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Thanks for the link, this is enlightening in a not very joyful way.
Frankly, this reads like a description from an industry insider who tries to be neutral and cover the viewpoints of many sides. I will provisionally update on it, it seems unlikely that someone would spend that amount of time on spinning a counterfactual narrative with that little potential for mass attention. It also feels plausible given what little I know from the finance industry and what my guess of SJ aims and methods are.
Nor is it AI, not with:
Amen.
More of McKenzie's dry, subtle humor:
On the SPLC ironically lobbying for laws forcing banks to report on NGOs:
Personally, I hate pretty much everything about the system he describes.
Allowing private businesses discretion over whom to conduct business with is good only if the market is working well enough to compensate individual decisions, and there is no systemic force which provides incentives not to work with some groups. If you have (for whatever reason) a monopoly on some good people need, like shoes or air transport or internet access, then I prefer if the state mitigates the impact of that monopoly by limiting your discretion in choosing customers.
Of course, the banking system is even worse than that, because it is tightly regulated by the USG, and the regulators have a lot of leeway:
Basically, if someone were to found a bank specifically for debanked people (excepting the OFAC list), like Nazi orgs or porn producers (though I think there the problem is more credit cards, specifically), they would not get rich by filling a niche left open by the system. Instead, the regulator would crack down on them hard at the first opportunity, and the executives would be lucky to escape with their freedom. "How could I have known that this porn producer would pay an underage porn actor with a fake ID from the bank account" -- "You could just have refused their account proactively, like the rest of the industry".
In a free society, it should be possible for the CEO of a non-criminal business to insult the president without the president shutting down their business in retaliation.
Of course, the potential for selective enforcement is not just to retaliate against banks which allow outgroups to have accounts. Consider:
This seems completely fucked up. If your lie is material in gaining a loan from a bank which you then default on, then I agree that it is reasonable to criminally prosecute you for defrauding the bank. In most cases, this will probably involve forged documents (so you are on the hook for that, which should carry a higher penalty), because when you e.g. apply for a mortgage, the bank is hardly going to take your word when you claim you own some property.
I do not particularly like money laundering, and agree that it is useful to have laws on the books against it to make it harder for criminals to spend their ill-gotten gains. However, McKenzie certainly makes it sound like 18 USC 1344 also applies to people using banking services normally while lying to a bank:
Crazy if true (which I have little reason to doubt). Reading the statue, it seems very plain that a dealer who parks his ill-gotten gains in a bank account (after having affirmed to the bank that it is not illegal funds) and later withdraws them again was not what the legislature had in mind when they wrote it. Heck, I would rather argue for either "2A only applies to its era's firearms" or "2A applies to nukes" than "1344 includes victimless fraud", because either of the first two seems much more solid than the last one.
The overall gist I get is the old 'everyone commits five felonies a day', and the USG gets to pick whom they prosecute.
Also, it seems like for the SPLC, they die by the very same sword they lived by.
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