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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   26677 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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In an escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and associated culture war, we now have one of the first(?) terroristic threat charges brought against someone in the States. A teacher felt that a student’s comment about his flag was disrespectful and responded by threatening to behead her. It is reported that the teacher shouted:

You motherfucking piece of shit! I'll kick your ass. I should cut your motherfing head off

And students report hearing that

"he would kick her fucking ass, slit her goddamn throat and drag her ass outside and cut her head off."

The teacher who made this terroristic threat is Benjamin Reese, a Jewish man from Georgia, and the flag he had in his room was an Israeli flag [1] [2]. I find this noteworthy for two reasons. A Jewish man is making threats that I would have guessed came from a Muslim, which tells me about my bias and the level of passion on both sides of the conflict right now. But I’m also surprised that, despite the story first being published 24hrs ago, it’s untouched by mainstream news except RawStory. There’s local affiliates, RawStory, and YahooFinance Canada. But there’s no CNN, Fox, NYTimes, etc. They can’t be waiting for more information, because we already have the police reports. I predict that this story will not gain the traction that it would had the threat been made by a Palestinian man, or Muslim generally. Certainly that would be brought up on prime time Fox.

This instantly reminded me of the Day of Hate news blitz, when the Chabad-affiliated Barry (Baruch) Nockowitz picked up a toddler and threw him against a wall because of “anti-semitism”, telling police he would find another kid to attack [3]. Besides Miami Herald, this had zero news coverage, all the while coinciding with the “day of hate” which received George Floyd levels of news coverage and zero crimes committed. (As proof of how little coverage it got, themotte is on the first page of google results for his name, linking to the last time I mentioned this crime).

A Jewish man is making threats that I would have guessed came from a Muslim, which tells me about my bias and the level of passion on both sides of the conflict right now.

To be pedantic, this doesn't tell you about your "bias", it tells you about your entirely reasonable priors that are presumably based on your familiarity with Islamists being the primary practitioners of political beheadings. If you know absolutely nothing else other than that someone was beheaded over a conflict on religious ideology, you should absolutely have your first case be that it was a Muslim. Even after this story, I am disinclined to make a major update to that prior, as there is no student with a sawed off head.

Maybe America could do with a general taboo against the display of all flags except the US flag?

I recall the debate over Tlalib's Palestinian flag (and comparisons to a Congressman showing up in his IDF uniform) and it all seems like a - somewhat distasteful - hassle.

Agreed. Why is an American teacher flying a foreign flag?

I could understand a Japanese flag in Japanese language class or something. But just flying a foreign flag in some unrelated class is jivey at best.

As a non-American, I find the idea of flags in a classroom very odd. I presume you need the national flag for the pledge of allegiance (another odd custom) but why permit other flags?

Although from what I see online, American teachers have their own classroom(?) instead of it being the room for a specific year(?) and so they get to decorate it like it's their own personal space(?) - at least that's what I've picked up from online bragging about putting up Pride material and trans flags and all the rest of it.

Again, very odd from my viewpoint - schools over here (to the best of my knowledge) wouldn't permit such things, though I have no idea what they do nowadays when it comes to 'Pride Month' - they probably do have the rainbow stuff in order to "support our LGBT+ students". But that's the school as a whole, not a teacher deciding to bring in their toys and hobbies to plaster all over the walls.

Growing up in the UK in the 1980's, you normally saw national flags in schools in two situations - classrooms usually used for foreign language lessons, and displays of large numbers of small flags (either because you were in a geography classroom or because some piece of silly internationalism was being celebrated). Schools were technically government buildings, so a school that had a flagpole would fly the Union Flag on the 10-15 days a year when flags were supposed to be flown from government buildings.

As a parent of school-age kids in the Current Year, the two standard use cases are still common. Actual cloth Union Flags still seem rare, but schools in immigrant-heavy areas are expected to teach "British values" which in practice means that there is usually a wall display of kid-coloured paper Union Flags up somewhere in the school. I don't know if this happens in outer-suburban whiteopia. The other thing that changed is that since the 2012 Diamond Jubilee, low-key celebration of royal occasions somehow stopped being cringe. So my son's school was all done up with red, white and blue bunting for the 2022 Platinum Jubilee and the 2023 Coronation.

There was a large Pride flag in the visitors' entrance lobby during Pride Month, but my impression was that Pride was otherwise low-key in the way you would expect at a school where muslims and west African evangelicals together make up almost half of the parents.

because some piece of silly internationalism was being celebrated

Yeah, that's where I usually saw other flags. We didn't even have the national flag in school in my time, or in the school I worked in. But it's been about fifteen years since then, so I don't know if they put up Pride flags or what have you. I'd be surprised, but not shocked to learn they did so.

I think because over here the classrooms are "this is the Fifth Year classroom" and teachers for the different subjects move around between the year rooms, rather than having one room of their own that the classes move around (apart from things like home economics room, science lab, metal and woodwork rooms, art room, gym) then there isn't the same kind of individualisation where a teacher could stick up the Israeli or other flag. And so there isn't the same sense of ownership, of "this is my room and I can customise it whatever way I like". If you are not making your classroom an extension of your personality, I think maybe the same motivation isn't present.

But that's separate from Jewish teacher losing his mind over Muslim student questioning having the Israeli flag in the classroom, which is the hot button topic right now. Although again, if the kids are being taught all up through school about being minorities and being offended and that offensive materials should be taken down and the only response the authorities should make is agreement, is it any surprise a kid piped up about "that offends me"? Threatening to cut her head off is too extreme a response, though, and the guy definitely crossed the line by following them through the hall, yelling and swearing. Any teacher is going to get into trouble for yelling and cursing in the school hallway:

A Georgia middle school teacher was arrested last week after multiple witnesses told authorities he threatened to behead a 13-year-old Muslim student who said the Israeli flag hanging in his classroom offended her.

Benjamin Reese, a 51-year-old seventh grade teacher at Warner Robins Middle School, was arrested on charges of making terroristic threats and cruelty to children in the third degree, according to an incident report from the Houston County Sheriff’s Office, which lists more than 20 witnesses.

...The incident report – written by a sheriff’s deputy who was on duty at the school when the incident occurred – cites several witnesses who said they heard Reese shouting profane threats at three female students in the seventh-grade hallway on December 7, including, “You motherfing piece of st! I’ll kick your a! I should cut your motherfing head off!”

Another teacher, who was tutoring students in the next classroom, reported hearing Reese call one of the three students “my antisemitic friend.” The teacher said the students began walking down the hall and Reese started yelling that they disrespected “his flag” and were ignorant, according to the incident report.

Reese began walking back to his classroom, the teacher added, when she says she heard him yelling, “She is a stupid motherf***er, and I will drag her by the back of my car and cut her f***ing head off for disrespecting my Jewish flag,” the report stated.

A separate adult witness reported to the deputy she heard Reese yell at the student, “You don’t make an antisemitic comment like that to a Jew,” and later shouting in the hallway that he would “slit her f***ing throat” when talking about the students. That teacher said Reese was yelling loudly and cursing down the hallway back into his classroom.

American teachers have their own classroom(?) instead of it being the room for a specific year(?)

American teachers generally have their own rooms, but they are assigned each year. Though in practice usually it is the same room every year, unless something changes.

and so they get to decorate it like it's their own personal space(?)

They can decorate it as they wish, unless a rule prohibits certain types of items. Most districts require even-handed treatment of controversial issues, so the Israeli flag probably was not kosher, no pun intended.

not a teacher deciding to bring in their toys and hobbies to plaster all over the walls.

What is wrong with that? All else being equal, a teacher who is seen by students as an individual human being, rather than as a bureaucrat, will likely be more effective on many dimensions.

All else being equal, a teacher who is seen by students as an individual human being, rather than as a bureaucrat, will likely be more effective on many dimensions.

This is a popular narrative that people in education, especially teachers, like to push (at least from my experience as a student), and as a result, plenty of former-students (i.e. almost everyone in the West) also seem to believe it, but I'm skeptical. Have we ever done any studies measuring stuff like "how much does a teacher bringing their hobbies into the classroom affects how much students see them as an individual versus a bureaucrat?" or "how does the students' perception of the teacher as an individual versus a bureaucrat affect the effectiveness of the teacher in [important dimensions], whether it be positive or negative, and how much?" or "if a teacher bringing their hobbies into the classroom and that does increase how much students see them as individuals, then does that particular method of increasing how they see the teachers as individuals cause an increase in effectiveness of the teacher in [important dimensions]?"

Given how convenient this narrative is for the teachers who tend to push it - how nice it is that bringing things I like into my workplace also makes me better at my work! - I think there should be a pretty high bar of evidence for this, to rise above the default presumption that it's a narrative that's just too convenient not to believe.

I think there should be a pretty high bar of evidence for this,

Why, if it does no harm? If a teacher has a pennant of his favorite sports team, or a picture of his family, etc. etc, what possible harm could that do? Shouldn't the burden of proof be on those who seek to bar such displays?

Why, if it does no harm?

The harm is the complexity of creating a policy that allows innocuous things but does not permit obnoxious or offensive things. The bureaucratic burden of having to decide that, say, posting pictures of a ski trip is fine, but posting pictures of a religious retreat is not, pictures of political protesting, or posting pictures of a gay wedding reception - it's all just so tiresome. It's a given that there are people who constantly push the limits of any policy in an obnoxious way, so it's entirely reasonable to set a simple bright-line rule that veers widely on the side of inoffensiveness.

And yet somehow thousands of schools manage to negotiate that ostensible labyrinth with little trouble.

More comments

I'm not talking about policy. Merely believing whether or not that the narrative is true. I agree, it's one of those things, like food that FDA categorizes as Generally Recognized As Safe, that we have enough anecdotal evidence that they're not harmful that we don't have to prove it more rigorously. But the narrative isn't about harm.

I'm not talking about policy.

But OP was.

What is wrong with that? All else being equal, a teacher who is seen by students as an individual human being, rather than as a bureaucrat, will likely be more effective on many dimensions.

Because your teacher is not your pal or your buddy, and why should you have to pretend to be interested in their skiing trips or collection of Funkopops? They are there to teach you, you are there to learn (we hope) and you don't have to know all about their home and personal life outside of school to do that.

Regarding them as a human being is no harm, but I think it's just as likely students will think that stuff is lame or boring, or that the teacher is trying to impose it on them, as it is to make them go "Wow Mx. Futterperson is a real genuine human just like me, not a robot!"

If the classroom is all decked out like Mx. Futterperson's living room, then the teacher has no right to be surprised when the kids treat it like a living room in their home, and play on their phones/get up and walk around/talk to each other/don't pay attention.

why should you have to pretend to be interested in their skiing trips or collection of Funkopops?

Who said anything about anyone having to pretend to be interested?

I think it's just as likely students will think that stuff is lame

Which is of course the default attitude of students towards teachers. which is absolutely fine. It isn't about trying to prove to the students that the teacher is "cool." It is trying to show that he is not a mere functionary.

then the teacher has no right to be surprised when the kids treat it like a living room in their home, and play on their phones/get up and walk around/talk to each other/don't pay attention.

  1. There is a big difference between having some personal items and "being decked out like a living room."
  2. And you have evidence that that is the case? Because in my experience, the opposite it true.

Who said anything about anyone having to pretend to be interested?

You think the average 14-15 year old really would be interested in boring old Teacher's holiday on the slopes? Even if they are themselves interested in the topic?

I could, at a stretch, imagine 12 year olds listening to Mx. Futterperson telling them all about their ski trip, or maybe 18 year olds when they're old enough to go on ski trips of their own, but in the interval?

Well, perhaps you know more Cool Teachers or well-behaved kids than I do! 😁

Again, who said anything about students being interested? Or about the teachers telling stories of their ski trip? We are talking only about classrooom decorations.

And, we also are not talking about "cool teachers."

Although from what I see online, American teachers have their own classroom(?) instead of it being the room for a specific year(?) and so they get to decorate it like it's their own personal space(?) - at least that's what I've picked up from online bragging about putting up Pride material and trans flags and all the rest of it.

American teachers have their own classroom, yes, and tend to decorate them with things they like about the subject in question- eg English teachers have shelves with books they have enjoyed reading, foreign language teachers have maps of places that speak the language they have visited, etc. When I was in school it was still acceptable to oppose homosexuality, so no comment on how many pride flags are floating around these days.

teachers have their own classroom(?) instead of it being the room for a specific year(?) and so they get to decorate it like it's their own personal space(?)

Yes to all of these for my American public school experience. But usually the decorations are related to the coursework. Maps, Spanish verb conjugation charts, etc. It wasn't typically their personal stuff unrelated to schooling. There was an occasional Garfield poster or something. But no one was flying foreign flags or anything.

Maybe America could do with a general taboo against the display of all flags except the US flag?

The one that was funniest to me on this front was being in Ireland and North Ireland shortly after the start of the Ukraine War. Due to the history of hostilities, there are generally not very many flags flown in Belfast. Either the Union Jack or Irish flag could be a point of incitement. The blue and yellow though? Plenty of those!

I am assuming you were in the City Centre which is indeed somewhat neutral territory for British/Irish flags for exactly the reason you state. But go a l little beyond that in Belfast and you will quite easily know which side you are on based upon the flags flying and which colours the kerbs are painted. And Israeli/Palestinian flags as well.

There is a reason why I joke that living in Northern Ireland is good preparation for moving to the US as a Brit. Flags almost everywhere, armed police on the streets and much more religious than the average Brit would be used to.

There is a reason why I joke that living in Northern Ireland is good preparation for moving to the US as a Brit. Flags almost everywhere, armed police on the streets and much more religious than the average Brit would be used to.

Also everything’s fried. Probably not a coincidence that one of if not the biggest ethnic group in the US white population is literally from Northern Ireland.

Correct assumption. Sadly, I was pretty sick and wound up not exploring the city as much as I would have liked. Normally, I would have gotten in a nice long run and seen quite a bit on foot, but wound up confined to a smaller area than usual (except for when we drove North for a daytrip). It was still enough to finally get some visceral understanding of what the deal is with Northern Ireland being British, which I previously understood intellectually, but was always puzzled by.

Flags and Emblems Act. True that there has been a lot of bother over flegs.

the Day of Hate

It should be noted that the the Day of Hate was a glow in the dark OP by the usual suspects.

...it's terrorism for a teacher to scream inappropriately at a student now? Or at least a 'terroristic threat'?

You don't think that's overblown?

Isn't that just garden variety verbal abuse?

In Georgia, a "terroristic threat" has little to do with terrorism; it includes includes a threat to commit any crime of violence with the purpose of terrorizing another, and is a misdemeanor unless the threat suggests the death of the threatened individual.

The term doesn't really have legal meaning, just an inflation in language.

But in this case, it actually fits. The teacher isn't threatening the kid with beheading on a personal basis, because the kid is annoying him. He is threatening the kid for the kid's political views, telling him if you oppose Israel you should/will be beheaded, or at least that your teacher will scream such obscene threats at you. This would have the likely effect of preventing other students from expressing similar views, for fear of beheading/getting screamed at by their teacher. The purpose is terroristic: the threat was made to change the expressed political views and actions of the threatened person and the audience.

I would say threats with a political purpose or agenda behind them are strictly worse than threats with a purely personal Animus. For scalability reasons, because of the additional victims in the audience, and because of the added threat to freedom of speech/association/etc. If he threatened a kid because the kid annoyed him, that would only impact the kid. When he threatened a kid for the kid's views on Palestine, the kid is victimized, and any members of the audience who share that view of Palestine are equally victimized because they know their teacher is also threatening them if they speak out (probably throw in anyone who has views that also might cause controversy), and the rest of the group is victimized because their thoughts will tend to be restricted by the threat.

Harsh, signal punishment is necessary to let everyone know that society does not condone political violence and that they are free to speak and think what they will.

No, I think threatening to cut someone's head off is actually a terroristic threat. A simple, "I'll fucking kill you" would be garden variety verbal abuse, but specificity feels oddly escalatory. If someone tells me they'll kill me, well, that's not great. But if they tell me they're going to cut my ear off, I will think they have a specific idea in mind.

Isn't that just garden variety verbal abuse?

I think it is not colorful enough and over the top be clear cut verbal abuse. If he threatened to hang them by their own intestines while raping their pet hamster dressed in santa suit it would have been. I will kick your ass and behead you is in the "low chance, but could be serious" territory especially while in rage. Context and body language matters a lot. Without video it's hard to make a call.

What makes the crime a terroristic threat rather than just a death threat?

I think the term comes from a threat that is intended to terrify rather than a threat to commit terrorism. The criminal act is threatening to commit any violent crime so threatening to assault someone is terroristic threat in Georgia law.

Jesus. Do we have any evidence that Mr. Reese was under the influence, perhaps? I’ve spent some time in poor, wrecked Southern schools and never seen anything quite like this.

A Jewish man is making threats that I would have guessed came from a Muslim, which tells me about my bias and the level of passion on both sides of the conflict right now.

This is precisely why it's national news. He threatened to behead the kid - and beheading is Arabic in the zeitgeist. The bait and switch was the reason the story was published, although I bet it didn't hurt that this gives both moral busybodies and people opposed to Israel the chance to chew others out for making bigoted assumptions.

I wouldn't normally expect a teacher yelling at a student, even inappropriately, to be a national story.

Since a student smiling at unhinged person with megaphone become one why not?

Lack of a memeworthy picture, presumably.

I don't remeber that. I did see a student smirking at a man who was not unhinged, though.

Indeed. I imagine that a teacher has a breakdown on this level once a week or so in this country.

Based on my recollection of trawling child abuse data, teachers are frequently fucking kids all across America. Catholic priests and boyscout leaders are the minor leagues of child sex abuse compared to the pros working in our public schools.

So yeah, "teacher yells a bit" is one of the least newsworthy and least vile things that many teachers have done today.

One of my teachers said he was going to rip my arms off and beat me to death with the soggy ends.

Based on my conversations with the handful of Australians I've know, I can't tell whether this was intended as threat or whether it's just the way Australian teachers talk to students.

It wasn't said in a friendly way, but also it wasn't a serious threat in the sense that I expected him to actually attack me in any way. He was just frustrated at me for not doing my work.

"Rip his arm off and beat him to death with the soggy end" is part of the kayfabe of the World Wrestling Federation (now WWE after a legal dispute with the World Wildlife Fund over who is the real WWF). Your teacher's annoyance with you might well be genuine, but he is nevertheless issuing a comedy threat and inviting you to participate in an in-joke (perhaps forgetting that you are too young to get the reference)

I don't see how an unhinged teacher screaming threats at a student is an "escalation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict."

Nor does it seem worthy of a national news story. And no, I doubt a Palestinian teacher threatening to cut off a Jewish student's head would make CNN or NYTimes either. (Fox, maybe.)

Nor does it seem worthy of a national news story.

A student hung a Palestinian flag on a Menorah for like 30 seconds at Yale. It got picked up by NYT, AP, CNN, and many more. This story with the Middle School teacher has more of the trappings of a national news story, a teacher threatening to kill and behead a middle school student is extremely unusual and certainly a much bigger crime against society than a milquetoast protest on a college campus, which is now being investigated by police as a "desecration" and hate crime.

The teacher was arrested (for "terrorism"). Highly visible protests in the midst of an ongoing public conflict are much more likely to attract media attention (indeed, that is their purpose) than one unhinged teacher screaming at a student in bumfuck Georgia.

Where could an Israeli flag be placed that would cause a similar media reaction, with police and federal authorities launching "desecration" and hate crime investigations? I think you are bending over backwards to not acknowledge a double standard:

Senator Richard Blumenthal, who is Jewish, called the incident an act of hate and described his father’s escape from Germany in 1935.

“It may look like a prank,” he said appearing at a news conference in New Haven on Monday. “It may look like a joke. But it couldn’t be more serious because it is the mockery and desecration of a profoundly important religious symbol.”

A bigger question is, if this is a desecration, then why are these profoundly important religious symbols being displayed on public land? How is this not a state establishment of religion? If the government posts profoundly important religious symbols and then persecutes protestors of that symbol for desecration and hate crimes, and it becomes a National News story with lawmakers and institutions all falling on the side of protecting the sacredness of the symbol that is being displayed on public land across the entire country (with no equivalent Christian or Muslim symbol, I might add, and during one of the most important holidays on the Christian calendar), how much room exactly do you have to deny a double-standard in the treatment of Jews versus Palestinians in our media and legal apparatus?

Where could an Israeli flag be placed that would cause a similar media reaction, with police and federal authorities launching "desecration" and hate crime investigations? I think you are bending over backwards to not acknowledge a double standard:

I think if someone plastered Israeli flags over a bunch of mosques it would get some attention. But as far as double standards, yes, the American public is generally more sympathetic to Israelis than to Palestinians. This isn't a puzzler, nor is it evidence of Jews controlling the media.

A bigger question is, if this is a desecration, then why are these profoundly important religious symbols being displayed on public land?

Crosses and nativity creches are also frequently displayed on public land. It is not prohibited to display religious symbols on public land - you just can't give preference to a particular religion.

If the government posts profoundly important religious symbols and then persecutes protestors of that symbol for desecration and hate crimes,

Let me know when the student who hung the Palestinian flag on a menorah indeed gets prosecuted for "descration" or "hate crimes." A senator performing outrage (and probably feeling some genuine outrage) is pretty weak sauce, as ZOG accusations go.

Stick "stochastic" in front of it, Amadan, and it's a phrase I'm seeing sprinkled everywhere about - well, I'm not entirely sure what, it has something to do with voting Republican?

Stochastic describes something random, involving chance or probability.

Terrorism involves an unlawful use of violence or intimidation to further political, social, or ideological goals.

Stochastic harm occurs when the cause (hazard) and its effect (harm) are indirectly linked by a probabilistic relationship. The idea of stochastic harm was first published in 1978, it originally applied to the unintended negative effects of medical procedures using ionizing radiation, such as radiation therapy for cancer when the treatment causes another type of cancer. The term "stochastic harm" has also been generalized to describe harm related to environmental problems such as climate change and some types of disinformation.

Under that definition, I think threatening to slit someone's throat and cut their head off does count as "intimidation".

NRA + ACLU

The ACLU reports:

We’re representing the NRA at the Supreme Court in their case against New York’s Department of Financial Services for abusing its regulatory power to violate the NRA’s First Amendment rights.

[previous discussion here]

For a tl;dr of the background: the New York Department of Financial Services pressured several licensed insurance agencies in the state of New York from working with the NRA, citing new interpretations of rules regarding affinity programs, and allegedly while promising during backroom meetings that the DFS would allow quiet and easy remediation programs if the companies would assist. Companies that didn't jump onboard quickly received steep fines; those that showed hesitation felt fear for their license to operate as insurers. The NRA sued, and lower courts have largely allowed all responsible parties to claim various immunity, or argued that the behavior even if true would not be unlawful.

While that twitter thread doesn't go into much of the minutiae, and there's nothing I can find on the ACLU's website, the NRA's lawyers report that the ACLU will be acting as co-counsel. This has not been without controversy just from other CLUs; the third-party complaints tend toward the hilarious. So in that sense, it's a costly signal in a way that weak-kneed amici are not -- and while I'm not optimistic about this case, it's not in that ugly spot where the ACLU's presence has no chance of impact, either.

That said, it's not clear how much this case will matter for its specific actors, even if the NRA wins at SCOTUS. Vullo and New York State and all the king's horses won't be able to put the NRA's finances back together again. It's been self-insured in an increasingly lawsuit-optimized world for years already, and that's not gonna change even if Vullo takes a hit for the team. While Cuomo takes too much credit given the internal problems already plaguing the gun group, this is exactly the type of lawsuit where 'victory' means legal fees, a token financial punishment, and a promise that the bad actors won't commit the same mistakes where they could be caught. It won't even touch the current efforts to go after bank and merchant services (also, coincidentally, a group that falls under NYDFS purview!). A victory before SCOTUS might help reduce the risk of the organization's other New York and DC lawsuits from hollowing out the leadership and wearing the infrastructure like a skin suit, but we won't see the NRA be a cultural or legal force worth mentioning again in the next decade, if not my lifetime.

But a more general precedent might matter, if it could stick. For example:

FCC v. Starlink

FCC commissioner Brendan Carr writes:

Instead of applying the traditional FCC standard to the record evidence, which would have compelled the agency to confirm Starlink’s $885 million award, the FCC denied it on the grounds that Starlink is not providing high-speed Internet service to all of those locations today. What? FCC law does not require Starlink to provide high-speed Internet service to even a single location today. As noted above, the first FCC milestone does not kick in until the end of 2025. Indeed, the FCC did not require— and has never required—any other award winner to show that it met its service obligation years ahead of time.

context.

SpaceX and its subsidiaries have received a lot of unusual scrutiny in recent years, but most of it could at least motion around textual (if not necessarily even-handed or reasonable) interpretation of well-established regulation. Contract challenges aren't unusual, sometimes even not wrong.

Here, there seems to be little, if any, fig leaf: the king is just naked.

It's not absolutely certain that SpaceX will be able to achieve the RDOF grant requirements, and indeed the average StarLink connection today is closer to 80/10 than the 100/20 for the target (though I don't know if RDOF grantees might be focused toward the higher end of the scale). But it's far from "not reasonably capable", not least of all because the company already supports 1.3 million customers at those rates, rather than the 650k in the RDOF grant. While total capacity doesn't reallocate cleanly, the company is clearly capable of achieving scale, and on schedule to continue doing so. And Carr's complaint that this evaluation is not standard rings a sharper tone. Even after a grant is completed it's not unusual for grantees to sputter without so much as an FCC complaint. Completely revoking a grant partway-through, without much clearer evidence of non-performance or outright fraud, is an entirely different matter entirely.

I've mixed feelings about the rural internet upgrade programs and grants, even as an (indirect, non-Starlink) beneficiary, but Simington's dissental is damning in a different way : "What good is an agreement to build out service by 2025 if the FCC can, on a whim, hold you to it in 2022 instead?" Simington does not give the same focus on political bias that Carr does, but in many ways the problem is more damning when considered in that frame. Starlink has committed to massive infrastructure build-out and contracted with hundreds of thousands of consumers on the basis of doing a job, and consumers have worked with the company under market conditions of doing that job.

If you genuinely believed that the FCC was just being arbitrary to the scale of almost a billion dollars, rather than 'just' trying to hammer a political dissident at the President's not-very-indirect orders, that's actually pretty bad too! I just don't see many plausible ways for that to be the case.

New Mexico Carry Bans

The federal judge that issued a preliminary injunction against the New Mexico governor's ban on carry in public parks has temporarily stayed the injunction until the motion for stay pending appeal is decided, which means it is back in effect for now.

[previous discussion).

Ping pong, hope no one ends up with an arrest record because the courts are fucking around. The public park carry isn't as extreme as the original county-wide ban, but it's still a clear violation of the dicta in Bruen, especially in a state like New Mexico. Doesn't really matter much if you can play with the court system long enough to fuck over anyone who wants to challenge a bad regulation, though.

More deeply, there's been no serious repercussions for it. During the warm-up for the upcoming legislative session, there's been more progress on an assault weapons ban than any serious rejoinder to Grisham's adventurism. The federal censure went nowhere. Citizen grand juries ditto.

Illinois v. Due Process

Speaking of the force of law being applied in random ways, Illinois just had a hearing on its Assault Weapon law. This law requires all guns in certain classes owned by certain people to be registered with the state, deadline January 1st, after which the registry closes. New ownership, or possession of an unregistered assault weapon, after that point will be a serious felony. What does it ban?

Interested parties have until Nov. 20 to submit written comments on the proposed rules... JCAR cochair Sen. Bill Cunningham, D-Chicago, told reporters after the meeting that he understands some of the technical confusion over which items must be registered, but he said the law gives ISP authority to adapt its rules as time goes on.

“The existing statute does contemplate the state police dealing with this problem and allows them to amend rules on an ongoing basis. They have that authority in the statute,” he said. “So I think that problem was anticipated. And that's how the law intends to deal with that problem.”

That is, not only is the rule arbitrary and vague, it's intended to be arbitrary and vague, able to change with little notice or opportunity to register newly-banned guns. And, indeed, the current rules are in limbo and will not be finalized before January 16th at their earliest.

There's at least some comedy in the court filings (do you know what a grenade launcher is? Because the state of Illinois doesn't think you do). But while the state managed to get a unlucky draw at the district level, this didn't last very long after appeal. And the basic problem that "When dealing with guns, the citizen acts at his peril" remains, with little recognition or response from the normal set, and a long and successful campaign to splinter the groups devoted to this topic.

There was a separate and more specific hearing on vagueness yesterday, after the 'new' rules failed their last chance to get passed before Jan 16th, and perhaps we'll get an answer there before January 1st, but it didn't sound during arguments like a pause was likely. And, of course, some people will register between now and the decision's release.

How many? Uhhhh.

Maybe this would be a good reinforcement of @HlynkaCG and "refuse to be ruled", but at the risk of paraphrasing a bad Dilbert strip, perhaps for your first felony you should pick something that hasn't given the police your home address and a reason to think you specifically dangerous. Illinois' various laws don't quite amount to sending the state the exact make and model of every gun purchase (though they do for recent 'private' transactions), but it's mostly just a matter of convenience at this time.

ACLU on twitter:

We don’t support the NRA's mission or its viewpoints on gun rights, and we don’t agree with their goals, strategies, or tactics.

Ignoring how lowly they regard the second amendment at this point, I think it's bizarre the way they cast shade on their client like this. Is... is that something they usually do? The fight for common rights seems awfully bitter to them. It gives the impression that they are a wholeheartedly partisan organization that is only taking up this fight in a ploy to maintain an image of impartiality. Why else would the blue tribe shibboleth be necessary?

It gives the impression that they are a wholeheartedly partisan organization that is only taking up this fight in a ploy to maintain an image of impartiality.

So, I think this is a reasonable takeaway, but another would be that ACLU is so principled that they are openly stating their hatred for an organization while still defending its civil liberties.

Now, the past decade or so has made it clear that "ACLU" and "principled" should only be in a sentence when there's an odd number of negations in it, but hey, organizations can turn a new leaf.

It’s to keep staff and donors happy. No rich progressive donates to the ACLU wanting their money to go to hiring lawyers for the NRA.

Even after a grant is completed it's not unusual for grantees to sputter without so much as an FCC complaint; the .

I've mixed feelings about the rural internet upgrade programs and grants, even as an (indirect, non-Starlink) beneficiary, but Simington's dissental is damning in a different way

Was there supposed to be additional text between these two paragraphs or was the first incomplete?

Also, general question, how do people go about archiving posts here with many reference links that risk bitrot? Recursive wget into an mht?

Was there supposed to be additional text between these two paragraphs or was the first incomplete?

Thanks, fixed.

Also, general question, how do people go about archiving posts here with many reference links that risk bitrot? Recursive wget into an mht?

I've been fighting a few different options. Recursive wget is the 'easiest', but I've had to screw around with whitelist/blacklisting to avoid getting random junk even at even mid-level recursion depth, and low recursion depth loses a lot of useful data to redirect spam. Gwern has a few good tools listed, but you still have to mix-and-match -- a proxy archiver is great for sites you visit but useless for links you don't click, while linkchecker is great for following every part of a conventional website or mapping out an individual page's links but can spider out of control for larger ones.

Also, general question, how do people go about archiving posts here with many reference links that risk bitrot? Recursive wget into an mht?

The Internet Archive Wayback Machine works pretty well for this purpose. There's even an extension that makes it pretty easy to archive specific pages that you worry won't be archived due to lack of visibility.

Alternatively, just use File > Save Page As...

Alternatively, alternatively, it's not that challenging to use selenium-wire to intercept every HTTP request a dummy browser makes if you really want to automate saving a bunch of webpages, and very few websites have good defense against that level of scraping (at least, if you keep you QPS low enough).

Is there anyone out here arguing that both civil rights law and expansive SCOTUS imposition of gun rights on states whose populations don’t want them are unconstitutional?

The Supreme Court, and conservatives in general, do not want people to have gun rights. They want to make an abstract legal point about the Constitution, but they'd be horrified if it had any practical effect. "Sure, you have the right to keep and bear arms. But what makes you think that means you can carry a GUN?"

Seem pretty uncharitable, maybe you mean just DC conservatives? Or city conservatives?

I've never lived in an area more dense than "suburban". And I can say I've never had a neighbor against gun rights. I've had plenty of liberal and democrat voting neighbors. Most of them have owned guns.

This issue has always seemed like a "rural vs urban" thing. Party lines have also tended to break down along those lines lately. But if I had to take a bet, I'd say the gun rights debate breakdown is better characterized by rural vs urban than it is by republican vs democrat.

I'll say for the Supreme Court: if Neil Gorsuch can be austisticly literal when it comes to the CRA, but doesn't apply that same literalism to the 2A, it's a strong sign of what he wants to get done.

I'm still waiting on the Supreme Court to strike down the blatantly unconstitutional magazine bans and "assault weapon" bans that have been popular in the last few years.

He was not being "autistically literal." He was applying the usual rule of statutory construction:

This Court normally interprets a statute in accord with the ordinary public meaning of its terms at the time of its enactment. . . . Most notably, the statute prohibits employers from taking certain actions “because of ” sex. And, as this Court has previously explained, “the ordinary meaning of ‘because of ’ is ‘by reason of’ or ‘on account of.’” . . . What did “discriminate” mean in 1964? As it turns out, it meant then roughly what it means today: “To make a difference in treatment or favor (of one as compared with others).” Webster’s New International Dictionary 745 (2d ed. 1954). To “discriminate against” a person, then, would seem to mean treating that individual worse than others who are similarly situated. "

Re Constitutional adjudication, the rule is somewhat different: the question is what entire clauses mean, not individual terms.* (Which is why the "no law" in the First Amendment does not literally mean "no.")

*Re the Second Amendment, "[t]he Courts of Appeals [must] ascertain the original scope of the right based on its historical meaning."

They can be treated with charity when I can buy and carry a gun. Or at least they're not declaring victory when in fact I still can't buy a gun. Until then I'll judge them harshly as deserved.

I mean I guess my complaint is less about charity than accuracy. You seem wrong about your assessment. I guess I'm curious if I'm missing something big or you just wanted to shit on conservatives. Sounds like the latter though.

You're missing that when push comes to shove, conservatives will not push the fight, and will side with the institutions. gattsuru mentioned above "refuse to be ruled". Well, suppose one were to do that by violating one or more of these gun regulations. And one were to get caught, and the state to come down on you like a ton of bricks. What would a conservative who previously advised "refuse to be ruled" say about that? I'm fairly sure it would be something along the lines of "play stupid games, win stupid prizes". Conservatives who can get guns because they're in a community where guns are a thing and they can jump through any hoops the state puts in their way anyway treat gun rights like a sort of intellectual game; they want to make the point that they have the right to keep and bear arms. But they don't give a shit about it being enforced in other communities that are more hostile to gun rights. That's why, for instance, there's been no move to challenge the interstate purchase rules.

Do you live in a large city? This is the only thing I can think of that would prompt this level of annoyance.

I own guns, I consider myself very pro second amendment, I don't know or honestly care that much about how difficult it is to get a gun in a city. My solution to them having shitty gun laws is to not go there. I'm also not in the habit of picking political fights for other people.

I'd love it if you explained to my wife that me owning guns is actually an intellectual pursuit. Right now she is under the mistaken impression that I'm just a big boy with disposable income and I'm buying big boy toys.

I live in suburban New Jersey.

My solution to them having shitty gun laws is to not go there. I'm also not in the habit of picking political fights for other people.

The left wasn't satisfied to have gay marriage only in their strongholds. They weren't even satisfied when there was a single clerk holding out. And they got their way, because Supreme Court decisions for the left count. Conservatives, on the other hand, have left prospective gun owners and those who wish to carry out in the cold everywhere but their own strongholds. They got a Supreme Court decision or three, but they don't count for spit in the real world; it turns out that according to the appeals courts, every restriction on guns an anti-gun jurisdiction engages in is OK according to Bruen. And rather than take those cases and reverse them, the Supreme Court took a case from the Fifth Circuit where a Federal gun restriction was ruled against -- presumably to decide that indeed, a simple restraining order of the sort handed out like candy by judges is sufficient to revoke someone's gun rights.

Well yeah, that is a shit state to be in for guns.

Maybe try and live in one of the non gray areas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Amendment_sanctuary

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I'd love it if you explained to my wife that me owning guns is actually an intellectual pursuit. Right now she is under the mistaken impression that I'm just a big boy with disposable income and I'm buying big boy toys.

A themotte.org meetup in your backyard, for the purpose of convincing your wife that owning guns makes your family very intellectual and sophisticated sounds like a worthy endeavor.

Haha, that would probably have the opposite of the intended effect. I'd not be opposed to a meetup in northern virginia if anyone is around though.

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I think it's pretty clear that the reason why gun ownership is widespread in America and virtually unheard of in places like Australia and the UK is 1) the second amendment and 2) an active movement of conservatives who continually fight for their gun rights.

Australia is what happens when conservatives don't want people to have gun rights.

  1. the second amendment and 2) an active movement of conservatives who continually fight for their gun rights.

Wrong order. When there wasn't a large active movement of citizens fighting for gun rights, the 2nd amendment was treated like an inkblot.

I totally agree, and this is a big part of why I oppose a bill of rights. Ultimately paper laws are worthless in the face of public will, and so creating constitutional protections that are supposedly above the normal democratic process actually just creates incoherent law as judges pretzel around provisions that don't have support. That and the inherently vague nature of these broad proclamations inevitably lead to a politicized judiciary.

constitutional protections that are supposedly above the normal democratic process

It's not above the normal democratic process. Congress could repeal the bill of rights tomorrow if they put their minds to it.

Ultimately paper laws are worthless in the face of public will

The entire point of having a bill of rights is to give rhetorical ammunition to the pro-rights side- sure, "rule of law" is always going to be "rule by law" to some degree, but even an explicitly worthless bill of rights (like, say, Canada's) still codifies how the public should ideally restrain its worst impulses and, much like guns, provides a common co-ordination point around which political action might crystallize.

Sure, this depends on a bunch of things- mainly that the past was freer than the present (though that's why bills of rights from countries that post-date the US' founding are all much weaker than the US's BOR in the first place!)- but giving [classical] liberals the ability to convict traditionalists and progressives of institutional and intentional unfairness is still a big deal especially when those factions start losing political ground, and gives those who might be in favor of returning to that stated ideal the same cover of "I just want to be treated fairly" that the corrupt enjoy when public opinion favors them.

I think the constitution is the wrong place to put rhetorical ammunition. If it were statutory law (like the Racial Discrimination Act which our government just suspends when it gets in the way), not so bad. There's value to making the government explicitly say "yes we are in fact abridging this right". But the current system rewards people for pretending that actually the second amendment wasn't meant for weapons of war or other similarly asinine things.

On balance I do favour a Bill of Rights, but with a get-out - either something like the Canadian notwithstanding clause, or a Constitutional amendment process that is easy enough that a stable 55% majority who know what they want can amend the Bill of Rights in order to get it.

I think the ability of a court to ask the political branches "Are you sure your really want to do this?" is valuable because the nature of politicians is that sometimes they do stupid stuff for a quick headline, and the sort of rights that get put into Bills of Rights ought to be taken seriously. And the possibility of being overruled acts as a deterrent to judges who want to get their inner politician on.

Yeah this is fair. I wouldn't massively object to a statutory Bill of Rights that effectively just forces governments to own their decisions when they come into conflict with it.

I'd qualify that somewhat?

Australian conservatives: 1) do not specifically desire that gun rights be protected or expanded in Australia, and 2) also do not specifically desire that Australians lack gun rights.

That is, I don't think the Coalition want people not to have gun rights. I think the Coalition just doesn't care very much. The Australian people in general do not care about guns very much. There is a small constituency that does (SFF exist, and One Nation mention it every now and then), but it is numerically small, not particularly wealthy, and not very effectively mobilised.

The situation here is basically that the Greens are strongly anti-gun, both Labor and the Coalition are inconsistent and opportunistic (Labor are probably a little more anti and the Coalition a little less, but neither are that devoted, and both usually signal anti-gun stuff in the aftermath of shootings), and the few pro-gun voices are marginal. I would expect the Coalition to turn out to be pro-gun if they thought there were votes it, but there aren't. SFF have very few seats, they don't have much of a lobby, and pretty much all SFF voters are preferencing the Coalition anyway. Same for One Nation. This is Australia, so turnout/mobilising-the-base are irrelevant; elections are about swinging moderates. And moderates do not care about guns.

I think the key difference in America is simply that there are a large number of people who either regularly use and therefore care about guns, or for whom guns have this almost talismanic power as symbols of liberty. As such there's a reasonably-sized constituency of people who care about them and will fight for them. America has low-turnout elections so mobilising people does matter, firearms enthusiasts and manufacturers have a powerful advocacy group in the NRA, and the Second Amendment provides a fantastic banner to rally to. As such firearms are one of the few of - perhaps the only? - culture war issue in America where the right has been consistently winning.

I'm always a bit surprised when I talk to Americans in terms of just how important the gun issue sees to them. I'm Australian and I am in fact in favour of liberalising our gun laws (seriously, the buyback scheme after Port Arthur did not actually reduce firearm violence), and even then I... kind of don't care. I'd like to liberalise our gun laws, but it is pretty low on my list of priorities, and I would be happy to trade it for other things I care about. As a point of principle, I want to relax the laws, but it's a pretty minor issue all things considered. I agree with the Americans in terms of overall position, but the issue is just so much less salient to me, and I think to most Australians.

Fully agreed, this is a fuller description of the situation. I feel like our gun laws should be liberalised at least a bit - people have had heirlooms from the world wars confiscated and destroyed, as if anyone was going to go and commit a crime with an antique Luger. But it's pretty abstract for me - crime is low, I don't need or want a gun for protection. And gun ownership does seem to meaningfully impact on suicide numbers, and that's less abstract for me because I used to deal with suicides for a living (they're awful, I do not recommend). And I'm one of the tiny minority of people who grew up with guns.

Gun ownership impacts firearm suicide rates; skip past that particular bait-and-switch and the evidence is mixed at best, with massive substitution effects.

Firearm suicides do tend to be messier and the not-immediately-fatal modes worse than almost anything short of the more aggressive overdoses, though.

There's a partial but not total substitution effect. Eg see here, where there is a steep decline in firearm suicides following Port Arthur and a correspondingly sharp rise in hangings, but it still nets out to a reduction in the overall rate.

Guns are quick and irreversible. You're holding the gun, you decide to do it, you pull the trigger, you're gone. Other methods take more time to execute, so you have time to snap back to your senses and think actually this is maybe not such a great idea.

That still gives an (age-adjusted) rate of 12.0 per 100k in 1985, which exceed all but 1993 (11.9 per 100k) and 2002-2013 (at minimum, 10.2 per 100k in 2006). That's better than it sounds -- the 'real' suicide rate is probably lower now than in 1985, despite the official numbers, due to improved data collection and reduced stigma -- but it's still a lot weaker and a lot less directly connected a signal than you're suggesting, especially given the nature of Australian suicides (and especially demographic concentration) and how the numbers have been measured.

You can smuggle some sort of causation out: perhaps it took seven years for the law to be implemented to some important threshold, and then there was some external economic pressure that fucked over a lot of people for the next decade after that or revision in the data-gathering. Or that it rode an already-decreasing rate from the more-suicidal early 80s, in ways that should have us comparing not pre/post Port Arthur or its laws but some other years. That might even not be wrong! But it's still mixed.

I know the theoretical fundamentals, but they seem insufficiently precise and a bit of a just-so story. There's no small number of other mechanisms with similar irreversibility and speed, some more available in Australia.

There's no small number of other mechanisms with similar irreversibility and speed, some more available in Australia.

Hanging isn't one of them, and it's the one people mostly choose.

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I've been meaning for a while to finally make the time to go down a local range and fire a gun for the first time - it's cheap, they lend out weapons for first-timers, and they sound pretty friendly. I just keep putting it off for dumb reasons.

Still, I feel like it would be good for me, in some respect, to at some point just... hold a rifle in my hands, aim at a target, and pull the trigger. I hope there would be some learning in that, in experiencing a gun not as a vague idea or symbol, but as a physical object in my hands. I hope there would be something demystifying in that.

Or maybe it'd just be a fun afternoon. I don't know. But it seems worth doing.

Anyway, on the laws, it's mostly just that my starting point for most regulations like this is that when in doubt, err on the side of liberty, and as far as I can tell the more restrictive post-1996 firearms regulations just haven't really had a positive impact. And insofar as there are people who have legitimate uses for firearms, and derive real enjoyment out of owning them, collecting them, using them recreationally, etc., there are no grounds for me to deny them.

The Supreme Court, and conservatives in general, do not want people to have gun rights. They want to make an abstract legal point about the Constitution, but they'd be horrified if it had any practical effect. "Sure, you have the right to keep and bear arms. But what makes you think that means you can carry a GUN?"

I have a lot of gun-owning conservatives in my social circle, and this sentiment is completely off-base, IME. Can you substantiate it?

You can look at the court cases. Bruen has changed nothing, and the only follow-up case the Supreme Court has taken (Rahimi) is one where their action can only LIMIT Bruen. In real life if you talk to "conservatives" who aren't hoplophobes about it, they tell you it's no problem to jump through the hoops the state has set up and you should just do it. If you point out that there's some reason you can't, they switch to saying maybe you just shouldn't have a gun.

The Supreme Court has been pretty pro-gun recently, though. It keeps getting ignored by blue states, but that isn’t the Supreme court’s fault.

Adding to Nybbler's comments, the 2nd Circuit (which includes New York) just recently decided Antonyuk's preliminary injunction stage. It's a long fucking decision, but the tl;dr accepts and allows to go into force everything but mandatory social media disclosures, a 'vampire' rule requiring carry permitees to get explicit permission before entering private property -- that is, the most aggressive of restrictions, and all only added after Bruen -- and blocked a complete ban on carry even with the permission of owners in houses of worship only as applied to the specific appellants and no one else.

By contrast, the "good character" requirement that was just a rewording of the Bruen-overturned "proper cause" rule survived. Even the disclosure of cohabitants can go into play, somehow! The case defies Bruen in every way but flicking it the bird -- and it gets pretty close, there.

Meanwhile, fewer people are getting permits now than before Bruen.

Now, that's 'just' the preliminary injunction stage, and 'just' decided on December 8th. It's possible that SCOTUS will allow an interlocutory appeal, grant a more serious injunction, and rap the 2nd Circuit's knuckles. It's possible that the 2nd Circuit will actually do a serious analysis that wasn't just padding the word and page count. But we haven't seen that in any other case of massive resistance, yet.

It is partly the Supreme Court's fault. There are any number of follow-up cases where the lower courts ignored the decision and restricted gun rights that they could have taken. Instead they took one case, Rahimi, where the Fifth Circuit took Bruen seriously and took an expansive view of gun rights. They appear likely to reverse Rahimi, thus limiting Bruen formally (though like I said, in practice it's obiter dictum in its entirety). The conclusion I come to from this is the Supreme Court wants, for some reason, to make an academic point about people having gun rights, but does not actually want to interfere with infringement thereof.

It is over a year since Bruen. I still cannot buy a gun, because it is illegal for me to buy a gun in any but my home state, and my home state requires not only that I give the name and hospital affiliation of every mental health practitioner I have seen in my lifetime (information I do not have), but also have two unrelated adults vouch for me. These are not restrictions which would be accepted for any other right, yet there are no challenges to them even pending. Because conservatives are fine with them.

A brief retrospective on the Battlestar Galactica reboot:

So I saw the other day that it was the 20th anniversary of the launch of the rebooted Battlestar Galactica. This interested me for a few reasons: firstly, I'm getting old. This was the first TV show I was actively a "fan" of, and as a young teenaged boy it was everything I could have wanted. Timing-wise, it aired in the last heyday of the network TV drama: before the writer's strike of 2007-08 that would see the bifurcation of television into cheap reality shows and "prestige" (but relatively little-watched) cable dramas. As such the show ever tries to balance itself between the seriousness of its concept and demands for mass appeal with 20+ episode seasons. But it also served as a sort of test case for the rebooted franchise, a phenomenon you may have observed has become more common in recent years. It is also not dissimilar to the slew of comic book movies in that it took a somewhat childish and cheesy media property aimed at children and "updated" it for adults. So in many respects it's interesting to see it again as a portent of the shape of things to come.

So I sat down and watched the miniseries, and then a bunch of episodes from season 1. It's still great, and although it collapsed into nonsense later in its four season run it's still very much worth a watch. Don't worry about spoilers here, I'm not going to spoil anything, but if you're interested then don't google anything. The characters are rich, the plotlines imaginative, the music might be the best ever composed for the small screen, and the special effects look great (especially for a constrained budget). And when the show fails, it does so trying to swing for the fences... or in an attempt to please network execs.

It's an interesting look back in time from a culture war standpoint, because it is a show very much of its time. It mines pretty heavily the feelings of post-9/11 America (though like almost all low-budget sci-fi, is staffed almost entirely by Canadians). There's an alternating sense of paranoia and simultaneous togetherness that runs through everything. The show muses repeatedly about the nature of overlapping civilian and military governance, and the appropriateness of how either might extend their power given the situation. The Iraq War of course provided inspiration no science fiction show could pass up, but the show generally opted for much more interesting parallels, and ones that you might not expect.

You might not also expect how little the ripped-from-the-headlines controversies resemble the culture wars of today. Take for instance the sex-swap of fan favourite, hotshot pilot "Starbuck", who was now a woman in the rebooted series. This is the sort of thing that has become a rote controversy in current media adaptations; inevitable long youtube rants about "wokeness" and trillion-dollar companies playing the victim ensues. There was a minor, albeit passionate outcry at the time, but was pretty solidly squashed by how well the show pulled it off, in part because the show makes no attempt to treat it as significant or lecture the audience. In fact there's almost no gender-war elements at play in the series, and the only one of note I can remember again does not play out how you might expect. (A bunch of characters were also "race-swapped"; some light googling suggests no one even cared at the time, nor does the show bring up racial politics ever if I recall correctly).

But there also exist parallels that didn't exist at the time: it's pretty impossible to watch it today and not think about it as an exploration of the dangers of AI. Of course, rebelling robots was a hackneyed concept even by the time the original series aired in the 1970s, but the reboot does a good job of imagining the ways superhuman intelligence might rapidly evolve out of our ability to contain or comprehend it.

So do you like sci-fi? Do you like drama? Do you like shows that respect your intelligence and don't treat you like a child, morally or intellectually? Do you like depictions of a military that is not totally incompetent and treats discipline as actually essential? Then hey, give it a shot. Though I understand it can be tricky finding it to stream legally; Amazon or torrents or 123moviestv dot net would be better options, especially because you want to start with the miniseries before season 1, episode 1.

In general, people don't actually care about gender or race swapping: put in the best actor/actress for the job, and you can do wonders. The issue is when people try to do a "modern" remake that lacks any artistic intention or execution except "we got rid of the white men!" That's what makes people grumpy.

Starbuck, in BSG, will always be Kara Thrace to me. She's flawed, compelling, and there is no Mary Sueing or girl bossing in her character. Makes me want to rewatch over the holiday break.

Starbuck, in BSG, will always be Kara Thrace to me. She's flawed, compelling, and there is no Mary Sueing or girl bossing in her character. Makes me want to rewatch over the holiday break.

Agreed. It also helps that I've never watched the original BSG series either and Kara Thrace pulled it off really well. Tricia Helfer is also very easy on the eyes.

Tricia Helfer is also, notably, not the actress playing Kara Thrace. Katee Sackhoff plays the fighter pilot, Tricia Helfer plays the toaster in high heels.

"Toaster" is deeply problematic, substratist slur for a Person of Artificial Descent.

Just kidding.

I have consistently found going back and watching the sci-fi of my youth that it is way more preachy about the progressive ideas of its time than I thought. DS9 is photon torpedoes full spread at traditional religious beliefs(which is especially clumsy because the Bajoran gods are real), Jack O'Neill is a peacenik xenophile who sneers with open contempt at Christian Republican Senator.

I don't think they were as bad as modern shows are today, but it is still consistently surprising to me how often and sometimes heavy handed political messaging was in these shows that I was totally oblivious to when I mostly agreed with the politics/hadn't been primed to notice.

I think the writing overall was better enough that it made for a satisfying watch even if you disagreed with the messaging. I think often about the TNG episode First Contact. In this episode, the crew is making covert overtures to an alien world with no prior knowledge of the existence of aliens about joining the Federation, which is fanatically opposed by Krola, an alien minister who is a clear conservative stand-in: suspicious, paranoid, religious, xenophobic, cruel, and fanatical. We the viewers know he is wrong in everything: we have prior knowledge that the Federation is benevolent, peaceful, and altruistic and that his concerns are groundless. But at the end of the episode, the leader decides that he has a point: the Federation were actually infiltrating them, and the changes they are offering may actually be destructive to the society they have. He rejects their offer, at least for a while, and they leave.

The intended message is clear: unfortunately, less-progressive attitudes have cost this society a chance to join the glorious future, and this is an parable about how conservative attitudes in contemporary society hold back the glorious future depicted in the show. But the writing is intelligent enough to see that there are both benefits and costs to any change, and actually gives their villains an in-episode win while still promoting their message. That's good writing. That makes an episode enjoyable to watch, even if you think the intended message is wrong or not a good parable.

I have to disagree about O'Neill. SG-1 manages to pull off that rare accomplishment of sometimes being about politics without ever being political. They never say what party Kinsey is from, from what I remember, and the 1990s were a time where his type was available in both parties to be disdained.

The way in which they have Jack handle Daniel's actually peacenik attitudes (even if Daniel is right by plot fiat) is also a bit of a conservative stereotype of the gruff, worldly military man running rough shod over the lefty ivory tower type. The way they handled their relationship (where both get to be right and wrong at different times and both get to be both positive and negative portrayals of their archetypes who both grow by learning to deal and work with the other) is actually exceptionally good writing, both from a character handling perspective and from a 'keeping your show unpolitical' perspective.

The show absolutely is suffused with triumphalism post-Cold War liberalism, but that was a practically consensus point of view at the time and it was something most of both right and left could agree on.

Maybe I am crazy, but I don't think Kinsey's red tie was a random wardrobing decision, and his particular style of bible thumping, like arguing that God would 'physically' intervene to prevent an alien attack, seemed very republican coded to me, but you are right I don't think they ever actually say what party he belongs to.

O'Neill is absolutely less of a peacenik than Daniel, but he stands in stark contrast against all the other military personal, save perhaps Hammond From Texas. He would be the most level headed security officer to ever serve on the enterprise if you slid him into TNG. Makepeace, the only other colonel in the program and one of the few military personal with a name, is an NID traitor. Jack is very superficially a gruff military man, but in practice he only really overrides Daniel when Daniel is asking him to gamble all their lives based on the style of pots the aliens use and a half translated prayer.

Kinsey's style used to be something you could find along Democrats, too. Especially the budget-hawking-but-only-against-the-military bit is something that could go either way in my eyes.

O'Neill's outlook is definitely post-Vietnam military burnout, but absolutely everything else about him codes hard on the right for the time. There really was no archetype of the Dem leaning special forces guy in the 90s. If anything, he has always struck me as the kind of mostly disinterested (if not actively disgusting) in politics personally conservative but not religious middle aged white guy who would be activated by Trump in 2016.

Red and blue as political party colors developed recently and not all at once, spawning from 2000 election night coverage where CNN showed states flipping between red and blue.

I have consistently found going back and watching the sci-fi of my youth that it is way more preachy about the progressive ideas of its time than I thought.

I recently made a similar exercise, and you're right they could get preachy, but I think there was more balance - unless I'm misinterpreting it, Voyager literally had an episode about the Great Replacement. For me the comparison was also interesting as a sanity check. There is an idea floating around that woodenness wokeness is just a continuation of previous iterations of liberalism, and all the people objecting to it would be crying out against it watching their favorite TV shows, had they been born a generation earlier. Who knows, maybe I would have been a Reaganite, but the fact remains all the things that all the things that made me clash with wokeness, rather than go along with it - free speech, colorblindness, meritocracy - were all there in TNG's messaging. Star Trek also had episodes that I feel heralded the Awokening, and they stuck out like a sore thumb - DS9's "Far Beyond the Stars", for example.

Voyager literally had an episode about the Great Replacement.

Which episode, exactly? I don't recall this plot point, but I'm no savant.

S03E24: Displaced, took a while to find it, as my memory was playing tricks on me. Could swear it was a two partner.

Thanks. I read the synopsis and still don't remember it at all. It definitely didn't leave an impression on me like the Aschen episode from SG1.

…idea floating around that woodenness is just…

I think you had an autocorrect issue here.

Yep. But now I kind of want to leave it there.

But also - goddamn, get with the program, autocorrect, "wokeness" isn't even that new a concept.

I remember being a small child and accidentally catching a glimpse of an episode on the TV, without much in the way of additional context:

I don’t want to be human. I want to see gamma rays, I want to hear X-rays, and I want to smell dark matter. Do you see the absurdity of what I am? I can’t even express these things properly, because I have to—I have to conceptualize complex ideas in this stupid, limiting spoken language, but I know I want to reach out with something other than these prehensile paws, and feel the solar wind of a supernova flowing over me. I’m a machine, and I can know much more.

Well, I suppose that explains how I became a transhumanist!

Edit: Added what I feel is the relevant degree of emphasis. To be fair, we can see gamma rays, astronauts see white spots/flickers of visual noise in their vision from cosmic rays detonating against their retinas. I wouldn't recommend that myself.

Talk about tasting purple. I've always wanted to "See" x-rays too. And radio waves. To feel magnetic lines as delicately as I can feel a breath disturb the little hairs on my arms.

To feel magnetic lines as delicately as I can feel a breath disturb the little hairs on my arms.

This one can (sort of) be arranged:

Magnetic implant is an experimental procedure in which small, powerful magnets (such as neodymium) are inserted beneath the skin, often in the tips of fingers. [...] The magnet pushes against magnetic fields produced by electronic devices in the surrounding area, pushing against the nerves and giving a "sixth sense" of magnetic vision.

I would strongly recommend against this, if you ever plan to get an MRI done in your life. At least most piercings are less of a PITA to remove (well.. depending on how inventive you are about where you place them..).

As much as I am an ardent transhumanist, most or all current mechanical additions or replacements are only half-decent at replacing damaged parts, to me, BCIs like a Neuralink represent the first kind of augmentation that an otherwise healthy individual might want.

To be fair, we can see gamma rays, astronauts see white spots/flickers of visual noise in their vision from cosmic rays detonating against their retinas.

Those are not gamma rays but mostly high energy protons and atomic nuclei.

I stand corrected then, thanks.

I learned English with this show so it's very near and dear to my heart. Gaeta announcing DRADIS contacts and Adama ordering vipers to launch is burned in my memory.

The real genius of BSG is that it manages to weave hard scifi concepts in with something that seems grounded and palatable enough of a character drama that people who aren't scifi fans can get drawn in and still get to do the philosophical contemplation that the genre has always been meant to cause.

It's not a perfect show, and as the writers candidly admitted they made a lot of it up as they went along (ironically they didn't have a plan), but it a properly great show in my opinion, not a merely good one. It has a real aesthetic proposition, it has something real to say and it has the means to say it.

I also very much appreciated and still appreciate how the show embraced spirituality as a natural counterpart and foil to its hypermodern grounded science fiction. It is a lot more convincing and intriguing for it and it allows it to explore more of the human condition in deeper a fashion than a now too common disdainful secularism would be able to.

Ultimately its core theme of man and machine is now so relevant it's hard not to draw parallels between classic episodes and staples of the AI debate.

they made a lot of it up as they went along (ironically they didn't have a plan)

This is what kills the show for me. I do still recommend people watch the miniseries and maybe one season, but then at that point just stop and come up with your own headcanon about what's going on; whatever you imagine will probably be more enjoyable and more logical than what the writers put to paper.

To be fair, at least Ronald Moore had a good track record when he got his Mystery Box Show nonsense greenlit. I'd like to complain more about Disney being dumb enough to hire J. J. Abrams to kick off the Star Wars sequels ... except that their decision making hasn't started to backfire until many years and billions of dollars later, so can I really call it "dumb"? Instead I'll just kick myself for being dumb enough to go watch a Star Wars X Lost crossover in theaters while naively expecting it to be the start of a story with some consistency and payoffs and closure.

I'd like to complain more about Disney being dumb enough to hire J. J. Abrams to kick off the Star Wars sequels ... except that their decision making hasn't started to backfire until many years and billions of dollars later, so can I really call it "dumb"?

I think you can. The counterfactual of someone other than Abrams directing episode 7 is likely a film that still made a billion dollars, possibly even more. Even if they went with the same basic awful soft reboot of episode 4 as the plot, I don't think anything about Abrams's trademark Mystery Box storytelling added anything good to the film. I recall that line "that's a good question... for another time" about Luke Skywalker's lightsaber was made fun of when the film came out, and even moreso when "another time" never came in the following two films, despite Abrams directing episode 9 as well.

I think the real dumb move was probably not having a set outline for all 3 episodes that was planned out with all the writers and directors on board from the start. But then again, perhaps that's just equivalent to hiring Abrams because Abrams and planning-for-the-ending are basically water and oil.

What aspects turned you off? I liked the political plays, the tension, the insurgency, the Mafia-style social deduction games. If you completely ignore the subplots having to do with spirituality and mysticism, it's a good show!

The combination of grandiose "there are Deep Mysterious Plans at work" claims with banal "Making Shit Up As We Go Along" reality. Ruined the whole arc plot for me as well as the social deduction games, and made the tension feel increasingly faked.

The political plays and the insurgency were excellent, I admit. And I have to credit the mysticism for at least being the least irrational way to get the plot out of an irrational corner.

ironically they didn't have a plan

This. Some writer decides that it would be neat if there were two religious factions among the humans, so they introduce that concept in one episode, which gets promptly ignored after that episode is over (from what I recall).

No matter what the science guy rolls on bluff, he should not get sole permanent possession of an intact nuclear warhead which he could use to blow up the Galactica along with half the human fleet at any time. Nukes are typically tracked by someone with object permanence.

In general, if the writers had the choice between logical consistency and making the story more emotionally compelling, they mostly went for the emotionally compelling story.

Funny, I very much experienced the "spiritual" aspects as cheap filler. They definitely set an intriguing mood, but they didn't populate it with a message.

It's vanishingly rare that we see spirituality or mysticism well done in sci-fi. The Starcraft II single-player campaign was another otherwise-decent story that was held back by poorly engaging with this. I just don't think most sci-fi writers have a connection with the divine. And godly men don't write sci-fi, mostly they write about the world they belong to.

I've been thinking that BSG with the "spiritual" bits expunged would be a much greater show. Though I'm sure something else would jump out as begging to be cut.

Have you seen Babylon 5? I thought they did a pretty good job with mysticism, especially in the first two seasons.

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nor does the show bring up racial politics ever if I recall correctly

Been a while since I watched it, but it has a plot line on discrimination between the different colonies(homeworlds) with wealthy capricorns and taurons looking down their noses at aerilons and one character being discovered to have faked his background.

Yes, but the different colonies aren't separated by skin colour/race; as far as I can remember they all run the gamut. In that respect it maps better on to debates surrounding free trade and western "exploitation" of developing nations rather than racial identity politics within western countries, especially with the talk of Zarek and his ilk as "freedom fighters" vs. terrorists

They weren’t separated by skin color but we are told that colonists can tell which colony you came from by accent, and Baltar changing his accent is a plot point that matches the 2000’s attitude towards race(there are likely destructive aspects of black culture and they should stop doing them and adopt superior white culture) especially because Baltar is said to have literally rejected his cultural background by studying extra hard.

Watch the prequel series which followed it, Caprica. The tribe played by Black actors were from a certain poorer colony planet, and those played by swarthy actors (Mexicans, Hispanics and Italians) were from another planet known for mafia-like organized crime. The tribe who colonized Caprica was played as lily-white and privileged by comparison.

Three months ago, LessWrong admin Ben Pace wrote a long thread on the EA forums: Sharing Info About Nonlinear, in which he shared the stories of two former employees in an EA startup who had bad experiences and left determined to warn others about the company. The startup is an "AI x-risk incubator," which in practice seems to look like a few people traveling around exotic locations, connecting with other effective altruists, and brainstorming new ways to save the world from AI. Very EA. The post contains wide-ranging allegations of misconduct mostly centering around their treatment of two employees they hired who started traveling with them, ultimately concluding that "if Nonlinear does more hiring in the EA ecosystem it is more-likely-than-not to chew up and spit out other bright-eyed young EAs who want to do good in the world."

He, and it seems to some extent fellow admin Oliver Habryka, mentioned they spent hundreds of hours interviewing dozens of people over the course of six months to pull the article together, ultimately paying the two main sources $5000 each for their trouble. It made huge waves in the EA community, torching Nonlinear's reputation.

A few days ago, Nonlinear responded with a wide-ranging tome of a post, 15000 words in the main post with a 134-page appendix. I had never heard of either Lightcone (the organization behind the callout post) or Nonlinear before a few days ago, since I don't pay incredibly close attention to the EA sphere, but the response bubbled up into my sphere of awareness.

The response provides concrete evidence in the form of contemporary screenshots against some of the most damning-sounding claims in the original article:

  • accusations that when one employee, "Alice", was sick with COVID in a foreign country and nobody would get her vegan food so she barely ate for two days turned into "There was vegan food in the house and they picked food up for her, but on one of the days they wanted to go to a Mexican place instead of getting a vegan burger from Burger King."

  • accusations that they promised another, "Chloe", compensation around $75,000 and stiffed her on it in various ways turned into "She had a written contract to be paid $1000/monthly with all expenses covered, which we estimated would add up to around $70,000."

  • accusations that they asked Alice to "bring a variety of illegal drugs across the border" turned into "They asked Alice, who regularly traveled with LSD and marijuana of her own accord, to pick up ADHD medicine and antibiotics at a pharmacy. When she told them the meds still required a prescription in Mexico, they said not to worry about it."

The narrative the Nonlinear team presents is of one employee with mental health issues and a long history of making accusations against the people around her came on board, lost trust in them due to a series of broadly imagined slights, and ultimately left and spread provable lies against them, while another who was hired to be an assistant was never quite satisfied with being an assistant and left frustrated as a result.

As amusing a collective picture as these events paint about what daily life at the startup actually looked like, they also made it pretty clear that the original article had multiple demonstrable falsehoods in it, in and around unrebutted claims. More, they emphasized that they'd been given only a few days to respond to claims before publication, and when they asked for a week to compile hard evidence against falsehoods, the writers told them it would come out on schedule no matter what. Spencer Greenberg, the day before publication, warned them of a number of misrepresentations in the article and sent them screenshots correcting the vegan portion; they corrected some misrepresentations but by the time he sent the screenshots said it was too late to change anything.

That's the part that caught my interest: how did the rationalist community, with its obsession with establishing better epistemics than those around it, wind up writing, embracing, and spreading a callout article with shoddy fact-checking?

From a long conversation with Habryka, my impression is that a lot of EA community members were left scarred and paranoid after the FTX implosion, correcting towards "We must identify and share any early warning signs possible to prevent another FTX." More directly, he told me that he wasn't too concerned with whether they shared falsehoods originally so long as they were airing out the claims of their sources and making their level of epistemic confidence clear. In particular, the organization threatened a libel suit shortly before publication, which they took as a threat of retaliation that meant they should and must hold to their original release schedule.

My own impression is that this is a case of rationalist first-principles thinking gone awry and applied to a domain where it can do real damage. Journalism doesn't have the greatest reputation these days and for good reason, but his approach contrasts starkly with its aspiration to heavily prioritize accuracy and verify information before releasing it. I mention this not to claim that they do so successfully, but because his approach is a conscious deviation from that, an assertion that if something is important enough it's worth airing allegations without closely examining contrary information other sources are asking you to pause and examine.

I'd like to write more about the situation at some point, because I have a lot to say about it even beyond the flood of comments I left on the LessWrong and EA mirrors of the article and think it presses at some important tension points. It's a bit discouraging to watch communities who try so hard to be good from first principles speedrun so many of the pitfalls broader society built guardrails around.

That's the part that caught my interest: how did the rationalist community, with its obsession with establishing better epistemics than those around it, wind up writing, embracing, and spreading a callout article with shoddy fact-checking?

Very simple. The "rationalist community" is embedded in the SF zeitgeist and questioning callouts from women is anathema. This has happened before (e.g. Kathy F) and will happen again.

I can't really see how the "rationalist community" can be such a thing when it's utterly compromised. Progressive wokism, or whatever you want to call it, is the preeminent irrationalist philosophy of modernity, and the "rationalist community" is one of its vassals--all too often a willing one at that. From the outside, they're so absurd. Maybe they'll evolve into something worthy of their name eventually, but I see little sign of that. They would have been eugenicists 100 years ago.

Yeah, until you fundamentally change the way non-profits are organized, the supposed goals of the organization will always come second to the grift.

One problem is that the world belongs to those who show up. Tolerance for boring, six hour long meetings determines who gets leadership positions.

And tolerance for those meetings goes up a lot when there's money involved. Few people are willing to do it out of the kindness of their hearts. But if they get a $300,000/year paycheck they will do it. So the grifter will naturally rise.

Aren't a non-negligible number eugenicists now?

What do you mean by eugenics and their support for it? I’m not familiar with Bay Area progressives.

That's the part that caught my interest: how did the rationalist community, with its obsession with establishing better epistemics than those around it, wind up writing, embracing, and spreading a callout article with shoddy fact-checking?

People occasionally ask whether the ratsphere is just reinventing the wheel of philosophy (my response then). I suspect that EA is similarly reinventing the wheel of non-profit profiteering.

This is something I've been thinking about a lot lately, but so far all I have to show for it is a scattered mess of loosely-connected (as though by yarn and pushpins) thoughts. Some of them are even a bit Marxist--we live in a material world, we all have to eat, and if you aren't already independently wealthy then your only options for going on living are to grind, or to grift (or some combination of the two). And the Internet has a way of dragging more and more of us into the same bucket of crabs. AI is interesting stuff, but 99% of the people writing and talking about it are just airing views. MIT's recent AI policy briefs do not contribute any technical work to the advancement of AI, and do not express any substantive philosophical insight; all I see there is moralizing buzzwords and wishful thinking. But it is moralizing buzzwords and wishful thinking from top researchers at a top institution discussing a hot issue, which is how time and money and attention are allocated these days.

So for every one person doing the hard work of advancing AI technology, there seem to be at least a hundred grasping hands reaching out in hopes of being the one who gets to actually call the shots, or barring that at least catches some windfall "crumbs" along the way. For every Scott Alexander donating a damn kidney to strangers in hopes of making the world an ever-so-slightly better place to live, there are a hundred "effective altruists" who see a chance to collect a salary by bouncing between expenses-paid feel-good conferences at fancy hotels instead of leveraging their liberal arts degree as a barista. And I say that as someone with several liberal arts degrees, who works in academia where we are constantly under pressure to grift for grants.

The cliche that always comes to my mind when I weigh these things is, "what would you do, if money were not an issue?" Not in the "what if you had unlimited resources" sense, but like--what would the modal EA-AI acolyte do, if they got their hands on $100 million free and clear? Because I think the true answer for the overwhelming majority of them is something like "buy real estate," not "do more good in the world." And I would not condemn that choice on the merits (I'd do the same!) but people notice that kind of apparent hypocrisy, even if, in the end, we as a society seem basically fine with non-profits like "Black Lives Matter" making some individual persons wealthy beyond their wildest dreams. I can't find the link right now (but I thought it was an AAQC?) but someone here did a Likewise, there was a now-deleted deep dive into the Sound of Freedom guy's nonprofit finances posted here a while back, and he was making a lot of money.

So if you want to dig in, the 2020 return is here and the 2021 is here.

As far as most concerning stuff, there is a pretty large amount of money flowing out to Ballard and his wife. $335,000 of salary to Ballard in 2021 and $113,858 of salary to his wife. These aren't super eye popping numbers, but it is a pretty high amount.

The second thing is that they seem to be hoarding a lot of cash. They have like $80 million cash on hand, and are spending much less than they raise. This isn't inherently an issue if they're trying to build an organization that's self-sustaining, but it does mean as a donor your money is not likely going to actual stuff in the short or medium term.

Speaking of that actual stuff, they don't seem to spend most of what goes out the door on their headline-generating programs. A pretty big chunk of their outflow is just grants to other 501(c)(3)s, which is not something you need to be spending millions in executive compensation for. As best I can figure, in 2021 they did just shy of $11 million of grants to other nonprofits. It's a little tricky to suss out their spending on program expenses versus admin, but they claim for outside the US a total of just shy of $8 million in program expenses.

Legal expenses are also very high (at over 1.5 million). Not sure if they're involved in some expensive litigation or what is going on there. Travel is also really high at 1.9 million, but given the nature of their organization, a good chunk of that is likely programmatic.

Now it looks like, even if maybe he did (?) save some kid(s) from trafficking along the way, it was mostly a grift? Anyway, the point is, stories like this abound.

So it would be more surprising, in the end, if the rationalist community had actually transcended human nature in this case. And by "human nature" I don't even mean greedy and grubbing; I just mean that anyone who isn't already independently wealthy must, to continue existing, find a grind or a grift! As usual, I have no solutions. This particular case is arguably especially meta, given the influence AI seems likely to have on the grind-or-grift options available to future (maybe, near-future) humans. And maybe this particular case is especially demonstrative of hypocrisy, given the explicit opposition of both effective altruism and the ratsphere to precisely the kind of grind-or-grift mentality that dominates every other non-profit world. But playing the game one level higher apparently did not, at least in this case, translate into playing a different game. Perhaps, so long as we are baseline homo sapiens, there is no other game available to us.

there are a hundred "effective altruists" who see a chance to collect a salary by bouncing between expenses-paid feel-good conferences at fancy hotels instead of leveraging their liberal arts degree as a barista

Yeah, I think that's so. If you're in the geographical bubble, there's a good chance that if you can't parlay your way into some kind of Silicon Valley start-up with free money from venture capitalists, the next best thing is to hop aboard the EA train. Especially if you knock together something about AI-risk. There's money in that, now (see Microsoft, Altman, and OpenAI). Put together a convincing pitch that you're working on existential risk, and there are donors, grant-makers, and a lot of deep pockets who will listen attentively.

Right now this makes it fertile ground for hucksters, scammers, and the like.

Right now this makes it fertile ground for hucksters, scammers, and the like.

Or also (I imagine, I'm not actually familiar) relatively sincere people, who do care about the goals in question, but also care about living well, or social status, or whatever else.

which in practice seems to look like a few people traveling around exotic locations, connecting with other effective altruists, and brainstorming new ways to save the world from AI

While snarky, this is indeed my impression of (current) EA movement. At the start, with the mosquito nets, this at least was practical, boots-on-the-ground charity and they could be forgiven for their slightly smug 'we're doing charidee right (unlike the mugs who went before we appeared fully-formed from the head of Zeus)' attitude because they were indeed helping the poor and deprived.

But helping the poor and deprived wasn't the full gamut of EA activity and philosophy, and the crank stuff (sorry, people, I do not care if insects suffer) was there from the start. However, it was a minor part. But AI risk was one of the Less Wrong and other rationalist/rationalist-adjacent bugbears, and because of the cross-over between EA and the rationalist bubble, that was there too.

And it was sexy! and modern! and interesting! in a way that plain, bread-and-butter, 'help the poor with an ongoing problem that, despite all the fancy technical attempts to solve it, looks to remain intractable: malaria by mosquito-borne transmission' wasn't, because all the former mugs had been doing 'missions to Africa' and the likes for decades, so what makes you so special?

And it involved flying around and going to conferences and hob-nobbing with Big Names and getting yourself known in those circles, and was way more appealing to the SF nerd in us all (c'mon, if we're hanging round these parts, even if we're not rationalists or EA, we're SF nerds).

So EA the movement seems, to me at least looking in from the outside, to have subtly but definitely transformed into 'making a living by taking in each other's washing' - going to conferences to network about getting an internship to get into a programme about signing people up to attend EA conferences.

(Here's where I mention the manor house in Oxford).

That's why, while I understand Scott doing an apologia for EA and appealing to all the lives it (presumably/allegedly) has saved, I don't think he still has entirely grappled with the criticisms from the outside about 'travelling around exotic locations and brainstorming for projects which are not practical, boots-on-the-ground, charity'. If (and it's one hell of a big if) AI is going to Doom Us All unless it's perfectly aligned with nice, liberal, 21st century middle-to-upper middle class San Franciscan values, then their work is important.

If AI screws us over because (deep breath) the free market capitalist system incentivises greed and the gold rush is on to get to market first and grab the majority share with your product, and just ignore that right now the product you're peddling makes shit up and is totally unreliable but people are being sold on the notion that it's super-ultra-mega-accurate, just believe all it says but the thing is never going to become self-aware and have its own goals and I highly doubt even smarter than human intelligence (exhale) - then all the fancy conferences mean nothing. Except pleasant trips to Oxfordshire manor houses for EA talking sessions where you pretend to be doing something meaningful - junkets, in other words.

And if you've reached the point of junkets, you are not "doing charidee right unlike those other mugs".

As for the rest of it? Sounds like the typical EA over-sensitivity/scrupulousness where small things get blown up into microaggressions, unfulfilled promises, and 'you said I'd get X and then I never got X' pouting where all kinds of accommodations for neurodiversity, gender diversity, I don't know what diversity, are expected implicitly.

EDIT:

That's the part that caught my interest: how did the rationalist community, with its obsession with establishing better epistemics than those around it, wind up writing, embracing, and spreading a callout article with shoddy fact-checking?

I think, and this is only a vague impression so don't take it as Gospel, that it's a case of the pendulum over-correcting and swinging too far to the other side. There have been previous internal scandals among rationalist groups, and subsequent accusations of cover-ups and people in charge not taking the complaints seriously/not acting quickly enough/doing their best to hush it up.

So I think there's a sensitivity around being seen to 'victim blame' and not immediately strike while the iron is hot when you hear people accusing EA/EA-aligned groups of wrongdoing, and this perhaps led in this instance into jumping the gun. Fact-checking could be seen as denying the truth, trying to delay embarrassing revelations, and even a form of harassing the victims by making them respond to little, nit-picky details.

The whole "my vegan diet/my money that I was promised" and so on sounds exactly like what I've come to expect from these types, to be frank (and a little mean) about it. Wanting a whole specific vegan product from one place and kicking up about not getting it. If you're sick with Covid, you're likely not to be eating much anyway, and if you can eat to the point that you're fussy about "I only eat this not that", then you're not that sick. One of my siblings got Covid and couldn't even keep down water because she vomited everything she consumed straight back up, so I was genuinely worried about her getting dangerously dehydrated; that's not at all the same as "I didn't get my vegan din-dins".

EDIT EDIT: To be fair, if she was that sick, and her stomach was sensitive, it may well have been that she could only eat that one particular Burger King vegan burger; Mexican food does sound like it would be too much. But building it up into The Persecution of the Vegan Joan of Arc is the kind of overly dramatic, self-regarding, navel-gazing that a lot of the writing by EA and LessWrongers and lesser lights exhibits. That's one of the attractions of Scott's writing for me - he's never (or barely ever) indulged in that slightly whiny "I have this entire laundry list of Things wrong with me and I need and demand these special accommodations and I continuously gaze into the mirror of my soul and you lot get the reports from the frontier on that every five minutes and any criticism no matter how mild is hate speech".

Rationalists have the flaw that they assume anyone interested in rationalism as a movement will be well-meaning. Which is probably true when rationalism is a couple of nerds debating whether eating oysters is moral, but in a world where "rationalism" is worth money and social cachet, it attracts hanger-ons who are motivated by other considerations.

Any movement seeking power has to consider what will happen when someone who is less interested in their principles than attaining power tries to join it.

Geeks, MOPs, and Sociopaths remains the classic diagnosis of this.

Any movement seeking power has to consider what will happen when someone who is less interested in their principles than attaining power tries to join it.

Almost like it's some sort of iron law. Combining the sibling comment to this one should enable any movement to derive the conclusions stated by the "neutral vs. conservative" thing, since neutral can't resist entryism by the evil but conservative can.

Rationalists have the flaw that they assume anyone will be well-meaning.

Fixed.

There are no well-meaning people, only cynics, liars and the self-deluded. Altruism is the first lie.

My own impression is that this is a case of rationalist first-principles thinking gone awry and applied to a domain where it can do real damage. Journalism doesn't have the greatest reputation these days and for good reason, but his approach contrasts starkly with its aspiration to heavily prioritize accuracy and verify information before releasing it.

On the other hand, I don't remember any journalists giving Nick Sandman, or Brett Kavanaugh a chance to respond. The Official Book Of Rules Of Journalism might have some good ideas in it, but it seems to have been gathering dust to the point where deliberately breaking some of the rules yields a better result.

Concrete note on this:

accusations that they promised another, "Chloe", compensation around $75,000 and stiffed her on it in various ways turned into "She had a written contract to be paid $1000/monthly with all expenses covered, which we estimated would add up to around $70,000."

The "all expenses" they're talking about are work-related travel expenses. I, too, would be extremely mad if an employer promised me $75k / year in compensation, $10k of which would be cash-based, and then tried to say that costs incurred by me doing my job were considered to be my "compensation".

Honestly most of what I take away from this is that nobody involved seems to have much of an idea of how things are done in professional settings, and also there seems to be an attitude of "the precautions that normal businesses take are costly and unnecessary since we are all smart people who want to help the world". Which, if that's the way they want to swing, then fine, but I think it is worth setting those expectations upfront. And also I'd strongly recommend that anyone fresh out of college who has never had a normal job should avoid working for an EA organization like nonlinear until they've seen how things work in purely transactional jobs.

Also it seems to me based on how much interest there was in that infighting that effective altruists are starved for drama.

They never promised $75k/year in compensation, $10k of which would be cash-based. This was the compensation package listed in their written, mutually agreed upon employment contract:

As compensation for the services provided, the Employee shall be paid $1,000 per month as well as accommodation, food, and travel expenses, subject to Employer's discretion.

They included another text in evidence where they restated part of it:

stipend and salary mean the same thing. in this instance, it's just $1000 a month in addition to covering travel, food, housing etc

The only apparent mention of $70000 as a number happened during a recorded interview (edited for clarity, meaning retained):

We're trying to think about what makes sense for compensation, because you're gonna be living with us, you're gonna be eating with us. How do you take into account the room and the board and stuff and the travel that's already covered? What we're thinking is a package where it's about the equivalent of being paid $70k a year in terms of the housing and the food, and you'll eat out every day and travel and do random fun stuff. And then on top of that, for the stuff that's not covered by room and board and travel is $1000 a month for basically anything else.

I would not personally take a job offering this compensation structure, but they were fully upfront about what the comp package was and it came pre-agreed as part of the deal. I see no grounds for complaints about dishonesty around it.

It's not a job, it's more like being an au pair: the 'employer' or 'host family' provides room and board and an allowance in return for light domestic/child minding work.

The selling point here seems to be "wouldn't you like to travel and have fun overseas on our dime? we'll pay for travel, and room and board, and even give you a stipend on top! and all you have to do is help us with our fun, impactful, altruistic projects!"

As a gap year thing, sure. Maybe. Were I a parent, I'd still be "but who are these people and what happens if you're overseas and get sick or something?" But it's not a job job, it's volunteer work or voluntourism or the likes, and that may be what Interlinear are relying on.

Yeah, that’s the same as things like teach abroad programs and Peace Corps. It’s nice when you’re young and single.

Sounds like Nonlinear are relying on those blurry boundaries; one person says you're an employee, here's your contract, you'll be working for me but the head boss says oh no all these are volunteers and we pay for travel, room and board plus we throw in a stipend, but they're independent contractors (as it were). So when they have you there, you think you're working in a job, but any trouble and you find out nope no that's not what we said and that's not what is written down, not our problem.

Speaking of blurry boundaries, Nonlinear almost certainly violated either federal tax law or minimum wage laws, and potentially immigration law too.

I read the same doc you did, and like. I get that "Chloe" did in fact sign that contract, and that the written contract is what matters in the end. My point is not that Nonlinear did something illegal, but... did we both read the same transcript? Because that transcript reads to me like "come on, you should totally draw art for my product, I can only pay 20% of market rates but I can get you lots of exposure, and you can come to my house parties and meet all the cool people, this will be great for your career".

I don't know how much of it is that Kat's writing style pattern matches really strongly to a particular shitty and manipulative boss I very briefly worked for right after college. E.g. stuff like

As best as I can tell, she got into this cognitive loop of thinking we didn’t value her. Her mind kept looking for evidence that we thought she was “low value”, which you can always find if you’re looking for it. Her depressed mind did classic filtering of all positive information and focused on all of the negative things. She ignored all of my gratitude for her work. In fact, she interpreted it as me only appreciating her for her assistant work, confirming that I thought she was a “low value assistant”. (I did also thank her all the time for her ops work too, by the way. I’m just an extremely appreciative boss/person.)

just does not fill me with warm fuzzy feelings about someone's ability to entertain the hypothesis that their own behavior could possibly be a problem. Again, I am probably not terribly impartial here - I have no horse in this particular race, but I once had one in a similar race.

Because that transcript reads to me like "come on, you should totally draw art for my product, I can only pay 20% of market rates but I can get you lots of exposure, and you can come to my house parties and meet all the cool people, this will be great for your career".

Sounds like a mercifully inexpensive lesson about the nonexistence of free lunches. What an offer like that translates to is

You could work for $4k/month cash, or, OR! You could work for $1k/month, and every month you get to pull a prize out of the Mystery Box! Wooo! The Mystery Box! Who knows what's in there? There might be all kinds of cool stuff!

If someone willingly agrees to work for a pathetic salary with "all expenses paid," or draw art for "exposure," and they get what they signed up for, it's really not shitty or manipulative, it's just an unremarkable business agreement, regardless of what unrealistic hopes on party may have had.

Ask questions, get everything in writing, in a contract, and if it sounds too good to be true, walk away. I'm continually amazed at how my some of my colleagues and acquaintances just take others' word and then get disappointed when their own expectations let them down. Classic example: "We can't give you a raise this year, but I'm sure we'll be able to do something for you when the next performance cycle rolls around." Okay cool, write me a bonus offer right now for next year and sign it, otherwise I'm hopping on LinkedIn tonight.

If someone willingly agrees to work for a pathetic salary with "all expenses paid," or draw art for "exposure," and they get what they signed up for,

I worked a few seasonal jobs in my youth that included room and board, which was taken out of the already-modest paychecks. You really could get away with not spending anything for months if you wanted, although many of my coworkers would occasionally find a restaurant or bar at which to spend money.

I don't regret doing these because the job itself was pretty enjoyable. I make better money now, but I didn't feel exploited by the arrangement: as long as you're saving enough for retirement and such, gigs that cover "expenses" in-kind can be an option, although probably not the most interesting one.

I have no idea how so many of these so called "well adjusted" human beings fall for things so simple as the Mystery Box. Like people used to call me borderline autistic and even in my worst moments I would never ever have fallen for "I'm sure we'll be able to do something for you when the next performance cycle rolls around".

OTOH, and maybe it's my backwater upbringing talking, $1K cash on top of room, board and other expenses, doesn't sound like a bad deal, if you're still young.

Combined with world travel within an existing social circle and without grinding repetitive labor, and it sounds good to me right now at over 30. Maybe negotiate some sort of bonus if my living/travel costs come in way under the estimate.

While I don't endorse "come on, you should totally draw art for my product"–type behavior, I do think the position would have been appealing and appropriate for a certain type of person I am not far from. My monthly salary on top of room and board was significantly larger as a military enlistee, but I also wasn't traveling the world. I think they were realistically underpaying for what they wanted but also think "don't take the job" is an adequate remedy to that.

I take your point about the writing style, but for me it's secondary to the core impression that the investigation was very badly mishandled in a way that makes examining things now feel unfair. The initial report should not have been released as-is and it reflects poorly on the whole EA/LW-rationalist community that it was. Given the poor choices around its release, I don't feel inclined to focus too much on what really looks like mundane and predictable workplace/roommate drama.

I agree that it was badly mishandled. I think it's valuable to tell EAs that the "people will try to get you to take a job where they say you'll be paid in experience/exposure, be mindful of that dynamic" but singling out a single organization to that degree makes it sound like it's a problem specific to that organization (which it is not, even within the EA space I personally know of another org with similar dynamics, and I'm not even very involved with the space).

I personally still wouldn't work for nonlinear but then I also would have noped out in the initial hash-out-the-contract phase.

Yeah. And honestly, there are worse things than being paid in exposure. I'd describe that as the primary compensation for my podcast job (my bosses pay me a perfectly fair hourly wage, but I'm certainly not doing it for the money). It's just worth being clear-eyed about precisely what that entails and when it's appropriate.

The problem is that even if Nonlinear is pure as the driven snow (and there seems to be some grounds to doubt that), it's operating in the EA sphere where 'put the majority of the money you earn to good causes, live sparely so you can give even more' is an acceptable community value, and where there are a lot of idealists willing to save the world if they can, and willing to be emotionally guilt-tripped into volunteering, doing way more work than they should be doing, and living on fresh air while doing that. Where scrupulosity is a known problem, and people do tie themselves into knots over paperclip maximisers.

It's not sustainable for anybody and it's very open to abuse.

Because that transcript reads to me like "come on, you should totally draw art for my product, I can only pay 20% of market rates but I can get you lots of exposure, and you can come to my house parties and meet all the cool people, this will be great for your career".

See all the reputable media companies, including the New York Times at one time, that use(d) unpaid interns for the same thing - this is helping you get your foot in the door, it pays in exposure. Lots of places rely on the unpaid/voluntary labour of hopefuls to carry them through backlogs, or the busy period, or rush orders. The wonders of the gig economy, where there will be no such thing as guaranteed employment but it's your responsibility to be flexible, available, and constantly re-skilling/upskilling to meet demand.

Sounds like a good learning experience about the world of work, but I imagine since this is all within the EA bubble, the expectations about being treated super-specially and not being taken advantage of and getting all sorts of loving, caring, treatment were sky-high.

Everyone involved sounds narcissistic at best and absolute pricks at worst, and I'm not going to single out one person from the lot.

Lots of places rely on the unpaid/voluntary labour of hopefuls to carry them through backlogs, or the busy period, or rush orders.

There is a certain narrative that this is common but I'm not sure a buy it. Maybe it's just software engineering but interns have never made sense as a free labor prospect to me, they cost more in senior dev time spent training than they could possibly be alleviating. It only makes sense as a junior talent pipeline tool.

It all seems very dodgy, and I think that the company was one of those set-ups that many people encounter at least once in their working lives: very extrovert/charismatic boss, who spouts a lot of the right stuff about ideals and appeals to better nature, and convinces you that working with them is going to change the world/improve the lives of many.

When you're young and inexperienced, you're vulnerable to all this because you don't have enough time put in to know what work is like. And the use of unpaid interns and so forth is common in all kinds of businesses.

So in this case - were the people volunteers, travelling on their own dime along with the Interlinear people, and getting room and board and expenses with an allowance on top, or were they employees? Since they don't seem ever to have been formally employed or given contracts, it sounds like the 'volunteer/unpaid intern' type of taking advantage.

If I take the initial story on face value, the Interlinear lot are EA-adjacent, swimming in the same waters, but sharks not dolphins (or behaving like sharks, at least). The kind of exploitative set-up that, as I said, most of us hit up against at least once when we're out there working for a living, but covering it all over with the language of volunteering and idealism and changing the world, etc. It's possible that Interlinear aren't that bad, but it's also possible that this Emmanuel guy is that sort of charming psychopath that top management roles attract. And the mess of overlapping romantic/family/employee or pseudo-family? who knows? roles didn't help.

Then the sort of people who are in the EA bubble are exactly the over-sensitive, rather credulous, inexperienced sorts who believe all the clap-trap about idealism and also expect a ton of accommodations for their lifestyle choices (e.g. veganism).

Put the two together, and that's putting fire and tinder together.

That's the part that caught my interest: how did the rationalist community, with its obsession with establishing better epistemics than those around it, wind up writing, embracing, and spreading a callout article with shoddy fact-checking?

The same way they got suckered into thinking AI x-risk is an "effective" altruist cause?

At least the callout post came with testimony from people who had actually worked at Nonlinear. It had quotes and screenshots and other forms of evidence of the kind that convince us of many things every day. It turns out these statements did not reflect reality and the screenshots were carefully curated to present a particular narrative. This is a risk we run any time we trust someone's testimony about a situation we don't have first hand experience with. This is an ordinary, and probably unavoidable, epistemic failure mode.

By contrast, what is the state of evidence for AI x-risk research being an effective cause area? If I'm making a $5k dollar donation should I make it to the Against Malaria Foundation (who I'm reasonably confident will save a life with that money) or to some AI x-risk charity? What's the number of lives, in expectation the donation to the AI x-risk charity will save? What was the methodology for determining that number? The error bars on it? As best as I can tell these numbers are sourced to the same place: their ass. If you think AI x-risk is an "effective" cause area, you have bad epistemic standards! Not good ones!

At least the callout post came with testimony from people who had actually worked at Nonlinear. It had quotes and screenshots and other forms of evidence of the kind that convince us of many things every day. It turns out these statements did not reflect reality and the screenshots were carefully curated to present a particular narrative. This is a risk we run any time we trust someone's testimony about a situation we don't have first hand experience with. This is an ordinary, and probably unavoidable, epistemic failure mode.

Not good enough.

Yes, the callout post came with all of those things. Here's what else it came with:

  • An emphatic warning from a trusted community member that he had reviewed the draft the day before publication and warned of major inaccuracies, only one of which got corrected.

  • The subjects of the post claiming hard evidence that many of the claims in the post were outright false and begging for a week to compile and send that evidence while emphasizing that they'd had only three hours to respond to claims that took hundreds of hours to compile.

  • A notice at the top, treated as exculpatory rather than damning, that it would be a one-sided post brought about by a search for negative information.

Any one of those things, by itself, was a glaring red flag. All three of them put together leave absolutely no excuse for the post to have been released in the state it was in, or for an entire community that prides itself on healthy epistemics to treat it as damning evidence of wrongdoing. If it had been published in the New York Times rather than the effective altruism community, every single rationalist would—rightly—be cursing the name of the news outlet that decided to post such a piece.

This is ordinary in Tumblr fandoms. It's ordinary in tabloids. It's jarring and inexcusable to see the same behavior dressed up in Reasonable, Rational, Sensible language and cheered by a community that prides itself on having better discourse and a more truth-seeking standard than others.

This is an ordinary, and probably unavoidable, epistemic failure mode.

I'm not sure what's so difficult about saying "It sounds bad if it's true, but I'll reserve judgement until I hear the other side's case." I say it all the time, to the endless frustration of friends and family, but still. I'd expect rationalists to get that one right.

Some people can make accusations, and people will say "That sounds really bad but we're probably not hearing the full story". They then will make no attempt to hear the full story, and just dismiss the accusations on those grounds. Other people can make accusations and they are gospel truth and questioning them simply compounds the offense. It is all about who and whom.

This was a weird one.

I remember reading the original callout post and thinking: "If this were coming from literally anyone else I'd call bullshit, but I trust the LessWrong guys to not massively screw up something like this." The fact that they did in fact massively screw up something like this is a big update.

I also think it was correct to make some huge updates on the FTX collapse. Ben and Habryka just updated too much on "calling people out is good," whereas most of my updating was on "Benthamite utilitarianism is bad".

My own impression is that this is a case of rationalist first-principles thinking gone awry and applied to a domain where it can do real damage. Journalism doesn't have the greatest reputation these days and for good reason, but his approach contrasts starkly with its aspiration to heavily prioritize accuracy and verify information before releasing it.

It seems like the opposite to me. Running with the baseless callout post to show how seriously you take wrongdoing in your community is extremely normal behavior. Normal people tend to assume accusations are true, without appreciating how easily they can be dominated by a small percentage of delusional or malicious people. Normal people tend to take a "if there's smoke there's fire" attitude rather than nitpicking individual claims to see if the accuser is credible. Normal people are more interested in punishing or warning about wrongdoers than the impact of false accusations, and don't think about the second-order consequences of incentivizing false accusations by taking even weak accusations seriously. Indeed, I wonder if one reason the claims weren't questioned enough is because those doing so wanted to act normally and being skeptical would have pattern-matched onto negative stereotypes about EAs: defending an EA organization accused of abusive behavior would be cult-like, while nitpicking the truth of individual claims by an alleged victim would be cold and emotionless. Now, normal people can be skeptical, especially after a response like the one Nonlinear has now posted, and obviously they aren't as bad as SJW-inclined communities with ideological antibodies against failing to "Believe Victims". But the behavior you're attributing to rationalism seems very typical. Sadly this includes large sections of mainstream journalism, regardless of what the SPJ ethical guidelines say they should be doing.

The narrative the Nonlinear team presents is of one employee with mental health issues and a long history of making accusations against the people around her came on board

28 people!

I'm not sure how much of this is specific to post-FTX behavior -- there were a good few explosions in the rat-tumblr sphere during its height, and even when (probably) correct, there was very little interest or ability to consider how one knows a thing from knowing the thing, or to separate halo-and-horns for one demonstrated bad act to every alleged one. The community often doesn't have the tools to do serious first-party investigation, evaluate conflicting claims, nor the dedication to track them down. The final collapse of su3su2u1 sticks with me for the extent people turned SHLevy (and Scott)'s reveal of the sock-puppeting into 'doxxing', but it's relatively light-weight in terms of spreading around the shit.

For a more serious one, I'm still not sure where to place the numbers any one specific allegation about Vassar, and that's as someone that considered conversation somewhere nonproductive back in the Gold Age of LessWrong.

((On the flip side, I've not been impressed by the guardrails in general society, not least of all because many of the people and methods were the same.))

I won't claim it's entirely discontinuous from the past, but I think it's notable that eg Ben expressed fury at the lack of changes since FTX and the EA community as a whole has recent memories of being dragged through scandal after not being suspicious enough.

EDIT: Oliver, too, mentions being intimidated by FTX and not sharing his concerns as one of the worst mistakes of his career.


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