domain:samschoenberg.substack.com
plural
11hr ago
They do matter because what's on the front page of Reddit is decided by what is bot upvoted. And the first comments are controlled and decided before it reaches the front page. It's all inertia after it gets there. You could say that because they reach the front page they're more pollutant to the truth because there's more eyes on them but I really don't think that people in 2025 are looking at Reddit and either not completely ignoring and avoiding political content or are not fully on board with the positions that are always fully left even knowing that some of them might be lies.
Maybe there are people being incepted by lies from Reddit but my guess is that those people are just being incepted by things they already wanted to believe anyway. This is all quixotic at best.
Rov_Scam
11hr ago
I think its an effort thing. Dem mayors instruct their police to not even try to stop rampant arson and not to bother investigating afterwards, and on the off chance they do then the Dem DA doesn't prosecute it.
But is it? The idea that the 2020 riot crimes were under-prosecuted is an article of faith on the right, but I haven't seen any real evidence that this is the case. The Major Cities Chiefs Association compiled a comprehensive report about the law enforcement response to civil unrest in 68 major cities between May 25 and July 31, 2020. During that time period, they recorded 2,385 looting incidents, 624 arsons, 97 burned police cars, and 2,037 police officers injured. They also recorded 2,735 felony arrests. The report isn't detailed enough to break down the number of individual felonies reported, but the 5,143 incidents named above is as good a guide as any (it goes without saying that looting incidents could have had more than one perpetrator, but this is balanced by the fact that the same people may have been involved in multiple incidents, and that some of the police injuries weren't due to assault by protestors). With that caveat, we get a rough estimate of a 53% clearance rate for riot-related felonies.
To put that in the proper context, nationwide in 2019 arson had a clearance rate of 23.9%, and burglary had a clearance rate of 14.1%. Even if my estimate is inflated, and I admit that it probably is, it's still a long ways away from suggesting that these crimes were significantly under-investigated; if that were the case, I would expect the totals to be substantially lower than the averages. Again, I admit that this data isn't ideal but... do you have any other data? With how much this has been repeated I'd expect something, at some point, coming out to back this up, but there's nothing. No studies, no disgruntled chiefs of police saying they were hamstrung by liberal prosecutors, no pardons from governors, nothing. On the other hand, it doesn't take long to find contemporaneous quotes from mayors affirming the right to peaceful protest while reminding people that lawbreakers will be prosecuted, or imposing curfews that they didn't have to impose, or bulletins from local police asking for the public's help in identifying rioters.
The source of this myth seems to come from media reports showing that 90% of the protestors were arrested had the charges dismissed. But this is accepted as a blanket fact without any context: These dismissals weren't for felonies or serious misdemeanors, but for summary offenses like disorderly conduct, loitering, and failure to disperse. The arrests themselves weren't made in response to any investigation, but as crowd-control techniques for when they felt things were getting a bit too rowdy. But crimes have elements that prosecutors must meet, and when police aren't making arrests with an eye towards prosecution, their cases aren't prosecutable. If you haven't personally witnessed a protest like this, the process generally goes as follows: The police declare a gathering illegal. A dispersal order is given. Whoever doesn't disperse is arrested by officers on the scene and loaded into paddy wagons. The officers who made the arrest stay behind, and the arrestees are booked by yet another officer. They're charged and released.
If you want to actually prosecute a case like this, you run into problems at the preliminary hearing. There's no police report. You can't produce the arresting officer as a witness; hell, you probably can't even identify the arresting officer for a given defendant. People arrested in different locations might be comingled at the precinct, so you can't even say where the guy was arrested. And even if by some grace of God you do have this, while the case gets easier, it doesn't get easier by much. First you have to establish that the protest was illegal, which may be the case if a road is being blocked, but is a tough row to hoe if it was a permitted protest that the police got uneasy about and hadn't yet seen any violence. Then you have to prove that a dispersal order was given in a manner such that the individual defendant would have heard it, which is tougher than it seems in a loud area with people moving around. But the real problem comes when you have to show that the defendant was given a reasonable opportunity to leave. The typical tactic used to facilitate mass arrests was to form police cordons around the perimeter to prevent the crowd from fanning out, then closing in to make arrests. A lawful protestor is thus presented with the dilemma of being told to disperse by police while simultaneously being prevented from leaving the area. And that's if you're lucky enough to have a real crime to charge. Most of these arrests were for charges like disorderly conduct and loitering whose elements are vague and are dependent on detailed police testimony showing that the defendant actually met some reasonable definition of disorderly and wasn't just arrested because the cop didn't like him.
But it rarely ever gets that far, because the cases have almost zero evidence, the prosecutors know this, and they dismiss the cases before they ever get in front of a judge. The one exception was Detroit, where the mayor, a former prosecutor, decided to charge all of the minor offenses that amounted to being in the wrong place. The poor assistant sent to present the cases to the judge had to suffer the humiliation of having dozens of them dismissed immediately after he admitted that he couldn't produce any evidence whatsoever. The DA's office dropped the remaining cases shortly thereafter.
Compare that to the Capitol riot, where everyone who merely entered that building and wasn't on a short list of people was guilty of unauthorized entry of a government facility, a misdemeanor carrying a penalty of up to a year in jail. There were thousands of hours of video posted to the internet within the next few days, enough in total that investigators could more or less track everyone's entire route through the building. People were bragging about their crimes on social media, posting selfies of themselves inside. And there was no shortage of people calling in to provide identification of people they recognized. Prosecutors had more evidence than they could dream of, and there was broad bipartisan consensus that the perpetrators should be prosecuted. Remember, this investigation started immediately after the incident, while Trump was still president, and it wasn't until months later until Republicans gradually came to the conclusion that it wasn't a big deal. Trump had weeks to issue pardons to anyone involved but he didn't. Was Biden supposed to call of his dogs in the middle of the investigation because Republicans suddenly decided it was better politics to let the people off?
One final thing—when people try to compare cases and show that person x got so much time for a felony while person y got so much time for "just entering a building" with the implication that the two sentences are disproportionate, they often don't take an important factor into account: Plea bargains. The people in the Capitol riot who merely entered and did nothing but walk around generally were able to enter pleas that avoided jail, and the ones facing felony obstruction charges got away with minimal jail time. But the Capitol riot had a disproportionate number of defendants who refused to take plea deals when the evidence against them was overwhelming, and went on to put forth horrible defenses that did nothing but piss off the judge. The argument can be made that this is unfair, and there shouldn't be a penalty for making the state prove their case. I can agree to a certain extent, but this misframes what is going on. They aren't getting penalized for going to trial, they're getting a light sentence for not going to trial. The alternative is that no one would be offered a reduced sentence.
Furthermore, the law grants a degree of lenience to people who appear to be remorseful for their crimes and take responsibility for their actions. Is this something we want to encourage or discourage? Should a first-time offender who admits he made a mistake, apologizes to the victim, and appears to have a genuine desire for self-improvement get a similar sentence to a defendant who continues to insist he did nothing wrong even after the jury says otherwise? These are things we can disagree about, or discuss, but wherever you land, that's the system that we have now. It doesn't matter whether you're in a Democratic area or a Republican area, people who take deals and show remorse will get lighter sentences than those who don't.
What irritates me the most about these arguments regarding January 6 is that they're almost without exception put forth by the kind of people who don't think that the criminal justice system is harsh enough. They talk about how police are hamstrung by liberal city governments, about how liberal prosecutors aren't aggressive enough, about how bleeding heart prison reformers don't understand that jail isn't supposed to be fun. But the minute they're on the receiving end of the system as it normally operates, injustice is everywhere. Marjorie Taylor-Greene is suddenly concerned about prison conditions. The minutia of overcharging becomes an issue. They seem to forget that in these liberal cities police make arrests every day and courts hand down sentences every day and that prosecutors don't just let minorities off the hook because they feel sorry for black people. One would have thought that when their own side fucked up it would have maybe given them some perspective. But no, they make excuses for why they shouldn't be punished before going back to whinging about how the cops aren't harsh enough.
token_progressive
maybe not the only progressive here
11hr ago
This is tempered by the fact that this arrest was obviously only possible by employing the surveillance state to its fullest extent. People get squeamish about facial recognition technology, but using cellphone location data is both less "emotionally" invasive as well as more durable as a tracking mechanism. Maybe carrying around constant location trackers in our pockets is a bad idea?
I'm all for limiting government surveillance, but the cell phone location of part of story does not seem to have anything to do with that. From the article:
However, geolocation data from his 911 call showed he was standing above the fire in a clearing merely 30ft from the blaze as it rapidly grew, prosecutors said.
If you don't want the authorities to know your location, consider not using the "tell-the-authorities-your-location" service.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
11hr ago
I will gladly pay twice as much for strawberries or steak in the U.S. if it means Americans get those jobs. I currently live in Japan, and so I'm already essentially doing that. It's really not that bad.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
11hr ago
The dog has no capacity to understand the role of an "actor"
You think the dogs running on treadmills to turn spits in Victorian England “understood” how their motive power was being transferred through cogs and widgets to procure a homogeneous meat temperature so the Earl of Chelmsford could entertain his dinner guests with delicious roast? Come on, requiring that a dog understand its role in order for its work to be morally permissable is ludicrous.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
11hr ago
Citizens shouldn’t have to worry about being detained for even a few hours by federal agents just because those agents randomly decide your license is fake, especially in a country like this where limiting government overreach was a core value of our constitution.
I agree. Unfortunately we are in a state of exception, because a large proportion of the people within our borders are not supposed to be here, and until very recently they were coming in at a faster rate than we could kick them out. Once there are almost no illegal aliens in our country, I will gladly join you in support of strengthened civil liberties to prevent ICE overreach (coupled with extremely strict and aggressive border controls, of course!).
hydroacetylene
11hr ago
I have a pair of aodad horns in my garage(not attached to the skull). Does anyone have any experience making drinking horns? Especially from a ram.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
11hr ago
· Edited 5hr ago
I'm implying that ethnic spoils systems aren't a particularly interesting or significant part of what's going on with NYC or LA. If you ask people "what is New York an engine of" or "what is LA an engine of" you're very unlikely to get an answer like "ethnic spoils" even from the most race realist types.
places with high numbers of illegals are dirty, overcrowded, dysfunctional, and foreign, in addition to them having higher crime and being generally low-trust
This sounds like a problem that can be solved through the approach of "don't live in such places". There are plenty of such places. I will say, having grown up in a majority-hispanic area of southern california that "overcrowded, dysfunctional, and foreign" is not a description that fits LA very well. LA is a sprawling, wealthy, soulless suburb stretching to the horizon with occasional pockets of city sprinkled throughout.
even willing to commute multiple hours to live outside of these places
People who commute for hours into LA are largely doing it because they're priced out of anywhere closer, not because they're trying to get away from immigrants. The exurbs have more immigrants, not fewer - e.g. Victorville (most stereotypical LA exurb) is 55% hispanic and only 18% white.
ActuallyATleilaxuGhola
Axolotl Tank Class of '24
11hr ago
what if they accidentally pick up a US citizen
Cost of doing business. I don't care. As a normal middle class person with a job who isn't tatted up or dressed like a thug, ICE is literally a 0% threat to me or any people I know or care about.
Again, what if the government makes you a lawbreaker? This is such myopic thinking. These are terrible precedents. This is literally the definition of the "first they came for" quote but you're just super confident it'll only be the first step.
It's not myopic it all, in fact the liberal scales have fallen from my eyes and I see clearly. The Left is going to eventually come for me anyway, and in fact they have already been boiling the frog for decades. No matter how hard the Right contorts itself to please the Left, it will never be enough. A lot of Leftists would already like to declare me a lawbreaker for my gun ownership, political and religious beliefs, and educational choices for my own children. They just haven't gotten the right tyrant in the power yet. They have a religious view of Progress and a Manichaean worldview that divides people into Decent Human Beings and chuds. Chuds deserved to be silenced, disarmed, barred from employment separated from their own children (who will be forcibly converted into Decent Human Beings by state education)..
Sure, but then you can't complain when I call your guy a retard and his policies terrible. If you want to have low standards that's fine, but I get to point at them and call them terrible. Your standards suck.
I'm not sure what you're trying to convey here. He's a "retard" because... he's doing what he was elected to do less than perfectly? Does "retard" here just mean "MAGA shitlord" or is there a more specific meaning you intended? To me, a retard (here I mean "foolish or naive person") would be trying to deport people with the best possible optics in attempt to please both sides while failing to accomplish anything of note because he'd be using a bureaucratic state full of hostile partisans. Under this definition, Trump is clearly not a "retard." Optics and decorum have been effectively weaponized by the Left, and only a retard would allow his supporters' agenda to be stymied by accusations of "racism" or "14 heartbreaking photos"-style manipulation.
I appreciate you sharing your thoughts. I am not very pro-immigration myself. I am mildly distressed I guess, but mainly because I feel kind of like I'm screaming into the void as a centrist.
You know, I am actually sympathetic to distressed centrists. I never wanted to be an angry partisan, and I am in fact weary and a little ashamed of my partisan thoughts and feelings. At heart I am a disappointed liberal. My world was more pleasant when I thought my fellow countrymen and I just had the same fundamental conceptions of goodness and justice, and we merely disagreed over the best ways to realize both. But it seems undeniable that the worldview of a large segment of the Left and the majority of the Right are actually incompatible and irreconcilable, and the Left believes in their political position with religious fervor. And so, in a great irony, the descendants of those religious men who laid down their arms and embraced Liberalism in order to end all holy wars must now arm themselves against a fanatical religious movement which is the fruit of that same Liberalism.
Butlerian
Not robot-ist just don't like 'em
12hr ago
because the dog has been bred for hundreds of thousands of years for subservience.
You are using the fact that the dog’s nature is to find serving humans agreeable, as an argument that the dog’s life serving humans is disagreeable?
ulyssessword
12hr ago
Thanks.
Yup, that's pretty much as described. "Shouts at" is a bit of a stretch, but that's just a nitpick.
MaximumCuddles
The world-spirit texting on the toilet
12hr ago
I think omnipresent surveillance has pushed it even lower class than is otherwise natural, as it’s never been easier to get into legal trouble for brawling due to the ease of recording and the social & psychological incentive to do so.
Likelihood of facing consequences is higher and the penalty is more severe.
It’s why I think every teenage and adult man should engage in some sort of combat sport and / or semi risky and preferably outdoor endurance sport like mountain biking, trail running, rock climbing, etc.
Danger is to the male brain like salt is to the diet; no intake is extremely harmful, moderate amounts are beneficial, and too much is inevitably fatal over the long run.
The_Nybbler
If you win the rat race you're still a rat. But you're also still a winner.
12hr ago
It's not really a lack of a market clearing price, but if the supply curve is very flat, behavior that looks like that can happen. Suppose there are 10000 people willing to do a job from any price from $10/hr to $100/hr. And there are 3 employers willing to hire a 3333 people for any price between $10/hour and $50/hour. Market clearing price is $10/hour and one person is unemployed. Now another employer pops up, also willing to hire 3333 people for between $10 and $50. At first they offer $11, and they fill all their positions while the other 3 employers end up understaffed. Those employers offer $12 to fill their positions. The new employer offers $13, and so on -- the market clearing price eventually reaches $50 and a bunch of positions go unfilled. And if any of those employers decide they can pay more than $50 (but less than $100), all they do is move the people around and end up at a higher equilibrium price.
magic9mushroom
If you're going to downvote me, and nobody's already voiced your objection, please reply and tell me
12hr ago
Well, yes, that's the contractarian view. Certainly, I oppose laws against people behaving cruelly to their own* animals, with a few exceptions for the animals that legitimately are capable of engaging in reciprocity.
*Cruella de Vil is still not okay, as while I don't see the puppies as having inherent value and being ends-in-themselves, they're valuable to the Dearlys/Radcliffes in both economic and sentimental ways, and she conspired to steal and destroy them.
chooky
12hr ago
I have very nice neighbors who trained or tried to train a dog to stop barking inside with one. I live in a very normy, probably even slightly upper middle class, burb.
Iconochasm
2. Bootstrap the rest of the fucking omnipotence.
12hr ago
I like to think I might do that, but it's much more likely that I would autistically lock in and just deliver the right answer according to the rules of the game.
ControlsFreak
12hr ago
there is no market clearing price for first world citizens doing a variety of shitty jobs- you can reallocate the limited supply by offering more money, but you cannot get them fully staffed.
This is, frankly, absurd. It must misunderstand both components, supply and demand. How is this supposed to work? Does demand for such workers not slope downward? (I would think that as the price of such labor increases, the quantity demanded would go down, as the price of the ultimate products would have to go up, reducing the consumer demand, in turn.) Does supply for such workers not slope upward? How would this work? Are you somehow going to entice fewer workers to take those jobs by offering $X+1 instead of $X?
DiscourseMagnus
12hr ago
or telling your kids that Santa Claus is real is child abuse
"Child abuse" is poorly defined, but lying to your children is definitely bad, and I don't think this is nearly the trivial matter that people usually think of it as.
hydroacetylene
12hr ago
I'm not going to write paens to Hassan's treatment of his dog. But its littermates are probably underfed in a junkyard.
hydroacetylene
12hr ago
Dogs attacking their owner is not an unusual story. Now, you, motteizean, can find a lower-paid and much easier job working from home. Fake Amazon reviews or something. This dog does not have that option. I'm not crying for it; a personal protection dog(which is probably what that cross was made for) is probably a worse fate than that. But it is just factually untrue that it could have left and found a different gig.
Eupraxia
Of all words spoken, all things read / most true was that which went unsaid
12hr ago
It is a perfectly reasonable observation to make that the features the Japanese (really, almost everyone) generally regard as "cute" have little in common with darker-skinned phenotypes. Darker-skinned populations have Noticed this for a long time, alongside related phenomena concerning group status, and take quite major offense to it. Despite the promise of equality given by the dismantling of explicitly discriminatory systems, these humiliating phenomena remain. Hence, it is not enough to be merely not-racist; one must be actively anti-racist.
hydroacetylene
12hr ago
I would assume based on that cross it was backyard bred and would have been sold to someone to use for protection, which likely entails worse treatment than Hassan is giving.
I wouldn't, personally, use a dog as a living prop. But I don't think it's beyond the pale.
ulyssessword
12hr ago
I invite you to see the footage for yourself.
Link?
Got to admit, of all the examples, that is not one I expected to occasion any controversy.
I was also somewhat tempted by "circumcision is child abuse" or "circumcision is surgical mutilation", though I think that's just the noncentral fallacy, rather than concepts being opportunistically expanded and diluted. It's also a proxy with a larger and more comprehensive argument behind it - that in general we seem to have a rule against unnecessary, permanent surgical procedures being done on children without their consent, or when they are unable to consent, and circumcision does not qualify as an exception to that rule.
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