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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   18413 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 29, 2024

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Jumping right in with something that may get me in trouble, who knows?

First, obligatory disclaimers. This is a serious question. I am not trying to "boo, outgroup". I don't think Trump is an innocent little baa-lamb, okay? Let's just get all the "but of course he did it, he's the type of guy, grab 'em by the pussy" stuff out of the way. "Reade is crazy, she's a Russian asset, it was all lies". Ignore all that. Try, as far as you can, to put the background and any opinions you have on X versus Y out of your mind. Just go by the statements of what was accused and alleged and no interpretation "well of course A is the type to do this so B is telling the truth but C is not the type so D is lying".

On the bare facts of the allegation, do you think E. Jean Carroll is telling the truth? Do you think it happened as she said it happened, do you think the verdict was correct? And if you believe her, why don't you believe Tara Reade? Neither have independent witnesses. Both allege sexual assault with digital penetration (at least, so far as I understand, Carroll did at first then said he penetrated her with his penis). Both allege it happened in a secluded area. Why does Carroll get an $83 million payout for Trump saying she's a liar while Reade - doesn't?

(1) E. Jean Carroll's account (from The Cut):

So now I will tell you what happened:

The moment the dressing-room door is closed, he lunges at me, pushes me against the wall, hitting my head quite badly, and puts his mouth against my lips. I am so shocked I shove him back and start laughing again. He seizes both my arms and pushes me up against the wall a second time, and, as I become aware of how large he is, he holds me against the wall with his shoulder and jams his hand under my coat dress and pulls down my tights.

I am astonished by what I’m about to write: I keep laughing. The next moment, still wearing correct business attire, shirt, tie, suit jacket, overcoat, he opens the overcoat, unzips his pants, and, forcing his fingers around my private area, thrusts his penis halfway — or completely, I’m not certain — inside me. It turns into a colossal struggle. I am wearing a pair of sturdy black patent-leather four-inch Barneys high heels, which puts my height around six-one, and I try to stomp his foot. I try to push him off with my one free hand — for some reason, I keep holding my purse with the other — and I finally get a knee up high enough to push him out and off and I turn, open the door, and run out of the dressing room.

The whole episode lasts no more than three minutes. I do not believe he ejaculates. I don’t remember if any person or attendant is now in the lingerie department. I don’t remember if I run for the elevator or if I take the slow ride down on the escalator. As soon as I land on the main floor, I run through the store and out the door — I don’t recall which door — and find myself outside on Fifth Avenue.

(2) Tara Reade's account (from Current Affairs):

And then it wasn’t long after that, that the scheduler called me in and said, I want you to take this to Joe. He wants you to bring it, hurry. And I said, okay. And it was a gym bag. She called it an athletic bag. She said he was down towards the Capitol and “he’ll meet you.” And so I went down and he was at first talking to someone, I could see him at a distance and then they went away. And then, we were in like the side area. And he just said, Hey, come here, Tara. And then I handed him the thing and he greeted me, he remembered my name. And it was the strangest thing. There was no like exchange really. He just had me up against the wall. I was wearing a shirt and a skirt but I wasn’t wearing stockings. It was kind of a hot day. And I was wearing heels and I remember my legs had been hurting from the marble of the Capitol, walking on it. So I remember that kind of stuff. I remember it was kind of an unusually warm day. And I remember he just had me up against the wall and the wall was cold. It happened all at once. The gym bag, I don’t know where it went. I handed it to him. It was gone and then his hands were on me and underneath my clothes. And then he went down my skirt, but then up inside it and he penetrated me with his fingers. And he was kissing me at the same time and he was saying something to me. He said several things, I can’t remember everything he said. I remember a couple of things. I remember him saying first before, like as he was doing it, “do you want to go somewhere else?” And then him saying to me when I pulled away, when he got finished doing what he was doing and I pulled back and he said, “come on man, I heard you liked me.” And it’s that phrase [that] stayed with me because I kept thinking what I might’ve said [to make him think that]. And I can’t remember exactly, if he said “I thought,” or “I heard,” but it’s like he implied I had done this.

Again, no 'afterwards we learned this or we heard that', just judge the two accounts on what is said here and which you find credible, if either, or both, or none. If it's "could have happened but I don't know" or "did happen based on what's here" or "never happened". But base that opinion on what you read here of both allegations, not any political swirling around in the past or present.

Both allege it happened in a secluded area. Why does Carroll get an $83 million payout for Trump saying she's a liar while Reade - doesn't?

I have to stop you there, Trump's alleged defamation was not a flat "I did not have sexual relations with that woman" or "It was consensual." The initial verdict was much, much lower; Trump manages to keep escalating it by continuing to deny the court's verdict in his inimitable manner. Trump will always strike me as an unlikely candidate to be railroaded simply because he could, so easily, avoid the railroading by simply choosing not to do the things he does. "I was acquainted with Ms. Carroll and thought we had a friendly relationship. It is unfortunate that she does not remember it the same way. I will continue to appeal the verdict." There goes your $83,000,000. Trump is trapped in a whirligig of his own creation.

That said, I weakly believe that both claims are more-likely-than-not true in a Rashomon sense of true: they reflect the internal experience of the women who made the claims. I strongly believe that neither claim ought to be justiciable, both because they are old and ought to be out of the SoL, and because as my evidence prof put it "Either Rape law is wrong or evidence law is wrong, but they can't both be correct." The standard of evidence demanded in rape law is so far below the standard demanded in virtually every other felony that the result is absurd, and we've already seen it used tyrannically against regime opponents.

Neither claim is provably true in a way that should lead to legal consequences for the accused. But neither is it provably untrue in a way that should lead to legal consequences for the women involved.

That said, I think you're going to end up just picking a fight here with the theory that:

Try, as far as you can, to put the background and any opinions you have on X versus Y out of your mind. Just go by the statements of what was accused and alleged and no interpretation "well of course A is the type to do this so B is telling the truth but C is not the type so D is lying".

Because now people are going to conceal that phase of their thinking. Or not. More likely, it seems that virtually everyone in a position of power (except Al Gore and his wife) are liable to become aggressive sexual deviants.

That said, I weakly believe that both claims are more-likely-than-not true in a Rashomon sense of true

But neither is it provably untrue in a way that should lead to legal consequences for the women involved.

Carroll won't name when the alleged assault happened. The details she can give are wildly implausible or verifiably false. She posed for a magazine cover wearing the dress she claimed it happened in, which didn't exist at the time it supposedly happened. (Unless she changes her story again.) She has admitted to deleting evidence related to the case.

Right, but all of that has already been examined by a jury and rejected, and so no court may consider it again. Also the courts consider lower courts and juries to be unbiased, and claims by parties that they are not are rejected out of hand.

The prior lawsuit did not reject anything. They concluded that Trump was liable in a civil case, a far lower threshold than proving he was guilty. Even then, many of the arguments I have just made were not admitted into court. And they still didn't find that Trump raped her -- that jury's compromise position was that he probably assaulted her by touching her vagina with his hands, but not with his penis. (Perhaps because her own story changed several times.)

As I said: Carroll has absolutely lied in ways that destroy her legitmacy. The idea that she is telling the truth is totally preposterous.

You can see others above saying that the jury decided it, so the courts are bound to assume it's true. That's the whole fig leaf the legal system is using to keep up the ridiculous fiction of the Carroll rape case.

I strongly believe that neither claim ought to be justiciable, both because they are old and ought to be out of the SoL

I think that is why Trump is not being criminally charged, but the defamation that he is being charged for is recent.

Do you think that's still improper, that if the matter of fact which the defamation centers on is outside SoL, the court shouldn't be allowed to say whether or not recent statements were defamatory?

Given that civil courts have a lower evidentiary burden to begin with, I don't think this naturally follows.

Do you think that's still improper, that if the matter of fact which the defamation centers on is outside SoL, the court shouldn't be allowed to say whether or not recent statements were defamatory?

I addressed this in my initial comment, but I'll work it out a bit further here.

  1. Statements of personal innocence, and defending your friends' innocence, should never be punishable in and of themselves. "I did not rape her" should not be construed as defamation.

  2. Statements that impugn someone's character unnecessarily can probably still be defamatory, but because truth is an absolute defense to libel and the truth of the matter is somewhat impossible to prove, it should probably be limited to cases where the defamation is extreme.

  3. Given that civil courts have a lower evidentiary burden to begin with, I don't think this naturally follows.

I disagree, and find the civil vs criminal distinction cold comfort. The civil courts ultimately have power of discovery to upend your life, the verdicts will be enforced by the courts and ultimately by men with guns, they create "facts" that can't be contradicted later.

For the present case, on balance I don't think Trump should face any liability for defamation in this case. It does meet the legal standards involved and procedures were followed, and he could easily escape liability by simply...cutting it out with the nonsense. But it is inappropriate to punish someone for protesting their innocence.

But it is inappropriate to punish someone for protesting their innocence.

I agree, but I really, really don't think that's a fair summary of what is being charged as defamation here.

I am going to just admit up front that I have not taken time to hunt down every speech and Truthbomb (or w/e they're called) or other public statement Trump has made about this which was cited as defamatory and judge them myself. If you have, you can pull rank here.

But my impression from summaries I've seen is that it was much more of an attack on her character and motives and person, made repeatedly and as part of stump speeches and campaign rhetoric and as political strategy, on a way that painted her as a political actor and possibly part of a conspiracy, in away that turned his supporters against her in ways that upended her life in major ways, and made her feel/be unsafe.

Just saying that you are innocent shouldn't be defamation, but that doesn't mean you can't do other things to defame someone at the same time as you claim your innocence.

I've followed the story very shallowly, I read Carroll's original short story (it's very engaging) and I browsed articles in the WSJ and NYT in between since.

Maybe what trump said is worse than I think? But my impression is that while he has put his finger into the fan blade over and over, it hasn't crossed the line as I would draw it. Unfortunately I don't get to draw those lines.

That said, I weakly believe that both claims are more-likely-than-not true in a Rashomon sense of true: they reflect the internal experience of the women who made the claims.

Agree. It's hard to overstate just how extreme this can extend, even in a totally non-sexual context.

I once had an HR interview as a bystander to an incident between two other colleagues. It look me 15 minutes of variations on "wait, what are you talking about?" to the HR rep to realize what I had seen as an forgettable, minor disagreement between the two was reported as "verbal assault and harassment" by one party.

And that reporting party was a Dude.

This is why physical evidence standards, documented intent, provable patterns of behavior etc. are so important in any cases wherein emotional salience is so high. I think in both of these cases, a whole lot of that is lacking.

@FiveHourMarathon is objectively correct in stating that the award and verdict is an own-goal on the part of Trump. The compensatory vs punitive damage awards clearly indicate that the bulk of the $83 mm is to convince Trump that he should really quit talkin' shit about Carroll.

@FiveHourMarathon is objectively correct in stating that the award and verdict is an own-goal on the part of Trump. The compensatory vs punitive damage awards clearly indicate that the bulk of the $83 mm is to convince Trump that he should really quit talkin' shit about Carroll.

But here you're continuing to support the double standard. Carroll can claim Trump raped her all she wants and nothing should come of it, but if Trump calls her a liar, he's liable for defamation over and over again.

I'll meet you half way.

I think you're right in that there does appear to be a double standard on Carroll's allegations (which a jury denied) and Trump's ability to say whatever he wants (at whatever volume he wants) about it. I'm not an expert enough in defamation to say where the line is.

But I still stand by my "own-goal" analogy because either a lot or all of this (past the first jury trial, to be specific) could've been avoided if Trump just STFUs and relies on milquetoast cliches - "The justice system functioned and I abide by the verdict." He keep creating new opportunities for potential attacks. The fact that these attacks are/may be politically motivated is irrelevant because (a) He keeps creating the opportunities and (b) It is impossible for him not to know how much certain groups have made it their existential purpose to hunt him through the courts. When you mix egotism with a martyrdom complex, you get a lot of frivolous legal activity.

To refer back to the One True Gospel, The Wire;

"Keep it boring, String, keep it real fuckin' boring" - Prop Joe

And, from the Prophet Lil Wayne;

"Real G's move in silence like lasagna"

But I still stand by my "own-goal" analogy because either a lot or all of this (past the first jury trial, to be specific) could've been avoided if Trump just STFUs and relies on milquetoast cliches - "The justice system functioned and I abide by the verdict."

Yes, Trump can avoid anything more if he just capitulates -- shuts up and allows Carroll to accuse him all she wants without answer. That is indeed how the justice system "functioned". The problem is the justice system got utterly broken.

Sure, but that's a general brokenness to the justice system, and Trump's increasingly large legal wounds are mostly a result of him refusing to stop walking on the broken glass even when he could just step around it and only be a bit inconvenienced, not the system being biased against him.

This is not a general brokenness to the justice system. Finding someone guilty for defamation for claiming as false an accusation of rape made against them many years after the time of the alleged event, without furthr evidence, is a specific brokenness for this case.

Without answer, except for getting to make an actual defense in court? Twice?

His personal brand demanded that he make a spectacular, performative stink about the issue, rather than issuing a press release and letting the lawyers sort it out. The jury decided that was the wrong choice.

I don’t see the problem with assigning a monetary incentive not to be maximally inflammatory.

2024, The fallacious ad hominem known as tone policing becomes law.

Always has been.

No, really. “Obscenity” is a bad enough category as it is. “Fighting words” is another. We ask judges and juries to assess the tone of speech all the time, which is part of the reason “actual malice” shows up in libel laws.

Trump could absolutely have chosen to sue her for defamation for her claim. There is no legal double standard in that, beyond claims of "the rules don't matter."

Trump can also call her a liar without committing defamation, he has repeatedly chosen not to. The framework for the non-apology apology is so well known at this point that it's practically available as a template on EForms next to promissory notes and ground leases.

That he's failed to do so is a matter of temperament.

Trump could absolutely have chosen to sue her for defamation for her claim.

He did. His claim got thrown out.

Do you have a link to that anywhere? I wasn't aware he had tried, I can't find that noted in the articles I'm looking at (though obviously it is possible it was left out intentionally).

It gets mentioned occasionally. Here.

Thanks! Very helpful.

The compensatory vs punitive damage awards clearly indicate that the bulk of the $83 mm is to convince Trump that he should really quit talkin' shit about Carroll.

It's clearly political.

How so?

I’d have expected loud, grating defamation to be very unpopular with a jury whether or not politics was involved. It pattern-matches to an “above the law” stereotype that Americans really, really don’t like.

Carroll didn't surface her claims until after Trump was president, for a book she was writing. She accused other men but sued Trump.

The case would not have progressed if not for New York State passing a new law to extend the statute of limitations in cases of rape. It was understood that this would allow Carroll to sue Trump over her claims.

Her lawsuit has been funded by Reid Hoffman, the same billionaire donor who (until recently) was funding Nikki Haley's campaign.

The judge was prejudiced against Trump from the start. The evidence his lawyer tried to admit was not allowed. Trump was largely prevented from speaking, on the grounds that the fact that he violated Carroll had already been established, so he could say nothing in his own defense. What little Trump did say the judge instructed jurors to ignore, except for his yesses and nos. The judge then instructed jurors to remember that they had the power to punish Trump with punitive damages. Maybe it's possible a New York jury decided to interpret these instructions in a totally apolitical way? I severely doubt it.

Trump's "defamation" was calling Carroll a liar who made up her claim to sell books. She demonstrably lied in several instances (the judge instructed the jury to ignore all such evidence every time it came up). Several of the remarks, in fact, were made by Trump before the statute of limitations was changed so Carroll could evensue him for rape.

The whole thing is political, from front to end. There is nothing ordinary about this case. The jury judges and accuser deserve no benefit of the doubt. That Trump has been declared guilty is obviously, facially, against a plain reading of the facts. The most obvious explanation is that it is political.

The judge was prejudiced against Trump from the start. The evidence his lawyer tried to admit was not allowed. Trump was largely prevented from speaking, on the grounds that the fact that he violated Carroll had already been established, so he could say nothing in his own defense. What little Trump did say the judge instructed jurors to ignore, except for his yesses and nos. The judge then instructed jurors to remember that they had the power to punish Trump with punitive damages.

How is any of this evidence of the judge being prejudiced?

The evidence his lawyer tried to admit was not allowed.

Surely you recognise that it is absolutely routine for judges to make rulings on what things can and can't be used as evidence in a case? If you want to claim the judge did something wrong here you'll need to argue he applied the rules of evidence incorrectly or something.

Trump was largely prevented from speaking, on the grounds that the fact that he violated Carroll had already been established, so he could say nothing in his own defense. What little Trump did say the judge instructed jurors to ignore, except for his yesses and nos.

Yes, and this is entirely appropriate. They already had a whole other trial to determine if he sexually assaulted her, and it found that he did. This was a defamation trial over whether or not he defamed her, and if so, over how much he owed her in damages. The judge ensured that the jury only considered evidence relevant to the case before them.

The judge then instructed jurors to remember that they had the power to punish Trump with punitive damages.

Should he have not informed the jury of what they could and could not do??

The compensatory vs punitive damage awards clearly indicate that the bulk of the $83 mm is to convince Trump that he should really quit talkin' shit about Carroll.

If the accusation is false, just shut up, fork over the dough, and take the lumps? I wouldn't be inclined to do that myself were I accused of a serious crime. But this is getting outside the limits I want to impose on the question, which is just: is the account as given credible?

I'll discount Rashomon as too much nuance and take it that, without supporting evidence, your view is neither claim is good enough to stand up on its own?

Okay, that's tangential to the question I am asking, and I should have left it out. Basically, do you find (a) one of these (b) both of these (c) neither of these accounts credible?

I want to avoid all the political stuff around them, because that's getting us nowhere and everyone has their own opinions. The media sure do, but going down those rabbit holes is a distraction.

What kicked this off for me is all the "look at all the court cases Trump is facing" and this is one of them. So forgetting, as best we can, the individuals involved or the three-ring-circus around it all, insofar as the first has been a successful court case or two, just on the bare accounts of the parties making the accusations: do the good people, folx, or however you all like to describe yourselves of The Motte, as reasonably intelligent and sane persons, think that either/both/neither account is credible and second, you'd convict on that alone?

I can accept "yeah this sounds like it could have happened, but I wouldn't be sure enough in a court of law to convict on it" if that's how you feel. I'm trying to get a gauge on how these two accounts sound to other people, outside my own views and opinions (for what it's worth, the more I hear about the Carroll case the more I'm shifting towards "she's lying" but that's not helping me decide if the bare account of the accusation, with no witnesses to back it up, sounds credible to others).

Okay, that's tangential to the question I am asking, and I should have left it out.

I'm curious what's tangential.

The Motte, as reasonably intelligent and sane persons, think that either/both/neither account is credible and second, you'd convict on that alone?

I repeat: Neither claim is provably true in a way that should lead to legal consequences for the accused. But neither is it provably untrue in a way that should lead to legal consequences for the women involved.

The entire concept of a "conviction" (or any kind of verdict, as we're talking about civil not criminal trials here) on the basis of one person's testimony to behavior that happened decades ago is obscene. It is contrary to the idea of civil liberties and limited government. Full stop. If in the jury box I'd be a vote against, regardless of the law involved.

Trying to adjudicate who had sex with whom and how into it they were decades ago is a morass. Trying to do so is obscene, and should not be a part of our politics. Full stop. That was my position on Brett Kavanaugh, on Tara Reade, on Trump's various women, it'll be my position on the next one too.

(for what it's worth, the more I hear about the Carroll case the more I'm shifting towards "she's lying" but that's not helping me decide if the bare account of the accusation, with no witnesses to back it up, sounds credible to others).

It's extremely likely that she is lying, or simply wrong, about multiple details of any quick moving event that happened decades ago. Trump, in turn, denied ever knowing her and said she was so ugly he'd never fuck her anyway; when confronted under oath with photos of their meeting, Trump misidentified Carroll as his then-mistress/later-second-wife Maples. Humans aren't actually so good at this stuff.

But neither is it provably untrue in a way that should lead to legal consequences for the women involved.

Jean Carroll has demonstrably lied.

because as my evidence prof put it "Either Rape law is wrong or evidence law is wrong, but they can't both be correct." The standard of evidence demanded in rape law is so far below the standard demanded in virtually every other felony that the result is absurd

Right.

I want to highlight a stark ideological divergence on the motte: people here often vaguely criticize the modern ‘framework of consent’. It brings to mind feminist consent-a-outrance ideas, where second-to-second affirmative consent in the presence of a notary is the current_year standard for wholesome sex. Haha, so ridiculous, let’s all bond over another pinkhair joke. Wrong. We are not the same. We’re bitter enemies, laughing from opposite sides.

In one corner, the defenders of the rights of the accused , like your prof. They think the exceptional burden on the accused to prove innocence, and therefore consent, is already far too heavy. That people now routinely record consent on their phones before sex out of fear, is a clear sign that the state is way out of line, taking liberties with people’s liberties.

In the other, radfems and traditionalists, who don’t think women’s consent matters at all. Women may keep the neighbours awake with their enthusiastic consent, but they don’t know what’s good for them (abstinence) , they’ve been brainwashed by the patriarchy or coerced by men’s greater physical force . Any non-lesbian, non-procreative sex is prima facie proof of grave societal failure, all hanky-panky pacts are null and void, all people who had unauthorized fun should be punished period.

So the first group laughs at pinkhair’s onerous consent norms because the accused should long have been acquitted, and the second laughs because the accused should long have been condemned.

So…Donald Trump already ought to have been condemned, therefore the trial is ridiculous?

I don’t believe I’ve seen a radfem draw such a conclusion. The closest would be those arguing that even if he didn’t assault Carroll, he’s surely guilty of raping someone. But those people are hardly calling the trials illegitimate. Where are these radfems making common cause with the legal conservatives?

Conversely, how often do you see a hardline traditionalist criticizing Trump? Set aside the general scarcity of such folks. It’s much easier to quietly opt out of politics than it is to shoot your team’s mascot.

I think you’ve built a Moldbug-worthy category, and that it doesn’t actually describe any real ideological divergence.

It's not about trump, it's about the consent discourse on themotte. I thought about posting it on its own, but it was a bit light, and fivehour's prof's quote was the reason I wrote it, so I just plonked it here.

Obviously the massive black hole of the trump culture war angle isn't helpful for delineating the kind of objective doctrinal disagreement that interests me here.

Conversely, how often do you see a hardline traditionalist criticizing Trump?

There's dozens of us! Dozens!

In the other, radfems and traditionalists, who don’t think women’s consent matters at all.

I would not agree with this characterization or the description that follows it. Of course the woman's consent matters. The problem is that due to the private and intimate nature of sexuality, consent simply cannot be determined in any objective or rigorous fashion in a large percentage of cases. Instead, it is very obvious that most disputes over consent in intimate relationships are going to devolve into a he-said-she-said situation, and that there is no practical way to prevent this, even in principle. And yet we still have to pick a norm, and the choice is between favoring accusers or favoring the accused. Both options appear to enable bad actors about equally, and it's not obvious that being falsely accused of rape is significantly more or less traumatic than being raped. Given the givens, which side should we come down on?

Setting the default in favor of the accused makes fornication significantly safer for those most inclined to engage in it, and setting the default in favor of the accuser makes fornication significantly riskier for those most inclined to engage in it. Traditionalists have no interest in preserving low-risk fornication, as they generally believe it is harmful to all involved, which is exactly why this has become an issue for current- and last-generation progressives in the first place: the norms the previous generation of progressives created and cemented have caused such obvious harm that the current generation is demanding a major overhaul of our justice system as a result. This entire dispute to be obvious fallout from the unworkable sexual norms promulgated by the sexual revolution, which we never agreed to and have no interest in shoring up against its own internal contradictions. We have no interest in helping to minimize risk for those fornicators most dedicated to pushing the risk envelope, because we think that such actions are bad and are happy to see them discouraged. We do not expect the downsides of favoring the accuser to affect us, since part of being a Traditionalist is agreeing that fornication, much less edge-pushing fornication, is a bad idea and shouldn't be done. If those who disagree wish to push the envelope anyway, they can do so at their own risk.

More generally, though, Traditionalists just see all this as not our chair, not our problem. Traditionalists do not generally believe that "affirmative consent" will actually work; it will simply shift the damage profile around. Both solutions seem stupid and awful, and mainly we're just watching in horrified fascination and doing everything we can to keep clear of the fallout zone.

that most disputes over consent in intimate relationships are going to devolve into a he-said-she-said situation, and that there is no practical way to prevent this, even in principle.

That's only a small part of the problem. Modern rape laws, and further ‘anti-rape’ lobbying efforts, are attacking consent as a defense, like they attack every defense. It’s not just ambiguity. The schema is not : he-said, she-said, what shall we do? ; but he-said-yes, she-said-yes, – still rape. If you’re drunk – consent invalid. If you’re a student or an employee – consent invalid. You agree the woman's consent does not matter to you in those cases?

I think the story is really a straightforward conspiracy by radfems and trads to impose their sexless tyrrany by classifying all sex as a felony. They haven't achieved it completely yet, but they're getting there.

And yet we still have to pick a norm, and the choice is between favoring accusers or favoring the accused.

For centuries, for all other crimes, it’s the accused . He gets the presumption of innocence. The acccuser has to prove a crime occurred. But we have allowed our justice system to be inverted and perverted in this holy crusade against rape. The rape our culture encourages, according to feminists.

We do not expect the downsides of favoring the accuser to affect us

I don’t think you can contain the damage to your outgroup. Your leaders are constantly being targeted under the absurd rape laws. I don’t think total abstinence or the pence rule can protect you from the sanctification of Woman’s Word. Remember, evidence is no longer required. Evidence Law is an obstacle to victims getting justice.

As you say, “it's not obvious that being falsely accused of rape is significantly more or less traumatic than being raped.”, therefore I’d have to side with any woman accusing you and send you to prison regardless of what actually happened.

Traditionalists do not generally believe that "affirmative consent" will actually work

yeah, because you don’t believe in consent. Sex is bad and consent is irrelevant, just like your radfem sisters.

The schema is not : he-said, she-said, what shall we do? ; but he-said-yes, she-said-yes, – still rape.

Proving they both actually said yes is impossible.

We just saw an example of this within the last few days: a rape scandal in Canadian junior-league hockey. From that thread, we have a description of video evidence recorded by the accused, explicitly to establish consent:

Two videos taken on the night of the incident were shown to reporters by lawyers representing some of the players. In the first, which was recorded within the hotel room at 3:25 a.m. on June 19, 2018, E.M. can be seen from the neck up. A male voice can be heard saying “You’re ok with this?” “I’m ok with this,” she replied. In the second, which is 12 seconds long, and which was taken at 4:26 a.m., E.M. appears to be covering herself with a towel. “Are you recording me?” she asks. “Ok, good. It was all consensual. You are so paranoid, holy. I enjoyed it, it was fine. It was all consensual. I am so sober, that’s why I can’t do this right now.”

The Globe story also revealed a text message conversation between E.M. and one of the players in the hours after she left the hotel room. The player begins by asking E.M. whether she had gone to the police. The woman said she had spoken to her mother and her mother had called police against her wishes. “You said you were having fun,” the player wrote. “I was really drunk, didn’t feel good about it at all after. But I’m not trying to get anyone in trouble,” she replied. “I was ok with going home with you, it was everyone else afterwards that I wasn’t expecting. I just felt like I was being made fun of and taken advantage of.”

This evidence was obviously insufficient to protect the men in question, as they were nonetheless accused of rape and were prosecuted, with disastrous results for their careers and their lives. Nor is this surprising, given that people here are willing to argue that such evidence is insufficient to establish consent.

You can have video evidence of consent that matters. For example, if there's a video of the same woman shot in a safe space before the gangbang telling the camera how excited she is to have sex with not just one, but five hockey players.

When you are in a hotel room with five guys who are built like literal hockey players and they are growing increasingly frantic about you giving them video evidence that you willingly had sex with them, even if the room is not locked and they are not barring your way out, the inherent power disparity means that lying on camera is the safer option than risking one of them snapping.

I disagree with the above statement, because it seems to me that the problem is in fact an infinite regress. If you have video of them giving consent, they can claim the video is coerced. If you have video of the entire encounter, they can claim they were coerced before filming began, and then the "start" of the video was staged. And of course such coercion is entirely possible, even if one might suspect it unlikely.

The problem is that sex is not, in fact, a safe source of unadulterated, low-stakes, trivial fun. It remains a deeply powerful and fundamentally meaningful act, despite generations of propaganda to the contrary, and with that power and fundamental meaning comes an irreducible capacity for serious harm. You can ignore that fact, as our society strove to do for some decades, but the consequences accumulate and sooner or later must be addressed. Telling people that sex was meaningless fun didn't make it true, it only encouraged them to walk blind into extremely painful realities.

If you’re drunk – consent invalid.

We have no rigorous way of measuring intoxication after the alcohol has left the system, and even timestamped breathalyzers suffer from the same problem as the video evidence above.

If you’re a student or an employee – consent invalid.

This fails for the same reasons the video evidence does. You can't prove a negative, and nothing less will be accepted because the accumulated harm demands that something be done. By all means, argue that the women should tough it out and that if they make the wrong call, they eat the consequences. I won't be the one you're arguing against, but I'm skeptical you'll prevail in any arena more consequential or connected to the real world than this one. People generally sympathize with women for solid, well-founded reasons; the fact that our current social dysfunctions render this sympathy increasingly toxic doesn't mean that withdrawing it will result in anything actually improving on net. Some fraction of men will abuse women if they can, and a much larger fraction of men will take advantage of women in a way that will inflict trauma on those women long-term. Given our current social structure, the women are in a position to do something about it, and woe betide those who get in their way.

You agree the woman's consent does not matter to you in those cases?

"Consent" is necessary but insufficient. That is very different from it "not mattering". You want fornication with fewer consequences for men and worse consequences for women, the radfems want fornication with fewer consequences for women and more consequences for men. I think you both are awful for basically identical reasons, and would not willingly live under either of your regimes.

I think the story is really a straightforward conspiracy by radfems and trads to impose their sexless tyrrany by classifying all sex as a felony.

Or perhaps the current system is a straightforward conspiracy by tits-and-beer "liberals" and people like you to continue getting away with rape and abuse. But wouldn't that be rather an uncharitable accusation?

In any case, your claim of "All sex" is obviously unsupportable. The radfems have no ability to criminalize the sex I have with my wife. The sex they seek to criminalize and you apparently seek to enable is not the sex we are currently having, nor the sex we intend to have in the future. I am safe from the radfems, and my wife is safe from the pickup artists or whoever. Nothing prevents you or anyone else from forming long-term pair bonds based on deep trust and mutual commitment and avoiding the whole mess entirely, all the while enjoying all the high-quality sex you please. Denying strangers access to your wallet and genitals is a simple, straightforward policy with much to recommend it, and safe sex is as much a myth as safe guns or safe liquor. Even if you have no interest in controlling your sexual appetites, you can at least take a cue from Diogenes: "would that I could sooth the pangs of hunger by rubbing my belly."

Alternatively, pay your money and take your chances. Just don't complain when the dice come up snake-eyes.

For centuries, for all other crimes, it’s the accused.

For centuries, we had strong social and legal restrictions that were effective at preventing and punishing premarital sex, and understood that this was good and necessary. Our societies understood that men and women are fundamentally different, and that "equality" between their legal interests is not really possible. Then we burned all that down because, like all good children of the Enlightenment, We Knew Better. And now those changes that you preferred have created such misery that changes you don't prefer are being forced through anyway.

I don’t think you can contain the damage to your outgroup. Your leaders are a constantly being targeted under the absurd rape laws. I don’t think total abstinence or the pence rule can protect you from the sanctification of Woman’s Word.

It is not a perfect defense, and it certainly cannot protect us from a Blue Tribe enjoying complete social and political dominance. Nor does it protect us as well as, say, the favor of the nakedly corrupt actors exploiting that dominance. It protects us better than anything you can offer, though. I am not immune to being me-too'd, but I am as close to immune as I can reasonably be, and probably closer to immune than I would be if I tried to convert to Bluedom, simply from social effects.

Remember, evidence is no longer required. Evidence Law is an obstacle to victims getting justice.

Sure. But not living around Blues and minimizing my interaction with them means that I have almost zero social contact with people who actually believe this, or would be willing to exploit it. That's the actual defense, and the fact that it breaks down when attempting to share institutions with Blues is simply more proof that such coexistence is a bad idea in general. In any case, my system gives the best chance of survival available to people like me. The accusations used to smear Kavanaugh were an appalling injustice, but his strict adherence to avoiding stupid antics spared him. If he'd spent his life maximizing body count as opposed to keeping meticulous journals of his day-to-day activities, there is zero chance he would have survived them.

The Pence Rule works, which is one of the reasons that I consider attempts to smear it as sexism to be so appalling.

As you say, “it's not obvious that being falsely accused of rape is significantly more or less traumatic than being raped.”, therefore I’d have to side with any woman accusing you and send you to prison regardless of what actually happened.

I'll take my chances, and I like my odds. False rape accusations are about as low on my list of concerns as unwanted pregnancy (we want them) or HIV infection (blood transfusion after a major accident, maybe?). It's not a thing that's worth worrying about.

yeah, because you don’t believe in consent. Sex is bad and consent is irrelevant, just like your radfem sisters.

Consent is necessary but insufficient, which is very different from "not believing in consent". I do not believe that sex is bad; within a marriage, and maybe even within a committed relationship, it's absolutely fantastic. As a potentially-zero-sum competition between alienated atomic individualists, it's dangerous and stupid for everyone involved, like playing Russian roulette. The radfems are fools, and if people like you are successful in wresting social dominance from them, I'll fight you the same as I fight them now. What I won't do is agree that their brand of foolishness justifies your brand of foolishness, or ally with you to help your brand of foolishness win over theirs. You, like them, have nothing to offer people like me, other than to leave us alone.

Proving they both actually said yes is impossible.

No, that has actually been done here, there’s video, text messages, no one is disputing that she said yes.

‘He said she said ‘ goes : ‘He said she said yes, she said she said no’ – If he’s telling the truth, she said ‘yes’, so he’s innocent of rape. And if she said “no”, he’s guilty.

That’s not the situation here at all: all agree she said yes, but for some cockamamie reason the consent has been declared invalid so - schocker – he’s guilty, yet again.

You and the radfems don’t accept consent as a defense because you don’t accept innocence as a defense. The way you see it, he may be innocent of rape, but he’s still guilty of being a man and having sex.

This evidence was obviously insufficient to protect the men in question, as they were nonetheless accused of rape and were prosecuted, with disastrous results for their careers and their lives.

Right, and that's absurd. They have overshot the standard for innocence by several orders of magnitude. They should be released with the court’s deepest apologies, maybe teach the prosecutor what a real case should look like.

disagree with the above statement, because it seems to me that the problem is in fact an infinite regress. If you have video of them giving consent, they can claim the video is coerced.

No argument there. @orthoxerox is just another guy on the trad-radfem side, he does not recognize women’s consent because there’s always a man hiding in the bushes, coercing them.

The problem is that sex is not, in fact, a safe source of unadulterated, low-stakes, trivial fun.

I get it, you’re not big on sex, like your prophets before you.

We have no rigorous way of measuring intoxication after the alcohol has left the system, and even timestamped breathalyzers suffer from the same problem as the video evidence above.

I don’t give a shit? Drinking does not put the responsibility for your actions on others in any other context (drunk driving, getting into a fistfight, etc).

You can't prove a negative, and nothing less will be accepted because the accumulated harm demands that something be done.

Maybe the ‘accumulated harm’ demands that all Jan 6 protestors be sent to prison. The accumulated harm is not a real thing here.

People generally sympathize with women for solid, well-founded reasons

You can sympathize with women, admire them, fear them, as much as you like. Their legal ability to turn their agency and reasoning faculties on and off at will still won’t make any sense.

If the employee, the student, the woman, cannot be counted on to make one decision because her body is weak and her mind easily influenced, how can she be counted on to make any?

You want fornication with fewer consequences for men and worse consequences for women

No, in the absence of evidence for a crime, I want no consequences at all.

would not willingly live under either of your regimes.

Not only are you living under the radfem one, you’re a pillar of it.

The radfems have no ability to criminalize the sex I have with my wife.

She could easily accuse you, anytime, of getting insufficiently affirmative enthusiastic continual consent, that one time in boca. Marital rape is a common thing, you know. Oh god, she wasn’t drunk, was she?

You, like them, have nothing to offer people like me, other than to leave us alone.

I originally set out to find where the battle lines really are in this triangle. And I think it’s pretty clear that you are in fact allied to radfems, in your shared hatred of ‘fornication’ and in support of modern rape and harassment laws, against classical liberals like me.

I don’t give a shit? Drinking does not put the responsibility for your actions on others in any other context (drunk driving, getting into a fistfight, etc).

"Friends don't let friends drive drunk". While it's not (yet) a legal duty, it's now a moral duty to stop your friend from getting behind the wheel, even if that means they can't give you a ride or that you'll have to pay for their ride home. And yes, this moral duty means you have to drink less yourself if you see your friend getting sloshed and bragging about their driving ability. And if you challenge them to a race, thinking they are more willing to answer that challenge and more likely to lose when drunk, then you will end up in legal trouble.

A), it's still their responsibility, even if I have a residual advisory duty to help them avoid death.

B), I have no such moral duty to prevent strangers and friends alike from having sex.

It's only a moral duty if you accept the state as a moral authority. If you believe in a higher authority or a superseding principle - like the idea that a person is only moral if they are responsible for their actions, then your duty is to uphold that principle. Forgoing that principle to look after your friend then puts the responsibility on you, but that is by choice.

I apologize that it has taken this long to respond to the reports on this comment, but the mod team discussed it and is very broadly of the view that this is a terrible post. It's antagonistic, primarily, but also stuffs a lot of words into other people's mouths. It doesn't discuss the culture wars, but merely wages them. And this will be the sixth time you're banned for it.

I entertained the idea of making it something long term, like maybe 90 days--we used to do a fair number of those back on the subreddit. But some mods suggested a permaban, and it seems nobody could think of a good reason to not permaban you. So, that's what I'm doing.

In case anyone's wondering about this ban, the real reason is that fuckduck got into a fight with a mod the other day, but the clique needed another excuse to ban him.
I probably should have made an alt account to say this, because now I'll probably get perma'ed for misusing an apostrophe next week or something.

Edit: called it https://www.themotte.org/post/851/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/184547?context=8#context

Why not the 90 day ban, though? Isn't that a more reasonable default?

Looking at the mod log, I think his most recent ban was for two weeks, so it would still have been a pretty substantial step up, six times as long (though maybe one of the others was longer, I didn't look).

I don't know, when people are willing to talk, and seem sincere (which seemed to me to be the case here), it seems reasonable to set cap bans at a few years.

Even if you end up needing to ban them again years down the line, there's a difference in messaging between "you'd be welcome back later, if only you can behave" and "leave, and never come back," and the former seems better. Even if the one in question isn't likely to listen, it sends the message better to everyone else that it isn't about personal antagonism.

Or so it seems to me, but you surely have the experience I do not.

(this is not to say that I disagree that the comment was pretty bad)

More comments

You, like them, have nothing to offer people like me, other than to leave us alone.

Then perhaps people like you should side with the sorts of people that will leave you alone (and have a lengthy track record of doing so), rather than the ones that will not, so that when socioeconomic conditions stop being able to sustain liberalism and that freedom dries up it's your brand of [master] morality and not theirs with a better chance of coming out on top.

People generally sympathize with women for solid, well-founded reasons

Reasons which are no longer relevant or correct, but their biological and cultural inertia remains. Traditionalism has, traditionally, never needed to come up with an answer for why women with the same (or more) sociopolitical power as men should obey rules meant to deal with the problems women create when they're the less powerful gender; that's the entire reason why it's been losing ground for the 300ish years since the Industrial Revolution. Traditionalist moral philosophy just isn't set up to handle post-scarcity environments for what should be obvious reasons, and corruption in post-scarcity environments is inherently progressive-biased anyway (as the former masters of North America, being a network of matriarchies that failed to advance technologically in any way over the 10,000 years they had the continent to themselves under functionally post-scarcity conditions, demonstrate).

This is perceptive. I plead guilty: I criticize the consent-only sexual ethic without really having a credible substitute to replace it.

I admit that I have trouble separating the context from the tale, but neither of these has either the ring of total truth or sounds so ridiculous that it's obviously false (e.g. that stupid Rolling Stone story).

The difference in outcomes is pretty obviously based on context and the behavior of the individuals involved. Reade appears to be an actual Russian asset. Trump can't shut the fuck up and take legal advice. I wouldn't describe the outcome as "fair", but what's fair got to do with anything in these sorts of proceedings?

Reade appears to be an actual Russian asset.

While I haven't kept up with this story in extreme detail, this is the first I've heard of this accusation. What makes that so apparent?

She defected to Russia:

“I’m still kind of in a daze a bit but I feel very good,” Reade told Sputnik, a Russian press outlet supportive of President Vladimir Putin, while sitting with Maria Butina, a convicted Russian agent jailed in the US but now a member of parliament in Russia.

“I feel very surrounded by protection and safety,” Reade said on Tuesday.

...

Sitting next to Butina, Reade said: “I just really so appreciate Maria and everyone who’s been giving me [protection] at a time when it’s been very difficult to know if I’m safe or not.

“I just didn’t want to walk home and walk into a cage or be killed, which is basically my two choices.”

I don't know, maybe she really believed that she was going to be murdered for accusing Joe Biden of sexual assault. I am cynical enough to think that the order of operations with regard to buddying up with Maria Butina and accusing Biden of assault might have gone the opposite direction to what she now states though.

In this case I think he’s in the right of not taking legal advice. The issue in my view is the law is wrong. This should have been statute of limitations. It’s far from certain he did this and he should have the right to defend himself in public.

His ignorance of legal advice on this manner is something I do admire about him. It’s the whole giving the FU to the system thing and believe every women. Many other men without his power have been destroyed by false accusations.

People aren’t voting for Trump because he’s a guy that’s going to capitulate to a jury and a judge. His whole game is destroying the deep state which means he’s going to stand up to all these things. Deescalating these matters would mean Ron Desantis is our next POTUS.

Doesn't really matter. As has become the common practice in trials of right-wing figures for defamation (Giuliani, Jones, and Trump), they skipped directly to the penalty phase this time.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't it the case that Guiliani and Jones both refused to comply with their discovery obligations?

E Jean Carroll's account is inherintly less beliveable because she has no evidence of contact. It's just a claim that a random celebrity raped her in a store fitting room years ago.

Tara Reade at least had verifiable professional contact with Biden.

I have a problem with both accounts. Carroll comes off as a nutter. Reade looks like she's coming forward because of some other grevances. I think Reade could be exagerating.

She has a photo of herself and Trump together.

Let's just get all the "but of course he did it, he's the type of guy, grab 'em by the pussy" stuff out of the way. "Reade is crazy, she's a Russian asset, it was all lies". Ignore all that. Try, as far as you can, to put the background and any opinions you have on X versus Y out of your mind. Just go by the statements of what was accused and alleged and no interpretation "well of course A is the type to do this so B is telling the truth but C is not the type so D is lying"... Again, no 'afterwards we learned this or we heard that', just judge the two accounts on what is said here and which you find credible, if either, or both, or none.

Why are we ignoring humongous amounts of Bayesian evidence here, exactly?

Yeah, if we just took the singular initial victim statement and judged the case based on how persuasive that was out of context, then we might judge a lot of cases differently. Probably we would find in favor of educated and well-spoken victims who know how to craft a persuasive narrative. That's not a good thing.

Why does Carroll get an $83 million payout for Trump saying she's a liar while Reade - doesn't?

Because one was defamed and one wasn't?

'That didn't happen' said a few times in response to questions isn't defamation. Taking time out in a bunch of your stump speeches and social media posts to call her a whackjob and crazy liar and say you never met her and fire up your followers to attack and harass her and ruin her career is defamation.

Like a lot of cases that come up here, the reason Trump gets a harsher sentence/any punishment at all is his own behavior around the event at question. Yes, there's a difference between discovering that you accidentally held onto some confidential documents, immediately notifying the relevant agencies to turn them over and ask if there's anything else you should do, and ordering your staff to do an internal audit to make sure it hasn't happened anywhere else, vs intentionally taking dozens of boxes of confidential documents to your home, bragging about it and showing them to people, denying it and lying repeatedly when the feds inquire about it, trying to cover them up and hiding more when the feds come to get them, and etc. etc. etc. Malicious intent matters for sentencing.

Why are we ignoring humongous amounts of Bayesian evidence here, exactly?

Because I'm not interested in "Trump is a sleazeball and Biden is just a funny old guy" arguments over who did it and who didn't do it and why one is bad and the other is good. That's not the evidence I want to consider. I want to look at the bare accusations and see what makes them credible, implausible, or one is better than the other. Supposing Carroll hadn't accused Trump but John Nobody. Would that change the view of "yes it's true" on 'Bayesian evidence'? Same with Reade - if she had picked Republican Tom Thompson the 19th instead of Joe Biden, would she have magically been more credible?

I want to avoid that, and look at the allegations in isolation so we can decide without clouding the issue. Then we can argue over "is this just evidence that they're out to get Trump with nuisance lawsuits" or not. I wanted as unbiased as I could get (in full knowledge that there's no change of no bias at all) views on "this is the accusation here, that is the accusation there, do these seem plausible or not?" and you guys are about as good as I can hope to get on that.

Ok, I think that's illegitimate in itself - these impressions of these people don't come from nowhere, the things they are built from are legit evidence - but fine, we can ignore that.

But the trial itself contains plenty of evidence beyond that one paragraph you cite as the only thing we're supposed to judge on.

Absent literally anything other than the written statements, sure, both seems plausible, both are things that can happen. Unless you're finding logical inconsistencies, things that are actually impossible, it's a bad idea to put too much weight on a single paragraph-or-two written statement... people vary too much in how good they are at recounting things in a coherent narrative, weird or surprising things happen all the time in real life (authors always talk about how coincidences in real life wouldn't be plausible in fiction), all human memories are fallible and getting a detail or two wrong years later doesn't mean the incident didn't happen, etc.

You always need more evidence than that to make any kind of confident judgement, which is why there's an investigation and a trial where they bring out other evidence.

Sorry to be graphic, but as a logistical matter, it's very hard to imagine how Trump could have inserted his penis into her vagina while she was both 1. standing up and 2. actively resisting him. In this scenario as written, he has his hand with fingers in a V-shape at her crotch, surrounding her vagina, and then he sort of squats down while maintaining pressure against her crotch, in order to thrust upward with his penis through his open fingers. At the same time, he is supposed to be pinning her against the wall with his shoulder. The shoulder of the same hand or of the other hand? At one point he grabbed both her arms and pinned her against the wall, but then he is using his hands to undress himself and putting one hand between her legs. Is she still resisting at this moment or not?

As written, the whole thing just seems impossible, it could have happened if she "gave up" at some point, but it could not have happened in the way she describes.

Yeah, it's the logistics of it that I find difficult. As someone who has worn tights, unless he flipped her round, it's very hard to see how he could have inserted his penis into her vagina while pulling them down unless he ripped/tore them so he could part her legs sufficiently. I think, but I'm not sure, that an earlier version of the story was that he digitally penetrated her, which is more plausible, but if you're going to claim rape then you probably need penile penetration as the event. Though a judge said that Carroll saying she was raped, even if the jury found that was not the crime, was substantially true so maybe you just need to pick the right target and "he looked at me with lust in his eyes, I was raped" is good enough for an NY judge?

maybe you just need to pick the right target and "he looked at me with lust in his eyes, I was raped" is good enough for an NY judge?

It's more like if you're found to have sexually assaulted a woman, and she says you raped her, then the difference between those two actions is not big enough for you to be allowed to sue her for defamation. The judge did not do any independent fact-finding of his own, he was bound to accept the jury's verdict.

I think, but I'm not sure, that an earlier version of the story was that he digitally penetrated her, which is more plausible, but if you're going to claim rape then you probably need penile penetration as the event.

This seems to have been the jury's assessment as well. They said he didn't rape her but did sexually assault her, which is consistent with a finding that he stuck his finger in her but not his penis.

Carroll testified that her tights were not removed or ripped. He allegedly forced a kiss on her, and I don't see any description of flipping her around.

She said she was wearing four inch heels; I don't know if that would improve or worsen the angles.

Well I wasn't there so I can't say, but if she's allegedly having her tights forcefully pulled down while she's resisting and he's attempting to put tab A into slot B, then.... I can't see how she gets away with that, when simply pulling on a pair of tights the wrong way can ladder them for me.

Maybe I need to update my priors in light of many recent events but I have a hard time believing someone would completely make up an encounter versus exaggerate. I’ve read enough PUA material and know enough high body count guys that I feel like I know how they think.

A lot of girls do fail to give consent when perfectly willing and I think a lot of playboys have internalized that and act with some aggression. My guess is Trump did pursue her for a fling and was likely aggressive and probably handsy.

My probabilities

90% an encounter occurred between her and Trump

30% he crossed a line. Which I would say is digital penetration

<10% he raped her in the common usage sense. And I’m like closer to <1% especially since it’s in a semi-public space

I’m under no illusion Trump is some kind of Saint. The jury award is silly and is a prime example of why we have statute of limitations. I wouldn’t be shocked if Trump did it and has zero recollection of it.

She has failed to substantiate any of her claims. The dress she claims to have worn during the encounter did not exist at the time she alleges it happened. She otherwise has not given details on when exactly it occurred. She has a history of making rape accusations against men. And the primary funder of her legal expenses is the same billionaire Reid Hoffman who funded the Nikki Haley campaign.

Put it up there with Christine Blasey Ford, or the UVA rape hoax. Jussie Smollet's story was more plausible.

I’ve read enough PUA material and know enough high body count guys that I feel like I know how they think.

I've had lots of sex. I don't walk into dressing rooms and rape the first woman I find.

Jussie Smollet's story was more plausible.

Ah now. Regardless of whether Carroll's version of events is true, things like it have happened - men have sexually assaulted women in semi-public spaces like changing rooms or fitting rooms. (The fact that they have - and do - is a major component of the dominant culture war issue du jour.) Nothing like Smollett's story has ever happened to anyone - there was no part of it which passed the smell test.

Good points. I did pre-qualify that I may need to update my priors.

I think it’s come from operation in a mistake theory mindset versus a conflict theory mindset. Mistake theory being a mentally ill lady perhaps with tds would magnify something that did happen in her head as she grew to hate Trump the President. Conflict theory being along the lines of people might actually just completely make things up ala Smollette for gain.

The part that makes this less believable is it occurring during the middle of the day in a public space where a simple scream would have place Donald Trump in cuffs and away for a few years. If the accusation was at 3 am after a night at the club it would seem more plausible.

Reid Hoffman point I give no credence to. Acting legally by funding opposition candidates in a Democracy is a lot different than participating in a fraudulent accusation. The only slight negative for Hoffman is I doubt he would ever vote for Haley so funding her I would consider as acting in bad faith.

occurring during the middle of the day in a public space where a simple scream would have place Donald Trump in cuffs and away for a few years.

You have a really different impression of how the legal system treated famous rich men in the 90s than I do.

This was around the same time as the OJ trial. If they can't convict a rich, famous man with the mountain of evidence present in that case and a nearly-decapitated body on the line, I don't see why they would bother to listen to some woman whining about getting fingered in a dressing room.

Maybe I'm wrong but I really believe the 90s were a different time to an almost impossible-to-convey degree, especially when it came to women being assaulted or abused. Even Anita Hill was turned into an attention-seeking floozy by the popular media of the day, every woman who got into the news accusing a famous or powerful man of something bad almost uniformly had their lives destroyed and stories inverted by the tabloid press of the day.

The claim seems to be that the dress was not made in 1994, at the early end of her time range. She had already shifted to probably 1996, because she didn't think her friend Lisa, in whom she had confided, would travel to Mar-a-Lago knowing about this attack.

I'm having trouble finding any precise claims about when this Donna Karan dress was made, so my assumption is that it was made in 1995.

It seems there should be some website going in deep with details of the 1996 Bergdorf floor layout, the sizes and colors the bodysuit were available in, etc. My search is failing me.

It seems there should be some website going in deep with details of the 1996 Bergdorf floor layout, the sizes and colors the bodysuit were available in, etc.

Surely this research would have been conducted by Trump’s legal team?

I have yet to see any evidence of Trump's legal team in any case being in any way competent.

From the court records, it seems that Carroll's lawyers introduced the floor layout into evidence, but I don't see how to download them. Obviously they didn't believe them to be exculpatory.

I don't know much about fashion, but this dress seems similar to Carroll's dress. Different color, but similar buttons, pockets, etc. Maybe a different cut, as this looks a little short to wear with just tights? This is a Spring 1995 fashion show, so it was plausibly introduced in 1995, and not available in 1994.

I’ve read enough PUA material and know enough high body count guys that I feel like I know how they think.

Let's remember that there is online PUA (un)reality and actual physical world PUA/high body count guy reality.

Online PUAs go hard into things like "last minute resistance" and "anti-slut defense." These are absolutely rapey and awful. And they're pretty much theoretical rationalizations and analysis created by soy boys LARPing as "PUAs" (any online subculture that has lots of acronyms is often populated by the same basic template nerds with various extra skins and other DLC attached.)

Actual, real life "PUA" types experience consent in absolutely black and white scenarios like "has she leaned over and asked me to f**k her? Is she actively unfastening my belt? Has she already gone ahead and leaned in for the kiss herself?" Real life PUAs look at a grey zone not just as a potential risk, but as a failure at the application of their skills. The idea isn't to jump her bones as she is perhaps just beginning to imagine an encounter, but to push the pre-physical seduction to such an extent that she is actively soliciting it in no uncertain terms - and will look back on it with genuine happiness. The parallel between real world PUA stuff and corporate sales is undeniable; don't sell them, make them want to buy the thing so bad they're shoving money at you. And make them happy to see you when you come back for a second time around (am I talking about sales or sex here .... I don't even know anymore).

Real life seduction / PUA / whatever you want to call it is about the challenge of generating real and powerful desire. It's not about weaseling into a grey area to be the sex-bandito who's in and out in a flash.

This is also why lots of (again, "real") PUAs leave that subculture - they want to level up to the next stage of generating real, powerful, and enduring desire over a long term relationship.

Because that is incredibly hard. And supremely worthwhile.

Actual, real life "PUA" types experience consent in absolutely black and white scenarios like "has she leaned over and asked me to f**k her? Is she actively unfastening my belt? Has she already gone ahead and leaned in for the kiss herself?"

Oh come on, there are plenty of real life promiscuous men who believe in the same stuff as your Internet PUAs, even if they don’t know the cringe terminology for it.

There are some men for whom seduction is about seduction, and for whom anything less than absolute enthusiasm would be unattractive and a turn-off, but there are many others who just want they dick wet, if you will.

Sure, I think all straight men on some level want women to find them attractive, but this isn’t a necessary precondition to want to fuck them, or no men would pay for it.

Sure, I think all straight men on some level want women to find them attractive, but this isn’t a necessary precondition to want to fuck them, or no men would pay for it.

That's a good point, which my post failed to consider.

Oh come on, there are plenty of real life promiscuous men who believe in the same stuff as your Internet PUAs, even if they don’t know the cringe terminology for it.

Sorry, but I have to "No True Scotsman" you on this one. Agree totally that there are a ton of guys with various levels of game that run around doing this shit. I tried, in my previous post, to call out the fact they aren't actually committed to developing the deeper skills and mindsets of "seduction" (aside: I don't like either the term PUA or seduction, but I can't think of a better one thats in common usage). To mix up some metaphors - knowing a few military phrases and having gone to one or two tactical training events doesn't make you a SEAL.

Just remember I apologized first before deploying my rhetorical ninja roll.

I spent time in the real life PUA community during it's heyday (eg regular lair meetups in different cities). While there are PUA's who act in the manner you've outlined, there are also absolutely PUA's who will aggressively try to push through last minute resistance. I know because I've heard them brag about it multiple times. I would not even be able to say the majority had graduated to the level of puissance you've described above.

Many were unskilled/had no idea what they were doing, or were skilled, but actually bad apples in the aggressive 'push through resistance' sense. I'd say 30% were both skilled at their craft and acting in good faith in the manner you describe above. I'd say 30% were just assholes using their powers (or lack thereof) for evil. At least 50% of guys were badly/untrained. There's a venn diagram with 4 circles between skilled/unskilled and kind/selfish players.

The bad guys exist. I don't mean to tar the PUA community with the same brush because the bad apples were still in the minority, and I knew that most guys just wanted to eventually get a girlfriend rather than go for a highscore on bodycount. But sights like the accuser stories above weren't unknown in the nightclubs (eg physically aggressive, unwanted advance). I'm not saying that's rape and deserves an $80 million payout, but it is what it is.

Online PUAs go hard into things like "last minute resistance" and "anti-slut defense." These are absolutely rapey and awful. And they're pretty much theoretical rationalizations and analysis created by soy boys LARPing as "PUAs" (any online subculture that has lots of acronyms is often populated by the same basic template nerds with various extra skins and other DLC attached.)

Meh. Such statements are needlessly generalizing and biased in my view. As far as I can tell, PUA recommendations/techniques mostly discussed LMR and ASD specifically in the context of one-night stands in clubs. Then again, such venues lost most of their relevance in the post-COVID digital age anyway.

I could believe that it was consensual between Carroll and Trump (who goes into a changing room with a man, with lingerie, to try it on by getting undressed in front of him? that's the kind of 'she must have been willing' assumption any guy would make) and that she later rejigged this into 'he assaulted me' when she lost her job as the advice columnist and needed money and publicity. Or it could all have been an invention from the start to sell her book. I'm leaning more and more to "she's lying" but that's precisely why I wanted outside views on "does this seem credible or not?" for both of them.

Carroll claims that Elle fired her because Trump disputed her claim about Trump assaulting her. The rape/assault accusation came first; it wasn't a later development. Even before her The Cut article, her income from Elle was in decline, and she's now finding more success at substack.

Carroll says one of the primary reasons she hadn't come forward earlier is that she blamed herself. On reflection, she says going into the changing room with Trump and lingerie was stupid. She agrees with your "who goes into" disbelief, but that isn't an excuse for assault.

She lampshades her telling, admitting it's inconceivable that Bergdorf would have a floor vacant of customers and staff. I don't know whether her account is credible, but the level of evidence seems underwhelming.

Tara Reade’s accusation seems more plausible, but I would have no trouble believing neither, or both, or Carrol but not Reade.

That’s the thing- we don’t know. Writing a rape accusation that doesn’t break the laws of physics is within the capabilities of college educated women, both are prominent men of the sort who false rape accusations, regardless of actual frequency, are probably more common towards, and both of them are old men with boundary issues who might plausibly have raped someone in the past. Obviously the defamation payout is politically motivated and obviously the case against Joe being dropped is politically motivated, but neither of those things has any bearing on whether it actually happened.

Why does Carroll get an $83 million payout for Trump saying she's a liar while Reade - doesn't?

Basically, because Trump is an idiot and Biden is not.

I don't believe Trump raped Carroll. She seems to me like a fantasist - possibly a crazy and malicious one, possibly just crazy. Either way, she seems pretty disconnected from reality. A good cross-examination should have destroyed her credibility. But the cross examination went terribly for Trump. And on the other side of the equation, he went and repeatedly made unnecessary false statements that diminished his own credibility (e.g. that he had never met her).

None of this proves he raped her of course. But it was a civil trial and the criminal law rules about giving the defendant the benefit of the doubt don't apply. The jury had to choose who they believed to be more credible based on what they were presented with in the courtroom.

And of course, there's the defamation element - which is actually where the big payout comes from. Listen to Biden denying the Tara Reade allegations - he says the claim is untrue, he points out that her story has changed, but he is careful not to accuse her of lying. Because that would give her a cause of action. Trump no doubt received similar legal advice but chose not to heed it.

And he continued to accuse her of lying even after he was found liable for sexual assault, and he continued to accuse her even after he had already been found to have defamed her in the first defamation case. And she has cause of action to sue him for defamation for a third time and get another payout! And when you keep doing the same thing you had to pay damages for already, don't be surprised when a jury decides that the penalty needs to scale up enough to actually deter you.

Biden said that Tara Read said untrue thing, Trump said E. Jean Carroll lied. That's a distinction without a difference. It's only meaningful to would-be intellectuals in the political and legal systems running augury-semantic power games.

It's not all like you say either: this case was deliberately weaponized against Trump, from the very beginning with the law that extended the statute of limitations in the first place. Yeah, sure, Trump is an idiot for not protecting himself from something that's never happened before. Biden is a mastermind. And I get to sit in judgment of both, because I've accepted the excuse du jour of rationalizing minds as something real that exists.

That's been a meaningful distinction for centuries, probably predating the Colonies.

Biden said that Tara Read said untrue thing, Trump said E. Jean Carroll lied. That's a distinction without a difference. It's only meaningful to would-be intellectuals in the political and legal systems running augury-semantic power games.

Yes, it is a meaningful distinction to the legal system. The question was why does Trump get punished by the legal system. It's because he doesn't play by the rules of the legal system. You can like that or dislike that about him, but it's why he keeps losing in court.

I don't think much would have been different if the statute of limitations had not been changed, either. The defamation claim was not outside the statute of limitations, and without a seperate trial on the abuse claim itself the first defamation trial would have just become a de facto sexual assault trial like Depp v Heard. It would still have had the same outcome where repeating the same claims that had been judged defamatory would open him up to further litigation where he would be bound by the outcome of the previous trial.

Biden said that Tara Read said untrue thing, Trump said E. Jean Carroll lied. That's a distinction without a difference.

No it isn't. Lying is saying something true with deliberate intent to deceive or mislead. It is, by definition, only a subset of saying untrue things. One can say untrue things without lying by:

  • someone says something untrue to you, and you believe it
  • misremembering
  • just plain old human error causing you to be mistaken

The difference is that those situations aren't generally considered to be a moral failing, while lying is. Therefore, it's derogatory to say a person is lying while it's neutral to say that what they said isn't true.

I believe both. Both men seem like sleazy perverts that would do this kind of thing. I assume most have seen Biden's creepy sniffing of children on live TV, kissing and so on. What does he do when the cameras aren't running? What kind of role model was he for Hunter, given how he turned out?

Then there's Trump's relations with Epstein, there's the quote: "He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life."

Note that none of this is 'hard proof' - but why would anyone expect facts to be rigorously, objectively confirmed in the most politically fraught matter imaginable? The facts were 'confirmed' in the case of Russiagate before the whole thing turned out to be a fraud. Why trust official facts in cases like this, considering the political sensitivity? The very existence of Epstein shows that there's a huge market for illicit sex, rape and so on amongst the US elite. Someone dealt with him before he could talk, he clearly had a lot of influential colleagues. These people can easily make facts disappear, they can make people disappear even inside a prison under 24 hour suicide watch. They are quite literally above the law. In the absence of facts, all that's left is vibes and both men give off pretty terrible vibes.

But do you believe both because "this seems like it did happen" or because your opinion of both accused is "they're the exact sleazy types who would do this?" That's what I'm trying to disentangle; I don't want to drag in the comparison of character between Trump and Biden, I want to compare both accounts on the bare accusation that "Such-and-such happened in this place" to see if one is more credible than the other, or both are, or neither are.

I don't believe either of them, but on the face of it, there's nothing in Reade's accusation that is not in Carroll's accusation, and I think it was primarily because of who the accused in both cases were that one was immediately believed and the other wasn't. That's no way to settle an accusation.

I believe they're the sleazy types who would do this.

I want to compare both accounts on the bare accusation that "Such-and-such happened in this place" to see if one is more credible than the other

But you can't separate facts from personalities and past events. We care about these people precisely because they're very powerful and influential, their personalities and pasts are of global significance. For example, juries in Australia weren't allowed to know that a woman had made false sexual assault complaints in the past, when deciding sex assault cases. This is, in my view, obviously wrong.

https://www.sydneycriminallawyers.com.au/blog/complainants-history-of-false-sexual-assault-allegations-is-inadmissible/

It's a similar kind of wrong to exclude character in this case. There's not much else to work from, it's pure he-said, she-said! Without considering character, we're left with gross shape-rotation exercises. I personally don't understand the mechanics of sexual assault very well, I've never seen it or done it. I expect most here are similar.

Just go by the statements of what was accused and alleged and no interpretation "well of course A is the type to do this so B is telling the truth but C is not the type so D is lying".

I don't think this is really that useful, especially when you look at some of the other statements made and that Trump's team was banned from presenting - like, are we allowed to take into account that the dress she said she was wearing when it happened hadn't been designed yet?

As far as I know, Tara Reade has fled to Russia. That is, not only did she simply flee abroad, she also made sure to flee to a nation outside the US sphere of hegemony. That tells me that she's afraid of being offed/suicided by Deep State goons. Also, as far as I know, Kamala Harris publicly supported her back when she was competing with Biden for the presidential nomination. When she later received the candidacy for vice president, all online media reports of her statement were scrubbed from existence.

All this suggests her accusation is legit.

Or she’s mentally ill and Kamala was grasping to take out Joe.

she's afraid of being offed/suicided by Deep State goons.

I would suggest if this was genuinely her fear that this not the greatest endorsement of the reliability of her testimony, but in fact an indication of quite absurd paranoia. Entertaining the fantasy that the 'Deep State' would murder someone for the benefit of Joe Biden's political image, she defected in May 2023, long after the story had come and gone - what would be the purpose of killing her? She and her accusation are now political non-entity, if they even ever had much of an impact.

I think they are both lying. The burden of proof is on the person making the claim and all they have are stories and their primary tactic has been to flip this burden around to make the person they are slandering have to prove they didn't commit the acts.

I'm currently working as a cybersecurity engineer and I'm a former Google SRE. So, I request you do not kneejerk dismiss me as some kind of technical ignoramus if you think that's what my argument hinges on.

Whenever privacy warriors complain about privacy I find myself rolling my eyes and thinking okay boomer. Even though more people than boomers say this and I do believe privacy is important. To be clear I mean privacy in the abstract. "I don't use Facebook because [privacy]". "I am looking to adopt a GrapheneOS based phone with no Google apps because [privacy]".

Privacy is obviously important. I don't want some rando, or worse, some personal enemy to rifle through my all of my digital data looking for ways to harm me. But the abstract privacy concern takes the form of a Motte and Bailey between the two. Google, Facebook and friends mostly act on your private data in the aggregate, but the privacy advocates generate worry that your intimate conversations or pictures are being personally viewed.

I also find privacy warrior claims rather, lets say, Joker-level anarchistic about rule of law. Everyone should have end-to-end encrypted messaging and the government should be locked out of private spaces no matter what. In no other domain do we accept a claim like "this dungeon in my house is off limits even to detectives with a court order because it is my private property" but apparently yes this digital cache of self-produced child pornography or evidence of a ticking time bomb terrorist plot[1] is something we can take to our graves regardless of any legitimate pursuit of justice. The level of hostility towards government here surpasses any of government's responsibility to protect its citizenry.

I'm not arguing against having digital security. It's very important for both organizations and individuals to have basic opsec lined up, especially because of how many automated and directed attacks there are trying to steal money and secrets. But in this battle companies like Google, who privacy advocates possibly fear only less than Facebook, are far closer to friend than foe because they provide a level of sophisticated and free security and direct privacy guarantee that almost nobody can achieve on their own.

The level of fear and worry privacy warriors generate rises to the level of conspiracy-adjacence. The word "qanon" pops into my head. Someone, Out There, is collecting all of your private information and you need to disconnect from the grid right now. Abandon all petty conveniences like being able to share photos with grandma, your life depends on it.

Ironically, the self-hosted Trust No One approach appears to make people even more vulnerable to attack. Even very technically sophisticated friends of mine who have hosted their own email have been hacked and their identities stolen (and used against them for extortion) in ways that would not have happened if they had stuck to GMail and used their FIDO2 two factor key for second factor.

I have another friend who decided to take his family's photos and files out of iCloud and Google Drive. He set up a home RAID array and was cruising along fine but neglected to monitor the drives. One failed and he didn't know, so when the second failed all of his data was gone. He didn't have backups, because why would you if you have RAID and snapshotting. He's not some noob either. He is also a sophisticated technology professional.

My argument against individual actions you can take on privacy are something like: you can do a few basic things to radically improve your personal opsec, and anything else is rapidly diminishing returns at increasingly greater inconvenience and, worse, may be a net increase in your vulnerability to attack or data loss.

My argument against regulatory action on this is, well: Europe leads the way on this. Does anyone think, say, GDPR has made Europeans much safer than Americans? At what regulatory and compliance cost? Mostly GDPR seems like a joke.

The fact that privacy fretting appears to primarily afflict men (with notable exceptions like Naomi Brockwell) suggests that there must be something autistic about it.

(Mostly, I can't shake the strange feeling that inside of all of this is a The Last Psychiatrist style phenomena (made with impeccable erudition that I could never live up to) that privacy worries are a proxy for dealing with some... thing(?) that people would never allow themselves to acknowledge consciously)

In the end, excessively fretting about privacy mostly is costly (in time), increases inconvenience and annoyance, increases the nanny/regulatory state, puts you at greater risk, and just makes the ads being served to you dumber.

  1. I'm aware this argument is cited derisively by other security professionals, but that doesn't make them correct. Ticking time bomb plots are a real thing.

I also find privacy warrior claims rather, lets say, Joker-level anarchistic about rule of law. Everyone should have end-to-end messaging and the government should be locked out of private spaces no matter what. In no other domain do we accept a claim like "this dungeon in my house is off limits even to detectives with a court order because it is my private property" but apparently yes this digital cache of self-produced child pornography or evidence of a ticking time bomb terrorist plot[1] is something we can take to our graves regardless of any legitimate pursuit of justice. The level of hostility towards government here surpasses any of government's responsibility to protect its citizenry.

This is implicitly misrepresenting the actual situation. Searching your home dungeon takes a warrant; searching your digital asserts (held by third parties) for self-produced child-pornography or other state-disapproved things requires a subpoena at best and may simply be blanket done on everything by some sort of automated system.

This is it, yes.

If there was a widespread invasion of privacy by our governments in the physical realm, as in once every year when you're out of the home a team of detectives (or to make the analogy more 1:1, a sophisticated automated drone) breaks in and inspect your home for evidence of crimes without warrants, we would very likely have at least some evidence that they did. If they did it in the digital realm, we would have... Exactly the evidence we have right now: no clear admission that it is so but also courts allowing "de-anonymising" of people of interest, implying they actually do intercept data without any kind of warrants, whistleblowers like Snowden, etc...

OP can dismiss it as "QAnon" stuff if he wants, but there's a hightened general distrust of our governments nowadays from both the left and the right. The red tribe today has reason to believe that the legal system, including police and the judiciary are weaponized against them, there's a discussion about such here today. You can disagree, but even if you do I think it's unfair to call it unreasonable to believe. And the blue tribe loudly frets about scenarios where if the red tribe gains power again they will weaponize government against them. So concerns about surveillance being in the interest of legitimate police interventions are convincing no one.

This is implicitly misrepresenting the actual situation. Searching your home dungeon takes a warrant; searching your digital asserts (held by third parties) for self-produced child-pornography or other state-disapproved things requires a subpoena at best and may simply be blanket done on everything by some sort of automated system.

Oh, sorry, I meant to say end-to-end encrypted messaging up there. Fixed. That's private to only the sender and recipient and even a warrant can't compel discovery if both sides destroy their copies .

Mostly, I can't shake the strange feeling that inside of all of this is a The Last Psychiatrist style phenomena (made with impeccable erudition that I could never live up to) that privacy worries are a proxy for dealing with some... thing(?) that people would never allow themselves to acknowledge consciously.

One alternative suggestion that I haven't seen explored (but I'm sure isn't original) is that privacy concerns are often the result of human intuition about our evolved environment rather than about our modern one. Thinking of data collectors as just algorithmic and disinterested in you personally doesn't come intuitively to most people. If they're collecting your information and using your information for something that they profit from, surely they must have some specific interest in you, they must be taking something from you that is yours, and you don't want them to get that which belongs to you. When it comes to physical goods, proprietary knowledge, or genuinely clandestine information in a Dunbar-limited world, these concerns basically make sense. If you had information that you could sell to some other guy to make money, you'd be pretty pissed off that someone was ripping it off! Likewise, if someone collected something you thought was private, it would be quite reasonable to be concerned that they're trying to hurt you, or at least want leverage over you in the future.

Oh, actually, people also seem to drastically overvalue what their private data is worth.

Anecdotally: So, I don't have health insurance (I have wealth insurance instead, for catastrophes and it can't call itself insurance). So, I pay the retail rate for drugs. But it turns out there's a whole bizarro world economy where you can go to goodrx.com and get insane discounts off of the list price, like 90% or more and the drug ends up costing less than it would with an insurance copay.

Anyway, I have no idea how this works. I asked the pharmacist once why this free coupon knocked $10 off of this totally mundane drug that millions of people take. Her knee-jerk reaction was "because they sell your data". She really thought the fact that I take this med + my email address is worth $10 to someone. Not just that one time, but every time I refill it.

So, extrapolating "taking something that's yours" and "$10+ per take", I could see a recipe for widespread driving people crazy about privacy.

…what would feel like a good price?

I agree that $10 is way too high for any real value of that data. I could also believe that it’s where companies end up after factoring in all that bizarro-world. Maybe they sell the data for $1, but are also saving for bureaucratic reasons. Maybe it’s one of those loss-leader things where the cheap Xanax keeps people (or insurers?) in the program when they have to buy the long tail of exotic drugs. My personal guess would be that it has something to due with Medicaid pricing, because that derails literally everything.

I think it's probably worth a penny, at most?

Anyway, my research suggests these goodrx.com coupons are actually drug manufacturer rebates to the pharmacy off of their wholesale purchase. The manufacturer is effectively using this channel to quote much lower prices to uninsured poor people who would otherwise be forced to go without.

privacy concerns are often the result of human intuition about our evolved environment rather than about our modern one. Thinking of data collectors as just algorithmic and disinterested in you personally doesn't come intuitively to most people.

We're looking at more of an intuitive statistical gap in understanding small percentage chances. There is clearly a greater chance that if my private information is stored at police headquarters that some sequence of events will lead to someone at police headquarters using that information against me in some way, than if that information is not stored at police headquarters. Most people aren't capable of actually calculating the expected value of that probability, so they either round it up too high or too low.

Most people don't have the information to even estimate. If your GPS location pattern marks you as being high risk for being a drug courier and you keep getting pulled over for minor and imagined traffic violations as a result, how would you even know that's what's resulting in the harassment?

It's worse. I have to estimate it long before anything goes wrong.

And my modal case is something like coming into contact with a person of interest. Or it's personal, your former coworker with an axe to grind or your ex boyfriend or your new girlfriend's ex boyfriend with a grudge, happens to have access to that kind of thing in some way or another.

That probability is impossible to estimate in advance. When I went skeet shooting in 2017, I could not have known that multiple people I shot with would be indicted in federal court on "insurrection" charges. I've seen friends stalk romantic partners, perspective and current and former, all across the internet including misusing work tools to do so. I have no method of assessing the people I interact with for whether they materially increase that risk.

There are a lot of half arguments here.

Like, you scoff at impenetrable end to end encryption. But the realities of the internet are that any back-door or security flaw that allows end to end encryption to be penetrated exposes literally everything to literally everyone. There is no limiting principle as is the case of say, a door to a kiddy porn dungeon. Presumably there would be a warrant. Or maybe in the case of your valuables being in the sort of safe The Lockpicking Lawyer could open in under 1 second with a toothpick, some hopefully limited number of criminals will ever actually get a crack at it. Not so with anything on the internet. Either it's impenetrable, even to legitimate law enforcement (but especially illegitimate law enforcement), or virtually every criminal on Earth already has access to it. There is very little in between.

Then you decide to stan for cloud computers. Because a friend of yours is an idiot and didn't fix his NAS when it had a problem. But the fact of the matter is, the cloud is still only someone else's computer. And they can revoke access to your data just as capriciously as a RAID array might fail.

And then to smear everyone concerned as QAnon, as though fears of data collection and spying haven't been validated time and time and time again. Did Snowden happen before you were born? Has it been that long?

Like, you scoff at impenetrable end to end encryption. But the realities of the internet are that any back-door or security flaw that allows end to end encryption to be penetrated exposes literally everything to literally everyone.

[...]

Not so with anything on the internet. Either it's impenetrable, even to legitimate law enforcement (but especially illegitimate law enforcement), or virtually every criminal on Earth already has access to it. There is very little in between.

This is grandiose. On Facebook without E2E encryption (but with TLS), your messages are only exposed to Facebook and whoever hacks them, which is a very remote possibility. Adding E2E encrypted messaging with a law enforcement decryption key that can only be used with a warrant does not increase the risk further than the non-E2E case, even if that key is ultimately compromised.

Then you decide to stan for cloud computers. Because a friend of yours is an idiot and didn't fix his NAS when it had a problem. But the fact of the matter is, the cloud is still only someone else's computer. And they can revoke access to your data just as capriciously as a RAID array might fail.

Somehow it never occurs to people making this argument that it's trivial to make off-site backups from cloud providers, if you're that worried about them revoking access.

On Facebook without E2E encryption (but with TLS), your messages are only exposed to Facebook and whoever hacks them, which is a very remote possibility.

You obviously haven't heard of the third party doctrine.

If Facebook has your messages, and you haven't encrypted them E2E, the government can look at them any time they want without a warrant. Your statement that they can only be seen by Facebook and by hackers is false; the current legal environment makes them open to the government, no warrant needed.

You're also ignoring that for the government to look in your basement takes some effort. Looking at millions of people's data is trivial.

I responded to this third party doctrine concern you raised on a different comment here: https://www.themotte.org/post/851/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/183485?context=8#context

But to recap

If Facebook has your messages, and you haven't encrypted them E2E, the government can look at them any time they want without a warrant.

This isn't exactly true. Things that neatly fall into the category of "communication" are protected, like 1:1 messages. Metadata and other content (like documents) are not.

You're also ignoring that for the government to look in your basement takes some effort. Looking at millions of people's data is trivial.

A different commenter also raised this. Addressed here: https://www.themotte.org/post/851/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/183482?context=8#context

Wholesale surveillance has been criticized as fairly useless to law enforcement by security experts for a long time.

Wholesale surveillance has been criticized as fairly useless to law enforcement by security experts for a long time.

  1. It might be useless for legitimate law enforcement purposes but fine and dandy for not-so-legitimate ones.

  2. I would argue that machine learning classifiers have made wholesale surveillance quite a bit more useful, by making it a lot easier. You want to find crimetalk, train a classifier with crimetalk and run everything through it; no need for humans to do all that work.

Fair enough. Eliot Spitzer got brought down because his bank transfers to a brothel were red flagged, they investigated, and they just happened to nail the governor of NY. Obviously what really happened is they brought up all of Eliot Spitzer's records, went over it with a magnifying glass, pieced together the brothel thing, and also noticed it had been red flagged (like a billion other transactions that are never looked at), and worked backwards from there to construct a story where they had cause.

So that's an extreme case. How often does this happen in practice though? Also, even in my extreme case, it doesn't seem actually wrong for this information to have come out about Eliot Spitzer?

So that's an extreme case. How often does this happen in practice though?

The magic of parallel construction -- where law enforcement obtains information from an illegitimate source, fabricates a chain of evidence back to a legitimate source, and then presents the fabricated chain to the court -- says we'll never know.

A different commenter also raised this. Addressed here: https://www.themotte.org/post/851/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/183482?context=8#context

Wholesale surveillance has been criticized as fairly useless to law enforcement by security experts for a long time.

Useless at preventing crime. Fantastic as "Show me the person, and I'll show you the crime." I routinely see the government producing private non-serious conversations they've harvested through whatever means to defame the character of people they are politically persecuting.

and whoever hacks them, which is a very remote possibility

Would you consider Microsoft making a configuration mistake giving read access to every Office 365 account to a test account that was then trivially hacked more or less likely than Facebook making a similar mistake? I work in IT too, and I would have considered Microsoft more serious than Facebook regarding security. Maybe I'm wrong and Microsoft is just unserious about security while Facebook is serious. Maybe. But personally I still adjusted my estimation of the likelihood of this kind of serious breach from all of FAANG(O)/big tech upwards.

My bias is Microsoft is a lot more incompetent at security than Facebook and they regularly prove it. They're getting better, but still have a long way to go. https://srslyriskybiz.substack.com/p/microsofts-security-culture-just

Adding E2E encrypted messaging with a law enforcement decryption key that can only be used with a warrant does not increase the risk further than the non-E2E case, even if that key is ultimately compromised.

...

law enforcement decryption key that can only be used with a warrant

How exactly are you enforcing this? Magic? This is, technologically, an explicitly unsolvable problem. You may as well propose a defence system that relies on a diviner performing tarot readings to determine when missiles are incoming.

This is a common talking point, but it's never really made sense. People go down the route of saying, "Well, you can't have a mathematically provable way of verifying the validity of warrants," but that's not really relevant to the typical digital threat vectors that are normally relevant (I.e., a 400lb guy in a bed in Russia attacking your device over the internet thousands of times in the middle of the night). You can pretty easily have FB keep a private key in an HSM locked in a vault somewhere, not connected to the internet, and after their legal department has fully vetted the warrant request, they could take the encrypted blob of messages into the vault and use the purpose-built hardware to decrypt it. Sure, add some qualifier about, "..can only be used with a warrant, up to the accuracy with which FB's legal team can determine the validity of said warrant," but then your only objection fades away.

Of course, this method would also be subject to the possibility of abuse by the small number of FB insiders who are tasked with this warrant service, but that, by the terms of the argument made above, "does not increase the risk further than the non-E2E case," because in the non-E2E case, FB can also trivially abuse their access to your messages. The question here is to what extent you think FB is, itself, a threat actor, but I think the terms of the argument above stipulated that they weren't. The appropriate criticism (seen elsewhere here) is that they are.

I will actually grant that I'm not sure making an actual secret backdoor key in those lines is technologically impossible - I thought it was, but I'll freely grant that I may have been wrong there.

You can pretty easily have FB keep a private key in an HSM locked in a vault somewhere, not connected to the internet, and after their legal department has fully vetted the warrant request, they could take the encrypted blob of messages into the vault and use the purpose-built hardware to decrypt it. Sure, add some qualifier about, "..can only be used with a warrant, up to the accuracy with which FB's legal team can determine the validity of said warrant," but then your only objection fades away.

But you depart from reality here.

Think about how many law enforcement requests for this kind of data are made all over the world, every single day. Every single time a person in the UK makes a problematic tweet, that vault is getting opened. Every single minor crime or drug dealer that the police go after? That vault is getting opened. This kind of law enforcement key/bypass would have to be so easily accessible that the idea it wouldn't be leaked is just not viable.

How would it be leaked? It's buried in an HSM that is not connected to the internet and housed in an access-controlled vault. Just assuming a breakage of the first of those conditions (extracting a key from an HSM) utterly breaks all device security guarantees you have for all the devices you own. If step one of your plan to "leak" this key is to be able to break all device security guarantees for all devices everywhere, then we can probably conclude that this thing doesn't constitute a meaningful additional risk over the status quo. Like, mayyyyybe an epsilon increase, maybe. But that epsilon is sooooo small that it would be dwarfed by a literal billion other security improvements we could make in every other aspect of our digital computing.

How would it be leaked? It's buried in an HSM that is not connected to the internet and housed in an access-controlled vault. Just assuming a breakage of the first of those conditions (extracting a key from an HSM) utterly breaks all device security guarantees you have for all the devices you own.

This just isn't true. Microsoft can keep the signing keys for some important elements of the OS private, and those keys are only accessed extremely rarely and in specific circumstances. But the threat that I'm talking about is from actors who have legitimate access to the vault.

This super skeleton key that unlocks all encryption and allows you to bypass all security on financial transactions, privacy, government documents, military assets... not only is this going to be the most valuable key in the world with thousands of motivated parties trying to get access to it, there are going to be law enforcement and government requests for it on a constant basis. Think about how many warrants are served in the USA and then remember that every single one of them is going to involve someone getting access to this key. Then remember that this key is also in use everywhere else in the world - it has to be the same otherwise you've completely broken the internet and global economy by making encrypted communication between different nations impossible (it'd be illegal to have communications that don't allow access via this master key after all). So that means that every single time a Chinese, Russian, Brazilian or South African cop wants access to some communications, that vault is getting opened right back up again.

THAT is what makes it so likely to leak - this key is going to have to be accessed by millions of law enforcement officers and government officials every single day, and it is the most valuable key in the world given that it can defeat all encryption used in financial transactions and would make fraud and financial crime as easy as pie, let alone privacy invasion and surveillance. If you think that the Chinese (or American for that matter) government is going to use this access responsibly (or just not keep their word when they say they're not making copies of the key), lmao.

This conversation is about E2EE of Facebook messages, not bank transactions. Law enforcement/government can just subpoena your bank to get your bank transactions.

this key is going to have to be accessed by millions of law enforcement officers and government officials

Also BZZZZT. As I said, the only people that ever access this key are a small number of approved Facebook insiders. Law enforcement/government make requests (with warrants) to Facebook, but they never even touch the handle to the door of the vault that contains the computer with the HSM with the key.

But the threat that I'm talking about is from actors who have legitimate access to the vault.

This is why I had said:

Of course, this method would also be subject to the possibility of abuse by the small number of FB insiders who are tasked with this warrant service, but that, by the terms of the argument made above, "does not increase the risk further than the non-E2E case," because in the non-E2E case, FB can also trivially abuse their access to your messages. The question here is to what extent you think FB is, itself, a threat actor, but I think the terms of the argument above stipulated that they weren't. The appropriate criticism (seen elsewhere here) is that they are.

More comments

And then to smear everyone concerned as QAnon, as though fears of data collection and spying haven't been validated time and time and time again. Did Snowden happen before you were born? Has it been that long?

The vein here is that the most unremarkable people seem to believe that far-away powers that be care about looking at their private data because they're such a threat to the state because they're so edgy and subversive when the truth is the powers that be just don't care about them. Probably not even in the aggregate.

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The powers that be seem intent on making examples of very average people these days. We've seen extreme prosecution of actions that "reasonable people" would believe would not draw nearly that much individual attention from the government (trucker protest in Canada, J6). And the other side is worried about the idea that, for instance, a right-wing government could use private collected information to identify and deport immigrants. "If you haven't done anything wrong (or big) you have nothing to fear" is not convincing to anyone.

These are average people in extremely man-bites-dog circumstances though. Contra-evidence: ~2 billion lifelong users of Google and Apple have uneventful things to report.

True, but more than ever we're at an inflection point nowadays where the ability to process this information and abuse it meets a distrust of its handlers. It's barely been one year where the public has seen the ability for computers to read and seemingly really "understand" human speech and its intents. All that collected data that we thought was too much to be processed, it could now be fed to NLP algos and to LLMs to read through and flag, on all sorts of criteria. Take a small fast LLM like Phi-2, tell it to read all personal conversations on Facebook Messenger or whatnot, flag all those that seem to indicate political extremism (as defined by politicians the public distrusts), forward them to a smarter LLM (GPT-4) to review, if it agrees, forward to a human for further review.

We've seen extreme prosecution of actions that "reasonable people" would believe would not draw nearly that much individual attention from the government (trucker protest in Canada, J6).

It was very predictable that the governments involved would be highly interested in going after the people involved in these two things, though.

Maybe after the fact. But prior, I'm sure a lot of people still clung to the belief that we lived in a free country.

Yes, nobody thought that the trucking protest was going to work, but anyone who expected that a ‘stop the steal’ rally busting into Capitol Hill during the electoral count would be treated proportionately had not been paying attention.

Seeing that over a summer it was free game to take over neighborhoods, torch police stations, do nightly assaults on federal courtrooms, attempting to blind police officers, and in the previous years interrupt official proceedings (supreme court nominations), some people could have been given a wrong impression, yes. Not so much that the government wouldn't be interested in it, but that the judiciary branch would be so captured as to do what looks at least to one side like enforcing laws on blatantly political lines.

And the other side is worried about the idea that, for instance, a right-wing government could use private collected information to identify and deport immigrants.

If anything, a number of privacy advocates are attacking the problem from an abortion rights angle, from what I've seen, so there's already a good amount of left-coded concern.

Google, Facebook and friends mostly act on your private data in the aggregate, but the privacy advocates generate worry that your intimate conversations or pictures are being personally viewed.

This isn't some hypothetical threat. Given you work in the industry I'm sure you're well aware of the number of times that employees at these companies have been caught spying on individual user's data or listening to them fuck via voice assistant recordings.

From the original Vice article:

The document says that Google terminated 36 employees in 2020 for security-related issues. Eighty-six percent of all security-related allegations against employees included mishandling of confidential information, such as the transfer of internal-only information to outside parties. Ten percent of all allegations in 2020 concerned misuse of systems, which can include accessing user or employee data in violation of Google's own policies, helping others to access that data, or modifying or deleting user or employee data, according to the document.

So, it's a bit hard to parse without the actual numbers, but it appears that of 36 security incidents, 31 (86%) were Google employees leaking confidential corporate information (ironically, including the document leaked to the Vice reporter). 4 of them were misuse of systems (which includes but is not limited to accessing user or employee data). This is actually pretty amazing, considering how many Google employees there are and the scale of data that Google collects. You might say "well, that's how many were caught," but it's very likely the majority of cases are caught (all major systems at Google have every user data access logged and audited, though I suppose some minor systems that no one uses might not have that set up).

If anything, working at Google actually made me a lot more confident about their PII protections. They take it extremely seriously and I'm actually surprised so many people were able to abuse it, though it's to be expected at their scale: Google has 175,000 employees and maintains billions of accounts.

To me, this is the exception that proves the rule: you're safer with Google.

Gin, mdb, rpcsp... Security there is taken very seriously. There're always potential holes in the system, but I trust Google much more to keep my data safe against realistic adversaries than anyone's homelab duct taped together with VLANs and reverse proxies. (And at least 90% of alternative non-Google third party hosts are honeypots, either out of incompetence or malice.)

The danger with Google is that Google co-operates with the authorities, either voluntarily, "voluntarily", or because they've been literally infiltrated.

It's absolutely fair to say that, if you're doing something the government places a high priority on detecting and punishing, Google is not the place to put digital evidence of that something. And that's a certainty.

The issue comes in when someone believes that there exist digital safes that no one but they can open. You're not going to build one in your spare time, and you're certainly not going to find one in other well-known third-party services (which are equally compromised by the government and less secure than Google) or in unknown fly-by-night services (half of which are government honeypots, and the other half are people waiting to do a rug pull to steal all your bitcoin and which are probably breached by the government anyway).

I agree, when I worked at Google I remember their security measures being extremely well-thought-out - so much better than the lax approach most tech companies take. However, I DON'T trust their ideological capture. They won't abuse people's information by accident, but I will not be surprised if they start doing it on purpose to their outgroup. And they have the tools to do it en masse.

Either for ideology or just to squeeze out a few more dollars. If Google's moats start falling, and their profits start falling with them, the first sign will just be that products start being less good. This is understandable and fine; they won't have as much funny money to blow on non-profit-centers that only add marginally, but that customers like. But if it gets really bad, well, there's always Baker's Law: "You never know how evil a technology can be until the engineers who created it fear for their jobs."

I've never heard of that (and DDG brings up nothing except stuff that looks more relevant to biology), what are some examples of tech-gone-bad like that?

The extremely low-level version of this is the classic example of a free, simple app. I heard the story of one recently that was just an app that let you change the brightness of the flashlight on some phones that didn't have that functionality built in. It started off just having basic ads. But as it became less and less profitable, crowded out by things like more phones having it just built-in, they saw the writing on the wall. Presumably, they just sold it to someone else, but I don't know in this particular case. In any event, either the original owner or someone who bought it added really obtrusive video ads... and then snuck in a $15/month subscription charge. Basically just banking on it already being installed in some number of phones, and some number of them not really noticing or accidentally clicking the wrong thing and not noticing and such. This is the really simple version.

I'd have to try to go back and see if I can find any real examples, but you can imagine that an app that collects a bunch of data on you, maybe biometric data and such, could end up on a downward spiral, profitwise. Who freaking knows how they'll sell it in order to make that last buck? Who knows what form of shady scaremongering they could do, "We see that you have this gene, and you're really in danger of [medical problem] (that is barely supportable by the scientific evidence), so you really ought to consult with [our shady partner who sells you some worthless shit and kicks us back money]."

Actually, just as I finished writing that, I thought of the example of virus protection software. That shit was constantly burying itself deeper and deeper into your system, until it had basically unfettered access to everything. Lots of people kept using it, mostly out of inertia. As it started getting squeezed out of the market, they started squeezing customers harder and causing all sorts of problems, not least of which is the tension between, "If our software has a vulnerability, attackers can use that to get deep access to your system, but you're probably oblivious to the details of how that works, so we're actually kind of okay with it, so long as it scares enough people to keep paying the subscription."

Jeez, never thought about it like that.

Are you aware of the third party doctrine?

Not specifically. I was aware of it on a "how to deal with the police" tactics based level: law enforcers looking at emails requires a warrant but documents you have sitting in Drive may not.

In the non digital world there are a lot more checks and balances. Getting a warrant to search a home is one thing, mass surveillance on millions of users is another. What is happening online is more like the police obtaining a search warrant for every building in a city and sending a robot with drug sniffing capacity into every room in the city. The police may follow a specific suspect around, while the state in many countries forces ISPs to keep a record of all visited websites for millions of people. Governments want to snoop mass amounts of data on cloud servers but don't have the right to routinely search hotel rooms or offices spaces. Why should data on the cloud be less protected than a letter laying on a desk in a hotel? Why can't digital services be as private as a taxi service? If I rent an uber the police can't set up a roadblock and search all documents in every car. So why can they do that for email?

As for GDPR it did make a big difference. In my career as a developer I hear the acronym GDPR on a regular basis, and it has forced companies to be far more careful in how they store and handle data. GDPR put a lot of pressure on companies to think before they acted and made the non-tech portion of companies much more interested in data security. Thanks to GDPR I have had non tech boomers with a business background send long emails asking about how we encrypt data, TLS, when data is deleted and other issues that they never thought about 10 years ago.

In the non digital world there are a lot more checks and balances. Getting a warrant to search a home is one thing, mass surveillance on millions of users is another. What is happening online is more like the police obtaining a search warrant for every building in a city and sending a robot with drug sniffing capacity into every room in the city. The police may follow a specific suspect around, while the state in many countries forces ISPs to keep a record of all visited websites for millions of people. Governments want to snoop mass amounts of data on cloud servers but don't have the right to routinely search hotel rooms or offices spaces. Why should data on the cloud be less protected than a letter laying on a desk in a hotel? Why can't digital services be as private as a taxi service? If I rent an uber the police can't set up a roadblock and search all documents in every car. So why can they do that for email?

In the olden days we used to argue that mass surveillance was actually useless because it generated far too much data and even detection systems with very low false positive rates still created an unworkably huge number of events that had to be manually reviewed.

I haven't seen anything that has changed the story on this, except in CSAM which is so radioactive that law enforcers have successfully pushed the burden onto companies to surveil and report them. There's been some criticism of the false positives here https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/21/technology/google-surveillance-toddler-photo.html but so far this doesn't seem like a huge problem. And again only something like CSAM appears to rise to this standard, for now.

To be clear, I still think police should have warrants to do stuff.

As for GDPR it did make a big difference. In my career as a developer I hear the acronym GDPR on a regular basis, and it has forced companies to be far more careful in how they store and handle data. GDPR put a lot of pressure on companies to think before they acted and made the non-tech portion of companies much more interested in data security. Thanks to GDPR I have had non tech boomers with a business background send long emails asking about how we encrypt data, TLS, when data is deleted and other issues that they never thought about 10 years ago.

I thought the Snowden leaks, specifically the revelation that the NSA was able to re-construct GMail inboxes without a warrant because they had tapped replication events on private lines between Google's datacenters, compelled an industry-wide effort to take security a lot more seriously, including TLS everywhere by default. Also it timed well with the fact that CPUs were now fast enough that encrypting by default didn't add an unacceptable burden. I'd be curious to see how the GDPR specifically made a difference here since it coincided with these two other events.

In the olden days we used to argue that mass surveillance was actually useless because it generated far too much data and even detection systems with very low false positive rates still created an unworkably huge number of events that had to be manually reviewed.

An issue that I think will no longer be a concern to the Big Other once AI gets good enough. Sure, ten humans today might not be able to find a dissident in the sea of data with four weeks of searching, but an AI drinking from the gigahertz of an RTX card might with only ten seconds.

I'll reply to what I think is your central claim which is that "my private sex dungeon isn't off limits to cops so why should my hard drive be off limits".

The difference is scale.

For example, my house is not very secure. I lock my doors, but anyone with a crowbar could pretty easily break in and steal my stuff when I'm gone. I live in Seattle, so there's also zero chance they would caught or go to jail. Why am I okay with this state of affairs? Why haven't I put iron bars on all the windows? The answer: there simply aren't enough people willing to commit a home invasion to worry about it.

On the other hand, let's say I had cryptocurrency on my computer. (I don't, by the way). I would take extreme measures to keep this secure because everyone in the whole world could potentially steal my coins.

The number of people that local cops can harass is limited by the resources of the local police department. Salaries aren't cheap.

The number of people that government spy agencies can harass is much more scalable. The Canadian truckers had their bank accounts frozen less than 2 years ago! We need digital privacy so that a government bureaucrat can't change a 1 to a 0 and lock a million dissidents from their bank accounts.

Scale matters.

I brought up the wholesale surveillance concern here https://www.themotte.org/post/851/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/183482?context=8#context

It's not a complete response to your comment though.

The number of people that government spy agencies can harass is much more scalable. The Canadian truckers had their bank accounts frozen less than 2 years ago! We need digital privacy so that a government bureaucrat can't change a 1 to a 0 and lock a million dissidents from their bank accounts.

Scalable harassment is worrying, though I don't see how this is a function of privacy really? Like how would you solve the de-banking problem? Is the problem that it was too easy for the government to figure out who all of the protestors were and then work backwards to find their financial accounts and lock them down?

On the other hand, let's say I had cryptocurrency on my computer. (I don't, by the way). I would take extreme measures to keep this secure because everyone in the whole world could potentially steal my coins.

Irony of ironies, the extremely technically competent anarchist friend who had his self-hosted personal email hacked was because the attacker was an organized criminal who knew he had millions of dollars worth of cryptocurrency. The level of sophistication deployed by the attacker was astounding, which included producing faked search warrants. The attacker also already somehow had copies of his driver's license and we have no idea how he got it. They were not successful in stealing his Bitcoin but they came very close and this criminal continues to pop up in his life from time to time using information he gathered.

See also that a Bitcoin core developer was hacked recently https://www.theblock.co/post/198688/bitcoin-developer-pgp-exploit

Google, Facebook and friends mostly act on your private data in the aggregate, but the privacy advocates generate worry that your intimate conversations or pictures are being personally viewed.

If by "privacy advocates" you mean Ursula von der Leyen and all the other assorted EU / WEF / World Bank goons who want to have all the aggregated data for themselves, in order to turn society into a panopticon while pretending they care about "privacy", then yes.

"I don't use Facebook because [privacy]". "I am looking to adopt a GrapheneOS based phone with no Google apps because [privacy]".

It's incoherent to scoff at privacy advocates because actually all the data is aggregated, and at the same time laugh at their efforts to not be a part of the aggregated dataset. There are valid criticism, like you can say it doesn't add up to a spit in the bucket, or that the only people using these alternatives are privacy freaks, so using one automatically marks you as the odd one out, but "it's still better than laying down and dying letting Big Tech have an absolute monopoly without a single alternative" seems like a valid counter-argument.

I also find privacy warrior claims rather, lets say, Joker-level anarchistic about rule of law. Everyone should have end-to-end encrypted messaging and the government should be locked out of private spaces no matter what.

Based. Bad faith actors are an absolute minority in society, and as you pointed out yourself most of the cyber-surveillance is aggregate level. If the cost of blinding the elites to society-wide trends is letting a few pedos get away with it, it seems worth it. Sure, you could posit some theoretically-existing good-guy elites, who only bypass encryption to catch the bad guys, and would never use Big Data to manipulate society, but that's not the elites we have, and not ones we are about to get any time soon.

I have another friend who decided to take his family's photos and files out of iCloud and Google Drive. He set up a home RAID array and was cruising along fine but neglected to monitor the drives. One failed and he didn't know, so when the second failed all of his data was gone. He didn't have backups, because why would you if you have RAID and snapshotting. He's not some noob either. He is also a sophisticated technology professional.

Your photo-album could perish in a fire if you house burns down, that's not an argument for leaving it in some centralized repository where every bureaucrat working there can skim through it, access to it can be denied at their whim, etc.

My argument against regulatory action on this is, well: Europe leads the way on this. Does anyone think, say, GDPR has made Europeans much safer than Americans?

Mostly no. GDPR has some good provisions, like giving you the option to force companies to delete all your personal data, or to send to you everything that they collected on you, but for the most part it's not even a joke. It's a measure to centralize data in the hands of a few big companies that are easier to pressure politically. I agree the solution is not regulatory but technological (like the aforementioned E2E encryption that nobody gets to bypass, or in the case of GDPR more trivial measures like blocking third party cookies).

Google, Facebook and friends mostly act on your private data in the aggregate, but the privacy advocates generate worry that your intimate conversations or pictures are being personally viewed.

If by "privacy advocates" you mean Ursula von der Leyen and all the other assorted EU / WEF / World Bank goons who want to have all the aggregated data for themselves, in order to turn society into a panopticon while pretending they care about "privacy", then yes.

Don't we live in the world where the maximum amount of information about you is widely available? Haven't we for 10+ years or so? The absolute worst that has happened from this is newspaper headline related freak events rather than stuff that happens to everyone. In terms of my personal life, it's telling that the only person I know who has suffered a catastrophic privacy breach is someone that was hell-bent on never trusting Google or Facebook and self-hosted the whole way.

This is a type of person.

It's incoherent to scoff at privacy advocates because actually all the data is aggregated, and at the same time laugh at their efforts to not be a part of the aggregated dataset.

I do scoff at them, independent of the avoiding aggregation claim, because in their efforts to protect their privacy because they're so paranoid about the ThE bIG tEcH ComPaniEs they leave themselves far more vulnerable. And effectively island themselves from social activities like, oh, sharing photos with friends.

Your photo-album could perish in a fire if you house burns down, that's not an argument for leaving it in some centralized repository where every bureaucrat working there can skim through it, access to it can be denied at their whim, etc.

I'm just here to say when someone tries to share a photo with me from their home nextcloud server and I wait 5 minutes for the account confirmation email to show up, and it never arrives, and I have to help them diagnose whether or not they fucked up their self-hosted mail configuration, it's hard not to judge them as being so conceited that they think a state bureaucrat gives a shit about their private life.

I suppose they could print their photos out and mail them to me. That would be a nice change of pace even. But could I convince them to put a printer inside of their home nowadays? Think of how much closed source firmware those things have which could be reporting every single thing you print to The Powers that Be.

Don't we live in the world where the maximum amount of information about you is widely available? Haven't we for 10+ years or so?

Maximum? Last I checked we still have not reached the elite's wet dream of all our activities being done through a uniquely identifying digital identity.

The absolute worst that has happened from this is newspaper headline related freak events rather than stuff that happens to everyone.

This is again incoherent in the light of your "it's all aggregated" criticism. These will never be things that happen to everybody, because manipulating society by manipulating each individual is the most inefficient way to go about it that I can think of. That doesn't change the fact that the measures they already took to monitor and control the flow of information already justify burning everything down and salting the earth.

independent of the avoiding aggregation claim

You don't get to do that. People avoiding Big Tech aren't doing so for fear of being super-haxxored, they do so to avoid centralizing power. You especially don't get to do that after claiming they ignore the aggregated nature of surveillance.

it's hard not to judge them as being so conceited that they think a state bureaucrat gives a shit about their private life.

We already had Google removing documents with wrongthink that got too popular. That I am personally not important to them is not relevant to my argument.

The absolute worst that has happened from this is newspaper headline related freak events rather than stuff that happens to everyone.

Are you familiar with the existence of the nation of China? The actual "absolute worst" that has happened from a complete lack of digital privacy is government dissidents and people who report the official who sexually harassed them getting disappeared and their organs harvested. You're talking about how all these silly paranoid privacy people have concerns that could never be realistic, and all the while we can just go look at one of the largest nations on Earth and see what happens when you get your way.

You're talking about how all these silly paranoid privacy people have concerns that could never be realistic, and all the while we can just go look at one of the largest nations on Earth and see what happens when you get your way.

I did not say lets also become an authoritarian dictatorship at the same time. I am specifically criticizing privacy warriors in the US.

See also the bottom of this other comment: https://www.themotte.org/post/851/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/183628?context=8#context

I did not say lets also become an authoritarian dictatorship at the same time.

Do you think authoritarian dictatorships announce themselves as authoritarian dictatorships and democratically ask the people to vote on their takeover? The privacy warriors in the US are looking over at places like China, Russia and the UK and seeing almost exactly the things they were warning about being implemented, and you're calling them paranoid when they take umbrage at US politicians talking about how great those things are and wanting to bring them here! One of the major arguments made by the privacy warriors is that even if you give the government this power now because you trust it not to become an authoritarian dictatorship, it is impossible to tell when one of those is coming down the pipe. Yes, it sucks that the one pedophile who was capable of using encryption perfectly to hide his crimes got away, but that's utterly insignificant when compared to the danger posed by our current panopticon if it were to fall into the wrong hands, and there is no way of making sure that it does not fall into the wrong hands. Both sides of politics believe that their opposition will use this power corruptly, and I'm honestly not sure either of them are wrong.

Your argument is essentially saying that it is fine to not have seatbelts because you personally haven't crashed your car and don't think you're going to crash it in the near future (yeah sure other people get into car crashes but you're built different), and the people saying "hey you should wear a seatbelt" are just paranoid, low-status losers who shouldn't be listened to.

I did not say lets also become an authoritarian dictatorship at the same time.

This is makes about as much sense as "come on, baby, just the tip", for all the derision you lob at privacy advocates this is insanely naive given what has already happened in the west, let alone their open drooling at China's social credit system.

I was really hoping there would be more of an argument here than "umm yikes, smells like Qanon" but you just completely ignored the whole issue. There's also some impressive irony in flipping between "qanon conspiracy theory" accusations and insinuations of "people worried about privacy look a lot like they have child sex slave dungeons, isn't that suspicious?"

This is exact sort of dismissive "if you have nothing hide, you have nothing to fear" attitude people in the 00s were worried would become common once universal surveillance was normalized.

I was really hoping there would be more of an argument here than "umm yikes, smells like Qanon" but you just completely ignored the whole issue. There's also some impressive irony in flipping between "qanon conspiracy theory" accusations and insinuations of "people worried about privacy look a lot like they have child sex slave dungeons, isn't that suspicious?"

I am not saying this. I think the grand majority of people who use (e.g.) Signal are unremarkable and having completely mundane conversations. The reason more people aren't burned by Signal is that it's not too inconvenient. If your phone dies you lose all of your chat history with everyone (since no cloud backups). People survive that okay, it turns out. But the flip-side of the normalization of Signal is that there also bad people using it for crime and law enforcement is 100% powerless to do anything about it.

The Qanon-adjacent part is believing your mundane unremarkable life is so important that you must use Signal and that this meaningfully protects you from The Powers Whom are Unspecified, which is Important.

This is exact sort of dismissive "if you have nothing hide, you have nothing to fear" attitude people in the 00s were worried would become common once universal surveillance was normalized.

What additional argument is needed here? The no privacy status quo has existed for decades for billions of people and the only people that are for the worse for it are stupid criminals who send CSAM over Facebook in the clear and have been busted for it, and also a few freak headlines where normies are also swept up in abuses?

I'm a Signal user, and definitely one of those people who are too mundane to be noticed most of the time. While I do use regular SMS for most convos, there are particularly spicy chats with trusted friends and family that I use Signal for because I don't trust the alternatives. Perhaps this is paranoid of me, but a few things triggered its adoption:

  1. A blast from my edgy teenage past (about 15 years old at the time of the incident) popped up out of the blue with potential professional consequences for not only me, but an old friend as well. I was shocked that a JPG uploaded to the middle of nowhere on a webzone stuck in early 00s design and infrastructure managed to turn up in a company's background check for him. I was lucky to get a response and takedown from the current owner after spamming his email for a week.

  2. There's this phenomenon where people caught in freak, chaotic situations who make a bad move have their text histories pored over. This is to be expected, I imagine. But... Did you express violent displeasure at the 2019 protestors to a confidant? Maybe use some colorful language? Were you so bold and colorful to suggest that maybe a certain kind of protestor should have the ambulances they're obstructing drive right through them? Hope you didn't write that down. If you end up in a situation where somebody gets hurt or killed, you're a premeditated murderer! Let's say that I would be fucked beyond measure if one of MY antisocial morning-before-coffee shitposts got dug up after a protestor died after attacking my dad, for instance.

And during these moments, I'm noticing that the open, mind-your-own-business, permissive tech culture of old has been largely inverted by men and women who sound like you. I don't trust that change, and I don't trust you or your fellow travelers to never take it too far. Sure, I'm too boring today - unless an aggrieved party forces my publicity. But I can certainly imagine an evolved, V2 future wokescold developing the interest once they've exhausted every other one of Al Capone's vaults in their quest to find racism and intolerance as an explanation for why the world sucks. When you can no longer find any mechanism for systemic racism in the processes or the data, but you don't yet have mindeaders, why not go for the next best thing like their lifelong chat history? And who wouldn't be tempted to ctrl-f the word 'nigger' to see what comes up in a paper trail of that size?

Part of the concern is that today's mundane can quickly become tomorrow's problematic. That transgressing popular orthodoxies is not as ruinous or catastrophic as it could be by historical standards doesn't assuage my fears, because I honestly don't know if and when such curiosity regarding wrongthink and badspeak will be sated. I think I need to cement here that I did not have 'privacy concerns' as a foremost thing in my mind until I felt like the culture and people I'm surrounded by got bizarrely tilted and bloodthirsty.

I recognize that my small, amateurish attempts to guard against this are probably futile and incomplete, and possibly laughable by your vantage. But the impulse to escape your sight lines will continue to be very real. Dangling a hypothetical pedo bunker over the scale doesn't move me. A world without privacy and encryption looks more like the Trump investigations stretching into infinite than a parade of young girls rescued from Joseph Fritzl. Even the latter would require real work and resources, so I expect more resume-padding and activity among DEI hires in the Department of Bad Texts than anything else.

If I have to submit to your preferred apparatus, it would only be in the 'nice until meanness is coordinated' sense. Secretly I'll keep hoping it's destroyed by implosion or external force.

Let me present you an alternate vision of dystopia.

https://www.themotte.org/post/479/calling-all-lurkers-share-your-dreams/94878?context=8#context

We've been pretty fortunate that everyone that has built darknet markets (DNMs) so far are not competent or visionary enough to produce something high quality. The potential black market has not come anywhere close to being fully actualized.

The maximally dystopian horror example case is: onlyfans for live streamed child rape / snuff films with tens of thousands of men watching from behind Guy Fawkes masks beating off and tipping tens of thousands of dollars an hour. Everyone involved, the viewers and performers, completely anonymous and untraceable.

Yes, I am very familiar with the usual cypherpunk arguments for why crypto is an important tool for protecting people's security/privacy from criminals, and that also you can't trust police to protect backdoors in crypto systems and to also not abuse them. I'm not convinced the endgame world of maximally "useful" DNMs that could be produced wouldn't be a net worse world overall.

Seems like cryptocurrency is waning a bit so this future may be delayed for now.

Perhaps my view on this is informed by being very close to the production of the tools that could create this dystopia, but the creation of a completely lawless criminal state that law enforcement is permanently locked out of meeting technocapitalist incentives is a possibility that is too casually dismissed.

There's still a lot of room for an underworld Jeff Bezos to pick up a trillion dollars.

I think part of the issue, for me anyway, is just how much of my data is out there and how useful it is. And it turns out to be not only nearly impossible to protect your data from leaking with or without a warrant, but absolutely impossible to remove information once it’s in the wild.

If I go into your house, warrent or not, I’m bound to only the things in that location to get Information on your life. I might rifle through the papers on your desk, and maybe find out some things. But it’s limited in scope and it’s not going farther than those bits of data that are available in that house. Give me access to your data and I can know pretty much literally everything about you. I have your location, the websites you visit, the apps you use, your contact list — and that’s just from your internet service provider. Get your credit card information, and I know every purchase you’ve made. The scope is worlds apart.

The other thing is the permanent nature of the databases that the governments can build off the data. Once they have it, storage capacity is the only limit to the size and detail of the profile built. And this presents a problem that really needs addressing— if the cops get a warrent on me today, how far back can they dig and how far forward? How long can they keep this data? What can they do with these dossiers once they have them?

For most people, I think the danger is probably overblown. Most of us aren’t that interesting. But there are people who would absolutely be harmed by public databases being available. Back doors for cops can easily be weaponized by bad actors to track down escaping domestic abuse victims, for example. Governments can use these databases to track dissenters or in extreme cases to enable genocide. If the government decided in 2357 that it wanted to kill Hispanics, your phone and the data it collected and continues to collect would turn you in rather quickly. You had your phone in your pocket when you went to the Hispanic church up the road. You have a Spanish keyboard on your phone. You follow Hispanic topics on social media. It doesn’t take a lot of work to query a database with markers for membership in the wrong demographic group.

These databases already exist and have more than enough information to carry out any kind of genocide you'd like. Society couldn't possibly work without them. This was true 100 years ago and it's true today.

If the government wants to find and kill a group (or even an individual), it's not lack of information that's going to stop them, it hasn't been for a very long time.

I feel like much of the pracrical issues is with how these databases are accessed. People shouldn't have as wide access as the do and analysis should be done more by machines whose algorithms are centrally controlled (rather than having potentially millions of bad actors accessing the information and being security risks), that can then hand risks related to specific individuals to human analysist/administrators who only get access to that relevant information.

There were limits. Real time tracking wouldn’t have been possible in 1924. And given that most of the data available at the time we’re on paper that had to be physically stored, copied and sent to various places, it would have been much harder to pull off a targeted mass killing without missing people who wanted to hide. In fact there was at least one country (I believe it was Holland) that managed to save a substantial number of Jews from the Nazis by burning the census records. In that era, burning the single copy of the records in question makes them no longer exist. In the era of cloud computing, nothing short of destroying all the internet connected computers on earth would guarantee the data being gone.

Privacy is obviously important. I don't want some rando, or worse, some personal enemy to rifle through my all of my digital data looking for ways to harm me. But the abstract privacy concern takes the form of a Motte and Bailey between the two. Google, Facebook and friends mostly act on your private data in the aggregate, but the privacy advocates generate worry that your intimate conversations or pictures are being personally viewed.

There is a very thin line between "enemies" and "neutrals" when it comes to protecting your digital privacy, its one irreversible data exchange away from belonging to both of them.

I generally don't take too many steps to protect my own privacy, because I consider it a lost cause. If some enemy wants to go after me I'm pretty sure I'm fucked. Because enough "neutral" parties have collected enough data on me that is only loosely protected. There is a certain point where tech savvy adults have this realization about their online activities. "Oh shit, all of this stuff in aggregate could totally be used against me and fuck me over." Plenty of them react by trying to lock down the data about them. I don't think I blame them for that reaction, even if I kind of agree with you that this is a pointless endeavor. Its a bit of a horror show to realize how quickly an unscrupulous asshole could fuck over your life.

I work in web-development and GDPR has been a huge annoyance. I think its brought us closer to a Balkanization of the internet. Many large companies in the US were able to comply with the regulations, many small companies weren't. The obvious choice for the small companies was just to stop offering services to Europe. At some point the inter region disparities in law could force even the big companies to pull out. I'm not convinced this is a bad thing. Let each country or region have the internet it deserves based on the laws they impose on it. The sophisticated users will resort to using VPNs (at least until those get fully banned).

The sophisticated users will resort to using VPNs (at least until those get fully banned).

Perhaps by the services themselves, rather than any government. Once I turned my VPN on, Google blocked me from search even after I solved a few captchas.

go figure. shitty pooled IPs. same experience here with VPNs.

A warrant lets specific authorities in to a specific place for a specific period of time. Unencrypted data doesn't know or care about the who or the when - it can be copied infinitely, in perpetuity. The risk profile is not the same. One single unscrupulous copy operation, or even a short residence on a machine that has a security hole and a curious onlooker, is all it takes for the genie to get out of the bottle.

Just FWIW as someone engaged on academic work on these issues, I broadly agree with your take. That said, two quick points of disagreement -

(1) Even supposedly friendly personalisation can be dangerous. Really effective personalised advertised can boost consumption, but if you're anything like me, you should probably be consuming less. You're like a dieter walking through a buffet restaurant filled with dishes perfectly targeted to your palate. By controlling the data held on you by third parties, you can limit how appealing the menu they offer you is. Now, of course, sometimes it will be your cheat day and you can eat to your heart's content, and having an amazing menu offered to you is positively desirable. But most of the time, having this personalised menu is going to be bad for your ability to achieve your reflectively-endorsed goals. Data privacy is one way to protect yourself from having your own most voracious instincts exploited.

(2) Privacy concerns don't seem to me to be male-coded. If anything, more of my female students are very worried about it. More than anything else, I'd say it skews continental European; Germans above anyone else seem obsessed with it. Brits are radically unconcerned about it.

Just FWIW as someone engaged on academic work on these issues, I broadly agree with your take. That said, two quick points of disagreement -

Wow, okay, good timing. I was just about reserved to believe I was debating with 100 swords pointed at me until this falls below the fold (thanks everyone for engaging!)

What's the line of your academic work?

(1) Even supposedly friendly personalisation can be dangerous. Really effective personalised advertised can boost consumption, but if you're anything like me, you should probably be consuming less. You're like a dieter walking through a buffet restaurant filled with dishes perfectly targeted to your palate. By controlling the data held on you by third parties, you can limit how appealing the menu they offer you is. Now, of course, sometimes it will be your cheat day and you can eat to your heart's content, and having an amazing menu offered to you is positively desirable. But most of the time, having this personalised menu is going to be bad for your ability to achieve your reflectively-endorsed goals. Data privacy is one way to protect yourself from having your own most voracious instincts exploited.

Well, right from a healthy living perspective, ads that are very targeted and appealing might be a problem. But isn't it said (advocated) that "good ads" are in fact, "content"? If that premise holds, don't we already widely suffer from this problem?

(2) Privacy concerns don't seem to me to be male-coded. If anything, more of my female students are very worried about it. More than anything else, I'd say it skews continental European; Germans above anyone else seem obsessed with it. Brits are radically unconcerned about it.

I agree it makes more natural sense that women have higher privacy concerns because there's a lot pervs trying to get inside of their digital devices to exfiltrate nudes (and be otherwise generally creepy). But the level of inconvenience and fringe-ness men take on in pursuit of privacy is more extreme than what women do, in my read.

I am probably less technical than you at this point but: Broadly, I agree that trying to roll your own security is less secure than trusting a convenient megacorp who employs professionals. For 99.5% of people, this is the case.

I also agree that the probability of being targeted because of your data is lower than many privacy-obsessed people mention.

I also am glad you're bringing arguably a fresh PoV to the discussion!

However, I think other folks have swung back on a number of items very well that I'm not even going to try to double up on. Random thoughts:

Not all privacy desires have their foundations in criminality and kiddy porn. Villainizing E2E encryption and truly private spaces as exclusively the domains of ne'er do wells is the exact same tactic people use against guns to win the culture war. Carrying a pistol doesn't make you a paranoid asshole; it means you're vastly more prepared for a rare occurrence than someone who doesn't. You can't even make the same off-color jokes in Discord that you could have made in a Facebook message 5 years ago without auto-bans, so the probability of unsecured communication having consequences isn't super low.

I want to be able to talk about the government without them listening. I want to be able to talk about psychotic leftists without them getting me fired, and I want to watch exotic pornography without pyschotic rightists getting me fired. I don't trust any convenient megacorp to safeguard me from any of these actors or themselves.

Not all privacy desires have their foundations in criminality and kiddy porn. Villainizing E2E encryption and truly private spaces as exclusively the domains of ne'er do wells is the exact same tactic people use against guns to win the culture war. Carrying a pistol doesn't make you a paranoid asshole; it means you're vastly more prepared for a rare occurrence than someone who doesn't.

Just to be clear, as I mentioned elsewhere, I'm not villainizing people for using E2E encryption. Just pointing out that E2E encryption is an absolute gift to villains while everyone else using it LARPs as an enemy of the state.

As someone who has guns himself, my view is

  1. it would be best if society had no guns in it
  2. but our society has guns
  3. criminals exist and are incentivized to crime
  4. police cannot stop them from doing crime fast enough
  5. therefore, I should have guns myself

Perhaps if police response time in my town was 90 seconds and not 20 minutes the economics of crime would change, but it's not so I need a gun.

Anyway, I agree given the circumstances handgun ownership makes sense. Is the claim for E2E messaging even this solid?

I want to be able to talk about the government without them listening. I want to be able to talk about psychotic leftists without them getting me fired, and I want to watch exotic pornography without pyschotic rightists getting me fired. I don't trust any convenient megacorp to safeguard me from any of these actors or themselves.

I don't quite follow. You want to be able to do this stuff under your real name without every adversary finding you? Or... you want to be able to do this via an anon handle without being easy to doxx?

I want to watch exotic pornography without pyschotic rightists getting me fired

As a psychotic rightist, I can't say I'm thrilled about anyone watching exotic porn, but I don't want to know you watch it and whatever you do in the privacy of your own goon cave is your business, not mine.

The freakin' ads and marketing and metrics and data scraping and the rest of it make it my business. Just shut up and let me browse in peace! The irony, of course, is that none of this stops the pornbots spamming me on social media sites, even when it's "we're a big professional company, trust us" (the Tumblr Female-Presenting Nipples Purge did nothing to stop the 'hi [username], I really like you and want to get to know your bank account' crap, and ironically Tumblr Live is now being mercy-killed since nobody used it except as an OnlyFans knockoff, and even that couldn't make money).

Will skip most of the points here since we already have great comments and I don't have a lot more to add, but I feel a very important a very important aspect of it is often brushed off without much thought.

makes the ads being served to you dumber.

I don't know about you, but to me that alone sounds like an end in itself. I am not aware of any comprehensive study that dissects the impact of targeted ads on - at individual level - opinions, behavior, finances and mental health; and, by extention, at a societal level - social development, culture, economy and public health.

This ought to be better understood (recommendations for reading are welcome!), but given gargantuan size of targeted publicity businesses (including Big Tech names) it seems like the impact of targeted advertisement can hardly be overstated. And I do not - and neither should you - trust that private corporations should hold that power.

Of course, privacy hacks can only do so much in terms of protecting you from big baddie tech, whatever that means, and people who do that are already very likely savvy enough to block ads anyway. But as a policy, I think GDPR and other initiatives are a great step forward, although not so effective yet.

In the end, excessively fretting about privacy mostly is costly (in time), increases inconvenience and annoyance, increases the nanny/regulatory state, puts you at greater risk, and just makes the ads being served to you dumber.

Halle-freakin'-lujah!

I don't want smart ads. I don't want tailored ads. I don't want "we've been snooping on what sites you browse for the past six months so we think we can sell you this particular crap".

If I want a good or service, I'll look it up. I don't buy unsolicited rubbish, and I haven't the money for the stuff they want me to buy, anyway, so I'm bad fit for their "if this bozo spends thousands, we'll get a cut" commission.

You tell me that kicking up about this shit means it will be hobbled? Sign me up to put the hobnails on and start the kicking!

I also find privacy warrior claims rather, lets say, Joker-level anarchistic about rule of law. Everyone should have end-to-end encrypted messaging and the government should be locked out of private spaces no matter what.

The steelman for this being "if technology is basically just telepathy, why should "because it's technically possible" ever be a valid argument for society to have any right to monitor the contents of the communication"? The strongest right is one you can guarantee personally, after all.

In no other domain do we accept a claim like "this dungeon in my house is off limits even to detectives with a court order because it is my private property"

We have at least 2; attorney-client, and religious priest-confessor.

this digital cache of self-produced child pornography is something we can take to our graves regardless of any legitimate pursuit of justice.

We throw, and threaten to throw, teenagers in jail all the time over this. It is probably good that they take steps to defend themselves if they're going to engage in this activity to avoid the current environment of societal overreaction; the entire point of "rights" is to limit the damage society can do when (not if) it overreacts (the flip side of the coin being "ticking time bomb plots", but I'm willing to trade the lives lost in those for the ones saved due to them not committing suicide any more over this).

The level of hostility towards government here surpasses any of government's responsibility to protect its citizenry.

The overwhelming majority of murders worldwide in the 20th century were perpetrated in an organized fashion by governments targeting their own citizens (organized mobs using simple demographic criteria make up most of the rest); the impulse to make one a harder target against those is only natural. Proponents of this approach can point to things like census records being burned to stop an angry invading force from determining which people were going to the concentration camps and which were not. The Germans are well-acquainted with this; being that they have committed the overwhelming majority of murder on the European continent in the last 100 years probably has something to do with that.

The fact that privacy fretting appears to primarily afflict men (with notable exceptions like Naomi Brockwell) suggests that there must be something autistic about it.

While there are a variety of reasons why this is true, men are murdered more often than women; I don't think it's more complex than that.

In no other domain do we accept a claim like "this dungeon in my house is off limits even to detectives with a court order because it is my private property"

We have at least 2; attorney-client, and religious priest-confessor.

Sure fine whatever. But even these are not absolute, and can be pierced if justified.

this digital cache of self-produced child pornography is something we can take to our graves regardless of any legitimate pursuit of justice.

We throw, and threaten to throw, teenagers in jail all the time over this. It is probably good that they take steps to defend themselves if they're going to engage in this activity to avoid the current environment of societal overreaction; the entire point of "rights" is to limit the damage society can do when (not if) it overreacts (the flip side of the coin being "ticking time bomb plots", but I'm willing to trade the lives lost in those for the ones saved due to them not committing suicide any more over this).

By "self-produced child pornography" I did not mean teenagers recording themselves over Snapshot. I meant something more like an adult recording a child that they have prisoner in their closet that they raped periodically before murdering and disappearing them. The child is now gone without a trace but authorities believe this crime was committed and would like to view all of their encrypted data.

The overwhelming majority of murders worldwide in the 20th century were perpetrated in an organized fashion by governments targeting their own citizens (organized mobs using simple demographic criteria make up most of the rest); the impulse to make one a harder target against those is only natural. Proponents of this approach can point to things like census records being burned to stop an angry invading force from determining which people were going to the concentration camps and which were not. The Germans are well-acquainted with this; being that they have committed the overwhelming majority of murder on the European continent in the last 100 years probably has something to do with that.

These atrocities were committed by dictatorships, yes?

When I say people with these worries are Qanon-adjacent. this is what I mean. Invocation of living in fascist Germany or the Khmer Rouge to describe the need to rigorously defend your privacy living in the United States in 2024. Yes, if you live in a totalitarian dictatorship, or one that's rapidly becoming one, sure fine privacy seems pretty important! To these privacy warriors in the US, I'm sure we seem a quick slide of the slippery slope away from being targeted for our Chud/Woke beliefs with no time to prepare before it's too late. IMO this is a persecution fear very distantly tethered to Earth.

I submit that privacy warriors are just another shade of culture warrior, and it's a kind of warfare with bipartisan appeal.

  • -12

authorities believe this crime was committed and would like to view all of their encrypted data.

And how do you propose authorities do that if the device is turned off and the data has been securely encrypted at rest? Put back doors into every computing device to prevent this scenario from arising?

authorities believe this crime was committed and would like to view all of their encrypted data.

And how do you propose authorities do that if the device is turned off and the data has been securely encrypted at rest? Put back doors into every computing device to prevent this scenario from arising?

  1. Torture warrants
  2. Require device and crypto backdoors

I'm aware 95% of security researchers think #2 is a nightmare and makes security worse, but I believe they are simply revealing their libertarian-anarchist ideology. We just got through a period where enormous sums were invested in web 3.0 crypto-systems with outlandish ultra complicated architectures for everything from micropayments to whole network states (etc) and it was all pursued with doe eyed zeal. It is absurd to claim a system where law enforcers have a backdoor is not a solvable problem.

I'm aware 95% of security researchers think #2 is a nightmare and makes security worse

They're both nightmares, only #1 is more honest about it.

It is absurd to claim a system where law enforcers have a backdoor is not a solvable problem.

Of course that's a solvable problem. But such a back door is destruction of security. And being universal, it's a rather less-than-controlled destruction of security.

The problem to be solved with law enforcement backdoors is not destruction of security by itself, it's law enforcement abusing the backdoor and not telling us. And you're not solving that problem.

I don't think @dr_analog thinks that's a problem.

I don't think @dr_analog thinks that's a problem.

To be clear, I think police abuses are bad. I consider that a problem. I don't think it's unsolvable or that it is destruction of security. At least not moreso than any other rights. I don't think someone would say the security around your property rights don't exist or are destructed because a police officer can theoretically steal your property and tell you to suck it.

By "We just got through a period where enormous sums were invested in web 3.0 crypto-systems with outlandish ultra complicated architectures for everything from micropayments to whole network states (etc) and it was all pursued with doe eyed zeal" I mean that it's absolutely possible to construct a system where law enforcement has keys to unlock crypto with some semblance of due process. The problem previously is that it's been done so secretively (since the community response is so outraged) that nothing with a sound design has been produced.

I cant stress this enough; the cypherpunk community warned us at length of how impossible it would be to prevent abuses if you give law enforcement a backdoor and then during web 3.0 cheerfully advanced pitch decks for protocol research labs for moving all social media to blockchain, tracking and enforcing all property rights either through blockchain or DAOs, doing anonymous voting, insurance, exchanges and a hundred other libertarian fantasy replacements for the state that balajis could generate.

Take their hysteria about police backdoors with a grain of salt.

To these privacy warriors in the US, I'm sure we seem a quick slide of the slippery slope away from being targeted for our Chud/Woke beliefs with no time to prepare before it's too late.

What do you think preparing looks like, if not fighting for civil liberties and maintaining our ability to coordinate politically without being targeted? To me it looks like you'd mock anyone fighting government overreach right up until it's too late.

Do you think those murdered by their governments in the 20th century had "time to prepare", but simply chose to not to? Do you remember the borders being closed with no warning during covid?

To me it looks like you'd mock anyone fighting government overreach right up until it's too late.

From my view everyone who raged teary-eyed against government "overreach" like the PATRIOT act or FISA has been proven wrong to date. This stuff did not at all alter life in the US except for giving the government slightly more power to investigate crime.

I'll be really embarrassed if this all paved the way for a USA Patriot Points social credit system but I just don't see that taking off in the US. The notion sounds really far-fetched.

This stuff did not at all alter life in the US except for giving the government slightly more power to investigate crime.

How are you going to know if the government investigated you secretly and then made some excuse about it? Look up parallel construction.

Touched on here: https://www.themotte.org/post/851/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/183560?context=8#context

I'm not denying it doesn't happen, it obviously does sometimes. So, that said, what's the argument in response? Because parallel construction could happen (and sometimes does), that means the government therefore should not have access to these tools without a court order ahead of time and if it wrecks their ability to counter terrorist plots or organized crime or handle fast-moving cases, so be it?

I agree that some people were overly certain about the consequences of the PATRIOT act. But I would still rage teary-eyed against government overreach even if I were merely worried it would lead to tyranny, because once the government is totalitarian it's very hard to come back from that.

Also, in that time there have been various counter-movements, such as Snowden's, that pushed back against mass surveillance. But that could have easily not happened, and plus the state has presumably hardened itself against the next Snowden since then.

Do you think those murdered by their governments in the 20th century had "time to prepare", but simply chose to not to? Do you remember the borders being closed with no warning during covid?

So, what's the ground truth here? When you unbox a smartphone do you decline to log into a Google/Apple account so you can sync because you're worried that if you say yes there's a 1% chance that's how you end up in a gas chamber some day? If this isn't you, are you saying you sympathize with that view?

What do you mean by "ground truth"? I personally don't make many sacrifices for privacy or civil liberty's sake, but I'm grateful when others do.

Where I live I already don't have freedom of speech or association, and the government recently froze the bank accounts of protesters whom the state-run news agency had already demonized.

Again, how do you think anyone ends up in a gas chamber?

Where I live I already don't have freedom of speech or association, and the government recently froze the bank accounts of protesters whom the state-run news agency had already demonized.

Do you believe Canada is on the slippery slope towards gas chambers?

Again, how do you think anyone ends up in a gas chamber?

I've read about a couple of these situations and the best answer I can take away is: they live in a place that has gone insane.

I've read about a couple of these situations and the best answer I can take away is: they live in a place that has gone insane.

This is indeed the main anxiety of those who confound you, I suspect, and moreover, the main driver of our modern discourse.

I've read about a couple of these situations and the best answer I can take away is: they live in a place that has gone insane.

Yes, that's it. Sadly, places that have gone insane don't make it necessarily obvious that they have gone insane, because they attempt to gaslight the sane. And being nice prosocial apes those sane ones waste a lot of time they could be using to get away from insane place wondering if everyone around them seeming insane is not what insane people observe about the world.

Do you believe Canada is on the slippery slope towards gas chambers?

I wouldn't say quite that, but canadian culture in particular is uniquely vulnerable to mass insanity and mass manipulation, being obsessed with getting along over anything else. So while it's not on the slope right now, you can be sure the canadian slope is gonna be steep and well lubrified when we get on it.

Do you think those murdered by their governments in the 20th century had "time to prepare", but simply chose to not to?

This very much depends on context, but in the case of murder by one's own government, usually yes.

German Jews had "time to prepare" in that it was obvious that a murderously anti-semitic political force was in the ascendant since 1930, and most of them did - the core fact about the Holocaust they don't teach you is that it was mostly a genocide of defeated enemy Jews because only 180,000 or so Jews were left in Germany proper to Holocaust.

The various groups that would be predictably disfavoured by the Soviets also had fair warning (the Soviet Union didn't actually enforce emigration restrictions until 1928, a decade after the revolution) and those who had the resources to get out, did so (more than 1% of the pre-revolution population emigrated). If you were a Ukrainian kulak, you had "time to prepare" but probably not the resources to do anything about it - with 21st century transport tech and refugee law, I think most would have got out. The people who got gulagged in the 1930's included actual political opponents of the regime, but also a significant number of people who were effectively swept up at random - that isn't something people manage to plan around.

I am less sure about precisely what happened in China, but the Great Leap Forward looks like a combination of "insane regime kills at random" and genuine incompetence in a country poor enough to have no margin for error, and the Cultural Revolution is the Trope Codifier for "insane regime kills at random". In any case, Communist rule in China follows a period of 30 years of pervasive political violence (warlordism, murderous military government under Chiang Kai-Shek, Japanese invasion, civil war)

The much more common case is "Lose war, get occupied, get genocided". Contrary to the usual spin, this covers the vast majority of Nazi victims. It also covers most of the post-1945 communist victims - if you became an ethnic minority in the USSR as a result of the Soviets conquering your country in WW2, things were unlikely to end well for you. (And, of course, all the colonial genocides). I

So in summary, "Emigrate if you find yourself ruled by people who hate you" seems to be a heuristic that people tend to put into practice if they have the resources, with the result that "Government genocides a disfavoured minority group in its own core territory" is a much less common threat model than people think it is. "Emigrate if you think your country might lose a war in the near future" and "Emigrate if your country might fall under communist rule in the near future." are similarly good heuristics, but ones which people seem to struggle with acting on.

We have only to look at the Chinese surveillance system, especially as implemented in Xinjiang to track Uyghurs, to see that it is entirely feasible to have technology tracking every individual citizen all the time: where they go, who they are in contact with, and what they say.

We can also see from the COVID lockdowns how quickly “of course we could do that, but we never would” turns into “we will use every tool at our disposal to keep you safe” when a real or perceived crisis arises.

I am enough of a heretic to know that I will be discriminated against if the UK ever implements Chinese-style social credit. I was already subject to a considerable amount of abuse for voicing moderate right-wing opinions at the university I was in. I therefore want to maximise the number of controversial steps that have to be made, and red lines that have to be publicly overrun, before such a social credit system becomes popular.

It is vital that using e2e, local storage, blockers and privacy settings is done by ordinary citizens as well as witches. Otherwise it is very easy to make attempting to avoid surveillance effective proof of wrongthink.

I did not say lets also become an authoritarian dictatorship at the same time. I am specifically criticizing privacy warriors in the US.

See also the bottom of this other comment: https://www.themotte.org/post/851/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/183628?context=8#context

You will not agree, I think, but from where I’m standing both America and the UK became authoritarian dictatorships in 2019 2020 when they locked the entire population in involuntary house arrest. I get why, but I was raised to believe that there were certain things we would never do, and seeing how quickly we stomped all over them has soured me on “let’s go 50% of the way there but obviously not 100%, who would do that?”. The fact that we managed to pull most of the way back again doesn’t really reassure me.

The privacy weirdos provide an immense service to society by keeping privacy somewhat non-partisan and acting as meat shields for witches.

Can discuss more later but got to go.

It's not substantive and I agree with your point but it is really astonishing to me that anyone could get the year in which the world reacted to COVID wrong. I feel like "2020" will never look the same as any other number to me again.

Ha. I think it’s because they first discovered it in 2019, so I got used to thinking of it as Covid 2019-2022. Thanks for the correction.

A few notes, but mostly marking to think and read more and maybe write more about later:

I have a feeling that like 70% of the privacy ultra-activist stuff is counter-productive in that it mostly serves to draw more attention onto you than would be paid if you acted more like a "perfectly ordinary sheep" type. Like the guy trying to be covert with the obvious trench coat just making sure everyone in the diner is staring at him versus nobody giving him a second glance if he was wearing business casual.

Google gets beat up a lot for non-responsiveness to user inquiries and supposed privacy violations. I actually agree with your point in that I continue to use Google for most things because I trust their security better than just about anyone else. Their Advanced Protection stuff is probably best of breed, and at least I can be sure that no hacker or activist will ever be able to socially engineer their way into my accounts. I accept that they might delete it someday because some wrongthink I posted somewhere gets caught in the wrong filter. And they might give everything they have to the Government some day, but meh, I doubt it's much safer anywhere else.

I do still use Google's location tracking, partly because it is sometimes convenient. I also have a feeling, or at least would not be surprised if it is some day revealed, that the phone UI checkboxes to turn it off actually only turn off the visibility to you, not the collection and storage. If they're gonna collect and store it either way, I might as well get some use from it too. If I ever need to really be covert, I guess I'll have to leave it at home. Though even that might not help much, since it's such an unusual and rare thing to do, if anybody was actually watching that closely, they'd probably have reason to think that, whatever I was actually doing then, I was up to no good.

And yeah, running your own servers and storage has its own risks as well. I doubt I'm a particularly great sysadmin, but as far as I know, I haven't lost any servers yet, so maybe it's not quite that hard, or maybe nobody cares that much about my stuff.

and just makes the ads being served to you dumber.

Calling it, this dude is an alien or something. No human being would communicate this to another as if it were something anyone would ever give one iota of a shit about.

As a former Facebooker I share this sentiment. Personalized ads are better than non-personalized. Sometimes I actually find something nice through personalized ads.

They don't butter my bread anymore and I still believe this.

This comment was an antagonistic and low effort reply. Warning you not to do this.

I was not holding it up as a loss in particular, just pointing out it's the only visible scar from all of that self-flagellation.

I think you are taking a bit different take here, but I haven't seen my argument considered by you or anyone else here. Why do people encrypt their personal notes, self-host their e-mail servers and use VPN with Tor? Because their can. Similarly, why people climb Mount Everest? Because it's there. Himalayan mountaineering is one of the deadliest activity one can think of and yet, there is no shortage of people who want to give it a try.

As far as I observed, many people concerned with privacy, usually do so on a superficial level, while their deeper motivation resolves around the temptation to do something single-handedly. Many programmers possess only a limited understanding of unix systems, operating systems architecture in general, cryptographic algorithms and other more obscure topics. They are usually happy using Windows with VS code. Do they miss something in their day-to-day life, do their actions lack utility? Not at all.

But I'm talking here about a different type of people: hackers, tweakers, geeks who just build complicated projects for their own joy, because it's in their nature to take the road less traveled. You are right that it takes a certain kind of person to take pleasure in tens of hours of setting and adjusting systems that have a high chance of being abandoned after a couple of uses, but isn't that what FOSS is all about? The famous: "Linux is free if your time is worth nothing" points to the fact, that exploring software consumes tons of hours. Is it useful? I don't know man, this is exploratory behavior, some people think that there is some utility in exploring and learning new things. Of course one should be able to find a difference between a hobby and mental issues.

I don't buy into falling prey to conspiracy theories. Maybe you know people, who are so involved into distrustful political stances or are stuck in the views of the society taken out of the '80s and 90's movies like 12 Monkeys or Fight Club, but usually it's just an excuse for DIY. Here you have a link to a blog of a person, who self-hosted her blog server as a unikernel. A cumbersome way of doing it to say the least! And she in fact mentions hacker attacks as a reason in her blog post, but it may as well have something to do with the fact that she has worked on MirrageOS, a framework for creating unikernels. This is the pattern I find among the bloggers I follow: not the distrustful schizos, but rather hackers constantly experimenting with new tooling.

I don't mean to condemn people who are doing it for fun. Or securitymaxxing as art. As a cybersec person I 100% appreciate the beauty of a blog tech stack that's pure OCaml all of the way down to the (virtual) metal and have fantasies that one day we will go further and synthesize bespoke hardware from the type graphs and there's nothing black-box between your code and the net. Holy shit, so good.

I'm specifically trying to grab and shake the person who, when setting up their new phone, sees the [x] use cloud backups/sharing for safety and convenience? option and unchecks it because they believe they're so subversive or outrageous that the state (or big corporations) are looking for them and they can't afford the risk of centralizing their photos and documents. And then they go further and get to work on their GrapheneOS game and turn off push notifications because of side channel attacks and really want to live in a world where they don't get your message until they take their phone out of a faraday sleeve, get on WiFi, open Signal and have it pull messages.

This is a type of person and they're afflicted with something and I'm surrounded by them and I don't fully understand what's going on. I understand liberals and conservatives and libertarians. I can change the sliders on my values and see how my thinking can have me end up in one tribe or another. But the amount of paranoia that I'd have to add to end up in privacymaxx zone seems untenable. Surely something else is going on.

Now I see your point better! I would suspect that many people nurture the grandiose thoughts of self-importance and would even dream of the government taking interest in their usual life. Though sometimes cloud services can suck and while iCloud is smooth, my institution uses Outlook and I'm struck with OneDrive, which is sometimes so slow, that I usually carry around external HD to not get frustrated every couple hours or so.

Though I must admit, that I don't know many people of the type you're writing about, since in general I don't know that many people.

I don't use cloud saves for photos not because of privacy, but because I'm afraid that inevitably due to an error on either side an empty folder is going to get synced the wrong way and I'll lose five years' worth of photos. As for music, movies, and ebooks: lol lmao, as if I'm going to vendor-lock myself to a single storefront.

Ironically, if you are paranoid about privacy you are better off using a big tech platform, not a smaller site, forum, or service. Big tech platforms tend to be harder to hack and less inclined to cough up info unless pressed, which small services are happy to comply with minimal prodding (look how hard it is for the FBI to get Apple to unlock its phones). I have lost track of the number of time small web-hosters and forums have been hacked and data leaked.

Yes, this completely. Smaller platforms, including things you'd use for self-hosting, are very easy to fool with (e.g.) completely forged subpoenas.


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