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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   26334 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 25, 2023

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Some updates from New Mexico since two weeks ago.

Firstly, the court ruled on requests for a temporary restraining order, most pertinently that:

... Defendants New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, New Mexico Department Secretary Patrick M. Allen, New Mexico Department of Public Safety Jason R. Bowie, Chief of the New Mexico State Police and any other New Mexico officials (“Defendants”) are ENJOINED from applying, enforcing, or attempting to enforce, either criminally or civilly, Section (1) of the New Mexico Department of Health’s “Public Health Emergency Order Imposing Temporary Firearm Restrictions, Drug Monitoring and Other Public Safety Measures” (“PHO”) published on September 8, 2023, which reads:

(1) No person, other than a law enforcement officer or licensed security officer, shall possess a firearm, as defined in NMSA 1978, Section 30-7-4.1, either openly or concealed [within complex metric that means Bernallio County]...

In addition, Defendants are ENJOINED from applying, enforcing, or attempting to enforce, either criminally or civilly, Section (4) of the New Mexico Department of Health’s “Public Health Emergency Order Imposing Temporary Firearm Restrictions, Drug Monitoring and Other Public Safety Measures” to the extent it imposes additional restrictions on the carrying or possession of firearms that were not already in place prior to its issuance.

The next hearing, for a preliminary injunction, was originally scheduled for October 3rd, three days before the initial state of emergency was scheduled to end, though I'd expect that gets delayed. How did the governor respond?

No person, other than a law enforcement officer or licensed security officer, shall possess a firearm, as defined in NMSA 1978, Section 30-7-4.1, either openly or concealed in public parks or playgrounds, or other public areas provided for children to play [within complex metric that means Bernallio County]...

It's not terribly clear how this will work, either as matter of enforcement or of law. I'd say that she's trying to maneuver for mootness and standing challenges to the lawsuit, but this is still unconstitutional under Bruen and the state constitution, the loose definition raises serious due process concerns, and it's not even very likely that the state's public emergency law permits it even outside of the right to bear arms problems. This revision to the emergency order can't or at least shouldn't avoid the TRO, and were it a right-wing effort it'd likely just get the judge mad; as it is, the Biden appointee sounded just disappointed during the initial hearing.

Nor, on the other side, have I seen any reports of the video-driven Grisham enforcement had claimed to be bringing during initial protests. On the other hand, even while enjoined anyone who wants to carry needs to evaluate whether they're willing to become a poster child for today's constitutional challenge.

What sort of fallout is Governor Grisham looking at? KOAT7 has a wonderful quote from one of the state politicians:

"People need to realize this is the first time in New Mexico history that a governor could be impeached," State Rep. John Block said.

That is somewhat undermined by reality: No, they don't, because no, she can't.

There's only been one successful legislature-initiated special session in New Mexico history, and its context (responding to a budget's veto) made it far easier to coordinate on top of the far simpler political calculus (the final budget vote passed 90%+ in both houses). The paper gives a single federal Democrat saying he'd be willing to vote yes to condemn Grisham, should it reach the floor of Congress, but the same man voted against considering the resolution, which failed without a single Dem yes, which isn't quite the same as a vote against the resolution (because it was mixed with two other process matters) but makes for awkward bedmates. The Santa Fe New Mexican reports that the state's congressional Democratic party's official position is against a special session or impeachment.

It ain't happening, bruh.

There's been a bit of embarrassment from state politicians and police pushing back -- the state AG, another Dem, did not defend the executive order -- which, fair, kudos. Not the most significant kudos, but worth mentioning.

What about that shooting that motivated this whole thing? NBC reports:

A third arrest was made Friday in connection with a shooting outside an Albuquerque baseball stadium that killed an 11-year-old boy and prompted the New Mexico governor to issue a controversial gun ban. Albuquerque police took Daniel Gomez, 26, into custody a day after two other men were identified as suspects. Police didn’t immediately release further details about Gomez’s arrest.

Romero was already wanted for failing to appear in court in connection with alleged drug dealing, Medina said. Garley happened to be in custody when he was arrested in connection with the killing. He had been stopped by state police on Sept. 13 while returning from Arizona and authorities found a gun and about 100,000 fentanyl tablets in the car, state Police Chief W. Troy Weisler said at the news conference.

Police alleged that the men, both reputed gang members, pulled up in a car and attacked the pickup truck that was leaving the minor league game at Isotopes Stadium.

I haven't been able to find any records showing their CCW permits being pulled. Or that they had CCW permits. For some reason.

Apropos of nothing, a couple other interesting notes in firearms law :

The New York State Police will pay $447,700 to the New York State Rifle & Pistol Association in attorneys’ fees and costs after the US Supreme Court ruled that refusing to grant citizens the right to carry a concealed handgun for self defense violates the Second Amendment. The state National Rifle Assocation chapter had asked for $1,235,567 in fees and costs after arguing that the complexity of Kirkland & Ellis LLP’s work in N.Y. State Rifle & Pistol Ass’n v. Bruen warranted compensation commensurate with the quality and effort of counsel.

On one hand, great work if you can get it. On the other hand, Paul Clement and Erin Murphy, the men who lead Bruen, no longer can, and it's just over half of their old law firm's typical billing rate. The reasoning, such as it is:

Plaintiffs failed to show that this was “a case requiring special expertise [and] that no in-district counsel possessed such expertise,” or that local counsel “were unwilling or unable to take the case,”.. .Plaintiffs’ arguments in support of out-of-district rates are limited to pointing to Plaintiffs’ success at the Supreme Court and the conclusory statements that “few in-district attorneys regularly practice Second Amendment litigation and even fewer practice this constitutional litigation on behalf of plaintiffs against government entities; . . . even fewer in-district attorneys have briefed or argued Second Amendment cases before the Second Circuit and the Supreme Court, like the attorneys Plaintiff selected; and . . . no in-district attorneys have the experience necessary for Plaintiffs’ challenge.”

I expect Clement and Murphy won't exactly cry all the way to the bank, to whatever extent their biglaw contracts covered this sort of case, but neither will it be a big war chest for their Second-Amendment-focused law firm, to whatever extent NYSPRA wasn't forking over those fees well before this point and is down some pretty pennies. Which matters quite a bit given NYSRPA was better titled NYSRPA II, and NYSRPA I was filed in 20_13_. Nor will it serve a particularly strong disincentive to avoid losing future court cases, or, for a matter where New York state might actually be persuadable, pad future court battles with beggaring levels of necessary paperwork to beggar their challengers.

At least they won, right? Well... Back in response to the NYSPRA II decision at the old place, a couple posters had different perspectives (with some format edits for brevity) :

@The_Nybbler:

Yes, the jursdictions which want to ban guns will simply claim historical justification, and the lower courts all the way up to the courts of appeals will pretend to believe them ("a bee is a fish"), and nothing will change. I expect New York's list of "sensitive locations" to include : Banks including ATM lobbies, Subways and other public transportation, taxis and other licensed transportation, All public buildings, All premises licensed to serve alcohol, Maybe all public parks.

You won't be able to practically carry legally in NYC.

@huadpe:

Many, and it would require a whole-of-government sort of rebellion to engage in that level of open defiance. Even if Governor Hochul attempted to enforce the law, state judges would not follow such an instruction, especially as against an explicit binding precedent. I can go through the mechanisms if you like, but the idea that NY would openly defy this ruling is an absolute pipe dream for a few radical accelerationists on either side, and will not happen.

And neither is wrong, and indeed excepting a few quibbles Huadpe's later post is a good overview of procedural protections. No one planted their feet at the door of a school house, so it's not true Massive Resistance, it's just sparking legal warfare. On the other hand, if Nybbler had a time machine or a crystal ball, his description of the Bruen response bill and its reception in the judiciary would have been broader, not more narrow. And on those broader points, the state has been playing with mootness and standing to avoid the obvious revelation that it still does exactly what Bruen says the state may not.

And that's just the explicit stuff. One thing neither Nybbler's list nor I expected:

The NYPD approved fewer new licenses to people requesting permits to carry or keep firearms in their homes or businesses in 2022 than the year prior, data obtained by THE CITY shows — despite the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that found a key provision of the state’s long-standing gun control law violated the Second Amendment right to bear arms.

In 2021, the NYPD — which vets firearm permits — received 4,663 applications and approved 2,591 of them, about 56%, all under the stricter “proper cause” standard the Supreme Court struck down last year. That standard required gun owners in New York to show “proper cause” in order to receive a permit to carry a weapon, but the court said licenses should be granted by default unless there was a specific reason to deny an applicant.

In 2022, the NYPD saw an increased number of new applications — 7,260 — but approved just 1,550, or 21%, even though applications filed in the second half of that year no longer had to meet the “proper cause” standard where applicants had to make an affirmative case for why they needed a license.

It's far from alone, here. Hawaii's response bill has repeated many of the same steps and components, California was just weird for waiting til this year before informing people that their right to carry a firearm is limited to sidewalks. Dick Heller from the 2008 Heller v. DC case is still working on being allowed to own the semiautomatic pistol and magazine he started that whole matter on. Defense Distributed is still fighting its mess of a case.

When I've made motions around this before, people have rejoined that lawsuits are a process: winning a case, no matter how big, does not mean winning everything forever and hearing the lamentations of your opponent's women. There have indeed been where state defiance has lead to significant costs. I don't mean to suggest that the court's never work.

But at the same time, it's hard to even find a pretense that this faces the same level of legal opprobrium or cynicism that favored rights get. Nor is it limited to guns. There's been a lot of Recognition that the aftermath of SFFA v. Harvard would result in a tremendous change in legal discrimination as teams of lawyers would be going through every admissions process in the country, and that's not wrong! But they've done so to hilariously transparent efforts. And there are lesser and lesser-known variants on a pretty wide variety of topics. There's no conservative equivalent that leads a country-wide and overnight shakeup, or even a state-level one, even in fairly egregious matters.

There's an argument that this shows what Really Matters is The Institutions, and while that might feel a little be retroactively defined by whatever conservatives aren't doing or by what they'd face massive discrimination should they wear their hearts on their sleeves -- can I point to Clement and Murphy again, and that even if you had their skills you'd be a fool to think you could follow in their paths -- it's not exactly wrong.

But then we're back to denouement of the post two weeks ago, but more so, and much broader.

I have it on good authority from a friend in New Mexico state politics: Governor Grisham is always proposing crazy schemes, but is reined in by her chief of staff. Said chief of staff was on vacation when Grisham issued this executive order.

That's funny if true (though I'm not finding any obvious evidence supporting it, and it'd be kinda disappointing for a chief of staff who can't delegate for a vacation), but...

Do you know who else was a chief executive always proposing crazy schemes, who had to be constantly managed by his staff, and who had awful hair and little respect for individual rights?

Sorry for the snark, but that, more than the policy being bad, or some in vino moron veritas, or even unconstitutional, is a good bit of what I'm getting riled up about, and have been for a while. There could perhaps be reasons to set certain political actions away from personal liability, or to make them consistently available, but instead we're finding increasing amounts of society insistent on 'for my enemies, the law' as a bedrock principle. Worse than even that, we're simultaneously telling people that their 'betters' can play stupid games with human rights with no personal risk, and they must violate the law at significant risk to challenge it.

This was an exceptional read and summary, and would love to see more posts like this on the site.

I have long since memory-holed how much of a shitshow the ongoing war against the second amendment in the US has become.

imho, I like shorter posts more. they leave more up for interpretation whereas effort posts tend to cover bases

Thank you for writing this update.

I was glad to see the state AG condemn the order. (Though I can’t find the original text of his letter anywhere…) It leaves me wishing there was a more obvious feedback mechanism for an elected official to be punished for flaunting the rules. Grisham ought to be staking something, anything, on her orders’ constitutionality. As it is, she can continue playing stupid games with the law.

Did @TracingWoodgrains post that anywhere other than Twitter? I found it fascinating, too. I tend to think the Long March theory is oversold, but this is a much more defensible version. It’s a particularly good lens for looking at the Trump executive branch: the roster wasn’t even deep enough to fill those positions.

(Though I can’t find the original text of his letter anywhere…)

There's a copy here.

It leaves me wishing there was a more obvious feedback mechanism for an elected official to be punished for flaunting the rules. Grisham ought to be staking something, anything, on her orders’ constitutionality.

I think my frustration is more that there are obvious feedback mechanisms. The state is one of few that allows citizen grand juries to indict her under, New Mexico has blocked qualified immunity in 'most' civil cases and has a few relevant state torts, and federally speaking there's a wide array of laws that could apply. Legislators could call a special session next week and impeach or, if they wanted to be soft-handed, 'just' cut down the NM Governor's emergency powers, including with warnings that they'll impeach next time if she doesn't knock it off. But being existent doesn't make it accessible: to be accessible, some nontrivial number of state legislators or courts or federal prosecutors would have to take things seriously even when someone on their side does it.

And for the most part, suspending part of the constitution just doesn't hit that mark. And while the Second Amendment makes that more clear than most cases, it's not like this is new or even limited to the United States. As much as Kulak might want to pray otherwise, Canada's flirtations and more importantly clear acceptance of the same is plain as day. The United Kingdom, to what limited extent Brits ever had rights to begin with, is running roughshod through the problems as well. There are mechanisms to punish overreach, they're just not swords that cut both ways in any seriously evenhanded sense.

Did TracingWoodgrains post that anywhere other than Twitter?

He mentioned an intent to post on his normal blog (presumably substack) eventually, though I've not seen it there or at theschism yet.

I tend to think the Long March theory is oversold, but this is a much more defensible version.

I think it's more defensible as a description of the scope of the problem, but I think its model of the cause goes one or two steps too short.

Not yet, but I’d like to polish it up a bit and post it on substack/disseminate it further.

If Democrats are so strong then why do they have some a lack of POTUS level candidates? I agree they control institutions but that always felt like the not elite people and the midtwits.

The GOP has a much deeper bench of Presidential people while I see nothing on the Dem side. How can the 10 people in the federalist society at Harvard out produce top tier talent than the other 99% of Harvard? Ted Cruz I think is cringe in his public persona and he’s quite far down the GOP bench but my guess is he’s more intelligent than anyone for the left. Same with Romney.

Only thing that I can come up with is leftist elites personal ethics turn off too many people in their own base to rise. AOC is the only one on the left besides Biden who seems to come off likeable though her weakness is she’s probably a bit mid intellectually.

I’m concerned I’m grading on a curve of my own biases but

they nominate someone with serious Alzheimer questions without serious challenges makes me think I’m not making it up.

Or is their coalition too difficult to manage so their is a lack of potential national candidates.

There are a few reasons for the lack of candidates...

First the racial organizing that the Dems do. It's worked out well for them for the past 40 years, but there is a problem. It's hard to make a jump from being the top black organizer or the top hispanic organizer to being a leader of the entire state. So the ethnic organizers can't jump into leadership, but they are also too powerful and experienced to be thrilled about falling in line behind some white guy in his 40s. So boomer politicians (and earlier) tend to dominate because they have influence going back to before ethnic organizing was dominant.

So big rich blue states that should have deep talent pools have past their prime senators occupying space who can never launch a presidential run. To name some names, Dianne Feinstein, Dick Durbin, Chuck Schumer, Patty Murray. Old Republicans like Mitch McConnell tend to represent lower gdp states where a replacement won't have the resume to launch a presidential run.

Next the Obama effect. Obama was more popular than his policies, he was dragging them into power with his charisma. However at the state governor level he was toxic. Dem politicians without his charisma or ability to excite black voters had to run defending his policies. So purple states were not generating politicians that could make presidential runs.

There are other factors. The two Obama terms were expected to be followed by two Hilary terms, so anyone planning to run for president before 2024 just didn't get involved.

There's also a split between how left wing the press expects a D nominee to be and where the country is. Keep in mind that Obama campaigned in 2008 as a prays every day Christian who believed marriage was a union of one man and one woman.

If Democrats are so strong then why do they have some a lack of POTUS level candidates?

Causally related. Because every Democrat is treated to a friendly media environment they all have artificially boosted popularity, which erodes in a national campaign, because, 2020 excepted, you still have to actually campaign to become president. Basically, they all are running for office on easy mode, and for a presidential candidate, that can't be fully maintained. Sure, national media is still a D++ advantage nationally, but I seriously doubt they could win in Illinois without the media bias. At the state level its worth like 20 points in the polls.

I think this would have been true before internet, social media and cell phones. Biden essentially had to avoid live events as much as possible to get by, and even then people noticed that Biden was doing few live events. Any future candidates will have to appear in public and the public will be perfectly free to post and comment on anything he says or does amiss. Short of another pandemic, Biden can’t win because he’ll have to go do live events and rallies and his failures will be filmed and obvious.

I think the same goes for anyone else. Yes a friendly media helps, but given how easy it now is to share information, I don’t see any way to prevent negative things from coming out. Even with Twitter bans and a press eager to squash the story, most people had at least heard about the Biden Laptop. It was “suppressed” but everyone who cared about it could easily find at least some information about it. Which means that the media isn’t that good of a filter for democrats at the moment.

OK, guess I have to speak up as probably the only actual social democratic partisan Democrat here -

The reason Joe Biden is running for reelection is because he's the incumbent President and wants to run for reelection, and primary challenges agains incumbent President's go badly, and most importantly, nobody would beat him. Like, contrary to popular opinion, there is no secret Deep State Cabal of Obama, Hillary, and whomever running the country. No, it's the codgy old guy, the people who have been around him for years, and a bunch of former Warrne staffers. Secondly, even if he did step down, Kamala's the nominee because she's the VP, still has good approvals among Democrat's, and so on.

Now, we're probably going to disagree on the fundamentals on who's smart or not, but going to the bench - the thing people miss is much of the current Democratic bench is in the states - Whitmer in Michigan in the same state Biden barely won, wins by ten, and also turns the Michigan legislature entirely blue for the first time in decades, Shapiro in PA wins by a landslide, Pritzer in Illinois's a little more controversial but you beat a bad billionaire with a good class traitorous billionaire, there's Governor Roy Cooper in North Carolina who has won two terms in a light-red state, while running as a standard issue liberal, Andy Beshear in Kentucky is a pro-choice and pro-LGBT Governor of that state about to win reelection, Tim Walz has been a solid governor of Minnesota, and for more well-known folks, there's Newsom in Cali, and for the more moderates/neoliberals, Polis in CO. In the Senate, even then, there's Raphael Warnock, a pretty down-the-line liberal Senator who won in Georgia.

Like, on pure electoral talent, 2022 shows the Democrat's have plenty of it, simply looking back at the historical record of midterms.

I also, frankly, think people have gone so over the board underestimating Kamala, that they'd assume she'd lose in some 40-state landslide. As a social democrat, she wouldn't be my preferred candidate in 2028 (Whitmer or Warnock for me), but at worst, Kamala loses the EC 312-226, and even then, still only narrowly loses the popular vote, and that's if the GOP doesn't nominate somebody Trump-adjacent or somebody with no charisma like DeSantis. So yeah, a boring ticket like I don't know Brian Kemp/Kim Reynolds probably wins that election that way, but Tucker/Vivek, or something like that - Kamala can totally win because people will choose cringe they're embarrassed guy by the weirdos, and as seen by some of the right's reaction to the Taylor Swift/Travis Kelce thing, they're entirely too much the weirdos.

Finally, probably most controversially, Fetterman. He outran Biden in Pennsylvania and has the look much closer to the median American than anybody else. Hell, polling showed the stroke made voters more sympathetic to him, as the elite media was telling him to withdraw, savaging his debate performance, and so on.

I'm not somebody who says the GOP can't win in 2024 or 2028, but this weird idea, because Biden's the nominee there is no bench is simply false, and I'd make the opposite argument for the GOP. Whose somebody that can win a primary with a Trumpian base, that can actually win a national election?

there is no secret Deep State Cabal

Aren't the super-delegates effectively a cabal of elite officials that have significant influence on picking at least one major party's presidential candidates?

Super-delegates are now prevented from voting on the first ballot. They only come into play if the primary voters don't give any candidate a majority of pledged delegates.

Aha, well that's a good change.

Now, we're probably going to disagree on the fundamentals on who's smart or not, but going to the bench - the thing people miss is much of the current Democratic bench is in the states - Whitmer in Michigan in the same state Biden barely won, wins by ten, and also turns the Michigan legislature entirely blue for the first time in decades, Shapiro in PA wins by a landslide, Pritzer in Illinois's a little more controversial but you beat a bad billionaire with a good class traitorous billionaire, there's Governor Roy Cooper in North Carolina who has won two terms in a light-red state, while running as a standard issue liberal, Andy Beshear in Kentucky is a pro-choice and pro-LGBT Governor of that state about to win reelection, Tim Walz has been a solid governor of Minnesota, and for more well-known folks, there's Newsom in Cali, and for the more moderates/neoliberals, Polis in CO. In the Senate, even then, there's Raphael Warnock, a pretty down-the-line liberal Senator who won in Georgia.

Most of those people won because their opponent sucked. Some of them even got to choose their opponent, like Pritzker.

I don't think any of these people could get serious traction nationally, except maybe Shapiro or Newsom (and Newsom has some hard caps nationally). The rest would be running, at best, as 'Generic Democrat'.

Whose somebody that can win a primary with a Trumpian base, that can actually win a national election?

Assuming trump’s not running, Hawley, Youngkin, Cruz, Abbott, all come to mind as normal candidates who can win the trump base.

To say nothing of the fact that based on current polling, the winner of both the trump base and the general is… trump.

Gop does have a bit of personality cult now which helps trump.

Perhaps no one has emerged since there is an incumbent but it still feels weak to me and Joe wasn’t all there in 2020. A lot of the GOP generally does like Trump while Joe always felt like a figurehead and why there couldn’t be some Harvard trained PMC to take the job from him in 2020.

Especially at the top the Dems field looks low IQ to me. None of the top 3 went to an elite school. While all the GOP top 3 went to the schools you would expect them to for a highly motivated high IQ person. Yet people are telling me the left owns the institutions.

The GOP has a much deeper bench of Presidential people

Does it? Trump stomped the 2016 field and appears poised to do the same in 2024 for a reason, and it isn't that the Republicans have a great bench. Looking at his closest competitors, DeSantis appears to be a walking charisma deficit and clueless at the art of campaigning, which is a shame because I like the job he's done in Florida a lot more than I like Trump's record in office. Ramaswamy possesses a brain and is willing to say interesting things, but is a transparently flip-flopping con man. Nikki Haley is only getting attention because the other options (Is Youngkin even running? He's undercooked even if so IMO.) are total non-entities (Doug Burgum? Lol.).

I'll grant you that the Democrats have troubles on their end (though I think Newsom is underestimated at one's peril), but it's more because being a successful Presidential candidate in the TV and post-TV age is HARD. Since Nixon (who more or less won 1968 by default as the Democrats imploded; note that he lost in 1960 against better put together candidates), the Republicans have had one great TV politician (Reagan) and the Democrats two (Bill Clinton and Obama). 2016 Trump gets half-credit because he created enemies as fast if not faster than supporters and only barely beat Hillary. Dubya IMO was passable but had the fortune of running against weak opposition (He barely beat Al Gore, the personification of boring, and still enjoyed the rally around the flag effect against Kerry.).

Gore still seems traditional even if boring. Harvard, served a little in Vietnam, Senator first. Just feels like elite but more relatable background. Actually looks like someone who would end up dissident right Republican today.

Maybe the issue comes from not having white straight men coming up in the party. I don’t dislike Kamala personality as much as others but her background doesn’t feel like the higher IQ type.

I do respect Blinken but I’m not sure if guys like him are capable of being on the ticket today.

Trump somehow got popular with the new right. I agree I like Desantis a lot and the GOP still has a few of his types that could be promoted without a trump. I do see guys like him available to the Dems.

Only thing that I can come up with is leftist elites personal ethics turn off too many people in their own base to rise. AOC is the only one on the left besides Biden who seems to come off likeable though her weakness is she’s probably a bit mid intellectually.

They literally had to go out casting for AOC. If anything she's a perfect example of their lack of talent.

Democrat intellectuals are completely unpalatable to the general public. They have to have plausible deniability when it comes to the Marxists who hate the United States and want to teach preschoolers sex-ed. The media can tell you not to believe your lying eyes when it comes to schools putting strap-on-sucking books in libraries, but a presidential candidate would be hard to run cover for.

If Democrats are so strong then why do they have some a lack of POTUS level candidates? I agree they control institutions but that always felt like the not elite people and the midtwits.

Who is in the White House now? Does it matter if they can produce the votes?

they nominate someone with serious Alzheimer questions without serious challenges makes me think I’m not making it up.

ppl used this argument in 2020 and it failed. The vast majority of voters don't care if the president is not mentally at 100%. For either Biden or Trump. Outside of a small subset of people on Twitter, average people do not care about the gerontocracy, or even welcome it. Rather than old people being seen as competition or incompetent, old people being in power gives hope to others that age is not a limiting factor to success, and that it's not too late.

Ted Cruz I think is cringe in his public persona and he’s quite far down the GOP bench but my guess is he’s more intelligent than anyone for the left. Same with Romney.

For the right at least, IQ does not win general elections .

There’s mentally not 100% and there’s barely aware. Biden is pretty far gone into dotage. The guy who scans an audience looking for dead people, who needs to be told how to exit a stage, or apparently falling asleep in a memorial service for victims of the Maui fires is pretty far gone.

And part of why the mental acuity of Joe Biden never became an issue is that unlike Trump, there were not really any large scale public appearances where his mental decline would be on display. He didn’t hold rallies or big campaign events where he’d be expected to speak without preparing a speech. Or where someone might notice that he needs help to exist a stage. His campaign was largely social media and traditional ads where his speech and behavior could be edited for coherence in a way that can’t be done at a live event.

Of course this was massively helped by the constant drumbeat of “voting for anyone other than Joe Biden and Democrats is a vote for literal nazi fascist ideology.” That sort of discourse makes critical evaluation of the candidates much harder. Biden never really came off as a good candidate, even among the democrats I talked to. Nobody was excited about him. The entire thing was about Trump and the importance that Trump not win.

Well sure, blue states are trying their damnedest to ignore federal gun rights. I won’t dispute that because it isn’t wrong.

I do want to point out that, in practice, the usual anarchy-tyranny thesis will not apply. The cops are by and large able to tell who’s law abiding other than guns, and have to wish to get into a confrontation over laws they privately think are silly. Yes, some people will get unlucky- but a lot of them will get their cases overturned, either by federal court or by state level authorities trying to give federal courts an excuse for the ‘no standing’ game. If anything, it’ll be the opposite- the cops will mostly arrest for gun violations where they expect to find weed or something else that lets them keep the feds away, and red tribers who don’t otherwise break the law will increasingly ignore gun laws.

Anarcho tyranny is in full effect. Use a gun for a proper purpose, like defending yourself from a rioter, and you will end up in the clink. The rioter, not so much.

Unfortunately, the opposite effect exists as well. Normal high-functioning law-abiding citizens who technically break a law will often get it enforced on them over low-functioning criminals because it's less risky and/or an easy way to make numbers look good. And this especially happens on people whom the police is biased again in the first place, which is the entire point of anarcho-tyranny. A typical example is that honest & otherwise law-abiding illegal immigrants will often get into more trouble with the state than criminal immigrants, because the former will naively seek out directions from the state, while the latter will just actively avoid the state entirely. Independent on whether you think the former should be here, this is often a misallocation of resources & attention away from the difficult but truly important towards the easy but overall meaningless (aside from also setting up terrible incentives).

Existing examples of gun laws in blue states don’t work that way, though. The cops ignore rednecks with their guns and affirmative defense to obviously illegal gun restrictions are common.

That's a little complicated. The cops up western Massachusetts or upstate New York don't religiously enforce the laws. If you stop to piss in Albany or live in New Jersey, they will absolutely love to come down on a rando like a stack of bricks. Gets their numbers up, no one that matters is gonna complain, and it's not like a law-abiding gun owner is going to resist arrest or shoot back, right?

Yes, some people will get unlucky- but a lot of them will get their cases overturned, either by federal court or by state level authorities trying to give federal courts an excuse for the ‘no standing’ game.

it's the opposite, most people who get involved will have their lives permanently damaged and a small few lucky ones will have the money or principle to go to trial, get convicted, perhaps spend time in prison, and maybe get their case overturned

people uninvolved in the system vastly overestimate the amount of justice which is dolled out by it; the truth is the vast majority of people will simply be ground into dust, plead out, pay their legal bills, and attempt to move on damaged whether the specific case against them is constitutional or legal

you see a case in the news about a court overturning a case and it gives you the perception of this being common in many of these scenarios when the reality is it's not common, it's extremely expensive, and the entire time the outcome is in doubt and many who go this route do not make it to the just outcome you think is a regular remedy and even when they succeed, they've had this affect years of their lives and likely lost a fortune in cash to pay legal bills and opportunity cost

Yes, some people will get unlucky- but a lot of them will get their cases overturned, either by federal court or by state level authorities trying to give federal courts an excuse for the ‘no standing’ game.

They'll plead out to whatever's offered just to avoid being killed on Rikers Island. Because you know the soft-on-crime prosecutor won't be offering bail to white collar gun criminals.

We separate prison pop by gender and bad-dude-ness, why exactly aren't we separating by ethnicity too?

Rikers is technically a jail, not a prison. And its reputation is very useful for exactly the reason stated -- it can be used to force people who aren't hardened criminals to accept a deal. Why would the city want it to be any better?

We do, just not until you get in.

Prison is effectively segregated by race in several states, most notably California.

What chance does the average white collar criminal have of getting murdered on Rikers lol

As our local black pill Nybbler points about below, Rikers is a jail, not a prison, and as such hasn't segregated the population into violent pyschopaths and others.

There are thousands of assaults at Riker's each year, and in 2021, 15 inmates died.

If an otherwise upstanding citizen were to defend himself from rioters using a gun in NYC, he could absolutely end up at Riker's where there is a high chance of being assaulted and a non-trivial chance of death.

From searching, it seems almost all deaths at Rikers are suicide or drug related, not homicide.

I do want to point out that, in practice, the usual anarchy-tyranny thesis will not apply.

It absolutely applied in the recent spate of rioting, where legal outcomes were markedly better for rioters than for the law-abiding attempting to defend themselves.

It absolutely is applying in administrative actions, like the longstanding de-facto policy to ignore straw purchases by associates of gang members and violent criminals, compared to the aggressive pursuit of law-abiding Federal Firearms License holders over minor clerical errors or even no error at all, provided the statutes can be subjected to sufficient creative interpretation.

...Your basic argument is that pro-gun-control politicians are not actually aiming their coordinated meanness at the law-abiding gun culture. That assertion is patently absurd.

...Your basic argument is that pro-gun-control politicians are not actually aiming their coordinated meanness at the law-abiding gun culture.

No, my basic argument is that pro-gun-control politicians are not capable of coordinating meanness, and don't fundamentally care enough to become capable.

...okay, what's your standard for coordinated meanness? What set of facts would convince you of the contrary?

lighthearted cs drama

The grace hopper conference is supposed to be for women and gender minorities. Since they have recruiters there, the job market is tight, and there's no explicit policy against men showing up, men have been showing up. It looks like a lot of people are unhappy about this. The csmajors sub banned discussion of it, but there are still plenty of juicy threads up; in addition to the gender wars, a lot of the guys being international students adds a 'they're taking our jobs' flair to the fire. Since it's basically impossible to gatekeep nonbinary-ness, the challenge for the organizers, if they choose to accept it, is to weed out the men without being accused of being TERFs.

I've watched intersectionals take Liberalism apart limb from limb using its own reasoning against it. I think turnabout is fair play.

White women who don't want brown enbies at their conferences are just reactionary bigots who are on the wrong side of history. Et caetera.

The most salient contradiction in this movement has always been the unholy union between the essentialism required to believe in transsexualism and feminism and gender abolition in general. It's been successfully papered over by appealing to how expensive the signal to become transgender is combined with careful political maneuvering inside of feminist circles, but now queer theory has thoroughly walked the whole thing into a trap.

They've spent years undermining the borders of trans to wrest control of it from the medicalists, and in doing so have made any proper friend enemy distinction impossible. I didn't know what the exploitation of that weakness would look like. I guess I do now.

This breach will probably be plugged, since the exploiters are not organized. But I'm not sure how they'll do it since the only way they can do it without folding to essentialism (which they can no longer) is to require political tests which can always be faked.

is to require political tests which can always be faked.

Everything can be faked. That's not necessarily bad, seen from the side of the movement.

In Havel's Czechoslovakia, by the time he wrote his 'Power of the Powerless', probably few of the Communist Party members were "real communists". That wasn't really the point, the power of the organization called the "Communist Party" over society was the point. In a sense there was a political test, that everyone was faking, from the greengrocers up. It didn't matter that you faked it, all that mattered is that a) you were aware enough that you knew you were supposed to at least fake it, and b) you were willing to fake it - even just for the sake of personal advancement - rather than insist on honesty. In doing so you were both submitting to the system, and contributing to empowering the system.

Every man who shows up and claims to be nonbinary to get a job is doing something similar. They don't say, this is an unfair way to hire people. They say, I'm an enby so I should get a job too. They legitimize it and empower it and in doing so chain themselves to it. They become part of it.

For all that it looks like undermining the stated goals of the movement, the workers of the world never really did unite either. I doubt that bothered the Communist Party in Czechoslovakia (or the other communist countries) one bit.

This breach will probably be plugged, since the exploiters are not organized. But I'm not sure how they'll do it since the only way they can do it without folding to essentialism (which they can no longer) is to require political tests which can always be faked.

Why is that the only way they can do it? Isn't the classic obscenity test - "I know it when I see it" - good enough? Arguably, the current regime is just that with more steps designed to obfuscate it. This ties into my thoughts on your first statement:

I've watched intersectionals take Liberalism apart limb from limb using its own reasoning against it. I think turnabout is fair play.

which is cromulent enough on its face, but which doesn't account for the defenses that the "intersectionals" (first time I've encountered this term used as a noun to refer to the people - I like it) have built against this very sort of thing. After all, if you master how to exploit a vulnerability, you also often learn how to fix them. In this case, it's just rejecting the concept of "using reasoning or logic to draw conclusions" as an oppressive made-up structure, in favor of "listening to marginalized voices." Which, given the degrees of freedom in determining what a "marginalized voice" is, in the context of some conference discriminating its attendants, is just another version of "I know it when I see it."

To address the core of your argument, I disagree that intersectional greatness on the attack translates into a learned defense. That may be how strategy works sometimes but not all the time.

Indeed most of the gambits that are and were deployed to sustain breaches, up and including the use of arbitrary power to break principles where contradiction is effective, are not translatable to the defense.

Progressives are not good at building or sustaining solid institutions. They are great at taking over existing ones and getting their effort's worth out of the ruins they end up holding, but builders and stewards they are not.

To take this specific example, the use of arbitrary power to maintain a "i know it when i see it" standard requires the constant deployment of political capital to defend a blatant injustice that can easily be attacked. This is not a problem if this is used to exploit a breach, such as in the case of preferential admissions into an institution as one's power can grow faster than is spent, but it's not something that can be maintained in the long term without a legitimizing principle.

Eventually someone you don't like gets the arbitrary power and can wipe you out since all restraints are gone. If it is "i'll know it when I see it", then you may very well say that only neo-post-chisto-integralist women are real women for these purposes, insofar as you have a coalition backing you.

I've long predicted that intersectionalism is going to have to mutate into a proper imperial religion if it seeks to maintain its gains as Christianity had to do. Either that or it'll end up being the same sort of flash in the pan as the Terreur or the Cultural Revolution. But I'm not sure which is more likely even now.

To take this specific example, the use of arbitrary power to maintain a "i know it when i see it" standard requires the constant deployment of political capital to defend a blatant injustice that can easily be attacked. This is not a problem if this is used to exploit a breach, such as in the case of preferential admissions into an institution as one's power can grow faster than is spent, but it's not something that can be maintained in the long term without a legitimizing principle.

Eventually someone you don't like gets the arbitrary power and can wipe you out since all restraints are gone. If it is "i'll know it when I see it", then you may very well say that only neo-post-chisto-integralist women are real women for these purposes, insofar as you have a coalition backing you.

These are fair points, and I particularly find the note about having to expend political capital to be a very good one. But what if these people believe that they have effectively infinite political capital, and what if they're right? We can talk about how naked power moves make the populace less likely to politically support you, but I think the protection they developed against the vulnerabilities they exploited can keep that at bay such that the long term is the long term. At some point as that long term gets lengthened, it becomes effectively infinite for someone living in 2023.

I've long predicted that intersectionalism is going to have to mutate into a proper imperial religion if it seeks to maintain its gains as Christianity had to do. Either that or it'll end up being the same sort of flash in the pan as the Terreur or the Cultural Revolution. But I'm not sure which is more likely even now.

I'm not sure either. After all, even tracing all the way back to the intellectual roots in the 20th century, it's barely a blip so far in historical terms. I don't know what a "proper imperial religion" is, but by my lights, I think it has already mutated - or perhaps "evolved" or "ascended" - to a proper religion at this point. I see it as one possible next evolution of religion, one that's developed in response to the greater materialistic and scientific thinking by the populace of the past couple centuries in comparison to most times before, which has greatly weakened the status of traditional religions which often directly contradict materialism or science. The religion that succeeds in this environment is the religion that convinces its believers that it's not a religion or even that it's antithetical to religion, and I think intersectionality (or CRT or wokeness or idpol or whatever name its adherents refuse to let others label it by) is proving to be extremely successful at this.

It’s easy enough for organizers to implement “I know it when I see it.” It also opens up new attack surfaces. “Live by the sword…”

...Isn't this just reimplementing monarchy with extra steps? The liberal thing is supposed to be figuring out how to run things on rules, but the rules don't work so we get "I know it when I see it", but that just hands power to an "I"; what's the difference between "I know it when I see it" and "‘L’etat c’est moi’"?

I knew there was a reason I didn't trust NrX...

Figuring out how to run things on rules works when you have a unified culture where people interpret the rules in the same way, but fails when that ceases to be true.

Maybe I’ve misunderstood but haven’t you said the same many times?

In the absence of a shared understanding, the reification of a local or federal “I” is the only alternative to full anarchy.

Quite.

I have been to night clubs where they obviously wanted to limit the number of straight regular white men, but this is in a country where face checks are just not a thing and would really enrage people. So they put an alt black female security at the door who would have a short chat with you at the door asking questions like "what does tolerance mean to you". Unless you really believe all the bromides (or you have an autistic level of cynical knowledge of social justice thinking like me and my friends), it is very difficult to give a fake correct answer.

is to require political tests which can always be faked

This isn't as easy as it seems.

  1. People aren't good at passing idelogical turing tests. It requires intense curiosity and acting skills if they're doing these in person.
  2. Even if you could conceivably do a good job with the above, this isn't the court of law. The implicit racial/sexual preferences of the organizers (along with normal biases) have even greater cover than before.

You've argued in other comments this opens up attack vectors. Sure. But with the weight behind intersectionality, as it stands today, the only legitimate attackers are still believers (at least in name). A corrupted institution being overtaken by another that's almost indistinguishable doesn't help anyone that's too low on the victimhood index, it's just boring drama and wasted energy.

There is indeed inertia that makes this particular not a useful actual target and a mere object of study. These weaknesses cannot yet be exploited but they are systematic. And someone eventually will exploit them.

I think that's coming sooner than people think, I can see thermidorian forces slowly coalescing together guided by the path of the repression of the current regime and it's growing reliance on ever harder and more obvious forms of power.

Who knows what's going to happen, but something will. This energy has to go somewhere and all the pressure release valves I can see from here are held shut.

What you're seeing is not the beginnings a Thermidorian counterrevolution but that they believe their ultimate victory is in sight; finally, the boot stomping on a human face forever, and the human face will thank the boot and demand more. That the Grace Hopper Conference is being used to practice employment discrimination and the only objection anyone can come up with is that members of the discriminated-against sex are interfering with this is demonstration that they are right.

White women who don't want brown enbies at their conferences

As long as we're all clear that OP just made that up, and the women actually just don't want men at this one conference.

  • -18

Of course. And Kyle Rittenhouse never shot any black people.

Framing is everything.

The rare miss. People forget about Maurice Freeland.

he shot at jump kick man, but did not hit him, and jump kick man's identity was not known at the time of the trial.

You'll have to elaborate on how he made anything up. It sounds like you're confirming what he said.

the job market is tight

What's going on in the U.S.? All these years I was hearing about how us IT europoors should just move to the promised land of the FAANGs, but I can't imagine being so desperate I'd attend a conference for recruitment purposes.

Interest rates, that's what's going on.

A lot of the IT markets (if definitely not all) was propped up by cheap money and the expectation that competitors would over hire so you should too. No longer. Now there's been huge layoffs and running a tight ship is back in fashion.

It's not really an issue for good graduates of good universities, but there is a sea of bootcamp people who want in, previously could and can no longer. And I'd grasp at any networking opportunity if I were in that situation.

The ECB is raising rates too. Maybe because we were so underpaid all the time, the European IT labor markets have been at a state of constant shortage, and we're just in a somewhat milder shortage now? All I know is the last few companies I worked for have been BEGGING me to recommend someone else they could hire.

It's not really an issue for good graduates of good universities, but there is a sea of bootcamp people who want in, previously could and can no longer. And I'd grasp at any networking opportunity if I were in that situation.

This is another thing that sounds bizarre to me. Good universities teach you to program?! The whole reason I'm in the field is that it's not credentialist. Whatever is going on with you Yankees, can you keep it on your side of the Atlantic?

I'm French for the record. Credentialism is alive and well in Europe, and to a much more powerful degree it ever was in America in my experience.

I also happen to be hiring for my company, but you're missing that whilst this is still a field with a lot opportunity it's one with a lot less opportunity than recently in the past.

It used to be you could barely know some JavaScript and get a really good job if with a lot of competition. Now you have to actually have decent skill to be considered.

Besides, the Euro techie shortage is simply a function of paying miserable wages in comparison with a very small captive market. Most of my English speaking friends have switched to remote working for American companies.

France is the most elitist meritocratic credentialist society in Europe though, and has been since the Napoleonic era. If you go to the right Grande Ecole, you’re set for life, otherwise you’re a pleb unless you’re either well-connected or very lucky.

In Britain, you can be poor and go to Oxbridge and still do poorly in life because you aren’t of the right class, make poor decisions or picked the wrong course. In Germany, you’re born into the bourgeois class, make it in via some pushy parenting and a few lucky programs (and, of course, the Gymnasium), or stay beyond it, no matter what you do. Perhaps those are worse, but they are different.

Most of my English speaking friends have switched to remote working for American companies

Do they make American salaries? I'm an American developer but I don't like living here. I dream of moving somewhere like France or Spain. But the wage disparity is so high that it is hard to justify. If there is a way to make a US salary and live there, that would be perfect.

Some do, some do not. Depends on specifics like how rare your skills are worldwide and how flexible companies are with timezones. At the end of the day it's all about leverage and the real fair market price of your labor.

That said I know at least three Americans working remotely in my company who moved from the US to Europe for a bunch of reasons including better cost of living. So it is a thing people do.

It can be a really good deal working for international startups if you're flexible and can live in Georgia, Thailand or other low cost and low tax countries. There are tradeoffs though, living among friends and people who share your cultural values is a hard to quantify but heavily underrated good.

Sounds interesting. For me it's the Mediterranean lifestyle and walkability that I am after. I'm still very junior though so I'll probably need to put in more years before I can realistically start aiming for this.

When you do get there check out Malta. I thoroughly enjoyed my time there and it's about as quintessentially Mediterranean as you can get, and people all speak English.

Good universities teach you to program?! The whole reason I'm in the field is that it's not credentialist.

When I sat on the other side of the table interviewing candidates for a not high paying, not AAA games company programming roles there was a noticeable difference in quality between four year degree holders and the self-taughts, four year "schools" and bootcampers. That was observed from checking for quality but I can absolutely see people having done many more interviews like that start filtering resumes on proxies like a credential especially when getting significant numbers of them. Nowadays for field/market specific reasons I mostly deal with people who have a 4 year but not in CS who have "some programming" experience getting hired into professional software roles leading to years upon years of spaghetti.

Good universities teach you to program?!

I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not. For all their faults, universities do still offer Computer Science courses to their students, and most of them are useful. Even if those courses are optional, the fact that they are explicitly offered instead of something you have to seek out on your own means that graduates are more likely to have that knowledge than people who went to a quick bootcamp or were self-taught.

It's not sarcasm. I can't tell you about people who went through a boot camp, and maybe it's a generational thing, but my experience has been that self-taughts have a better understanding of technical subjects in general, because they picked them up out of interest, rather than because they needed to pass an exam. There's also an overlapping cluster of self-taughts who got a degree that might be muddying the picture. We might argue what their success should be attributed to, but I'd attribute it to being self-taught since I seen them breeze through their classes, and their knowledge of the subject predated the participation in the class.

I graduated with a EECS degree. Programmed in C, Matlab,Python, Assembly, Verilog/VHDL for various courses.

When people ask I say I am self taught, because that's the truth. The programming taught in uni is too theoretical to actually make too much of a left or a right for a professional dev. I also partly say it because I think its higher status that I have a job straight out of college that people with fancy degrees and 5+ years of experience have.

The whole reason I'm in the field is that it's not credentialist.

If nothing else, only people with good highschool test scores get into the good universities, and smart people usually stay smart, and it's a lot faster to look for a school name on a resume than investigating someoone's side projects to see if they're actually good

A lot of jobs I applied to preferred to give a simple programming task somewhere during the interview process, rather than just look at degrees / experience. That even made it into rat-adjacent folk-wisdom as 199 out of 200 applicants don't know how to write fizzbuzz. Personally I think the ratio is absurd, but the idea is directionally correct. An ex-boss explicitly told me he got burned on a lot of people who looked good on paper.

Cheap interest rates led to massive VC investment and tech's overall growth meant that 2010-2020 was a huge boom for the industry. Then during the pandemic tech saw a huge surge as people became even more wedded to their devices and their services to make the world run. The hiring during the pandemic period was insane with many tech companies expanding their workforce like never seen before.

Then the fed raised their rates and the amount of money in VC tightened up as everyone buckled down for some sort of recession. That anticipation led to a lot of companies reassessing their workforce and letting a number of people go.

The market is better now than it was 6 months ago. Overall it's still quite robust compared to most other industries, but it's a significant slowdown compared to how crazy things were just two years ago.

Local bay area coding jobs are seeing 150-650 applications. I'm not even looking at remote jobs at this point.

That's absolutely brutal. Best of luck to you, man.

This is hilarious because the narrative is that women are discriminated against in hiring for CS jobs but the men are going to women's conferences because that's where the jobs are easiest to get. Honestly, there's really nothing to say at this point. This is just how it is now and while I'd like it to change I'm just one person going up against massive institutions who smear your character for dissent. And the only people who would be sympathetic to my cause are people I really wouldn't want to be associated with either.

And the only people who would be sympathetic to my cause are people I really wouldn't want to be associated with either.

If your enemies care about winning at any cost and you care about looking gift horses in the mouth, the outcome is already decided.

As Nybbler once succinctly put it, tribalism as a strategy dominants non-tribalism.

Everyone is an enemy compared to what I want out of government

Then you're never getting what you want. It's as simple as that.

Which makes it a silly thing to want in the first place.

I doubt your appraisal of everyone is accurate though.

AnitaB.org is a nonprofit social enterprise inciting a movement to achieve intersectional equity in the global technical workforce by 2025.

Ambitious!

I do have to wonder if Title VII covers employers hiring from discriminatory events. I’d expect recruiting at a Klan rally to be verboten, but I’m not very confident in that.

Title VII doesn't even cover outright employment discrimination, such as internships which exclude white men, when the discrimination goes the "right" direction. Something like hiring at a discriminatory event doesn't stand a chance; the EEOC and courts will accept any fig leaf offered (e.g. "the event is open to anyone") and if none is offered they'll make one up.

Part of the problem here is that the optimal number of men (from the point of view of the organizers of the conference) is not zero. Having some allies that get their messages about gender discrimination out of the conference is very much so a goal of the conference, albeit not a primary one. Even if they could devise a rule that banned men but not "real" non-binary attendees, it's not actually what they want.

It seems like the actual solution probably looks like getting rid of the recruiters and thereby removing that incentive to attend from people not interested in the supposed main point of the conference.

(This feels parallel to discussions I've been involved in about non-queer people in queer spaces. Although I haven't personally seen such a space get overrun with non-queer people, my understanding is that they generally either have to fight hard to stay queer by being very explicit about being a queer space or end up splitting off and creating a new Really Queer This Time(tm) space every once in a while.)

It seems like the actual solution probably looks like getting rid of the recruiters and thereby removing that incentive to attend from people not interested in the supposed main point of the conference.

I think that the recruiters are part of the point for a conference about increasing women and minorities in computer science. I dunno, maybe that’s just my redneck type a personality talking and the point is woke posturing. But it certainly seems like if your goal is ‘more people in computer science who aren’t white men’ then inviting recruiters to a conference of computer science interested people who aren’t white men would serve your goal.

(This feels parallel to discussions I've been involved in about non-queer people in queer spaces. Although I haven't personally seen such a space get overrun with non-queer people, my understanding is that they generally either have to fight hard to stay queer by being very explicit about being a queer space or end up splitting off and creating a new Really Queer This Time(tm) space every once in a while.)

More out of curiosity than anything else, what queer spaces do straight people want anything to do with?

More out of curiosity than anything else, what queer spaces do straight people want anything to do with?

I'm just relaying the (a?) classic gentrification story: the weirdos make good art / make the place "cool", more mainstream people notice and eventually overrun the place, outnumbering the people who made it cool in the first place, the vibe is dead. When it happens to a neighborhood, it's (negative connotation) gentrification. But the same pattern happens to social spaces. I've heard people talk about it in relation to kink communities and music subcultures.

That is, straight people aren't drawn to the space because it's queer, from their point of view the queerness is coincidental and often invisible. Of course, this is also the story queer people tell themselves; maybe the queer people aren't actually as cool as they think they are.

I think that the recruiters are part of the point for a conference about increasing women and minorities in computer science.

It's certainly the point for a lot of the attendees, recent incident notwithstanding. I'm not going to say no one gives a shit about the talks or presentations, but I'd bet that if you were to split the event into a recruiting event and a pure talk conference, the former would be far better attended.

I think 'there's no hard enforced rule against this, but it makes you a jerk and everyone will call you a jerk very publicly and that might affect your career or at minimum your chances of getting laid' is a perfectly fine way to handle this, and many other, social conundrums.

Policing by police with guns, and even by event organizers and security, should only be a fallback for cases where social policing isn't enough; social policing is the default method for discouraging all kinds of negative and antisocial behavior, and that's usually good.

Social policing only works to the extent the polity is culturally homogeneous. CS is fucked.

GHC is fucked, but that's nothing new. CS will be fine, as long as the machines don't care if they're programmed by sweaty white male nerds, Chinese and Indians of all genders, or the occasionally skinny white Eastern European woman.

Forget cultural homogeneity; social policing only works when there are actual social skills involved. CS is bound for Stallman-esque situations at best.

Why isn't the solution to this to say "women and women identifying attendees only" and trust that 99% of cis men / man identifying would be too embarrassed to pretend to be trans to crash the party?

The only difference between what you're suggesting, and what they did, is that they left it open to "non-binary identifying" people as well. Maybe if you enforced a very feminine dress code, some kind of shame would kick in, but then you'd probably be excluding the actually female attendees too.

Ah. Well. That's rough. I got nothing. I'm sure a committee will think really really hard and figure this out.

the challenge for the organizers, if they choose to accept it, is to weed out the men without being accused of being TERFs.

They won’t accept it. They’ll trumpet their inclusion of diverse gender identities if it comes to that.

To the point of letting an obvious troll in? If Catgirl Kulak tries to get in, I don’t believe the inclusivity will last.

Obvious trolls/bad actors have been exploiting the various Anglosphere policies on trans women in prisons and sports for years with little to no pushback from the TRAs themselves. I'd be surprised if a tech conference proves to be the straw that breaks the camel's back, although I suppose stranger things have happened. "Academic politics are the most bitter because the stakes are so low" and all that.

Maybe you’re right.

My reasoning is that the people clamoring to kick men from this conference are the ones who would be directly affected by trolls and bad actors. This isn’t the case for separate populations like prisoners and athletes. It is much easier to err on the side of credulity when it’s someone else at risk.

”Academic politics are the most bitter because the stakes are so low” and all that.

How did this meme ever catch on? It’s obviously false.

People die over “real” politics. People go to prison, lives are ruined. The same cannot be said of academic politics, for the most part.

I think that ruthlessness and venom are two quite different things. Often they’re related, but not always. Imagine two soldiers who have a professional respect for each other but nevertheless kill (again, far from universal, but not uncommon) vs somebody who writes a bad review of your paper and makes it clear at every opportunity that they consider you vermin.

It seems to be harder than it used to be to play the game (whatever it is) to win without getting your feelings mixed up in things. That might just be historical distance though.

I've heard an Afghanistan war veteran say he'd rather deal with the Taliban, than with progressives engaging in petty politics back home. The former might kill you, but reportedly are nowhere near as vicious.

Sounds like the premise for a sappy movie. Local Farmboy Returns From War to find his hometown irrevocably…woke.

Nah, Demolition Man already did it.

Reminds me of the Battle of Athens, America's own Scouring of the Shire.

Issa joke

I’m pretty sure rule 0 at this event, like most others of its kind, is ‘you’re cancelled for offending anyone who doesn’t claim to be male’, which an obvious troll would do quite quickly. They might declare that him saying hi to a woman in an elevator is sexual assault or something, but uberwoke events have historically been quite good at expelling ridiculous trolls(often for even more ridiculous reasons).

Does the lady in the elevator make a complaint, and then people who've never met her line up on her side to enforce that complaint?

Or does the lady in the elevator make a complaint, and then her friends and allies megaphone that complaint to the entire community, in and outside, creating the impression of both internal consensus and external judgement, cementing a narrative through mass propaganda?

...Who can say in a hypothetical? It seems to me that the real-world cases I've observed have resembled the latter more than the former, though. That is to say, you're talking about a fundamentally nepotistic/tribal social process, and what makes it work isn't any sort of formal rules structure, but rather the social machine the attackers have built. If this is correct, then trolls are unlikely to have that sort of structure ready to go. They run in and try to troll, and the tight-knit activist types simply shut them down.

Yeah, that’s what I’m saying. Matt Walsh showing up to this thing will just get railroaded out by activists, and our own kulak revolt will get railroaded out rather more quickly.

This is my first time posting so I hope I'm posting in the right place, following all the local conventions, etc. This is something that I've had on my mind for a while and this seems like one of the only places on the Internet where this kind of thing can go.

I've been thinking about how laws are described, and how lacking and vague they often are.

Imagine you are a preschool teacher, supervising a group of children on the playground. You decide to teach them the rules of soccer. You tell them some of the basic rules, like how there are two teams, and that the goal of the game is to score points by putting the ball into the other team's goal. You also tell them that You Are Not Allowed To Use Your Hands.

As the game begins, you leave to attend to some other business. When you return shortly afterward, all the children come flocking to you. They eagerly clamor to tell you that Johnny broke a rule. Specifically, he used his hand to stop the opposing team from scoring a goal. Johnny readily admits this, adding that he is sorry. One by one, the children line up to tell you what they think should happen.

Alicia says that Johnny should be given five minutes of timeout.

Braden says that Johnny's team should lose the game.

Carrie says that Johnny's opponents should be awarded one "point".

Darren says that Johnny should have to apologize to everyone else and promise never to do it again.

Esther says that Johnny should be banned from playing soccer because he clearly can't follow the rules.

Given the rule that you gave them (You Are Not Allowed To Use Your Hands), which, if any, of the children is correct? There is a correct answer in "real" soccer – Johnny's opponents should be given a free kick (or penalty kick, depending on where the offense occurred) and Johnny should be given a red card for denying a goalscoring opportunity. However, you never told the kids that rule. You only said that You Are Not Allowed To Use Your Hands. There was no way they could have figured out what your intended punishment for the infraction was. There's no reason why their suggestions aren't equally valid, since even though you stated that an action was illegal, you failed to tell them its consequences. Ultimately, you will have to appeal to the meta-rule of The Rule Is Whatever I Say It Is Because I Am The Adult And I Am In Charge, and the children will have a valid grumble about the arbitrariness of your tyrannical rule. However, their suffering is not in vain, as you have learned from this experience and in the future, you will formulate your rules in the form of a trigger ("when someone uses their hands") and a consequence ("the other team gets a free kick"), saving future generations of preschoolers from untold agony.

Okay, great. Some hypothetical preschoolers are unhappy. When has this ever happened in real life?

Take the case of the Pine Tar Incident. On July 24, 1983, the Kansas City Royals played the New York Yankees in a game of baseball. In the eighth inning, Royals third baseman George Brett hit a two-run home run, putting the Royals ahead 5-4. However, opposing manager Billy Martin then pointed out to the umpire that the bat Brett used to hit his home run had pine tar applied in an illegal fashion. Specifically, he contended that Brett violated the following rule:

a bat may not be covered by such a substance [pine tar] more than 18 inches from the tip of the handle

The umpires examined the bat and agreed with Martin, ruling Brett out and his home run void. A whole flurry of events followed, including the Royals lodging a successful protest where the league office overruled the umpire's initial ruling and ordered a replay of the final innings of the game, stating that the appropriate consequence of the infraction was to remove the bat from the game, not overrule the home run that had been hit with it.

The ultimate ruling isn't very important, but the point is that Bats Can Have Pine Tar In Some Places But Not Others is the same kind of rule as You Are Not Allowed To Use Your Hands. It's a bad, ill-formed rule, leading to ad-hoc rulings that leave those involved feeling justifiably aggrieved. A better rule would be something like Bats That Have Pine Tar In The Wrong Places Will Be Removed From The Game. Indeed, Major League Baseball (one of the best-run organizations in terms of writing good rules) has recognized this deficit and has since amended its rule to be along those lines. Other examples of well-formed rules include If The Ball Goes Out Of Play Then The Other Team Gets A Throw-In (in soccer) or If A Pitcher's Socks Are Too Colorful He Has To Change Into Different Socks (in baseball), which both specify a clear trigger and consequence.

Obviously, these concepts apply to laws made by governments just as much as it applies to rules for games. There is a reason why the earliest laws read something like He Who Puts Another's Eye Out Shall Have His Own Eye Put Out and not like Putting Another's Eye Out Is Not Allowed. Transparency is important to having a fair set of laws, and clear consequences provide that transparency. In the case of Hammurabi's code, it means most people can live free from the fear of recreational eye stabbers, since they know that most people will be hesitant to stab eyes if it means getting their own eyes stabbed in return. On the other hand, if the law was Putting Another's Eye Out Is Not Allowed, the question of what the consequence is unanswered. In practice, it would default to The Law Is Whatever I Say It Is Because I Am The King And I Am In Charge, which is significantly more volatile. One would have to keep an eye out (har har) for eye stabbers that were unusually friendly with the king, for example.

How does this relate to the culture war? Well, I was thinking about the recent (okay, not really that recent) Supreme Court ruling on Affirmative Action. Every source I have ever read on the topic has talked about the ruling as something that says You Are Not Allowed To Discriminate On The Basis Of Race without any mention of what the consequences are. For example, the New York Times writes

The Supreme Court on Thursday rejected affirmative action at colleges and universities around the nation, declaring that the race-conscious admissions programs at Harvard and the University of North Carolina were unlawful

Affirmative action is "unlawful", but what exactly is the penalty if someone discriminates on the basis of race? To draw a parallel to the preschool soccer situation above, one can easily imagine five people with the following suggestions:

  • Harvard et al. were guilty of discriminating on the basis of race, so they have to promise to stop doing that.
  • Harvard et al. were guilty of discriminating on the basis of race, so they have to retroactively admit all the students affected by their discriminatory policy.
  • Harvard et al. were guilty of discriminating on the basis of race, so they have to pay back all the federal funding they received during the period of time that the discriminatory policy was in place.
  • Harvard et al. were guilty of discriminating on the basis of race, so they must be nationalized.
  • Harvard et al. were guilty of discriminating on the basis of race, so all the people involved in perpetuating this discrimination must have their eyes put out.

All these suggestions are completely consistent with You Are Not Allowed To Discriminate On The Basis Of Race. In practice of course, the law defaults to The Law Is Whatever I Say It Is Because I Command A Byzantine Bureaucracy That Will Somewhat Enforce My Demands So I Am Vaguely In Charge. This is exactly the same kind of unclear situation as the handball and pine tar cases, except the stakes are much higher. If you ask various Experts (TM) what the current law actually is (in terms of trigger/consequence), you will only get speculation. Some say that universities will be able to continue to discriminate on the basis of race as long as it's in a way that isn't exactly the same as the way they had been doing in the past, while others say that the effect is slightly larger. No one knows what the law really is until it gets enforced.

On the other hand, there is also the possibility that we actually do know what the law is. After all, if a law is simply a trigger paired with a consequence, we've already witnessed at least one instance of the trigger (a university discriminating on the basis of race) along with the consequence brought about by that trigger (the universities are told nicely to stop doing whatever they were doing). That is, the law isn't You Are Not Allowed To Discriminate On The Basis Of Race, but rather If You Discriminate On The Basis Of Race, We Tell You To Stop Doing That. (As far as I know, the universities have not been penalized or ordered to compensate their victims in any way – if this is incorrect, I would be open to being corrected.)

If I'm right about this kind of law being bad, what can one reasonably do about this? If someone says "The Supreme Court just made affirmative action illegal", should I respond with "That is a non-central usage of the word 'illegal'"? If saying "AA is illegal now" is bad usage, what would be good usage of "X is illegal"? Certainly, there could be some cases where it is useful, as a code of laws can be made easier to understand if you group multiple triggers with the same consequence (for example, multiple actions in soccer are grouped together as "fouls" and have basically the same consequences). The category of "illegal" could be useful in a similar vein, where we group together various triggers that have the consequence "negative things happen to you". We could then exclude things from the "illegal" category if the consequences are not sufficiently bad, like how we don't consider earning income "illegal" even though it results in losing some amount of money through taxes.

I don't know how to end the post so this is the end of the post.

I think it is important in this context to distinguish between "unlawful" in a criminal sense and "unlawful" in a civil sense. Functionally all criminal laws are written the way you describe. With a list of the prohibited conduct and a range of penalties for doing it. Civil law penalties are more vague because their purpose is to redress some harm that some individual A has caused some other individual B. Legislatures can (and do) pass laws modifying what kinds of damages one may receive when one has been wronged in various civil ways but there is not (by design) as complete a specification as criminal law. Civil law instead relies on the Plaintiff (the person bringing the suit) being able to articulate how much they have been wronged and asking a court for appropriate relief. To some extent we put trust in judges and courts (and a complex system of precedents) to figure out what the appropriate relief is in civil cases.

Lawsuits for violations of civil rights are, in the United States, civil lawsuits and generally are asking courts for (1) damages actually suffered and (2) an injunction against the defendant. The second part is important because it means if the enjoined defendant engages in the described conduct again there can be additional penalties (criminal and civil) for violating a court order, above whatever civil law violations it would also entail.

Circling back to your AA example the Supreme Court's ruling is more like "If You Discriminate On The Basis Of Race We'll Order You To Pay Damages To The People You've Discriminated Against And If This Isn't The First Time We'll Impose Additional And Escalating Penalties."

(As far as I know, the universities have not been penalized or ordered to compensate their victims in any way – if this is incorrect, I would be open to being corrected.)

If they haven't yet, they will be. I think a little civil procedure is instructive here. Before anyone in a civil suit gets ordered to pay anyone else damages you first need to figure out whether the defendant is liable. After a court has made a determination about the defendant's liability, that determination becomes appealable to some higher court (and eventually SCOTUS). On appeal the appellate court doesn't take over the whole case, they are usually only deciding the particular issue being appealed. Afterwards they'll send the case back down to the original court with an order to continue proceedings consistent with their opinion. So SCOTUS's decision was the "end" of the case in the sense it found Harvard and UNC liable and created a national precedent that their conduct was a violation of the student's constitutional rights but it was not the end in a procedural sense. The trial court still needs to actually issue an injunction and figure out how much in damages to award the plaintiffs.

A SCOTUS ruling is not a law. However, the constitution is, and it does suffer from the problem you have observed. Except, is it a problem?

"No Soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law."

I am not a legal expert, but I think there's nothing in the US Code that explains what the punishment for forcing you to shelter and feed a soldier is. What happens if Major González forces you to shelter and feed one of her soldiers during peacetime? You sue her! Just like the soccer kids, you come up with a punishment you deem appropriate and ask the court to levy it. And the whole judicial process is a solved problem. If Major González is able to avoid trial or punishment, you have bigger problems in the US.

What's the point of laws that include consequences for breaking them, then? When the state itself is a plaintiff you need laws that are written like this to direct the agents of the state that act on its behalf. Why did Hammurabi bother with his code of laws, then? The other point of laws that include consequences for breaking them is simplifying the job of the judges. Common law requires to judges to be aware of existing precedents to avoid unjust unequal verdicts. Having a code of laws for common, typical infractions reduces the burden on the court system.

Should there be a law like this for AA in college admissions, or should there be a bunch of "Wang v. Harvard" lawsuits? I think the latter option is much more American in spirit.

I think there's nothing in the US Code that explains what the punishment for forcing you to shelter and feed a soldier is

Shelter would probably constitute illegal entry under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, section 929(b). Food would seem to be theft or wrongful appropriation under section 921, or, depending on the facts, robbery under section 922

There is a third point to having laws that include consequences for breaking them, which I think is relevant in this case. It's to ensure uniformity of treatment, and therefore fairness, among cases. If we end up with a thousand Wang v. Harvards, it could end up that one Wang runs out of money for lawyers and settles for $100, another Wang loses his case due to an incompetent attorney, while a third Wang gets an eight-digit payout. All while a thousand other Wangs go about their lives completely aware that they had the ability to sue. We know from criminal studies that certainty of being caught (and therefore punished) is more important for deterrence than the magnitude of the punishment, and if instead of having a well-known penalty, Harvard is playing the roulette wheel every time they do a discrimination, the deterrence factor is much smaller.

I agree that a massive sue-fest is hyper-American and it appeals to me on a gut level, but I'm not sure the benefits outweigh the way that it obscures what the EV of discriminating is.

I think your hypotheticals perhaps obfuscate more than they clarify. The reason the penalty was unclear in those hypotheticals is because, in each, there rules were new (in the soccer example) or had rarely been adjudicated (in the pine tar incident), so there was no existing body of law for the adjudicator to turn to to determine the penalty. In contrast, re criminal law, the penalties are always stated in the statutes, and in civil litigation, the body of law re remedies is large enough that law schools offer entire classes on the subject

As far as I know, the universities have not been penalized or ordered to compensate their victims in any way – if this is incorrect, I would be open to being corrected.)

You are not correct, or if so are only very technically correct in that I do not know if there has been a remedy announced yet. When a trial court rules against a plaintiff, as the trial court did in the Harvard and UNC cases, but the decision is reversed on appeal, the case goes back to the trial court for further proceedings. The precise further proceedings depend on whether the appeal conclusively decided the case for the defendant*, but if it did, the lower court would conduct proceedings on remedies. See, eg, the football coach school prayer case, which settled 9 months after the Supreme Court's decision

And, note that sometimes plaintiffs do not seek damages (or only nominal damages, like $1), but rather only an injunction. I don't know that any damages were sought in Brown v, Board of Education, for example. That was not the point of the lawsuit.

*If the case was dismissed at an early stage, it might still be unclear whether the plaintiff's case has merit.

The reason the penalty was unclear in those hypotheticals is because, in each, there rules were new (in the soccer example)

But it doesn't have to be that way. There's nothing about the nature of laws that requires new laws to omit penalties. The preschool teacher could have provided a penalty when explaining the rules. The fact that they didn't mostly just shows that they are not a good rule writer. This is fine for a soccer game, but for matters of law, we want good rule writers who don't neglect to specify a penalty for breaking their laws.

or had rarely been adjudicated (in the pine tar incident), so there was no existing body of law for the adjudicator to turn to to determine the penalty.

Why should we wait for adjudication to determine a penalty? Why can't the original writers of the rule specify their own penalty? We can't expect perfection, but we should at least prefer better to worse. The pine tar incident is a good example of the flaws of waiting for a ruling to establish a law. When faced with the vague law, the umpire chose a penalty that sounded good to him (the home run doesn't count), which was a pretty clearly bad ruling that caused a bunch of consternation and unhappiness.

You are not correct, or if so are only very technically correct in that I do not know if there has been a remedy announced yet. When a trial court rules against a plaintiff, as the trial court did in the Harvard and UNC cases, but the decision is reversed on appeal, the case goes back to the trial court for further proceedings. The precise further proceedings depend on whether the appeal conclusively decided the case for the defendant*, but if it did, the lower court would conduct proceedings on remedies.

So if I understand you correctly, at this point in time we don't know what the penalty for breaking the "no discrimination" law is, only that the Supreme Court has decided that the "no discrimination" law has been broken. If/when the trial court reaches a verdict in those cases, would that create a precedent for what the penalty is? Or is the meta-law simply that trial courts determine penalties on a case-by-case basis based off what they think is fair? I ask as someone who has very little clue about how the legal system really works.

But it doesn't have to be that way.

That is my point. It ISN'T that way, which is why your hypothetical is not particularly germane.

Why should we wait for adjudication to determine a penalty? Why can't the original writers of the rule specify their own penalty?

Again, that is what authors of real laws usually do.

So if I understand you correctly, at this point in time we don't know what the penalty for breaking the "no discrimination" law is,

No, that is not quite right. We know what types of remedies are available for torts. That is quite well established. What we don't know is what the damages will be in this particular case. Eg: if I am wrongfully denied admission to Harvard, and have to go to Purdue instead, then my damages would be something like the present value the difference between the income I am likely to earn in my life as a Purdue grad versus what I likely would have earned as a Harvard grad. And that, of course, depends on things like my major; if I am a Social Work major, then my damages are going to be less than if I am a Business major, and if I am a Civil Engineering major, I might have no damages at all.

No, that is not quite right. We know what types of remedies are available for torts. That is quite well established. What we don't know is what the damages will be in this particular case.

It's not just that we don't know what the damages will be in this specific case, it's also that we don't know what the damages will be in the generic racial-discrimination-in-university-admissions case. At best, we know that the penalty in this case will be a subset of the remedies in tort law, and that in future cases like this one, the remedies will also be a subset of the remedies in tort law, though not necessarily the same subset. This is only slightly more helpful than not knowing anything at all. Knowing that the available remedies for torts are X, Y, and Z is like knowing that the remedies for a foul in soccer are free kicks, penalty kicks, yellow cards, red cards, lifetime ban, etc. The part that you really want to know is what the algorithm is for figuring out which of those remedies applies in any specific case.

Eg: if I am wrongfully denied admission to Harvard, and have to go to Purdue instead, then my damages would be something like the present value the difference between the income I am likely to earn in my life as a Purdue grad versus what I likely would have earned as a Harvard grad. And that, of course, depends on things like my major; if I am a Social Work major, then my damages are going to be less than if I am a Business major, and if I am a Civil Engineering major, I might have no damages at all.

Is this a statement of what you think will happen or is this what you think should happen? That is, do you think that as of this ruling, every White and Asian person who has been rejected from any AA-practicing university in the past few decades will be able to sue successfully for monetary damages equal to the drop in expected earnings they suffered? Alternatively, is there established tort law that says "when a university wrongly denies admission to someone, the damages are to total the loss in expected earnings, no more, no less"?

The reason I'm trying to nail down a specific penalty is because it sounds like the current system is a judge flipping a coin to decide whether to take your case and then pulling a number out of an ass for the damages, which is very much The Rule Is Whatever I Say It Is Because I Am In Charge.

That is, do you think that as of this ruling, every White and Asian person who has been rejected from any AA-practicing university in the past few decades will be able to sue successfully for monetary damages equal to the drop in expected earnings they suffered?

  1. That depends on whether the decision applies retroactively, which can be complicated.
  2. Decades? Certainly not, because of statute of limitations issues
  3. Even more importantly, a given applicant would have to prove that he or she would have been admitted, if not for the affirmative action policy, which would be extremely difficult, if not impossible.

the current system is a judge flipping a coin to decide whether to take your case and then pulling a number out of an ass for the damages

I can assure you that that is not the case. First of all, why you think courts have discretion not to take a case is beyond me. As for damages, there are entire books published on the subject of tort damages and a whole slew of jury instructions on the topic. And see here:

How do litigators prove and attack compensatory damages? Proving damages Compensatory damages must be proven by a preponderance of the evidence – although courts may apply other burdens of proof such as reasonable certainty or substantial evidence, depending on the case. Proving compensatory damages typically requires presenting documentation such as receipts, testimony from the plaintiff or other witnesses about the impact of the tort on the plaintiff’s life, and, in some cases, expert testimony. Whether an expert is necessary depends on the facts and circumstances of the case, including the type of injury and the damages claimed.

Attacking damages Defendants attack damages evidence in the same ways they attack other evidence in the plaintiff’s case. This can be done by filing motions in limine – pretrial motions requesting that certain evidence be found inadmissible and not referred to or offered at trial – to exclude evidence of damages or limit an expert’s testimony.

Defendants can also move to exclude or disqualify an expert (sometimes called a “Daubert motion”), cross-examine witnesses, as well as introduce contradictory evidence and expert testimony about the existence and/or amount of damage the plaintiff has suffered.

How do litigators calculate compensatory damages? When calculating the plaintiff’s damages – or attacking the other side’s calculation – it is important to consider damage principles, claim valuation methods, and jury instructions.

Damage principles The collateral source rule: Benefits that an injured person receives from sources that have nothing to do with the tortfeasor may not be used to reduce the tortfeasor’s liability to the injured person. Mitigation: This doctrine of avoidable consequences holds that an injured plaintiff has a duty to take reasonable steps to minimize its damages and will not be able to recover for any losses which could have easily been avoided. Comparative negligence and contributory negligence: the affirmative defenses in negligence cases can greatly impact a plaintiff’s damages. States differ in apportionment of fault in tort cases. Claim valuation methods Adding up economic damages like medical bills and lost wages is relatively straightforward, but valuing intangibles like emotional distress is more complex. Two mathematical methods are typically used for noneconomic damages; the multiplier method and the per diem method.

The multiplier method: Start with the amount of the plaintiff’s economic damages and multiply them by a number between 1.5 and 5. The multiplier will depend on a variety of factors that a jury would consider in calculating pain and suffering. The per diem method: Some courts permit a calculation based on how many days an injury caused pain and suffering with a standard amount charged for each day; oftentimes a person’s daily salary is a measure. Jury instructions J>ury instructions may assist in calculating economic and noneconomic damages, or limit how counsel argue about the valuation. For noneconomic damages like “pain and suffering,” juries are sometimes told to assess damages that are “fair and reasonable” without much guidance. Litigators must come prepared to argue why the proposed changes are “fair and reasonable.”

That depends on whether the decision applies retroactively, which can be complicated.

Why wouldn't every decision apply retroactively? When a court interprets a law in a precedent-setting way, isn't the idea that the law is and has always been that way, and that earlier courts had simply gotten it wrong? If this specific case of SFFA v. Harvard had featured a specific plaintiff, wouldn't that person be entitled to damages? If so, why that person and not others? It seems to me that all decisions of this nature must be applied retroactively by virtue of the fact courts typically rule on events that happened in the past.

Decades? Certainly not, because of statute of limitations issues.

That's fair. We can limit it to the last few years. I don't think this changes much.

Even more importantly, a given applicant would have to prove that he or she would have been admitted, if not for the affirmative action policy, which would be extremely difficult, if not impossible.

This takes me back to my original point, which is that if this is truly the case, then the law isn't If You Discriminate On The Basis Of Race Then You Have To Pay That Person Some Amount of Money. It's If You Discriminate On The Basis Of Race Then Nothing Happens To You Because No One Person Can Prove Anything. I appreciate you educating me on tort law (I mean this sincerely; sorry if I come across as combative but I do appreciate the lesson on something I know very little about) but it's kind of irrelevant if we never get to the point where damages are being calculated.

That said, is the standard of proof really that an applicant has to show that they would have been admitted but for their race? For employment discrimination, as far as I'm aware, you don't have to prove that you would have been hired/not-fired but for your race/sex/etc. You only need to prove that your protected group status was a significant factor in the decision. Is university admissions different, and if so, is that difference spelled out in law?

I can assure you that that is not the case. First of all, why you think courts have discretion not to take a case is beyond me.

Maybe "take a case" is not the step where attempts at justice are thwarted, but my impression is that it is often the case that people are in theory legally entitled to some compensation but cannot reach the point where a court issues a decision on their complaint. My point is that in order for "AA is illegal" to be true, there must be a reliable way for an entity that engages in AA to be penalized for that violation, and from what you said and what I see, it doesn't look like that will be the case.

it's kind of irrelevant if we never get to the point where damages are being calculated.

There are many attorneys who make a very good living representing victims of illegal discrimination. Moreover, class actions are often an option. Were there truly no remedy, defendants would not settle suits. But they do.

And note that attorneys fees in successful civil rights suits, which are paid by defendants, can often be much greater than the damages. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uzuegbunam_v._Preczewski

Ultimately, you will have to appeal to the meta-rule of The Rule Is Whatever I Say It Is Because I Am The Adult And I Am In Charge, and the children will have a valid grumble about the arbitrariness of your tyrannical rule.

While this isn't exactly wrong, people tend to invoke it too broadly. Some aspects of the rule are what you say they are, but the rule itself isn't. The rule doesn't let you penalize teams because you didn't drink your coffee this morning and are cranky and decided to subtract points for S&G.

You could have a rule "I am the dictator and what I say goes, so I can penalize someone because I skipped my coffee", but that wouldn't be rule of law, even if it's literally following a rule.

This in turn incentivizes would-be-dictators to make tons of broad and vague rules with selective enforcement. If there is such a byzantine maze of laws that almost never get enforced, then nobody pays attention to them and then everyone ends up technically in violation of some sort of rule. Then the enforcer can pick and choose who gets penalized based on their own internal reasons, but always has some sort of justification in the actual rules to pin it to.

In a country where the constitution is broadly interpreted as allowing or forbidding (or requiring) a huge number of things, the body that ultimately interprets the constitution (ie. SCOTUS) is by far the most powerful political body. The one limit on its power is that it can’t directly enforce its decisions without the support of the other arms of government. If you allow SCOTUS enforcement powers (which essentially amounts to control over the police, intelligence, and the military) then you have turned the US into an interesting form of quasi-democracy in which a panel of absolute rulers who govern based off interpretation of scripture are elected for life by the senate on a rolling basis.

Personally I think that would be a better political system, but it isn’t our political system. As @RandomRanger has said, SCOTUS has afforded Congress the ability to devise a system whereby unconstitutional behavior around affirmative action is subject to criminal punishment. Will that happen? Of course not. Currently, the threat is more that a future GOP executive could possibly take some actions via the Education Department against non-compliant universities, or that civil suits could result in expensive damages.

Courts really need legislative or executive support to punish things, as opposed to merely rendering them "illegal". I'd levy a big fine, like the EU does against tech companies that it dislikes. They just pick a number - $5 billion dollars plus after 90 days 5% of daily revenue unless they stopped bundling google search with android phones...

Of course, in the EU they know that legislators have their backs, they're united on this issue. I doubt it's the same in the US re affirmative action. The court is basically saying "if legislators want to set out a law to ban this stuff, we have your backs", they don't feel confident enough to go out alone. It's not really in the spirit of separation of powers for them to act alone. Likewise, Trump couldn't execute a travel ban, he faced suppression from the courts.

Just like Hanania's posts/book about US civil rights being interpreted into what they are today, it's the executive agencies and legislation alongside the legal decisions that make things actually happen.

In the US, legislative support for the ruling itself is irrelevant, as when a court makes a ruling, it is basically saying "The law as written is properly interpreted like this. If you don't like it, write a better law." The way that a legislature that disagrees with the ruling would overrule the court is by rewriting the appropriate law.

The executive branch, on the other hand, does have massive power to overrule the courts with immediate effect. John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it. My take is that when this power is used as often as it currently is, it's a bad thing for the same reason that The Law Is Whatever I Say It Is Because I Am In Charge is a bad thing. I'll have to check out Hanania's writings.

as when a court makes a ruling, it is basically saying "The law as written is properly interpreted like this. If you don't like it, write a better law

My point is that they can only do this if there's a law or decision to interpret and they feel confident they won't just get hammered. Like you say, there's no law that says affirmative action is illegal, no clear notion of what the punishment should be, no guidance as to what should happen. They can reinterpret but it's hard to reinterpret standard and continuing practice into illegal, fineworthy, jailworthy crimes.

In Australia we had a case that would've cost the WA govt billions so they legislated to prevent the payout. Courts generally don't want to make judgements that will then get rendered irrelevant by the legislators.

Like you say, there's no law that says affirmative action is illegal

There is. Title VI of the Civil Rights Act. Same law that protects blacks against discrimination also protects whites and Asians. It's just that the courts apply totally different standards depending on the race of those being discriminated against, while claiming otherwise.

Same law that protects blacks against discrimination also protects whites and Asians.

Only de jure, as you say. It was devised not to protect Whites or Asians but to advance blacks, women and so on, so there's a logical consistency there. Intention and use were aligned. The court would not just be implementing what the words say, they're changing the fundamental meaning of the law even as everyone pretends it stays the same. I guess if we looked around we could find some case where whites were protected by the law (was there some case in Hawaii) but by and large that's not the function or goal.

This is on a different level to ruling that fish are bees or whatever for the purposes of some biodiversity preservation law, even though that's a huge change of factual content (and logically bizarre). They really need commitment from the other branches of govt to make such a meaningful change and get it to stick.

There's no change in saying those laws protecting everyone. The Fourteenth Amendment and the Civil Rights Acts would never have been passed if they were written to protect "only the blacks", and the Supreme Court has consistently held that they do, in fact, protect everyone. That is what the words said, that is what was intended. A claim that "No individual, on the basis of race, sex, color, national origin, disability, religion, age, sexual orientation, or status as a parent, shall be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination in, a Federally conducted education or training program or activity" means "Well actually it's OK to discriminate as long as it's against people of the majority race, the less-fair sex, the lighter color, domestic origin, able-bodied, Christians, or heterosexuals" is at least as crazy as "a bee is a fish".

and the Supreme Court has consistently held that they do, in fact, protect everyone.

But the outcome is massive and blatantly obvious affirmative action that favours non-whites and harms whites. Corporate America somehow managed to hire 94% nonwhite in 2021! You see all these HR people openly admitting what that they've been doing it and nobody seems to leap on this illegality. Because it's not de facto illegal.

The Soviet Constitution might promise you all these beautiful rights. They may be written in black and white. It might even be legally binding, it might technically be the supreme law of the land. But Stalin can wipe his ass with it every day of the week and your peers will laugh (quietly inside their heads) if you want to use it to defend yourself against the NKVD. Ultimately, the people who commissioned and made it wanted to make it look good to foreigners, not for it to actually act as a constitution. It had little or no relevance to the administration of the USSR.

Even if the law as written protects whites, there's a partiality in people's heads where they know what is or isn't typically a hate crime, what equal opportunities mean, what sexual harassment is, where the standards of proof should be. Law is implemented by men, not words on paper and what's inside their minds takes on paramount importance. It is possible to change people's minds and reeducate them but it takes time and unity from above. Judges are not out of sync with the legislators, they're not just suddenly deciding to interpret against the text, they run in the same circles and execute the meaning of the law as they understand it, not the letter of the law. If their interpretation was actually against what the legislators (as a collective) wanted, the legislators would change it.

If their interpretation was actually against what the legislators (as a collective) wanted, the legislators would change it.

The legislators can only change the law de jure. Changing the law de facto can only be done by the executive and to a smaller extent the judiciary. The court is NOT saying "if legislators want to set out a law to ban this stuff, we have your backs". The court is saying "legislators have ALREADY set out a law to ban this stuff". The court merely lacks the power to enforce its decisions against the obstinacy of the executive.

Punishing racist liberals who act like their ideology is the law is indeed one of the most important ways to restore western republics. Liberals here is a wide range and include woke conservatives like the Theresa May, Torries and others who in practice have been part of this problem.

At minimum people who abuse their post to make a police that goes after not self hating people, or to discriminate for minorities, can in fact be removed from their positions.

Another possibility are large fines.

And why not criminal prosecutions as well.

Generally what needs to be done is simple and doesn't really fit into a bothsidesist narrative that pretends to have intellectual complexity when it is actually intellectually dishonest.

A rule of principle does conflict with the current mainstream liberalism and the ideology that has taken over much of the establishment.

Nevertheless one must also consider organisations. Can you have a non racist society when left wing activist organisations and etnhic supremacist organisations have successfully conspired to have huge power in goverment and in private corporations?

The ADL is quite notorious example in American sense and organizations like hope not hate in places like Britain. I believe making such organizations illegal and declaring them criminal organizations and putting in charge prosecutors with a mind to have them go the way of the mafia, is the way to go.

You must be intolerant to the ideology and ideologues who say that it is ok to discriminate in favor of groups of the progressive stack, to get a society that doesn't do it. So don't tolerate people who promote these ideas in academia, in books, etc. The playbook that has been followed against both the far right and moderation can be used quite successfully against the far left.

As for freedom of speech absolutism, that is completely impossible. A relatively more free society might happen but like in eastern europe after end of communism when they blacklisted the political commissars, you will need to do that. At some point the freedom of the criminal or the political commissar to be an authoritarian tyrant conflicts with the freedom of rest of society.

However things like equality under the law might require a culture that is quite for it. Generally tradeoffs are certain, but you can have a different balance that are worse or quite better. Lets just say the world where Stalin, or Jonathan Greenblat has the maximum freedom is worse than one where regular people are relatively free but figures like these are much less so. Plus freedom of certain individuals isn't everything, there is also to consider how institutions should faction in the way they supposed to.

Academia focusing on promoting the truth and real intellectualism is more important than respecting the freedom of those who want to promote nonsense, and so on. So I believe we need an attitute of enforcing behaviors that are not tolerant to the ideology that what is right is progressive/liberal dogma.

Let me propose an ethical system that is part of the enforcement mechanism and does allow vaccum to dominate. The ethos that it is moral of people promoting their own good, or their group's good while respecting the golden rule and same right to others and trying to not trample over other groups or individuals in pursuing their own betterment.

Enforcing evenhandedness and institutions working in the way they are supposed to will work better than most alternatives I see proposed. Although this also requires a faction of people who support doing this getting power and pushing it through.

Of course, contra some American libertarianish types, part of the rule of law includes international justice which includes the rights of national sovereignity, self determination, genocide being a crime and also purporseful demographic change at expense of a nation also being a crime under international law. In many cases there are pragmatically grey areas, but no people are not interrchangeble, in both attiutes and behavior, nor does the current zeltgeist successfully try to remove ethnic identitarianism of their ingroup against their outgroup. They reinfore it. You see them promote antidentiarianism against natives. So, you can't go full 100% hardcore on nationalism, since that can lead to areas of other groups being mistreated, but respecting the human rights of native peoples are a key aspect to deviating with the current pathological extremes. This means stopping illegal migration and mass migration and recognizing that it had been an infringement on the rights of native people. I have a view focusing more on the old world on this than USA specifically which is somewhat more complicated with its history in my view.

Anyway, the right wing that actually wants to enforce rules evenly and promote things more in line with what I argue here are the people whose ideology is compatible with changing the current injustice into justice. The far leftists in moderate or even fake conservative clothing who play bothsidesist games when they aren't outright hating on the only ones who could change things tend to for the most part side with the agenda that is far left ethnic supremacist against native ethnic groups in western countries. It is fairer to just call it antiwhite in the USA since one could claim blacks there are no more native than white Americans. They are the people to blame for what has happened and the kind of people who need to be kept out of influence on these issues and these far leftists in the centrist clothing are representative of who is to blame for pervasive racist policies of the nature I outlined continuing.

Sometimes facts might appear more muddy because like decades ago Its like trying to convince people who claim to be moderate that Soviet Union sucks and is oppressive while being in a room full of vicious fellow travelers. It won't go well for you, because of the bias and bad nature of the related people. But it doesn't make the facts less straightforward, it is just that straightforwardness and truth is controversial in certain circles that are acting with enough fanaticism, bias or bad faith. And then the struggle sessions start and pressure to apologize. So the problem is not that people aren't charitable enough to the people I condemned but that they have been too willing to excuse their bad behavior and tolerate it. In part because they haven't gatekept them enough out of influence and are allowed to influence the reaction to themselves.

Its like putting the thieves in the position of the judge when deciding the penalty for thievery!

Punishing the corrupt is indeed one of the most important ways to restore any system of government that wasn't itself built on corruption

The problem with corruption is that it's society-wide and an emergent phenomenon from economic circumstances (poorer countries are always more corrupt than rich ones are- just comes with the territory). This is why it's happening now- compared to 60 years ago there was no massive uplift out of poverty for most of the West through industrialization, no transformative technologies like radio, TV, thinking machines, telephones, affordable semi-private transportation, and certainly not all of those things at once.

This is why the US (and its provinces to varying degrees) citizenry was at a high watermark of anti-corruption at that time, and why conservatives even have a US that barely had any corruption to remember in the first place. Of course, despite their best attempts, all their anti-corruption laws ended up getting corrupted over time; movements and groups that were once positive-sum expansions of economics and civil rights have all devolved into zero-sum supremacy movements.

As far as eliminating corruption goes, well, that's a hard problem and not one any society has ever managed to solve. It's harder without circumstances that empower the anti-corrupt (we're currently scraping the bottom of the barrel for new technology) and that technology has allowed us to prevent most of the Four Horsemen from paying us a visit (as mostly-indiscriminate death from war/disease/famine tends to, after the fact, increase the individual's power to resist corruption due to increased resource availability, leading to the society becoming less affected by corrupt tendencies in itself- sometimes this needle doesn't move much, like in China during the mass exterminations campaigns of the '50s and '60s, but it does still move).

Calling it by its proper name is generally the best way to start.

Look, I live in a poorer country than USA where you don't see as happened in the USA of over 90% of jobs going to favored by progressives groups after BLM as Bloomberg reported. You don't see this kind of behavior because there are less people with this ideology.

There are also people here who advocate moving more in line of this direction. And they do this because of their ideology. if they capture power they are going to push things more in that line. If people who see it my way are in power, then we will not tolerate progressive supremacists.

It really is tragic that your best hope of moving the needle even a little is mass death other than recognise that groups like the ADL not having a chapter in Microsoft, Google, not having influence in the FBI, is moving the world closer to evenhanded application of the rules by both the goverment and private institutions.

Generally I see here people willing to endorse more extreme ways of thinking over being negative, resentful and bitter of groups in a manner that might see as taking a side in the culture war, while their attitute also by default takes a side. Mercy to the guilty is cruelty to the inoccent, but what about not blaming the guilty at all?

I initially had a bigger post talking about the history and how even initially so called civil rights movements had supremacists in charge and in key positions of power. The main difference was that they might have some legitimate grievances too about how some of their favorite groups were treated while after getting their way it is all getting more and more. When the civil rights act was passed Lyndon Johnson was praising Marcuse's as the man whose philosophy reflects it and people like MLK were demanding that USA treats blacks especially better for having treated them in the past especially bad and he and his activists were harassing business to get them to hire larger percentage of blacks and complaining how disparate outcomes were evidence of racism.

But in any case, even if they were more moral in the past which I don't think they were to the extend people think, it doesn't change the current reality.

Progressive supremacists (Jewish supremacists, black supremacists, LGBT supremacists, female supremacists, left wing supremacists that is discriminate in favor of being a leftist) have captured power and are abusing it.

This is only a facet of corruption.

There are others. I fail to see your economic explanation apply to say warmongering in the USA. Where groups like the neocons have captured key positions in American goverment and remain in the key positions as administrations change and are authoritarians who gatekeep and cancel those who aren't neocons. Meanwhile weapon manufacturers have been one of the biggest funders of think tanks. Then there are contractors who make a lot of money in nation building while enriching themselves and local elite collaborators by overcharging and underlivering to the most extreme proportions.

There are plenty of poor communities that behave more morally than richer ones. You might be confusing in some instances the effect of bad behavior to the cause. Behaving in destructive enough manners help perpetuate poverty butt it is possible to be rich and be immoral and even predatory and parasitical.

The people involved with revolving doors in weapon manufacturers, governance, even intelligence services and front groups who promote warmongering are rich and made plenty of money out of this. They are also corrupt. Becoming richer has not made them more moral. Indeed as their method was corruption, it ensures a continuation of it.

Public private partnerships in spheres of medicine with revolving door with big pharma and goverment is also an issue.

Taking very serious agency problems is one way to combat other forms of corruption outside of just the progressive supremacists. Although it is all connected since in addition to intersectionality in ways of other identities, compromise in regards to other agendas and interest of the powerful and willingness to play along is a means for different factions to get their way and promote less conflict in a "bipartisan" uniparty manner.

The dominant ideology and whether institutions tolerate corruption is key. You can have improvement absent mass death, and promoting hopelessness is a cope excuse for being unwilling to name and oppose the corrupt and corruption. Things can always improve and become worse, which relates with whether moral people are willing to behave morally and enforce morality. If they are unwilling and allow immoral people to impose their vision and even strategically demoralize any opposition, well you will see how interesting times can get when people don't try to enforce a better way of doing things.

Of course a certain level of unpleasantness, negativity, bitterness is necessary. Sorry but you can't support being ruled by the reasonable, the ethical, the truthful, the honorable, the restrained, etc, etc, if you aren't unpleasant to the unreasonable, dishonest, unethical and corrupt.

Affirmative action is "unlawful", but what exactly is the penalty if someone discriminates on the basis of race?

Well, civil rights law suits against institutions that result in that institution paying large monetary damages have long been a thing. So presumably going forward Harvard can no longer use "targetting diversity" as a defense against such suits?

It's a little curious to me that there was no monetary judgement attached to this case. When a company like coca-cola or Tesla is judged as having acted in a discriminatory manner, they face hundreds of millions of dollars in damages. So why was there no monetary judgement in this Harvard case?

At least in SFFA v. Harvard, the underlying complaint requested :

(a) A declaratory judgment, pursuant to the Declaratory Judgment Act, 28 U.S.C. § 2201, from the Court that Harvard’s admissions policies and procedures violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. § 2000d et seq.;

(b) A declaratory judgment, pursuant to the Declaratory Judgment Act, 28 U.S.C. § 2201, from the Court that any use of race or ethnicity in the educational setting violates the Fourteenth Amendment and Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. § 2000d et seq.;

(c) A permanent injunction prohibiting Harvard from using race as a factor in future undergraduate admissions decisions;

(d) A permanent injunction requiring Harvard to conduct all admissions in a manner that does not permit those engaged in the decisional process to be aware of or learn the race or ethnicity of any applicant for admission;

(e) Attorneys’ fees and costs pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1988 and any other applicable legal authority; and

(f) All other relief this Court finds appropriate and just.

SCOTUS generally does not answer all questions in a trial (barring a few rare situations where it is the court of first resort); it only resolves questions of law that were appealed to it and the court granted cert. Because questions of law related to attorneys' fees are very settled, that wasn't at question in the SCOTUS case. Instead, this was determined after SCOTUS vacated previous decisions and remanded to lower courts, which found just under 50k USD in costs. We won't know about attorneys fees for a while yet, because the district court gave an extension to October 27th and defendants almost always contest it (you can watch here for updates), but I'd expect that they'll do better than Clement and Murphy in my last post.

So in that sense, SFFA didn't get cash because they didn't ask. But that just kicks the can down the road to why they didn't ask? The Title VI doesn't explicitly authorize private rights of action at all, but the courts have generally allowed compensatory (though not punitive) damages. Some of the why's for legal strategy reasons -- SFFA knew they had an uphill battle without also getting into debates on how much access to Harvard is worth -- but there's also a broader logistics problem.

Courts can issue preliminary injunctions to prevent irreparable harm. And harms that can be compensated are repairable, by definition.

((There are a few exceptions-in-everything-but-name around "dignity" harms, but gfl bringing that here.))

In most cases, this makes sense! But it's a bit of a problem for a case like this one, because Harvard (and other schools) demonstrably care more about keeping The Wrong Sorts Out than the cash, and virtually every case will exceed the length of time that someone can wait to get into college. So SFFA was wagering for future preliminary injunctions in other cases over the (often trivial) compensatory damages in this one.

((In practice, they've lost that wager.))

Did anyone of you had Waffen SS fighter getting standing ovation in Canadian parliament for their 2023 bingo card?

Congratulations - you will be rich.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66908958

Canada's House Speaker apologises for praising Ukrainian who fought for Nazis

Yaroslav Hunka, 98, was sitting in the gallery and got a standing ovation in parliament after Mr Rota said he was a "hero" during a visit by Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky. During World War Two, Mr Hunka served in the 14th Waffen-SS Grenadier Division, also known as the Galicia Division - a voluntary unit made up mostly of ethnic Ukrainians under Nazi command. Division members are accused of killing Polish and Jewish civilians, although the unit has not been found guilty of any war crimes by a tribunal.

Now I doubt that the svastika will be on the Canadian flag anytime soon. But the fact that the ideology blinded the people to make even a basic background check on the so called hero is troubling. And there seems to be some kind of full blown damage control operation going on.

Anyway a lot of Canadian politicians will have to figure out how to unsuck this dick. ADL seems to be silent as of now. Media try to bury the waffen ss part in the bottom of the articles, and I wouldn't be surprised if some of the more fanatical ex blue checkmarks try to write opinion piece explaining how this unit were somewhat different than the rest of the Waffen SS.

> be born in 1920s Polish Galicia

> be Ukrainian-speaking peasant

> be oppressed by ethnic-majority poles

> West side of country gets invaded by Germany

> your side of country gets invaded by Soviet Russia

> have to deal with literal fucking Stalin for two years

> get invaded by Germany

> liberation.jpg

> ”Hey kid, wanna fight the Russians and Poles that have been oppressing you your whole life?”

> 80 years later

> “fuck you. You picked the wrong side”

Yeah, people are acting like he drove a truck to Toronto, or something.

How were they oppressed by Poles? Not disagreeing, I'm just not very familiar with this area of history.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Ukrainian_War

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pacification_of_Ukrainians_in_Eastern_Galicia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bereza_Kartuska_Prison

Thanks!

I only heard of the Polish-Ukrainian War two weeks ago, from this video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=DVZARacjKGI

The axe being ground in that video is a little complicated. Poland has a law making it a criminal offense to talk about "Polish concentration camps". I thought that I understood where the Poles were coming from. The Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact kicked off WWII with the Germans and the USSR dividing Poland between them. The Germans set up some concentration camps in the part of Poland that they occupied. Calling these "Polish concentration camps" blames the Poles for what the Germans got up to.

But the Polish law also bans talking about the Polish concentration camps that the Poles set up in the aftermath of the Polish-Ukrainian war. The law against blaming the Poles for what the Germans got up to, turns out to be a sneaky law against blaming the Poles for what the Poles got up to.

That leaves me rather against any law limiting freedom of speech; you never know what kind of sneaky cover up is being attempted.

Many such cases

I caught the daughter's Facebook page before she deleted. She and her father were so incredibly proud and excited about this, and her father was over the moon at the chance to meet Zelensky. (there is a lot of boring stupidity around "but Zelensky's jewish!", but I think this is sufficient disproof of at least "currently a joins-the-SS-to-cleanse-Ukraine-of-jews-level nazi")

I think it's worth giving a hearing to his own account of his experience with the war (auto-translated). This obviously could be heavily sanitized in retrospect, but with the historical literacy to understand the circumstances of growing up in a village in eastern interwar-Poland through 1939, I don't think it necessarily has to be. This whole situation is just profoundly sad.

I imagine the daughter gave the staffers of Speaker Rota, who is also their personal MP in North Bay, the little lie-by-omission of "First Ukrainian Divsion" as part of trying to arrange for her father to be able to come see Zelensky speak (I didn't see any indication that the expectation was for him to be presented before parliament), and it snowballed all the way through all the staffers necessary for this to have happened without a second thought. It's fun to imagine those staffers, and the circumstances that lead the Liberal Party and Parliament to have nobody in the entire chain equipped to realize that "fought against the Russians in WWII" needs a second look. What an unbelievable unforced error.

I think there may be some meaningful distinction to be made between Eastern European and Baltic people who had first been conquered by the Soviets and who subsequently lived under NKVD terror and had friends and family disappeared forever in the middle of the night, and who were later under the direct physical threat of the Soviets' return, for whom these Waffen-SS units were the only organized option available for them to fight that with; and German SS who had other options and for whom joining the SS was something very particular. Indeed a Canadian government commission found something like this in the 1980s (pretty explicitly laid out in part 2), specifically regarding this division.

Of course there's no conceivable way you would expect the general public to have enough historical literacy to process this with any more finely-grained nuance than how they are. Boy did they ever fuck up.

Other things:

The SS Galician's specific accusation of atrocities was against not-specifically-jewish Poles. File this too under "there's no conceivable way you could expect, historical literacy, etc". (also I can't find any mention of this atrocity in the commission report ...)

The Daughter's facebook was absolutely plastered, multiple posts per day interspersed with their giddy anticipation of this event going back as far as I looked, with "Good People Don't Spend Their Time Harassing Marginalized Communities" (Progress Pride Flag), "No Space For Hate" (Intersex-Inclusive Progress Pride Flag-coloured map of Canada), Orange Shirt Day profile pics, etc. What an impossible nightmare this attempt to do a nice thing for her incredibly elderly father must have turned out to be.

expect the general public to have enough historical literacy to process this with any more finely-grained nuance

This is a cheque the current regime [and the fragment of the public that supports them] is inherently unable to cash. If you want to pretend the evil Nazi menace is everywhere, fine, but that approach has inherent costs, one of which is that you now have to be unimpeachable about not bringing things literally called "Nazis" in.

The public is not going to care (their faction has in large part seen to that) that "he's one of the good ones", even though that's obviously true, and so that faction has no other option but to cancel a military ally from a country they're trying to help because to do otherwise is just writing your own attack ads. Caesar's wife must be above suspicion.

Personally, I'm rooting for the father; a Communist foreign empire trying to unjustly impose its will on territory that empire considered a western province is not entirely irrelevant to recent Canadian history. Sadly, I don't think there's a Canadian political party willing/representing a public that would be receptive enough to actually pointing that out, but it would be absolutely hilarious if there was.

The public is not going to care (their faction has in large part seen to that) that "he's one of the good ones", even though that's obviously true

How is it "obviously true"?

Also, Eastern European SS sympathizers just looked to act out ethnic revenge fantasies on civilian populations. This is what Hunka's group did, mostly focusing on killing Polish civilians. Same thing in Croatia and doubtless other places too, where it was an excuse for killing local Serbs and Jews and stealing their property. What about that makes them "the good ones"?

the little lie-by-omission of "First Ukrainian Division"

I'm glad someone pointed this out. That he was introduced to the parliament as the veteran of the "First Ukrainian Division" was a calculated and blatant lie. The 14th Waffen-SS division was named Galizien specifically to avoid any official mention of "Ukraine", as the Nazis did not view it as a legitimate nation, and certainly not as a polity worthy of sovereignty. Then in the last stage of the war when defeat was imminent, the Ukrainian collaborators in Germany started to self-organize as control over them collapsed, and one of their actions was apparently renaming the 14th, which was at that point stationed on Austrian soil, to the "First Ukrainian Division". The Waffen-SS headquarters never sanctioned this, so the change was never official, and thus does not appear in official documents.

Another calculated lie that at least some members of the Ukrainian diaspora in Canada committed was erecting monuments to their military veterans which carry the insignia of the 14th on them, but are nominally dedicated to the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA), which is a completely different organization and was not founded by the Germans.

"No Space For Hate" (Intersex-Inclusive Progress Pride Flag-coloured map of Canada), Orange Shirt Day profile pics, etc. What an impossible nightmare this attempt to do a nice thing for her incredibly elderly father must have turned out to be.

Pardon? I'm supposed to feel sympathy for someone willingly participating in slanderous attack against parents concerned with the gender affirmation scandal?

The racism that ought to be focused upon when it comes to these old fighters being praised is obviously Anti-Russian racism. That is the stronger continuity. I don't think it is an accident that Ukrainian nazis are being promoted. Rather the point is to allow a continuity of ultranationalism against Russians, including of warcriminal type.

But of course not to allow dissent from the other agendas that said grandaughter was all too happy to promote. So nationalism including of the more extreme sort but only so far leads to Ukrainians dying to kill Russians. And including putting no pressure on groups and a mentality that has proven willingness to commit attrocities towards civilians as well.

Which is immoral of course. Especially if you examine things from a more long term outlook, not just last two years and consider whether the meat grinder had to happen. Those who supported it happening because they don't mind Ukrainians dying and Russians dying for they value the weakening of Russia as more important, could very well be more bloodthirsty characters than this 90 year old in his youth.

Certainly I find the obsession with 80 years old WW2 insane when it is far greater moral affront to be arming people willing to commit attrocities than giving awards to someone who might have commited them in the past. We have people who have bloodied their hands with warcrimes enough in our timeline to not concern us too much with those who did so 80 years ago. It is current warmongering imperialists who we should be more concerned with.

Another thing to consider is maybe her grandfather was not the most evil to ever evil, but in addition to any atrocities he might have participated or not participated in, even more importantly today like in his youth he is betting on the wrong horse. He is betting on a foreign power establishment which sees his own nation's and its people and sovereignity as a threat and has no intention to let them be.

There is a repetition of the same mistake of joining with the devil you don't know how oppressive it is to oppose the devil you have a more direct experience of screwing you over. I believe this is a factor in the establishment supporting these "nazis". Already proven to be useful idiots for a foreign western power and are following the same playbook.

The better path for Ukraine to have followed would had been to try to resist being captured by either sphere of influence and to play the threat of each against each other. If that had happened, the future would be much brighter for the Ukrainian nation. It would be better for the world as well. The real shitshow, this incredible unnecessary loss of life would not have happened.

I caught the daughter's Facebook page before she deleted. She and her father were so incredibly proud and excited about this, and her father was over the moon at the chance to meet Zelensky. (there is a lot of boring stupidity around "but Zelensky's jewish!", but I think this is sufficient disproof of at least "currently a joins-the-SS-to-cleanse-Ukraine-of-jews-level nazi")

Jews supporting something does not sanctify evil since plenty of Jews has supported all sorts of evil in modernity especially as well. There are the obvious far left movements but even certain movements less associated with the left.

I have even seen the arguement that Italian fascists were not racist because they were rather friendly with Italian Jews who were well integrated and overepresented per their population in Italian fascism which is actually a hidden fact. One should not take the wrong conclusion from this however. The Italian fascists changed their attitude due to the influence of nazi Germany but even then they were much more protective of Italian Jews than various other nazi allies.

At the same time that the Italian fascists (including Jewish Italian fascists) were friendly to Jewish Italians (or less hostile later on) they were genocidal imperialists demonizing and justifying brutal murderous conquest against other ethnic groups including european ones. Even well within WW2, Italian fascists obviously treated Jewish Italians far better than Greeks, Slavs and other groups they conquered.

Jews or some Jews being at the center of something does not mean that something is good. That prejudice is racist stupid nonsense and it is promoted by people who want to excuse evil by using it.

Someone with nazi symbols who isn't an antisemite but willing to commit attrocities against other groups should be condemned for what they are. Jews should not lie at the center of our moral universe, although their welfare should be considered too along other groups but never as a prioritization at expense of others.

The better path for Ukraine to have followed would had been to try to resist being captured by either sphere of influence and to play the threat of each against each other.

Sounds nice, pre-2014. Once one of your neighbors invades you, this isn't an option anymore. I know you know this. Help me understand what I'm missing.

You are missing the fact that it is immoral not to blame people who make crisis inevitable and it is short sighted to look at things only after things have escalated. So no, we need to blame those who made 2014 reality, both in Ukraine, Russia and in the USA.

After 2014, escalating to the current level has proven a worse option. Not shelling civilian areas for the Ukrainians. Or the USA not having their hands in this proxy war while their apologists lying their asses off. Or the Russians not supporting the rebels.

After the more hardcore invasion of 2022 there isn't really a good endpoint after the invasion. Ending the gruelling meat grinder sooner is better for an Ukrainian and Russian point of view. Unless you want Ukrainians to die so they can kill Russians for a long war, a peace agreement is not going to make people happy but is better than the alternative.

Of course if the Ukrainians could have won easier, it would be a better alternative for them not to go to the negotiating table. But that isn't the case.

The Ukrainians aren't the only ones needed for a peace agreement, but the better end point would have been a ceasefire peace. And crimea should had been the one area the Ukrainians should had been willing to make more direct concessions.

Actually it appeared that Ukraine and Russia were close to make an agreement but Britain torpedoed the agreement.

American imperialists both in terms of the USA itself and in terms of random indivudals who are American imperialists are not the only big power, and the only group of chauvinists willing to screw over others but they are not a good force for the world and they are very willing to destroy whole countries to expand their sphere of influence or harm rival powers like Russia while promoting propaganda about freedom and other nonsense. Meanwhile they try to put their own preffered people in charge who will go along with it. Maybe even advocate with greater zealotry for the American empire to remain engaged.

So I don't have a grand solution of the biggest powers bringing international justice because they are not lead by moral people with moral goals. I can still condemn the ruinous paths being followed. And pressure immoral actors who are hypocrites into behaving better, and condemning them for failing to live up to their propaganda. Obviously this forum has an over-abudance of American imperialists who cheerlead destruction and act with unparalled arrogance, having learned nothing from the Iraq, Libya, Syria debacles but even doubling down in acting as if they are moderates for doing so. A fraud.

Ideally we have a multi polar world where great powers use the concept of international justice to dissuade each other from warmongering would work better.

And while the world never had that, it could have it to a greater or lesser extend. The worst trajectory possible is American imperialists dreaming of world conquest and consolidating an authoritarian alliance that oppresses their vasals and is very hostile towards Russia/China and others while BRIC alliance also consolidates, and things heat up for a WW3.

For what is worth, I believe we need more gatekeeping against authoritarian american imperialists who deplatform and shame dissent while promoting both war outside and authoritarianism at home.

The escalatory potential of Ukraine/Russian war and how it helped lead Europe away from Russia and threatens to do so with China, is another facet to it.

I'm not going to begrudge anyone the schadenfreude of watching the other tribe beclowning themselves, and this is absolutely fucking hilarious for anyone with a functioning sense of humour even if they are basically pro-Ukraine and pro-Trudeau, but I don't think this means very much.

Legislatures get a lot of requests from members to do small favours for a constituent (see this Atlantic article about the plethora of bills to rename Post Offices for the US version) and generally operate an assumption of good faith as long as the request doesn't come across as partisan. The most famous example is the Texas Legislature being pranked into honouring a serial killer. The US Congress begrudgingly allocates a certain amount of staffer time to vetting post office renamings to make sure they don't honour anyone unsuitable, but the actual legislators wave requests through as long as the home-state delegation are onside. Other legislatures have less staff support than Congress, so they can't even do that level of vetting.

This is a case where you shouldn't have needed to do the vetting - anyone with a clue should know that "Ukrainian patriot fighting Soviets in WW2" implies "Nazi collaborator", but the only person I would expect to do even the bare minimum is Speaker Rota as the constituency MP honouring a constituent. So I think he deserves to go. But I don't think the Canadian Parliament as an institution is more blameworthy than the Texas Legislature was in 1971.

I'm not going to begrudge anyone the schadenfreude of watching the other tribe beclowning themselves, and this is absolutely fucking hilarious for anyone with a functioning sense of humour even if they are basically pro-Ukraine and pro-Trudeau, but I don't think this means very much.

Like with the blackface it matters only because we all know the Liberals would be calling for nuking the CPC from space if they even approached anything like this.

And it wouldn't be seen as an honest mistake but a reflection of real issues within the party (it clearly is a reflection of credulity on the part of Liberals since, as you say, this shouldn't have even passed the sniff test but good luck getting that standard applied equally)

But it's the Liberals so they'll get a pass , like the time they did both a misinformation and a stoking stochastic terrorism while pushing for ever greater censorship and control to fight such things.

like the time they did both a misinformation and a stoking stochastic terrorism while pushing for ever greater censorship and control to fight such things.

It's always fucking DARVO with these people. Whatever it is they are complaining about the other side doing its exactly what they are doing. Like that whole "fake news" and "disinformation" shit they where whining about at the same time as they were coordinating literal conspiracy theories worse than the wet dream of a schizophrenic. (Russia-gate/pee-tape)

Imagine all the staff people who didn't realize "fought against Stalin in WW II" probably meant was a Nazi (Finns excluded, of course).

Well, for a time ‘fought with Stalin’ also meant you were probably a Nazi.

I’d bet 95% of them don’t even pay attention during every session. And they just follow along with the clapping figuring the people in charge are NOT getting them to clap for a Nazi soldier.

More surprising that Zelensky didn’t stop it since the Ukranians most of the time have decent meme game.

He looks positively gleeful during the ovation -- probably didn't occur to him that it could be a problem.

I realized a bit into this war that Russian Nationalist and Putin himself use the word Nazi in ways that we do not in the west. Often it seems like they used it to just refer to the west - the people who call themselves Neoliberal today are Nazis to the Russian Nationalists. Perhaps more simply western society itself gaining influence in the area Russia views as there backyard.

(Finns excluded, of course).

You appear to be forgetting at least Poland, probably also other.

But wasn't the fight between Poland and the Soviet Union over within about 2 weeks?

Two weeks' time, but there were nearly half a million Poles fighting, and since the German invasion of Poland was a couple weeks earlier I'd bet approximately 0% of the anti-Soviet fighters were Nazis or Nazi-sympathetic.

"fought against Stalin in WW II" probably meant was a Nazi (Finns excluded, of course).

was still wrong

also, there was further partisan activity, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cursed_soldiers

Interesting. I had never heard of them.

It’s denialism about the role of nazism in Ukrainian nationalism. Like it or not Ukrainian nationalism involves lionizing figures who supported the nazis and often as not lionizing actual neo nazis themselves, and I mean actually literally nazis not just politically incorrect. A general policy of denial had the side effect of bringing in an actual literal SS trooper. This man is viewed as a hero by lots of Ukrainians for the same reason lots of southerners view Lee and stonewall Jackson as heros. But pro-Ukraine western posturing denies that and then gets caught with its pants down. Simple as.

I think at least we can say, Nazism doesn't mean what it means to us to people who lived in Eastern Europe.

One of the more surreal things I've experienced lately was when I asked on the Motte Telegram back around the start of the war (which has a couple of actual Ukranian residents), basically, so what's the deal with Jewish Zelensky having an apparently-actual-Nazi unit (Azov battalion) serving in his army? Taking Western views at least sort of seriously, surely an actual Nazi unit would refuse to take orders from a Jewish President, and a Jewish President would surely boot an actual Nazi unit out of the army he was Commander-In-Chief of. But all the Ukrainian residents were like, yeah, so what, why do you think this is weird? Even for English-speakers who presumably have at least some exposure to the Anglosphere, the idea that Nazis and Jews might not like each other much just seemed incomprehensible to them.

In the abstract there's room for nuance in this discussion, but in the context of the year of our lord 2023, it will never not be funny that an actual member of the Waffen-SS got a standing ovation from the very people who claim "honk honk" is code for "heil Hitler".

The way I understand it, the Azov aren't that Nazi and Zelensky is really not that Jewish. And even Hitler had a Jew or two he liked.

They are about as Nazi as the IRA were terrorists.

This seems to be fair to me for the people between Russia and Germany. They didn’t have a choice to pick the good side. I would have chosen Franco or Pinochet when those countries had their communists moment. Eastern front you had no good choice. And Russia isn’t just communists - they have a military based authoritarian form that did brutal oppress their neighbors for centuries. It’s not Cuban Marxism which is poverty but hasn’t been very deadly (they’ve allowed mass emigration any time it gets hot which was an immigrant group the US was fine with).

A lot of wars don’t have the obviously good side to be on. And that applies to modern wars.

I just love it. It's such a funny thing, especially the part where the speaker said the "thank you for your service" incantation. I didn't think we would surpass (multiple, separate occasions) photos of our "woke dream" PM doing blackface in terms of pure lol factor, but this has to be close. The politician who got caught on a home camera peeing in a coffee mug is maybe a close 3rd. Canada politics man.

I was crying laughing. It had to be Trudeau.

ADL seems to be silent as of now.

The mother organization, however, has played it absolutely straight. The Times of Israel:

B’nai Brith Canada’s CEO, Michael Mostyn, said it was outrageous that Parliament honored a former member of a Nazi unit, saying Ukrainian “ultra-nationalist ideologues” who volunteered for the Galicia Division “dreamed of an ethnically homogenous Ukrainian state and endorsed the idea of ethnic cleansing.”

“We understand an apology is forthcoming. We expect a meaningful apology. Parliament owes an apology to all Canadians for this outrage, and a detailed explanation as to how this could possibly have taken place at the center of Canadian democracy,” Mostyn said before Rota issued his statement.

Gotta say, it's heartening to see that some things don't change. B’nai Brith doing some NAFO "oh shush, what Nazis, Zelensky is literally Jewish so all's well, and who really knows, maybe SS volunteers really had a point, after all, you see, those Russians…" routine would be a total clown world event. I don't much like those guys but can appreciate anyone sticking to their bit.

The thing about Ukrainian patriots is they're quite straightforward. They had a bog standard Eastern European/Balkan ethnonationalist movement with all the classical knuckledragger tropes about $ingroup being Aryans/Greeks/Amazons/Huns/werewolves (the account belongs to some grifter but I've ran the list by Ukrainian acquaintances and they say it is "common knowledge" or school program to a greater or lesser extent) and $outgroup being racially inferior nonhuman pig dog creatures (rural prejudices, a haughty Moscal urbanite would certainly say); they still have it; many naively buy it as literally true (eg their famous auteur with a "cult following among Kyiv intellectuals" theorizing on Moskals' descent from some separate, evil species of ape… ah, the video is private now) and often do not expect reproach; their imagemakers will dress it up as merely «standing up to Moskal Asiatic Imperialists», and obvious geopolitics as well as the nature of the conflict force polite people to keep awkwardly smiling and pretending that's some cute exotic custom or whatever. It really is refreshingly attractive, the way Remove Kebab memes were, I imagine it speaks to the suppressed music in the blood of those whose ancestors went on Crusades; and they have better music than Serbs. Better lyrics too.

Canadian foreign politics has become a lot more riveting lately. Trudeau giving a MCU era impression of a Churchill speech was not in my bingo card either.

From Podervianskyi's Wikipedia article:

Podervianskyi's works have often been criticized because of his use of vulgar unprintable language. They are written mostly in Surzhyk and include much swearing and obscenities, which make them appear as if they were composed by an uneducated person. Often it seems that the only reason one would read the works is for their comic impact and to hear creative swearing. But this is not the case. The numerous citations from Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Taoism and dzen buddhism philosophers give the idea of several intellectual layers in his works. Although a number of Podervianskyi's expressions have entered Ukrainian slang, he uses crude language to show the flaws and grotesqueness of his characters. Podervianskyi carefully matches up language with his characters. Thus a self-made intellectual spouts scientific-sounding nonsense, while more "straightforward" characters use simple words to express complex things.

"To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Les Podervianskyi. The humour is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of theoretical physics..."

“We understand an apology is forthcoming. We expect a meaningful apology. Parliament owes an apology to all Canadians for this outrage, and a detailed explanation as to how this could possibly have taken place at the center of Canadian democracy,” Mostyn said before Rota issued his statement.

If I am holding official position and someone evens thinks of daring of holding this tone to me I will throw everything in the state possession to ruin him. Every piece of dirt the intelligence agencies have for him, his relatives and anything he holds dear.

This is not antisemitism btw - just anti obnoxious cuntism. This level of entitlement just has no place in a civilized world, no matter if it is this, PETA, or PMRC

B’nai Brith are not PETA but, in our crude gentile terms, something between a Masonic organization and an ethnic mafia. If you were holding an official position and "threw anything in the state position" to ruin them, you'd have had bad luck on the road, or were revealed as a violent pedophile, or something to this effect (but these days probably just your Antisemitic utterances from 20 years ago suddenly surfacing). I believe this is generally understood by people who matter; though, seeing as they fail to anticipate the side a Ukrainian who fought Russians in the WWII stood on, it may be an issue those historically illiterate people still need to be reminded of. Thus the uncouth tone is necessary to deter future transgressions.

I'm surprised that people are surprised. The West will back anyone from a radical jihadist or in this case praising a former (?) Nazi if it suits its geopolitical interest. Ultimately, the rhetoric of "human rights" is reserved for the large domestic audience of midwits even as the de facto foreign policy is far more ruthless.

Yeah, this is where I am on most things. It’s not even just foreign policy, but most things to do with government— the official version is not really believed by anyone educated above 5th grade civics. The powerful rule for their own sake, not the public’s.

the official version is not really believed by anyone educated above 5th grade civics

Unfortunately, this is not my experience. Some of the most conformist people I've met have had higher education degrees. I think Chomsky wrote something about this some years ago, how the primary function of universities is to increase compliance with the system. Interesting thought.

Did Chomsky write this specifically about universities? Looking at the summary of Manufacturing Consent (written as an MIT professor, co-authored with a U. Penn. professor), you can see all sorts of complaints about profit, advertising, anti-communism ... "government and corporate news sources" is probably the closest category to "universities" but it sure doesn't sound like they had their employers specifically in mind.

I've seen complaints about this before. Let's see ... Moldbug had:

If anyone is in an obvious position to manufacture consent, it is (as Walter Lippmann openly proposed) first the journalists themselves, and next the universities which they regard as authoritative. Yet, strangely, the leftist has no interest whatsoever in this security hole. This can only be because it is already plugged with his worm. The complaint of the Chomskian, in other words, always occurs when the other team is impudent enough to try to manufacture a bit of its own consent.

I may never be a huge Chomsky fan, but I haven't read the primary sources and I wouldn't trust Moldbug as a charitable paraphraser; I'd definitely like to know if I fell for a misrepresentation.

Self-selection for compliance/conformity to managerial authority.

I was amused by this follow-up article that refuses to call the guy a Nazi, or even a former Nazi. Many paragraphs deep they print that he was in the Waffen SS, but even then hedges by saying the unit was "under Nazi command" instead of itself Nazi, and they throw in a pseudo-exonerating line about his unit not being found guilty of war crimes.

https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66919862

Trudeau calls praise for Nazi-linked veteran 'deeply embarrassing'

An invitation to parliament for a Ukrainian man who fought for a Nazi unit in World War Two is "deeply embarrassing" to Canada, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau says.

Yaroslav Hunka, 98, got a standing ovation after House of Commons Speaker Anthony Rota called him a "hero" during a Friday visit by Ukraine's president.

Mr Rota has said he did not know of Mr Hunka's Nazi ties and made a mistake in inviting him to attend the event.

...

During World War Two, Mr Hunka served in the 14th Waffen-SS Grenadier Division, a voluntary unit made up mostly of ethnic Ukrainians under Nazi command. Division members are accused of killing Polish and Jewish civilians, although the unit has not been found guilty of any war crimes by a tribunal.

The unit was renamed the First Ukrainian Division before surrendering to the Western Allies in 1945.

There are several things which are just astonishing to me. First, even if he didn't know he was a Nazi, shouldn't it have been enough of a problem that he fought against the Russians during WWII? He had to have known that the Russians were on our side.

But even more disappointing is that our Parliament, the most powerful institution in the country, is putting people forward as worthy of high praise without doing the most basic investigation into the person they're giving such an honour to.

Then you have the fact that he got a standing ovation from the other members of parliament, which indicates none clued in to the significance of his having fought against the Russians during WWII, and they were all eager to applaud him even though they should have recognized they didn't have a clue who he was.

This should prove once and for all the incompetence of Parliament as a deliberative body.

shouldn't it have been enough of a problem that he fought against the Russians during WWII?

A lot of people fought against Russians in that time period, and Canada has a large Ukrainian population with unfond memories of the Russia of that era.

This seems to be just a regular mildly charitable interpretation to me?

Per Merriam-Webster, Hunka would be a Nazi if he was either a

1.Member of the Nazi party

2.Supported Nazi ideology.

He wasn't a party member, and superficial search doesn't give any indication of him being an ideological Nazi.

There's a small matter of him fighting under Nazi command but given the historical context, it's entirely plausible, indeed probable, that him volunteering had nothing to do with a sympathy toward Nazis, but rather hatred of communists

and superficial search doesn't give any indication of him being an ideological Nazi

What standard of evidence are you looking for? When someone volunteers to join the SS, which requires swearing an oath to Hitler and probably a bunch of other stuff, hosts Himmler, carries out a genocide against Poles to Himmler's approval, etc., I believe it's fair to say that they are a Nazi. I am not saying that he personally carried out a genocide, of course: just that he willingly joined and armed group whose primary accomplishments and motivation was killing Polish civilians, when he had every option not to.

I mean any standard of evidence that excludes literal SS members from being Nazis is ridiculous.

Perhaps an analogy might help: I have ancestors who fought in the Red Army, but I would never stoop to branding them communists just because they decided to take part in fighting off Nazi invasion

So what actually happened? They just didn't do a background check? Historical illiteracy? Aide who hates his job let him through for a giggle?

For added hilarity, it was on Yom Kippur.

Trudeau has said that Canada has committed genocide. Perhaps they're just owning it.

Let’s not forget when then-Congressman Adam Kinzinger praised the totally 100% real heroism of the fighter ace the “Ghost of Kiev”. Or when NATO shrugged its collective shoulders when Ukraine fired a missile at Poland, blamed it on Russia and then lied about it even after contradicting evidence came to light.

Nobody in the West is acting seriously about this war anymore. The battle lines are frozen. Russia isn’t giving up territory it has annexed. Ukraine will be just another failed state, just another sacrifice made on the altar of neoliberal democracy.

I’m not sure they were ever taking Ukraine seriously. The minute the Russians crossed the border, it was treated like a kids’ story. Ukraine good, NATO good. Russia bad. Ukraine will win, Russia is pathetic and weak. Made up stories of heroism. And of course boycotting and deplatforming and renaming anything Russian. Cancel the Russian opera singer, if you can’t ban Russian athletes, make them compete under a different flag, and of course shame anyone who doesn’t use the proper names (Kyiv, Ukraine (no the), Chicken Kyiv, The Russian Invasion of Ukraine) or companies that don’t leave Russia within the first ten minutes. Anyone who questions the narrative is either a Russian Troll or fooled by one.

Now a lot of the above, worryingly, sounds a lot like what was going on in WW1. We at least in America, saw the war as a chance for glory, we cheerfully shit on the Germans and renamed Sauerkraut to Liberty Cabbage. And eventually we found out just how bad war can be.

I would like to chalk this up to the foolish youth of American nations who haven't yet tired of the millennias of ruin warfare can bring.

But the truth is probably more grim. I recently watched They shall not grow old which is ostensibly about the British youths in WW1, and they too had a cheerful glee about them to start with, despite being part of a culture that has seen its fair share of horror at that point (if not of the industrial kind).

Maybe people are just eternally naïve about such things. There are seemingly endless examples of bloody conflicts that everyone was strongly convinced would be over by Christmas. The power of delusion is strong, and maybe it has to be to muster the will to defend oneself in the first place.

It's about exposure to reality and control of narrative. These proxy wars will continue to happen, even "real" "wars" will continue to happen. New soldiers are born every day, and they will be continuously fed into the meat grinder, until the mass of the populace gets exposed to the harsh reality of war, it will never end. This war needs to happen on US ground, everyone must feel the pain viscerally, personally for it to be real. When people die somewhere else, it's an abstract thing. It doesn't really register to the common person. If it does it will be swept away by some other personal problem or the news cycle will shift and some other bullshit will fill their attention.

Have you read this article? https://www.ecosophia.net/notes-on-stormtrooper-syndrome/

I think you'd find it interesting given some of the points you've made above.

Or when NATO shrugged its collective shoulders when Ukraine fired a missile at Poland, blamed it on Russia and then lied about it even after contradicting evidence came to light.

Well, the important part is that if it was Ukrainian missile, then it was a collateral damage of anti-air missile.

The battle lines are frozen. Russia isn’t giving up territory it has annexed.

That does not appear to match reality, as far as I know.

The memory of the Commonwealth, the Soviets and Americans fighting on the same side has long faded. Plus the Cold War happened. It's no longer part of the public consciousness.

Isn’t this basically “Ukraine good, Russia bad.” No need to think through the details.

Update - it seems this story has some legs:

The Canadian Speaker of the House of Commons Anthony Rota (no relation) has now resigned over this incident.

Meanwhile, Poland has reportedly "taken steps" towards extraditing Yaroslav Hunka for "crimes against Polish people of Jewish origin". That story doesn't seem to have the update of Mr. Rota's resignation.

So I've been reading and listening to a lot of WWII memoirs, specifically of Germans on the eastern front. I want to find out for myself the motivations of these men, dispel the myths and western propaganda of WWII, and find any parallels to our modern times. Many of these memoirs are written by soldiers of a Waffen-SS division. What I have picked up from reading these memoirs, is that the reasons these men joined the Waffen-SS are diverse and not as dubious as our western propaganda and the myth of the just war would have you believe. The Waffen-SS were elite units composed of volunteers, whereas I imagine the Wermacht were comprised of mostly conscripts.

Based on the accounts I have read, many of the men joined the Waffen-SS out of pure hatred for the communists and concerned the growth of communism would swallow European culture and religion. The time they spent in the Ukraine often talked of the local populace's hatred of the communists and the atrocities that were committed against them by the bolsheviks. The more fanatical SS that one usually thinks of were termed the Allgemeine SS and were often thought of poorly by the soldiers of the Waffen-SS.

So, it is no surprise that many Ukranians such as Mr. Hunka volunteered to serve in a Waffen-SS division as a matter of revenge against the bolshevik hordes. This hardly makes him a nazi as is the common narrative and its hilarious to see this backfire on Canada. Many if not most of these brave heroes died and its sad to see them slandered after the fact, when they were right to fear, and fight against communism.

Relevant Books

The Eastern Front: Memoirs of a Waffen-SS Volunteer

Für Volk and Führer: The Memoir of a Veteran of the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler One of my favorites and actually has a really good audiobook on Audible, which as you can imagine is hit or miss on these memoirs.

The Forgotten Soldier This one is unique as the author was a young poor french kid who joined the army under Vichy France because of little opportunity when he came of age, then found himself a part of the Großdeutschland division. Also had a real good audiobook on audible.

Take them all with a dump truck of salt given the incentives. "I wasn't a real fascist, I was just an over eager patriot who donned the swastika to fight muh godless commie bolshevik asiatic hordes" is on the bingo card next to -

  • "I was just following orders"

  • "actually I never hated Jews"

  • "we lost because of numbers alone, not superior enemy tactics and strategy"

  • "those war crimes were carried out by this other officer who is now conveniently dead"

-and so on for conveniently self-serving narratives commonly encountered among accounts by nazis and quislings living in NATO countries seeking to ward off prison, hanging, repatriation or pariah status by whitewashing their past and selling themselves as useful assets for NATO. Historians are lately more critically approaching such works rather than taking them mostly at face value as before, which is really improving military history around the eastern front.

Interesting how all those brave heroes went to fight against "communism" and "bolshevik hordes", yet ended up mostly fighting Soviet people.

You could turn this same argument around on every western ally justifying their fight against Nazi's. Don't forget the soviet forces had political commissars in their units.

"Justifying" their fight against Nazis? The nazis attacked the allies and countless neutral countries first, that's all the justification needed to fight.

I'm not going to get dragged into a justification debate on WW2. You will clearly stick to the usual normie narrative so it's not worth the reddit style back and forth.

Retreating because you can't back it up. The "normies" are far more correct than the neo-nazis on this topic. The Gleiwitz incident was a false flag attack ordered by Hitler; the nazis attacked first and did so after years of other powers making nonaggression pacts, trade deals, territorial concessions, lifting Versailles treaty enforcement, and other negotiations in an attempt to avert another war. All of that amounted to a big waste of time, because the nazis were just acting in bad faith stalling to arm up and backstab everybody.

A bunch of my family died fighting in the Wehrmacht, then even more when Hitler in his incredible arrogance and egomania refused to allow civilians to evacuate as the front lines crept closer and closer. The region they were from doesn't even exist any more. Know who the survivors blame? Not the Allies, not even the Red Army, they place it squarely on Hitler and Nazism for starting the war then refusing to surrender when it was clearly lost.

I don't really understand why you feel the need to argue something I didn't even bring up. I'm not a "neo-nazi", merely trying to understand the time and motivations of the men that fought there, especially the eastern front.

My point, which I should have spent more time on, was that communists committed atrocities in these areas before the nazi's showed up. So it stands to reason that some men in the Waffen-SS, volunteered for retribution or to fight against a fear of spread throughout Europe. Which IMO is a valid reason.

To answer:

"Justifying" their fight against Nazis? The nazis attacked the allies and countless neutral countries first, that's all the justification needed to fight.

Yes justifying, as in the common narrative of the western soldier going off to fight the Nazi's but ended up just fighting normal German people. This was in response to sun's comment.

I don't appreciate your emotional appeal in your argument, and nowhere did I defend Hitler, his strategies, or motivations. I'm not a Nazi, however I also don't think the narrative that is so common in regards to WW2 is 100% correct. In order to find out the truth I read first hand accounts and other history in order to form my own opinion. I'm also not an expert on the subject and freely admit that. Sorry to trigger you I guess.

It seems like a dumb but honest mistake. Maybe they will learn to be more tolerant of much more understandable incidents like this one.

People's Party of Canada Leader Maxime Bernier posed for a photo with members of an organization described as a hate group in Calgary Sunday.

Normally, when such things happen, the subject of the scandal is accused of being secretly far-right, but few people have that reaction to the Liberal Party when it does something much worse.

The reporting there is fascinating. I appreciate how long it takes for them to actually name the hand gesture in question. Uncharitably, because they know their readers would take it less seriously if they used the phrase "OK sign".

I'm sure that the Canadian government would have preferred a veteran of the Ukrainian Insurgent Army (UPA) to present in front of the parliament instead. It's true that the UPA, among other atrocities, committed ethnic cleansing of Poles in the Volyn region of Ukraine, but what is more important is that it was an organization of Ukrainian origin, not German, which fought both the Germans and the Soviets, and obviously has much better potential PR as a result compared to any SS unit, obviously. (Potential Polish complaints notwithstanding.)

The issue, I guess, is that while thousands of Ukrainian SS men managed to immigrate to the West after the war, as they surrendered to the British in present-day Austria, the UPA was largely wiped out by Soviet internal troops after the war, and I'd be surprised if even a dozen of them managed to flee to the West. And certainly not one of them survive to this day.

Edit: I was replaying to other comment in the thread from DaseindustriesLtd . You can find it under there.

My hot take is that he deserves a standing ovation for fighting for his nation.


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If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


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