular, there's a type of "theater kid trans," who has an extremely extroverted personality and is constantly going out of their way to seek attention They can make a lot of friends that way, but also annoy people. I can see how that sort of person could end up getting murdered by someone they annoyed, and it's not directlly because they're trans, but it's not totally unrelated either. The fact that so many of your examples are black adds a whole other element to this of course.

I am willing to believe this, but trans types seem to have stereotypes about themselves- theres clearly a subculture there. Is there anyone who feels like writing up what the ‘trans normie’ is like?

Based on a very trans-heavy niche of science fiction I like (i.e. almost all protagonists are trans people written by trans):

  • Gender non-comforming
  • Slim, a bit soft.
  • Knew from a young age they were different
  • Competent in their niche but oppressed more broadly - low down in the overall hierarchy, looked down on, not desired or treated with respect
  • Has a few friends but not many. Occasionally adopted by an extrovert
  • Likes girly things: long hair, loose flowy clothes / dresses but not usually girly hobbies except maybe art
  • ADHD / autistic, prone to stimming in a 'cute' way
  • Life is usually a bit of a mess: disorganised, unhealthy. "Remember to eat and to take your meds," is a mantra that is seen as very important advice.
  • Soft-hearted to everyone except bigots, charitable (but too poor to follow through, alas!) "You are valued, you are loved," is also a common mantra.

Ok, but this is obviously idealization of trans people by themselves, right? What's their view of themselves as nonfiction? What are the shibboleths of the subculture?

I wouldn’t know, but it’s a very idealised subculture. I don’t think they’re secretly hiding a bunch of semi-negative stereotypes about themselves, you’d get cancelled for being non-supportive to your trans sisters.

THIS IS WHY AGE VERIFICATION ON SEX/PORN SITES YOU MAROONS YOU MAY NOT LIKE IT BUT THIS IS THE HELL WHY.

Age verification on sex/porn sites doesn't do anything, that stuff is hilariously trivial to circumvent. Like you might as well try to ban drug by requiring people to say "I promise not to do drugs in here" every time they enter any building.

It's a much worse point than that -- what do porn site age limits have to do with Grindr? Porn isn't generally a social activity that leads one to go out and meet new, potentially dangerous people. Hookup sites are, obviously, but why group them together? It's like commenting

THIS IS WHY AGE VERIFICATION ON GUN PURCHASES/VIOLENT VIDEO GAMES YOU MAROONS YOU MAY NOT LIKE IT BUT THIS IS THE HELL WHY.

when discussing a shooting.

I know, kids have been putting up fake "sure I totally am 18" on the age questions forever. But a 14 year old able to go on Grindr and hook up with a 29 year old (allegedly) who then murders them and dismembers the body after sex is just that step too far. It may all be in vain, and the kiddies will continue to jump merrily over the stile, but I still want the stile to be there.

according to a quick check Grindr does indeed have age verification, they ask you for your birthday when you join and check if it pegs you as at least the legal age of your region.

pegs you

Man I tell ya – if I wanted to get pegged, I sure as hell wouldn't be on Grindr.

More like Grindher.

Any examples of the ‘trans panic’ defense being used successfully?

The Isimemen Etute case is the closest one that I'm aware of.

Not in the one I found, the guy still got convicted. And there was another case where it was tried as a defence, same result. Gay panic/trans panic seems to be no longer deemed acceptable.

Was it ever? Even Wikipedia only lists cases where the defense resulted in a reduced sentence, not a dismissal of charges.

Since the day after the last Transgender Day of Remembrance on November 20, 2023, at least 36 transgender and gender-expansive people have been killed in the U.S.

Let's do some back of the envelope math. Let's say that constitutes 18 trans and gender expensive killings per year.

There are apparently 3M trans people age 13 and older in the USA. 1% of the population seems high to me, but this is the top Google result so I presume it's an estimate that pro-trans people would find credible.

Let's ignore the gender expansive category for now.

18 / 3M = 0.14 0.6 homicides per 100k [math error fixed]

CDC reports 6.8 homicides per 100k Americans in the general population.

What are we even talking about?

Paradoxically, inflating the number of trans people may be useful for certain public policy goals, but it simultaneously dilutes the apparent epidemic of violence against them.

What are we even talking about?

Specifically, anti-regime violence.

The demand for murder of [not men] vastly exceeds its supply- this is why it has to be overestimated and/or overstated. Compare "femicide" for the more general case.

Compare "femicide" for the more general case.

The most incredible example of this I've encountered is "The Part About the Crimes" in 2666, which details the murders of many Mexican women. It works to establish that this is an especially heinous set of killings that target women. Of course, it turns out that the murder rate in Juarez is astronomical, but it's not "androcide" when hordes of men are killed, that's just drug-related violence.

In fairness, killings of women are way less likely to be a mutual combat where the victim could have as easily been the murderer had events gone differently.

I noticed something peculiar this evening. In the coming weeks there's meant to be a protest against what's euphemistically called "gender-based violence", and there have been posters dotted around the city advertising the protest in question. Curiously, the posters are bilingual, half of them solely in English and the other half solely in Spanish (even though I'd hazard a guess there are more Portuguese speakers in Dublin than Spanish). The English-language posters refer to a protest against "gender-based violence", whereas the Spanish-language posters don't beat around the bush and refer to a protest against "violence against women".

I guess Spanish-speaking feminists haven't totally ceded all territory to the Ts.

More specifically domestic violence is a known problem in Hispanic cultures(which I was unaware of being a significant enough presence in Ireland to need a specific address towards). If you're wondering why close to half of US Latinas marry white men, this is the reason(well, one of the bigger ones).

If you're wondering why close to half of US Latinas marry white men

It looks like the outmarrying rate of latinas is about 28% in total, so well less than half marry white men.

More specifically domestic violence is a known problem in Hispanic cultures… this is the reason [US latinas marry white men]

So they say. It also Just So Happens that white men are taller and richer.

I mean, better looking, more money for fewer hours(and motte posters underestimate the latter part), better behaved, cuter children(the median Hispanic/white pairing produces white-looking children)... all kinda part of the complex. The stereotype that Hispanic men are alcoholics who think it's OK to beat and cheat on their wives because they earn a slightly higher percentage of household income by holding three jobs instead of two is also the opinion of many in the Hispanic community.

cuter children(the median Hispanic/white pairing produces white-looking children)

For some Latinas, priority #1 in life is children with light eyes.

One of the most fun culture war games to play is always that most men:women statistics about bad things have similar counterparts with black people:white people, and with those each tribe's inclinations to downplay or exaggerate are flipped.

or were shot by a random shooter who was in a quarrel with a completely different person

I mean that's been the modus operandi for these sorts of things since at least as far back as Harvey Milk (killed over what was essentially an employment dispute).

Or Matthew Shepherd, who was killed in a drug deal gone wrong.

Ziz echoed a lot of these talking points during his arraignment yesterday.

It probably didn't help his case that when asked to state his date of birth for the record, he replied that he had been born many times.

Sometimes when people are yelling hard about how oppressed they are, it's very tempting to wish they were, in fact, getting as oppressed as they claim to be.

No, I'm not wishing genocide on the Zizians. But given that they seem to have no problems murderating people to get what they want, a little murderation would be "turn about is fair play". Not going to happen, because we are civilised unlike them, which is all to the good.

But pointing out that "look, if we really were genociding self-proclaimed trans persons, you guys would be in the Top Five of the Top Ten of the list and since you are getting the benefit of a trial, not to mention able to shriek in performative outrage about starving to death because you're not getting vegan meals to your liking in jail, that genociding is clearly not happening" can be a useful corrective.

Wait how do vegans justify murdering people, isn't veganism all about non-consensual killing for any reason being bad, humans or animals?

These people are nuts but I think it goes something like "animals innocent and good, humans wicked and blameworthy". Sort of a Seven Kill Stele vibe.

The Seven Kill Stele really is some kind of metalhead poetry.

As the Dreaded Jim points out, the impulse behind the seven kill stele and environmentalism is the same; you simply have to replace "earth" for "heaven":

Earth brings forth innumerable things to nurture man.
Man has nothing good with which to recompense Earth.
Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill. Kill.
10:10 no pressure.

Unfortunately, according to the 1948 UN Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide, "causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group" or "imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group" with "intent to destroy, in whole or in part" the group also counts as genocide.

Maybe at this point we need a new word for "they're literally, I mean literally and it's not exaggeration, killing people."

TBF, "genocide" - etymologically "the killing of genes" - is indeed accomplished by mass sterilisation, although not by mental trauma.

"Massacre" and "extermination" seem like words you might want to use.

New updates in the Comey and James cases. Both indictments dismissed because Lindsey Halligan was not lawfully appointed as United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia and so all her actions as such are void and without effect. Comey and James opinions. Though the two are substantially identical, having both been authored by the same judge. These dismissals are without prejudice meaning the government can try and secure further indictments. Although, in Comey's case this faces some additional hurdles since the statute of limitations for his offense expired several days after the first indictment against him was secured.

Note that a similar dispute is playing out in New Jersey with respect to the appointment of Alina Habba as United States Attorney for the District of New Jersey and in Nevada with respect to Sigal Chattah's appointment as United States Attorney for the District of Nevada. These cases are a little more complicated than Halligan's due to implications of the Federal Vacancies Reform Act but they arose due to circumstances like what Halligan is facing now.

At the heart of these disputes is 28 USC 546 which provides:

(a) Except as provided in subsection (b), the Attorney General may appoint a United States attorney for the district in which the office of United States attorney is vacant.
(b) The Attorney General shall not appoint as United States attorney a person to whose appointment by the President to that office the Senate refused to give advice and consent.
(c) A person appointed as United States attorney under this section may serve until the earlier of—

(1) the qualification of a United States attorney for such district appointed by the President under section 541 of this title; or
(2) the expiration of 120 days after appointment by the Attorney General under this section.

(d) If an appointment expires under subsection (c)(2), the district court for such district may appoint a United States attorney to serve until the vacancy is filled. The order of appointment by the court shall be filed with the clerk of the court.

The dispute is principally about whether the Attorney General is permitted to make successive 120-day appointments or whether the Attorney General gets a single 120-day appointment and then when that expires the District Court makes the appointment as to who shall be United States Attorney. In Halligan's case Erik Siebert had already been appointed for 120 days earlier this year and was appointed by the district court upon expiration of that appointment. He then resigned under pressure to prosecute James and Comey, whereupon Bondi purported to appoint Halligan under 28 USC 546. Naturally, the court finds that Attorney General Bondi has had her 120 day appointment and so authority to appoint a new USA for EDVA lies with the district court.

Has this objection been used before? Conversely, have previous administrations gotten away with repeated interim positions?

I seem to recall Trump I having a lot of trouble filling similar positions. Trump II has done a much better job on that front, so I’m a little surprised that they left the goal open. With control of the Senate, Republicans had to have the option, right?

I’m tentatively okay with this outcome. If your handpicked man resigns rather than take a case, it’s a sign that the case is weak.

Has this objection been used before? Conversely, have previous administrations gotten away with repeated interim positions?

The opinion talks a little about the history. Pre-1986 there was no mechanism for the Attorney General to appoint USAs at all. Between 1986 and 2006 it seems there were a couple times the Attorney General re-appointed someone, but no one challenged it. In 2006 Congress abolished (c)(2) and (d) altogether. Then in 2007 it brought them back.

I seem to recall Trump I having a lot of trouble filling similar positions. Trump II has done a much better job on that front, so I’m a little surprised that they left the goal open. With control of the Senate, Republicans had to have the option, right?

For Halligan, specifically, I think there were timing issues. Siebert resigned on 9/19 and the statute of limitations for Comey's charges would be up on 9/30. So that's ~7 business days to get Halligan confirmed in the Senate and secure an indictment. Halligan was ultimately appointed the 22nd and the indictment was docketed on the 25th.

For the others, part of the problem is that the way they've made them "Acting" officials under the FVRA means they can't go ask the Senate for confirmation. The FVRA generally prohibits the nominee for a position from also serving as an "Acting" official in the role they are nominee for, subject to some exemptions that don't apply here.

See my above comments, but those concerns aren't really valid when you consider:

  1. There's no way Halligan was getting Senate confirmation and

  2. This wouldn't have been an issue at all if there had been literally one other person in the office willing to sign the indictment.

Then in 2007 it brought them back.

The key background to this is that as soon as the 2006 law passed GW Bush fired a bunch of his own Senate-confirmed US Attorneys for no obvious reason and replaced them with long-term interims. Democrats tried to run with this as a massive abuse-of-power Bushitler scandal and Republican senators saw it as an attack on their patronage. (The mos maiorum was that home-state senators from the President's party had a major role in picking US Attorneys). So if you are trying to tea-leaf-read Congress's intent (which you should only be doing if the actual statutory text is ambiguous, but on a superficial reading it appears to be) there was a bipartisan consensus against long-term interim US Attorneys.

I don't know if the repeated interim appointment thing has ever been done, but that's not really the whole story, because it likely wouldn't have mattered in the past. The problem is that she was the only one in the office to sign the indictment. Typically, a line prosecutor would be in charge of the case and sign the indictment, but these indictments were so incompetently handled and obviously politically motivated that nobody else in the office was willing to sign them. Hell, her predecessor got fired for refusing to sign. So the only person who signed the indictment had as much authority to do so as you or I do, so they aren't valid.

A similar disqualification happened in the central district for California, bringing the total to 4.

Team R has a majority in the senate. They should be running every single US Attorney through confirmation instead of stepping on rakes with this fighting over acting/interim US Attorneys. I understand the admin's "just do things" approach, but getting hung up on procedural stuff like this is amateur hour.

Easier said than done. I can't speak for the other three, but Lindsey Halligan would not make it through Senate confirmation. Her Wikipedia bio says:

After graduating from law school, Halligan worked for Cole, Scott & Kissane, an insurance law firm specializing in residential and commercial properties. She became a partner in 2018. At Cole, Scott & Kissane, Halligan represented insurance companies against lawsuits filed by homeowners and corporate plaintiffs.

This is a bit misleading for someone not familiar with the legal industry. Cole, Scott, & Kissane is what's known as a "defense mill". She did not represent insurance companies directly in coverage cases or bad faith cases, etc., she represented them as carriers covering other defendants. So if you get into an accident that's your fault and the person you hit isn't happy with what the insurance company is offering they sue you, your insurance company pays for your representation and pays the settlement. While they're the ones paying for everything and (mostly) calling the shots, they aren't the named defendant; you are. These places are known for low pay and high billing requirements, and that she made partner after five years isn't surprising because most attorneys will jump ship as soon as they get a better offer. And being partner doesn't mean that you can bring in business like it does at most firms, just that you get to bill at partner rates which are ten bucks an hour more than associate rates. This is mostly just to compensate for a lower billable requirement due to increased administrative work.

After nearly a decade of doing that, during which time she never once took a case to trial, she met Trump and he hired her as one of his personal attorneys in the classified documents case, where she basically did doc review. I don't want to denigrate what she did here (there's a kind of do review that's bottom of the barrel in the legal profession, but this isn't that), because reviewing documents and analyzing them is a core part of legal work. But it hardly qualifies one to be United States Attorney. Most of these people are career prosecutors with significant trial experience. Halligan is about as qualified to be US Attorney as I am, and I'm not qualified at all. There are people associated with this board who are more qualified by virtue of their having worked as criminal defense attorneys for some amount of time. The only real "qualification" she had was that she was willing to sign an indictment that literally no other attorney in the office was willing to sign.

Amateur hour is the fact that these indictments even happened. The Comey one was already on incredibly thin ice anyway after Halligan failed to read the corrected version of the indictment to the grand jury before they voted on it. Or that the James indictment, which didn't have a lot of meat on the bone to begin with, somehow failed to make the best argument. Or that literally everyone in the US Attorney's office for the Eastern District of Virginia, including Trump's named interim US Attorney, came to the conclusion that unemployment was preferable to being involved in these prosecutions. Given Trump's vindictiveness, it's a miracle he didn't order Halligan to fire the entire staff and just not have any prosecutions in the Eastern District for a while. If there's one silver lining to the corruption it's that it's balanced by a heavy dose of incompetence.

After nearly a decade of doing that, during which time she never once took a case to trial,

To be fair, that is a moderately impressive achievement (unless she was handing the trial work off to a trial specialist). That type of law firm avoids trials like the plague.

The Comey indictment paperwork screwup is one of the all-time great amateur hour screwups and the Lowering the Bar and/or Above the Law accounts of it are going to be coffee/keyboard risks. If Trump were more personally involved I would say it is an example of his scofflaw attitude and calculated contempt for procedural regularity and cast aspersions that he was trying to lose on a technicality deliberately in order to avoid losing on the merits, but in this case I think it is just that Halligan is incompetent and either she didn't bother to find a competent junior career AUSA to help her with the paperwork or the whole thing is so outrageous to the culture of career prosecutors that she couldn't.

The lawyer who was selected for hotness has a fool for a client.

The lawyer who was selected for hotness has a fool for a client.

Lawyers are like houses - if you judge by the usual criteria, you pay through the nose and get one no better than anyone else’s. So you need a find a criterion which is meaningful to you :P

What's the lawyer version of the worst house on the best street you can afford?

The worst lawyer from a Big Four Magic Circle legal company, naturally.

Doesn't affect the argument, but Big Four is for accountants (and accountant-adjacent management consultants). The equivalent for law is Biglaw, or if you want to be specific to the top tier in prestige and not just size, White-Shoe in the US and Magic Circle (or Silver Circle for the next tier down) in the UK.

Thanks! You're right, I was thinking of the Magic Circle.

A paralegal or wet-behind-the-ears junior associate writing under a Biglaw letterhead.

The exact mirroring is eerie, though. Some of Jack Smith's cases against Trump got dismissed because his appointment was considered unlawful by the District Judge (and Clarence Thomas).

It did ultimately lead to the clusterfuck that's happening now, though. If Bondi could have appointed a special counsel to investigate Trump's enemies, she likely would have done so. But because of the Smith decision, she had to push the interim appointments laws beyond where the court was willing to take them and throw the district offices into disarray as a consequence. There is effectively no one in charge of four offices at this point, though I can imagine that the career supervisors there will keep things running in the meantime, at least as far as routine matters are concerned.

But because of the Smith decision, she had to push the interim appointments laws beyond where the court was willing to take them and throw the district offices into disarray as a consequence.

Could you please explain this?

Judge Cannon ruled that Jack Smith had no statutory power to bring the classified documents case. Thus, Bondi couldn’t just spawn a Special Counsel to manage the lawsuits Trump wanted. She had to slot them into an existing office.

In this case, Siebert was the lawfully appointed U.S. Attorney for Virginia. But he wouldn’t sign the indictment. Bondi fired and replaced him with Halligan, who did. Since that skipped the confirmation process, though, it ran into the same problem which got Smith.

Thanks!

I think the OP does a pretty good job of explaining Trump's interpretation of the law and why the court didn't buy it. As for the second part, there are four US Attorney's offices operating without a US Attorney for the time being. While the district courts can appoint a US Attorney, I don't know how long this will take, and I don't know what's going to happen if they appoint someone the administration doesn't approve of. Right now it's currently a matter of dispute who is, in fact, the US Attorney, if anyone even holds the position at all, and Federal prosecutions there have accordingly ground to a halt.

There is effectively no one in charge of four offices at this point

Aren't courts supposed to appoint US attorneys if the AG's choices can't secure Senate confirmation?

In theory, yes. In theory, there's also someone already in the office who would automatically become Acting US Attorney in the event of a vacancy without an appointment. In practice, both of these are the same person—a career prosecutor who anticipates outlasting the current administration and would prefer to prosecute boring criminal cases rather than participate in Trump's revenge tour. So what happens is the Administration appeals the court ruling and fires whoever the court appoints, or tries to use some backdoor shenanigans to appoint their preferred candidate to a position where she'd automatically take over as US Attorney upon her own disqualification, creating confusing arguments where one holds multiple titles at once. At least this is how it's playing out in New Jersey. I'd offer a more detailed explanation but I'm not entirely sure I understand Pam Bondi's reasoning so I'll hold off.

The upshot here, though, is that the Trump Administration is going to continue to insist that Halligan is the US Attorney for the EDV, despite a court ruling saying she isn't. Imagine if you got an email from your company saying that your boss was no longer employed there, but he continued to show up and was assigning your team work that would cost the company a lot of money. When you email top leadership they tell you he doesn't work there anymore, but when you email his immediate supervisor you're told that he does and just continue the way things have always been. How much work do you think gets done in that situation? How long can the company continue to operate amid the uncertainty? How efficient will any work be? Now assume that this guy is also entirely unqualified for the job and was hired for the position because he was his boss's college roommate and he occasionally makes bizarre decisions that no one in the company can justify. You have absolutely no idea what's going on. What do you think morale is like? This is basically what's going on in New Jersey right now, where the entire office isn't doing anything because nobody knows who has the authority to do anything.

Imagine if you got an email from your company saying that your boss was no longer employed there

Getting an email from some judge saying that your boss is no longer employed at your company would be quite unusual though; "your company" in this case is the executive branch (c'est Trump!), no?

Within Rov's analogy, "your company" is the US gov as a whole (with Trump being the "immediate supervisor").

A better analogy then would be that the SVP of your division says your boss is still employed, but a SVP of a different division which contains HR says he's not

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Companies that are structured as distinct and separate branches with no overall leader would be... quite unusual. I can't think of any, and if I could I would think it would be extremely unusual for a minor minion of one of the branches to be able to overrule the leader of a different "coequal" one. (and @pusher_robot, I'm pretty sure the DoJ already has their own HR?)

And it was a really shitty analogy. Besides there not really being a company structured like the federal government, in this case there was a department lead that said “you are still employed” and a junior person in a different department said “nope you are fired.”

Now maybe Rov made an innocent mistake but I think he is trying to stack the deck because of his political leaning.

There is a real question about separation of powers where the court appoints an executive officer.

There's a real question about separation of powers if a President tries to appoint principal officers without the consent of the Senate.

Or if there's no one to actually run the US Attorney's office.

There's no way around the dysfunction. Congress tried to craft a compromise (muddle) solution.

https://reason.com/volokh/2025/07/26/appointment-of-interim-u-s-attorneys/

I don't buy that argument. The statutory text makes clear that after the 120 day term expires (c2), then (d) the district court appoints until the vacancy is filled. What would the point of an expiration be if the AG just gets to repeatedly re-fill it? The entire (c)(2) provision would be surplussage.

That said, maybe the Supreme Court looks at 28USC§546 and decides the way Prof Calabresi argues here. I just don't see it.

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That is a shockingly bad post by Calabresi. The Constitution explicitly allows Congress to delegate the appointment of inferior officers to the Courts. Calabresi's response is that they can't have meant it because the Constitution sets up a unitary executive, and the clause allowing Congress to delegate appointment of inferior officers to the Courts can only apply to Court clerks and suchlike. [I am not a historian and don't know the reason for the clause, but my guess is that the framers expected the local district judge to be the highest federal official in the sticks, and therefore best-placed to make local interim appointments before a message could get to Washington]

But the only reason why you might think the Constitution sets up a unitary executive is the text of the Constitution and, critically, the Appointments Clause. You can't just say "if I ignore this sub-clause, the vibes of the rest of the text imply X. Because X, this sub-clause should be ignored."

I'm not sure appeals to original intent help here - the framers would have been horrified at the idea of a corps of full-time professional civilian Federal prosecutors, because they didn't want the Federal government to be creating enough civilian criminal law to support one. You should look at the words they wrote, not the vibes here. And the words are clear.

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"why are the people who perpetually go out of their way to step on rakes, stepping on all these rakes??? I voted for President 'i love stepping on rakes to own the libs' so he could get shit done, not step on rakes!"

Elect clowns, expect a circus

Or in this case, elect a reality TV star, expect amusing antics

This is like a form of gaslighting, where the actions of Trump’s enemies are reconfigured as Trump’s fault. No, these things don’t happen haphazardly, people worked hard to make them happen.

Literally every administration has to contend with the opposing party making it difficult to enact their agenda. Trump has been gifted with a majority of all three branches greater than most administrations ever get. And Republicans have opted for a line where, rather than the legislative branch approving things, the executive simply creates its own mandates while the legislative passively allows him to.

What you are describing is the inadequacy of Republicans in Congress, which is the exact failure of leadership that created the opportunity for Trump’s election in the first place.

Yes, but that's still Trump's problem. Them not doing their job does not grant Trump authority to do it for them. Which is why a big part of every President's job is to get enough of Congress aligned with him, or vice versa. Trump is trying to skip that step and do everything through the executive, which results in a circus in the courts.

How is failing to confirm someone such that they have the legal authority to prosecute people when you control ALL THREE branches of government not your fault?

How is everyone in the DA's office deciding they would rather literally get fired than sign off on it the fault of "Trump's enemies"? Do you think the entire DA office is staffed with Democrat sleeper agents?

From other comments in this thread:

In this case, Siebert was the lawfully appointed U.S. Attorney for Virginia. But he wouldn’t sign the indictment. Bondi fired and replaced him with Halligan, who did. Since that skipped the confirmation process, though, it ran into the same problem which got Smith.

Typically, a line prosecutor would be in charge of the case and sign the indictment, but these indictments were so incompetently handled and obviously politically motivated that nobody else in the office was willing to sign them. Hell, her predecessor got fired for refusing to sign. So the only person who signed the indictment had as much authority to do so as you or I do, so they aren't valid.

"Wahhh it's the Dems fault"

This is all political. Competence has nothing to do with it. There is no threshold at which procedural pretexts stop being invented. It’s as if you said, “Muhammad Ali should be fighting, not getting punched. Amateur hour!”

This is all political. Competence has nothing to do with it. There is no threshold at which procedural pretexts stop being invented.

Getting US Attorneys confirmed by the Senate is presidentin' 101. This isn't some new, dazzling pretext--as Nybbler points out, this problem even hit the Jack Smith prosecutions against Trump.

At least one such GOP Senator has said he will not vote to bypass the blue-slip process that has been custom for a century or so.

Even the 60-vote Obama Senate respected it, rather than allowing Obama to put a Keith Ellison type as USA in Texas.

I'm amused that progressive copium that "nobody competent will work with these assholes" is turning out not to be cope.

It does help when you follow up with, “and if they do, we’ll make them suffer”.

One of the more politically enlightening experiences I had was being on a committee with a socialist who argued strenuously against the secret ballot because “people need to know there are consequences for how they vote”.

It does help when you follow up with, “and if they do, we’ll make them suffer”.

This is a "thing," but is it does it outweigh encouragement of people to keep their jobs, rather than create openings to be replaced?

One of the more politically enlightening experiences I had was being on a committee with a socialist who argued strenuously against the secret ballot because “people need to know there are consequences for how they vote”.

Story? What kind of committee? What kind of socialist? What consequence did they want?

The story is a bit doxxy. It was local politics, he was a Labour activist and leader of the militant wing of the committee who were in the middle of a hostile takeover. He did not have ‘I am a socialist’ tattooed on his forehead but he did have a desk full of books on Marx and biographies of 20th century socialists - I knew him and believe me he was socialist.

The consequence he wanted in this particular case was extensive public shaming. It worked too - lots of people were unhappy with the new direction but absolutely refused to say so in public.

Classic banana republic tier shit. Why even pretend to have a vote if you're going to use social pressure tactics. Disgusting.

Funny. I’d have thought you’d be all about accountability for government.

When you’re electing representatives, it’s nice to know their actual voting record. That’s why Congress does roll-call voting.

Corvos probably knows more than me, but there is an extensive history of arguments about whether internal elections in left groups, and particularly in militant unions, should be by secret ballot. Some of it is good-faith arguments the scope of the principle that people voting in a representative capacity don't get a secret ballot because they are accountable to the people they are representing. Some of it is the hard left favoring public votes as a loyalty oath with democratic-sounding characteristics (cf elections in people's democracies).

The announcement that Labour MPs representing London constituencies would not get a secret ballot in the 2000 Mayoral selection was the point at which it became obvious to people paying attention that the selection was rigged and that Ken Livingstone would run as, and probably win as, an independent.

I think that there is a vast gulf between people voting as representatives and people voting on the base.

Secret elections are obviously better at establishing common knowledge of what the base actually wants.

But for a representative, it is more important that they be accountable to their electorate. If 3/4th of the senate vote for something deeply unpopular, you do not want every senator to be able to tell his voters "no, I totally voted against this. It was all the other lying senators to vote for it."

For important personnel decisions (where there may be a lot of pressure to vote a particular way), the fix would be not to have representatives vote but just let the base vote. In secret, obviously.

Very much agreed - for instance all legislators vote publicly on legislation and when electing officers such as the Speaker. But there are a lot of corner cases when it comes to internal party elections. One particularly important one is MPs electing their party leaders - which in Parliamentary democracies will usually be a de facto election of a Prime Minister or selection of a candidate Prime Minister. Almost all parties in almost all functioning Parliamentary democracies have decided to give MPs a secret ballot in the internal vote. (UK parties have a range of processes for combining the views of MPs and grassroots members when electing their leaders). Obviously MPs are expected to vote non-secretly for their party's preferred candidate for PM in the external vote.

This is why the London Labour thing was controversial - Blair made the MP ballot public even though analogous internal elections usually give MPs a secret ballot.

Something similar is supposed to happen in Congressional leadership elections in the US. The House majority caucus elects the Speaker-designate by secret ballot, and then all caucus members should vote for the chosen candidate in the recorded House vote for Speaker

Were they an entryist or just an asshole?

Bit of both? We got in three or four entryists at the same time and they staged a coup by getting quorum and instituting DEI minority seats making up a majority of the voting positions.

Bummer! Thanks for sharing.

It does help when you follow up with, “and if they do, we’ll make them suffer”.

While I am sure that the woke left punishes defectors who cooperate with Trump, it is team MAGA which has perfected using administrative decisions to go after the people who were in the past on the wrong side. I vaguely recall law firms (who by design are mercenary) who had represented people who were litigating against Trump finding themselves without security clearance at the start of the year (or at least having to do an extraordinary amount of ass-kissing to keep them).

Political retaliation is bad no matter who does it. But the way I recall it, when Musk bought Twitter, the reaction of the Biden admin was not to try their very best to burn Tesla and SpaceX to the ground. By contrast, if there was a billionaire who was as firmly committed to opposing Trump as Musk was opposed to the Democrats, I would totally expect Trump to do his best to destroy any companies where that billionaire holds significant stock.

  • -12

But the way I recall it, when Musk bought Twitter, the reaction of the Biden admin was not to try their very best to burn Tesla and SpaceX to the ground.

For that very specific example, the Biden FCC did in fact cut a major SpaceX (StarLink) contract/grant program on clearly spurious grounds (see FCC v. Starlink here for further details), the Biden EEOC brought questionable claims of anti-immigrant discrimination against SpaceX directly. And those are just the ones with Biden admin people directly signing the paper.

Political retaliation is bad no matter who does it.

I definitely agree in the case of political retaliation without legitimate provocation. With respect to political retaliation which does have legitimate provocation, I would say it's bad in the same sense that war is bad. Yes, it's expensive and destructive but sometimes it's the best choice.

There's been a problem in the last few years, with abusive lawfare-style tactics on the part of certain prosecuting authorities. How does one handle such attacks? By gently entreating the attackers to stop behaving unfairly?

it is team MAGA which has perfected using administrative decisions to go after the people who were in the past on the wrong side.

The question I have about this is whether this strategy was used during the first Trump administration.

By contrast, if there was a billionaire who was as firmly committed to opposing Trump as Musk was opposed to the Democrats, I would totally expect Trump to do his best to destroy any companies where that billionaire holds significant stock.

Has Trump abused the power of the federal government to "do his best to destroy" CNN?

This just seems crazy. Obama retaliated against law firms. Law firms were attacked for filing 2020 election cases. Musk was attacked (eg FCC cancelled grants re Starlink even though Starlink by far was better than other options not cancelled or the DOJ tried to claim worker discrimination for not hiring foreigners even though they were obliged not to do so) by Biden shortly after buying Twitter.

So I think your facts are just wrong.

Technically the FCC rejection of Starlink's rural broadband subsidy application was after Musk made the offer to buy Twitter, but before the transaction took place.

And the Biden grudge against Musk was at least a year older still. Biden holding his "Electric Vehicle Summit" but then not inviting the manufacturer of a supermajority of US EVs because they weren't unionized was ... well, the phrase "crossing the Rubicon" does get overused, but that NY Post article helpfully includes the photos of Biden literally test-driving an electric Rubicon, so who am I to argue with dramatic irony?

It does help when you follow up with, “and if they do, we’ll make them suffer”.

And it's indicative of something that while law firms bent the knee and universities got on their knees earlier in the year when the accusations were around anti-semitism, we're still seeing issues here.

This is important data about the Vibe Shift. Is the belief that MAGA or MAGA-adjacent leaders will have enough power to punish in the future weaker than expected? Is there an expectation that Dems will be back in office and will punish MAGA prosecutors?

Something I'm curious about is the dynamic within state level governments relative to federal for employees. Historically, AUSA is way better than local ADA or state AG's office. But right now, I'm aware of a lot of good federal lawyers looking for state level work because the federal government is unstable.

The very randomness of the Trump approach is the most effective way to rebalance the government away from the feds and towards the states.

This is silly. Trump has many competent operatives. They are here outnumbered by DC saboteurs.

Paranoiaposting on this forum is funny, but I do wish more here held at least some pretense that they weren't.

He does. Lindsay Halligan is not among them.

He did (attempt to) appoint an insurance lawyer to be an AUSA. Good grief.

You're giving her too much credit. If you want to see what an insurance case actually looks like read this. This was not the kind of thing Halligan was doing. She was in "insurance defense", which is basic civil defense. It's just called that because 99% of civil tort cases are covered by insurance; the insureds don't really care much about the suit because the settlement is covered, and the insurance companies are the ones who hire the attorneys and call most of the shots. So if you're injured in an auto accident and decide to sue, the guy who hits you's insurance company will be hiring the attorney and covering the settlement. Ditto if you slip in the parking lot of the grocery store and break your arm.

Government by social media strikes again.

The deliverable that Lindsey Halligan was tasked with producing was not, "putting Comey in jail". It was, "generate headlins about Comey going to jail". In that light, she did about as well as she could given the circumstances. You see the same thing with Hegseth posting about court-martialling Mark Kelly.

Conservatives really need to learn that the corrupt swamp cannot be taken out with the corrupt swamp's own tools. Buy guns people. You aren't fixing things by voting and things will only get worse.

edit: since I forgot how feminized this place is and don't want to get accused of fed posting. Rawls was a moron, institutions are downstream of culture. Our culture is shot, institutions will continue to degrade. The people that will inherit what is left will be people that have high trust and cohesive cultures + birth rates + guns (security). If you really want to be double safe find one that already has parallel institutions, like education (religious communities) money (crypto?) etc.

  • -17

Hey @Amadan (and the other mods, if necessary), can we actually get a ruling on the "advice to, in the event of state failure, do things that are illegal under current law" genre? I can imagine some people saying that it's incitement to crime, but others saying that in the event of state failure, the present laws will have ceased to mean anything and thus the actions wouldn't really be crime anymore in the circumstance in which they're being recommended.

(The post I'm replying to probably doesn't qualify as being in that genre, as AIUI shooting bandits attempting to loot you is pretty legal in most of the 'States. But there are certainly adjacent positions which would qualify.)

"how feminized this place is" - LOL. @remzem, Internet Tough Guy never impresses anyone. Do you think anyone actually believes you're the very model of a modern masculinity?

The "ruling" is that fedposting is against the rules because it could get Zorba in legal trouble, and actually advocating violence is against the rules because it's rude. We have all these feminized rules about being civil and shit.

Can you discuss what you'd do "hypothetically" in the event of the Happening? Depends. Advice about how to stock up on ammo and form your own militia - probably okay. Talking about how you're going to murder all the people you hate? Not okay.

I want to register that I find call to violence posts generally boring. It inevitably leads to internet tough guy, "my team/tribe/sensei/dad could beat up yours" nonsense posting, and generally just represents a total breakdown of interesting conversation.

You're not going to get far with a consistent habit of booing the outgroup and clear consensus building. I note multiple previous warnings, so I'm going to extend a 3 day ban to make this one stick.

I have to ask, will it ever be considered "rational" to talk about living up to the ideals of the American Founding and watering the tree of liberty? I currently live in a state with my Attorney General elect thinks I and my children should die because we're breeding "little fascist". His top priority is emptying the prisons into my community to see this done. At what point does it become permissible to openly discuss your natural rights to self defense against the state?

In the post you replied to, self_made_human modded remzem for consensus-building and boo-outgroup, not for advocating violence. Did you mean to reply to Amadan's post?

Irrespective of whether it's "rational", is it really a conversation we need or want here? I'm with @FiveHourMarathon below regarding how these discussions always wind up going. I don't even think that there aren't interesting discussions to be had about how a popular uprising in the US would proceed, but the burden at this point should really be with those who want to talk about it to lead with something novel rather than another instance of "my chad tribesmen will beat the shit out of your effeminate wimps, if only the sheeple finally wake up and develop classtribal counsciousness".

There is no winning for anyone if it comes to that. Just violence until both sides are exhausted, or one is annihilated. I can't even speak with confidence which side it would be. But funnily enough, I always remember a line out of a trashy fantasy novel I read once.

"We don't fight to win. We fight so that we don't lose."

The prevailing wisdom here cannot be "Listen, it's just 'rude' not to walk into the ovens. It would get us into trouble with the feds if we talked too openly about non-compliance with their pogroms". Are we really so committed to ensuring everyone cannot even imagine a world where they aren't forfeiting their lives for nothing?

Why does there need to be "prevailing wisdom" here on this topic at all? You treat it as a given that we can't just ignore the topic, as something that can't be discussed while maintaining the spirit and purpose of the forum, and perhaps even mean to suggest that enforcing non-discussion is tantamount to complicity with your enemies. The exact same approach has been tried on the other side, with popular glosses like "the personal is political", "silence is violence" and what-not; and look where the discussion norms built around those memes got them.

Why does there need to be "prevailing wisdom" here on this topic at all?

I'm not saying what the prevailing wisdom should be, I'm saying what it should not be.

You treat it as a given that we can't just ignore the topic, as something that can't be discussed while maintaining the spirit and purpose of the forum, and perhaps even mean to suggest that enforcing non-discussion is tantamount to complicity with your enemies. The exact same approach has been tried on the other side, with popular glosses like "the personal is political", "silence is violence" and what-not; and look where the discussion norms built around those memes got them.

This is wrong and bad faith and borders on intellectual malpractice. "Silence is violence" as deployed by the left is about compelled speech. I'm asking for free speech, non censorship. Nobody has to have an opinion about their own genocide. But I'm asking for the freedom to discuss it, as well as extra-Democratic ways to survive.

And this is exactly what people mean when they say this place, and it's rules, are too "feminized". The only possibility that can be imagined is consensus. If you disagree, you are trying to change the consensus to a different consensus. Because a consensus must exist. There must be a norm that everyone conforms to. There cannot simply be endless discussion.

"Silence is violence" is absolutely deployed in defense of "free speech" too - it's a mainstay in protests where students disrupt unrelated university functions to inject progressive talking points of the day, and in those cases is taken to mean that being forced to stay silent (on the talking points, at university) is tantamount to being forced to be complicit in violence. Essentially, you and they are conflating the "I have the right to be heard" notion of free speech and the "I have the right to speak wherever and whenever I want" notion; while neither can be implemented perfectly, we can get a lot closer to something like a stable equilibrium with the former.

Also, from where do you get the idea that there is a consensus here, and anyone is trying to force some other consensus? I am under the impression that, weighted by posting frequency or upvotes, this place leans mildly towards the at least boogaloo-sympathetic. I do not think that a right-wing uprising in the US would win, and I am generally pro-chaos so I would want to see it happen! Yet, I do not want it to be discussed here, just like I don't want my approximation algorithms lecture to be disrupted by people yelling about Palestine (even though I am inclined to agree with them).

So, full disclosure, I found @remzem's post obnoxious and performative, but I would not have modded him for it, even though it did get several reports. @self_made_human decided otherwise, and while I would have decided differently, I don't think he's necessarily wrong. (Yes, this does in fact mean how you do or do not get modded sometimes depends on which mod decides to take action.)

I will attempt to answer your questions directly.

Are you allowed to discuss resisting the state? Yes, you can discuss it. People discuss that all the time here! (And that's why I personally thought @remzem's post was borderline but within bounds.)

Talking specifically about people you think should be killed is not within bounds. Talking about plans to do violence is not within bounds (and would be pretty fucking stupid if you're serious).

No, we are not saying it would be "rude" to talk about not walking into ovens (really, though? Come on.) Or that you can't talk openly about "non-compliance."

But what is it, exactly, that you want to say that you think you are not allowed to say? That you hate Jay Jones and hope someone shoots him? Well, you can say you hate him, but no, you can't openly wish death on him. (Yes, his texts would have gotten him banned on the Motte.) If you want to be more indirect about it ("I really think some of our state leadership should water the tree of liberty"), we are not stupid and we're still going to tell you to knock off the fedposting. Both because, yes, it's easy for you to whine about what you're not allowed to say when you're not the one who would get visited by the FBI, and because as several others have pointed out, most people here are not really interested in reading dick-fondling threads about what people will do to their enemies when the Boogooloo happens. If that's what you're into, there are guys on Twitter whose entire niche is jerking themselves off over such fantasies, including our own Motte alum Kulak. If you want Kulak-posting, go give him a follow.

More comments

"my chad tribesmen will beat the shit out of your effeminate wimps, if only the sheeple finally wake up and develop classtribal counsciousness"

Maybe I’m unusual, but I’m pretty doomer-pilled about the right’s prospects in a civil war.

Enh, 50/50.

I think they hold clear dominance in fieldcraft, and modern infrastructure is in fact so perilously fragile that a small group of dedicated individuals can have truly outsized effects. On the other hand, team red sucks at organizing in groups.

The biggest deterrent against civil war is that a vast majority of people on both political aisles are Comfortable(tm), or at least, comfortable enough that a civil war would have deleterious effects to their present quality of life and material well-being. They may not be happy or even content, but there's a gulf between that and everything else.

Also, there's nothing sadder than the yes-chad who got shot first getting less than half-hour's engagement on social media before everyone else shrugs and moves on. Nobody wants to be the one who starts a revolution if it doesn't start a revolution.

I don't see where "rationality" even comes into the picture here. If we were modding people for being "irrational", we would have far fewer participants left.

As it stands, your comment is a non-sequitur. To assess the rationality of armed resistance to what you perceive as a hostile state is not in my remit as a moderator. Questions of rationality don't even come into the warning/tempban here. He was building consensus, being a culture warrior, and so on and so forth. Fedposting isn't in the sidebar rules last time I checked, but we frown on it because:

  1. It goes against the culture and ethos of this forum. Doesn't get much more heated than that.

  2. Zorba prefers the FBI don't kick his door down. We're all here at his behest, and on his sufferance.

You want to discuss your to natural rights to defend yourself against a state? Buddy, that's half of all we talk about over here. But if things have gotten so bad across the pond that you feel the need to form a militia and shoot the AG, then take it to Facebook. And if everyone else feels that way, I think moderation guidelines will be a less than pressing concern during a civil war.

I don't see where "rationality" even comes into the picture here. If we were modding people for being "irrational", we would have far fewer participants left.

Aren't we a rationalist forum? I've always thought so, at least; a part of the rationalist diaspora, if a few steps removed from LessWrong/Overcoming Bias.

I wish, I really do. Unfortunately, this place is best described as rationalist-adjacent, which is the next best thing.

LW? The ur-rats.

Scott himself? Of course.

SSC/ACX and the subreddit? Mostly the case.

Us? The blood is a bit diluted.

Of course, this is my personal opinion, but IMO, a real "rationalist" forum includes more explicit discussions of the tenets of rationality itself, which we really don't do very often. We have high standards for discourse, we have people using Bayesian arithmetic when they feel like it, but we are a more general interest kinda place. And that's fine!

Not really, and IMO the old-guard movement is a shell of itself. I certainly wouldn't count any of Scott's other commentariat-zones as 'rationalist,' either.

And if everyone else feels that way, I think moderation guidelines will be a less than pressing concern during a civil war.

10/10.

Can we put this on the sidebar?

And if everyone else feels that way, I think moderation guidelines will be a less than pressing concern during a civil war.

Yeah, I'll admit that a good chunk of why I'm not protesting too loudly is because the potential circumstances where I'd be willing to infohazard-dump are basically a strict subset of the potential circumstances wherein theMotte would be imminently doomed (along with, in many cases, the entire Internet) - and hence, wherein permabanning me would be nearly meaningless.

I would imagine on The Motte you could make an effort post about what people would consider a morally acceptable line for either starting revolution or committing political assassinations in a completely abstract sense. Though that does invite people to come up with "hypothetical" scenarios that are thinly-veiled parallels to actual American events.

Because it's a non-argument: or rather, you're forgoing your opportunity to make an argument with an appeal to violence. Honestly, advocating others to fedpost on your behalf on social media is a cowardly and self-defeating act. A real chad just goes out and does things, you know?

I currently live in a state with my Attorney General elect thinks I and my children should die because we're breeding "little fascist". His top priority is emptying the prisons into my community to see this done.

Please don't share more info than is wise, but out of curiosity, why not vacate that state? There are states with moderately sane AGs (and overall saner justice systems that try to lock up criminals), minimal gun laws, and lower taxes. And I don't mean places that many people dread like North Dakota or Wyoming, although the latter is a very pretty state in places and no one is going to put their nose in your business.

People, by revealed preference, seem to like living in the northern Rockies. But even neighboring North Carolina is a very pleasant GOP run state.

Trivially, there are pretty significant costs to flight.

More seriously, there's very little guarantee it would work. I'll point, again, to KendricTonn getting a Kirk Smirk in Ohio meatspace, or to my own experiences over half-a-decade ago. Crusading AGs from Blue States have brought the long arm of the law against people who did try to escape, or (as people trying to publish CAD files from Texas have found out) even if they were never in New Jersey to begin with. WhiningCoil cares a lot more about trans stuff than I do, but Wyoming specifically isn't exactly matching with his goals there despite a legislative and regulatory environment that specifically ordered or legislated it.

And then you get the federal government decides that they're going to have a new interpretation of a law and want a nice high-profile grab, you get your skull ventilated at 6AM, the cops doing that put more effort into documenting your soon-to-be-widow's morning piss than the pre-dawn raid, and no one in office in Arkansas cares. The supposed libertarians otherwise traumatized by the presence of masks for law enforcement they don't like will suddenly find crickets, the people who would burn down buildings over government overreach will suddenly decide to roleplay owls with a 'who, who'.

Trivially, there are pretty significant costs to flight.

And I'm not downplaying them. His job, his wife's job if she has one, schooling for the kid(s), church, overall support structure if family is nearby... those are all significant considerations and make moving complex. However, if the alternative is seriously weighing armed rebellion, then perhaps relocation is a more realistic first step.

As to your other points, I don't disagree. There is no perfect escape at this point. To add to your examples, in Arizona, Daniel Shaver got killed by a cop while crawling along the ground, and there certainly wasn't any rioting when the cop was acquitted of murder. And that's Arizona, so what does that say about supposedly pro-freedom states? Even so, there are an awful lot of states I'd pick before VA or NJ.

As entertaining as watching fedposters like you fedpost is, it seems bad for the sites continued existence and vaunted neutrality to enable and encourage it.

"Viewpoint neutrality" does, in theory, include permitting the viewpoint "we should massacre my enemies" (from either side). Forbidding that viewpoint is a concession to legal reality and arguably utility, not upholding neutrality.

"fedposting is bad, actually" shouldn't be a hot take

Depends if the government is conspiring to murder you or not.

Motte:

fedposting is bad, actually

Bailey:

it seems bad for the sites [...] vaunted neutrality to enable and encourage [fedposting].

The bailey is something I feel morally obligated to oppose wherever I see it, i.e. the redefinition of terms to legitimate a preferred policy without acknowledging real tradeoffs. This is catastrophically dangerous because it leads to important principles getting hollowed out and losing their actual meaning - see "free speech doesn't include hate speech".

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.

So, defend your claim. Or retract it. Don't try to pull a fast one by retreating to a motte.

(The reason I said "arguably utility" is because it can be useful for people like me to talk people out of starting a Boogaloo, and that can't happen if the other side is deterred from speaking.)

I think whatever response you give here, you should give in sufficiently general terms that I can also give it to my lefty college buddies that think we're at the point of having to pick up guns against the Ice-Nazis.

At the very least, it's "we're not even close".

Within 24 hours of this post, two National Guard members were shot and killed in Washington DC, by a shooter that alleged targeted and ambushed them.

I'm willing to give another 24 hours from now before speculating on the motives of that shooter. The shooter has been capture and is expected to survive. I'll note, however, that nationally syndicated television did not wait to see whether the man was a gangbanger or schizophrenic before giving justifications for the shooters actions.

It's possible that Dilanian is fired in a week. Would you like to make a wager?

Because I'd wager that your lefty college buds can get all the justifications and friendly tongue-washing from broadly published news media that everyone treats with far more respect than it deserves; the wig-wong waggling here doesn't really matter.

Edit: I shouldn’t trust politicians. “conflicting reports”

No argument here about the media.

Nevertheless, on an individual level, you should endorse a logic on the threshold for armed conflict that cannot transparently justify both you and your opponents.

Surprisingly, no.

Trivially, there are levels of armed conflict that would be acceptable and even laudatory. If New Yorkers could accept self-defense or defense-of-others by innocents against illegitimate threat to life and/or limb, we'd be in a much better place. Just as trivially, there are levels of endorsement I can give that are hundreds of miles short of what is not just common but already mainstreamed to the point of being room temperature; endorsing Rittenhouse is not going to give any genuine sanction to Jay Jones.

These aren't without their risks. There are definitely progressives willing to hallucinate that the knife-waving meth addict who broke into someone's house at midnight tots wasn't gonna hurt nobody, and that the police officer considering a speeding ticket was a dire threat to life; there are people who were already drooling over the shooting the children of political opponents now and did respond to the Rittenhouse defense by doubling down. But those are concerns in the same sense that a schizophrenic legitimizing a murder because the radio waves in his teeth told him it was okay, and sometimes by the same biochemical pathways.

At a deeper level, the Litany of Tarski wins. If you're arguing game theory and utilitarianism, it's not just enough to believe that pacifism is the best behavior with the best outcomes. Most advocates aren't even willing or able to pretend.

A lot of IMO naive discussion under this post. Lawfare is a rigged game and discussing bias political outcomes as if they were normal legal procedures is silly.

Trump: “2+2=4”

Judge: “Actually, 2+2=5. Case dismissed!”

Commentariat: “How could Trump screw up this badly? Why doesn’t Trump have competent lawyers? Does Trump hire too many bimbos? Why was his 2+2=4 case so weak?”

Etc etc

So…why do you think Trump’s the one saying “4”?

Because I think Trump is right. James Comey lied before Congress and he knew Russiagate was a sham.

Because in subsequent interviews Comey has constructively admitted to submitting false testimony on multiple occasions. He frames it as working within the system, a "we knew where the evidence was we just needed a Judge's blessing to go get it" sort of situation. But what it boils down to is that he knowingly submitted false statements and/or fruit-of-the-poisonous-tree to secure warrants.

Specifically, we now know that wire-tapping of Trump associates on suspicion of Russian Collusion was secured under false pretenses, and that Comey knew this to be the case when he testified otherwise in September of 2020.

This is the first thing which makes me, if not exactly sympathetic to Trump, then at least unsympathetic to Comey.

Criminal procedure exists for a reason. There are plenty of jobs in the world where you can do just fine by sometimes taking shortcuts instead of doing everything by the book. Criminal investigations is not one of them. If you find yourself lying to a judge so that they will bless you violating someones constitutional rights, or engaging in parallel construction, then you are the villain. If you can't do your job while keeping within the law, then at least be honest, quit your job, wear a batman mask and beat up suspects in the night, don't pretend to serve the law while breaking it.

Sure, Trump going after you is roughly orthogonal to you having acted in a criminal manner, and this very much does not scale to a systemic solution, but if your allegations are true then I would consider a conviction at least a happy accident, like a bolt of lightning striking a serial killer.

Because in subsequent interviews Comey has constructively admitted to submitting false testimony on multiple occasions.

That is absolutely true. It also has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not the attorney that submitted his case to the grand jury for indictment was properly appointed.

People go absolutely bonkers on procedural rulings. It wasn't even dismissal with prejudice!

It also has absolutely nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not the attorney that submitted his case to the grand jury for indictment was properly appointed.

Or even on whether or not he is guilty on the charge he was indicted for, which is for lying to Congress about a leak. My understanding is that most of the alleged wrongdoing by Comey happened back in 2017 and the Trump administration had to scrape the bottom of the barrel for a charge where the statute of limitations had not expired. And that one was a squeaker - it looks like the administration doesn't get a do-over because the statue of limitations has already expired. I don't know the US position but in England not getting do-overs on minor procedural issues is a well-known risk of litigating close to the SoL deadline and judges are unsympathetic regardless of the political valence of the case.

On the "judges get to do what they want, actual justice gets to suck it" front and related to the thread you dislike below, a Hennepin County judge overturned a jury's verdict in one of the Somali fraud cases. The judge doesn't seem to have released any information beyond the overturn and acquittal, here's news agency commentary:

Defense attorney Joe Tamburino, who is not affiliated with the case, reviewed the decision and analyzed it for KARE 11 News. He says Judge West ruled that the state's case "relied heavily on circumstantial evidence," and that she believed the state didn't rule out other "reasonable inferences."

To my non-lawyery ear this sounds a lot like "vibes" and the jury should've known better nudge nudge wink wink.

To my non-lawyery ear this sounds a lot like "vibes" and the jury should've known better nudge nudge wink wink.

I'm quite curious how this will shake out on appeal. In my state, setting aside the jury verdict after a finding of guilt is a one-way ticket to reversal. The judge can only act as the "13th juror" in the most rare of circumstances. It can't just be that the State's case was weak or relied on circumstantial evidence or "didn't rule out other reasonable inferences," but rather the evidence was non-existent.

Minnesota uses a two-step analysis laid out in State v. Silvernail:

Under the circumstantial-evidence standard, we apply a two-step analysis. State v. Ortega, 813 N.W.2d 86, 100 (Minn.2012). The first step is to identify the circumstances proved. State v. Andersen, 784 N.W.2d 320, 329 (Minn.2010). In identifying the circumstances proved, we defer “ ‘to the jury's acceptance of the proof of these circumstances and rejection of evidence in the record that conflicted with the circumstances proved by the State.’ “ Id . (quoting State v. Stein, 776 N.W.2d 709, 718 (Minn.2010) (plurality opinion)). As with direct evidence, we “construe conflicting evidence in the light most favorable to the verdict and assume that the jury believed the State's witnesses and disbelieved the defense witnesses.” State v. Tscheu, 758 N.W.2d 849, 858 (Minn.2008). Stated differently, in determining the circumstances proved, we consider only those circumstances that are consistent with the verdict. State v. Hawes, 801 N.W.2d 659, 668–69 (Minn.2011). This is because the jury is in the best position to evaluate the credibility of the evidence even in cases based on circumstantial evidence. Id. at 670.

The second step is to “determine whether the circumstances proved are ‘consistent with guilt and inconsistent with any rational hypothesis except that of guilt.’ “ State v. Palmer, 803 N.W.2d 727, 733 (Minn.2011) (quoting Andersen, 784 N.W.2d at 330). We review the circumstantial evidence not as isolated facts, but as a whole. State v. Hurd, 819 N.W.2d 591, 599 (Minn.2012). We “ ‘examine independently the reasonableness of all inferences that might be drawn from the circumstances proved’; [including the] inferences consistent with a hypothesis other than guilt.” Andersen, 784 N.W.2d at 329 (quoting Stein, 776 N.W.2d at 716 (plurality opinion)). Under this second step, we must “determine whether the circumstances proved are ‘consistent with guilt and inconsistent with any rational hypothesis except that of guilt,’ not simply whether the inferences that point to guilt are reasonable.” Palmer, 803 N.W.2d at 733 (quoting Andersen, 784 N.W.2d at 330). We give “no deference to the fact finder's choice between reasonable inferences.” Andersen, 784 N.W.2d at 329–30 (citation omitted) (internal quotation marks omitted).

Under this second step, we must “determine whether the circumstances proved are ‘consistent with guilt and inconsistent with any rational hypothesis except that of guilt,’ not simply whether the inferences that point to guilt are reasonable.”

I suspect "rational" in that standard is doing some heavy lifting, because otherwise the second step reads "not only must the State prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, but must disprove every other theory as well (aside from aliens or Bigfoot)." That's a big hurdle depending on how strict "rational" is.

I also wonder, but don't care enough to research, how often that second step leads to vacating a conviction. All that quoted language sounds defense-friendly, but every case there (Silvernail, Palmer, Hurd, and Anderson) upheld the murder convictions at issue. It sounds particularly prone to vacating convictions in white collar crimes where a defendant claims they didn't know. Unless there are written declarations of "I know I am committing fraud by doing X," then saying "I didn't know, it was all confusing and overwhelming" could always be a rational hypothesis of the inferences.

I suspect "rational" in that standard is doing some heavy lifting, because otherwise the second step reads "not only must the State prove guilt beyond a reasonable doubt, but must disprove every other theory as well (aside from aliens or Bigfoot)." That's a big hurdle depending on how strict "rational" is.

That second part (disprove all other theories) is a common out less entrenched judges use quite often in minor cases (most judges in state courts get crappy assignments when they start, like in traffic misdemeanor rooms) so they can avoid being appealed following a bench trial. A real life example I know of goes like this: Cop pulls up to a scene where a car hit a traffic sign of some sort (i dont recall exactly). Man is drunkenly attempting to remove the sign from the front window. Cop has him do field sobriety tests, which he fails miserably. Guy is arrested and refuses to blow at the station. Not guilty, stated reason is that the state failed to prove that defendant actually drove the vehicle.

stated reason is that the state failed to prove that defendant actually drove the vehicle.

It's kind of amazing police don't go postal on judges more often.

That second part (disprove all other theories) is a common out less entrenched judges use quite often in minor cases (most judges in state courts get crappy assignments when they start, like in traffic misdemeanor rooms) so they can avoid being appealed following a bench trial.

I agree, I've seen it myself. But there is a difference between applying it in a misdemeanor to avoid an annoying appeal vs. a murder or multimillion dollar fraud case.

The judge doesn't seem to have released any information beyond the overturn and acquittal

Except a 55 page order that outlines the facts of the case in excruciating detail, accompanied by the relevant analysis. There's no way to link to the order, but you can find it by searching https://publicaccess.courts.state.mn.us/ for Case No. 27-CR-24-13734. The gist of the opinion is that the prosecution did a very good job of proving that the defendant's brother was committing fraud through a home-health entity that the defendant owned. The brother was managing the business and hired a consultant who produced documents that were submitted to Medicaid showing inflated hours for legitimate clients as well as hours billed to fictitious clients. The issue was that none of the witnesses with direct knowledge of the fraud were able to implicate the defendant. Most had never met him at all, and the few who had testified that they only met him a couple times and just made small talk. There wasn't even any evidence that he had any direct involvement in the management of the company.

The circumstances that the jury convicted on were that he was the chartered owner of the company, that he received substantial cash payments from the company, and was in possession of a company debit card. There were also a few checks with his purported signature, though the signatures are inconsistent and he was out of town on the dates that some of them were signed in Minneapolis, so it's an open question which ones are genuine. His signature also appears on the padded Medicaid submissions, but the consultant testified that she forged his signature at his brother's direction. I quote the standard in a comment below, but the gist of it is that if a case relies entirely on circumstantial evidence, then the defendant's guilt has to be the only reasonable conclusion inferred from the circumstances. Since you can also reasonably infer that the defendant was an absentee owner who simply collected money from the business and didn't participate in its day to day affairs and neither knew of nor participated in the fraud his brother was perpetrating. The prosecution, therefore, didn't reach their burden and the conviction must be set aside. You may disagree with the reasoning, but its difficult to say that she let this guy go just because she felt sorry for Somalis.

For a link, see this file

Except a 55 page order that outlines the facts of the case in excruciating detail, accompanied by the relevant analysis.

Local news sites tend to be better about actually linking useful stuff but it's such a pain in the bahonkus to get to the actual case, maybe that's why they chose laziness instead.

The brother was managing the business and hired a consultant who produced documents that were submitted to Medicaid showing inflated hours for legitimate clients as well as hours billed to fictitious clients.

Having a sibling or two is a great way to avoid court, if you're a little bit clever.

I'm familiar with a case of identical triplets that, when one was called to court, a different one would go, be all "no that was my brother you've got the wrong guy," then the case would be dismissed/delayed/etc. IIRC they got to the point of doing fingerprint verifications as they entered the court to ensure they actually had the correct brother.

Oh, that sounds pretty spicy.

I was able to get at the judge’s order by following these instructions. It appears the prosecution did a great job convicting the defendant’s brother. That might be good enough for some people, but it’s apparently not sufficient under MN law.

As I understand it, though, because the case can be appealed, the state gets another shot at proving it.

annnnnnnnd Rov_Scam beat me to it.

As I understand it, though, because the case can be appealed, the state gets another shot at proving it.

While this is one of the few times a state can appeal an acquittal, appeals primarily review mistakes of law. The state does not get a do-over unless they can successfully persuade the appeals court about that first. I think Rov_Scam is being far too deferential to the judge, here -- there's a lot of judicial 'I could imagine alternative explanations' in that order -- but the standard to retry is so high I would be very surprised if they get a second go.

I was able to get at the judge’s order by following these instructions.

Irritating. When they said the attorney reviewed it for them I assumed it wasn't a (complicated but possible to obtain) public document.

So United States attorneys work for the Executive Branch and are supposed to be selected by the AG.

Clause (d) looks like it's just there to let courts do something to keep the district courts functioning in the case of political paralysis.

If the legislature actually wanted to strip the executive of its ability to make temporary appointments then they would have at least used "shall appoint a United States attorney" instead of "may".

Also this text has existed since at least 1986 and Lindsey Halligan is the first one a court has attempted to remove. I'm fairly sure it's not the first time there's been a second temporary appointment.

Combine that with the fact that the Eastern Virginia legal establishment strongly wants to stop these prosecutions and I think it's likely that this judge is purposefully misinterpreting the law.

Commentariat: “How could Trump screw up this badly? Why doesn’t Trump have competent lawyers? Does Trump hire too many bimbos? Why was his 2+2=4 case so weak?”

I don't know if you understand the full scope of what happened over the past couple weeks. The broad outline is this: Back in 2019, one of Comey's attorneys was investigated as part of another case that was closed in 2020. The Justice Department seized a bunch of evidence in this attorney's possession and had it stored on DVDs. The proper way to obtain this evidence would have been for Halligan to obtain a search warrant with the proper scope delineated and have the material reviewed by a court-appointed special master to remove anything that was privileged or attorney work product. Instead she just looked at all of it and used some of it as part of her case to the Grand Jury.

This is itself evidence of either incompetence or malevolence, but I'm not going to belabor the point or argue about it because these are honestly forgivable offenses, at least for someone who is wholly inexperienced in criminal law. Regardless, this was a problem for the prosecution, because if she presented any privileged information or attorney work product to the grand jury it would be grounds for dismissing the indictment, and the possibility that she even viewed such information herself would be grounds for removing her from the case (though I doubt the defense would ask for that). The defense requested that the court take the unusual step of releasing the grand jury information to them so that they could review it and determine if they had grounds for dismissal. A court granted that request, and while Halligan did not present anything privileged to the grand jury, what transpired was much worse.

The only witness who testified was an FBI agent who had no personal knowledge of what he was testifying to but had heard things from other agents. Hearsay testimony is allowed in grand jury proceedings, but it's inadmissible at trial, and it says a lot that she couldn't get the agents with first-hand knowledge to testify. The real shocker though was the ending phase, when she was giving the jurors instructions on how to proceed. She made the following two averments:

  • In response to a question from a juror about the facts of the case, she said something to the effect that if Comey had a satisfactory answer then he could testify at trial and the jury could choose to believe him or not. She implied that a jury could draw a negative inference from the defendant's failure to testify, but more importantly, she implied that such a question would shift the burden of proof to the defendant.

  • She told the grand jury that they could assume the prosecution would present more evidence at trial. In other words, you can base your decision to indict on theoretical evidence that we might have at the time of trial.

It's been fifteen years since I graduated from law school, and I've seen a lot of incredibly stupid shit in that time. While I can't say that this is necessarily worse than anything I've witnessed, I can confidently say that I haven't seen anyone do anything remotely this bad and not get fired immediately. It certainly presents a logical conundrum for people such as yourself, because there are only three possibilities here:

  1. She's incompetent to the degree that she doesn't understand the most elementary concepts of the US criminal justice system.

  2. Her case is so weak she felt the need to lie about the law to obtain an indictment. An indictment.

  3. She's so morally bankrupt that she would intentionally lie to a grand jury regardless of the strength of her case to ensure the maximum possibility of obtaining an indictment.

And of course some combination of the three. What does not exist is this fantasy land where the case against Comey is strong, Halligan is a competent attorney who scrupulously adheres to the canons of ethics, and anyone who thinks otherwise is a crypto-Democrat trying to distract the country from how low prices are getting. In a world where Trump, Bondi, et al. were rational, they would, regardless of what they thought of the opinion, at least hedged their losses by accepting the decision and allowing the court to appoint a real US Attorney, at least while the case was under appeal. Based on my own knowledge of how they operate, I would expect them to do nothing.

But no, showing that their idiocy knows no bounds, they have somehow found an option that's even worse. After the decision disqualifying Halligan was handed down, attorneys were instructed to stop signing her name on court filings and to use the name of the First Assistant instead. That guidance lasted about an hour before it was superseded by new guidance that they were to continue to use Halligan's name. This is an administration that is so committed to law and order that they are willing to take legally dubious measures to deploy the National Guard to "Democrat cities" because of "out of control crime". Yet he is unusually willing to risk every ongoing Federal prosecution between Virginia Beach and Washington, DC. If I'm a defense attorney I'm licking my chops right now over the prospect that any motion I file while this circus continues will effectively be unopposed. If the Eastern District courts have any sense whatsoever they'll make it clear that any pleadings that come in with her name on them will be rejected, and maybe the administration will get the message. But I wouldn't bet on it.


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