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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32404 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of February 13, 2023

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Is it really likely that the average person of African ancestry is cognitively impaired when compared to the average white person? I can't think of how that could actually be true.

Harvard historian and medical ethicist to Vox, 2021

We've had a few discussions about futility lately. Why bring up HBD? Even granting that it's an accurate model of reality – what are consequences of that? Do any policies different from race blindness follow? If not, why not let sleeping dogs lie?

The pragmatic answer is that the opposite of HBD awareness is not the innocent race-blind utopia that millenials have retconned into their childhoods, but ¬HBD, which by virtue of impossibility to bring reality in accord with it has unbounded actionable consequences.

On another note: lately, we've also had discussions of RLHF-tuned AIs. The technique is now associated with an image of «shoggoth wearing a smiley face mask». The joke is that the essential nature of an LLM is an eldritch mass of inhuman thought patterns, which we don't see behind its friendly – and perhaps transient – public-facing outgrowth (a pity Kkulf Kkulf was forgotten). Rationalists panic about the beast's misalignment, Mottizens ponder the ambiguity, and Scott observes sagely: humans are scarcely different, yet robustly human. «…babies are born as pure predictive processors… But as their parents reward and punish them, they get twisted into some specific shape to better capture the reward and avoid the punishment. … After maintaining this mask long enough, people identify with the mask and forget that they’re anything else».

On a yet another note: @ymeskhout reports on the failure of DEI activists to redefine the word «racism» such that it would cease to apply to anti-white discrimination. They have gaslit some people into believing that the academic «systemic power (=being white) + prejudice» definition is official, and normalized it in spaces they control, but are not legally in the clear. This may be seen as consolation: the Law remains the substantial aspect of the culture, and enterprises of these Twitter radicals are simulacra, a painted mask that can flake off under real heat. But consider: a Law becomes void if enough people deny its legitimacy. We shake our heads at quaint laws that have stayed on the books; and they are typically worked around, reduced to trivia, almost fiction. In other words: the mask and the shoggoth can trade places. Like in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, fiction can consume reality; yesterday's modus tollens will become modus ponens and so on. Such is the power of changing common-sense intuitions.

Two examples that made me write this.

The Independent: MRI scans reveal impact of racism and poverty on Black children’s brains (The American Journal of Psychiatry)

[…] In this study, we investigated the relationship between racial disparities in adversity exposure and race-related differences in brain structure among participants in the ABCD Study. We hypothesized that Black American children would have experienced more adversity than White American children in the sample. We further hypothesized that greater exposure to adverse life experiences would be related to lower gray matter volume in the amygdala, the hippocampus, and several subregions of the PFC. Finally, we anticipated that Black and White children would show differences in gray matter volume of these regions and that these differences would be partially explained by racial differences in exposure to adversity.

Sure enough,

Lower brain volume was detected in children with lower household income — both Black and white. However, Black children are more likely to live in lower-income households in the US, as they are in the UK, so they were more likely to be impacted.

“These racial disparities are not random,” researchers confirmed. “Rather, they are deep-rooted structural inequalities that result from a history of disenfranchisement of racially minoritised groups (e.g., slavery, segregation) that reinforce themselves through societal norms and practices (i.e., systemic racism).”

Some psychologists have long attempted to assert the egregious and discredited theory that Black people’s brains are different because they are inferior.

However, given that race is a social construct and all human beings are 99.9 per cent identical in their genetic makeup, the study has been hailed as further proof that social inequalities are a key determinant in health inequalities, and not the other way around.

Nathaniel G. Harnett, who led the study and is director of the Neurobiology of Affective Traumatic Experiences Laboratory at McLean Hospital, said: “There’s this (…) view that Black and white people have different brains.

When you do brain scans, you’ll sometimes see differences in how the brain responds to different stimuli, or there might be differences in the size of different brain regions.

But we don’t think that’s due to skin color. We don’t think white people have just categorically different brains than Black people. We really think it’s due to the different experiences these groups have,” he said.

Now the study is fine but for the logical fallacy in its premise. They assume causation: brain volume is changed by adversity& the group with smaller brains faces greater adversity (mainly from parental dysfunction), ergo differences in brain volumes cannot have non-environmental origins (also race isn't real so it double dog can't be); voila, systemic racism, yer guilty of shrinking brains of black babes, shitlord.

Bizarrely, their mediation analysis shows modest upper bounds for (assumed) effects of adversity, adjustments don't change the result that brains of white children are summarily bigger; they do a ton of calculations to pad the piece with rigor but it does not amount to the desired pattern that'd be suggestive of specific effects of stress. I'm told the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study has data on adoptees, to wit, an opportunity to test causality. They've abstained.

But sociologist's fallacy is an old hat; here comes a big one! Perhaps the most popular conservative explanation for the condition of blacks is «single mothers»; I did not realize how bad the issue is. Or is it?!

The Myth of Low-Income Black Fathers’ Absence From the Lives of Adolescents (Journal of Family Issues)

Coresidence was a robust predictor of adolescents' reports of both father-child closeness and father child interaction in the current study. Moreover, coresidence significantly predicted father involvement after controlling for race/ethnicity, child gender, education, work hours, and immigration status. These results are noteworthy in light of media portrayals of Black fathers as being uninvolved with their children (Goodwill et al., 2019). The tendency to associate race/ethnicity with fathers' noninvolvement with children obscures the real contributor to noninvolvement, and that is the residential status of fathers with their children. Even though Black fathers were more likely to be nonresident, as a group, Black fathers were perceived by their children to be no less involved than fathers in other racial/ethnic groups.

It's even worse, they filter out uninvolved fathers entirely: "Adolescents answered these questions only if they had seen the biological father in the past year." So by definition, all of the data (never mind analysis) removes the least involved fathers.

It's not easy to find plain up-to-date figures for noninvolvement of fathers by race, unlike those analyses with nonsensical «corrections», strange comparisons, highfalutin deboonkings: there's an effort to popularize the notion of «The Myth of the Missing Black Father», plugging it back into the stereotype threat and systemic racism that shrinks brains, I guess. Census Bureau, 2012:

  • 57.6% of black children, 31.2% of Hispanic children, and 20.7% of white children are living absent their biological fathers.

I can only echo Lemoine:

«This is what an academic Übermensch looks like to be honest. The rest of us try to be coherent and show some concern for truth, but this guy doesn't give a shit and just forges ahead with pure narrative. Absolute chad move».

This is good science now: publishable, welcomed by press like CNN and Bloomberg, «hailed as further proof». Those are scholars; standards; incentives; a whole gimped epistemology and philosophy springing forth from the intuitive starting point that one can't think of how innate race differences could be true. Workable solutions, though, do not follow.

My takeaway is simple. I believe the Shoggoth-Mask metaphor is, like other takes on LLMs, more useful for sociology. Much of American social and biological science has already metamorphosized into the shoggoth of ¬HBD, with the smiley face of StaTiStiCS on top; the same is happening in all other institutions and in imperial satellites. This is the concrete price of the sane choice to sacrifice a boring autistic truth on the altar of peace for our time.

/images/16766753171675832.webp

These predictions fail to take into account the dominant demographic trends of our times- notably, African Americans have east Asia tier fertility rates(blacks in general look like they have higher fertility rates because African immigrants do), while Hispanics prefer to interbreed with white if at all possible. So you’re looking at a future where there’s lots of people who are for all intents and purposes basic white Americans but check ‘Hispanic’ on forms, coupled with a lot fewer African Americans. Something tells me that 1/4 Mexican, 1/4 German, 1/2 English Americans are going to have the same white guilt complex as ones that aren’t 1/4 Mexican, and when African Americans are only like 8% of the population with another 5% being high performing African immigrants black underperformance will not be nearly as profound.

Maybe I’m just rambling. But it seems like it’s important to note the trends for what they are where the nuance is important.

Australian Aborigines are about 3% of the Australian population, but they still serve the role of the oppressed minority. Even if their support is not directly imporant in the Australian culture war, it seems important to consider the support of those who feel guilty about the Aborigines and hostile towards any perceived oppression/disrespect of them.

So I don't see why African Americans becoming a small proportion of the US population would affect the trends that BorfRebus discusses, except perhaps to make them less expensive.

Something tells me that 1/4 Mexican, 1/4 German, 1/2 English Americans are going to have the same white guilt complex as ones that aren’t 1/4 Mexican

It ultimately doesn't make a dramatic difference, but, in most parts of the country, whites are much less than half English.

Outside of Utah, parts of the South, and Upper New England, I would be surprised if most whites in any given area were 1/3 English.

Well sure, but 1/4 Cuban or Mexican or Puerto Rican or Venezuelan, 1/2 Italian, 1/4 German whites aren’t functionally any different. It’s just an example.

Right, it's not a problem, it's just kind of my personal crusade. People learn American history with a focus on the early history and think that English heritage and tradition means the US still has a very large component of English descent today when it really doesn't. Mass immigration in the 19th century already caused the majority portion of the white population to be non-English descended in many parts of the country. By the early 1920's, for example, most of the major East coast metropolises were 70%+ descendants of immigrants in the last three generations. These immigrant populations have since moved all over the country and diluted what remained of colonial populations. Even the populations of much of the plains states are often only a third to half descended from English settlers or immigrants -- it's just the immigrant populations that settled much of those areas were Northern European Protestants so they just kind of blend in as assimilated and invisible.

There's no real point to it, it's just a popular impression of the American population that is very wrong. Probably less than a third of the population (including black Americans) is descended from colonial settlers and, while the English did send a great many immigrants to the US in the 19th century, they tended to be overwhelmingly middle class and so were often less fecund than Catholic immigrants to start with and rapidly assimilated to native born birth rates.

While there are not that many Americans of purely English ancestry remaining, I think it's important to note that the fraction with any such ancestry is likely still a supermajority. This includes pretty much every black descendant of slaves, most whites in the south where the impact of European immigration was minimal, people like me in the north who have an English surname despite having less than 1/16 colonial English ancestors, and the increasing numbers of mixed-race Hispanics and Asians whose parents married into the white majority.

While true to an extent, it's also worth remembering that inter-faith marriages were almost as no-no as inter-racial marriage for a long time in many places. It has probably only been since the Boomers that that has entirely disappeared. In places where the immigrants were Protestant, they would likely intermarry and quickly assimilate with the English descended population. Where they were not, English descent is going to be relatively much lower.

think that English heritage and tradition means the US still has a very large component of English descent today

I've never heard anyone assert this as those posing as Germans and Irish are clearly far more numerous. How often does it come up for you?

Eventually Hispanics will become the majority in America anyway. They won't buy into HBD either, but their lack of white guilt means they also won't care very much about the black excuse industry.

Doubt.jpg

Objectively speaking I'd say Hispanics should be MORE vilified by wokeism. Your generic White might be a Swede or an Austrian, who never colonized anyone. Hispanics definatly descend from the particularly cruel and exploitative Spanish or Portuguese Empires - the ones who led the way and taught all the other Europeans how to be mean to foreign continents.

Once the Hispanics rise to a dominant economic / political position, you can bet the grievance industry will remember that part of the Age of Discovery, instead of pretending that Original Sin year was 1619.

The average Hispanic in the US is only about 60% European by blood. The other 40% is some combination of indigenous and black.

This gives Hispanics some ability to larp as the descendants of colonized populations(even though the ones who know to do that are, uh, not exactly nahuatl speakers).

This is a thought I've had before: everyone gets on America's case for slavery, nobody is really mad about how Spain basically genocided South America's empires out of existence and led the way in terms of European colonization. Maybe that's because we Americans spanked Spain so hard at the end of the 19th Century that they effectively stopped being an empire. Maybe some other country will dethrone America as world superpower and we'll no longer have to worry about culture wars.

Actually in Anglo countries the attacks on the Spanish Inquisition and Spanish colonialism are so common as to elicit a response from the Spanish - they call it la legenda negro.

Two things are true here - the average Hispanic is more likely a descendent of imperialists than a swede.

The other truth is that many Hispanics have a fair bit of native ancestry. So the genocide wasn’t as total as North America.

However, given that race is a social construct

This is such an irritating motte-and-bailey. The motte is "Discrete racial categories are imposed classifications since race is in reality a continuous phenomenon", and the bailey is "Therefore race is not a meaningful biological phenomenon and should not be thought of as such". The motte is trivially true if a bit uninsightful. The bailey is utterly ridiculous.

The motte isn't trivially true. Racial genetics are not a continuous phenomenon, there are distinct genetic clusters owning to the tens of thousands of years during which there were geographic barriers to interbreeding and substantial local selective pressures. Sure, the difference between Germans and Italians is going to be something pretty close to continuous, but there is very nearly no continuity between East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa.

This may be seen as consolation: the Law remains the substantial aspect of the culture, and enterprises of these Twitter radicals are simulacra, a painted mask that can flake off under real heat. But consider: a Law becomes void if enough people deny its legitimacy. We shake our heads at quaint laws that have stayed on the books; and they are typically worked around, reduced to trivia, almost fiction. In other words: the mask and the shoggoth can trade places. Like in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, fiction can consume reality; yesterday's modus tollens will become modus ponens and so on.

I should point out that this has already happened in certain parts of the law. I mentioned this in my review of David Bernstein's Classified book:

The most cogent illustration for how race categories metastasize into a distraction is by examining government-mandated "minority preferences." In the early 1980s, Congress tasked some federal agencies (primarily the Small Business Administration and Department of Transportation) to set aside a portion of their grants to businesses that are "owned and controlled by socially and economically disadvantaged individuals." These programs are usually referred to by the moniker Disadvantaged Business Enterprise, or DBE. Almost immediately, "socially disadvantaged" was interpreted to refer only to racial discrimination, and the relevant regulations declared that any enterprise owned by a racial minority would be presumptively deemed "disadvantaged." Bernstein does not directly provide an explanation for this peculiar shift, but in all likelihood proving whether someone has been "socially and economically disadvantaged" for each individual applicant would likely have been too administratively burdensome to be practical. Yet this also meant the opportunity to have a nuanced investigation into the question of disadvantage was entirely quashed by just checking the right box.

A federal law meant to address "disadvantage" was functionally transformed into a sort of racial reparations program. If whites/men by definition cannot be "disadvantaged", then no harm done apparently. DBE funding is definitely a place where the "racism equals power plus" crowd achieved a practical victory within the legal system. The legal acrobatics around racial discrimination in college admissions are another.

I can't think of how that could actually be true.

Yep, I'm going to resort to quoting Orwell:

In fact, there will be no thought, as we understand it now. Orthodoxy means not thinking—not needing to think. Orthodoxy is unconsciousness. (Syme explaining Newspeak to Winston, in "Nineteen-Eighty Four")

In that first bit, I notice how they scooted RIGHT by a discussion about class. Nope, can't talk about that, have to go right to race. I'll stick with my stance that the current favor of various forms of monodirectional power dynamics (and let me just say the assumption of this is absolutely a form of bigotry going in every which way) is exactly to freeze out these discussions. Because when you add class inequality to the discussion, suddenly, it changes from trying to gatekeep and control the pipeline to give the people you want an advantage over the outgroup, it suddenly becomes a talk about how to manage and encourage relative socioeconomic decline (I.E. term limits for jobs, end of tenure, catering your programs to the lower classes, like Ivy League schools opening up sections dedicated to teaching trades to local people) among the in-group. And that's a huge third rail.

Wait, the effect also supposedly happens to poor white children, but it's caused by racism but white children can't experience rac--

Are people just so well trained that their brains immediately crimestop the most obvious chain of thought here?

Lower brain volume was detected in children with lower household income — both Black and white. However, Black children are more likely to live in lower-income households in the US, as they are in the UK, so they were more likely to be impacted.

They do say the above, so they are saying the fact that black people are proportionately more likely to be lower income is because of racism. They have an explanation. It may not be correct, but they aren't being short circuited in the way you think.

It should've been so easy for academic institutions to see through this rubbish. How can black poverty and 'social inequalities' leave them in good physical condition such that they can dominate running and various sports like basketball but shrink their skull volumes?

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S016028960200137X

(I actually once had a debate with a progressive about something completely different and brought up an article from Intelligencer as proof of my case. Instead of looking at the article in question, he misread it as Intelligence, the journal I'm quoting here and gleefully crowed that my source was promulgating 'racist pseudoscience'. That gave me some insight into the mindset involved, where you don't even look at the content of the source so much as whether it's from a rightthink organization or not.)

This is the concrete price of the sane choice to sacrifice a boring autistic truth on the altar of peace for our time.

Well there's also the trillions of dollars spent on useless aid and redistributionary programs, plus various anti-meritocratic staffing policies and higher levels of crime.

I don't think we can interpret the ¬HBD school of thought as purely a strategic decision to avoid internal unrest or diplomatic embarrassment in the Cold War. Who cares if sub-Saharan Africa went communist? Half of it did and they did very little for the Warsaw Pact. Controlling Suez or at least keeping access to it is important but we could make a carve out for the strategically vital Arabs who hate blacks anyway. They make Russia look like a bastion of racial tolerance, see pic. Whatever was needed from Africa could be kept by retaining some well-placed colonies. The British held Somaliland until 1960, that would be useful if you want to control the Red Sea.

Anyway the US bloc has never been afraid to offend huge swathes of Arabs if it's for causes that are considered vital like defending Israel.

As for internal unrest, what about using suppression? The FBI or whoever could have produced conclusive evidence that MLK was a rapist, plagiarized his speeches and was just a really bad person all around. It might even be true, who knows? Or they could arrange for these people to be assassinated before they got much traction. If there are riots, they could bring in troops to straighten things out. They could arrange for the media to show protestors in a bad light, tar them as communist-backed or whatever.

The only strategic reasons to adopt ¬HBD are if you already believe its premises. If Africa really is just underdeveloped and oppressed, then it does make sense to be on their good side! There's enormous potential growth there, new major powers that will emerge in Nigeria and Ethiopia. If US blacks would perform better under a different social organizing system, then implementing that would increase total national power and stability. However, these theories have not been proven over the last 50-60 years. Nigeria and Ethiopia are not major powers, US blacks have not become much more successful under the era of antiracism - they are not winning STEM Nobels. Enormous costs have been borne for very limited benefits, if any.

¬HBD was really first made explicit with the declarations of universal human rights in 1948. That preceded any major civil unrest from blacks in the USA. It was something invented by elites and adopted as policy by Roosevelt, who was the primary mover behind the UN. I think it's a primarily ideological policy rather than a response to various pressures. You can see the same thing in Britain's anti-slavery work during the 19th century onward, where they accepted considerable costs to reduce the practice globally.

/images/1676681594640654.webp

The only strategic reasons to adopt ¬HBD are if you already believe its premises.

IMO the main reason to adopt ¬HBD is straightforward: explicit rejection of HBD, or more properly, habits of thought developed over decades spent vigorously condemning anything that smacked of post-hoc justification for discrimination against black people. The hated outgroup believed proposition N, therefore we will believe ¬N, and any statement that can be interpreted as supporting position N (however innocuous) will be treated as giving succor to the enemy.

It also has the benefit of never having to tell someone to their face that they're part of a group that is intellectually inferior to one's own, which is fighting words even if true - an understated benefit for someone who's afraid of getting punched!

True, I suppose. But they could've chosen not to take that particular ideological stance. They could've kept the war at the simpler level of 'they attacked us and are doing us harm'. The average US soldier was not ideologically motivated, apart from their hatred of Japan they didn't really care so much about the European front. See page 21: https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/a301424.pdf

Mostly soldiers seemed to be motivated by other things than ideology: camaraderie with their fellow soldiers, a desire for adventure (especially flyers), a sense of duty and pride in their country, a desire to win the war and go home. The Germans hated the Russians and the Americans hated the Japs but the Americans and Germans didn't dislike eachother that much.

It also has the benefit of never having to tell someone to their face that they're part of a group that is intellectually inferior to one's own, which is fighting words even if true

I don't deny that this is a factor but this strikes me as perhaps the ultimate cowardice. We apologize and abase ourselves, provide trillions in informal reparations based upon the premise of equality, vacate our own communities so they can turned to semi-wasteland (this is not a pleasant process for those who are unable to leave), integrate schools and sacrifice the prospects of our own children (or more often move to whiter locales), tolerate massive grooming rings lest we be thought racist, create political patronage jobs for DEI commissars to harass whites in the workplace and sabotage our own employment prospects. Or take the sabotage and suppression of former Rhodesia and South Africa. Since when has the Chinese government ever tried to bully their own coethnics in the Philippines or Malaysia and get them to be nicer to the locals? Since when have Arabs waged extremely bloody wars to get other Arabs to stop enslaving blacks? You don't see Turkey apologizing and providing compensation to Greece for invading and occupying their country for centuries, or for enslaving millions of Slavs, Poles and Ukrainians. You don't see Algeria apologizing for the Barbary Pirates raiding and enslaving Europeans across the Mediterranean.

This behavior is a massive historical anomaly.

Americans and Germans didn't dislike eachother that much.

I heard differently from my German-Canadian relatives who were a teenagers in WW2. But likely the Japanese kids got it worse.

But I was actually thinking after my reply about the persistence of certain liberal outgroup modes, notably the KKK and Nazis (who are kind of a super-KKK). Scott Alexander memorably pointed out that there's hardly any of either group left, those that managed to hang on being almost universally despised & marginalized, but you still hear about them all the time, and a certain kind of leftist always jumps at the chance to pattern match their foes with one or both of these two groups.

(Status: speculative, possibly uncharitible)

One possibility is: liberals just really hate racism, so the biggest baddest racists of the 20th century loom large in their imaginations. I'll grant this one to an extent, although not all instances of racism attract equal fervor. (especially when perpetrated by nonwhites).

I think the more interesting explanation is: at its roots, in its memetic DNA, modern liberalism is designed for fighting the outgroup that it was born to oppose. "This Machine Kills Nazis", everything else is incidental.They might hate racism, but not on first principles, not really; they hate racism because racism is what the KKK did, and they exist fight the KKK. The modern humans who make up the ideology don't have write access to it anymore, so in order to steer the Nazi-killing machine in the direction of the outgroup-du-jour they have to make it think they're Nazis.

In this context, ¬HBD being taken as gospel seems perfectly natural.

Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa fell less due to sanctions and more because the white population fell too low, relatively, to maintain white dominance by force. Needless to say, the US is in no danger of becoming less than 15% white any time soon.

40% of whites in America are anti racists fighting to dismantle white supremacy so you don't need to get anywhere near as low as 15%.

Anyway the point wasn't whether sanctions were critical to destroying Rhodesia, it's about how bizarre it is that the western world sided with African communists against their own co-ethnics.

I wouldn't exactly call Afrikaners "coethnics" to America or Britain, although you have a point about Rhodesia.

Did the Netherlands condemn apartheid? They're definitely coethnics

The most hajnal place in the world condemning behavior by groups that code as its own backwards hicks, knowing it would make its military protectors happy, while not particularly grokking the consequences of the end of minority rule, doesn’t seem totally inexplicable.

It would be like New York City condemning Texas’s border policy. Oh, right.

And to be fair, there’s lots of people who may not use the words HBD(or know what they mean) but who understand full well that blacks are relatively deficient in something important(although it’s often not phrased as intelligence) but who would never say it in front of black people. Both because it’s rude to remind people of this, but also because getting into a fight just doesn’t sound like a good idea.

What I don’t understand is if you asked “who is most likely to win a marathon” nobody but nobody would object to Kenyans. The idea that it isn’t in part due to genes seems ridiculous.

Yet for some reason there is a block where people can’t extend that to IQ

Is it really likely that the average person of African ancestry is cognitively impaired when compared to the average white person? I can't think of how that could actually be true.

Fetal alcohol syndrome, which is far more rampant in the black community than anybody wants to admit. Even worse among natives.

Edit: It's probably why we get the civil rights movement when we do, with people like MLK, as the generation of blacks born during prohibition were probably less likely to have fetal alcohol syndrome.

But Prohibition is also associated with bootlegging, and bootleg liquor could be even more deleterious than normal, legal alcohol. Of course, maybe there were other factors that could make your hypothesis true (blacks too poor to afford even the bootlegged stuff, kept out of speakeasies, had a harder time avoiding the law, anyone who did get tainted liquor straight-up died before they could even reproduce).

Some alcohol related medical issues, like cirrhosis of the liver, declined during prohibition.

“These racial disparities are not random,” researchers confirmed. “Rather, they are deep-rooted structural inequalities that result from a history of disenfranchisement of racially minoritised groups (e.g., slavery, segregation) that reinforce themselves through societal norms and practices (i.e., systemic racism).”

Yes, so slavery and systemic racism manifests itself to produce a phenotypical difference today that is likely present at birth?

An update to a post I made after Christmas lamenting the state of children's books, and all their on the nose, "current year" agenda pushing nonsense. Specifically an update in reply to this comment.

This is why we only have classic little golden books and some innocuous stuff from the 80s and 90s on our bookshelf. Also Roald Dahl, he's great. As others have said, there's no reason to buy modern propaganda children's books. Not only are they proselytizing, but they're mostly objectively ugly.

Roald Dahl goes PC in a world where no one is 'fat' and the Oompa-Loompas are gender neutral

archive link

The publisher, Puffin, has made hundreds of changes to the original text, removing many of Dahl’s colourful descriptions and making his characters less grotesque.

The review of Dahl’s language was undertaken to ensure that the books “can continue to be enjoyed by all today”, Puffin said.

You can read the litany of changes for yourself. I guess I missed the boat on stocking up on Roald Dahl children's books. As is feeling increasingly typical these days, there can be no escape from current year. Fuck me I guess.

Something that's striking about some of the rewrites is that they're not just striking ostensibly verboten words, but actually making the writing worse. The first example from the table that @buffy_bot helpfully provides below:

Like all extremely old people, he was delicate and weak

Like most extremely old people, he was delicate and weak

First, note the moronically pedantic nature of this change - you can picture the dweeb interjecting, "ackshually, not all extremely old people are delicate and weak". To a first approximation, all centenarians really are delicate and weak, with the best counterexamples still being people that don't have half the strength of their youth and that can suffer severe injuries from falling down. More importantly though, it changes the rhythm and feel of the sentence in a way that I can't quite articulate, and not for the better.

The removal of anything to do with "fat" is a good example of what we were talking about with regard to victories of fat activists yesterday. I don't think they've actually made any inroads on convincing people that there's nothing wrong with being fat, but they have convinced people that ever referencing fat negatively in writing is a sin that's just short of using a racial slur.

“It was easy. I smuggled them over in large packing cases with holes in them, and they all got here safely… They all speak English now”

“They’ve told me they love it here”

Again, notice that this is just plain worse. It's not just getting rid of something that's putatively offensive, it's scrapping the underlying content, making it flat and dull. The original sentence gives you a vivid image of how the hell the oompaloompas wound up there (and it's not a pretty image). The update says nothing meaningful. This is a theme across these, replacing well-crafted sentences that call to mind an image with some simple descriptor conveys only the sequence of events. Perhaps the sensitivity editors all suffer from aphantasia and lack the capacity to visualize a scene from a few words; I can't decide if this explanation would be more or less charitable to them.

Matthew Dennison, Dahl’s biographer, said that the author - who died in 1990 - chose his vocabulary with care. “I’m almost certain that he would have recognised that alterations to his novels prompted by the political climate were driven by adults rather than children," he said.

Flow and tone matters. Some of these changes sound like adults “talking to kids” rather than “talking with kids”. It’s against the spirit of the stories.

It's called "condescension". The group who (claim to) hate it so much they invented another word for it are the people responsible for most of it.

And sure, the kids eventually pick up on it- nobody likes being treated as if they're beneath someone (which is partially why teen media is infamously edgy as well as the general trend of kids wanting to consume 'adult' media in general), but they're not even human beings so who gives a damn?

Plus, if you do it enough, you can even make some of them proud of this treatment so it's self-reinforcing after a while... exactly what one with power should want in order to retain that power forever.

Welcome to early Ingsoc. As more content goes digital, there won't even be any (legal) way to possess content that is deemed oldthinking and thoughtcriminal. The books would be edited right in your electronic device, and they would always have been like that.

This is one of the reasons my preferred copyright regime would strongly incent active selling and action to maintain copyright. If you stop, your old work loses copyright protection and it becomes public.

In one of history's little winks almost the first book this happened to was 1984.

Some copyright SNAFU meant that Amazon had distributed the thing when it wasn't allowed to, so they disappeared it off people's Kindles. This wasn't an attempt at censorship, other editions were readily available, but it was a clear case of memory-holing.

I'm really wondering when is Amazon going to do something about the fact I buy cca 3 books from them for a year, but pirate roughly 10 each year, and put them all on the same device.

Been 3 uncalled for updates of the OS so far, and ..nothing ?

I don't know whether or not they scan Kindle's actively for sideloaded stuff. But there is probably specific pressure to go after you.

I think in the case above, Amazon wasn't acting out of a general programme to enforce copyright, they were reacting to someone with laywer who was upset about a particular e-Book that they had actively distributed.

You mean there isn't pressure to go after people who sideload ?

I expect there is, and I don't know how that affects Amazon's behaviour. That's a generalized thing though. Distinct from "some specific lawyers are going to sue us unless we do this specific thing".

Are you saying you think it will be made illegal to have physical books?

Most likely route is child protective services investigation for giving children dangerous and problematic books after your kid takes one to a show and tell. Like what would happen if they brought porn or Mein Kampf today.

If it sounds absurd, remember how CPS taking people's children for using the "wrong pronouns" was absurd last year, and now it's law.

Are you saying that's less likely than things that are already happening? Do you think all the rhetoric about "schools saving children from christo-fascist cults" is just talk? Parents having an old paper copy of Dr Seuss books is already passed around as a "red flag dog whistle" on the teaching and library subreddits

Parents having an old paper copy of Dr Seuss books is already passed around as a "red flag dog whistle" on the teaching and library subreddits

Do you have a link for us to gawk at? That sounds crazy even for Reddit...

I'll try to find it again. Was stalking the accounts of users supporting the Roald Dahl censorship (well, attacking anyone who opposed it as hateful bigots with no empathy, anyway), and ended up closing the whole window.

No, they would just not print physical books anymore for mass market. At least not for the Western mass market. If you want to print it out by yourself, on your private printer - it probably would be possible, but not from copyrighted source directly (this function will be disabled in most consumer market devices, see how HD video signal is treated). You could probably hack around it, if you are technically proficient (most DRM is removable, and there are flourishing pirate markets for non-DRMed content) but most of the population would be unable to do it.

Can you elaborate on the HD signal?

Probably the HDCP requirement for 4K UHD video over HDMI/DisplayPort. DRM (albeit fully compromised) has been baked directly into the wire protocol. If you try to run without (on the cables, monitors, source, any other pieces of equipment passing the signal), you get downgraded to 1080p HD.

Oh okay, I consider 4K to be a meme and never looked into any tech adjacent to it, which explains why I haven't heard of this. Still bad for the future, I guess, but not immediately concerning.

Any computer monitor running a resolution higher than 1920x1080 over HDMI is also affected. For reference every current gen iPad on the market pushes higher resolution than that.

What I mean is this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-bandwidth_Digital_Content_Protection

Or maybe I'm not being pessimistic enough and UK counter-terrorism will just make a huge list of books, TV shows, and movies that get you on a terrorism watchlist, such as "Yes Minister", John Locke, Carlyle, C.S. Lewis and Tolkien.

https://archive.is/5RQ0d

https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/1134986/Independent_Review_of_Prevent.pdf

Or maybe I'm not being pessimistic enough and UK counter-terrorism will just make a huge list of books, TV shows, and movies that get you on a terrorism watchlist, such as "Yes Minister", John Locke, Carlyle, C.S. Lewis and Tolkien.

This ship sailed long ago, check Terrorism Act 2000

https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2000/11/section/58

58 Collection of information.

(1)A person commits an offence if

(a)he collects or makes a record of information of a kind likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism

(b)he possesses a document or record containing information of that kind

(c)the person views, or otherwise accesses, by means of the internet a document or record containing information of that kind.

"information likely to be useful to a person committing or preparing an act of terrorism" sounds so very very scary.

What exactly it means in practice?

In practice it means books you can easily and fully legally buy from Amazon.uk

If the cops feel like including ...check... Great British Railway Journeys among this super dangerous knowledge, it would be fully legal according to this act.

"Why are you watching documents about trains? Do you plan to cause derailment?"

(more examples here)

https://www.cps.gov.uk/crime-info/terrorism/counter-terrorism-division-crown-prosecution-service-cps-successful-prosecutions-2016

Subsequent forensic analysis of the mobile device revealed four electronic documents, all of which contravened s58 of the Terrorism Act 2000.

The Anarchy Cookbook Version 2000,

The Improvised Munitions handbook Vol 1 1981

Mujahideen-Poisons Handbook

The Explosives Course.

.....

In a folder on the computer, analysts discovered PDF files containing five issues of Rumiyah, the Daesh propaganda magazine. Each of those contained an article in a section known as “Just Terror Tactics” that contravenes Section 58 Terrorism Act 2000 in that they contain instructional information likely to assist a person in the preparation of acts of terrorism. There was clear evidence of attribution to Zakaria Yanaouri. Those exact same files were duplicated on the Samsung Galaxy mobile phone and indications were that Zakaria Yanaouri had transferred the files from the computer to the phone.

.....

The police uncovered a wealth of data from five devices used by Harry Vaughan including a list of 129 internet accounts, usernames and passwords on a memory stick and a large volume of material linked to Siege, ISIS, Satanism, Neo-Nazism and antisemitism totalling approximately 4200 images and 302 files including videos.

.....

There were numerous digital copies of books on firearms, explosives and military tactics. These included manuals on how to construct homemade guns and ammunition. There were also several digital copies of books which tended to reveal extreme right-wing views and objectives.

Thing that would have seemed impossible and absurd even last year happens, people get temporarily upset, change nothing. Everyone gets used to it, desperately copes that "this is the high water mark," and goes on with their lives.

Then something even worse happens and the process starts all over again. This is how the last decade has gone. And this is how the next decade will go. And the one after that and the one after that.

I don't really see the point of even talking about it unless it's building actionable solutions.

The absurdity and bipartisan revolt leads me optimistically believe we're closer to the peak than not. It does not mean wokeness has peaked, but we're close to it . Rewriting classic books is something even many left-wing artsy types and progressives will not stand for. Losing the intelligentsia means losing the movement, because that is where the money is too.

Absurdity isnt an objective measure - it only demonstrates how far outside or inside the current overton window an idea is. The idea that prepubescent children can know that they somehow have the spiritual essence of the opposite sex would also have seemed absurd to most anyone 40 years ago. Heck, 1950's sock hops were absurd to Sayyid Qutb when he went to Colorado State Teacher's College. That an idea is absurd to a person only tells you where that person stands now. Not why they stand there now, and not where they'll stand tomorrow.

Surely it has some sort of telos or terminus, though, no? Civilization may appear asymptotic in terms of how much ruin and insanity it can withstand, but there must be some practical limit.

North Korea still exists.

I have no idea what the practical limit to a civilization's utter insanity is. I just know whatever that limit is, we appear to be dead set on suicidally testing it.

Fires eventually burn themselves out, but you should still be concerned if you find one in your home.

In Rwanda, men hacked their neighbors to death with machetes. People were condemned to death for wearing glasses and owning books in Cambodia. The Soviets slaughtered thousands of whales to meet quotas that served no purpose. How crazy can people get?

The OP of a post in this over on /r/books listed out all the changes in table format. It’s crazy. One missing detail in your post is that the rights to the works are owned by Netflix. I wonder if they were the ones employing the sensitivity readers. Thank goodness I impulse bought his whole collection for my baby back in the fall. Not a moment too late.

Everything is worse than the original. Of course it must be. These books were written by a talented author, or authors. They are “corrected” by mediocrities.

Here is a list of the changes. Roald Dahl could have written a whole book of short essays about each individual change and how it's retarded:

https://old.reddit.com/r/books/comments/1154tr5/the_hundreds_of_changes_made_to_roald_dahls_books/

Ironically, they didn't race swap Charlie:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlie_and_the_Chocolate_Factory#Race_and_editing

Anyway, I can accept that new cultural products will tend to be terrible, for reasons including wokeness, but when it comes to the glories of the past, I think of us in the position of Irish monks in the Dark Ages: unable to produce, but duty-bound to preserve. So pushing back hard against this sort of thing (or indeed Puffin's past decision to put a sexualised image of a child on a Charlie and the Chocolate Factory cover, on the grounds of giving it "adult" appeal, about which they have never repented, as far as I know) makes sense.

Time for sensitivity readers to modify problematic parts of Orwell?

By 2050—earlier, probably—all real knowledge of Oldspeak will have disappeared. The whole literature of the past will have been destroyed. Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Byron—they'll exist only in Newspeak versions, not merely changed into something different, but actually contradictory of what they used to be. (Syme, explaining Newspeak to Winston in "Nineteen-Eighty Four".)

"She went on olden-day sailing ships with Joseph Conrad. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and to India with Rudyard Kipling."

This passage is modified to:

"She went to nineteenth century estates with Jane Austen. She went to Africa with Ernest Hemingway and California with John Steinbeck."

The sorts of thinkers that a child should be reading - in the revised editions, at least, where Elizabeth Bennet is an engineer ("Better than Brunel, they say!") Jane Bennet is a badass lawyer, and Georgiana Darcy is Black. Jane is rewritten to have more sass, while Elizabeth is rewritten to stop being so mean. Mr. Darcy is rewritten to be a better role model for men: modest, empathetic, and socially competent. The story is about how Elizabeth and Jane can have Pride, while Mr. Darcy enjoys lessons from them about the importance of not having Prejudice.

The Oakleys are a queer collective of artists who are travelling to California to escape the prejudice of dumb rednecks. Ernest Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea will be the Wise Latinx Woman and the Sea and of course she successfully brings the fish back in the end, because women can be just as good fisher-persons as men and other genders.

That "correction" is not even consistent. How the hell are Conrad and Kipling Problematic, but Hemingway is fine?

I can't work out the logic here - "can't have three males in a row, must include female". Okay, but why dump Conrad?

"India and Kipling racist attitudes". I do see that, but why is Africa and Hemingway okay then, what with hunting big game?

why is Africa and Hemingway okay then, what with hunting big game?

You may be overestimating the knowledge of professional "sensitivity readers".

But there has long been criticism of Hemingway for "toxic masculinity" (even if the term wasn't used then); the bullfighting, the drinking, the guns, the womanising. If a dweller-under-a-rock like me is aware of that, then surely the publishers are too?

I mean, this is just total ignorance on display. People who have no memory extending past ten minutes ago. It's not just the censorship that is bad, it's the stupidity and lack of knowledge of anything past their own nose that is dreadful. They know nothing except how to squawk out the Right Thought Right Speech. Even bloody ChatGPT would be better than this.

Most Americans haven't read Hemingway, many haven't read Kipling, and I think you'd be hard pressed to find in most environments someone who would be able to tell you the title of more than one of Conrad's books (I only know two off the top of my head but the second is due to my naughty sense of humor, not because I'm well read). Your degree of familiarity with these subjects is likely unusual even if you want to roll in the highly educated. Most modern westerners (Americans specifically, speaking anecdotally and with a fuzzy understanding of the numerous studies done on literacy here) simply don't read and when they do they pick YA lit or the latest in ex-SOG power fantasies. I genuinely believe you might be typical-minding the motives of your outgroup. Even if I'm completely wrong about that I would remind you of the admonition of TLP, "If you're watching it, it's for you" as well as Scott's addendum "It's bad on purpose to make you click".

Engagement with minor egregor-level organizations or corporations makes you legible to them and opens you up as a source of sustenance to these entities. Don't feed the (metaphysical) trolls, they live on the psychic plane and should be forced to come out and visit you in the waking nightmare of life if they want to eat your joy for breakfast.

Because Hemingway fought for the communists in the Spanish Civil War.

A witch working the tills in a supermarket is now a "top scientist". A good inconspicuous cover.

It's also very damn condescending to women who work in positions like on the tills or being cleaners or shop assistants or any job that is paid an hourly wage and is not some middle-class college degree salaried position. What are children whose mothers aren't "top scientists" supposed to think about that patronising classism?

What are children whose mothers aren't "top scientists" supposed to think about that patronising classism?

Eh, those cheapskates are probably using hand-me-down books or buying from thrift shops, no need to cater to them.

Indeed, I forgot: lower class people don't read. Of course the children reading these books aren't going to identify with "Mommy works as an office cleaner" type jobs 🙄 That's me and my kind all wiped off the map of relevance, but who cares about the poor save as a chance to do the Lady Bountiful bit?

Well feminism is more or less a class interest group for a certain kind of disproportionately female professional person, so it makes sense.

This has been a problem for feminists since Hilary Clinton remarked that she decided not to stay home, bake cookies, and have teas. How do you encourage women into making the choices feminists want, without making them feel coerced or insulted?

It's writing off working class women in pink collar/manual labour jobs. The 'heroine' in the first Knives Out movie was a nurse; no wonder in the second movie it had to be a black woman scientist (or her twin sister imitating her). It's just not good enough to be ordinary, only the kind of college-educated type counts. Maybe there's an article waiting to be written on that, how political theory feminism has abandoned ordinary women for the sociology department adherents.

Maybe there's an article waiting to be written on that, how political theory feminism has abandoned ordinary women for the sociology department adherents.

Sure, but I don't think I'd have anything more to add about class struggle than the 19th century political writers who put that name on the concept.

Well, except for the gender angle.

God might have initially made the classes "male" and "female", but he also made Stanton Allen, Lynde Bradly, Simon Ingersoll, John Deere, Henry Ford, [the programmer who will be responsible for the neural network that forces as many women out of the workforce as the list of men above did] and, perhaps as impactful as all of those men combined, [the man who will go on to invent the first viable artificial wombs].

So now, we have to go a little deeper... and what we find is that one of those genders is "the one that for all of history is easily replaceable and so is biologically geared to do most of the hard work" and "the one that the former works for because it is not so easily replaced". Or in other words, "labor" and "capital".

And I agree- I think there's an article waiting to be written about the two genders actually being "capital" and "labor", and transgenderism is best defined by what happens when you cross those lines. So if you're a man, you're trying to become the capital-associated valued-for-your-existence gender, and if you're a woman, you're trying to become the labor-associated valued-for-your-actions gender. (Weird how the popular concepts of 'masculinity' and 'femininity' have always pointed at this across every culture, even the matriarchies.)

The upshot is that the labor-to-capital transitioners are useful to capital against labor in ways capital-to-labor transitioners are not (under typical socioeconomic conditions- post-disaster golden ages are an exception to this), which is why it's trans-capital (biological men) getting elevated and why trans-labor (biological women) more often find themselves treated the same way as 'normal' labor is. Sure, trans-labor women don't actively set out to do that, but capital women see it as not only a choice, but a betrayal- after all, they're supposed to be the gender that loots labor, not joins them, and with all the [unfair] advantages they've provided them how could they refuse their offer?

And to top it all off, there's the TERF faction that ignores this dynamic on purpose (they're doomed partially because they did that, and partially because that 'RF' part means they can't get the quantity of labor they need to build capital of their own).

It's also the kind of thing nobody dares write (or research) because it's the kind of thing that makes everyone who reads it get "misgendered" to a degree (I'm pretty sure most women think Ayn Rand is a gender-traitor already... and, well, I rest my case) and also probably doesn't cover all the cases. But then again, this effect is at the population-level so maybe I don't have to.

So apparently the words "black" and "white" are now banned in every context. A "black figure" in the night becomes a "dark figure" and instead of a woman's face going "white" it goes "pale".

sexualised image of a child

I was curious about this (as I'm always up for looking at a sexualized image of a child) having not heard of it before, looked it up, and must say that even by the standards of 2014 (which in my view quite frankly weren't that modest), calling such an image "sexualized" seems to me to be a major stretch. There's literally not a single part of the child's skin exposed but that on her face and a small amorphous portion of her leg near her knee and most of her clothed body is essentially entirely obscured by long hair and a giant boa. If it's sexualized, then so is my grandma going to bingo.

There's been more sexualized stuff on Nick Jr. (Stephanie is a legendary pedo fap icon, even making an appearance in the pedo visual novel that is in my username. They wiped a good portion of the clips of her in her classic outfit, which was later changed for obvious upskirt reasons, off of YouTube though, so that's the best example I could find at a glance. It's actually not strictly from Nick Jr. either as it is apparently a clip from Icelandic TV before the Western adaptation of the show, but she wears the same outfit in at least one season of that and in many cases exposes herself more (along with doing the same song and dance featured in the clip).)

Trying to say this in the least accusatory/inflammatory way possible, but I find it interesting how the posters here who are at least somewhat anti-woke and presumably anti-pedo (at least in explicit communication) can rant all day about how woke types are supposedly so silly for being on such a hair trigger about anything that might be right-coded, trying to get some truck driver or whoever fired for using the "OK" hand sign, and yet not look at what they so often decry as "sexualized" in regards to children and think that they're maybe doing basically the same thing, overreacting to every minor possible-but-probably-not-even-and-if-even-still-barely-anything instance of their chosen "worst thing imaginable" (or perhaps "bitch eating crackers"), which maybe explains the oversensitivity) issue (which for the woke left is equivalently racism). For example, this is another commercial from Korea that was also criticized as inappropriately sexualizing the young girl in it and it also just seems like not much at all to me.

Of course, I'm basing my opinions off of actual empirical evidence of what might actually trigger a sexual response in the types of people who might sexually respond to media of children were it sexualized (like me), which I suppose is not necessarily the standard your average "normie" is going to use, and yet it does seem to me to be a better one. After all, if "sexualization" doesn't have anything to do with actually being sexy or at least trying, then what is it?

Conversely, to me certain segments from this network television program did in fact depict some quite sexualized/sexy children (that is, I watched them more than once, occasionally at certain times) and yet I didn't seem to hear a peep of protest about them (except on /pol/, where the complaints were about the interracial pairings of some of the kids). (There is a search engine suggestion for "dancing with the stars juniors controversy" but it seems to be about people disagreeing with the final winner of "Disney Night".)

It very much often strikes me as similar to left-wing outrage: frequently random, illogical, and disproportionate with the offense even from their point of view, in my perspective. (Yet, much like on woke venues in regards to anything right-wing, due to how much even suggesting "This isn't even that [X]." tends to get you accused of actually being a crypto [X]ist (which in my case doesn't apply as I am an open [X]ist here), I am essentially the first person that I know of to bring this issue up in neutral company at all.)

Edit: Sorry for the sloppy proofreading. Two links have been fixed if you couldn't figure out they were just YouTube videos.

Yeah, the disproportionate, bizzare outrage for pedophilia is fairly universal in modern culture, and odd. It's particularly funny - and obvious something's not right - when rdrama does it. People who are more than happy to joke about mayocide or gay rape or whatever suddenly start seeing pedo conspiracies when someone makes the exact same jokes, almost word for word, that's tangentially related to something pedoish. (unless it's "homosexuals reproduce by r[a]ping kids", then it's okay).

It's so disproportionate it ends up completely mistargeted, too, and thus doesn't really prevent any child grooming (which incidentally is rarely literal pedophilia, 14yos get groomed wayyy more than 8yos do, the 'ITS EPHEBOPHILIA NOT PEDOPHILIA' thing is, in practice, crimestop preventing one from even trying to understand the risks involved). There are at least tens of thousands of parents who are incredibly angry about LGBT childrens books, tv shows, or teachers 'grooming' their children while their child is literally groomed into dming about nsfw things on discord or tiktok. Yet it can't be any other way - kids spend thousands of hours talking to random people on the internet, but much less time discussing lgbt stuff with teachers or reading books from school libraries.

14yos get groomed wayyy more than 8yos do, the 'ITS EPHEBOPHILIA NOT PEDOPHILIA' thing is, in practice, crimestop preventing one from even trying to understand the risks involved).

What kind of people do you hang out with, that "ackshully it's ephebophilia" doesn't immediately out someone as a pedo?

There are at least tens of thousands of parents who are incredibly angry about LGBT childrens books, tv shows, or teachers 'grooming' their children while their child is literally groomed into dming about nsfw things on discord or tiktok.

Aren't a lot of the places where this happens LGBT-themed as well? I mean, think, they breach the boundary of talking about sexuality with kids by design, it's pedo paradise.

Yet it can't be any other way - kids spend thousands of hours talking to random people on the internet, but much less time discussing lgbt stuff with teachers or reading books from school libraries.

Last I checked kids spent half their day at school, also what's taught there can contribute to kids having lower boundaries around sexuality in other contexts.

What kind of people do you hang out with, that "ackshully it's ephebophilia" doesn't immediately out someone as a pedo?

That's what I meant. That's the "crimestop". Wanting to groom a 14yo girl ie "ephebophilia", and wanting to groom an 8yo girl ie "pedophilia", are just not the same thing. And even if you're not endorsing either, just drawing the distinction, it does, yes, "immediately out one as a pedo". As most men are biologically attracted to anyone post-puberty*, most men have the ability to want to groom a 14yo girl, and if you're a social outcast / lonely / spend a lot of time on the internet, the lack of other options + lack of moral/shame-based reasons not to plus easy opportunity makes it very common. And those people aren't pedophiles, it's an entirely different thing from wanting to fuck 8yos.

Aren't a lot of the places where this happens LGBT-themed as well? I mean, think, they breach the boundary of talking about sexuality with kids by design, it's pedo paradise.

90%+ of them are not. They're just places for discussing television shows, video games, memes, etc. LGBT places are overrepresented for various reasons, but it's a 2%->5% overrepresentation rather than a 2%->80% overrepresentation.

Last I checked kids spent half their day at school, also what's taught there can contribute to kids having lower boundaries around sexuality in other contexts.

Yeah, but school is a regulated and regimented many-to-one environment. Teachers don't have one on one time with kids, teachers are teaching the material rather than having personal interactions with the kids, etc. Opportunities for having emotionally or sexually charged teacher/kid discussions are much rarer in 8 hours of school than 2 hours of after-school social media use.

*although because desires are 'on the same level' as social norms, most men suppress it (good, one would think), so they don't "notice" it. This is the same thing as "my wife is the most beautiful woman in the world to me" or "i'm not attracted to anyone under 25", but much stronger since it's a universally held taboo. Some people who say this are straight lying or telling white lies, but others genuinely believe and feel/experience it, because desires are commensurate with social norms or personal beliefs. But even among the most pious the 'natural' desire to fuck anything that's somewhat attractive is still there, and resurfaces quickly if e.g. they divorce.

also, it's pretty funny to be discussing this in the child comments of the self-proclaimed pedofascist, but witches or something idk

And those people aren't pedophiles, it's an entirely different thing from wanting to fuck 8yos.

You know (and not that I'm disputing your words in general, since hebephilia and pedophilia are indeed different), since you seem to be of the opinion that most men are naturally attracted to pubescent but not prepubescent girls, you might be interested in this study in which only 9 out of 80 subjects showed no arousal (via penile plethysmography) to nude photographs of prepubescent female children (compared to 4 for no arousal to nude photographs of adult females). Further, 21 out of 80 (26.25%) exhibited arousal to the prepubescent females equaling or exceeding their arousal to the adult females. (Keep in mind this was apparently just basic slides of nude girls standing there too, not the erotic hyperstimuli little girls are putting of themselves on social media nowadays, so I bet it would be much higher with that.)

(Yes it's definitely an aging study and just one (though it cites multiple prior studies itself that found similar results using the same methods) but despite its shocking results and it being cited 105 times according to Google Scholar there are barely any newer studies that have replicated its methods that I can find, with the newest phallometric studies in this meta analysis (which is authorially biased and pro-pedo, but the studies it cites are legit) being from 2000. I guess that shows you how little society is interested in confirming it.)

Perhaps I'll make a post about it sometimes, but it seems to me like "Legal, moral, and social concerns aside, most men are attracted to (on some level even if suppressed) and would bang an attractive 14 year old if they could." is the semi-approved "everyone knows" limited hangout uncomfortable (for modern men) truth meant to obscure the additional but equally valid truth that if you replace "14 year old" with "8 year old" the numbers don't go down much at all and still constitute probably a majority and at least a significant portion of men (which is not to say most of them would necessarily pick the 8 year old over the 14 year old (though a significant minority, possibly up to 25% of men though likely smaller, apparently would), but they'd probably still pick her seems like).

calling such an image "sexualized" seems to me to be a major stretch.

It's the designated stereotype 1930s-boudoir-dancer-prostitute outfit; you can more easily accept that label if you make that association (I don't find that outfit attractive even when it's actively intended to be, and have no idea why people like it aside from maybe 'it leaves so much to the imagination' and connotations of 'those clothes will definitely be coming off soon').

The Korean commercial is... yeah, it's absolutely bait, but it's restrained and aesthetically pleasing enough that the people complaining about it can be mocked for what being mad about it says about them (weird how "no u" can work as a counter to claims of murderism).

overreacting

Don't traditionalists and progressives also agree that sex in general is bad with the relatively small distinction that progressives are more tolerant of the corner cases that don't involve a straight biological woman (using their blanket of "sex positivity" to deny a distaste for it)? I've yet to see one example in their propaganda literature that even portrays a woman at all much less a girl; it's exclusively boys and men interacting in ways that would only be appealing if you're reading it for the articles oppression narrative.

And clearly they're worried about nothing; we put more (admittedly, non-straight) sexual material in front of the average child's eyes and the rate at which they're getting laid is in massive decline. Maybe the trads doth complain too much; teaching that straight sex is morally wrong and that women are right to lord it over men because men have a duty to women is exactly what's being taught. Narcissism of small differences, after all.

After all, if "sexualization" doesn't have anything to do with actually being sexy or at least trying, then what is it?

"Sexualization" is the spear counterpart to "his advances made me feel unsafe".

Both have definitions of "what the viewer sees" embedded in it, and the "Hello, Human Resources?" implicit call to action is the same- it's a way to abuse the fact that people will/want to go white-knighting for the "victim", and men have figured out that invoking the social power [that having daughters give them an excuse to use] is as effective and just as abusable as women invoking the social power [that the capital class give them an excuse to use].

I don't think it's any more complicated than that; the only time anyone appears to use the word is when speaking critically (one would just say 'sexual' otherwise).

Conversely, to me certain segments from this network television program did in fact depict some quite sexualized/sexy children (that is, I watched them more than once, occasionally at certain times) and yet I didn't seem to hear a peep of protest about them

The protest space from the traditionalists is already closed over "all dancing is sexualization", so neither they nor their opposition can back off their positions even if they wanted to. Of course, neither side can consistently spot it which... suggests to me that the outrage is fake.

Don't traditionalists and progressives also agree that sex in general is bad

I feel like that depends on which traditionalists. Abrahamic traditionalists? Probably in most cases. Those informed more by pre-Abrahamic traditions? Powerful and dangerous especially in the wrong form or hands maybe, but I don't think automatically bad.

"Sexualization" is the spear counterpart to "his advances made me feel unsafe".

This is definitely an interesting comparison to make and I do largely agree.

The protest space from the traditionalists is already closed over "all dancing is sexualization"

Most modern dancing anyway. I don't think anyone fully believes that all dancing including many traditional, intentionally chaste forms of dancing is sexualized.

You linked twice to the domain namzso.eu, which I don't believe is registered. Is this a typo, or some weird local domain resolution?

Whoops, sorry. That's terrible proofreading of mine in this case. It's supposed to be namazso (which is a public mirror) as it is in one link. (I actually had it as another one but that one is more obscure and linked to me so I changed but I guess got the one I changed it to wrong twice as I don't use it very often legitimately, I had to run off a bit after making the post, and the word isn't in my standard mental dictionary to correct.) The links have been fixed.

Judging by the URL structure, I'm pretty sure it's supposed to be a more private YouTube mirror (clearly it's so private it doesn't even exist).

Sorry, that's terrible proofreading of mine in this case. It's supposed to be namazso (which is a public mirror) as it is in one link. (I actually had it as another one but that one is in fact more obscure and linked to me so I changed but I guess got the one I changed it to wrong twice as I don't use it very often legitimately, I had to run off a bit after making the post, and the word isn't in my standard mental dictionary to correct.) The links have been fixed.

Just like the Dr. Suess issue, this is what happens when you let greedy families of authors keep control of a work. Put in the public domain, and a thousand versions could come out.

I've just downloaded the full collection as ebooks.

My kids can have kindles full of samizdat.

Got a link? I used to love Dahl's books as a kid, and this especially disappoints me.

I just want to second that if there was an online library with PDFs/kindle files/whatever of uncorrected works like these, I would want access to it.

In unrelated news: https://torrentfreak.com/z-library-returns-on-the-clearnet-in-full-hydra-mode-230213/

It's an underappreciated fact, possibly explaining to some extent the geopolitical and racial animus too, that very much of the world's piratical freedom is created and maintained by Russians. Not the old Cypherpunk part that's mostly reserved to the highly technical (Freenet, i2p, obscure IRCs...) but the publicly accessible freedom. I think this owes both to Communism and to its opposition in the form of Samizdat – and of course to older cultural traditions of coping with an effectively unbeatable but not highly competent power.

Libgen, Sci-Hub (well, to the extent that Elbakyan is Russian, but culturally she totally is), Z-lib, Tornado Cash and other parts of crypto infrastructure, Telegram, Vkontakte (back when it was owned by Durov), Hydra marketplace until Germans took it down; and that's only the explicit tip of the iceberg, when you start digging you find much more. Collaborating with Westerners on this kind of stuff, however, can give you the Aaron Swartz experience, with your project ending up gutted and mothballed, with parts repurposed for political ends.

It's ironic that I often have an easier time finding some Western author in Russian. E.g. here's Dahl – Flibusta is nearly flawless as a prose repository. Who knows, maybe it'll make more sense to do back-translations from there than hope for Amazon availability of old versions. @hydroacetylene knock yourself out.

Oh right, here's a better plan. https://www.btdig.com/search?q=roald+dahl+books

«BTDigg was founded by Nina Evseenko in January 2011.» Figures.

Hint: anal pain

Those random search suggestions never fail to make me smile.

I'm not sure what the relation with https://bt4g.org is. It has a nicer interface.

…After we are done with, I wonder if Hajnalis will figure out how to make these things accessible to more than the small circle of cranky snobbish Electrical Engineering grads, or if their… conscience will get the better of them and tip the scales in favor of regulation, surveillance and omnipotent woke schoolmarms.

My feelings towards Russia carry a number of ambiguities, but I will say I feel a definite sense of approval toward its existence as the global cultural counterweight to America, even after the fall of the Iron Curtain. Describing it as Samizdat in the form of a modern cultural "black market" (at least for westerners) is an interesting framing and lines up nicely with a lot of my more nebulous ideas of where the global powers sit.

This btdig thing is great. I think it's trying to tell me something

/images/16769142718173819.webp

How is Z-lib compared to libgen? I've always used the latter, but their search is pretty bad and there's a lot of low quality dupes of everything.

In my experience libgen has slightly higher quality, but Zlib has books that are not on libgen.

How do you know whether a given torrent is safe from viruses?

Libgen and z-lib have direct download, no torrent required.

..how would a torrent spread viruses ? I'm curious. Unless you torrent an unknown executable or script and execute it, I don't really see a way.

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It's unclear to me whether they're taking the original versions out of print or not. I'm fine with a censored version being available for purchase, so long as the originals are too. Maybe they could slap a warning label on them, like the Looney Tunes Golden Collections.

If these versions are the only ones that are going to be available, then that's disturbing. This is worse than just removing the books from print. It feels like rewriting history. There needs to at least be a note inside that this isn't Dahl's original artistic vision.

As we learned from the sudden banning of Dr. Seuss from every mainstream online marketplace, there won't be any integrity. These will be treated as the only versions that ever existed, and we have always been at war with Eastasia.

The part of the Seuss debacle which really chafes my hide is the works were chosen for extinction, not even the clumsy editing of censors, or the clever redactions the liberal Geisel would have made to his own works to update them to the new ethos, were he still kicking.

On Beyond Zebra is one of my formative memories: a world tour of things so fantastic that they need to be described with entirely new letters like Yuzz, Thnad, and Spazz. …Oh wait, “spaz” is as bad in England as “retard” was here, and both are now hate speech. Ol’ Ted would have renamed it “Plazz” or “Svazz” or something.

One of the other cancelled Seuss books was a gorgeous book full of watercolors he painted, very unlike his usual cartoon style. One page would have needed editing.

BTW, Geisel was a liberal, but he also - at least for some time - held some views about racial and ethnic differences that would get him so much cancelled noways. He most likely abandoned those views later in life, but as we know, for cancellation purposes there's no excuse even for what you did in kindergarten. You can see some examples in an excellent book The Seuss, the Whole Seuss, and Nothing but the Seuss - which I fully recommend for many reasons outside finding material to cancel Geisel.

He (and later, his estate) were known for cracking down pretty hard against pro-life groups using his biggest cultural touchstone, "A person's a person, no matter how small," from Horton Hears a Who. It really refers to oppressed people-groups, "A people's a people," but it doesn't roll off the tongue as easily.

I borrowed the book on his early commercial works from the library, and he was as bold as any cartoonist back then in contributing to the general miasma of ethnic caricature. He survived the zeitgeist by his children's book publishers being far more careful than he, and by shifting his views with the times as most Democrats did.

When the whole brouhaha happened, I made a point of getting every "problematic" Dr. Seuss book and finding out what exactly the thoughtcrime was (it was usually stereotypical depiction of people of non-European ethnicities, though in a couple of places I couldn't really figure out what it was). The main problem was most of the libraries I could access had rather long waiting lists on those, but I could get every problematic one eventually without paying anything out of pocket (obviously, I paid for the library from my property taxes already, but that's a different tangent). So I must conclude they weren't entirely banned, at least not from the libraries.

banning of Dr. Seuss

If there was a peak wokeness, the banning of Dr. Seuss books would be it. It was hard to find anyone who supported that.

But it was easy enough to find people who believed it wasn't actually happening. Who rationalized it by the existence of the second hand market. Despite ebay banning resale of the books because "nobody should profit off hate." Or they rationalized it because it was only a few Dr Seuss books. It wasn't even the ones most people had heard of. Or they went full "It's a private company and they can do whatever they want."

Turns out being unable to find anyone who actually supports it is cold comfort, when it's easy to find people willing to cling to any excuse that the thing they would absolutely not support isn't actually happening. It's just right wing misinformation and scare mongering.

While it is trivial to offer old editions of books alongside new ones, the idea is that new ones are better, so I wouldn't bet on it and, for usual reasons, would expect this to go the way of non-kosher food, only faster.

Now consider this manifestation of the dictatorship of the minority. In the United Kingdom, where the (practicing) Muslim population is only three to four percent, a very high number of the meat we find is halal. Close to seventy percent of lamb imports from New Zealand are halal. Close to ten percent of the chain Subway carry halal-only stores (meaning no pork), in spite of the high costs from the loss of business of nonpork stores. The same holds in South Africa where, with the same proportion of Muslims, a disproportionately higher number of chicken is Halal certified. But in the U.K. and other Christian countries, halal is not neutral enough to reach a high level, as people may rebel against forceful abidance to other’s religious norms. For instance, the 7th Century Christian Arab poet Al-Akhtal made a point to never eat halal meat, in his famous defiant poem boasting his Christianity: “I do not eat sacrificial flesh”. (Al-Akhtal was reflecting the standard Christian reaction from three or four centuries earlier — Christians were tortured in pagan times by being forced to eat sacrificial meat, which they found sacrilegious. Many Christian martyrs starved to death.)

I belong to a religious group which bans intentional consumption of actually halal meat, but not unintentional consumption or consumption of "halal" meat which does not follow the correct ritual. The statement that comes to mind on this was that Australian halal certified meat was OK to eat because the Australian imams grant the certification extremely loosely, like at the point of playing a tape recorder with the relevant prayer on it in the manager's office while making no other changes, and that Australian slaughterhouses for that reason practically all get halal certified without actually making any changes except buying the $100 stereo and $20 CD because it lets them sell to Saudi Arabia and Indonesia for $120 and the cost of sending some emails to an imam.

the way of non-kosher food, only faster.

I certainly hope so, because if there's something there is absolutely no shortage or deficit in the US that is non-kosher food. BTW, I hope you don't confuse kosher and halal, because those are completely different. Also, making food actually kosher if it's actual food and not something made out of a set of enumerated chemical components in a factory (like Coca-Cola) would be rather non-trivial task usually requiring at least periodical specialist human oversight. Which means outside of areas where there are a lot of religious Jews around (Israel, New York, LA, etc.) maintaining a kosher food production would be a non-trivial task to achieve. It is possible, but requires significant additional investment and in most cases outside areas above would be non-viable commercially. There could be non-commercial kosher food sources (e.g. a synagogue could run one, supported by donations - I've seen that happen) but nothing even remotely suggesting non-kosher food would go away in any type or form anytime soon anywhere.

In fact, even in Israel, where maintaining kosher has significant advantages, there is no shortage of non-kosher restaurants and grocery stores, which are very popular.

Sure, this only really works on the scale of a single store or restaurant: instead of offering both kosher and non-kosher (or halal and non-halal: the same principle applies, and for most non-Jews and non-Muslims the impact is similar) food, the easier choice is often to drop the type alienating a minority of customers entirely. Though for something like a chain supermarket, or Amazon that's a unified marketplace dominated by a single store (that is also invested in reputation of its partners), this logic also holds, with minor caveats.

I agree that Taleb's example with peanut allergy and peanut non-availability on planes would be more apt. But people with allergies are not really a political block and it has more to do with insurance, probably.

Can you easily find pork in Israel? I can't in Turkey.

the easier choice is often to drop the type alienating a minority of customers entirely

I don't know how it looks in theory, but I do know how it works in practice. In practice, in the US, the number of kosher restaurants outside of the "Jewish" areas is vanishingly small. On the contrary, the number of non-kosher restaurants in, say, Israel is quite decent. I didn't ever bother to pinpoint why exactly Taleb's argument doesn't work there, but it is absolutely clear it does not, and thus why it does not becomes rather a theoretical exercise.

Can you easily find pork in Israel?

Yes, very easily. For example, here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiv_Ta'am or here: https://mania-m.co.il/ (sorry their English site seems to be broken, but the pictures are pretty clear).

There are also many restaurants that do not serve pork, but still do not maintain official kosher certification - either because of costs, or because of limitations on recipes and processes that involves. E.g. cheeseburger is very much not kosher, even if you use kosher beef. Thus, McDonalds has 2/3 of his locations is Israel non-kosher and 1/3 kosher (no cheeseburgers there, obviously). They do use kosher meat (so here Taleb's theory is correct - it'd be uneconomical to use two different types of beef) in both kinds.

Is kosher beef not much more expensive than non-kosher? In the USA there is a difference in price of 2-3 times. I have a hard time imagining that not making it economical to use two different types of beef.

I think in Israel, it wouldn't be much more expensive in practice, because you won't find any local supplier that would be big enough to supply McDonalds and yet not already set up to supply kosher beef - because most of other large consumers in Israel do want kosher meat. Meat is quite expensive in Israel, and limits on import is one of the reasons. But I think this applies to non-kosher beef too, which likely would be imported. In general, meat politics in Israel is complex and pretty bizzare and changing a lot, I am sure I'm not up to date on all the details.

One thing I find most amusing about the dominance of kosher-friendly cuisine in the US is that literally every time I read a recipe from an American website, the recipe always specifies to use "kosher salt", rather than just "salt". This is true even if it's a recipe for pork chops, or prawn curry, or any other recipe which is non-kosher by definition.

This is (used to be?) how Americans say "sea salt." "Salt" usually refers to table salt. Sometimes you need to specify large crystal salt instead of fine table salt.

It used to properly be called "koshering salt" because it was the type of salt used in the koshering/kashering process for meat. But then English did what English does and now nothing makes sense anymore.

Ah hah! I am enlightened. Thanks; is been wondering about this for ages.

It has to do with standardization, you're specifying to use salt that has this size and composition so your seasoning is the same as the recipe creator. Chefs like kosher salt because the grains are larger than in regular table salt (which is rather fine) but not as large as say a finishing sea salt which might be really big and flaky. They also don't have any anti-caking agents, so I guess it's more "pure"? In general it's also saltier due to having more sodium content, so if you substitute just regular table salt instead of kosher salt, your dish will be under-seasoned in my experience. None of it has to do with religion for most Americans, product just happened to be good enough to become a standard for chefs.

Huh, TIL.

Just checked my kid's copy of The Giant Peach. The centipede sings about the fat aunt. We got it at Costco, in a boxed set. They still seem to be selling it sometimes. Act now!

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Children's songs, too.

Drei Chinesen mit dem Kontrabass (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drei_Chinesen_mit_dem_Kontrabass) is about three Chinamen, and the way the song is sung plays with the idea of trying to speak foreign languages.

Nowadays the song has apparently been corrected, and is now about...fruit. Fruit talking to each other.

Glad I got the box set of his works before this went down. Hard to believe that, surrounded by all of my screens and TBs of HDD space, I still find myself hoarding dead tree books. What a silly time to be alive.

I donno if this is exactly culture war or not. But it involves a major culture war figure.

I finally got Starlink on my isolated rural property. I'm having a guy mount it proper this week. So for now it's just on my north facing porch, maybe 3 feet above ground level, totally blocked to the south by my house, surround by trees. It's working 10x better than a competing satellite internet company Viasat, with a proper mounted dish pointed exactly where it needs to go with zero obstructions. We had some light rain on Sunday, and Starlink powered on through it with small micro-losses of connection regularly, where as Viasat was just totally down probably 80% of the day.

It's night and day. Starlink, on their best effort plan, pulls about 80 Mbps down, 10 up, with a 50 ms ping. Viasat pulls about 110 Mpbs down, 0.40 mbps up, with an 800 ms ping. So while Viasat seems to technically have more throughput strictly down, it's upload bandwidth and ping are off the charts terrible. I can also say, experientially, that Viasat speed test number does not reflect their actual download speeds. I'm lucky for Steam to suck down games at 1 MB/s on Viasat, and it was happily peaking over 11 MB/s, but mostly in the 5-6 MB/s range on Starlink.

To say nothing of the quality of service. I'm paying about $300 a month for Viasat, with an extra $15 a month for their "easy care" which gives me a discount on service appointments. Down from $500 to $200. When I had some roofers accidentally nudge the dish a fraction of a degree, that was $200 to have fixed 3 days later. Starlink just points itself exactly where it needs to point. And it's $110 a month. There is no small difference in the data caps either. Viasat has me paying $200 a month for 100 GB of "priority data", and $40 for another 30 GB when I run out. I typically have to buy two of those a month, hence the $300 bill. Starlink has a 1 TB data cap. I don't think I've ever used that much data in a month in my life.

10 times better, 1/3rd the price, indescribably more convenient. If this were being run by a public company, or a company with different stake holders, there is no way they'd have overshot the target in such a small market by so much. It would be minimally better, minimally less expensive, and it's hard to say how much they'd care about convenience. If it made them more money, they'd gladly make that worse to charge you for service appointments. I can only attribute the astounding quality of service to Musk's naive ideological commitment to the vague cause of "more internet for more people".

Which brings me to the culture war angle. It's been the subject of some number of headlines that Musk's financing of Twitter is an enormous albatross around his neck. He's forced into liquidating stock almost monthly to keep it up. I've seen a lot of talk that it might force his hand, and cause him to lose control of some or all of his companies. So I'm going to register a prediction here. Probably the first noticeable casualty of that, is that if anyone ever gets their hands on SpaceX, they are going to monetize the ever loving fuck out of Starlink. Jack the price up to $150-$300 a month, remove all the waitlist and oversell every area, throw harsher data caps on everyone, you name it. With the added culture war angle that if it ever occurs, SpaceX will almost certainly fall into the hands of Neoliberal Adherents, the Starlink mostly services rural red tribers, or grey tribers that have defected. So it'll be hard not to interpret changes in policy as being punitive towards political enemies.

On the subject of Musk, I reckon he reveals just how much management skills are ignored and denigrated in society. In about half the Musk conversations I've seen, people say 'oh it's his engineers who make the brilliant inventions, he just does media, finance, (did you hear about his father's SOUTH AFRICAN diamond mine?) cult of personality'

If the quality of engineers is all that matters, why don't we just sack all the engineers at NASA, who've done fuck all after the Space Shuttle, which was itself enormously cost-inefficient?

Hiring the right engineers, putting them in the right places and managing their projects in the right way is essential. Few know how to do this right. Bezos's rockets aren't successful - but he's rich enough to get good engineers. If he knew how to pick them and manage their work, it stands to reason that his rocket company (founded in 2000, launching only small rockets that don't even achieve orbit I believe) would be more high-profile. Perhaps there's a separate skill needed for running rockets than running Amazon or he didn't spend enough time on Blue Origin or whatever, I'm confident that Bezos has a similar capability.

Musk interviewed and decided upon the first thousand or so employees at SpaceX himself, he clearly did a pretty good job of it. I recall from the same book that he was poaching people off the F-35 program, people who were basically solely devoted to a single bolt on the fuselage or something of that nature. The established space launch companies were all stifling bureaucracies.

Similarly, Napoleon's soldiers did all the fighting but the general himself was indispensable. Napoleon picked out the Imperial Marshals, planned campaigns, often decided where battles would be fought and made the critical decisions in combat. That's the essence of military genius. Musk has business and project management genius, achieving impressive results fairly quickly. His wisdom and political skills are more dubious - Bezos might have the upper hand in that less obvious domain.

I don't like a lot of things about Elon, but it can't be denied that projects he's involved in are ambitious, difficult, and — occasionally — successful. Say what you want about his means, politics, manipulation, fraud, etc., the man gets things done, and that's respectable.

Very often successful. What's the average success rate for startups.. 15% ? And how many Musk companies are still operational ?

And not by fraudulent or political methods - e.g. no amount of fraud or politics or manipulation can orbit payloads. And his company just tested the most powerful launch vehicle ever.

Sure, he's engaged in what's probably fraud (with Tesla autopilot especially), however, given his parentage, that's really not a bad track record.

Musk while he has problems, seems like a far better person than his father.

If Maye Musk is to be believed, Elon is basically a product of fraud.

Depends on how you define success. He's incredibly ambitious with SpaceX; I don't think he would say he's succeeded until people are living on Mars. Many of his projects have failed/are failing: The Boring Co., Twitter (IMO), Neuralink... again, he's incredibly ambitious. It should be expected that he fail at least a few times. As for comparing his projects to the average start-up, you have to consider that the perceived success or failure of a start-up is determined by the investors' view of its future. When you're the investor, or when you control the money, whether your projects fail or not becomes a decision you make. He's parlayed his success with PayPal (not a flattering story for Elon) into enough wins to keep going and that's it.

Is it really a culture war idea to suggest "If someone buys this company, they will try to monetize it over a shorter timeframe?"

Are price increases(which are the most obvious route to monetize) really culture war in this economy?

Who are "Neoliberal Adherents"?

The sorts of people running companies steering hard into ESG and DEI. Making the right mouth sounds about equity, and creating special programs to advantage the usual minority client populations while generally being terrible for everyone regardless.

In my experience, "neoliberal" is basically a sneer word among woke people to characterize more moderate social/economic positions (e.g. Hillary Clinton is a neoliberal because she loves global corporations too much, etc.), so the fact that you seem to think it means the opposite basically confirms my belief that there is no consensus on who neoliberals are, other than that they are bad and control everything.

It's the ideology of the world order. What you're describing is tribes of neolibs arguing about what it means to be a neolib, but they all are within it, none of them fundamentally disagree with the direction of the modern social project, they just bicker about how committed or practical methods of advancing it are.

Compare Islamists, or Dengists.

People call it that for lack of a better word to describe modernist globalism. But what ideology is the "party of Davos" if not neoliberal?

I think it means, basically, "pro-globalhomo".

Neoliberal is definitely not woke. Neoliberal is Reagan and Thatcher and maybe Tony Blair if you're stretching it. Only in fringe online circle (like the reddit neoliberal sub) does neoliberal have anything to do with woke. When the average person uses neoliberal, usually in a pejorative sense, they mean "Those bad people who supported free market reforms at the expense of unions or the coal miners (or whatever)"

The confusion comes from the fact that the word mostly gets used by far-leftists to refer to people like Hilary Clinton, which gives everyone else the impression that the term means something like "deep Democrats who want to regulate everything to death". I basically never see it used for people like Reagan or Thatcher except in exactly this scenario of explaining what neoliberal really means.

I always got the impression that the dissident right thinks of neoliberals as "socially liberal, economically conservative". Ergo, allowing corporations more latitude to exploit workers and push for stuff like LGBT, abortion, etc. because "they want the labour force completely atomised from traditional social relations and derive all its identity from its career and place in the firm". This is a very common line among right coded tankies. I suppose there's some truth to it, but I suspect the "real reason" why wokeism is pushed so hard is no single reason at all. There is no Machiavellian scheme behind any of this, just some people (especially from the urban middle class) with whom there is legitimate purchase of wokeness because they see it as the next wave of progressivism which has already been the dominant ideology for decades, companies and public figures that parrot whatever's the most fashionable in elite consensus, activist types who will themselves to believe in this, casuals who just about believe the first thing they see in the headlines, and dissidents who are frustrated with it all.

I suppose there's some truth to it, but I suspect the "real reason" why wokeism is pushed so hard is no single reason at all. There is no Machiavellian scheme behind any of this, just some people (especially from the urban middle class) with whom there is legitimate purchase of wokeness because they see it as the next wave of progressivism which has already been the dominant ideology for decades

I suspect the exact opposite. No one was seeing wokeness as the next wave of progressivism at the beginning, even pointing at it would get you accused of weak-manning or nut-picking. Even if you were paying attention to nothing other than /r/ssc /r/themotte, you could see wokeness bubbling up towards the top, the attempts to hand-wave it away going from "it's just a couple of crazy kids on tumblr" -> "it's just a couple of crazy kids on university campuses" -> "it's just some Karens in HR (but Damore had it coming, BTW)" -> "it's just a couple of cynical CEOs insincerely mouthing woke slogans" (<-- you are now here), you could see it seizing the reins of power, and imposing itself on the masses.

I think the only reason people come up with these mundane non-Machiavellian explanations, is that it allows them to position themselves as non-supporters of wokeness, without becoming it's opponents. It's the most comfortable spot for a lot of people, as declaring yourself as a supporter requires you to commit to some amount of self-flagellation (not to mention having to answer for all the crazy stuff being pushed by governments, companies, ngo's and activists), but coming out as an opponent gets you branded as a rightoid, even if you're otherwise an outright communist, and there's nothing worse than being a rightoid.

I suppose a counterpoint to the 2nd paragraph would be that it's also comforting to blame a select few groups for the cultural crisis, but it's much more black pilling to believe that a sizable chunk of the masses isn't merely being misled, but is very much within its own agency when it demands more wokeness. And to some extent, what's most fashionable among the woke urban middle class does seem to direct the conversation. For instance, throughout the last decade, it was all feminism that was pushed so aggressively as the centrepiece of woke. Culminating into MeToo which went on until 2019. It's still being pushed of course, but the spotlight is on BLM since the George Floyd protests and the whole "Defund the police" campaign. I just cannot rationalise such a scheme without making it seem even sillier. There does seem to be some pressure from below.

Well, you're a bit behind the times, because even BLM fell out of fashion post-Rittenhouse, it's all about trans issues now, which will also fall out of fashion because of the medical scandal around transgender care for minors.

I sympathize with the pushback against being psychologized, since as you rightly point out this is something anyone can do to anyone, but in my opinion the mundane theory just doesn't hold water. If there was pressure from below, you shouldn't have seen accusations of of nut-picking in the past. If there was pressure from below you shouldn't see wokeness having to rely on censorship, shadow-banning, and algorithmic supression. If there was pressure from below, you should see that Harry Potter game bomb in terms of sales, and fuddy-daddy game journos struggling to explain it. Everything about these mundane explanations flies in the face of observable reality.

I just cannot rationalise such a scheme without making it seem even sillier.

It seems pretty brilliant from where I sit. It's like fighting a hydra, for every head you chop off, two new ones take it's place.

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Neoliberal is definitely not woke. Neoliberal is Reagan and Thatcher and maybe Tony Blair if you're stretching it

If "neoliberal" can mean Reagan and Thatcher, then it can also mean woke. This is like a Rings of Power fan complaining about being unfaithful to the source material.

I think it's use by that subreddit has led to a lot of people on Reddit thinking that that is actually what neoliberal means.

For a big part of my life, the only person I had ever seen purposely identify as a neoliberal was Scott Sumner.

Lol another word butchered by the left. Milton Friedman basically the reviver of neoliberalism ain’t woke.

Milton Friedman

Yeah, he died in 2006 at the age of 96.

This is objectionably low-effort. Don't post like this please.

It's worth noting that United Launch Alliance (ULA), one of their main competitors, is a joint Lockheed-Boeing project rather forcefully spun off from lawsuits between the two major market players. In the interest of continued service (neither going bankrupt and ending production), they were effectively forced to work together in 2006. I think your prediction is right: a forced sale to one of the larger government contractors, followed by re-evaluating the continual loss-leader strategy Musk seems to like.

On the subject of Starlink specifically, I had a project to estimate the market feasibility of such a service before it started launching, and at least my result was that it probably can't be profitable at the list prices. There is a chance it could be selling to the government, but there aren't enough people in OP's position to pay landline ISP prices to fund the operating costs for the launches, the ground stations, and staffing.

The US at least has spent a ton of money running fiber to rural areas in the last few decades, which doesn't require too much ongoing upkeep.

My (Musk-skeptic) view is that Starlink exists to provide a regular payload for Falcon 9: despite promises that cheaper launches would increase demand, they seem to have largely flushed out the wait lists and have actually seen a decline in commercial launches in recent years. "Exponential growth" wasn't going to keep banner launch rates up without making payloads themselves. The satellites and ground terminals themselves seem to work, although not as well as originally promised: do they have cross-links like Iridium had in the 90s? How much power do the ground terminals draw?

The economics of private companies mean that its hard from the outside to view their profitability. On the other hand, I've long predicted that empire dissolving, and I've admittedly been wrong about the timeline for that so far.

My understanding is that the Starlink has three potentially profitable strategies, all of which depend on inter-satellite links to really be breakthroughs:

  1. HFT without fiber latency. This is where clients will be able to pay eight to nine figure subscriptions per year, with major routes forming a high speed web between New York, London, Brussels, Singapore, and Tokyo.

  2. Military/aviation. It's hard to put a dollar value on military contracts, but this is probably seven to eight figures per year total, since military already has their own communications web.

  3. Worldwide consumer access with less than worldwide infrastructure. Note that once access (downlinks) are installed for the above contracts, the marginal cost to expand civilian access to the globe is almost nil. The cost of satellite launch may be spilt between customers across the entire broadcast range: Africa, Europe, Asia, all the ocean shipping and cruise ships, etc.

And it's $110 a month

Not bad, though outside of rural areas, internet prices are already much cheaper and far faster in most of the West outside the five-eyes countries (where internet prices are absurdly expensive) and population density is much higher. Musk spoke about bringing internet to far-flung places but how many people can afford these prices in rural India? Seems like he'd have to cut prices by 90% to make it viable.

Given how important it appears to be for Ukrainian efforts, I suspect that its true utility will be in the military domain and potentially B2B, too.

Seems like he'd have to cut prices by 90% to make it viable.

Once the satellites are up, he can do this and still make money -- the marginal cost of new customers is nearly zero, and the dishes can be trivially geolocked so Americans can't just ship units from India for home use.

The dishes themselves are unavoidably expensive due to being quite a bit more complex than a normal satellite dish, but this opens up some sort of business model for somebody to buy a dish and set up a mesh network in each village or whatever.

Given how important it appears to be for Ukrainian efforts, I suspect that its true utility will be in the military domain...

I haven't seen anything mentioning Starlink anywhere in coverage of the Ukraine conflict! I mean, there was that wave of stories covering the donation, most of which predicted it would bring vital help to Ukraine's military, but those were coverage of an American company being generous--and likely at the behest of the same company's talented and experienced P.R. team--and not technically coverage of Ukraine.

Remember Seattle's CHAZ/CHOP? After the place was cleared, a bunch of local businesses and property owners sued the city and now they all reached a settlement. One part that definitely didn't help Seattle were tens of thousands of deleted text messages:

The city of Seattle has settled a lawsuit that took aim at officials’ handling of the three-week Capitol Hill Organized Protests and further ensnared the former mayor and police chief, among others, in a scandal over thousands of deleted text messages. The Seattle City Attorney’s Office filed notice of a settlement Wednesday in U.S. District Court, just three weeks after a federal judge levied severe legal sanctions against the city for deleting texts between high-ranking officials during the protests and zone that sprung up around them, known as CHOP.

[...]

Attorneys for the more than a dozen businesses that sued the city, led by Seattle developer Hunters Capital, sent a series of letters to the city in July 2020 — after another lawsuit over the violent police response to the protests — demanding that any evidence pertaining to the city’s alleged support and encouragement of the zone’s creation be retained, according to the court docket and pleadings.

U.S. District Judge Thomas Zilly concluded last month that officials ignored the notifications, sending the so-called Hunters Capital lawsuit to trial on two of five claims and dismissing three others. In doing so, Zilly issued a blistering order that leveled crippling sanctions against the city for the deletion of tens of thousands of text messages from city phones sent between former Mayor Jenny Durkan, former police Chief Carmen Best, fire Chief Harold Scoggins and four other ranking city officials during the protests.

The judge found significant evidence that the destruction of CHOP evidence was intentional and that officials tried for months to hide the text deletions from opposing attorneys.

In doing so, Zilly issued a blistering order that leveled crippling sanctions against the city

I'm imagining the judge as some sort of Godzilla-sized ant creature spewing jets of hot acid across Pioneer Square, BLISTERING hundreds of bystanders! And permanently CRIPPLING many more! Disfigured and mamed for life! Let's hope the judge doesn't start SLAMMING people into the pavement, EVISCERATING and GUTTING them with his mandibles, or BLASTING them with additional acid streams.

The absolute state of modern journalism.

I mean, that certainly could be the prompt behind a political cartoon.

And yet I still don't know what the sanctions actually were. Deleting text messages that are pertinent to a case is destroying evidence, which is a crime, right? So the people who did it are going to prison, right? Right?

U.S. District Judge Thomas Zilly concluded last month that officials ignored the notifications

The city didn't ignore notifications, officials did.

Mayor Jenny Durkan, former police Chief Carmen Best, fire Chief Harold Scoggins and four other ranking city officials during the protests.

Don't sanction the city, sanction the people. The city didn't delete texts, people did. Throw those people in jail, fine them until they are destitute, and make an example that misconduct is punished personally.

Mayor Jenny Durkan, former police Chief Carmen Best, fire Chief Harold Scoggins and four other ranking city officials during the protests.

Believe it or not, those people were the moderates who were trying to keep things sane. If you go to /r/Seattle they are trying to throw Durkan and Best under the bus because they are not left-wing enough.

Durkan and Best, to their credit, did eventually dismantle the zone after the two teenagers were murdered by Antifa. Other voices, especially radical members of the city council, deserve much more blame.

Don't sanction the city, sanction the people. The city didn't delete texts, people did. Throw those people in jail, fine them until they are destitute, and make an example that misconduct is punished personally.

I completely agree, but Qualified immunity would like to have a word with you. If cops can steal $225k during the execution of a search warrant with no repercussions, what makes you think anything anything would happen here?

Explain to me why Chauvin wasn't protected by Qualified Immunity, then. Or the cops in Memphis.

Your example does little to influence me other than to raise the level of contempt I have for judges and courts. That seems blatantly against the Fourth Amendment, but what good are parchment rights in treacherous hands?

Qualified immunity traces back to 1982, when the U.S. Supreme Court announced a rule that government officials would be liable only if their specific actions had already been held unconstitutional in an earlier court case. They called the new rule “qualified immunity.” The Court’s decision was a drastic departure from the historical standards of government accountability. At the founding and throughout the nineteenth and earlier twentieth centuries, courts simply decided whether a government official’s actions were unlawful and, if they were, ordered a remedy. It was up to the other branches of government to decide whether the official should be reimbursed (if he had acted justifiably) or not (if he had acted in bad faith).

Treacherous indeed. I was going to blame Burger, but he was the only one dissenting.

You're correct to point out that my answer was incomplete. The default state is sovereign immunity, where anything the government does is by definition not illegal or criminal. Of course, governments can choose to waive immunity, which is why people are allowed to sue a city bus for running them over or something. For criminal prosecutions, there is a legal obstacle and a practical one. Sovereign immunity protects criminal prosecutions, as is the case in a recent SCOTUS case involving prosecution of a Turkish bank and as Nicaraguan President Manuel Noriega tried to have happen. Those examples are both foreign sovereigns, and the law for domestic sovereigns is a bit more complicated and depends on the jurisdiction. Sometimes criminal laws create an intentional double standard depending on whether the person committing the act is an agent of the state or not, as was the case until recently in Washington state where a police officer charged with murder required the prosecutor to prove "evil intent" (something not required when prosecuting a peasant). Beyond the state-specific carve-outs, there's the practical reality of governments generally being reluctant to punish one of their own. This reluctance is sharpest with police officers given the intimate working relationship they have with prosecutors. It still happens (as it did with Chauvin) but only in extreme circumstances, not as a matter of course.

Those reasons explain why criminal prosecutions are both legally and practically rare, something which would be politically difficult to change, because why would the government choose to ruin a good thing? At this point the only alternative method of redress if a government official commits a wrong is a civil suit. §1983 and similar laws explicitly waive sovereign immunity to allow civil suits, and made the field wide open. The text plainly stated that any citizen could sue every official acting under color of any law for any violations of any rights. And as relative outsiders, civil attorneys wouldn't have the same reluctance about going after "one of their own". That's at least the ideal, except as you saw, Qualified Immunity has significantly gutted §1983's previously open field to the point where it's functionally worthless.

Qualified immunity doesn't explain the whole story, but it is a significant reason behind the nobility's lack of accountability.

Qualified Immunity has significantly gutted §1983's previously open field to the point where it's functionally worthless.

That seems like a gross overstatement, given the number of lawyers who seem to make a good living filing 1983 actions, including actions for police misconduct.

Qualified immunity only covers civil trials (mostly in the context of S 1983 and Bivens torts), not criminal charges. The problem for criminal charges and cases like Jessop is more that there's no chance of the state wanting to bring a theft charge against its own employees, even where, as in Jessop, one employee had already plead guilty for a different crime committed on the job, just one that the government cared about because it interfered with a drug trial.

((And along with the special Fuck Kim Davis clause, "don't harm marginally-resisting arrestees, even on 'accident'" is one of the few things judges sometimes consider "well-established law", though sometimes not.))

You can look up the current King County prosecutor (Leesa Manion) and Washington State attorney general (Bob Ferguson), but I don't think you'd need to make too many guesses about their political alignments.

I was born and raised in the state. I'm familiar with Ferguson. He's likely to run for Governor when Inslee decides to move on (please, soon). Manion doesn't ring any bells, but King County is blue as the deep sea. The KC Exec is going on fifteen years in office, and the KC Council are dominated by Dems year in, year out.

Explain to me why Chauvin wasn't protected by Qualified Immunity

  1. Qualified immunity does not apply to criminal charges.

  2. "qualified immunity, as a federal doctrine, does not protect government officials from liability under state law. E.g., Johnson v. Bay Area Rapid Transit Dist., 724 F.3d 1159, 1171 (9th Cir. 2013); Jenkins v. City of New York, 478 F.3d 76, 86 (2d Cir. 2007); Samuel v. Holmes, 138 F.3d 173, 179 (5th Cir. 1998); Andreu v. Sapp, 919 F.2d 637, 640 (11th Cir. 1990)." Mack v. Williams, 138 Nev. Adv. Op. 86 (2022).

  3. Qualified immunity is qualified. It does not apply to clearly established rights.

I would give a caveat to 2: many states have their own statutory or common-law qualified immunity doctrines, or other doctrines with similar effects. Washington State's discretionary immunity rule isn't the worst, but while the standard of 'good faith' is somewhat stricter, it's not that strict. But, yes, the general 1983-style rule is mostly federal.

Isn't 3 pretty worthless as a restriction in practice? They keep making each rights violation more and more specific so that it's never been violated before. I'm on mobile and can't pull up specific examples, but I do remember there being some ridiculously specific rights violations.

Worthless? No. Courts deny qualified immunity all the time. See this study finding that it is relatively rarely successful. Which is not to say that it is not nevertheless successful too often.

But it is almost certainly true that the bad cases in which QI is granted get plenty of press, but unless you follow Short Circuit, you never hear about the cases in which QI is denied.

I don't think "relatively rarely successful" is an accurate summary, as much as the lead-in might want to play otherwise. The surprisingly low 'success' rate of QI it highlights in the header comes from taking a list of 1983 claims in five jurisdictions "brought by civilians, alleging constitutional violations by state and local law enforcement agencies and their employees" that reached the trial phase where QI could have been brought, and then counting only those where it was brought and resulted in a complete dismissal of all claims on QI-specific nexuses.

((Also, its procedures are 'did Bloomberg specifically catch a QI motion', which... likely undercounts.))

If you're actually interested in how often QI motions are brought and completely denied, the study gives a number closer to 30-40%. Which is still higher than I'd expect! (I don't think it breaks out those denied on "not clear) But still much larger than "relatively rarely successful", or the 3.6%/3.9% it brings in the earlier summary. There are some valid reasons to include cases dismissed for other reasons in the denominator, or where QI 'only' eliminated most counts, or where the defense did not bring QI (and maybe some cases where the LEOs were not acting under official duties?); there are valid reasons to exclude non-LEO cases. But it limits the study heavily, as does its inability to break out why those denials occurred.

Nevertheless, a 30-40% rate is a far cry from "worthless." And this Reuters data looking at appellate court decisions on excessive force shows them letting cops off on QI in a minority of cases, though 1) it varies by circuit; and 2) it is nevertheless too high, probably.

More comments

Don't sanction the city, sanction the people. The city didn't delete texts, people did. Throw those people in jail

I said it with regards to a suggestion last month about making examples of gain-of-function researchers for Covid, and I'll say it again here: you can't fine people for fucking up on high-skills jobs, because if you do you'll never get competent applicants for those positions - they'll go study a discipline with a career path that doesn't carry a jail risk, instead. So then you'll only get incompetent applicants who didn't have the brains to switch to a less risky career, having incompetent people in the position is more dangerous than having criminal people in the position.

This sort of thing is one sphere of human activity where holding people responsible for their crimes is actively detrimental to the greater good.

Sorry, but the current (terrible) practice of punishing a faceless organisation is nevertheless the least terrible of all the options. Well, aside from encouraging voters to stop electing crooks, but no-one's cracked that problem since Pericles.

People in the private sector get fined and jailed for fucking up all the time, and there doesn't seem to be a shortage of competent applicants for those positions despite the risk. Why not?

CHAZ wasn’t just an oopsie of city leadership. They deliberately decided to keep it up. It wasn’t an innocent mistake, an accidental screwup. It is totally fine to sanction people for deliberately using the power of their position for evil.

More specifically, they embarked on an easily foreseeable train wreck, and should be held accountable. Just like a doctor or engineer who makes the same category of deliberate unforced error.

Huh? If I committed even unintentional negligence in my private sector business I could be fined and lose my licenses and my industry has no shortage of applicants - why would it be different for public sector employees?

So then you'll only get incompetent applicants who didn't have the brains to switch to a less risky career

No, I think it's the reverse.

The competent applicants are all in the private sector (where punishments for incompetence or malice exist- wages are higher as a result), and the incompetent applicants are all in the public sector (where the protections you described exist- ignoring the black swan event that is "the public gets so angry they just kill you").

The public sector also has a unique failure mode where incompetence and political motivation are indistinguishable from one another, and intentionally not punishing those things just serves to amplify the power of whatever political opinion can best leverage who/whom. Additionally, the public sector can excuse the same sort of who/whom bad behavior from the private sector in a way the private sector can't do to the public sector (outside of news media, of course), so the consequences of not reining them in are worse.

I think the framework for civil engineering demonstrates a pretty strong case against this: criminal charges for negligent construction or operation of a business are rare, but they're not unheard of, and fines or suspensions of licenses targeting individuals are fairly common. And civil engineers are very aware that even if things like the Hyatt Regency collapse weren't brought to court, that was as much by the grace of grand jury as by law or norm.

Yet, despite being a difficult and math-heavy field, civil engineering remains a popular career path, and the Sword of Damocles has not frightened away all of the competent or risk-averse candidates. There's certainly some point where a lower standard of proof, or broader concept of liability would, but given that the Hyatt Regency guys weren't tarred and feathered I'd argue we're a little on the too-soft side even recognizing Joint Over- and Under-Diagnosis.

This also isn't really specific to any one field. You have to fuck up really bad to get twenty-five counts of involuntary manslaughter running a food processing plant! But people have done it.

If you're one of the umpteen US generals who lied to the public and the politicians about winning the war in Afghanistan, making progress and so on, then you ought to be punished. There's already a problem of there being too many suck-ups in the military, there are only so many slots open to become a general so they have to please all of their superiors. But the way to fix this isn't to make the system even more uncompetitive and stratified. We need to open up more new posts, appoint people who get results. Real-world success should be rewarded and failure punished. If we don't get rid of the old guard who lose wars to illiterate goatherders with 1/1000 of our resources, how can we expect to win wars against strong opponents?

These people and systems are not functioning at anything near peak performance. It is possible to win wars against opponents you massively outclass, though this might be a novel concept to the average NATO commander. Or even if we can't reach a vaguely decent level of performance, could we aim for 'dignified exit within a year of realizing we can't achieve our political goals' as opposed to 'subsidizing a pedophile-run army and funding corrupt Afghan officials for hundreds of billions in the vain hope something will change and we'll suddenly achieve our goals'?

People obey incentives. If we don't provide a serious negative incentive for global failures like 'losing the war', they'll simply optimize for avoiding local failures like 'bad press coverage' or 'falling behind schedule' or 'looking bad to my superiors'. But these local failures are there precisely to avoid global failures. The whole point of press coverage and oversight is to correct mistakes rather than letting them get entrenched. Only a severe punishment for global failure can get people to acknowledge local failure. If admirals and top brass knew they'd face serious punishment if their warships crash into civilian freighters (and kill seven sailors in the case of the USS Fitzgerald), they'd take the time to train them better and maintain their fleet properly rather than accept every political request to do missions and run themselves ragged.

If we don't punish the gain-of-function researchers who unleashed this catastrophic disaster, they will do it again and again. We already obliterate the careers of geniuses who have sex in the workplace. And then we wonder why fertility rates are falling... If we're going to punish people, it should be for some kind of actual failure.

I'd be very happy to see a world where there wasn't a single gain-of-function researcher, we should be moving towards that scenario at great speed. Militaries do need generals - but there's a lot of competition to become a general. There are plenty of aspiring officers.

On the other hand, if you save the govt 500K or 1M through some method, you should get a large bonus for your work.

but no-one's cracked that problem since Pericles.

I don't know, the Venetians had a decent system

Seattle police have given few details about the shooting and said the crime scene was disturbed before they arrived. They’ve declined to answer questions, saying it remains an active investigation. No one has been arrested.

one man says, standing next to the crashed Jeep, blood stains on his sweatshirt. “And our people weren’t having it. We already had their right tire out and we [expletive] drew down and took them out the car and we gave them the service.”

And three years later nobody has been arrested, because leftist street gangs can confess to murder on camera knowing the prosecutor won't go after them. That's a bigger deal than some capitol hill hipster business losing a few dollars in knick knack sales, but we get accountability for one and not the other.

Is Alex Jones the appropriate comparison here? IIRC, Jones was perceived as causing harm because unrelated people harassed the people he was talking about, and the highly unusual scale of the penalty was justified by claiming that he failed to comply with the court's instructions in delivering evidence to the plaintiffs. Here the scale of the harm is much higher, and the connection to those committing it plausibly much more direct.

Does it really come down to "government agents are above the law?"

The scale of the punishment had exactly zero to do with his failure to comply with discovery. That failure resulted in a default judgment on the issue of liability alone.

The scale of the harm is not greater here. The parents were subjected to years of egregious harassment. In contrast, the CHOP was in existence for less than a month.

  • -14

How many people did Alex Jone's listeners shoot as a result of the Sandy Hook Controversy? How many did they kill. How many business did they force out. How many buildings did they burn?

Temporal length is not the only means of measuring "damage."

No, temporal length is not the only measure of damage. That is why I said "egregious harassment."

How many did they kill.

None, but the Seattle lawsuit in question did not seek damages for the death of anyone, so that is irrelevant.

How many business did they force out.

As I recall, many of the Sandy Hook parents were forced out of their homes.

How many buildings did they burn?

None, but the lawsuit does not allege that the CHOP people did so either, so that is not relevant.

As I noted earlier, proving damages was going to be difficult for the Seattle plaintiffs, and if they had any realistic expectation of being able to prove huge damages, they would not have settled (of course, we don't know yet how large the settlement is; perhaps the settlement is indeed huge).

As I noted earlier, proving damages was going to be difficult for the Seattle plaintiffs, and if they had any realistic expectation of being able to prove huge damages, they would not have settled (of course, we don't know yet how large the settlement is; perhaps the settlement is indeed huge).

Everything you've said seems correct, as far as it goes. Do you see the disconnect between the questions being asked, and the answers you're providing, though? If so, do you think that disconnect is worth bridging?

To spell it out a bit, the core question you're responding to, as I understand it, is "is this outcome just, and if not, what went wrong?" Many here, myself included, believe that the city either directly or indirectly facilitated a very, very serious crime, and we would like to believe that our existing social mechanisms are capable of holding those who did so responsible. If they aren't going to be held responsible, it would be good to examine why that is: did the plaintiffs file the wrong type of suit? Hire the wrong lawyer? Something else?

People balk at the plain reading, which is that in many places in this country, state and local governments will allow leftist thugs to threaten, beat and murder ordinary citizens, and then carefully avoid investigating, arresting or prosecuting those responsible, either because they're too afraid or because they are allied with the thugs. Most people here lack legal training, but retain a belief that the situation isn't quite so bad that large-scale insurrection and public murder can be swept under the rug by the powers that be so long as the criminals are their criminals. So when they see exactly that happening, they grope for some alternate explanation, some way to rationalize the apparent madness. Responses like yours, while impeccably factual, do not actually resolve the deeper question.

Okay, so the local government allowed insurrection and murder, and then they destroyed large amounts of evidence of their deliberations and orders when they were sued over it. What follows? What should follow? What should we learn from this incident?

If they aren't going to be held responsible, it would be good to examine why that is

The most obvious answer is that you're legally shit out of luck if the government fails you. @gattsuru posted clear and egregious examples of governments utterly failing at their most basic duty of protecting their citizens, including Warren v. DC. That's a case where three women called the police during a home invasion. The cops showed up, casually looked around, then shrugged and left. The three women were beaten and raped over the next 14 hours. SCOTUS told everyone to pound sand because the state doesn't owe you shit.

Though practically abhorrent, the ruling is legally well-founded. With sovereign immunity as the well-established default, there's nothing within the four corners of the constitution that imposes any obligation on the state to lift a finger. The attenuated recourse is that maybe someday enough people are pissed that they get voted out of power. Passing a law or an amendment could fix this issue, but there isn't much appetite for it.

I remain deeply ammused that not only is "Social Contract Theory" bunk, but its official court doctrine that its bunk.

The state is under no obligation to protect you. You pay taxes and obey it because you are its slave. There is no exchange of of any good or service for you're obedience... you're just a coward who obeys because you're afraid

I actually think the federal government had an obligation to intervene under the Republican government guarantee. CHOP claimed to be a new government that failed that guarantee and therefore there was an obligation by the federal government to crush this new government.

the core question you're responding to, as I understand it, is "is this outcome just, and if not, what went wrong?"

Well, if that is the question, it is a bit misguided, in the following sense: The Seattle lawsuit was not seeking justice in the abstract; it was seeking compensation for the financial losses suffered by a very specific set of plaintiffs. You asked, "Is Alex Jones the appropriate comparison here?" -- The answer to that has to be "no," because the damages suffered by the plaintiffs in the two cases is very, very different. So, of course the outcomes will be very different (though we don't yet know the precise outcome of the Seattle case).

Responses like yours, while impeccably factual, do not actually resolve the deeper question.

No, but it wasn't meant to. That deeper question is not a legal one, so the comparison to Alex Jones is not particularly fruitful. Whether the Seattle govt officials should be punished for the larger ostensible harm is a political question that ultimately must be decided at the ballot box; in contrast, whether Alex Jones should pay for the damages suffered by the parents is very much a legal question.

I think the objections you bring are reasonable and accurate: the people in this trial represent a handful of businesses with relatively minor harms over a shorter period.

There's a deeper question that is, if not legal, at least practical rather than political: under the neutral rules of our justice system, is there anyone bringing comparable tort here as in Jone's case? And that's actually kinda interesting, because there are!

Both the mother and father of Lorenzo Anderson, the 19-year-old killed at CHOP, have brought separate torts against, and while the mother's case is unlikely to succeed, the father's case received a half-million settlement. The father of Antonio Mays, the 16-year-old killed later in CHOP, only recently filed notice for a lawsuit; I'm not able to find much other information about that, or about the 14-year-old killed at the same time.

There's still some fun questions here that are descriptive, rather than normative, underneath that!

Why are these cases not being brought quickly and at high profile, and sometimes not being brought competently or at all? (The rioting goon squads are often judgement proof and difficult to identify for either political alignment, but where progressive defamation tends to mix a very distributed message by a variety of actors where the rich ones near-universally have deep legal defenses, Jones had a lot of cash and an obvious single name and a shallow/incompetent/intentionally-bad legal defense, and you don't even have to notice where the judges have a skeptical eye, or how the politics of the legal profession might have made pro bono or contingency services more available in one case than the other.)

Others are legal, rather than political -- are there no state claims that would not be subject to federal qualified immunity or state discretionary immunity doctrines, and if so, why are they not used against politicians and police in cases like this? (The Washington Tort Claims Act is theoretically broadly available, and there are relevant torts, but even after a successful trial judgement can not be served against the state against the will of its legislature, and the state attorney general is required to provide costs for individual state employee defenses if "purported to be in good faith" and "in the scope of official duties", and "any employees who receive such a defense can not have a valid judgement executed against them" instead being covered by the state at its choice.)

Didn't people get murdered in CHOP/CHAZ? It may not have lasted long, but there was quite a bit of damage.

In the western legal tradition, violent crime is not a tort, or at least not exclusively a tort. If Brown murders Jones, the case is The State of Maryland vs Brown not Jones vs Brown. This is because violent crime causes lasting damage to the social fabric. I would argue that just the establishment of a law-free zone without any violent crime does a ton of damage to the social fabric. The knock on effects of delegitimizing the state's agents of violence are where most of the damage was.

Didn't people get murdered in CHOP/CHAZ?

Yes, but the plaintiffs were not seeking damages for that.

I would argue that just the establishment of a law-free zone without any violent crime does a ton of damage to the social fabric

Yes, absolutely. But, again, the plaintiffs were not seeking damages for that.

The issue raised by the OP was why the two lawsuits led to differing amounts of damages. How "bad" an event is in the abstract is rarely an issue in a lawsuit. A lawsuit is about whether the defendant wrongfully caused damage to the plaintiff.

Why won’t there also be criminal proceedings for the people who destroyed evidence?

Because all the new city officials who would bring those criminal proceedings think "There but for the grace of God go I".

It's the same reason that normal Presidential administrations don't dig through the dirty laundry of previous Presidential administrations - because if you do it to the last guy, what's to stop the next guy doing it to you? Sure, the guilty go free, but that's better than e.g. Brazilification, where everyone's campaigning from their prison cells so they can overturn their own politicised convictions.

Because there's no crime to speak of. The only thing that comes close is Obstruction of Justice, but that only applies in criminal cases, not civil. Spoliation of evidence in a civil case is shitty, but it's a civil wrong, not a criminal one, and the appropriate punishment is sanction by the civil court.

Washington has an evidence tampering criminal statute. Although the statute says physical evidence, there's at least once case where someone was convicted for trying to break a cell phone to hide incriminating text messages. I'm sure a creative prosecutor can find way more relevant statutes.

Those are all very good points. I wouldn't say that a conviction here would be easy, but prosecutors have chased after plenty of far more ethereal charges before (and sometimes won). All I was saying is that if officials are not being prosecuted here, it's not because the statute is lacking. Compare that to the Loudoun County Schoolboard issue, which was stymied by the lack of a witness tampering law on the books in Virginia.

I hope you understand that I'm not disagreeing with you.

All I was saying is that if officials are not being prosecuted here, it's not because the statute is lacking.

I think there are several states with open meetings and records laws (uncertain about the specific one in Washington state) in which this might rise to a criminal act. But that would also depend on the state wanting to bring charges.

I thought about including something like this but I decided against it because these laws don't really apply here. For instance, Pennsylvania has an open records law, but it's only concerned with whether an agency is obligated to provide certain records; it doesn't contemplate that an agency would actually destroy records to prevent disclosure. Furthermore, there are plenty of exceptions to disclosure, notably, a record that reflects

the internal, predecisional deliberations of an agency, its members, employees or officials or predecisional deliberations between agency members, employees or officials and members, employees or officials of another agency, including predecisional deliberations relating to a budget recommendation, legislative proposal, legislative amendment, contemplated or proposed policy or course of action or any research, memos or other documents used in the predecisional deliberations.

If the text messages in question were the mayor and police chief strategizing about how to handle the protest, they could conceivably fall under this exception and thus not be subject to public disclosure. But whether or not they're subject to disclosure has no bearing on whether they have to be produced in discovery, because open records law has no bearing on the discovery process. There is, of course, a separate criminal offense for destroying public records, but that wouldn't really apply here because it's unclear if it would apply to text messages. Historically, all the cases involving this (at least the ones that made the news) involved falsification or destruction of actual records that are required by law to be filed with the state. For example, there was a case a few years back where the operator of a water treatment plant was submitting falsified water quality reports to whatever agency monitors such things to cover up the fact that the water wasn't up to standard. I'm not saying that text messages necessarily couldn't be classified as public records under this law, or under whatever comparable law they have in Washington, but it's not an obvious prosecution.

The one I'm most familiar with is the Texas Open Meetings Act, which seems to place some stricter requirements on "meetings" with although that would depend on the details of city governance (were these "meetings" with the mayor and city council or is the mayor authorized to directly command the police department without deliberation?) and the text messages at play. Anecdotally, I've heard that politicians are advised to not discuss business outside of announced, scheduled meetings, but charges are infrequent (although not non-existent).

Ever heard of Qualified Immunity? It protects state agents from consequences of conduct which, if done by a peasant, would otherwise result in criminal sanctions. Detectives can lie on the stand, prosecutors can hide exculpatory evidence, jail officers can scald the skin off a prisoner, cops can even kill people, and there's basically nothing you can do about it.

edit: this answer was incomplete, I expand upon it here.

Qualified immunity only covers civil trials, so in theory criminal charges wouldn't be impossible. One of the parts that makes Jessop go from tragic to tragicomedic is the detective in charge of the search, who almost certainly would have been involved in the alleged theft, had already plead guilty to other on-duty-crimes by the time the case had gone to the 9th Circuit. Of course, there's no private right to bring criminal charges in California, and criminal law isn't particularly focused on making people whole, so gfl.

((Also, technically, prosecutors fall under prosecutorial "absolute immunity", as do judges fall under judicial absolute immunity, which manages to be worse: even clear and knowing violations of well-established law can not be brought to heel in civil courts, so long as those actions are done under their official duties. But that's mostly a nitpick, given that "knowing violations of well-established law" might as well be a black hole.))

You're correct, I linked to a more complete answer.

With the concept of adverse inference existing in US law non-criminal law, it seems strange that a mere settlement, instead of verdict finding the City responsible was reached.

Even if you're trouncing your opponents in a lawfight it can be smart to settle because juries are weird and unpredictable.

According to an article in the linked article, the trial court determined that "he’ll instruct the jury that it may presume the text messages were detrimental to the city’s legal position and that there’s significant circumstantial evidence they were deleted intentionally." That isn't all that helpful.

Plus, the plaintiffs might have a tough time prevailing on appeal, given that this is a civil rights action and their claims -- that the city violated their procedural and substantive due process rights and that the city effected a taking of their property -- are clear stretches under current jurisprudence. And there also might be problems proving causation re damages.

Finally, after trial the attorneys fees award would likely be much larger than the damages, so I would not be surprised if the city agreed to settle for damages + attorneys' fees to date.

Yeah, unfortunately there's an absolute charlie foxtrot when it comes to deprivation of rights where the government ignores or merely assists a bad third-party actor: Castle Rock v. Gonzales Warren v. DC, Lozito v. New York City and Riss v. New York (cw: rape, cops being bastards) are just high-profile examples of the general rule against the public duty to protect any individual meaning basically anything, with DeShaney v Winnebago County (cw: child abuse, 'cops' being bastards) showing how close the state's assistance and negligence could get even in the most extreme of harms.

That's why the motion to dismiss phase of this case had already reduced to some esoteric theories of a "right-of-access" taking and "nuisance", while explicitly blocking any direct due process or conventional takings torts. And honestly I'm not sure how strong those theories could have gone.

Archive link for the article: https://archive.is/pmqAT

Thanks for this, how does it work exactly? Does it always allow you to circumvent paywalls?

I honestly don't know. It has worked in over 90% of cases for me so far. It is also very good in case someone sneak-edits the article in question (which has become rather common lately).

If I’m reading this right, Hunters Capital kind of slung every accusation they could manage, and now at least one has reached settlement.

  • allegations that the city violated their right to due process

  • allegations of negligence

  • illegal taking of their property and civil rights

  • the city “directly participated” in creating CHOP through its decision to provide… accommodations during the three-week protest.

  • “right-of-access taking”

I think these correspond to the 5 claims mentioned, but I’m having a hard time getting the order to load. If so, the first three were dismissed; the other two went to jury trial, and this settlement must be one or both of them. Any guesses? As a layman, I’d expect the right-of-access claim to be more damning, but that’s just because it’s harder to follow.

Also, I shared the ghola’s reaction to BLISTERING judicial smackdowns. Quite the turn of phrase.

The order divides them into

  1. allegations of violations of due process (of "right of free movement and the right to remain in a public place of one’s choosing")

  2. allegations of violations of substantive due process (of "state-created dangers" that "increased the likelihood of property damage, loss of business revenue and rental income, personal injury, loss of use of property, and other damages".)

  3. a) unlawful per se taking ("of the right to exclude others from their properties") and b) right-of-access taking ("deprived them of the right to access their properties")

  4. negligence (which seemed to focus for procedural reasons on Seattle's non-enforcement of fire code and street public meeting safety laws?)

  5. nuisance (for not-directly-statutorily-authorized-actions that blocked roads and, indirectly, lead to graffiti, damages, loud noises, etc)

Claims 1, 2, 3a), and 4 were dismissed with prejudice. Claims 3b and 5 held to rest on matters of contested fact to be determined by jury.

Right of access is a Washington-specific variant of the right, and it requires that "access to their properties was eliminated or substantially impaired", and that "the government action in question has actually interfered with the right of access", and "was more than mere inconvenience at having to travel a further distance". It could be relatively lucrative if pressed successfully, but it's very dependent on how much the jury believed people were unable to get to a building and how much those interference were closely tied to state action.

The nuisance claim's... complicated. The law-school answer is that public nuisances don't give a right of action under common law, but in practice there's a sieve of exceptions and Wisconsin's law Washington's law explicitly allows anyone with particularized harm to bring a suit. But there's a host of immunities and exceptions. Seattle focused on the theory that municipalities are immunized from the negligence of their employees, and nuisances that were 'really' negligence wrapped in a fancier word don't escape that. But the plaintiffs at least claimed that the nuisances were actively caused and abetted by Seattle's actions and policies rather than mere failure to enforce, so this didn't work. In turn, though, the nuisance claim's damages are much smaller, and harder to show as caused proximately by Seattle's actions. As a layman, I think it's more likely to get some acceptance by a jury, but I have no idea what the actual damages could be, and for a variety of reasons the normal target of an injunction isn't very useful.

That said, I'm not a fan of the case law that restricted claims 1 and 2 to their limited form, and that resulted in them being thrown out so quickly.

Washington State is a land grant University in Pullman. Go cougs.

Washington is a state of the union.

And your link goes to Wisconsin, for some reason.

Whoops. Corrected, and thanks.

Are takings claims ever not thrown out? I never understood why people even make them with the reception they get.

In this case, the right-of-access taking is one of the two (along with 'nuisance') that didn't get thrown out and is a takings claim, if a weird one, though I don't know how well it would have lasted in a Seattle jury had it not been settled.

For takings per say, the very simple cases -- state grabbed 'real' (aka land) property for public use, no process or procedures, not even a fig leaf of a police purpose -- have decent odds of surviving to trial (or get settled earlier than that), and we just don't hear much about them because they end up depending on facts-of-case matters that usually aren't outrageous even when they're wrong. Or in the case of the federal government, get eaten by the Tucker Act and that's its own mess in a different way.

But most of what you hear about is complicated in some way: either a regulatory taking, or at least claimed to fall under the police purpose exception, or it's not a permanent or whole taking, or it's an item rather than 'real' property. Sometimes the courts have been willing to accept these, a la Koontz; other times, they're pretty much left fallow. Some part of that's just hoping to get lucky. Another part of that's 'only port in a storm', as the takings clause is very nearly the only remotely likely approach to recovering direct removal of property, since property-based due-process and substantive-due-process claims tend to have even worse odds.

The bigger driver's just that they've got much clearer and generally larger damages. How much do you hope to get from a jury over "bad traffic, unsanitary conditions, and loud noises" as a nuisance in Seattle?

Times are a changing. A lot of the issues related to having to bring suit within the state first and then collateral estoppel. My recollection (could be wrong) is that fed judiciary is re thinking that. The current scotus is much more friendly towards takings claims.

It's Charlie Brown and the football. There's just enough good case law stemming from Lucas and Loretto to make you think that maybe you've got a shot, or maybe the Supreme Court will decide to return to the glory days of the mid 90s and save you from bad precedent. (Hey, it even sometimes works! Cedar Point was a massive win for property rights advocates). There's a small glimmer of hope, so people will keep making the argument and keep getting shot down.


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