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It is unreasonable to compare any repatriation of migrants in European countries to their homeland to what is happening to the Palestinians. The mass murderous ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from their own homeland is analogous to similar historical behaviors of genocidal ethnic cleansing done by many regimes including the Soviet one.
Also, it is immoral for you to keep bringing up Jewish suffering when you promote the take how white Christian communities of Trump supporters deserve to die and support attrocities against Palestinians.
Fundamentally dead Jews from 80 years ago matter less than currently dying Palestinians, because we should care about current events and the past has passed.
Another thing to consider is that Jews in modernity not only suffered but also participated in causing suffering to others. Both as part of the communist movement but also as part of race marxist movements that supports the destruction of western civilization and its people, vilifies them and promotes one sided extreme propagandistic grievance that falsifies history.
The attempt by Jews to impose a Jewish supremacist ideology, makes some of the whining about insetivity to be particularly disingenuous. And this is why this taboo you are trying to take advantage is completly in bad faith and we need the opposite taboo against those trying to manipulate history in this manner.
Empathy towards the Jews is manipulated for purposes of elevating Jewish lives above non Jewish lives and to support screwing non Jews.
This milking of history by people who want to manipulate others to empathize with them while they are racist supremacists themselves ought to stop. So we actually ought to be punishing propagandists using Jewish suffering in such a manner to justify stripping groups from their rights. Or to promote a general dishonest narrative of one sided historical victimhood that justifies Jacob ruling over Esau.
Also important to decriminalize discussion of historical facts even if we ought to make it as taboo as possible if not criminalize using Jewish suffering or slavery to demonize Europeans in general and strip them of their rights. This is to say discussions about facts should be free, but overly milking such events should not be a free action.
Even excessive amount of holocaust, slavery films is suspect, but how things are framed and what narrative they promote is also important. The narrative of Jews as oppressed group that are chosen by God and God's will it to destroy other nations is one narrative that must be condemned and not promoted.
Rather than stopping machiavelian grievance merchants who promoted such narratives for destructive purposes, we had people siding with their crocodile tears about how they are victimized by racists.
Anyway, a moral goal is to stop the grievance merchants and to put different nation states on an equal playing field in regards to certain rights. Including the Jews. Rather than using say their history with communism, or the oppression of Israel towards Palestinians to claim that Jews should have no homeland neither.
So my favorite end result is fairer towards the Jews than your end result towards your various outgroups. So there is an inconsistency here.
Jewish supremacists who want it all at the expense of other ethnic groups such as the Likud faction are kind of paid by the same currency if they are responded to by people who want from the river to the sea a state only for Palestinians. Just like Netanyahou wants from the river to the sea only Israel.
So compromise is a good idea but it can't be a one way street by people who want to promote maximum sympathy for themselves while not respecting at all the rights of others.
Nevertheless for us who want good and moral outcomes, we should pressure the worst behaving faction with power who are destroying their opposite ethnic group on the ground. And we ought to not respect whatsoever such manipulations.
There is a reason why so many countries worldwide including countries that have nothing to do with the middle east like Japan have such a negative view of Israel. It's because the lie that people react negatively to bad Jewish behavior due to them being racist is wrong, and Israel is abusing human rights of Palestinians in a despicable manner that deserves condemnation.
Of course not. The key part of whether mass expulsion is genocidal is if it is done through mass murder. And indeed mass murder, the goal to induce starvation and horrible circumstances to Palestinians, as well as destroying their homes is part of this violent ethnic cleansing.
It is definetly a warcrime that those who support paint themselves in some of the most negative colors.
Also, it is especially immoral to expel people from their homeland and Palestinians homeland is Palestine.
This is about racist supremacist Jews wanting greater Israel. What would be more in line with justice would had been for them to try to agree with a compromise with the Arab world and Palestinians that took seriously both Israeli security and Palestinian statehood that respects Palestinian human rights. This compromise would have come after past mass murderous ethnic cleansing and occupation. So even that would be a big compromise for the Palestinians.
There is a fundamental difference from resisting colonization in your own land by foreigners that leads to your entire destruction as a people (which is unsuprisingly supported by a movement that demonizes your history and people and discriminate against it and that is an important reason why they favor your destruction), to expelling people from their own country to take it for yours. Also, the movement against Europeans milks and utilizes past Jewish suffering against Europeans. And even promotes propagandistic narrative of Jews as historically the inoccent victims who never didn't do nothing, all antisemitic slander and Europeans as the permanent evil oppressors.
The behavior of both Jewish migrants in Israel and of Palestinians in how they are polled and even how they behaved in places like Lebanon is actually indicative of the problems of foreign colonizations.
The one thing both groups have in common is they should not be trusted to rule over others fairly, and shouldn't be destroyed neither.
The world does have an interest in suppressing the more sociopathic elements from being leading those communities. More so for the Jews due to being more influential worldwide. Especially outside their country. Such as suppressing those more narcissistic, sociopathic factions and individuals from destroying and mistreating foreign ethnic groups and having power over them. Also there are non Jews who have been influenced into being Jewish supremacists who favor the destruction and oppression of non Jewish ethnic groups and share the same pathological extremism, including the hypocricy of pretending that they are against "racists", when they are the worst ones and people are correct to oppose them.
So there is an interest in changing the prevailing ideology among Jews and having them be less self serving. But really, what can observe when looking at the history of Israel, Jewish mega ngos and groups of billionairs connected with people like Epstein and Mossad like MEGA, polls and behavior is that there has been a continuous core element of Jewish establishment which has been Jewish supremacist against other ethnic groups and organized to use their power against them. And the Jewish community has had some sympathy for that. But there has been also some divergence which was reduced as that establishment got them in line. Crisis is used to get Jews in line, since they have absorbed a mentality of the inoccent martyr.
If that establishment is broken and Jewish elites are both moderate at Israel and in diaspora, less influential abroad and also the dominant non Jewish elites who would be influential worldwide are moderates, and I consider you the opposite of that then a greater bulk of the Jews would behave morally, as they are subject to moderate memes that promote the idea that the rights of Jews/non Jews end where each others begin.
That we even allow Jewish supremacists to promote their propaganda and to be a faction acting freely is a mistake. We well know by now that it is a faction that is fanatically spiteful, totalitarian, greedy, cruel, dishonest and ruthlessly destructive. It should be a faction that is suppressed and condemned.
Do you think the descendants of European settlers have a right to remain a majority in America and Canada?
Yes.
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I know this isn't addressed to me, but the thing is European settlers won in America, Canada, Australia. Indians/Aborigines are not going to become a majority in any of those countries anytime soon, no matter what the fertility rates look like, nor is there anywhere to import those people from(sure, you can probably find a Navajo living in France or something, but probably north of 90% live in the USA). The alternative in these countries to a White European descended majority is a majority of Chinamen or Mexicans or the other kind of Indians or something.
That is a meaningful difference between Israel and the USA; if all white people left the US it would be either a black country or a hispanic country(depending on how you count) with only local majorities of Native Americans. If all Jews left Israel, there would be a solid majority of Palestinian Arabs.
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(Don’t endorse much of what Belisarius said, or only much weaker versions of some of it).
I don’t think we’d have a right to complain if North American Indians pulled an Amish/Hasidim and outbred us. I also don’t think it’s reasonable to begrudge them having resisted our expansion with violence, though without endorsing every single thing they did. (The Palestinian Arabs do have a very bad habit engaging in violence that’s both needlessly indiscriminate and ineffectual - the Cherokee didn’t really have the option of nonviolent resistance, whereas the Palestinians would probably have done much better for themselves with that approach than they did in reality).
One relevant difference between our northern Amerindians and the Palestinians is that the whole Zionist process was needless - some European country was going to roll over the North American tribal societies regardless of what Britain did. But Zionism-in-Palestine was a very complicated and very involved way to not achieve security, normalcy, or
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Does she actually do this? I do not think this true.
This whole thread gives her an opportunity to discuss Jewish suffering and compare it to Palestinian. She indeed directly downplays the violent murderous ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by comparing it to deportation of migrants.
Further bellow she is debating the holocaust as she knew SecureSignals would bite the bait. And most importantly others would jump in the opportunity to show how serious they take this issue.
She recently argued that Williamson was right that white working class communities of the type that voted for Trump deserve to die. And she definitely supports atrocities against Palestinians and their ethnic cleansing.
Cimarafa is definitely a spiteful individual that wants to dish it out and while she promotes destruction and condemnation for other groups promotes sympathy for Jews, accuses others of antisemitism and so on.
You are allowed to disagree with someone, and you are allowed to dislike their viewpoint (and even dislike them personally), but these last two posts are full of personal antagonism, which is not allowed. @2rafa is allowed to bring up Jewish suffering and say it's the most horrible thing ever and not comparable to anything else. She's also allowed to "downplay the violent murderous ethnic cleansing of Palestinians." I am not necessarily agreeing with you that she's actually doing that, but she is in fact allowed to. You are allowed to take offense at someone's arguments, and you are allowed to make counterarguments. You are not allowed to namecall or engage in literal ad hominem arguments.
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Williamson’s point was that it wasn’t wrong to say that those people can move to where the jobs are, not that the people literally deserve to die.
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The element of the story you gloss over is the extensive but not-much-talked about cooperation between the Nazis and Zionists, which is a subject which was discussed in Ron Unz's new article on Israel and the Holocaust earlier this month. In addition to the extensive efforts of the Germans to transfer Jews to Palestine, there existed plans for a post-war Jewish state in multiple forms, including the Madagascar Plan (a plan which Joseph Goebbels still mentioned in his diaries when the Holocaust had supposedly already been decided and implemented). After the Madagascar Plan, there were various plans for resettlement in the Pale of Settlement, newly conquered Russian territory, the Lublin district of occupied Poland, etc.
This is why the gas chamber and alleged extermination program are such important claims in the story. Without those elements, this is a story of a country that brutally collapsed right in the middle of a mass resettlement. Like if Israel decided to concentrate and then resettle all Palestinians out of Israel into Egyptian territory, but then Israel was destroyed and conquered by Iran right as that was happening. And then the Iranians made a bunch of ridiculous claims about death factories using absurd methods of mass murder- i.e. the Israelis turned the Palestinians into bars of soap!
So, the Nazi plans all entailed the creation of a Jewish state after expulsion from the European sphere. Historians though claim that (for some reason) this long-standing policy was replaced with an extermination order (they can't say who, when, where or why such a radical change in policy was decided, and such an order has never been found) using primarily homicidal gas chambers disguised as shower rooms.
If you accept the Revisionist interpretation, that the plan was for resettlement East ahead of the post-war creation of a Jewish state, then these plans by the AfD are absolutely comparable to what the Nazis did. And in particular, if it turns out the Wannsee conference really was all about resettlement as a plain reading of the minutes show, and not codewords for an extermination policy, then the Wannsee Conference is comparable to secret conferences planning for mass resettlement of migrants to their homelands or to a separate colony of some sort.
The gas chamber legend and alleged extermination order are the only things that set them apart, which is why those claims are so important to the broader history.
If someone like 2rafa is making a post that is inviting a discussion of this topic, i.e. trying to make an argument for reasons these situations are not comparable, I'm going to engage in the discussion with my viewpoint. You need to decide if you are going to ban me for doing this or not, I agree it's an annoying situation. It's up to you, I'm not going to avoid engaging in these discussions just because I'm afraid of these kinds of mods interventions. That defeats the point of this community for me...
What I will not do is not spam top-level threads to force topics like this every week, which I've never done. But if someone brings up a topic like this in a relevant CW discussion (especially with 2rafa trying to let Israel off the hook for policies that are indeed very similar to the Nazis), I'm going to participate, and if you're going to ban me for it then the ball's in your court I guess...
You are answering only those parts of @raggedy_anthem's post which you want to address, and ignoring the actual salient points. Which is, ironically, the same thing you do every time someone engages with you on your Holocaust revisionism: answer the points you have ready pat answers for, and ignore the points that you can't actually refute.
You are not being threatened with moderation because this is your pet topic, or because we hate Holocaust deniers, or because we're coopted by Jews, or because you answered someone else who (indirectly) brought it up. That is not the problem, since you have indeed cut back on the manifesto-posting after the last time we told you to give it a rest.
The problem is that, precisely as @raggedy_anthem described, you are not engaging in good faith. What that means is, for example, multiple people have walked through your claims that there is "no written evidence of an intent to exterminate Jews" or "the numbers don't add up," etc. etc. And while I'm sure you will disagree about whether your claims were effectively refuted, you cannot claim that people haven't given you very solid (and cited) responses, which at least deserve to be acknowledged and answered in turn.
Instead, what you do is disappear after someone does this. And then return, a week or two weeks later, making exactly the same claims as if no one ever responded to them before.
Understandably, the last person to go point by point with you probably doesn't feel like doing it again, only to be ghosted and ignored again and then see you weeble-wobble your way back into the same talking points after short-term memory of the discussion has faded. Other people see you do this, and also feel like it's not worth the trouble: you will just stick to your talking points, disappear when effectively challenged, and then come back with the same talking points. Repeating the cycle over and over again until you are effectively in command of the field because only the occasional newcomer encountering you for the first time wants to bother. Occasionally someone will be frustrated at this tactic and call you a liar and then we have to mod them because calling you a liar (even when you are being transparently dishonest) is not allowed.
This is not how debate is supposed to work here. We don't have rules requiring you to keep responding when someone challenges you. You don't have to answer anyone. We don't have rules requiring you to admit when you've been refuted. We don't have rules forbidding you from making the same argument you've made in the past, or requiring you to acknowledge that someone else made a counterargument you never answered. In other words, what you're doing, while obviously a very bad faith debating tactic, is as one mod put it, "finding a bespoke way of arguing like an asshole in a way that's hard to mod without singling him out."
What we would like you to do is actually engage in good faith. I don't think you can or will do that, so that puts us in the position where we can either let you keep exploiting our charity, or decide we've had enough. If your response continues to be "Well, I'm going to post what I post and you can mod me or not," fair enough, so be it.
Why avoid actually quoting the parts of my comments where you think I'm being dishonest?
I said, exactly:
And nobody in the replies has challenged this claim at all or provided an explanation for this: the who, when, where, and why the long-standing policy of resettlement became "extermination." Even Historians don't have a consensus on this point either, and it's dishonest to pretend otherwise.
Can you Amadan please show me where this question has been answered for me, and I haven't responded to those answers, such that I have no right to again make this point where it is relevant?
This is a highly relevant point because if Revisionists are correct, that the Resettlement policy never actually changed to "extermination", and that accusation is a wartime propaganda fiction, then 2rafa's conclusions are wrong.
I promise I will engage in good faith, if you can just give me examples of something I have said here which is dishonest.
On the other hand, I think it's dishonest and bad-faith for Moderators to constantly put on their red hats when I am engaging in discussion. If you are going to accuse me of bad faith, then point to where in this thread specifically you think I'm engaging in bad faith or not responding to people who have replied to me. That would be more helpful than using your moderator status to accuse me of bad faith with vague generalities, and threatening to ban me for engaging in the discussion.
Because I'm not interested in getting into it with you myself. This entire response is you basically demanding that I engage with you on your hobby horse. No.
You can think what you like. We're telling you that we see what you're doing, and no, we aren't going to get into a protracted legalistic debate about what "is" is.
If you accuse me of being bad-faith, and I ask you to point out where exactly in this conversation I have been bad-faith, and you reply like this then I think it's fair for me to complain about this moderator intervention here...
How about you just let this conversation happen without jumping in to accuse me of being bad faith, and then refusing to identify where in this conversation I have done what you are accusing me of?
You can complain. Clearly you are complaining.
If by that you mean "How about you just let me continue to do the same thing," no.
There are two possibilities here:
I personally believe it's 2, but if it's 1, you're just going to have to spend some time figuring out what you're doing wrong, because I am not willing to extend the necessary charity it would require for me to walk you through it (again).
If it's 2, well, short of persuading @ZorbaTHut to overrule us, no, there is no other avenue of appeals.
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Is this where you pretend that Eichmann doesn't exist again? This is well trod territory by now. I'm trying to keep my wording compliant in order to avoid a warning by the mods, but your particular fixation wouldn't be so annoying if it were just merely dishonest - it's that you have to constantly bring it up as well.
It is "well-trod territory" because even the mainstream has backed away from the original stature given to the Wannsee Conference as supposedly being the decision point for the extermination policy. It was a 90 minute meeting of mid-level officials. Wannsee was only important because they have literally nothing else to go on, so they have to take a 90 minute meeting about Jewish resettlement and pretend that "resettlement" is a codeword for gas chamber extermination. They also say the Germans specifically wrote the minutes of the meeting to camouflage the actual purpose of the meeting. That's not a misrepresentation, either, that's actually what they claim.
The Revisionist interpretation of Wannsee, i.e. what the minutes of the meeting say it was, is actually comparable to AfD meeting in secret to plan proposals for mass resettlement of migrants. It is not comparable to the Steven Spielberg version of history.
Man, if only they had somehow tracked the guy who wrote those Wannsee minutes down. Maybe interrogated him, or had a big trial or something. What an incredibly insightful process that would have been. Shame it didn't happen.
Your hate is too obvious, it makes the shtick too visible. You need to apply a few more layers of lacquer or something. I don't get the point of it all either, it's too effortful to be merely the product of some kind of stubborn contrarianism. I know you're lying, you know you're lying, you know I know you're lying, what's the point?
An interrogation in a show trial from a rogue state that violated international law by kidnapping someone is not a good way to establish the use of code-words in the minutes to a meeting. Decades before the Eichmann circus, Josef Bühler, the deputy governor of the General Government and attendee of the Wannsee Conference testified at the IMT as a defense witness for Hans Frank in 1946, and claimed that the purpose of Wannsee was to discuss the forced resettlement of Jews in the northeast of Europe:
You must admit though, that it's likely he understands that if he does say, yeah we did decide to exterminate the Jews and I was in on it, is unlikely to go well for him after the war. So why do you think you can trust what he says? He has a huge incentive to say, oh no, from my understanding we were just going to move them.
If I were a Nazi, that is exactly what I would say once we lost!
Yes, if you assume the conclusion, you can explain behavior in that light.
It's not assuming the conclusion. It's pointing out IF the conclusion is right then his words cannot be trusted. You can't then rely on his words to disprove the conclusion. Because he would say the same thing either way.
An accused murderer who is guilty is highly likely to lie. Which is why we generally do not accept "I didn't do it" on its own to exonerate them and let them go with an apology as part of an investigation. We check their alibis against other people, were they at the bar they claimed to be at? Did anyone see them?
But pointing out that someone accused of X is not often a credible witness in their own defense is not particularly radical. It can't be used as evidence they did do X, because of course an innocent person will also claim (honestly!) they didn't do it, but it doesn't on its own tell you they are innocent either. because there is a significant incentive to lie to protect themselves.
OJ says he was innocent, should he be believed?
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I never heard of the Madagascar plan before but as an alt history that would be one of the more interesting things if it happened especially for the HBD crowd if 6 million Jews went there.
American Jews accomplished a lot but we never received anywhere close to that and they took over our elite institutions. Ashkenazi Jews were 15/20 of the biggest political donors in 2020 in America. Madagascar could have become one of the most powerful global civs on that timeline.
Best I can tell America received around 2 million Ashkenazi Jews by 1920. So a country counting for some natural population growth double the size of Americas Jewish population. That population has produced 30-40% of Nobels. The scientific output of Madagascar might rival the rest of the world.
There were a few equivalent ones. Northern Australia was also mooted, and I'd love to see a counterfactual in which the Australian Indigenous had to fare with that particular settlement.
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Whatever the actual numbers the nazis conduct against various ethnic groups during the war was murderous. They also enslaved for labor plenty of Europeans and Jews too. It isn't accurate that AFDs plans are equivalent with the nazis agenda even under the framework of many revisionists. Whether towards the Jews specifically, or other populations. It is fair to say the nazis commited genocides against multiple ethnic groups.
Actually the use of nazism as a propaganda towards Europeans is unethical also because the Nazis mistreated the people of plenty of European countries. But of course before the nazis and during and after them, other evil factions existed with a negative agenda against Europeans who even milked antinazism to justify themselves and demonize Europeans. Including those who suffered under the Nazis.
One could well argue that the antifa type of faction, which in fact shares some of the worst pathologies that nazism had, has in fact an agenda quite more destructive than even the nazis. And this applies especially when it comes to Europe. So I would say that if you are more hostile to Europeans than even the nazis, then you should not be allowed to have any influence and say about Europe.
In regards to AFD, some level of repatriations is a moderate response for their own survival that has been forced upon European nations by the extreme "destroy Europeans" faction which tries to promote as fait accompli the extinction of European ethnic groups. And of course there is the issue of those who migrated, illegally but "legalized" or legally, and got a paper saying they belong in said nation while are contemptuous of the native people and see the process as a conquest and are happy for it, and support discriminating against the natives, denying them their nationhood, and bringing more foreign settlers. Fundamentally, homeland's should be made mainly by their own people and minorities that respect the native majority and are tolerated in turn and through small numbers and intermarriage there might be some assimilation.
Too large numbers and too much hostility and the assimiliation goes to the other way towards the postnational state for the natives to be oppressed and destroyed and as a homeland for the conquerors. There are always trade offs when it comes to human rights and different nations, and this is the way that results in the least trouble and mutual respect of the rights of different nations to existence. And preserves world diversity of different nations, over say the world being dominated by the more fertile blacks, or a coalition of foreign groups who subsequently transform the west more in line to south africa. https://www.aporiamagazine.com/p/diversity-is-good-actually
The Nazis conduct was of a more imperialist, genocidal nature in general at expense of non German populations under their control, so it isn't productive to compare AFD suggestion to that. In fact it can aid the conduct of anti-Europeans and help create a narrative that reverses the victim with victimizer. Which in this case the victimizers are those trying to destroy European nations.
The concentration camps and labor camps were part of the war effort, for sure. But the "Final Solution" as such was the resettlement of the Jews out of the European sphere into what would have become a Jewish territory partly occupied/administered by Germany, at least in the short term. That is comparable to Israeli ambitions to expel the Palestinians from Gaza and the West Bank, including proposals to resettle them into a territory on the Sinai peninsula. 2rafa is trying to say these things are not comparable, but that's only the case if you accept certain premises such as mass gas chamber extermination inside shower rooms. If you take the documents at face value, they are comparable policies.
The use of "slavery" to describe wartime conscription is a bit dubious, but I don't feel like splitting hairs. If you give someone a rifle, force them to the front, and shoot them if they try to desert, I don't think you would call that enslavement (or maybe you would!).
The Nazis conducted slave raids across Europe, ultimately kidnapping millions for forced labor. Himmler being characteristically blunt:
The Nazis conducted slave raids across Europe insofar as the Soviets conducted slave raids across Europe, but nobody says the latter because the only real purpose of the former is to draw distinctions that don't actually exist. It's pretty typical of the mainstream historical method, too: ignore the thousands of WVHA documents dealing with the administration of the prisoner labor force, which did not regard them as slaves (and they were paid for their labor), but pick out a sentence from a (poorly sourced? can't tell) "secret speech" by Himmler.
If you want to call the forced labor during the war slavery that's your prerogative. I think it would be dishonest to call wartime forced labor as salvery but not conscription for front-line combat. But it's just splitting hairs. My point was that just because the Israelis have no plans to use Palestinians for forced labor does not mean their proposals to expel the Palestinians to the Sinai peninsula cannot be compared to German plans for the resettlement of Jews.
Nazis burned down Polish/Ukrainian villages and marched people onto trains at gunpoint to be sent to the Reich to work but at least they got paid in worthless money.
Yes the Soviets also made extensive use of slave labor and Stalin was also a bad guy.
Israeli treatment of the Palestinians is quite horrible and still isn’t half as horrible Nazi treatment of the European Jews.
It's not as much a question of "horribleness."
For our entire lifetimes, the idea of anybody supporting a mass expulsion/deportation/resettlement, whatever you want to call it, so close to home has not even entered into anybody's minds. It is significant that now we are faced with two plausible programs of mass resettlement within the "Western" sphere of influence: the resettlement of Palestinians out of Palestine, i.e. to the Sinai desert, and the mass deportation of non-European migrants.
Of course people like 2rafa who support these initiatives are going to try to explain why these programs cannot be compared to the Nazi policies regarding the Jews. But the uncomfortable reality is that they are definitely comparable. It's a grave situation, it's going to be violent if these policies are carried out. The gas chamber legend elevates the Nazi policies to another plane of existence, and allows people like 2rafa to not confront the similarities which are definitely there.
Look, I am willing to believe- I don’t believe it, I think the evidence is stacked against it, but I’m willing to believe it in the existence of a good argument- that Hitler did not intend to exterminate the Jews and German gas chambers were not tools of mass murder. I’m willing to believe the death total from the Holocaust was dramatically lower than generally believed. And I’ll even concede that Nazi Germany had the moral high ground on the eastern front compared to the USSR(but still in the sense of, like, the edge of the Mariana Trench instead of the bottom).
But it seems suspicious that of people making this argument- and I say this to Holocaust deniers in my ingroup- the argument makers(as opposed to fellow travelers and argument repeaters) can’t tell you if 200k-300k Jews dying from a combination of localized massacres and poor conditions in the camps is a tragedy that reflects a black mark on Hitler’s regime. Because Germany was quite clearly capable of running large scale prison camps with a normal-at-the-time death rate in conditions of wartime. They did it in WWI, after all. But even if the Jews in the concentration camps all died of typhus or famine or whatever(and I will concede that plenty of them did in fact die from this), that represents at least a lot of neglect from the German government and Nazi party for which they are morally culpable. Not to mention the massacres ‘in the field’ by einsatzgruppen. I’ve never seen a Holocaust denier even attempt to address the einsatzgruppen by the way; if it was all localized massacres that also seems like something Nazi germany is morally culpable for because they 1) had a policy to concentrate these people 2) per official state ideology considered them racial undesirables and 3) per official state ideology considered murder an acceptable way to deal with other undesirables, such as the disabled, and overzealous SS or Wehrmacht captains ordering massacres is what happens when that combination comes about.
Look, the eastern front was evil vs evil in a way that breaks most peoples’ brains. I don’t blame you for trying to resolve that ambiguity in your head by absolving the Nazis of guilt. And I especially don’t blame you for it when whites are under attack and anyone who defends them gets called a Nazi. But acknowledge what actually happened here especially when polite, intelligent people refute your arguments and provide high-quality, detailed, evidence-filled explanations of Nazi Germany being more evil to Jews than Israel is towards Palestinians a couple of times a month.
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If Israel was in the process of resettling all 5.4m Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza and was then invaded by Iran, and when the dust settled it turned out that perhaps 500,000 of those Palestinians survived and were discovered by the Iranian occupiers, the rest having vanished from history never to contact their countless surviving relatives overseas ever again, I think it would be fair to suggest they had died in the war. If it turned out that the Israeli civilian casualty rate was such that only 500,000 out of 9.5m Israelis were killed, it would be reasonable to ask what the Israelis had done to ensure a civilian casualty rate that was 90% for Palestinians but just 5% for Israelis.
Beyond the usual discussions, though, I think there are a few questions you gloss over.
Firstly, most mainstream Holocaust historians accept that Hitler’s initial plan was not to murder all Jews if he could persuade them to leave by other means. They acknowledge Hitler’s deep enmity toward Jews, but they also acknowledge that emigration was obviously the first preference of the Third Reich.
Secondly, you seem to imply that a Jewish Madagascar under Nazi authority would have been (a) capable of hosting the exiled population and (b) something analogous to a Jewish state like Israel. I don’t think either of those are likely. If anything, a Jewish Madagascar would have been - at best - like an occupied West Bank, which you have previously railed against as highly unethical. In reality, given the extremely generous NGO support for the Palestinians, life on Nazi Madagascar would have been much worse.
Thirdly, Hitler wasn’t only concerned by Jews on his territory. Hitler was of the profound belief that all Jews, everywhere, were a threat to his project and to Aryan civilization. Hitler railed against Soviet, American and British Jews long before he was at war with them and indeed long before he was even in power. The argument that ‘it just doesn’t make sense for him to kill them, even if he was hostile to them’ often ignores this fact.
Hitler believed Jews were a great threat to his civilization whether they were within or beyond Germanic lands, and in this context the Holocaust makes more sense for Nazi leadership, since the mere exile of Jewry would not ‘solve’ their Jewish Problem under these circumstances, particularly if those exiled Jews bore a (reasonable, we might say) grudge about all their expropriated land and property and general ill treatment.
And this is the crux of the whole question. If Hitler doesn’t merely hate Jews but considers them eternal enemies of his civilization, then leaving them alive in their own state in Madagascar or in Palestine or elsewhere just doesn’t make sense amid the heightened tension of wartime, unless you think he was such a great guy that he just considered it morally wrong to kill them (but not to do any of the other stuff he unambiguously intended, like ethnically cleansing West Slavs to make way for German settlers and so on).
The revisionist interpretation requires that Hitler - who had no issue killing his political enemies, or indeed even friends, often on spurious or fully false flag charges - chose not to kill the Jews under his total control, despite extreme public hostility toward them for 20+ years, blaming them for almost everything that went wrong in Germany, and considering even their existence in foreign lands a great threat to Aryan civilization, because…he was a nice guy? Because that was a step too far?
The Holocaust would appear to be more congruent with Hitler’s writing, ideology and deeply-held worldview than the absence of the Holocaust. Nowhere does Hitler express any empathy or compassion for the majority of the Jewish population that would suggest he was not content for them to die.
If Iran had the grip on the region that Stalin had behind the Iron Curtain, you would not trust any reports coming out of Iran about the state of Palestinian survivors and how many of them were killed by Israel, and how. If Iran refused any international observers or investigators and deployed their own kangaroo courts to place the blame for every single Palestinian death during their brutal conquest of Israel onto Israel, you would not accept that either.
Yes, the Madagascar plan is comparable to the Israeli expulsion of the Palestinians to the occupied West Bank, that's my point (with the major exception that Palestinians were indigenous to Palestine and Jews were not indigenous to Europe). So were the plans to concentrate the Jews in the East in the Pale of Settlement/Lublin/Russia which never came to fruition because the Eastern Front and then entire regime collapsed. Those plans are in fact comparable to plans you support for dealing with Palestinians, and to a lesser extent non-European migrants.
It's interesting you call adversarial rhetoric from leaders the "crux of the whole question" rather than the mountain of documents that quite clearly lay out the policy objectives as described by Revisionists... South Africa's submission to the ICC accusing Israel of genocide follows a similar line of argument, under the heading Expressions of Genocidal Intent against the Palestinian People by Israeli State Officials and Others (pp. 59 - 67), i.e. here's a brief sample from those pages:
This is especially interesting because, since no written orders for extermination or mass gas chamber executions have ever been found, the mainstream historical position has heavily relied on vague rhetoric from German leaders and cherry-picking diary vague diary entries to allege a genocidal policy intent in lieu of any orders actually establishing it, like you are doing in your post here. But now that it's Israeli leaders giving the same sort of rhetoric you would hear from Goebbels or Hitler (in many cases worse), I assume you don't think this is evidence of a genocidal intent. But don't tell me these things are not comparable, they absolutely are comparable.
“Genocidal intent” is a largely bullshit term (even if it’s sometimes necessary) outside of the most banal “I will commit genocide” declaration (and even then), just look at how many thing politicians say they’ll do and then don’t.
That said I think, exactly like some of the speeches and diary entries you mention, that some on the extreme right fringe of Israeli politics (not Bibi) have expressed what could become an openness to genocide. And I certainly think there are a substantial number of religious Zionists who don’t particularly care what happens to the Palestinians, or whether they live or died.
But litigating genocidal intent is different than litigating genocide. And yes, I absolutely think that if there’s some geopolitical chaos and 90% of Palestinians on territory controlled by Israel vanish in 4 years Israel should be the prime and obvious suspect in their disappearance. So I’m not, in that sense, disagreeing with you at all.
Edit: And regarding your first point re. the Iranian control example, I agree and am glad you acknowledge that the central question about the whole revisionism debate does revolve around estimates of the prewar and postwar Jewish population of Central and Eastern Europe, as I have long argued here.
I don't think it's a bullshit term given that you appealed to it without calling it that in your previous post. Revisionists point to all the documentary evidence that the plan was resettlement and concentration. You point to Hitler's speeches portraying Jews as an enemy to infer a genocidal intent even if you don't call it that. In any case, you are trying to draw a difference between these two cases where we only find more similarities...
Bibi has invoked Biblical prophecy and associated the Palestinians with Amalek:
The revisionism debate does not revolve around population estimates, because that data is fundamentally incomplete and unreliable. The Revisionist case weighs most heavily on the documentary and physical evidence, with population census data being too inconclusive for the question at hand. For what it's worth, the mainstream position does not revolve around estimates of prewar and postwar population estimates either, by far the most important body of evidence is testimony from witnesses which has been picked apart by Revisionists for decades.
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Dunno, Ashkenazi Jews are much better at running a society than Palestinians.
Without extensive imports (which Germany was already short of) of food and fuel the great majority of the settlers wouldn’t have survived the first 24 months, it would have been like Darien or one of the other failed European settlements of Central America. Beyond that time the survivors may have been OK, depending on the level of German meddling.
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Broadly on your side in this sub-exchange, but puzzled how ‘thirdly’ fits with the claim that a Jewish state would have prevented the Holocaust. Palestine was not only well within Germany’s reach, but it was right next to their primary goal in North Africa. If the Germans had taken Egypt and the British had withdrawn to Iraq, it seems like the Palestinian Jews would have been screwed regardless of their relative population share - if Anita Shapira is to be believed, the Yishuv’s plan (such as it was) was to cooperate so as not to give a pretext for reprisals.
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The same could be said for the rhetoric of various Israeli politicians towards the Palestinians.
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Again, we have the extermination program in writing. You seem to have conveniently forgotten this, again, since our last 40-comments back-and-forth in which you tried to dodge the issue.
Of course they can. You know this, because we discussed this ad nauseam.
It won't
It wasn't
It clearly doesn't. The opposite is true. We've been over this. Stop lying.
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The analogy doesn't fit the premise, so the conclusion is... not even wrong??
Germany is a board of landlords who - rightly or wrongly - signed various contracts (citizenship, residency, asylum). So tough titties to them. They have to live up to the responsibilities they signed up for. If someone can convince the majority of the board to void certain contracts and "evict" people, then they'd run afoul of their responsibilities to various human rights charters aimed at preventing exactly this kind of "eviction". They're free to do that too, as far as I'm concerned, but "landlords remorse" doesn't make comparisons to other dubious evictions unreasonable.
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This is...intensely silly. You assume, without justifying the assumption in any way, that one can accurately describe citizens and residents of a different ethnicity/religion as "house guests" of a polity. I reject your ethnonationalist distinction. I'm amazed to see the Zionist-Nazi collaboration revived, we've closed the loop here.
Neither German Citizens who some bureaucrat judges as "unassimilated" nor German Jews circa 1940 were "house guests." If the nation is a family, these are their brothers. They live there. This is, at best, three brothers voting to throw out the fourth brother onto the street.
Palestinian families have been in Israel, their genetic roots go deeper, than the Israelis who are "throwing them out of the house." Ditto, you know, most of the fucking Jews you so blithely label houseguests in the 1940s, they lived in countries Hitler conquered.
Both the Israelis and the Nazis didn't throw houseguests out of their homes, they broke into another home, and murdered part of the family.
In what sense is the nation a family? Particularly given that we're letting people swap citizenship on a whim.
It's her pathos based metaphor not mine.
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Israel boasts of genocidal intent. Everyone from former policymakers to children singing war propaganda songs talks about how the Israelis are going to stamp out the Palestinians, annihilate them.
There's been a lot of discussion about how the slogan 'from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free' is a genocidal mantra. If so, then there can be no doubt that 'within a year we will annihilate everyone and then return to our fields' is a genocidal slogan. Moving on from rhetoric, Israel is genocidal in action, blowing up an enormous amount of Gaza without regard for civilian casualties.
Well, that's how borders are formed, that's how nations move or get moved around. Survival of the fittest. History is written in blood.
What I object to is how Israeli expansion is somehow turned into this normative, moralistic end as opposed to the cold functioning of nature, tooth and claw. They can't reasonably cry 'help us we're being attacked by genocidal inhuman monsters' as they kill 20x more than they've lost. If Hamas and the Palestinians generally are genocidal, it follows that Israel and Israelis generally are also genocidal. And they clearly need no help in defending themselves.
Israel is using US-supplied weapons, US-supplied diplomatic and military coverage to wage this war. It's geopolitical cuckoldry to subsidize the imperial operations of other powers, assist Israel de facto with its settlement-building and colonization of Palestine (since that's what US aid unarguably does, by strengthening Israel's position). I live in a colonized country, the essence of civilization is conquest. But the big idea is that if you do the conquering, you enjoy the spoils. You don't do the conquering for other peoples. We are literally paying so the Israelis don't have to come to any reasonable accord with the Palestinians or other Arabs, so they can take more land, annex it, ignore the NPT and attack their neighbours with impunity. They know that they won't have to pay the price of their actions in Arab hostility, that we'll shield them militarily like we are now.
The US and the West more broadly doesn't need Israel, Israel has never joined the US in any war. They've made a lot of enemies for us, they provided phoney intelligence to encourage the Iraq War, they sold US tech to China, they brought down the Arab Oil Embargo on us. Israel clearly doesn't consider itself part of the Western bloc, they've never contributed anything. They only cause us problems, lap up aid and beg for more assistance like the aforementioned cuckoo bird. Now they've gotten us into another conflict in the Red Sea with their zeal for bombing. So be it if they want to kill lots of Palestinians - why is that our problem? Why do we have to guard their container ships from the Houthis and get ourselves targeted, start yet another expensive war? Why do we have to provide them munitions (out of already depleted stocks) and make Arabs angry with us? Strength is needed elsewhere, we've expended about 4 years worth of Tomahawk production (yes, that amounts to 80 missiles) on this campaign, which hasn't yet yielded any results.
Even this proposed moral trade 'if we get to expel our troublesome Palestinians from their own land as we annex it, that means you get to expel your troublesome migrants from your land' is unnecessary. I have no doubt that the plethora of Jewish refugee/migration NGOs would reject it, many are consistent in their contempt for both Israeli and Western national homogeneity: Soros and Ignatiev for example. The fact is that the Western world can do a great deal because there are hundreds of millions of us and we wield vast resources. Israel is a small country that acts as though it's a great power, having us shoulder the cost of its supersized ambitions.
Civilian casualty figures for the invasion of Gaza are on par with other urban assaults by western militaries. You can contrast this with the battles in the Ukraine war, which are a lot a lot worse, and Assad’s reconquests of major Syrian cities, which are also way way worse.
So, a question I keep asking when people make this claim, and which no one has answered thus far(or even engaged with)- why is Israel’s genocide killing fewer civilians than Russia and Syria are doing on accident in campaigns with the goal of controlling the civilian population to subjugate as normal citizens of their respective regimes? While the IDF is probably more competent than the Russian army and definitely dramatically more competent than either the SAA or NDF, this shouldn’t matter that much if it’s an attempt at genocide-by-collateral damage, because after all Israel could easily get away with making Gaza look like Mariupol and then say sorry, we definitely not really regret the collateral damage, can’t make a shakshuka without breaking some eggs.
This is not true. The civilian casualities in Gaza are significantly higher than that in Ukraine, the invasion of which by Russia people have been rushing to call genocide, including many people here. For simplicity I will just takes about deaths specifically and not casualities.
As already posted below the OHCHR estimates 9,701 civilian deaths in Ukraine between 24 Feb 2022 and 24 September 2023.
Reliable estimates for Gaza are hard to find but OHCHR estimates the deaths to be over 11,000 between 7 October 2023 and 16 November 2023 (some of whom would not strictly speaking be Gazans as there are also casualities outside of Gaza). So Gaza has roughly the same number of deaths in a month than Ukraine had in a year and a half. More recent numbers from early January suggest this number could be over 22,000 for Gaza. This would put the percentage of Gazans killed somewhere around 1% of the total population.
Now, Gaza is more densely populated and urbanised where the fighting is taking place, but this is also offset by the fact that Ukraine has a much larger population than Gaza and the operations are larger scale.
Regardless, no matter how you cut it, the civilian casualties in Gaza are extremely high and people would not be hesitating to call it genocide if it were any other country.
Did the US genocide Iraq?
For that matter, did the US genocide Japan?
Something like a million Japanese civilians died in the latter years of WW2 in retaliation for Pearl Harbor. And this was long after Midway: the US was clearly the dominant power by that point and not under existential threat, if it ever was.
And I think unequivocally the answer is “no.” One might think the fire bombing or the nukes were bad, but not all bad things in a particular category is the “worst” thing in that category (I don’t think that’s the point you are making to be clear).
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The USA has committed its own atrocities in the past. When it comes to the war against Japan, the Japanese had their own murderous empire.
What is the point to bring them now but to excuse new warcrimes? At some point bringing WW2 constantly to justify new wars being started, or actual warcrimes such as Dresden kind of undermines the moral legitimacy of WW2 itself and should make us question whether the people doing this were also acting with self serving motives then too. Especially since the Nazis and Japanese were condemned for being warmongers and imperialists.
Is WW2 a permanent card to excuse starting wars and committing attrocities rather than a historical episode that should make us oppose such bad behavior?
There is also a genocide that happened against German civilians after the end of WW2. So by this logic, you could justify the most depraved behavior.
At some point this milking of WW2 to excuse warcrimes is behavior that is similiar to the nazis using the communist atrocities (including against ethnic Germans) as a means of legitimizing their future attrocities.
Rather than deflecting responsibility towards the past USA, we should focus on the now and judge morally Israel's actions. What we will see is an extreme racist supremacist goverment that dehumanizes a population and wants to conquer its land.
The same population that they ethnically cleansed in the past, in violation of the expectation of initial promises by zionists when they were promoting their project that they would respect the Arab inhabitants of the place. And in addition to this, of course they also promote culturally genocidal propaganda denying the Palestinians their nationhood. Unsurprisingly this is related to also to the project to violently ethnically cleanse Palestinians from their land, as well as as it is always the case with such rhetoric. The people who don't exist, can more easily be made to not exist.
History isn’t about creating get out of jail free cards. But it is a useful barometer for “what is normal” and what is “abnormal.”
By historical standards what is happening in Gaza is not abnormal nor is it a genocide.
By historical standards all sorts of mass murderous attrocities are not abnormal, including genocides. As is rhetoric of people calling such conduct as not abnormal to justify and excuse it. It is definitely a disgusting atrocity of ethnic cleansing through mass murder, complete obliteration of the homes of the Palestinians, inducing policies to starve them.
Considering the starvation it is mass murder in the process of becoming genocide if one takes a higher standard for genocide. Or already qualifies as a genocide if one considers the mass murder that already has happened as qualifying.
Also, obviously all this attempt to understate terms and it would be too late if the numbers of dead keep on pilling, in line with what Israeli politicians want. Not to mention all the people who have lost limbs.
The reality is that the treatment of Jews in WW2 is brought precisely to justify the murderous ethnic cleansing of Palestinians by people who certainly prove in that regard that we should be careful with our sympathies for bad actors would use them to justify vile warcrimes. It would be more sensible to not be manipulated to obsessing about Jews from 80 years ago and be diverted by that from confronting those committing or supporting the warcrimes of today.
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The Gaza Strip has a population of 2.1-2.4m (the lower is from the CIA, the higher is from Wikipedia), so no, 20,000 civilian casualties are absolutely not 3-4% of the total population. It’s possible you looked up the population of only Gaza City, one of several in the strip.
Corrected, thanks.
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I'm somewhat disappointed by the long span of time in which people in this discussion here just claimed that either number was higher without comparing actual numbers.
Those people work with a very loose definition of genocide.
Personally, I'm not particularly interested in the question of whether Israel's actions meet the 'definition' of genocide, formal or otherwise. I get why it is important (least of all for the ICC and other international law proceedings) but at some level it just becomes a semantic question. I do think those who claim Russia is committing genocide against Ukraine but refuse to make or support the claim that that Israel is committing genocide against Palestine have a huge double standard.
My perspective is that, at best, Israel has displayed a overwhelming level of disregard and negligence to the Palestinian people that amounts to criminality, both recently and historically. At worst, I have to take at face value the multiple statements, both recently and historically, of senior Israeli officials that they want to utterly destroy Gaza and/or the Palestinian people. I both these things to be horribily immoral and should be rebuked. Whether they meet the formal definition of genocide I don't particularly care to argue.
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Blame the U.N. Since 1948, it has defined genocide as
It also criminalizes “direct and public incitement to commit genocide” and “complicity in genocide.” Some of the speeches by Israeli politicians clearly fall afoul of the former, while, if what is happening in Gaza is a genocide, the United States’ actions would arguably fall afoul of the latter.
So October 7th was also a genocide?
According to the U.N.’s definition, yes. As were 9/11, various other terrorist attacks, the aftermath of the Armenia/Azerbaijan war, etc. Now, you could argue that this definition is so expansive as to be useless (and I’d agree if you did), but it’s the one that the international community has been using for the past 75 years.
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Can you?
Russian actions and intentions are considered genocidal.
How many civilians dead in Gaza (and West Bank, and Syria, and…)? 10k, 20k? I don't want to cite Hamas-affiliated sources. But no, it doesn't sound a lot a lot worse.
Russians are currently in mourning about the (admittedly cute) cat Twix who got tossed out of the train near Kirov (really tragic), they don't give much of a fuck about hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians killed by the Russian army. Had we higher verbal IQ, everyone else would also have cared more about Twix. Jews care about Jews, and they're smarter and more influential than we are, though not remotely as smart as they seem to imagine.
It is what it is.
By Ukrainians and in a very limited sense by some observers around stuff like the Ukrainian kids taken to Russian orphanages or adopted or whatever (I don’t know whether that’s actually true). Russian actions are only genocidal around the expanded late-20th century definition of genocide that includes the Uyghurs and other cultural reeducation efforts (or ambitions toward such efforts). By this logic of course Napoleon repeatedly genocided his own people to make France and so on. Public schooling is essentially genocide by these standards.
Actually it was the second-most read article on BBC News (UK) yesterday, so maybe you do. That said, they then followed up with this.
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For the record, I don't believe Russian bombing ought to be considered genocidal at the current rate. Its insinuations towards "destroying Ukrainism", however...
...
At least one major Russian mass media outlet. I googled Ann Coulter and she is labeled as "a conservative columnist". I must remind you that there is no such division in official mass media as there is between Democrat newspapers and Republican ones in USA. You get pro-government TV and mass media, and nuts on telegram of various sorts.
Apparently, in late 2013, in an auspicious coincidence with Ukrainian Maidan troubles, RIA Novosti was directly reorganized by Putin's edict, and since then there has been a trend of anti-Ukrainian messaging.
edit: does Dmitry Medvedev, ex-chairwarmer for Putin of 2008-2012, count as a nut on telegram or as an Ann Coulter? He does post on telegram, and he does sound like a nut, and his posts are similar to what you quoted. I could dig some up if you're interested. You know, when Putin doesn't outright say "we really should paint Ukraine our color on the map and call Ukrainian 'an outdated Russian dialect'", but everyone around him says so, it gets one thinking.
You aren't familiar with Ann Coulter? She was a conservative political pundit known for telling it like it is or saying the quiet part out loud, depending on your politics. Sort of respected in the nineties but a joke to most people after the culture shift of the noughts (although not conservatives generally of course). I think No_one's point was that she was a political pundit, not an official member of the government (telegram nut and Coulter being of a kind, as opposed to alternatives). So Medvedev is definitely closer to authoritative than either the telegram nut or Coulter, but still not someone representing Russia's official position. As for that news piece, denazification of the Ukraine might be a fig leaf, but it's a pretty good one.
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Genocide is now like fascist— a slur that doesn’t really mean anything outside of “I don’t like X.” By any reasonable standard, Russia is not committing genocide. Ditto Israel.
Now that doesn’t mean complaints about civilian causalities are necessarily wrong. But seems to me the real complaint is about war per se.
Or about the existence of Israel full stop. If you're anti-Zionist, any stick to beat Israel with is fine.
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If our ‘benchmark’ for genocide is the Holocaust, in which the vast majority of Jews under Nazi geopolitical control were murdered, then it’s hard to see how Israel’s action in Gaza is genocide. Even assuming that the vast majority of the Hamas-reported casualty figures are civilians, something like 1% of the population have been killed, which is not unreasonably high in comparison to historic invasions of dense urban environments. Whatever the threshold for genocide, 20,000 casualties out of a population of 2,000,000 surely isn’t it.
The Israelis have proposed multiple reasonable accords with the Arabs, who have rejected all of them, and who indeed rejected even the UN’s 1947 accord, brokered by many global powers. More generally, I don’t think that either Israel or Hamas are ‘genocidal’; they would commit genocide if they could, but so would many tribes and peoples throughout history, what matters is whether they can (both geopolitically/diplomatically and practically), and in this case neither can by those conditions.
To be clear, that wasn’t my intent. My intention was to argue that the expulsion of descendants of German Gastarbeiter would not be ethically equivalent to the Holocaust by any means. I added the last line about Israel because I knew that, otherwise, it would be all anyone would discuss in the replies. I don’t think the fate of the Palestinians and the fate of Muslims in Western Europe are linked, certainly not in so direct a way.
I know you said in the past 'I don't support the West giving Israel aid'. However, the key issue with Israel repatriating/expelling Arabs out of Israel is that they're using our strength to do it and having us pay most of the diplomatic, economic and military price. If it weren't for the US carrier groups nearby, the looming threat of Western firepower to back up Israel and the munitions they've received, they would not be able to do what they've been doing.
The intense bombing and blockade meets "deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part" to a certain extent. Genocides are routinely listed which don't kill a high % of the population in question - the Rohingyas for example. If the Israelis have killed 1% of the Palestinian population in 3 months of war, that's roughly similar to what happened in Myanmar over several years, indeed it happened at a faster rate.
The Israelis never proposed any reasonable accord with the Palestinians or at least they haven't done so sincerely. They've refused to allow Palestinian statehood, which includes control of borders, airspace, water rights and raising an armed force. They expelled a large number back in 1948, more in 1967 and won't let them return. They've consistently annexed more and more land from Palestine, regardless of what the UN says. If the UN ruled to give Israel land more land than they had before, as it did in 1947, they'll take that land happily. If the UN rules against Israel and tells them to give land to Palestine as in 1967, they'll ignore them and keep taking land. These are not the actions of a state that's interested in a long-term diplomatic solution but a state that knows they are stronger and wields that strength (our strength) to their advantage.
True, it's not you but there were a bunch here who make an equivalence between Palestine and struggles with third world migration - 'how can you claim to be against terror attacks/atrocities in the West from migrants and not oppose terror attacks/atrocities against Israel' was the implicit reasoning. The natural conclusion is 'since we oppose terror attacks against Israel, we should assist Israel in war'. Yet one could reverse it just as easily: 'since we oppose bombing of civilians and support national self-determination, we should support Palestine in war'.
This sort of thinking is the underlying rationale behind the disastrous global war on terror. Terror is a subset of war, war is the use of force to achieve political goals. There's no need to support either Israel or Palestine, it's not and shouldn't be about who can present themselves as the victim. We shouldn't be picking sides in other people's conflicts.
Diplomatic perhaps, but economic and military? Other have already pointed out that most of Israel's foreign aid is for them to buy US weapons - in other words, it's a government subsidy for the US defense industry.
The US is probably all that is keeping the Israelis from literally committing genocide. Our presence may give them more of a sense of security, but it also serves a sort of "big brother is watching" function and gives them less excuse to claim that they are under an existential threat.
US carrier groups aren't deterring Hamas or Hezballah, they're there to deter Iran.
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Why? Who do you think would invade them in 2024?
Hezbollah would've launched a major attack, not skirmished on the border. The US seems to think somebody would've been opportunistic, they sent a carrier group there with the express intention of warding off any opportunists. https://www.voanews.com/a/us-aircraft-carrier-to-remain-in-mediterranean-near-israel-officials-say-/7400248.html
I don’t think we know this - I don’t think Hizbullah & Hamas together can take Israel. Iran would have huge logistical difficulties intervening directly and it is… not obvious that would succeed, even if Israel didn’t have nukes.
I don't think Hamas + Hezbollah can take Israel, but I do think there is at least some probability they would have tried if the US hadn't moved its carrier groups nearby. And in that reality we're talking about a much bigger, bloodier, and less restrained war than the one we're seeing now.
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Yes, they would. Israel has won very consistently in major conventional wars.
Thanks to US military aid. If it were the Soviet backed Arabs vs Israel alone Israel would've lost.
More recently, without US support the Israelis would not have enough munitions to bomb Gaza as intensively as they have since they're using munitions that come straight from the US. Without US support the Israelis would've probably just made peace, as opposed to continual settling and expansion, since they'd be paying full price.
https://www.axios.com/2023/11/04/us-israel-aid-military-funding-chart
Israel won in the 40’s without US support, and it’s reasonable to think they’d be poorer without US support but they probably still would have won the 6 day and Yom Kippur war.
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...
You don't have to be capable of storming Tel Aviv to impose serious costs on Israel, just like you don't have to raise your flag over Washington DC to impose costs on the USA. If it weren't for unflinching US support the Israelis would moderate their stance since they'd have a less favourable balance of power.
Finally, they're using US supplied weapons:
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Return to where? The right of return is such a tremendous case of isolated demand for rigor. I don't know any other case in which a treaty between two powers allowed people who left to come back into a land now controlled by a foreign power.
Well, we can see what happened after a unilateral withdrawal from settlements in Gaza.
Historically, it is indeed customary for stronger powers to expel populations they defeat in war. If you read my posts I note that history is written in blood, that this is how borders are made.
We also saw intensive bombing of Gaza, indiscriminate shooting of protesters, those IDF T-shirts with 'one shot two kills' and pregnant women in the crosshairs pre October 7th. It reveals a certain attitude. Do you think this might be related to lots of people joining Hamas and going on to dedicate their lives to killing Israelis?
Intensive bombing, you mean after gazans shot rockets at Israel?
Shooting protestors indiscriminately after they tried to illegally cross the border?
It's beyond crazy to claim that Israel is responsible for the sorry state of Gaza when the gazans took advantage of the Israeli withdrawal to elect a party running on a platform of killing every jew and subsequently poking the three hundred pound gorilla next door for nearly twenty years. The hatred of Israel was well ingrained at the time of withdrawal. Everything since has been biding time and begging, borrowing, or stealing war materiel to attack Israel with.
How about sniping two women walking inside a church courtyard, as happened just before Christmas? Seems pretty indiscriminate and militarily indefensible to me, yet for some reason, the Israeli government doesn’t seem to mind.
As I said in my other comment, I'm not doing to defend everything Israel has done. But this event from December cannot possibly explain how things got to this state in the first place.
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There was no 'illegally trying to cross the border', they were protesting from inside the fence.
https://www.ohchr.org/en/press-releases/2019/02/no-justification-israel-shoot-protesters-live-ammunition
When did I claim that Israel is responsible for the sorry state of Gaza? It's a conflict, responsibility is split. Obviously it's Israeli (US-supplied) bombs that are doing the destruction.
I'm not going to defend every Israeli action, but this was a classic "mostly peaceful" protest.
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I actually disagree with RR’s response here - allowing refugees to return after a war is historically normal, not allowing it is somewhat unusual (though by no means unheard of). Rulers usually didn’t care what ethnicity their subjects were in the past, and usually preferred mass forced conversion to expulsion except in special circumstances. Why not let the expelled Palestinians return (since their expulsion probably wasn’t actually planned)? Democracy creates a very strong incentive to engage in (relatively soft in this case, to the Yishuv’s credit) ethnic cleansing.
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This is Copenhagen ethics. Assuming you're not a weird EA utilitarian, you don't have any obligations to someone who's already starving in the streets. So if you take someone in, you can't have any obligation to not throw them back out in the streets again.
I think being a 'weird EA utilitarian' is to a significant extent implied by the morality that most people hold, but it's just to difficult to actually follow so people rationalize it. Even if you aren't an EA though, I think 'you can ethically kick someone out of your house even if it will lead to them instantly dying' is something that very few people would agree with. I think the vast majority would agree you can ethically kick someone out even if it makes them homeless, but not homeless to the point where it's >50% likely they will die in the next month. (Note, though, that this is true because we have material abundance, a welfare state, etc - if tradeoffs between 'your family starving' and 'kicking out your guest and them dying' were common, the popular stance would be (and was) different, B is unconscionable precisely because there's a better option. But it's reasonable for 'which action is moral' to depend on 'which action is available')
But I think you're assuming a contradiction and using it to prove something false.
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I agree with your reasoning.
The whole affair is just very slightly unusual in how hitherto-respectable politicians and functionaries ended up going to an event with Sellner. Did they not know in advance that the Identitarians would be there? Did they expect perfect secrecy to hold up? How the media would spin it seems obvious, and I don't mean in retrospect.
I wanted to type out my opinion of the whole thing just to add a German sorta-nativist perspective and some details regarding the media coverage and "public" reaction to the affair, but as I set to it it turns out to be too tiresome. The goodthinking people of Germany have promptly held several rallies to denounce the participants and their ways of thinking, but no more than that because what more can they do that they haven't already, the initiatives to ban the AfD have been underway long before this event and there's just not much more that anyone can do in that direction. The overblown reactions I'd say are part AfD Derangement Syndrome and part a performance of the rites of the German Civil Religion.
Ah, I think I don't really have anything to say. It's all very tiresome and mostly just more of the usual.
The interesting thing to me is that this has created the fuss it has, when the AfD itself contains people who are arguably more radical on these issues (particularly Höcke and his wing) than Sellner is.
Is that an attempt to signify ö, or a deliberate anti-search-engine variation?
It’s poor eyesight while holding down the ‘o’ key on iPhone, unfortunately…
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You're right, but frankly, it doesn't matter. The German anti-right is on a hair trigger because of the AfD's recent growth to the point where, if their polling numbers hold up in the upcoming state elections, it will no longer be possible to exclude them from all high offices as before. Since the political methods of keeping the AfD from regional power are about to fail, there are instead redoubled efforts on other levels - in the media, via legal measures, and through public rallies. Many people who genuinely believe that the AfD is a blight on the country are very on edge at present, and will react more strongly than before to anything related to the matter.
Wait, I don't understand. The AfD's polling #1 in Thuringia, Saxony and Brandenburg, but it's not polling more than Die Linke + SPD + CDU, and they already did a "Die Linke and CDU work out a confidence agreement" thing to keep the AfD out the last time Thuringia had an election. Are they fearing AfD will continue to gain to the point where it has an outright majority? Is someone threatening to break the cordon?
Wagenknecht is probably enough of a wildcard to throw it out of whack.
Eh, not necessarily. I mean, I'm no lawyer or political expert - I don't actually know how it works in the nitty-gritty. What I look at is just how media and people around me act. And Wagenknecht doesn't really play any noticeable role in their fear of the AfD. But sure, when it actually comes to elections, she may have an effect.
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Presumably CDU wouldn't want to work with Linke any more than it absolutely is forced to, and the rise of Sahra Wagenknecht's party throws another spanner in the works?
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I'm not 100% sure why, to be honest. Media and politics are panicking and sure enough, it might just be some drama put on to increase voter turnout or just to attract attention. Maybe it's even merely a performance intended to galvanize one's existing supporter base. Maybe it's just a hysterical feedback loop.
Under the assumption that the risk of the AfD winning a state election is real, I'd guess the following:
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I think you've left out houseguest C; houseguest C is unwelcome due to his many poor habits- let's say he's a substance abuser, occasional thief, and also just loud and messy. Houseguest C's parents live down the road, and fed up with his antics, they kicked him out with a restraining order. Absent your shelter, he will be homeless in a rough neighborhood and all of the neighbors are turned against him.
This seems to be the more comparable situation for the mass deportations under discussion- or at least some portion thereof. Egypt doesn't want palestinians and won't take them. And "unassimilated citizens" in Germany have quite literally nowhere to go; most of them are not Turkish citizens and Turkey doesn't want them.
I would say that in Israel’s case it is reasonable to attempt to broker a deal whereby Palestinians are resettled in nearby Arab lands. If all refuse (as they have in recent decades) then the Israelis will have to accept responsibility for them and are morally obliged not to deliberately hurt those who are peaceable. However, it is also within their rights to do what is necessary to limit terror attacks and political violence against them.
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I don't think the ancestral homeland part actually matters. What matters is just whether someone is willing to take them in.
If Israel had existed at the time, the worst of the Holocaust probably could have been averted, because it is true that the countries of the world refused to accept the Jews. But the flipside of that is that if there had been any country willing to take them the worst of the Holocaust could have been avoided. It didn't have to be Israel.
And if any country had taken them, that country would probably be more powerful in the present day as a result. Let's say all the Ashkenazis who would have settled in Israel all immigrated to Canada (historically some tried this and were turned away). Today Israel has a population of only 9 million, and many of them aren't descended from Holocaust survivors. You could pretty comfortably put all of Israel inside Canada without bothering anyone. Israel and the Canadian province of Quebec have about the same population, but Quebec is 70 times the size of Israel. Canada's population would be about 10-20% higher today.
This feels like an argument for having open borders, but it's not. Is it even a good thing to live in a country with a higher population? Actually, my main point is just that it doesn't have to be your ancestral homeland. What matters is that any country is willing to take the refugees in.
Agree it can be anyone willing to take them in, or even anywhere they're strong enough to conquer themselves.
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Your last sentence rests on a category error fallacy. Arab is an umbrella group, but Palestinian is a specific ethnic group. The Palestinian homeland is Egypt in the same way that the Irish homeland is Spain, both being Europeans of Celtic origin; in other words, it’s a mistake to assume that an ethnic homeland is the same as an umbrella group’s territory. The DNA of Palestinians is closer to Samaritans than “North African Sunni Arab Muslims” for this reason. Also, I don’t think this argument would be made if the Palestinians sought to repatriate Israelis to Brooklyn or Lakewood. Isn’t Israeli culture unique despite belonging to the general umbrella group “Jews”?
The opposing argument will be that “Palestinian” as a distinct and/or overriding identity didn’t crystallize until the mid-20th century (there exist people arguing for earlier, have not read, can’t comment on quality of argument). Of course, pre-nationalist identity for non-Jati-like groups* was generally more local/regional than what replaced it, so it still wouldn’t make sense to “repatriate” them to other Arab countries.
To anticipate another counter-argument, there was some migration between Muslim regions (especially at urban and elite levels), so that some Palestinians have surnames indicating, e.g., Egyptian origin at some point. This is accurate, though the scale can be significantly exaggerated. My main complaint about this line of argument is that (except with very recent migrants) it makes about as much sense as “repatriating” all the Slovak Horváths to Croatia.
*Actual Hindu Jatis, but also Bosnian Muslims, Jews, Gypsies, Druze, Zoroastrians, etc. - (at least mostly) endogamous, religiously-defined groups with severe intercommunal purity barriers that reinforce common identity at a relatively early date.
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Interesting developments in use of AI in mathematics and writing
{Math}International Mathematical Olympiad is an international competion for high schoolers around the world. They compete in solving problems related to inequalities, number theory and geometry. It is the last category in which Google's AlphaGeometry leapfrogged the previous SOTA, reaching almost Chinese-team level of success.
It's method is intuitively attractive: it uses both unbiased but blind pattern finding skills associated with LLM today, and rigourous symbolic math honed by millenia of human efforts to find the greatest amount of pure truth. That the latter was included speaks to the fact that we are still at the centaur stage of AI, in that sometimes augmenting AI with what humans already know, allows it to perform better than not doing so.
In the future all AI will be unconstrained by human traditions and biases, thus it will be able to search a wider space, enabling it to beat humans at games humans invented. Such is already the case with AlphaGo. Euclidean geometry has more difficult rules, so some handholding is still needed.
{Writing}Akutagawa Prize is a literary prize expected to awarded twice each year. It is considered one of most prestigous such prizes in Japan. Previous winners include: 石原 慎太郎, 安部 公房, 遠藤 周作, and 大江 健三郎.
The latest winner, 九段 理江, won it for 東京都同情塔, a novel about a high-rise prison tower in futuristic Tokyo and its architect's intolerance of criminals, AI being a recurring theme. In the acceptance speech 九段さま admitted that 5% of the novel was copied verbatim from ChatGPT. Again centaur approach wins out against pure AI.
Had the author attempted to write the 144 pages by asking AI to do it instead, the result would be incoherent, as currently techology isn't there yet to hold in memory so great amounts of data. 九段さま judicious and moderate use of AI to augment, rather than replace, human writing seems to have served them well, beating out works written by only humans.
And yet creative-class salaries and status is the greatest it's ever been. The very jobs AI is predicted to automate, are thriving. For example, the revenues and readership of the 20 or so Substack blogs I follow has only grown, even accelerated, since 2021. Blogs that only got 40 'likes' per article in 2021 now get easily in the hundreds. Substantial revenue growth, too. So either AI cannot replace this job, or there is a big arbitrage opportunity here. Same for fiction writing (e.g. AI imitation Stephen King ) . I think the former. This does not mean it cannot eventually happen, but predictions about technology have a tendency of being either wildly optimistic or pessimistic. Or , AI can do a good job fooling or pretending to be human or emulating human-like attributes, but cannot easily replace a job.
I don’t think Substack readership or even revenue is a good proxy for the general salaries and status of the arts. Maybe substack is just in its New Relationship Energy. Maybe this is what the kids call a “zero interest rate phenomenon.”
Shit, with the amount of hate a “creative-class” receives around here, you’d think authors were one paycheck away from getting run out of town on a rail.
A motivated doomer can go scrounge up, say, movie theater statistics. I wouldn’t take that seriously as an argument against the arts. The ceteris never is paribus.
It has been 3 years and no sign of slowing, coinciding with the huge surge of LLMs over the past 2 years. If that is a poor proxy, consider tech salaries, which are also on the up-and-up, layoffs notwithstanding (although these layoffs seemed to have more to do with over-hiring post-Covid than Ai). I think this shows that creative jobs are surprisingly resistant to automation. The laptop class is the butt of many jokes or a convenient whipping boy for perceived class stratification in an increasingly divided America , but is not going away either.
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For once in my life, I will contend that a particular example of AI reaching competence comparable to peak humans is not that big of a deal.
Here's Paul Christiano claiming this could happen, and soon, and quite easily, in the primordial times of 2022:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sWLLdG6DWJEy3CH7n/imo-challenge-bet-with-eliezer?commentId=jSnfYKAv3hxAPwWhH
So while I agree with the general thesis that AI is going to overtake humans, even our best, and quite soon (3-10 years for ASI is about my 95% CI, 50:50 by 2028, as in any an AGI that is better than the set of all humans at all cognitive tasks), this shouldn't make you update particularly hard in either direction.
The arrival of GPT-4 prompted me to dust off my urge, present for a while, to write a novel. Not because it is as good a writer as me (it isn't), but I could see the writing on the cards since the GPT-3 days, and right now I give maybe 30% odds that GPT-5 will write a better novel on any topic I would wish to, including emulating my voice, and according to the majority of readers, do a better job at it.
It does, however, write better than the average human on any topic, if only because of how incompetent the average human is. GPT-2 was semi-convincingly replicating entire subreddits, even if the outputs were hilariously incoherent, and I think most of the default subs like /r/aww or /r/WorldNews would be improved if every human redditor commenting was replaced by an instance of GPT-4 (hopefully one not prompted to act like the average user there, and even then it's only pretending to be retarded). Have you seen the average email or high school essay? For most people, outsourcing that to GPT-4 is an unqualified improvement.
But yes, the strong expectation that I will one day be obsolete as a writer was a driving force for me knocking out a couple while I'm still relevant. Maybe it'll give me street cred in the posthuman future, like Usain Bolt has today even though a car from the 1930s could leave him in the dust. I was good at my passions, before AI replaced everyone.
Yeah, Christiano is absolutely right here. There are some sorts of problems which have significant components that are comparatively much simpler for machines than humans, for example:
This is not to say that it's trivial to make a computer be superhuman at these problems. Despite there being aspects that are very machine-friendly, there's still a lot of difficult work to be done to actually get a machine do them. But it shouldn't make you update particularly much; this is not an "AI is now smarter than IMO medalists" moment.
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That is actually a problem: it gets harder to filter out spam and idiots. I actually got fooled few times already.
essays free from typos or other errors from students whose in-class work is full of mistakes or otherwise of poor quality, would give it away
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The goal of those is usually proof of work/attention given, not quality.
One thing I've learned from the internet is that American schools and universities seem to love making students do large amounts of largely pointless drudgework.
this is to filter for conscientiousness
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I feel like schooling would be much improved by the adoption of military/FAA style PQSs and "Murder Boards" but those would require educators to actually educate, and I'm not convinced that's in the cards.
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Because the goal of the American school system is to justify its absolutely ludicrous amount of funding, ideally in a way which doesn't require the people staffing it to do any actual work and definitely in a way which requires even more funding.
Massive amounts of pointless drudgework is easy to evaluate and declare a thing which is a result, an output that shows the education system doing something. That it doesn't help students learn and may actually be counterproductive is besides the point; the students learning is absolutely immaterial to the education system, and in fact the students learning too well may not be a good thing from its own perspective, because that makes it harder to make the obviously false claim that schools need more money.
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Are other school systems any better? My experience with South American schools and everything I have read about East Asian schools suggests that both are worse.
My school in India (a prestigious one, for what that's worth) did not give us nearly the amount of homework as was expected in Western school.
Homework is hardly a thing here. You're not graded on it, you have annual and quarterly assessments, and the teachers expect you to look over the teaching material and practice till you pass them.
What is substituted, for homework, is hours of private tuition after lessons, which is not imposed on the students by the teachers, not a filter for conscientiousness (almost anyone who is not bottom 25th percentile is chucked into one of those), and is nigh a necessity if you want to be competitive for the exams that actually matter, at the end of high school.
But homework, in the American sense? Largely irrelevant. You will be tested, in a standardized manner, on your mastery of the subject, at the end of primary education, and that will change the trajectory of your life.
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I wonder how long before AI makes substantial progress with string theory, which based on my limited understanding is based on geometry.
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To be honest, the base LLM-style AI seems far more reliant on "what humans already know" than augmenting it with some math laws. The former seems like a move closer to a truly thinking AI rather than one that just predicts what an answer would be without any kind of logic behind it.
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Last week, @SlowBoy posted about Ray Epps being sentenced to probation and asserted this was a "uniquely generous outcome" for Epps. I was puzzled by this assertion and so I asked some clarifying questions and most of my responses were heavily downvoted. As a barometer of community sentiment, I tried to understand why my questions would be met so negatively and so this post is my attempt to formulate some theories. I am open to feedback on how I can post better!
Theory 1: I focused on the wrong parameters for evaluating Ray Epps' situation
I would like to think I have some practical experience in evaluating whether a given defendant is treated with unusual leniency/harshness. I once had a client who was arrested along one other guy at the same place, both for illegally possessing a firearm. Both were felons with comparable criminal history but in addition to a gun, the other guy also was caught with what the cops referred to as a "pharmacy" of drugs in his backpack (very likely worth at least $20k on the street) and also very openly admitted to police that the gun was his. So it was really weird that my guy got charged with a gun felony while the street pharmacist was charged with only a gun misdemeanor and offered a diversion program on top of that (charges get dismissed if he stays out of trouble). I investigated more of the pharmacist's background and found out he's been arrested at least three times within the last year for exactly the same conduct (gun + drug backpack) and each time no charges were filed. I had no way of proving this conclusively but the only explanation that made sense is that he was an informant of some kind. Letting the prosecutors know I was aware of pharmacist's disparate treatment was likely instrumental in getting my guy a misdemeanor plea offer.
Obviously that was a serendipitous comparison scenario, but when I was presented with Ray Epp's situation the reasonable starting point was to examine the severity of charges and sentences that other J6 defendants received. The DOJ and other sources make this information very easy to find. At least from a bird's eye view, nothing about Ray Epps pleading guilty to misdemeanors (505 out of all 1,265 J6 defendants also did), avoiding jail time (282 out of 749 convicted J6 defendants also did), or avoiding pretrial detention (70% of J6 defendants also did) seemed unusual.
If there are factors besides the severity of the charges, sentencing, or pretrial detention that I should have evaluated instead, I would love to know about them. Maybe I can even use this information at my real job.
Theory #2: I posted false or misleading information
Maybe I focused on the correct parameters, but DOJ information is either false or misleading? That's certainly a possibility, and it wouldn't be the first time a government agency made shit up. But if so, either some evidence of this duplicity or some alternative source should be offered and I'm aware of neither.
Theory #3: I posted truthful information that people thought was false or misleading
This is an online forum and we often shoot from the hip when posting. Sometimes mistakes happen. @HlynkaCG for example responded to my questions by offering two points of comparison as a contrast to how Ray Epps was treated: "we had so-cal soccer-moms and that guy who took a selfie sitting at Nancy Pelosi's spend over a year in prison only to be released after pleading to misdemeanors." I don't know who the soccer-moms are but the Nancy Pelosi reference is presumably referring to Richard Barnett who was convicted of 4 felonies and sentenced to 54 months in prison, definitely not "released after pleading to misdemeanors". As I showcased more than a year ago, this wouldn't be the first time someone here makes a confident assertion on the topic of J6 or on related election fraud theories that are not necessarily reflected in reality.
Speaking personally, I would react with genuine gratitude if anyone pointed out I had made a false or misleading assertion, because it's not something I ever wish to repeat intentionally. Part of that effort requires introspection to investigate what went wrong in the process. I again maintain there is absolutely nothing shameful about making mistakes, and part of what I value about this community is how much we celebrate remedial acknowledgement and introspection for faulty thinking and I hope HlynkaCG can shed light on the matter.
Theory #4: I posted truthful information that could lead to false or misleading implications
This reaction is commonly encountered, and likely stems from a poor decoupling ability. For example, it's likely true that Africans had a higher life expectancy enslaved in the US than they did free in Africa at the time of the slave trade. Whether or not this is true is purely a factual determination, but many people can't help it and get ahead of themselves to pre-emptively address what they believe are necessary implications of this fact. The only way that the "slavery can raise life expectancy for the enslaved" fact could in any way threaten the position of "slavery is bad" is if the former is a significant pillar of the latter, or if someone had succumbed to 'arguments as soldiers' mentality. The classic example of this scenario is AOC's famously-lampooned "Factually inaccurate but morally right".
And so I've often wondered if this is driving part of the negative reaction to fact-checking J6-related claims. Maybe challenging one specific premise (Ray Epps was treated with unusual leniency) necessarily challenges an overall conclusion (J6 defendants are treated unfairly) because someone assumes the two are coupled at the hips together:
I don't know what the solution is to this lack of decoupling. It's really hard to teach nuance.
Theory #6: I'm ruining the fun
People have deeply cherished beliefs they want to hold on to, and challenging those beliefs ruins the prospect of a good time. This is the least charitable theory obviously. The operating principle of the Motte is to be "a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas" but unfortunately this has and will forever risk being prescriptive more than descriptive. Cognitive dissonance and confirmation bias clearly exist but it stretches my empathy to its limits for me to try and understand what could motivate someone to sacrifice truth-seeking in order to pursue belief affirmation points. I don't understand it and, given the nature of its manifestation, I don't anticipate a transparent confession. I offered a template of what an introspective admission could potentially look like when I admitted to having previously believed in abolishing police/prisons despite my awareness that I lacked the ability to defend those beliefs, but maybe that confession was only possible because enough time had passed to give me distance from the sting.
True to the spirit of this post, I'm open to being proven wrong.
I didn't reply to you at the time because I thought the conversation up to before you posted had covered everything important. I didn't downvote you.
I think you posted true-but-misleading information. Sure, Ray Epps was not the only J6 protester to only receive probation. In that respect, his situation is not unique. However consider the other elements that make his case totally unique:
He is on video having encouraged protesters to go into the Capitol Building, and on record before J6 wanting to invade the Capitol. He did not go into the building even as he encouraged others to do so.
He was on the FBI's most-wanted J6 protesters list up until the moment news organizations (Revolver News) started covering him. He was only charged after Merrick Garland was asked about him in a hearing. (I do not have the video in front of me, as I recall it Garland was asked about Eps not by name but in terms that could not have referred to anybody else.)
Eps was undercharged relative to other manor J6 figures, especially in the context of other figures being overcharged. (What's the "baseline charge" protesters deserve? That's a subjective unanswerable question. However I think it's hard to contest that the whole J6 prosecution is unprecedented in American history, and even if you think DOJ is justified, it's hard to argue why Eps wasn't charged more seriously.)
Leftwing news outlets and even the judge at trial all bewailed how poor Eps was made to suffer as the victim of conspiracy theories. This is uniquely generous! Maybe there are some other outliers (I know there's some grandma who went viral by apologizing for her participation and calling MAGA a cult). But, by and large, the same people calling J6 an attack on democracy are saying Ray Eps is a victim. Why? -- he wanted to attack democracy! I am not aware of the judges treating anyone else so leniently.
Epps' suit against Fox News will be allowed to continue, suggesting the possibility that he could win millions of dollars. It's shameless. I don't suppose some secret tribunal met and decided that Ray Epps gets his payout. But nobody in DOJ is working to stop him from making millions. If the DOJ didn't like this, they could try to find something else to charge him with. (Double Jeopardy is no guarantee -- the DOJ made big headlines about potentially investigating Darren Wilson over shooting Mike Brown. If Merrick Garland wanted to, he would get on TV and say Epps deserves to be looked at again.)
Conclusion: Ray Epps was handled uniquely leniently, in a way most people would understand those terms. Epps' treatment only looks normal within the context of an excel sheet of convictions, which doesn't tell nearly the full story.
Two things can be true here. (1) that Eps committed crimes on J6 for which he deserves to be convicted and (2) he is unfairly the target of right wing conspiracy theories of being a federal agent. Eps can be a bad person in one sense and a victim in another. There is no contradiction here. In terms of how judges have treated other defendants, what other defendants have been the target of conspiracy theories like Eps?
Maybe I am the one who is confused but I'm pretty confident the DoJ does not have a mechanism to force someone to drop a civil suit. If Fox News did defame Eps by calling him a federal agent when he wasn't, why should the DoJ step in (to whatever extent it can) to stop him? Maybe Eps' actions are shameless if you assume he is a federal agent but from another angle he's another entity (like Dominion) defamed by Fox News and trying to protect his reputation.
The contradiction is not between committing crimes and being unfairly accused of being a Federal agent, the connection is between the left being uniquely willing to forgive his crimes and being a Federal agent. Arguments as soldiers is done by the left too. If the left thought he was a bad guy, the left would demand that he be overcharged and would completely ignore any false accusations made about him, because that's how they behave for everyone else.
That would require that the left and the DOJ care in general about people being defamed. They don't.
Who on the left is willing to forgive Eps' crimes? Certainly not me. Citation on how the left acts for "everyone else?"
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Sure, but this is not how people emotionally reason. Epps committed what is, according to what the government claims in other cases, an attack on American democracy. How much sympathy do you have when bad things happen to bad people? Somehow, though, charity runs Epps' way.
I hope if I am accused of a crime, all the judges decide I was punished enough by the bad press, and in fact deserve the chance to sue for millions.
Can you please explain how you think the civil court system works? In your mind, do you believe that a judge presiding over a criminal matter can "allow" civil suits to proceed? I'm especially very intensely curious about what role you think the DOJ plays in "allowing" suits to proceed.
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I mean, I personally do not have much sympathy for Epps but I understand why other people do.
I do not understand this sentence. A judge in a criminal case cannot, as a general matter, decide a defendant cannot file a civil case against some third party. It is up to whatever judge is hearing the civil case to decide whether a case can go forward or not and a criminal conviction in some other case is not, for I think obvious reasons, generally disqualifying.
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Is there any legal basis for this at all? Would I be able to escape a criminal conviction by having a bunch of people on twitter talk about how I was a federal agent? If this is actually a criteria that's being used to adjust sentencing and shift legal outcomes, I've just come up with an incredibly profitable new business idea that will help get people out of sticky prosecutions even when there's direct video evidence of them committing the crime! Of course I don't actually believe that's the case - he's not being let off due to an actual legal principle. There are hundreds of conspiracy theories circulating about Donald Trump, and I highly doubt that he's going to be able to dodge the charges by using a similar precedent.
But Eps didn't escape a federal criminal conviction. He pleaded guilty to federal charges. My understanding is judges have a pretty wide latitude to consider a defendant's circumstances at sentencing, so nothing explicitly prevents a judge considering these factors.
My apologies for being unclear - please replace "criminal conviction" with "prison sentence".
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Not explicitly so and not unique to conspiracy theories, but judges and prosecutors do indeed factor into their decisions whether someone has "suffered enough already". The prime example I can think of are deciding whether to charge negligent parents whose child is killed as a result of being forgotten inside a hot car. I also had a client who avoided jail time on her third DUI, most likely because the collision she caused severely mangled her foot and left her in a wheelchair.
I can see the tenuous basis/linkage here, and I appreciate you providing an answer to my question. But, unfortunately, it isn't enough to change my mind on this matter - I can't understand how Ray Epps gets away with what he did on the basis of people saying mean things about him online when this same principle is not applied to anywhere near the same degree when it comes to others. Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell were the target of far more online conspiracy theories than Ray Epps was, but that hasn't impacted their sentencing or prosecution in the slightest.
Well there's two questions here and it's important not to confuse them:
I've laid out my reasons for why Ray Epps does not appear to have been treated unusually when comparing his charges/sentences to other comparable J6 defendants. In terms of how much him being the victim of a conspiracy theory affected the outcome, it's hard to say because his ultimate sentence was well within the ballpark compared to other defendants. I do think it's plausible just based on the fact that this is indeed a factor in other cases, but his sentence was expected to be low anyways. You can read Epps' sentencing memo filed by his attorney for further details on how his life had been affected.
This is why a comparison to Epstein/Maxwell wouldn't make sense. The "suffered enough already" factor might sway judges/prosecutors at the margins, particularly for petty or questionable offenses, but I can't imagine a scenario where it would justify leniency for someone accused of running an underage sex trafficking ring.
Could you please show me where you actually did this? I gave the post I was responding to the and the links a few looks, but I couldn't find any where you went through the claims made in the Revolver piece in great detail.
Also, I'd just like to add as an aside that I don't think "being the victim of a conspiracy theory" is actually what is responsible for his lenient sentencing - rather, it was due to him being a federal informant or otherwise working for the government. I think that the conspiracy theory claim is being used as a figleaf for those other reasons. And finally...
Petty or questionable offences? Epstein was just running an underage sex trafficking ring, and the government didn't even think that was a big enough deal for him to go to prison the first time he did it. They haven't even gone after many of the confirmed customers of the sex ring - Ehud Barak is still a free man, as is Prince Andrew. In contrast, I've been repeatedly informed by "reliable sources" that what took place on January 6 was a violent insurrection that attempted to end our democracy, and is actually legally comparable to raising an army and literally waging war on the US government. The idea that people being mean on twitter could make up for that beggars belief.
I was addressing whether or not Epps was treated unusually as a defendant, and I examined that by comparing him to all other J6 defendants: "Ray Epps pleading guilty to misdemeanors (505 out of all 1,265 J6 defendants also did), avoiding jail time (282 out of 749 convicted J6 defendants also did), or avoiding pretrial detention (70% of J6 defendants also did) seemed unusual." What claim within the Revolver piece addresses whether or not Epps was treated unusually that I did not address?
Do you believe that the 37% of other convicted J6 defendants who also avoided jail time were also federal informants or otherwise working for the government?
Sure, that would beggar belief if it happened. I've seen no indication that's the case because plenty of other convicted J6 defendants avoided jail time despite not being the subject of a conspiracy theory. This is evidently not a material factor for sentencing purposes.
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Edit: Merrick Garland timeline, and MAGA grandma below
I really appreciate the specifics in your response! I'll go point by point first, from the standpoint of how unusually Ray Epps was treated:
Factor 1: Epps encouraged others to enter the Capitol
It's true that Epps 1) repeatedly encouraged others to go into the Capitol "peacefully" (whatever that means) and 2) did not enter the Capitol himself. Moreover, he's captured on video trying to calm protestors down. I agree #1 is a negative factor for sentencing, but would you agree that #2 is a positive factor for sentencing? I don't know if the two factors exactly cancel each other out but it's fairly routine for the legal system to have drastically lowered penalties for criminals who change their mind at the last minute.
Besides that, both Alex Jones (though he did say "We are peaceful" and "we need to not have the confrontation with the police") and Nick Fuentes ("Keep moving towards the Capitol! It appears we are taking the Capitol!") encouraged others to march towards the Capitol but did not enter themselves, and unlike Epps neither of them were charged with any crimes.
Because far more prominent individuals who encouraged others to go to the Capitol and were not even charged, while Epps was charged with misdemeanors, this particular factor does not indicate that Epps was treated unusually. What do you think I'm missing?
Factor 2: FBI's most wanted
It's true that Epps was put on an FBI "Seeking Information" list as Photograph #16. He still shows up on Twitter, but no longer on the official list, but lots of other photos have also been taken down from that list (they're numbered sequentially so if you start at the beginning you'll see it goes 1, 2, 5, 9, 13, etc). I don't understand how this is indicative of unusual treatment if the FBI is removing dozens (hundreds?) of other photos.
Regarding the timing of charges, it's true that Epps wasn't charged until a mere 3 days after Merrick Garland was asked about him.[Edit: I hadn't looked closely when I posted this, but Merrick Garland was asked about Ray Epps by Thomas Massie on 9/20/23 and charges against Ray Epps were actually filed two days prior on 9/18/23. Epps appeared virtually in court on the 20th to plead guilty, which heavily indicates the plea was negotiated a couple of months prior]. The timing could be more than just a coincidence, but in what direction? You could argue that Epps was treated unusually harshly if you compare his conduct to Jones and Fuentes (who have not been charged) but you're arguing the opposite and I don't understand how.Factor 3: Undercharged relative to others
It's true it's difficult to draw a direct comparison about conduct regarding what the "baseline charge" should be, but you're begging the question by saying Epps was undercharged "relative to other major J6 figures". Regarding his specific conduct (and not the attention he's garnered) why should Epps be considered a major figure to begin with? To conduct any comparison it would be helpful if you can identify an illustrative example of a J6 defendant who acted similarly to Ray Epps but was charged/sentenced much more harshly.
Factor 4: Victim of Conspiracies
This is a recursive argument. The judge at his sentencing said "While many defendants have been vilified in a way unique to Jan. 6, you seem to be the first to have suffered for what you didn't do". I don't deny that's a unique situation, but to establish that Epps was treated uniquely generously you need a baseline to compare against.
I don't know the grandma you're referring to[Edit: Found what I think is the grandma, who entered the capitol and got 2 months in jail], so all I have to compare against is the fact that Epps avoided jail just like 37% of other convicted J6 defendants.Maybe if we had a hypothetical Ray Epps Two who was the subject of similarly intense conspiracy theories but whose sentencing judge did not acknowledge his suffering then you could argue that Ray Epps One was treated unusually generously, but if it's not reflected in sentencing why would that matter?
Factor 5: Epps' suit against Fox News
I don't understand any of this. Why is the suit shameless? How could the DOJ possibly stop Epps from suing Fox News? Even if somehow they charged him with triple-digit felonies, he would still be able to sue (almost a quarter of federal lawsuits are filed by prisoners!). This is a baffling point.
TL;DR
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That's fair pushback, what examples would you suggest as superior comparisons? From another post of mine:
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I already mentioned Fuentes and Alexander who were on the scene and loud and were never even charged.
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I don't understand what this means
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If "Alexander" refers to Jones, then you are again being misleading.
I'm not sure how you could've missed that I was talking about Ali Alexander, that was only one level above.
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Before I respond to any specifics I want to lay out a few general suppositions: I think it's totally reasonable, almost necessary, to believe that the FBI had informants in MAGA groups and at J6; J6 prosecutions (even if you think they're legitimate) have a strong political dimension.
I can't read Epps' mind; I don't know how thoroughly the FBI was embedded in J6 attendees; I don't know whether the FBI orchestrated any part of J6 or it's only been weaponized in the aftermath; I don't have and might never have any records that will prove anything beyond a shadow of a doubt. I do know that some specific people have been caught lying about J6 (the J6 Committee, government reports of officers killed, Nancy Pelosi's bodyguard, etc.).
Let's concede that it's entirely possible Epps could really be innocent. We're all just filling in blanks here. But for the reasons already discussed, I do not find Epps' total innocence very likely.
Onto some of your specific points:
Jones is not known to have been near the Capitol at all: he was speaking from Lafayette Square. This is in a different category from Epps, who was present at the Capitol and encouraging people to go in (while pointedly not going in himself). I don't think this is an apples-to-apples comparison.
The lack of charges for Fuentes are taken as suspicious by many people. It's openly discussed whether he was a Fed. I have not bothered looking into the accusations, there are a lot of arguments floating around. My supposition is that he's been a party to so many shenanigans by this point that the Feds would be stupid if they haven't at least tried to recruit him. He could also be genuinely that dumb.
In part because he was near the top of the FBI's J6 List until he wasn't. In part because he's a highly-visible face saying everything lefties have accused J6 of representing. He was an Oath Keepers chapter president. He he was on restricted Capitol Grounds. He fits the exact profile of people who have been otherwise severely charged.
Granted that Epps is not an Alex Jones, or Enrique Tarrio, or someone who otherwise might have been presumed to be a leader within MAGA before the J6 events. But that's not the only qualification. Epps is perhaps the most visible face of protesters agitating to enter the Capitol, the very proof that J6 was part of serious sedition, and all he gets is a slap on the wrist.
Yes? I don't disagree, but don't know how that's relevant to whether Epps was treated with unusual leniency.
Innocent of what? He already plead guilty.
That's totally fair that you don't think Alex Jones is a good comparison, so who would you propose comparing against? You can't say that someone was treated "unusually" unless you already have a comparison in mind, so who are you comparing Epps against?
I don't know what you mean by "near the top" except that he was one of the first to be put on the 'seeking information' list. Chronology does not determine severity, so why is this significant? What does it mean to have a highly-visible face? People know who he is because he received significant right-wing media attention, so is that your metric? What are lefties claiming J6 represents and how does Epps represent it? It's true that he used to be an Oath Keeper chapter president in 2011, why is that significant? It's true that he was on restricted Capitol Grounds, but so were up to 10,000 other people, so why is that significant? What exactly is the "exact profile" of people who were charged? Did you determine this profile by examining all 1,265 J6 defendants? Are you claiming that prosecutions are decided by looking for this profile? This is an extremely confusing paragraph.
You concede that Epps would not be presumed to be a leader of any kind and I just want to understand how you contrasted his situation to determine that he was treated unusually. I again repeat that a really good starting point would be for you to pick one comparable J6 defendant that you think was treated much more harshly than Epps.
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Is there video of Alex Jones telling people to enter the capitol? I thought there was opposite video evidence, of him saying "don't enter it's a trap".
Search engines are fucking useless these days. I can find hundreds of second hand descriptions from "reputable" news sources, but it's nearly impossible to find the first hand video evidence.
I remember Alex Jones in a video interview. Saying what I described in the first paragraph and then I remember looking it up and confirming it at the time with video evidence. But it's seemingly impossible to retrace steps.
I have no seen any evidence or video of Alex Jones explicitly telling people to enter the capitol. He was just the first person that came to mind who seemed more-or-less comparable to Epps along the "whip up crowd to head to the Capitol" axis.
This is the only video I could find, and only by adding "Joe Rogan" to my search terms which is apparently an alternate tag for "original video". In the video Alex Jones is telling people to avoid a confrontation with Police, and to march to the other side. He is a hundred or more feet away from the capitol building.
Mostly you can know that Alex Jones had zero involvement, because there is no footage of him having any involvement. If there was anything remotely implicating him it would have been blasted on every news channel. Your vague intuition of "Alex Jones would do something like this" is the exact same intuition as the people that put that intuition there in the first place. If they could have fed it, they would have.
Its also part of my continuing frustration with the state of the world. Common perception has diverged massively. You have the intuition that Alex Jones would do something. I have the intuition that Alex Jones would be set up and blamed for doing that thing while being totally innocent. The evidence for your intuition is easily findable in a bunch of second hand news sources that all vaguely hint in that direction, without ever saying enough to get hit with a slander lawsuit. The evidence for my intuition is buried and nearly impossible to find despite it being something I heard on the most listened to podcast series in the world.
I have no idea what you're referring to about my "intuition" that "Alex Jones would do something like this". Do what? Where are you getting this from?
Why did he come to mind, I'd call that intuition.
@ArjinFerman also
I don't want any ambiguity here, I never said or implied that Alex Jones "would do something like this" (I still don't know what is the 'something' you're referring to here), I never spoke of potential or possibilities about his conduct. The reason he came to mind is because I was trying to think of individuals comparable to Epps, and I first did so by deconstructing Epps's conduct into "He was on Capitol Grounds but did not enter, but encouraged others to enter". I figured finding someone who was caught on tape precisely asking people to enter was going to be a challenge, so I abstracted the latter factor into a more generalized "whipped up crowd to head towards the Capitol" to broaden the search. Alex Jones came to mind because he was there and I remembered him leading a "1776!" chant with a crowd. It's not going to be a perfect comparison, but I'm trying to do the work SlowBoy hasn't by proactively looking for individuals to compare Epps against, and I'm more than open to other suggestions.
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From your post in which you're using Alex Jones as an example of someone who behaved analogously to Epps.
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I also saw a video of him driving around in his hummer shouting on a bullhorn for people not to enter, at the time -- search seems remarkably fucked indeed. (and/or youtube has been scrubbing this sort of thing -- probably the fastest way to find the video would be to go ask on /pol/, which is quite the state of affairs)
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First off, I think you mean "into" here. But anyway, complete side track, but it's sort of hilarious watching this regularly-scheduled program on a completely different screen than watching the Section 3 disqualification program. Like, here, the fact that someone just encouraged others to go into the Capitol is good reason to not charge them. But ya know, with Trump, he didn't even do that, yet it is clearly and obviously "engaging in insurrection".
No I meant "to" because I didn't see anything about Alex Jones encouraging others to go inside. I don't know what you're referring to about regularly-scheduled program, it's hard to compare behaviors from different people because people don't act like mimes and do exactly the same thing at the same time at the same place. Best you can do is outline what the relevant factors and dimensions are and then analyze the actions according to that template. Inevitably you're bound to encounter reasonable disagreement throughout that process.
I mean, I agree with basically your entire comment about what we can do. The bit about "regularly-scheduled program" is that if you just look at the screen about this topic, it might on the surface look like everyone is doing this sort of 'best thing', outlining relevant factors, etc. It looks like the normal, ho-hum, program of people doing the best thing. Alternatively, if you just look at the screen about Section 3 disqualification, it might also look on the surface like everyone is doing this sort of 'best thing', outlining relevant factors, etc. But then it just strikes you when you see both of them smashed together. Like, really?! Trump "engaged in insurrection" on one screen, but we appear to have just an entirely different outline of relevant factors on the other screen. Just wild in contrast.
That's how the law works in general. There's enough precedents and opinions laying around that in any given case, you can credibly apply them to make the case go either way; in fact, almost every case has at least one lawyer on each side doing just that. So how do you actually decide the case? By criteria outside the law, which you then justify using the appropriate set of precedents. If you really can't find any which support the thing you want... make something up that sounds all legal-like, building on the closest thing (e.g. the "bad actor" test making Trump's speech not eligible for First Amendment protection).
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On a purely academic level, I wonder if there's an argument that, in isolation, "he's a fed!" is not actually defamatory. The claim is (I assume) that he was defamed as "working for the feds by encouraging protesters to enter the Capitol," but the second half of that claim is pretty evidently true from the video evidence. Is the first half alone, even if it is false, a negative claim about a person? I'm sure it is to some people, but it seems fraught to allow a court (in which most of the professional parties probably see "working for the government" as a positive, or at worst neutral claim) to generally rule as defamation something that only a small minority actually find disparaging. The overall claim is probably disparaging to the government itself, but I'm not aware of any law against alleging government conspiracies.
Sure, I believe he's received a bunch of hate mail for these accusations, but I'm pretty sure that's par for the course of anyone who achieves that level of infamy.
Can’t find the court docs at the moment, but
If he is able to prove financial damage to his business, that’d probably satisfy the legal requirement.
If the statement is not defamatory as a matter of law, damages don't matter.
Sorry, I was unclear.
I think the alleged harms to Epps’ business satisfy the fourth element of defamation. I’m not commenting on the other three.
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https://revolver.news/2023/07/against-all-odds-rap-legend-tupac-shakur-shot-down-ray-epps-defamation-claim-against-tucker-and-revolver-news/
Revolver news agrees with you.
Turns out that there's actually legal precedent that calling someone a government agent doesn't count as defamation.
I think you'll find there's some reason this precedent doesn't apply in the instant case.
I think that's a fairly likely outcome. Hell, given Fox's actions as of late I wouldn't be surprised if they throw the case and just give in anyway because the legal settlement would be worth paying in exchange for the political outcome.
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I think the 'fed' modifier turns it from "honest person encouraging protestors to enter the Capitol (true)" to "dishonest person sets other people up to get arrested." It's not the working for the government that is defamation, it's the claim that he orchestrated a false flag.
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... I'm on team don't break the law, fuckos when it comes to January 6th, but this seems to have a lot of overlap with past discussions you and I have had regarding the Molotov Lawyers and similar enforcement messiness, and come with many of the same problems. There is a genuine weakness when people point to two arbitrarily-selected examples and make a broader comparison without looking deeper, but it's very easy for demands for more scrupulous data to swing into isolated demands for rigor, or to require information that doesn't exist anywhere.
You put a lot of emphasis on the median conviction and sentencing for J6 defendants, and that's nice in the sense that it's readily available information. Yet the median (and mode) conviction and sentence is dominated by either 40 U.S.C. § 5104(e)(2)(G) (included in at least 412 sentences, "willfully and knowingly parade, demonstrate, or picket in any of the Capitol Buildings") or 18 U.S.C. § 1752(a)(1) (included in at least 115 sentences, "knowingly enters or remains in any restricted building or grounds without lawful authority to do so"). Some of those were included with other convictions, including more serious and/or violent ones. There's a lot of interesting space to be discussed in the broader context of what extent this is a typical enforcement action for this class of violation of the law, but it's not clear much of the necessary data exists anywhere (how many people weren't arrested at a previous capitol protest?), and very clear that it doesn't actually matter since quite a lot of people want strict enforcement because of the specific
Trump-election-related context.There's still a bit of quibbling still about Epps within that context but it's necessarily going to be quibbling.
((Epps plead to 18 U.S.C. § 1752(a)(2). There's some trickiness about comparing to other 1752(a)(2) convictions, of which the FBI describes just over 100, because the vast majority of those included other convictions -- just over a dozen were sentenced solely under 1752(a)(2), like Epps, only three of whom seem to have received probation, and one home detention. Even where the plea agreements are comparable, allegations are not, in either direction.))
As AshLael points out at length, Epps is neither accused nor alleged to have gone into restricted capitol grounds. People are claiming that Epps planned and encouraged a riot, and likely communicated with a number of others planning a riot. You correctly point out that not all those who've done that class of behaviors have been charged or even arrested, (though in turn I'd caution that Fuentes at least has been long-suspected of being a fed or CHS or informant or whatever, even before 2020). Those who have been charged and convicted with an emphasis on their encouragement of others to enter the capitol often also committed other acts, or had past criminal history, or both.
But, to borrow a phrase, "[n]either you or I know enough about this case". It's certainly possible that the videos Revolver has publicized were the sole and only circumstances where Epps did any communication to other people encouraging bad acts, that the context of those acts makes incitement charges implausible, and after a long history of totally-normally-for-Trumpist arguments woke up on January 7th with a hell of a hangover and immediately went full anti-Trump. It's also certainly possible that he's just a generic garbage person with a long history of generic garbage stuff that the FBI just finds below its standards, who blanched when actually in a riot rather than talking about it on IRC, and who squealed as soon as the spotlight focused on him. It's also possible that he's a garbage person who turned human source, who spent a lot of the months before January 6th planning and encouraging violent activities, and we'd never be able to see it. Or a wide variety of more- or less-charitable ways that less garbagy CHS get recruited.
((To be absolutely clear, my bet's on garbage person, because there are absolutely a ton of rightie garbage people. But I wouldn't be a lot of money, because no small number of garbage people end up with feds leaning on them to get bigger scores.))
Comparing him to Palm doesn't illuminate much, here; comparing him to the more general morass of rioters is even less useful -- even just for the specific question of whether Epps has been treated unusually or even uniquely, since whatever Yavoich did was nothing like what Epps is alleged to have done. Nor does it tell us anything about the extent matters look suspicious.
((Similarly, both the 60 Minutes and Congressional interviews don't impress; the questions are softballs and Epps still can't give very credible explanations.))
Now, maybe there's a fair criticism that people are holding this belief non-disprovably, based on little evidence, despite extreme unlikeliness. And while there are things that would make the Epps-as-fed claim much less likely, such as if a video dropped from the sky clearly showing him yelling not to enter the capitol, they're probably going to be exactly as persuasive as they are unlikely to be found. Indeed, there's ways that this can go full non-disprovable: in the previous thread, /u/jkf mentions "MaroonPB" as one of the people Epps was talking with before the riot broke into the capitol, and it looks like that guy was later ID'd and arrested as Ronald Loehrke. But he's still awaiting trial, after being released on recognizance, despite entering and leading some of the charge into the Capitol itself: is this evidence that January 6th rioters are being given the kid glove treatment and the FBI just wants to be absolutely sure about what appears to be a slam-dunk case? Or is it a sign Loehrke too is a 'fed' of some kind? Will we only know after his trial/plea and sentencing?
((Or is there some superposition here that would only collapse after conviction and sentencing, and maybe not even after that? After all, one of the fed informants for the Bundeys ended up with a pretty lengthy sentence himself.))
((Loehrke's codefendant, James Haffner, I can't figure out the current situation for, including if he's still being detained, and the man (allegedly) sprayed a chemical at capitol police.))
And were feds and human sources rare among the nutty right, I'd even agree with you. But they're not. You yourself have previously commented on a case involving J6 'ringleaders', where some of the defendant's own witnesses turned out to be (undisclosed-until-figurative-eve-of-trial) CHS. There's a fair discussion to be had about how this sort of evaluation needs to be handled, or how to discuss events where none of the data sources are especially trust-worthy, or what Bonferri knockoff we needs use to handle this sort of discussion with over a thousand examples to cherry-pick from.
But emphasizing the FBI's summary sheet isn't doing it.
As expected, you bring the scalpel that I look forward to these discussions. I want to first clear up distinct questions that seem to get conflated:
My post focused exclusively on #2, I didn't touch any of the rest. I did not find the informant allegation interesting enough to investigate further because even if it's true, so what? My suspicion is the reason Ray Epps received so much attention was as a bid to find a scapegoat for the violence and chaos that day. That theory is too incoherent to evaluate properly because it requires simultaneously assuming 1) J6 protestors had no plans to engage in violence and 2) J6 protestors could be prodded to commit violence (See previously Overkill Conspiracy Hypothesis).
Accordingly there is motivation to seek out any indication that Ray Epps was indeed a fed, and absent a damning confession, the only evidence likely available is circumstantial. That's why so much focus was on the fact that Epps was never charged with a crime, but then when he was charged the focus shifted on the lack of severity. The underlying assumption is that government informants do not get punished (or at least just enough to keep up appearances) which isn't unreasonable, but as you point out that's not necessarily true. There's nothing wrong with relying on circumstantial evidence (I did the same when I investigated the street pharmacist after all) but the problem here is when two premises start a circular reasoning chain reaction: Epps was treated leniently because he was a fed, and we know he's a fed because he was treated leniently.
You put in way more work than I did in dutifully comparing the relevant charges Epps and other J6 defendants faced. You're absolutely right that finding a proper contrast is fraught with confounding variables and near-impossible to do satisfactorily, and I don't claim to have a definitive answer. I started with the big picture and zoomed in by just examining whether I would have been able to pick Epps' case out of a pile, and nothing about him stood out. If someone wants to make the affirmative assertion that Epps was treated with unusual leniency, hopefully they have some evidence to demonstrate that rather than just wishing it was true.
I don't know that's true -- as I pointed out, the sole 1752(a)(2) conviction makes up only a tiny sliver of 1/6 convictions, the majority of people sentenced under it (and even those sentenced only under it) excluding Epps received prison sentences, often long incarceration. I haven't gone through too large of a group of broader cases, but both the procedural posture and the prosecutor behavior do not show up in a psuedo-random selection of cases on similar grounds. The majority of simple cases, even with pleas, received two or more years of probation. Those which received short probation either entered the Capital grounds later out-of-view of more violent protests, could make not-laughable claims of confusion about what areas were restricted, some medical or age-related concerns, or some combination of the above. Not all sentences above that 12-month line involve knowing statements that an action would be illegal, or disclaimer of responsibility (like Epps' deflection toward antifa), or a person bringing material preparations for physical violence (like Epps' tourniquets), but all are much more common above than below, and often used to justify home detention or short incarceration.
((And that's outside of the likely-spurious stuff. Epps doesn't show up on the DC FBI case list by name or case number as of today, which is just an organizational issue that'll... probably get fixed soon, and even if it doesn't is probably more the FBI being lazy than anything malicious.))
There's ways to square that circle: perhaps Epps was just better at playing his cards, or drew a prosecutor who was less willing to push harder (and to be fair, the sentencing request aimed for six months incarceration, just doing so very badly and without highlighting publicly-available information against him), or just got lucky on judge assignments ([Boasberg does seem to use a light hand even for morons), completely coincidentally. There's still a circle to square, here, even before adding in the media and congressional coverage.
But I think my deeper point is worse than even that.
I could pick Epps out of a stack, but I could also pick another thirty-odd people out, without much effort. Some of them have had comparable conspiracy theories, and some haven't even had significant media coverage: Loehrke seems in the first category, Haffner in the second. Doyle (sorry, her courtlistener is all Pacer-locked) received bizarrely short probation for someone who went in through a window and was turned in by coworkers. There's even a trio including a lawyer who managed to get comparable or even lesser sentences after going to trial, albeit some data weirdness on the courtlistener and DC DoJ page about them. With a sufficiently large dataset, there are always going to be outliers, and indeed many of the same things that made Epps a plausible fed also would have made him a normal outlier.
There's a fair complaint that this reflects too many degrees of freedom in the questions we're asking -- just as Wansink could always find something in a dataset, so could we find something here -- and to an extent that's even true. They're all weird, and weird in different ways, so you could trade off whether Doyle's sentence or Epps' advocacy or a handful of active-duty-military CAC-holder's military connections or a dozen other things are all The One Thing that matters most, and that you can makes the signal less relevant for Epps. But it still remains a signal.
I don't think that's a good model of the complaint, as it mixes to many different types of behavior together. All bad acts invite conspiracy theories at some level, especially when highly promoted in public awareness, as a way to shy away from the ramifications, but January 6th was not just bad or violent, but also involved people doing the single most identifiable things available, while also committing violations of a very distinctly different and not-especially-well-known set of laws.
The results would have been drastically different had J6 protestors planned for and had a fatal fistfight with counterprotestors on the Mall, or got shot trying to take the Washington Monument in some misguided belief it controlled space lasers emitting the magical smoke informing us of the next President's gender, or tried to storm Area 51 to force the US military to air strike DC, or done something stupid with the Secret Service trying to 'protect' Trump. Hell, even as someone who wrongly believed conservative protestors wouldn't riot, I'd caveated at the time that I'd expected something on that level (if, uh, more on the fatal fistfight side).
It would have still been bad! But we'd not have a thousand-plus cases simultaneously going through the legal system able to prove every part of the crime solely through video evidence and cell phone data present for the entire area they could have committed the crime, if only because it'd be really hard for a thousand people go Brutus on the Washington Monument staff, and a lot of them would flinch if you tried.
I don't particularly buy the conspiracy theory, because I know enough about crowd management and the sorta garbage people these protests invite. Zip tie dude neither planned at length how to kidnap a Senator and settled on zip ties, nor was a fed who brought them from home just to make a particularly photogenic picture, but grabbed them from a police officer and did as a moron does.
But while it's hard to prove the difference between people being lemmings and being lemmings-following-a-fed, it's easy to come up with possible evidence that would demonstrate a larger portion who had been planned these particular violations of the law beforehand. A lot of the evidence that could disprove this theory would be very interesting on its own merits! Do we see that?
I again admire and commend your thoroughness. At the big picture level, I'm unclear what we exactly disagree about. I don't deny that various factors played a role regarding Ray Epps's specific outcome. You mention two incriminating factors for Epps that appeared to have been ignored. He did indeed initially blame Antifa, but then also fully cooperated with law enforcement by calling the FBI on January 8th, and then sitting down for an interview on March (with a lawyer) where he admitted what he did was wrong. I don't see how having tourniquets can possibly be viewed as incriminating, it's normal for anyone attending a protest/rally to bring first aid supplies, especially with how violent 2020 was. I would concede your point slightly if he brought some offensive capabilities like a weapon, but even that is justifiable as self-defense precaution given how violent 2020 was.
I don't deny that the other cases you referenced had some odd outcomes, but it's still not demonstrating the original assertion: Ray Epps was treated with unusual leniency. Finding people with outcomes that are more lenient than Epps's doesn't tell us anything about that assertion. What would illuminate that question is someone with comparable conduct who nevertheless received a harsher sentence, and then ensuring that this hypothetical person wasn't just an outlier. I haven't seen this attempted, and people keep rejecting the comparisons I bring up on the other side by claiming those people (Fuentes, Jones) are probably feds too. This should be very easy if it was so obvious.
I agree that outcomes would have been very different had protestors tried to storm the Washington Monument or something, but as the classic saying goes if my grandmother had wheels she would have been a bike. I wouldn't expect any other location to have spawned 1000+ prosecutions, unless they also had the critical "very important government proceeding taking place" element. Regarding evidence of pre-planning, the most illustrative would be everything outlined in the Proud Boys sentencing memo. They created hierarchies, chain of command, recruitment standard, guidelines for communication, etc etc
If I'm understanding your arguments correctly, your position is that we have no evidence that Epps is a fed because he was not treated uniquely or unusually. My argument is that he has been treated unusually and possibly uniquely, but that this is not strong evidence he is a fed because there's enough of a spread of possible selection bias to pick such outliers.
Epps continued to state the possibility of antifa infilitrators over a year later during congressional hearings. Maybe that's not enough to overcome the question of remorse, and after all that's what sentencing is supposed to rest on. I can't even say, since the final reasons for sentencing from the judge are (afaict) almost always sealed in these cases. But there's a few people who did that sort of ambivalence -- albeit usually on social media rather than before Congress -- and it was read as evidence of insincerity.
I agree with you, but the DoJ does not. There are several informations or sentencing requests that highlight first aid, non-weapon personal protection such as body armor, or other non-weapon preparation (painter's mask!, sometimes explicitly to describe culpability or planning. Now, I can't prove how many other cases don't mention such a thing despite it being present -- we only know for Epps because he discusses it before Congress, after all! And yet back to the start we go again.
Yet in practice, it's impossible to show anyone charged with the same conduct. Only a handful of people were sentenced after pleaing or being found guilty of the same offense and only the same offense: I provided a list: 10 of the 14 include jail time, including no small number of plea bargains -- but almost all of them entered the Capitol proper, so that's not a fair comparison.
Same for 18 USC 1752(a)(1): I can easily show cases that showed similar or greater levels of remorse and admission of culpability but received home detention and longer probation, but the overwhelming majority entered the Capitol building, if only for minutes. The only cases I can show didn't enter the Capitol proper was a nutjob with a long criminal history, who brought her kid with her and tried/helped moved barriers, or maybe that one moron who ran for Michigan governor. They all got significantly harsher sentences, but there are easy ways to pull them as unique in their own various ways, and they're certainly either less remorseful or more plainly two-faced in their fake 'remorse'. Kepley is probably the closest, but you could readily argue (and I might agree!) that her sentence reflected assumptions her 'remorse' was especially fake or she had closer responsibility to attacks on police than shown in the indictment or sentencing memo, or just that she drew a hanging judge.
((You can even flip this analysis: there are a lot more sole-1752(a)(1) sentences, so out of all of them, you can pull three that received 12-month probation, though their fact patterns in turn (sorry, the courtlistener for this one is nearly empty) are drastically different. And that'd even be fair, although in turn I can readily point to the same nitpicks or exclusions.))
You can (and as far as I can tell, do) hold that this must mean Epps was charged unusually harshly. After all, I can only find three people with comparable sentences who didn't enter the grounds! (though, uh, that's not a deep search). But you're demanding a remarkable amount of rigor, here: trying to break apart whether they're the only three at all is rough enough. Figuring out and proving whether that means they were the only people to commit that particular offense but no further, if those others who did either weren’t caught yet or have yet to be sentenced, or if the DOJ decided to do some sub-criminal investigation punishment, would range from incredibly difficult and expensive to impossible at a philosophical level.
((This, on top of their long-proposed fedishness, is part of why Ali Alexander and Fuentes seem like distractions. They fit into AshLael's defense of not-committing-technical-crimes closer than Epps, who plead and had long admitted to crossing into restricted grounds.))
That's fair. I've got some quibbles about it, but got more weight as evidence than the vaguer assessments of non-uniqueness. As I’ve said, I don’t buy the Epps theory. But it’s easy to dismiss as not-even-wrong when you aren’t really engaging with it.
I think I understand the disagreement here. First, I would state my position on whether or not Epps is a fed is almost entirely divorced from whether or not he was treated leniently. That can sometimes be a factor, but it's barely relevant here. On whether or not he was treated leniently, I agree with your point that there's enough of a spread for outlier cases that it's difficult to do a 1:1 comparison. Defendants are not cloned mimes after all.
For what I understand you focus significantly on how rare his charges are, and I should have said this more explicitly but the specific statute he's charged with barely matters because he entered a plea. The fact that he plead guilty 2 days after his indictment was filed indicates his plea deal was negotiated ahead of time. Two days is not enough to send out a summons notice, and federal court definitely does not move fast enough to have allowed a plea deal negotiation to take place. If a defendant already agrees to plead, the prosecutor doesn't really care which specific statute they plead guilty to, because fictional pleas are very very common (and legally sanctioned!). In my work, prosecutors regularly ask me to suggest a charge my client would plead to.
It's less the specific charge -- you note fictional pleas, but even beyond that the relevant statutes are just vague and open-ended enough that a good half-dozen can fit pretty easily -- and more the behavior I'm trying to isolate down, and with things like charges and sentences are the closest proxies that the USAO DC page you linked actually exposes. I bring 40 USC 5104(e)(2)(G) and 18 USC 1752(a)(1) because they're the only other convictions that have similar or lesser sentencing that what Epps faced in the entire spreadsheet.
In an ideal world, we'd filter by what the alleged (or actual) behaviors were, but I tried throwing a couple scripts at the full USAO DC setup, and between missing pdfs (Andrew Morgan's courtlistener page makes him look like he got slapped more for his political views... but only because his sentencing request is still pacer-locked; taking it from other sources makes clear he behaved unusually poorly), heavily obfuscated descriptions, or bizarre descriptions... well, I got those three I mentioned last post out who didn't enter the capital building proper, but I also got another ten that did go into the building, and I'm 90%+ sure there's some false negatives.
((And I'm still finding typos and misfiles and stupid case citation errors, but that's more typical.))
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