domain:abc.net.au
In Which I Complain About This City
Or: An Urbanite's Lament
So a few days ago I mentioned that I was going to get around to typing up some stories about my time living, studying, and working in an urban area you have heard of because of its crime rate. This was reasonably well received, and clearly there is an appetite for this sort of post here. So, here we go. I have spent the last several years of my life living and working in an American city with a very high rate of both property and violent crime. Our police force is largely useless, and spends no time enforcing laws against "quality of life" crimes. Litter is everywhere, and red lights are regarded by many of our drivers as suggestions. Urban blight is everywhere. I spent about a year working part-time at a local courthouse, across the street from which was a block of rowhouses which had clearly suffered more than one fire in the past several years, and through every single one's top floor windows you could clearly see the sky. Until this year our murder clearance rate hovered around 45%, and I'm sure that the recent boost is the result of some creative accounting with regards to cold cases. The police operate under a federal consent decree, imposed in 2017, which they are pleased to inform everyone they achieved 25% compliance with just this year!
Yes my friends, I lived and worked in Charm City. You know it from The Wire, and from the 7-o'clock news.
Baltimore.
Baltimore is a shithole. There's no two ways about it. The subreddit is full of yuppies who live in Mount Vernon or Fed Hill or one of the 5 other safe clean neighborhoods in the city, who will insist up down and sideways that they actually like the city. The food is great! There's so much to do! It's vibrant! There's an art scene! Bullshit. All of it. Utter crap. This city is a shithole. Not a diamond in the rough, not an up-and-comer, not a "if you just tried it" grungy but fun place to live. It's not New York in the 90s, where it's a little rough but if you just give it a chance you'll fall in love. It's a hive of scum and villainy.
I won't bore you with reciting those facts you can find out from a simple google search. How the Gun Trace Task Force was a case study in corruption. How a mayor was arrested and sentenced for various corruption charges. How in the last week alone there have been 84 aggravated assaults, 62 robberies, 17 carjackings, 6 shootings, and 3 homicides. Instead I'll just tell you some of my personal experiences. Things I have seen, or heard, or which were related to me by a friend or coworker.
It is my first week of living in Baltimore. I am tentatively optimistic about this city. After all, if it bleeds it leads. Things can't possibly be as bad as it's portrayed on the news. There's no reason to judge the city before I've had a chance to really experience it. I am talking about this with some of my fellow students. Most of us agree that things are probably exaggerated, and we should form our own opinions. One of my classmates pipes up. She heard gunfire outside her apartment last night. When she got up this morning to come to classes, she found a bullet hole in her car.
It is my first month of living in Baltimore. I am beginning to think that perhaps things are not being exaggerated. One of my friends is having a party. "Just don't use the main entrance to the building" he says in his invitation. "Junkies like to hang out around there. Use the garage." I go to the party. A fellow partygoer mentions he didn't like that the host used the word "junkies" because he feels it is dismissive of people who just need help. A few hours later the group-chat gets a text. Then another. Then another. Then another. Five in all, each more frantic than the last. One of the girls stepped out for a smoke and can't get back in. Some of the aforementioned junkies are harassing her. Three of us leave to get her. One stays by the door, two more go to where she is, and escort her back inside the building. She is crying. The party ends shortly after.
It is my second month of living in Baltimore. I am awoken at midnight by the sound of revving engines. I peek through the blinds. There is a horde of young men riding dirt bikes driving down the street. At least thirty of them, possibly as many as fifty. I do not know at this time that this is a regular occurrence, so I shrug it off and go back to sleep. This will continue to happen sporadically throughout the rest of my time in the city.
It is my third month of living in Baltimore. I am awoken at 2am by the sound of gunfire. I am nervous. I've never heard gunfire outside of a range before. Eventually I go back to sleep. It is not the last time this will happen.
It is my fourth month of living in Baltimore. I have walked to a nearby McDonalds because I'm tired and don't feel like cooking. Before heading in I smoke a cigarette. A local junkie asks for one. I hand him one, and the lighter. He lights the cigarette and begins to walk off. I ask for my lighter back. He begins screaming, pleading, begging me to keep the lighter. He is wailing like a child. Sickened, I wave him off and tell him to keep the damn thing. Like a switch was flipped he immediately stops, and walks away. I know I've been hustled, but for the life of me I can't bring myself to give a shit. I take my burger and fries to go.
It is my sixth month of living in Baltimore. I have yet to find a decent pizza place. This irritates me more than it should. My phone buzzes. I scan the email briefly. It's from the campus police. There was a shooting on school property. No students were involved, so I don't bother reading the whole email. I've gotten a similar email before. I will receive two more before my first year in this city is over.
It is my eighth month of living in Baltimore. One of my professors kindly informs us that it is a matter of when, not if, we are mugged. He suggests all the things he is allowed to suggest. Keep your head on a swivel. Don't wear earbuds in both ears. Don't walk alone at night. Don't go out at all after midnight. Comforted by the knowledge that the only place in the city I go without a gun is the school, I mostly tune this litany of advice out. I've heard it all before, from more than one source.
It is my twelfth month of living in Baltimore. I have accepted a part time position. Every Monday, I go down to the courthouse, arriving before 8:30am. I begin to recognize some of the junkies and crackheads indigent citizens along my morning commute. One of them regularly masturbates himself in full view of traffic. I have rather unimaginatively nicknamed him "jack-off" in my head.
It is my thirteenth month of living in Baltimore. Every day on my drive home I pass a large banner advertising temp tags from Virginia. This is an illegal service, intended to circumvent the costs of registering a car and getting insurance in Maryland, or at least getting around having a suspended license, or no license. The banner is at least four feet high, and ten feet across.
It is my fifteenth month of living in Baltimore. I am cut off on the freeway coming back from grocery shopping, and honk my horn. The driver swerves out of traffic, and begins driving along next to me, matching my speed. I slow down, he slows down. I speed up, he speeds up. I look over, and he is screaming at me from the driver's seat of his car. I unholster my gun and hold it in my lap. He gets off at my exit, I don't. As he takes the exit, he forms a finger gun and points it at me. I file a police report. I am told to avoid that stretch of highway if possible. I do my grocery shopping at different stores for the next few months.
It is my eighteenth month of living in Baltimore. I still have not found a good pizza place. This has gone from annoying, to infuriating, to depressing. I have tried every recommendation on the subreddit, and half a dozen others besides. This city seems to thrive on pizzas that consist of doughy crust, no sauce, and plastic-y cheese. The best slice I have had in this city so far came from Costco. I joke about this with my friends.
It is my twentieth month of living in Baltimore. I have started working at a different courthouse. This one seems like it's in a slightly better neighborhood. At the very least, there are no obviously deserted and collapsing houses near it. When I tell my supervisor this he laughs, and tells me to make sure I leave before dark.
It is still my twentieth month of living in Baltimore. There has been a shooting near my workplace. I am unaware of this until I try to drive home, and have to detour around police tape cordoning off an intersection. I check the news when I get home. A one paragraph blurb informs me that one man was killed, and another wounded. The dead man appears to have been an innocent bystander. I realize I am more annoyed by the detour than the loss of life, and I am revolted by my own callousness.
It is my twenty-first month of living in Baltimore. It has rained all day, and when it's time for me to leave from work, the road home is flooded out. This road has flooded every time it rains heavily for at least the last ten years, according to my coworkers. No effort has been made to solve the issue. I detour to the next road. This detour takes half an hour. It too is flooded out. My twenty minute drive home takes two hours.
It is my twenty-second month of living in Baltimore. There has been an accident blocking the road on my drive home from work. A driver in a sedan ran a red light, and slammed into an SUV. The SUV has flipped onto its roof. The rear doors are open, and I can see an infant's car seat in the back. The intersection is clear enough for me to drive past. I take a look at the tags on the sedan, already knowing what I'm going to see. Sure enough, temp tags. I'm sure they're fake. For a moment I wonder about the fate of the SUV's occupants. I don't look it up when I get home. I don't want to know.
It is my twenty-fourth month of living in Baltimore. It is my last day working at the courthouse before classes begin again. There was a shooting at the same intersection as before. This time it took place early enough in the day that the police tape is down by the time I drive home, and I am grateful for the fact I won't have to take a detour getting home.
It is my twenty-fifth month of living in Baltimore. Disgusted with this city, the banality of its corruption, the constant grind of low-level crimes that the police just don't seem to give a fuck about, the seemingly monthly shooting close enough for me to hear it, the roving gangs of dirt bike youths who will occasionally smash the mirrors of cars they pass, the need to constantly wave off "squeegee kids" (ten to eighteen year olds who skip school to make a buck washing windshields at intersections throughout the city), the constant pervasive odor of weed, the open air drug deals I see every day, the crackheads and junkies I see every time I step outside my building asking for a dollar or a cigarette, the chicken bones that litter every sidewalk, I begin to write up this post.
When I first began to write I thought I would include anecdotes from other people I knew, if I felt myself running low on stories. I did not. Everything I wrote about in this thread, is something I experienced personally.
There's nothing new about what I've written here. Nothing you haven't heard of before. I'm not even completely sure this belongs in the culture war thread. I just hate this city. I hate what it does to people. I hate the callousness it has successfully infected me with. I hate the fact that I still have not found a decent fucking pizza place. I have received a job offer in a republican-run city in a blood-red state, and while I don't know if I'll be moving there, I will certainly be moving away from here.
Following up on this comment, I was recently working on an effort post that was loosely organized around "some people I have known." Specifically, I have been thinking about unenviable lives, people whose existence strikes me as excessively resistant to improvement of any kind, and how the way we structure society helps, hurts, or even creates such people. Some intended figures for inclusion were a man in his 50s who is a permanent American expatriate and recent convert to Islam; a woman in her 60s who lives in her car after burning through a six figure inheritance in the space of a single year; a man in his 40s whose whole life consists of playing video games and harvesting pineapples. All of their stories have culture war implications, I think, but one of them is culture war all the way down. This is Lana's story.
Requiem for a Friend(ship)
Once upon a time, before the world Awoke, I had a friend.
When I met Lana (name has been changed for all the usual reasons) she was a newly-minted attorney, freshly hired to the Office of General Counsel. A few weeks after being introduced at a university function, I ran into her at lunchtime. She was having a political discussion with another OGC employee and cheerfully invited my participation. This basic scenario played out again, intermittently, for several semesters, organically developing into a friendship that extended marginally beyond the workplace.
Over the years I learned that, when Lana first joined the OGC, she'd been married to another attorney--a family law practitioner of no particular reputation. They were religious Protestants but political Progressives. Lana's feminism was very 90s, in a way I find hard to describe today, but you can probably imagine it: makeup good, Barbie sus, "pro-child, pro-choice," but nary a mention of "patriarchy" or "rape culture" or "microaggressions." Critical theory was already a Thing, of course, but the battle of the sexes (as it was sometimes called) hadn't yet been racialized or radicalized in quite the way we see today. Anyway, Lana enjoyed--or seemed to enjoy!--that I was (approximately) an irreligious conservative. I think that, perhaps, by doubly violating her expectations (arguing against her politics without resort to Jesus, being unmoved by her appeals to Christian charity as a justification for bleeding-heart policies) I presented a novelty to her lawyerly (read: contrarian, adversarial) mindset. I appreciated her openness to discussion.
Eventually, Lana took a position elsewhere, but we occasionally caught up using whatever technology was in fashion. Email, Instant Messenger, social media. She proved to be an especially prolific Facebook poster after giving birth to a child and retiring from law practice to parent full-time (what she said then was that she never really enjoyed practicing law anyway--if memory serves, she was a literature undergraduate). Of course, social media is often a distorted lens, but what I saw was a pretty relatable mixture of joy and struggle, interspersed with the discussions of political interest that were the heart of many of Lana's friendships--including ours.
And then it was 2015.
It cannot possibly have been Donald Trump's fault that Lana divorced her husband. The problems she recounted in her Facebook overshares must have been simmering for some time: husband pressuring her for sex more than once a month, being a full-time mother had cost her her identity, raising a kid seemed like an impossibly difficult and objectionably thankless undertaking. But long-running disagreements with her Protestant friends over same-sex marriage came to an apogee in June of 2015, when Obergefell v. Hodges was decided--ten days, if I'm counting correctly, after Donald Trump announced his candidacy for President of the United States. That same month, Lana very publicly, very noisily separated from her husband--as well as her religious community, which she felt had taken "his side." The extended process of an acrimonious custody dispute began.
We sometimes speak of the "Great Awokening" and pin it to 2012 or 2014, but the first time I really noticed it influencing my personal life was during the 2016 election season (and aftermath). And what I noticed was not a vibe shift, but a shocking spate of relationship implosion. I had always thought of "blocking" people on social media as a tool created to weed out spammers, trolls, and perhaps the occasional stalker or abuser--not something anyone would ever do to friends, family, or even acquaintances, certainly not over something as trivial as political disagreement. But as 2016 progressed, Lana's Facebook posts grew increasingly vitriolic, and her tolerance for dissent all but vanished. "If you support Trump, just unfriend me now," she posted once. "Because if I see anyone post anything supporting him, I will block you."
Well, I wasn't a Trump supporter, so I didn't worry too much about it. At the time, I attributed this unbounded anger to Lana's personal circumstances, but by the time Trump won the election, Lana's divorce had been finalized for months. I suppose the official "end" of our friendship came in March of 2017. After months of watching Democrats scramble for any possible way to overturn the results of the election, from inducement to faithless electors to violent protests, I made a social media post highlighting several of the absurdities of the 2017 Women's March (in particular, its deliberate exclusion of pro-life women), and Lana put me on her block list.
I was sad about that, but by then our friendship had lacked an "in person" component for several years. I still had "in person" friendships with several mutual acquaintances, however, so I would occasionally get a second-hand update. At some point in 2018, Lana remarried--this time, to a woman. She had a couple of bad starts at getting back into law practice before finally settling back where she'd begun, doing lawyerly work for a (different) university. She gained two hundred pounds (ten of that in piercing jewelry), stopped shaving her legs (and started posting pictures of her unshaved legs to social media), shaved half her head instead, and colored blue what remained. Her Facebook posting, I was told, never slowed down, but became a stable mixture of "#NotMyPresident" and "I'm having another mental health crisis today" posts. (COVID-19 apparently heightened the amplitude in predictable ways, but in substance changed little.)
Then, not long ago, I got a message from a mutual friend asking if I knew of any way to contact Lana. They pointed me toward a post (now removed) on a subreddit I'd never heard of--a "suicide watch" subreddit. It is apparently a place for people to post their suicidal inclinations and get "non-judgemental peer support ONLY," whatever that means in the context of an anonymous internet forum. Under a pseudonym I recognized from our Instant Messenger days, Lana had posted that after a year of non-stop fighting (again, mostly over sex), her second marriage was coming to an end. All her friends had abandoned her and all she had left were online discussion groups with internet strangers, where she constantly faced accusations of being an awful spouse, awful mother, and all-around awful person. Our mutual friend was seriously concerned for Lana's well-being, but had been unable to get a response via social media, texts, phonecalls, or otherwise.
My first thought was that maybe I could find a way to get in touch with Lana--surely I owed her that much, for the years of friendship we'd enjoyed? Perhaps she was still active on one of her old accounts. But my second thought was that even if I could get in touch with her, there was a good chance I would only make her feel worse, in any number of ways. That put a damper on any inclination I might have felt to make any heroic effort on Lana's behalf, which in turn inspired some self-recrimination. I had to wonder: was my reluctance down to schadenfreude? Am I such a culture warrior that I would turn a blind eye to the suffering of a friend? After all, at minimum I could roll a fresh reddit alt and just... drop Lana an anonymous message of support. Would she see it? Would she care?
I won't tell you what I did, in the end. The point of this post is not to solicit advice, much less to inquire, with fluttering eyelashes, "AITA?" I will say that if my choice had any meaningful impact at all, I've never learned of it. I do have it on good authority that Lana is still alive, her second divorce final, and another same-sex romance underway. I can honestly say that I hope it works out for her.
Boo Outgroup
It leaves a bitter taste in my mouth, in a way that is difficult to discuss anywhere but the CW thread of the Motte. Lana is a person, but Lana also instantiates a personality. She is not the only friend I lost from 2015-2017, but the further we get from those days, the more closely their lives come to rhyme. I have a comfortable life, and often I think that's a g-loaded task (so to speak), but by and large these are not stupid people I see, setting fire to their lives in pursuit (or as a result) of ideological purity. I would say "status games" but they don't seem to be accruing any particular status! Swap out "lawyer" for "analyst" or "educator" or similar and much of Lana's story could be told of a dozen of the relationships I've enjoyed and lost. A cousin at a family function, a high school acquaintance on Facebook, a former student dropping by my office; all rolling in the deep, and every time a Bayesian reckoning lands me on "Leftism is both a cause and effect of acute mental illness" I roll to disbelieve, because I know it can't possibly be that simple--can it?
Of course it can't--conservatives top themselves, too, after all! And this is, like, prime culture war fodder, "boo outgroup" of the most aggressive sort. I don't know whether it's "mistake theory" or "conflict theory" to assert that people who believe differently have a disease of the mind, but--
Seven or eight years ago, I had a somewhat surprising interaction with a colleague at a conference. We were having dinner and discussing politics, and it gradually dawned on him that I was not just being entertainingly contrarian--that I was honestly defending some views, mostly libertarian but some downright conservative, which I actually held. His response was presciently forecast in Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality:
"Oh, yes indeed," Albus Dumbledore said in level tones. "Your acting was perfect; I confess myself utterly deceived. [You] seemed--what is the term I am looking for? Ah yes, that is the word. [You] seemed sane."
Well, okay, to be honest, he didn't actually accuse me of being insane. Rather, he refused to believe I am actually conservative. Weirdo contrarian libertarianism he could understand, but conservative? Never. In fairness, probably a lot of conservatives would refuse to believe it, too; my views on speech and sex and God and the like definitely put me on the outs with the diehards, but nevertheless I'm far too pro life, anti woke, pro federalism, anti public employee unions, etc. to ever fit in on the Left; it is a little difficult for me to even make a plausible bid for "centrist" without appending a caveat like "right-leaning." Even so--I simply was not believed.
That conversation got much less surprising by the fourth or fifth time it happened--most recently, just last week. I don't think I'm hiding the ball, here. I don't aggressively share my viewpoint in professional settings but neither do I bother to code switch for the benefit of others. And I have learned, over the years, that people really do just see what they expect to see. I'm a professor; once they know that, they make assumptions about my ideological commitments which even my own direct protestations are insufficient to counter. And this repeatedly inspires people to insist that I am putting on the affectation of conservatism; that I am clearly too smart, too educated, and too obviously sane to possibly see any value in right wing politics. Well, there's a lot I don't like about right wing politics! That's fair to say. Even so, I'm pretty conservative, especially as radical Leftism continues to push "classical liberalism" to the right of the recognized spectrum.
The obvious weak man here is just, you know, reddit commenters in default subs. These days it seems I can scarcely doomscroll for five minutes without encountering an entire thread of "no sane person can be a Republican" and "Republicans are all murderous sadists" and "I used to think tolerance was important, but there is no saving MAGA, we need to round these psychos up and put them out of our misery." Radical left wing violence is a thing! Presumably at least some of these posts are coming from Russian and Chinese botfarms, but most strike me as just the products of American public education.
Is there a forum for progressive cat ladies out there somewhere, where Lana is writing about her old friend, the professor? The one who used to be a mild-mannered contrarian scholar but who was radicalized by Harry Potter and My Little Pony fanfic and now moderates a forum for explicit wrongthink? I feel like, objectively, I've got the preferable outlook; I'm not suicidal, I haven't torched any marital or familial or professional relationships. I feel pretty sane, honestly. But I'm increasingly concerned that (1) I struggle to see sanity in my outgroup and (2) my outgroup struggles to see sanity in me.
In 1922, at the end of the Greco-Turkish War, about 1.2 million Christian Greeks relocated from (what is now) Turkey to (what is now) Greece, and about 400,000 predominantly Muslims relocated the other direction. There was a lot of force, and no small amount of death, involved in the process, but even so, the ethnic cleansing of the region (two regions?) has proven... surprisingly uncontroversial. Mostly forgotten, in fact. The "Cyprus Problem" is downstream from that conflict, of course, but even featuring as it does in the occasional Russian oligarch psychodrama, probably very few Americans have the first clue what a "Cyprus" is, never mind the finer details of the resolution of the Greco-Turkish War.
I do not think the United States is likely to be ideologically partitioned in my lifetime. But I am increasingly concerned about why that is the case. Greenland (population: 55,000) apparently warrants sovereignty and self-rule--but not California? Not Texas? (Not Taiwan? Not Israel? Not Palestine? Not Ukraine?) I think mostly that American citizens, fat on bread and satisfied with our circuses, are unwilling to sacrifice. Actually starting a war with the federal government of the United States would be suicidal, but I don't think the threat of military action is the primary deterrent to schism movements here--at least not yet. Rather, our prosperity is in part the result of our outsized global influence. While far behind China and India, we are nevertheless the third most populous nation in the world, an economic juggernaut despite the recent ascent of various others.
What will happen, if that changes?
What will happen, if it doesn't?
It's a problem for future generations, but at the same time I feel the desire to act, to do something about the rift that I see, to "reach out" and bridge the growing divide somehow--even though, if my actions have any meaningful impact at all, I am unlikely to ever know it. Talking about the problem (as we so often do here) doesn't seem to make it better. Not talking about the problem doesn't seem to make it better. Maybe if I were a billionaire, or a movie star, or a successful politician... but I'm not.
This is an oversimplification (inevitable, perhaps, when discussing Hegel) but Hegelian philosophy is sometimes explained through the metaphor of an acorn. An acorn is not an oak tree; a sprout is not an oak tree; a sapling is not an oak tree. And yet the oak tree is within those things, somehow. If we think of the bronze age as the sprouting of human civilization, and the renaissance as perhaps a sapling, then we begin to grasp the idea of our species progressing toward Hegel's "Absolute." The primary disagreement between Hegelians is whether we are each individually just along for the ride, or whether there is something we can do to accelerate the growth of our collective oak tree toward its final form. I am not much of a Hegel scholar--mostly I am aware of his work in connection with its influence on others, notably Karl Marx--but if I were a Hegelian, I think today I would side with those who suspect we're just along for the ride. Voltaire's Candide suggests we each tend to our own gardens, to not seek influence in the wider world. The older I get, the more I think that is probably good advice. But once Lana had a role to play in my particular garden, and now as a result of her own intolerance of diverse viewpoints, she does not. And, good or bad, inevitable or not--that makes me sad.
I can't be the only one getting tired of the same couple topics, so here's some comparatively lighthearted fare. Well — if one can call lighthearted anything involving a first-world nation flirting with plague.
https://x.com/lara_e_brown/status/1909607333090513144
The Birmingham bin strike has reached its fifth week. Rubbish is piled high, rats are infesting the streets, and experts are concerned about Weil's disease.
🧵on how the Equality Act contributed to this, and how it may cause similar strikes across the country.
1/ In 2012, 174 former Birmingham Council employees brought an equal pay appeal to the Supreme Court.
They argued Birmingham City Council had provided lower pay to women in predominantly female jobs (cooks, cleaners & care staff) compared to refuse collectors and road workers.
Long story short: The Birmingham City Council employed (employed) garbagemen, roadworkers, and grave diggers, who naturally were mostly men. They also employ cooks, cleaners, and caregivers for the elderly; these are mostly women.
At some point someone noticed that the former set of workers tended to earn more than the latter. A lawsuit was launched which argued that this was obvious sexism and a violation of the Equality Act since, in aggregate, male employees were getting paid more than female employees. The lawsuit succeeded, which spawned countless followup lawsuits. Any woman working in a job which paid less than a typically-male job was suddenly able to sue for damages, and consequently the Council has paid out over a billion pounds in equal pay compensation. The Council estimates that it is likely to have to pay an additional 800 million or so pounds before the thing has run its course.
Naturally, they also had to fix the problem, and so slashed the pay of garbagemen, road workers, grave diggers, and so on to match the female average. (Raising female pay to the male level would have been untenable before paying out >£1B, and certainly isn't possible now, as they're already basically bankrupted.) Unfortunately, it seems that people aren't interested in doing those jobs for so much less pay, and have declined to continue.
Result: Ever-growing piles of garbage all over the place, leading to a massive population of disease-bearing rodents and other pests. Weil's disease and hantavirus are suddenly major concerns. And, as the average daily temperature rises, the already-unspeakable miasma is getting worse. And no one can do anything about it, since, afaict, it's not allowed for the private sector to 'compete' with the government.
No one's even arguing that it's different pay for the same job. It's universally agreed that it's different pay for different jobs. However, the rhetoric here has to do with the value of the job not economically, but in some ineffable moral sense. Supporters of the move argue that surely the 'value' of the predominantly-female jobs must be the same as the predominantly-male jobs. To think otherwise would apparently imply that female labor is less 'valuable' than male labor, which in turn would imply that women are less 'valuable' than men.
What can one say in reply? It's one of those things where all one can do is shake one's head. Especially in Birmingham, where anyone considering pointing out some obvious considerations on the matter is liable to be charged with misogyny. And modern polite white society doesn't seem to have any kind of defense against women's tears.
All in all it's one of the clearest examples I've ever seen of wokeness destroying a society's ability to perform basic functions.
Birmingham is, FWIW, the economic and cultural center of the Midlands region, and Britain's second-largest city after London. Now it's facing problems which sound like something out of its medieval era.
And I have to wonder: if it happened there, can it happen in London?
To add some of my own commentary, this seems to me an example of the impossibility of compromise with wokeness. There can be no detente. Wokeness can never rest until it has erased all practical distinctions between human beings, and one generation's gracious, ostensibly common-sensical compromise ('equal pay for the same job') not only doesn't address the real problem but serves as a springboard for the next generation's 'equal pay for different jobs', e.g.
The fundamental relationship between men and women hasn't been harmonious since Eden at the latest, but it has at least remained functional throughout most of history. When I see the above, it occurs to me that one side effect is even fewer men able to generate enough income to provide for a family or maintain the respect of potential mates. Another straw on the camel's back.
cjet79
8mo ago
Scott Alexander endorses basically anyone but Trump
The main points:
- Trump will move the needle towards right wing strong man authoritarianism.
- The democrats might seem worse, but they aren't.
- Some of us want to punish the democrats for being bad by voting for Trump, but this isn't a good thing to do if Trump will be actually worse on the things we care about punishing the democrats.
I went back and read Scott's 2016 anyone but Trump election endorsement.
The main points:
- Trump doesn't have solutions, he just wants to blow up the system.
- Trump is high variance.
- He will lead to anti-intellectual populism dominating the conservative movement.
- Trump won't do as much about global warming.
- Trump pisses off the libs, and this will further radicalize the libs rather than bringing us back to a better spot.
I would maybe suggest in the future that these posts are counter-productive. The most recent one moved my needle more in favor of Trump. I can't believe I'm considering voting for a major party candidate (I've voted libertarian the few times I've bothered to actually show up). Going back and reading the old anti-endorsement was even worse. With hindsight answering the criticisms:
- Trump did not blow up the system. People blew it up in an attempt to oppose him. Generals lied to him about troop deployments. Prosecutors invented novel legal theories for going after Trump. The FBI encouraged censorship of a story by heavily implying it was false when they knew it was true. Pharma companies held back the release of their vaccines to not give any perceived benefit to Trump. Congress and intelligence agencies spent three years persecuting Trump based on an accusation that was entirely made up by the Clinton campaign.
- Trump had a high variage twitter account. Crazy things were said sometimes. But the actual day to day governance was fine. There were fewer major wars and foreign entanglements started. War seems like a very high variance problem especially wars with a nuclear power involved.
- I feel that the conservative movement has come to a healthier space where they differentiate the university and educational establishment that they hate from intellectualism in general. This worry did not materialize.
- He didn't do much about global warming. I'm happy about that. Honestly worrying about something with consequences 20 years out feels a little silly at this point. It was nice when we had such long time horizons.
- He did indeed piss off the libs. Trump Derangement Syndrome did not go away. He also didn't "crack down" on them. He didn't send Hillary to jail, despite how much her Russia hoax thing probably meant she deserved it (I know she would have gone in for other reasons, but seriously talk about norms breaking). Trump has weathered a great deal of hate. He seems uniquely suited to it. I am happy with him in this role. It has helped a large number of people learn to basically ignore "cancel culture" attempts. Or to immediately look with suspicion at any story of someone doing something awful.
I really feel like there is some gell-mann amnesia going on with Scott. He reads these horrid stories about Trump. With the details sensationalized in the worst possible way. And he accepts them as fact. Meanwhile the New York Times threatens to dox him so they can run a hit piece article on him that they sourced from a weirdo on wikipedia with a knack for rules-lawyering.
He talks about how Trumps norms violations are loud and unsubtle. While the democrats only subtly and slowly violate norms. But this is a framing that has been shoved down our throats by the media. Every minor violation of Trump's is blown out of proportion, and every major violation of the democrats is minimized and not talked about. How is it not a massive norms violation to spend 3 years investigating and accusing a sitting president of Treason based on a campaign dosier that was almost entirely made up by his opposition? And the people doing this knew it all along. I don't think democrats or liberal leaning people seem to realize how much the Russia Hoax thing has utterly fucked their credibility on everything. Especially after the Hunter Biden laptop story came out, and it turned out that the intelligence agencies helped them cover up exactly what they had been accusing Trump of doing.
This is supposed to be a government system where one side wins, implements their things, becomes a little too unpopular for going too far, and then the other side wins and get to do their thing for a little while. They switch back and forth. We all learned in 2016 that no, this is not actually how it operates. There is actually a hidden veto by the bureaucracy and the deep state. If they don't like the president they can decide not to let him do his thing. People are righteously pissed off about that, and many of them would happily see that bureaucracy and deep state dismantled if it meant they never get to use their veto again. And one way to test if they still have the veto power, and one way to give someone an incentive to fix it, is to keep electing presidents that we know they will "veto".
Trump is a vote for restoring norms. For restoring the ability of democracy and the vote to actually pick a direction for the country, rather than have that direction dictated by unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats. I dislike Trump on most of his policies, but it wouldn't be a vote for his policies. Its a vote for voting on policies.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
1mo ago
There's an idea I've been toying with for a while that connects with this. I saw some comment a while ago (I can't recall where) that Obama had said he expected some macho, manly, John Wayne type to be who Republicans settled on in 2016. And so Trump blindsided him.
And lurking in the background there, you can see, I think, something like Obama's (ultimately disastrously flawed) theory of how progress happens in society. Namely, you get a bunch of hardcore radical leftist activists to get agitated up like an agitated bee's nest. And then kind-hearted liberals publicly portray themselves as simply responding to the people's will as they enact progressive change. And then, after enough of that, eventually stern dad John Wayne gets back in office and spanks the radical activists who have overreached - and he gets considerable public support in doing so. And so those activists are forced to have their more extreme edges get sanded down. A certain amount of liberal capitulation happens - but meanwhile, quite a lot of the previous change sticks, too. And liberals get to console their radical activist fringe and say, "I know, I know - what a dick that guy is! We fought for you, and we'll fight for you next time, too! Show up at the polls and organize! But I mean, what can you do? Reactionaries and fascists, am I right?" And notably, in that story, liberals never, ever, ever have to be the bad cop and police their own crazies. They really want to be the cool uncle who still listens to Nas on their ipods (but wear mom jeans).
But Trump threw a massive wrench in this theory of social change. Because of course actual Trump is intermittently pretty radical himself, or at least is quite comfortable with radical rhetoric. And because the actual populist forces that Trump taps into are frequently fairly radical too (but a radical strain that is utterly terrifying to American liberals who really don't want to accept the reality of their own social position). And because American liberals secretly want stern dad John Wayne to reassert reality and normality after their radicals go too far and temper those radicals a bit while leaving the hands of liberals clean and letting them chafe against the repressions of normality... and Trump really didn't do any of that. Trump loves chaos. He doesn't have any of that energy that George W. Bush or Mitt Romney have, trying to be a beleaguered dad from a 50s sitcom holding the line and reinforcing norms in a prissy, stuffy, uncool way.
In 2017, the old, comfortable script got thrown out. And that meant that nobody was there to police liberals' radicals for them - and indeed, liberals were busy being utterly frantic themselves because of Trump, so policing their radicals was the last thing on their mind. They were coming to feel pretty radical themselves. So there ended up being no breaks on the train, and the radicalism of the left ended up growing way more pronounced and unchecked. And so that's grown and grown...
But by 2025, 1) it's turned out that some of those radical edges are absolutely electoral poison (and increasingly make even normie liberals uncomfortable), 2) some of those radical edges are tearing the Democratic coalition apart, 3) intersectionality has proven a lot more adept at making fervent enemies (like nearly all young white men in America) than friends, and crucially 4) a lot of those radicals REALLY, violently hate the Jews, and given how the current Democratic coalition is structured, that simply can't be allowed to continue. And because of the way Trump rolls, they simply can't wait for the stern 1950s dad to show up and reinforce norms and boundaries for them. So (or at least in this theory) some American liberals (or their powerful institutions in the background) are finally reaching the point where its dawning on them that they're going to have to do the policing themselves, as deeply painful and unpleasant as that may be. And that's going to require theorizing their erstwhile allies in Latinate language and casting them in pretty unpleasant lights via rhetoric rewritten as social "science".
Throwaway05
3mo ago
So, I can often be found posting on here complaining about bias in medicine (although I disagree about some of the kinds of bias with quite a few posters here).
We do have something of an update to a long running story that’s worth sharing.
Meddit link for more discussion and detail: https://old.reddit.com/r/medicine/comments/1jotpzz/follow_up_on_the_study_showing_discrepancies_in/
Basically, awhile back there was a headline about how black babies received worse outcomes when care for by white doctors. Apparently, this went so far as to get cited in the supreme court.
Sometime later someone on Meddit (which is still quite pro-woke) noticed that they forgot to control for birth weight, which would likely completely kill the effect size (explanation: white physicians have more training and take care of sicker babies who have worse outcomes). At the time there was a significant amount of speculation essentially going “how do you miss this? That would be the first you would control for.”
Well, it turns out that someone filed a FOIA request and well, to quote Reddit:
“A reporter filed a FOIA request for correspondence between authors and reviewers of the article and found that the study did see a survival benefit with racial concordance between physician and patient, however it was only with white infants and physicians. They removed lines in the paper *stating that it does not fit the narrative that they sought to publish with the study.” *
While I often criticize medicine for being political, I’m often found here telling people to trust the experts when it comes to (certain aspects) of COVID or whatever, and well this kinda stuff makes it very very hard.
The initial findings were passed around very uncritically and sent up all the way to the supreme court.
How can people trust with this level of malfeasance? How do we get the trust back? How do we stop people from doing this kind of thing? I just don’t know.
My wife takes our kids to our local public library. The YA section is overflowing with [unasked for aggressive child targeting LGBTQ evangelism] graphic novels (I get that that's a unkind way to describe this shit, but they are overtly targeting my early middle school aged daughter - I didn't start this). There are giant, proudly displayed pride flags up all the time. Jack Turban "hooray for trans!" book endcaps. Lots of community "witchy knitting circle!" outreach. I am not exaggerating here. We live in a purple area, politically, although our particular corner of it is more like 66% blue. I legitimately find it all very frustrating - if I took my kids to a "pray the gay away" church, it would horrify my wife, but our local library is quite literally that, and then some, for a different ideology (or secular religion, really), and one that appalls me. But, you know, it's a public library. Reading is good. Libraries are good. This is currently a really vexed issue for me, actually.
Anyway, I'm not saying burn it down, exactly, but if Hercules came along to reroute a river through it to clean it out, I wouldn't shed any tears. And I grew up loving my time in libraries, too. Very depressing.
jeroboam
3mo ago
South Africa : The Ultimate Red Pill
There's been quite a lot of speculation on what Elon Musk's red pill moment was. Some have said it's that the government interfered with his space launches. Others have said its because his kid transitioned from male to female. But it's hard to write the story of Elon without considering where he grew up: South Africa.
South Africa is a cautionary tale. It's the ultimate failure of the progressive experiment.
The decline of South Africa since the end of apartheid has been as stunning as it was predictible. At one point, a small population of 3 or 4 million white South Africans was able to build a suprisingly advanced society. They performed the first human heart transplant. They had nuclear weapons!
But over time, international pressure against apartheid mounted and South Africa became a pariah state. In 1994, the apartheid government caved and allowed blacks full participation in democracy. Optimism was high. F. W. de Klerk, the last white president, even ran for another term. He got 20% of the vote.
The man who won the office with 63% of the vote, and who de Klerk would share a Nobel Peace Prize with, was Nelson Mandela. Today, Mandela is often compared to Gandhi or MLK, but that is not an accurate representation of his earlier years when he viewed himself as a guerilla in the model of Che Guevara. Fortunately for his image, he was arrested in 1962 and imprisoned until 1990, largely avoiding personal involvement in his party's genoicidal rhetoric of "Kill the Boer" and the infamous use of the South African necktie which involved placing a tire around a person and then burning them alive.
Neverthless, as President, Mandela managed to be mostly conciliatory towards whites. The Truth and Reconcilation Committee was an effort to bury the hatred of the past, and was largely viewed as succesful at the time.
But the rot had already started. Mandela's term saw the imposition of huge amounts of welfare spending and affirmative action. There was an influx of illegal immigrants from poor countries nearby, but an outflux of whites and coloreds. As a result, the percentage of whites in South Africa fell from 13% in 1995 to just 7% today.
After Mandela, things would get much worse. Thabo Mbeki, the next President, denied the link between HIV and AIDS, and the number of South Africans suffering from the disease skyrocketed to a quarter of the population. After him came Jacob Zuma, a polygamist, who would rehash the "kill the Boer" song during a 2012 rally.
Today, South Africa is in shambles. The passenger rail system, which once served 600 million annual journeys, is now essentially defunct. The electricity grid is teetering. Life expectancy and GDP per capita have been stagnant for 40 years, while nearly every other country in the world has seen staggering increases.
Worse, though, is the fate of rural white farmers who have been subject to attacks in which they are tortured for several hours and then murdered. Almost none of these attacks are prosecuted, meaning the farmers can be murdered with impunity. In fact, the government of Cyril Ramphosa, the current president, has proposed seizing white-owned farms without compensation, echoing what happened in Zimbabwe.
It was in the context of all of this, that today the Trump administration said it will grant asylum and a rapid path to citizenship for white South African farmers who flee to the United States. Furthermore, the government will cut off all aid to South Africa.
This will likely hasten South Africa's decline, and it's an acknowledgement that there is no longer anything there worth saving. South Africa is a failed African state, no different than many others. But despite everything, I'm not sure what could have been done differently. Apartheid is morally reprehensible, and at the same time it was the only way to keep South Africa from falling apart. That's all in the past now. It's time for the elves to get back on their ships and sail back to Valinor. And pity the ones that stay behind.
2rafa
2mo ago
What gets me about you and your infinite cycle of creating new accounts and then deleting them, new posts and then deleting them is that you never really seem to explain why. You can just be a normal poster here. It’s OK. You’ve posted about a lot of interesting things, you’d fit in. It’s a mostly civilized political discussion forum for nerds. There’s no real malice. Just stop with the dumb routine.
You Did It To Yourself
Again, the endless seething by doctors over their ongoing replacement by “physician associates/assistants” (PAs) and “nurse practitioners” (NPs) rears its head. The many concerns that physicians have about NP/PAs are, of course, entirely valid: they’re often stupid, low-IQ incompetents who have completed the intellectual equivalent of an associates degree and who are now trusted with the lives of people who think they’re being cared for by actual doctors.
Story after story describes the genuinely sad and infuriating consequences of hiring PAs, from grandparents robbed of their final years with their families to actual young people losing 50+ QALYs because some imbecile play-acting at medicine misdiagnoses a blood clot as “anxiety”. Online, doctors rightfully despair about what NPs are doing to patient care and to their own ability to do their jobs.
But there’s a grand irony to the nurse practitioner crisis, which is that it is entirely the making of doctors themselves. If doctors had not established a regulatory cartel governing their own profession, the demand that created the nurse practitioner would not exist. The market provides, and the market demanded healthcare workers who did the job of doctors in numbers greater than doctors themselves were willing to train, educate and (to a significant extent) tolerate due to wage pressure. It is a well-known joke in medical circles that doctors often have a poor knowledge of economics and make poor investment decisions. This is one of them; the market invented the nurse practitioner because it had to. Now all of us face the consequences.
I had multiple friends who attempted to get into medical school. Some succeeded, some failed. All who tried were objectively intelligent (you don’t need to be 130+ IQ to be a doctor, sorry) and hard working. The reason those who failed did so was because they lacked obsessive overachiever extracurriculars, or were outcompeted by those who were unnecessarily smarter than themselves (there is also AA, especially in the US, but that’s a discussion we have often here and I would rather this not get sidetracked).
The problem goes something like this: smart and capable people who just missed out on being doctors (say the 80th to 90th percentile of decent medical school candidates, if the 90th to the 100th percentile are those who are actually admitted) don’t become NPs/PAs. This is because being an NP/PA is considered a low-status job in PMC circles; not merely lower status than being a doctor, but lower status than being an engineer, a lawyer, a banker, a consultant, an accountant, a mid-level federal government employee, a hospital administrator, a B2B tech salesman etc, even if the pay is often similar. To become a PA as a native born member of the middle / upper middle class is to broadcast to the world, to every single person you meet, that you couldn’t become a doctor (this isn’t necessarily true, of course). This means that NPs and PAs aren’t merely doctor-standard people with less training, they’re from a much lower stratum of society, intellectually deficient and completely unsuited to being substitute doctors (the work of whom, again, doesn’t require any kind of exceptional intelligence, but it does require a little). Almost nobody from a good PMC background who fails to get into medical school or, subsequently, residency is going to become a PA/NP for these reasons of social humiliation, even if the pay is good.
Nobody who moves in the kind of circles where they have friends who are real doctors, in other words, wants to introduce themselves as a nurse practitioner or physician associate. A similar situation has happened in nursing more generally. Seventy years ago, smart women from good backgrounds became nurses. Today some of those women become doctors, but most go into the other PMC professions. Nursing became a working class job, and standards slipped. Still, nursing is still often less risky (although there are plenty of deaths caused by nurse mistakes) than the work undertaken by NPs and APs. Nursing became if not low status then mid status, and is now on the level of being a plumber or something - well remunerated, but working class.
The result is a crisis of doctors’ own making. Instead of allowing (as engineers, bankers and lawyers do) a big gradation of physicians, all of whom can call themselves the prestige title doctor but who vary widely in terms of competence, pay and reputation in the profession, doctors have focused on limiting entry, reserving their title for themselves and therefore turning away many decent candidates. (Of course there is a status difference between a rural family doctor and a leading NYC neurosurgeon, but the difference between highs and lows is different to the way it would be if medical school and residency places were doubled overnight.) The karmic consequence of this action is that they are now being replaced by vastly inferior NP/APs who deliver worse care, are worse coworkers and who will ultimately worsen the reputation of the broader medical profession.
What will it take to convince the medical profession, particularly in the US, to fully embrace catering to market demand by working to deliver the number of doctors the market requires, rather than protecting their own pay and prestige from competition in a way that leads to ever more NP/APs and ever worse patient outcomes? The US needs more doctors, especially in disciplines like anaesthesiology, dermatology and so on paid $200k a year (which, much as it might make some surgeons wince, is in fact a very respectable and comfortable income in much of the country). Deliver them, and the NP/AP problem will fade away as quickly as it began.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
8mo ago
There's something at the core of this all, from progressives, that I fundamentally have a hard time wrapping my head around.
I grew up in the 80s and 90s in the South in a conservative religious family in a conservative community. The view of the Supreme Court was overwhelmingly that it had behaved as an unelected, anti-democratic, civilization wrecking dictatorship for half a century. If you valued freedom of religion and freedom of association in a more traditional, de Tocqueville-ian sense (with a strong emphasis on the ability of people to form and police their own communities with their own values and their own norms and their own boundaries), the Supreme Court had behaved as a wrecking ball. And particularly if you were sensitive, as most smarter conservatives I knew were, to the ubiquity of second order effects in society, the Supreme Court came across constantly as a body that was totally indifferent to, and totally insulated from, the disastrous second order effects of its dictates and airy social engineering.
BUT... well, Reagan won in a landslide, and the country had turned back to the right, and with that level of political domination, at some point the Supreme Court was going to have to reflect that political reality... or so we thought. And besides, conservatives value authority and institutions and fear chaos. There's a very deep awareness of Chesterton's Fence on a gut level. So despite those wide spread, deeply held beliefs about the Supreme Court, we just marched ahead, accepted their rulings, and tried to steer our lives around the damage they inflicted. (Also, the federal government had made it clear earlier that they would send in Federal troops from time to time to enforce Supreme Court rulings at gun point, and most people were ready just to move on with their lives)
But of course, over time, all the pipeline issues about the judiciary did become more apparent - the political domination of Reagan conservatives really SHOULD have resulted in a much more conservative judiciary than actually resulted, with much, MUCH more radically conservative rulings on all sorts of things like abortion and affirmative action and disparate impact back in the 80s and early 90s, if you were going by the feelings of voters at the time. But it took too long for conservatives to recognize the problems about where you get those judges from, and by that point, the country had moved on... or so it seemed until Mitch McConnell played the hardest of hard ball, fate intervened, and former Democrat Donald Trump got 3 supreme court picks after not winning the popular vote.
Anyway, that's my baseline for how people I grew up around viewed the Supreme Court.
And so when I see enraged public progressives and fellow travelers like David French railing against the current Supreme Court and its legitimacy, the thing I keep thinking is, the progressives I'm thinking of have built their ENTIRE moral universe around other citizens respecting all sorts of previous (as their opponents see it) destructive Supreme Court rulings from roughly the 1940s to the 2010s. Much of their moral progress stories require other citizens to simply bow down and accept and actively prop up those other rulings. They gain from the legitimacy of the Supreme Court in a way that the traditionalists I grew up around absolutely don't. Given that, it's very difficult for me to imagine a future where people upset by the current Supreme Court manage to publicly delegitimize it and mess with it AND also their opponents still accept the legitimacy of previous generations rulings. And if I'm right about that, it seems like progressives have vastly more to lose by having a much more weakened Supreme Court.
I've noted before that I often get a "born on third, thought they hit a triple" vibe from progressives when it comes to the institutions they've inherited, and their overwhelming sense that it's just natural for different institutions to lean their way - and the Supreme Court is absolutely a place where I think that is true.
Astranagant
11mo ago
Sunderland, UK, is on fire.
It appears a tipping point has been reached; protests are seemingly erupting all over the UK right now in response to the stabbing of three young children. Ordinarily a sadly unremarkable happening, this incident was exacerbated by the authorities refusing to release any details about the attacker other than being "from Cardiff", which did not placate the mob, as media sources routinely use this kind of languages to elide criminals' real origins (saying things like "Mahmood Suleiman of Bristol", later turns out that he's a boat migrant from Albania currently being housed in Bristol), leading certain corners to pattern-match to previous instances of such attacks and conclude the killer was a boat migrant and the media and authorities were covering it up.
This narrative spread quickly in the wake of no other information being released, for which the excuse was that the killer was under-age and so no detail could be released. Internet detectives soon managed to piece together the identity regardless, that being Axel Muganwa Rudakubana, son of two Rwandan parents but nonetheless actually born in Cardiff.
Left-wing sides of the argument immediately went into crowing mode, seemingly elated that the killer was "British", to which the pithy right-wing response came that "a dog born in a stable is not a horse" and that this crime was still preventable if his parents had simply not been allowed to migrate.
Regardless, the protests were now in full swing. A vigil was held, and things got out of hand, with one man being arrested for bringing a knife and balaclava. The simmering tensions of the backdrop of mass migration seem to have come to a head, as a group gathered to damage an unrelated mosque and a police building. This is possibly a response to the boat migrant theory being spread like wildfire as the authorities refused to release any correct information, and possibly in part just a release valve for long-pent up tensions.
Government response was immediate condemnation of the protesters from all and sundry, pledges to set up specialised task forces to deal with "far right extremism" and deployment of riot police to quell the unrest. This only sparked further anger as people contrasted the response to the very recent Harehills riots in which a Roma community revolted over the removal of children from the house of negligent parents. Response on that occasion was the police in full retreat and the later total capitulation of the state in handing back the children in question. Others still remember now-PM Kier Starmer's response to the BLM riots of 2020, in which he knelt in supplication to the rioters and pledged fealty to their cause.
This has earned him the moniker of "Two-Tier Kier", with many calling out that a two tier justice system exists in the country; when minorities riot over facing justice, the state bends over backwards to appease them, but when native whites riot over the stabbing of children, the full force of the state comes out to crush them. As such, more protests have erupted across the country over this double standard, the most notable of which is Sunderland, where people attempted to torch a police station.
Further protests have been stated to be planned all week. PM Starmer has scrambled all police manpower available to suppress them, it seems, with the Home Office issuing a stern warning in the media that "we're watching you". The usual ancillary conversations about "Russian disinformation" being the cause are happening, and the Muslim Council of Great Britain has stated "law and order isn't enough to deal with Islamophobic hate" in response to the mosque attack.
Ok this might just be funny to me, but the CloudStrike Crowdstrike worldwide outage is the funniest thing to happen in computer security this decade.
If you haven't caught up, 100+ million (billion?) computers around the world were simulatenously broken in an instant. It's black comedy for sure. Hospital & emergency systems around the world have crawled to a halt, and there will be a few hundred deaths that will be traced back to this event. Millions of $$ will be lost. But, the humor comes from the cause of it.
Here is how things panned out:
CloudStrikeCrowdstrike is a 100 billion valuation tech company that provides security services to a bulk of the world business.- Most sensitive organizations (govt, military, healthcare) will refuse to work with you unless you are compliant & all your machines have this installed.
- It is effectively an anti-virus that sits 1 level below your operating system, 'protecting' your organization from 'bad outcomes'.
- On Friday afternoon (which we all know is the best time),
CloudStrikeCrowdstrike deployed a software update that began this outage - For any other software this would be a simple restart or uninstall away, but since
CloudStrikeCrowdstrike is a 'trusted' secuirty tool, it sits under the OS layer, bricking the whole device. - Alright, so how do they fix it ?...... THEY CANT !
- The beauty of bricked device, is you can't send any more software updates to it. You must do it manually. Raw dog it like the 90s.....all 100 million of these computers.
- That's bad, but surely they can give those instructions to people and each person can fix their laptops themselves. Divide the labor.....
- NOPE !
- This software is used in vending machines, kiosks, tablet displays....and all sorts of devices that sometimes don't have keyboards and other times haven't been looked at for years. But at least there is a fix right ?
- Yes....... but it needs you to start the computer in safe mode....which you can't because 'Bitlocker'.
- Ah yes, Bitlocker. Turns out, another security measure, makes it so that 99% of a company's employees can't open safe mode.
- So yes, a few hundred IT people will be responsible for fixing hundreds upon hundreds of laptops, daily, for weeks !
This is the Y2k that was promised.
The world spends billions in computer security every year, and no virus has managed the kind of world-wide disruption caused by one simple bug by the premier security company in the world.
No direct culture war implications, but goes to show just how much of a house-of-cards the tech ecosystem is. 1 little, simple, stupid bug can bring the whole world to a halt. Yet, the industry continues quarterly-earnings chasing.
Jobs keep getting cut, senior members get aged out, timelines get thinner and 'how many features did you deploy' remains the only metric for evaluation.
In tech, staying at a job for more than 3 years is seen as coasting. Devs are increasingly expected to do everything, because 'everyone should be full stack' and everything that isn't feature development (testing, staging, canaries) get deprioritized. Overworked novices means carelessness, carelessness creates mistakes.
At the same time, devs get zero agency. Random HR types make list of regulations mandating certain checkboxes for compliance, while having near-zero knowledge of the risks-and-benefits of these technical decisions. Therefore, the implications of a mistake are opaque to decisions makers. So by being compliant, you've suddenly given CloudStrike Crowdstrike a button to shut your entire business down.
This kind of error should literally be impossible in a company of the size of CloudStrike Crowdstrike . If such an error happens, it should be impossible for giant corporations to crumble zero backup. Incompetence on display, on all sides. Having worked in 'prestigious tech companies', especially in 2024, it isn't surprising. At times, the internal dysfunction is seriously alarming, other times it's a tuesday.
I'm not going to hope for much out of this. Just like Spectre & Solar , people will cry about it for weeks, demand change and everyone will get collective amnesia about it as the next quarter rolls around.
End of the day, tech workers are treated as disposable labor. Executive bean counters are divorced from the product. And the stock price is the only incentive that matters.
As long as tech is run by MBAs and smooth talkers, this will go on.
Some choice photos:
This is what the west is now, old men and women telling raped children to shut up and not be racist.
Post about specific groups, not general groups, wherever possible. Banned for 3 days. The rest is details.
Yes, this is explicitly a token banning. For all your complaining, you do mostly stick to our discussion norms, minus some name calling and weak manning. At least one moderator prefers to not moderate people when they are clearly asking for it. At least one moderator is sympathetic to the point and points out that we do allow the argument to be made that argument is useless. I've had this conversation with other users in the past: sometimes it seems like conflict theory is actually right, and that's something we have to consider if we claim to be open to considering all arguments.
I have a different approach: moderation is driven by user sentiment, you've accumulated many reports, and I try to give people (including you) what they want. As this is a mod message, I set aside the substance of your post without comment, except those portions in which you directly criticize this space:
Rotherham is in large part the reason I don't comment on this forum anymore.
This raises a question: why are you commenting on this forum now? You have a history of doing it well, and then doing it poorly, and then mostly stopping. Why are you back? Welcome back! Would you be willing to post some good stuff again?
If any critical mass of people here or in other rationalist spaces actually valued the truth above politeness we would rationally immediately ditch all the speech norms of rationalist spaces and adopt those of 4Chan.
Where everyday you could have seen exactly this discussed, predicted, and parallels drawn to comparable things happening across the west.
But the Motte won't, because the Motte doesn't value the truth that highly, but rather values endless self justifying discussion for its own sake.
You're mistaken, though it is an easy mistake to make. Let me ask you something silly--do you dance? Specifically, are you a classically trained ballerina, or do you know any? If you spend much time around ballet studios, you will see an interesting phenomenon where little girls (and, occasionally, boys) show up with a dream. They love to dance, because they saw a ballerina do something amazing and beautiful. But real, recognizable ballet is pretty tough, on par with very high level gymnastics, and most people aren't really cut out for it. From ten classes of fifty toddlers in tutus a school might hope to produce one girl capable of dancing corps in a national production. And so along the way each aspiring ballerina reaches a point where she realizes that no matter how much she might enjoy dancing, this is not the dancing for her. This is hard on the ego, so a very common way of stopping ballet is to join a different dance club--pop dance, modern dance, stuff people will say they "prefer" when really what they prefer is not needing 40+ hours per week of effort to excel in their particular sphere.
Suppose one of these girls switches to a "contemporary dance" studio. She generates an argument--"ballet is so hidebound and pedigree-obsessed! It's stupid. In contemporary dance I can express myself without all these hurdles, all these rules and traditions and obstacles."
"Okay," replies the ballet world. "That was always allowed."
But then the girl shows up at a production of the Nutcracker and demands equal time on stage with the ballerinas. She will not be dancing ballet, but she is tired of all the attention ballerinas get for this stupid annual tradition of dancing to a nonsensical Christmas plot.
What should the ballet company say to her?
Kulak, the point of the Motte is not to change the world, or to change politics, or even to change anyone's mind. It's performance art: we're here to dance ballet. If you do not wish to dance ballet, then you may dance other dances in other places. The dance of this space is not, and has never been, truth; it is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Truth is an interesting and important part of that, but so are norms of politeness and, yes, inclusion. Our most vocal critics insist that we are already where you want us to be--that we are a hive of scum and wrongthink, several zillion witches in sheep's clothing. You seem to think the opposite, that we are are a hive of... priss and wrongthink, I guess?
But we deserve neither such praise nor such censure (as Jane Austen once put it).
It is my hope that the world be more like the Motte: more open to the truth, and more able to discuss ideas openly, however so much people may disagree. I cannot force people to be better, smarter, or less evil. I usually cannot even persuade them to be so. Barely am I able to even change the minds of my own children, now that they are adults.
But I know the rules to this particular dance, and I can still dance it.
Any light produced without heat is an illusion, a trick cast on the wall, a fire in a film that illuminates only what the director chooses and warms nothing. Real productive though, real productive discussion builds heat to intolerable levels and then combusts, burning away the lies in it's warming light, and injuring or killing the liars who crawled amongst their tools of darkness.
People once thought that all light was fire--that all light consumed. But my house today is brighter than any pharaoh's court, and it burns not. What we do here is performative art, but art is an act of hope, and hope can, sometimes, change the world. Slowly, as they say--then all at once. The Motte is not supposed to change the world, except to the extent that it serves as a model for what the world could be.
I am sympathetic to your conflict-theory takes. I worry that what we do here will not--maybe cannot--be enough. But it is all I can actually do. I am neither soldier nor politician nor billionaire nor celebrity. The people who come here to do what we do, come here because it is what we want to do. It is the dance we wish to dance, however so hidebound it may be. We who maintain this space--this studio--this garden--are doing what we can do.
Go thou and do likewise.
Left work late the other night to find a druggie going through in my car in the parking lot. First time that's happened, but should have expected it from seeing them stagger around after all the shops are closed down.
I'm assuming it's the fentanyl stumble, because sometimes you see them standing in weird positions staring at nothing, but maybe someone more versed in modern druglore can correct me.
The level of crime here is still low, but the jump from "literally absent" to "a general background level" has ruined the high trust that made this community great.
There are no more open cash boxes at vegetable stands (the last one got smash-and-grabbed a month ago). A friend had all his plumbing gear stolen out of his truck (you can't even fence that stuff locally!). I never used to carry a gun here, but started recently. I never used to lock my door while I was out, but started after my neighbor's place got ransacked. When I was a kid I used to leave the keys in my truck like everyone else, in case a friend wanted to borrow it.
All the petty crime here is carried out by dysfunctional scum who were attracted by the scraps thrown to them by do-gooders. Some of them were deliberately recruited in "rehabilitation schemes" and dumped on us when they inevitably failed. Those responsible quickly moved on to providing "safe drug use supplies" for their former charges at the local community center. All taxpayer-funded, of course.
In fact, I know all the people responsible for importing this biowaste to our community, and they all live in newly-built mansions down long driveways with automatic gates and security cameras.
Meanwhile I have a lot of my net worth in equipment that basically can't be secured right off a main road, relying on the fact that until now nobody just wandered in to steal your stuff.
It might seem stupid to complain about when we still have basically no murders, but it enrages me that we lost something precious, and it was deliberately inflicted on us by smug pricks who will never face any consequences for it. They won't even gain anything from having done it to us, other than the joy of seeing us suffer while they remain comfortably immune.
Not sure where I'm going with this, but like Goodguy's personal story the other week, it's a general reflection on the inadequacy of crime statistics to capture its impact on communities.
And a growing appreciation for the importance of meting out consequences in an equitable fashion.
The Great Le Pen Conviction Saga
Yesterday, Marine Le Pen, a French politician sometimes called a (female) French Trump and once called the Devil's daughter, was convicted in France of embezzling EU funds in the early 2000s. She is to be sentenced to house arrest for two years, and barred from politics for five.
The significance? That takes her out of the next presidential election, in 2027, where she is the current front runner.
The other problem?
When the original sentencing judge says Le Pen and other co-defendants didn't enrich themselves personally, 'embezzling' may have the wrong connotations. The judge who made the ruling preferred a 'democratic bypass that deceived parliament and voters.'
How does this lead to a leading political candidate getting imprisoned and disqualified in a leading western democracy?
Oh boy. This is a long one.
TL;DR: Banal political corruption insinuations ahead. And more. And more. Bless your innocent hearts if you have high trust in government, and don't be surprised if what follows starts to echo in your culture war interpretations in the months and years to come.
Disclaimer: What follows is a mix of plentiful citations, and some things that can only be noted with an eyebrow. Which is to say- some pretty hefty suspicion of impropriety, in ways that aren't exactly public record. However, if you want to believe that all governments are innocent unless proven guilty, by all means. Be ye warned.
What is this scandal?
It's more of a funding-code issue that results when you deliberately overlap organizational interests but establish conditionals that can be used as gotchas depending on whether the anti-fraud office wants to pursue.
EU funding for european political parties is normal. The overlap between national parties and EU political parties (Members of European Parliament, or MEP) is normal. The transition between national parties and nominally distinct EU parties is normal. Money is fungible. Even political aids are fungible- an aid who helps in one respect of a politician's work load enables the politician to work on others.
What Le Pen is charged / guilty of is that EU MEP party-member funds were used for someone who was working for Le Pen, the National Party leader, rather than Le Pen, the MEP party leader. Part of the basis of this claim is where there aid worked from- MEP assistants getting EU funds are supposed to work from / near the EU parliament, but around 20 of Le Pen's aides worked from France. As a result, they did not qualify for the funds they drew for being an aid to MEP-Le Pen, since Le Pen's MEP-aids are supposed to be geographically bounded.
Hence, embezzlement. Did the aids help with MEP work from France? Not actually relevant. Did the aids enable Le Pen to better focus on her MEP duties, as was the purpose of the money-for-aides? Also not particularly relevant.
What gives the saga more backstory, and scandal potential for those who think it's a gotcha, is that it's part of a much, much longer multi-decade saga.
Who is Le Pen?
Marine Le Pen is the daughter of Jean Le Pen, her father who founded the party. In short, he was the political outsider / far rightist / probable fascist sympathizer / possible nazi sympathizer, or at least dismisser, who was absolutely hated by the French political establishment. He's the guy who's synonymous with the National Front, unrepentant French far-right of the post-WW2 variety .
One of the key notes of Le Pen is that he ran the National Front like a family business... not successfully. Whether by purely coincidental mismanagement, personal bilateral animosity with French industry, or possibly indirect state pressures after the National Front's surprise and embarrassing showing in the 2002 presidential election, the National Front had some troubled finances.
And by troubled finances, I mean that by 2010 the French Government was progressively revoking the government's political party stipend that made up a plurality of its funding, even as Jean Le Pen was unable to get bank loans from French banks and unable to find a buyer for the 10-to-15 million Paris HQ to raise funds in 2008.
Where does the money come in?
The financial situation is where Marine Le Pen really enters in earnest. Marine Le Pen was given control of the party by her father in 2010. This was notably after she had already entered the European Parliament for over a half decade. Marine Le Pen was a MEP from 2004 to 2017, which is to say she inherited the National Front- and its financial issues- when she was already a MEP with no particular issue.
Marine's political priorities in the early 2010s was the rehabilitation of the National Front as a party. In 2013, she was still being called the Devil's Daughter by publications by the Atlantic. In 2018, this was when the National Front became the National Rally.
But the other part of Le Pen's job was to right the fiscal ship to keep the party viable. This is why across the 2010s Marine Le Pen was seeking foreign bank loans from abroad, including from US banks. This was where the Russia bank loan line of attack starts, since it was a Russian bank in 2014 that ultimately ended the credit embargo, but also saw Le Pen adopt a more pro-Russia rhetorical position. This challenge / options for loans has endured, and is why Le Pen more recently got a loan from Hungary in 2022.
So, to restate- Marine Le Pen was a reasonably-long-standing MEP in the 2000s with no major alleged issues at the time. In 2010, she took control over the national front. At this time, the NF was in financial distress.
This is the context where the misuse of European funds arose.
The Start of the Scandal
The Marine Le Pen allegations arose in Feb 2015, when European Parliament President Martin Shulz, a German MEP, raised complaints against her. Le Pen's party promptly counter-accused one of Shulz's own aids of a similar not-in-the-right-location violation. This didn't exactly get anywhere, because as noted at the time-
Machmer explained that one of Schulz’s assistants organizes study trips for a local branch of the SPD, but said this was “in his spare time, for free, because it is his hobby.”
Remember: it's embezzlement if you take EU money and work for the party. It's not embezzlement if you voluntarily do national party work for free as a hobby.
Who was Martin Schulz?
Well, in 2014, the year before he initiated the Le Pen allegations were made, Schulz was generally considered a bit... lacking in ethical enforcement. He was one of the European leaders who may / may not have turned a bit of a blind eye to notorious Malta corruption. After his time in the EU parliament, he made a brief but ambitious play in german power politics as the actual head of the German SDP in the 2017 German election. He lost to Merkel, of course, but so do they all. But he had the ambition to try, and had a history of building favors and friends.
But back to the earlier 2010s for a moment. Besides being President of the European Parliament at the time, he was a member of the Party of European Socialists in the European Parliament. He was also a (clearly important) member of the Social Democratic Party (SDP) in Germany, i.e. part of the key governing coalition which itself is part of the Franco-German alliance that is the heart of the EU. Schulz was in the running for being the German foreign minister following the 2017 German election,, which might have some relevance to foreign relation implications with France.
Why does Martin Schulz matter?
Why does this party orientation possibly matter?
Because in 2015, the President of France, Francoise Hollande, was a French Socialist. Unsurprisingly, French Socialists tend to caucus well with the European socialists in the European parliament, though party politics being what it is I'll just ask you believe me on that.
Did they get alone? It's hard to say. But in May 2015, just a few months after the le Pen allegations were leveraged, Hollande was among the heads of state awarding Schulz the Charlemagne prize 2015. The Charlemagne prize is bestowed to those who have advanced european unification, which means as much or as little as you think it means. Typically it's an insider's appreciation award for strengthening European Union politics, which is to say strengthening the Franco-German influence on the continent because that is, in most practical respects, what EU centralization entails.
More relevant was that Schulz's very diplomatic interest in working with French rose above partisan politics, such as his notably high-profile willingness in 2017 to work with Macron, the current (but currently troubled) French president whose political fortunes have gotten a bit better with Le Pen's disqualification.
Would a German politician-
- with a spotty ethical record
- who stood to personally benefit
- from a political favor
- to the ideologically-aligned current French president
- or the subsequent french president
- who they might closely work with in their post-EU political career
-ever leverage a politically motivated ethics complaint against a MEP with a decade of non-complaints, over an issue that they themselves might be guilty of?
Heavens no, that's absurd.
Ahem. Sorry. Back to 2017 for a minute?
2017: Enter Macron
2017 is when Macron enters the Le Pen tale, since the 2017 election is what established them as rivals.
The 2017 French elections were notable for that they benefited both Macron and Le Pen as anti-establishment candidates. The election saw the collapse of the French establish right and left, and while that left a vacuum for Macron, it also benefited Le Pen. Macron ultimately won by the French firewall when the French socialist-left voted for him and against Le Pen, but it was historically remarkably close.
What was also remarkable is that Macron's party position has gotten worse over time. His party did very poorly in the 2020 municiple elections, though this was more a collapse of his left than a rise to Le Pen on the right. Macron pulled out another win in the 2022 election, where Le Pen, again, made it to the final round after a stronger-than-most showing.
This creates a certain... shall we say complication for the 2027 election, because Macron can't run for re-election in 2027, and he's known to not like that. Macron managed to beat Le Pen twice- was arguably the only person who could have- but the 2027 election would see him leave the stage and Le Pen be... well, a clear leading candidate, if by no means a guarantee.
Unless, of course, the judicial block-out is coincidentally underway even before the 2022 election is over.
And starting in a way that is- coincidentally- convenient for Macron's re-election.
2022: The Year the Scandal Returns In A Most Convenient Way
Five years after Macron takes the presidency, and nearly 7 after the Le Pen EU funding scandal starts, it returns in ways whose implications to the surrounding context become a bit clearer if you lay out relative dates of events. (Most of these dates are in the above al jazeera link.)
11 March 2022: The European Anti-Fraud Office provides the French prosecutor's office it's report on Le Pen.
Clearly the French government was taken by total surprise, and had no hand or insight into this EU process delivering this package.
12 March - 9 April 2022: No mention of or publicity is given to this report in most media. As such, no voters are aware of the duplicitious deception of French voters by a former MEP for whom this is an old scandal, forgotten scandal from over half a decade prior.
Which might have been slightly topical, given that...
10 April 2022: The first round of the French Presidential Election occurs.
After the French government sits on the report for a month, Le Pen places strong but somewhat distant second place, out-performing some expectations and underperforming others. 28% Macron, 23% Le Pen. The third-place runner up, and thus the potential second-round candidate party is a leftist party that garnered... 22%.
Which is to say, the French Prosectors really did Le Pen a favor by keeping that potentially embarrassing and undemocratic revelation a secret! Why, if she hadn't made it to the second round, Macron would have faced a broadly united left against him rather than for him in the name of the anti-le pen firewall!
It's a good thing that this virtuous adherence to principle applied for the rest of the campa-
17 April 2022: French prosecutors announce the new (actually old) Le Pen fund appropriation report
Coincidentally, 17 April 2022 was a Sunday, meaning this would be one of the opening media report for the next week's media cycle.
24 April 2022: The second round of the French Presidential Election occurs. Macron wins, 58% to 42%.
Fortunately, Macron's presidential margins are great! Any effects from the timing of the report probably had no result on a 16% gap.
June 2022: Unfortunately, Macron's parliamentary margins in the June 2022 elections are dismal, as his party loses control of the parliament and Le Pen's party gains 81 seats to become a key power player in government (in)stability for the next year and a half.
July 2022-February 2023: No particular action or movement is made on the Le Pen case. Nominally this is when the French prosecutors are developing their case, but given the substantial prior awareness in practice the case remains where it was since between rounds 1 of the election: available as a basis of future prosecution if and when desired.
The key point of 2022 is that the Le Pen scandal resurfaced coincidentally in time to shape the 2022 Presidential Election, where it was sat on when it might have hindered Le Pen's ability to get to the second round, but publicized right at a time to maximize Macron's electoral margins. Afterwards, it was further sat on until future timeliness.
2023 - 2024: A series of Correlating Progressions
March 2023: After Macron does the eternally popular thing of cutting welfare in the name of reform, the Macron government (in the legislature) comes less than a dozen votes from falling in a no confidence vote after Le Pen's party largely votes for no confidence.
June 2023: After about a year of political paralysis and parliamentary instability, a Macron ally who totally likes him for real guys raises the prospect of amending French constitution to give Macron third term. This totally-not-a-trial-balloon proposal flops like something that has no life.
October 2023: Just kidding about before, Macron makes a personal call for constitutional amendment for a third term.
8 December 2023: The French government announces Le Pen's trial will start in March 2024.](https://www.france24.com/en/france/20231208-french-prosecutores-order-le-pen-to-stand-trial-in-eu-funding-scandal)
20 December 2023: Le Pen does the unforgivable, and gives Macron a 'kiss of death' by forcing him to compromise on immigration legislation in return for support. This actually triggers an internal party rebellion for Macron. Unrelated, establishment French media wonder how Macron will manage Le Pen's ever-rising rise.
The 20 December events aren't particularly causal in the process, but are amusing context.
The more relevant point of 2023 is that Macron's decision to prosecute Le Pen, an act which would bring favor from the French establishment, comes amidst his very unpopular bid to extend his time in office, which would require support from the French establishment. At this time, the Macron administration adopts a Tough-on-Le Pen position of 10 years- a period of time that would easily take her out of two elections- that will later be taken down to two years out of [insert choice here].
Also notable in the August 2023 initiation of prosecution of that it is both a starting block for the timer, and all future events. Whether there needed to be a 7-month gap between the announced intent to prosecute and the trial or not, had the prosecution train been started seven months earlier- during the large gap after the 2022 elections- then the future 2-year house arrest would have by consequence ended before, rather than probably after, the 2027 election. An 18-month bar, for other cases, would have been even less likely have a presidential election impact... had that been desirable.
2024: The Trial of Political Opponents with Absolutely No Political Parallels Or Impacts Elsewhere
March 2024: The Trial of Le Pen starts, about 24 months after the French government received an EU report of the 2015 report nearly 108 months prior. Truly the gears of French justice turned as fast as they could.
These are completely unrelated. Just because three major democracies of mutually-sympathetic ruling parties had parallel legal cases against leading opposition parties that threatened incumbent interests, and just because they did so on similar narrative themes/justification sof protecting democracy and rule of law themes, does not mean there was any sort of wink or nod or feeling emboldened by the example of others. Every case was independently moved forward on its own merits, with monetary judgements appropriate to the severity, and the mutual commentary by the states on the other's prosecutions was exactly what you would expect.
Also also coincidentally, this happened to be timed to roughly the same time that a UK court not only rejected a Trump lawsuit over the Steele dossier that was the root of the Russiagate hoax, but ordered Trump to pay 6-figures in legal fees, which was helpfully noted as adding to the half-billion in legal fees Trump had accrued so far that year and not at all contributing to pressures or efforts to drive Trump into bankruptcy analogous to the Le Pen experience earlier in the experience. Note that was before the historically unprecedented further half-billion fine from the New York judgement.
Now, admittedly, the Trump fiscal correlation must be a total distraction. Reputable democracies do not try to bankrupt their oppositions out of politics, and France failed to force Le Pen into fiscal insolvency years ago. The French government would only seek a 300,000 euro fine against Le Pen. And a 2 million euro fine against her party. And opened up a new case in September 2024 alleging illegal financing of the 2022 election.
This, clearly, is utterly unrelated to any other aspect of handling the Le Pen case, and not the initiation for a future basis to further fine and disqualify Le Pen from politics in the future after the current judgement runs its course.
And returning to the only relevant case itself, Le Pen trial that began in March in turn would certainly have no impact on...
June 2024: Surprise! Macron triggers snap elections in effort to overturn political gridlock and break his dependence on Le Pen. Perhaps the ongoing Le Pen trial will at last get rid of this troublesome opposition party?
July 2024: It, uh, doesn't work. Le Pen's party gets about 1/3 of all votes, and about 13% more than Macron's party.
The snap elections are generally considered a strategic mistake for Macron, doubling-down on his issues.
They also, coincidentally, totally kill any talk of Macron's constitutional reform for a third term candidacy.
A candidacy that- remembering previous elections- would have been substantially improved with a Le Pen in the field to rally a resentful Left to his side.
But now that Macron's political hopes for a third election are dead and buried...
November 2024: The French Government announces it seeks 5 years in jail, on top of the political bar, for Le Pen. However, conflicting reports say 2 years., with judgement expected in march 2025
Notably- even a 2 year sentence from vaguely April 2025 to April 2027 would release Le Pen right on / after the 2027 election, and thus totally unable to compete. And, depending on the terms of the house arrest, unable to speak or influence.
31 March 2025 (Yesterday): Le Pen is sentenced to 4-but-2-if-she-behaves years of prison, 2 of them under house arrest and 2 suspended, and a five year bar from political office. She is allowed to appeal but...
Even if she does appeal the ban on public office, only an appellate ruling could overturn it and restore her hopes of running, although time is running out for that to happen before the election as appeals in France can take several years to conclude.
Gallic shrug
I am sure the French government that took a decade to bring this conviction about will speedily process the appeal of the Le Pen who recent French polling suggested was somewhere in the 40% voting range for the first round. (Usual French first round poling disclaimers abound.)
Functionally, this ruling conveniently clears the deck for France's nominal establishment left and rights to make a return, without Le Pen in the way.
Call it Macron's farewell gift to French democracy. It's not like he disqualified his own presidential election opponent...
...though that's more because he failed to get the constitutional change he wanted that would have allowed him to run again...
...in which case, perhaps prosecutorial discretion might have leaned another way.
Summing It All Up
Le Pen (Senior) was an all-around tosser and more or less enemy of the French establishment, if not the French State per see
- Le Pen (Senior) embarrassed the French Establishment in the early 2002 election where he made the second round of the presidential election
- Le Pen (Senior) thereafter suffered years of unfortunate financial prospects that would have driven the Le Pen party out of politics
- Misfortune including perfectly neutral reductions in state stipends for political parties, a bank blockade, and an inability to sell a multi-million dollar property in Paris
- Le Pen (Senior) is politically toxic, and fiscally insolvent, before his daughter takes over the party
Le Pen (Marine) is Le Pen's daughter who inherited his mess, and his enemies
- Le Pen was an unexceptional MEP for over a decade with no notable scandals or accusations of fraud of this sort at the time
- In 2011, Le Pen inherits the party, and its finances, from her father. Money is tight.
- During this time, and probably before, Le Pen deals in the technically-illegal-but-totally-not-widely-practiced practice of paying national party members with EU funds.
- No one cares.
- Le Pen spends the next years working to rebuild fiscal solvency, including taking foreign loans to break the Parisian bank blockade
- The foreign loan most in question is Russian, marking a turn towards a more Russian-friendly narrative line, and increased institutional and international suspicion
President of European Parliament Shulz was a totally-not-corrupt German politician who totally didn't do a political hit job on the rival of an ally in furtherance of his own political ambitions
- Schulz had a notable, internationally-reported reputation for corruption, including on a similar issue
- The issue that will be the basis of the scandal is, uh, not unknown in his circles
- Schulz takes a particular stab at the political rival of a major political partner
- and potential future diplomatic partner who could help Schulz's ambitions come true
- Schulz definitely doesn't get awarded for services rendered for French-appreciated interests
- Or eagerly try to sustain the relationship with surprise arrival Macron
- But Schulz is not the villain
- Merely the tool providing the French establishment their means to prosecute Le Pen when desired
President Macron was totally not letting Le Pen stay in politics as a foil to bolster his personal electoral prospects against the French left
- It's not like Le Pen automatically invoked the support of the French left in every second round election
- Or bolstered his parliamentary prospects against the left that would, absent her, happily no-confidence him
- Or that his administration hid scandalous information that might have let her fail to be the foil when his left flank was weak
- It just takes an additional half-decade to complete investigations to find prosecutable evidence of something that was recorded and reported on more than half a decade prior
- You know, to develop the case until the time is right
Macron was totally not prolonging the case management by months or years in parallel to anticipation of extending his own political career
- Extending his jupiter-style presidency to a third term would have been more unpopular than he was
- In which case a free Le Pen sure would have been useful for those second-round elections
- But keep her and her party in a slow boil post-2022 with unclear intentions or scope
- As insurance policy, or leverage on the parliamentary politics
But Macron's efforts to garner support for a constitutional amendment failed
- And Macron's snap election gambit to regain control of government failed
- And when it failed, so did his prospects at constitutional change
- And if he's not running again, there's no electoral advantage in Le Pen to run again
Which makes it naturally the best time to announce the intent to jail and disqualify the clear frontrunner
- A merciful 'mere' 2 years house arrest just coincidentally scheduled to time to the next election cycle
- It certainly could not have occurred earlier, and thus mitigated the perception of intentional procedural manipulation
- This is justified because embezzlement of EU funds is a critical subversion of democracy the voters should know about
- Just not when it might have harmed Macron's electoral prospects
- Or by letting voters vote accordingly against Le Pen with the knowledge
In Conclusion
Is there a 'benign' explanation for all this? Sure, if you want.
Is this a sketchy-but-will-be-claimed-above-reapproach series of events? Also yes.
The Le Pen saga doesn't actually require some all-encompassing conspiracy. La Pen (Senior) can have his own political feuds with the French establishment separate from La Pen (Marine). Schulz was a means, but hardly the start or the end of the Le Pen family feud with the French establishment. Macron was (probably) never involved in the early phases of whatever French state pressures may or may not have been used to try to bankrupt the Le Pen party.
But unless you believe the French prosecutor's office is completely independent of Macron and only coincidentally schedules things to align with electoral milestones and key dates to Macron's benefit, the Macron-era Le Pen saga has plenty of its own implications of, shall we say, politically considerate handling.
And those Macron handlings were built on a history of the Marine Le Pen handlings. And the Marine Le Pen handlings were built on the Le Pen (Senior) handlings. This has been a political fight for longer than some of the posters on this forum have been alive.
None of this means that Le Pen didn't actually 'defraud' the EU of however many manhours of political aid hours she charged the EU. If that's all you care about, this can be 'just,' sure. Let justice be done though the heavens fall, and all that.
But the other part of 'just' is if this is handled the same as other cases. And to an extent this is impossible, because no one else in France gets handled like Le Pen, because no one else represents what the Le Pen family represents, or threatens, to the French establishment.
What Next?
Don't be surprised if this becomes a significant reoccurring propaganda / european culture war theme for the anti-establishment skeptics, on both sides of the Atlantic.
Establishment European media are already signaling an expectation of further political chaos in France, and trying to coax/signal Le Pen to 'help her party' over 'seek revenge.' (Politico) The National Rally remains in position to topple the government by contributing to a no-confidence vote if the other parties oppose Macron.
The New York Times, which is broadly sympathetic to the French government effort and hostile towards Le Pen with the NYT's characteristic framing devices, concedes that-
Ms. Le Pen, like it or not, may now become another element in the Vance-Musk case for European democratic failure.
This is surrounded by all the appropriate signals that this is bad thought, of course, but it is unlikely to be solely an American critique. Various right-of-center politicians across Europe were quick to condemn, and the culture war lines will write themselves.
Not all are unhappy or afraid, though.
In Paris’ Republic Plaza, where public demonstrations often unfold, Le Pen detractors punched the air in celebration.
“We were here in this square to celebrate the death of her father,” said Jean Dupont, 45, a schoolteacher. “And this is now the death of Le Pen’s presidential ambitions.”
Jean-Marie Le Pen, the founder of the National Front and a figure long associated with racism and Holocaust denial, died earlier this year at age 96.
Sophie Martin, 34, a graphic designer, was among those in a celebratory mood. “I had to check the date — I thought it was April Fool’s Day,” she said. “But it’s not. She’s finally been knocked down. We’ve lived with her poison in our politics for too long.”
functor
7mo ago
I worked in a tech hub next to a ghetto. A large number of engineers were terrorized by a small group of young men. There were more engineers who were fit gun owning veterans than there were criminals.
The criminals were generally in poor physical condition, disorganized and not an especially impressive force.
Had the cops not been there the criminals would have been dealt with swiftly. However, the police protected them. If they stole a bike, nothing happened. If an engineer with friends shut it down, they would have had their lives ruined. The criminals didn't mind getting arrested for smaller crimes. The engineers were terrified of even getting arrested. The imbalance in the risk acceptance between tech workers and criminals completely shifted the power dynamic on the street. When they mugged a developer on the way home from work it wasn't by physically overpowering them, it essentially a game of chicken in which the developer was more afraid of going to prison. It is simply cheaper to clean up graffiti on a weekly basis than to spend an night waiting in the bushes with bats and dealing with the problem.
The justice system is too harsh toward people with a life while not being effective at keeping people who can't function of the street. Ideally the dysfunctional crowd shouldn't be punished but warehoused in a place that provides them with structure, meaning and a well balanced life. Mental asylums need to be scaled up.
marinuso
8mo ago
You guys need to organize your elections better. The reason people will believe Trump when he yells 'fraud', is because election fraud looks to be plausible.
There's usually no voter ID. The electoral rolls can easily be screwed around with (by both parties in different ways, even). Voting machines seem opaque even when they're not, and break down during voting, necessitating workarounds that don't inspire confidence. Mail-in votes are common and there's barely even a pretense of a chain of custody. And then there are outright shenanigans, such as kicking out the poll watchers.
I've said it before, you need to be able to convince the loser that he lost a fair game.
Consider how it works in the Netherlands:
- Everyone who is legally in the country is registered with his municipality. The same registry is also used for taxes, so you bet the government makes sure it's kept in order.
- When there is an election, everyone who is eligible to vote is mailed a voter card, which looks like this. It is personal to you and has your name on it. You should receive it at least two weeks before the election. If you don't get it for some reason you still have two weeks to get it sorted.
- When you go to vote, you bring the voter card and your ID (such as a driver's license, government ID card, or passport). They take your voter card and put it in a sealed box. Then they give you a ballot (all voting is on paper). This prevents anyone from voting more than once, and also prevents ballot box stuffing: there need to be at least as many voter cards as ballots at the end.
- Polling stations are generally in schools, churches, or other public buildings. There is approximately one per 1000-1500 voters depending on the election. A wait time of an hour is considered a scandal.
- By law your employer has to give you time to vote. Normally this doesn't matter, as the polls are open from 7AM to 9PM, well beyond normal working hours.
- If you really can't make it, you can appoint a proxy by writing their name on the back of the voter card, signing it, and giving it to your proxy. One person can only cast two proxy votes, to prevent ballot harvesting.
- Each polling station counts its own votes, by hand. Each polling station submits an official report containing their votes, which is nowadays also published online. Anyone is allowed to attend the count, and anyone is allowed to speak up, and the comments will be written in the report. (You can get yourself kicked out if you really try, but that's also written in the report.) They add up all the results by computer, but if you really don't trust it, you can download the reports and check the work.
Media outlets will download the reports and make fancy visualisations such as this one from the last election. I encourage you to click that link, you can see every single vote that was cast. Each dot on the map is a polling station, and if you click them you can see how many votes were cast for each party.
We do sometimes still have sore losers who yell fraud, but we don't have anyone taking them seriously, not even their own supporters.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
10mo ago
NPR brutally fact-checked Trump, finding "162 lies and distortions". I am not here to inform you that Trump is a particularly honest man, but this bizarre tic that news outlets have developed of referring to statements of opinion that they disagree with as "lies and distortions" is wildly unhelpful. Let's look at a couple:
59 “The judge was a brilliant judge, and all they do is they play the ref with the judges. But this judge was a fair but brilliant judge.”
There has been lots of criticism of the judge in the case, Aileen Cannon, who Trump appointed. She had very little experience as a trial judge, made several decisions that were questioned by legal experts and early in this case, had a ruling, in which she called for a special master to review classified documents first, overturned by the 11th Circuit.
What the fuck? OK, you think she's not fair and brilliant, fine, I probably even agree with that, but it's just obviously a statement of opinion rather than an appropriate target for some nerd to "fact check".
91 “They wanna stop people from pouring into our country, from places unknown and from countries unknown from countries that nobody ever heard of.”
Someone has likely heard of whatever the unnamed country is.
Wow, thank god for that fact check. Very serious journalism.
135 “I've never seen people get elected by saying we're going to give you a tax increase.”
Vice President Harris has echoed President Biden’s pledge not to raise taxes on anyone making less than $400,000. However, Biden has called for raising taxes on wealthy individuals and raising the corporate tax rate from 21% to 28% – halfway back to where it was before the 2017 cut. — Scott Horsley
I don't even know what NPR is trying to argue here. Again, perhaps Trump is incorrect in his assessment of the electoral success of promising tax increases, but there isn't some "lie or distortion" there.
153 “She was early, I mean, she was the first of the prosecutors, really, you know, now you see Philadelphia, you see Los Angeles, you see New York, you see various people that are very bad, but she was the first of the bad prosecutors, she was early.”
Although Harris did refer to herself in her 2019 memoir as a “progressive prosecutor,” her legacy has largely been seen as tougher on crime. She has supported some progressive reforms, such as pretrial diversion, which offers certain criminal defendants things like drug treatment instead of going to trial. — Meg Anderson
And on and on and on. These are disagreements, not "lies and distortions". Maybe you think Kamala's great! That she's actually the perfect balance of tough on crime with smart on crime progressivism, that Trump is just too goddamned stupid to understand that, and so on. That's fine! But there isn't a "lie and distortion", there's an actual disagreement.
I'm amazed at just how banal "factchecking" has become. I wouldn't object to this particular piece framed as an argument that Trump is VeryBadActually, but this smug tone intended to reward their readers with the sense that they're hearing serious truths, and that they have precisely calculated 162 lies is incredibly annoying. That figure then gets repeated by figures like Pete Buttigieg as though it's actually a serious empirical measure of dishonesty, furthering the sense that they're the party of facts. Perhaps things have always been this way and I'm just sick of it, but it sure feels like it's getting worse as party apparatchiks try to create an impression of the official truth.
Amadan
Enjoying my short-lived victory
11mo ago
Replying to your top-level, though I did read the follow-ons.
So, BLUF, you're banned. Good-bye.
Now, working from the bottom up: Yes, your posts have (had) to be manually approved, because you are an infrequent poster who posts angry rants that get heavily downvoted, hence you were stuck in the new user filter like everyone else. Had you made any effort to be a reasonable participant, that wouldn't have happened, but instead, your posts sat in the new user filter while we mods discussed "Should we just remove this angry drunken rant, or approve it and then ban him, or what?" (Spoiler: we decided the latter.)
You should have reread that mod note of mine you quoted above, because I was trying to steer you in the direction of actual productive engagement.
"Trump bad" is a perfectly valid opinion (and contrary to what you seem to think, it is not unique or even that rare here on the Motte).
"Trump bad and everyone who thinks differently is bad fuck you" is not.
You're a classic law and order conservative who loves America and the Constitution? Good for you. Wish you'd been able to express yourself without over-the-top rage and contempt, because it would have been good to have a little more of that, some more diversity of thought.
So why did I ban you, if we wanted more diversity of thought? Because someone who only seems to be able to participate by raging at his enemies isn't actually contributing anything. We've had your type before (usually, though, they are Impassionatas or Marxbros or other leftists), who are so implacably convinced of their objective and provable correctness and righteousness that they are literally incapable of good faith engagement because everything to them is a scissor statement.
Any forum in which I'm not free to use my speech like this isn't a free speech forum.
There is almost no forum that is a "free speech forum" in the sense that you get to say literally anything you want. Such forums rapidly turn into shitshows and there is a reason people generally prefer moderated forums, no matter how much they disagree over how the moderation should work (usually, "ban more of my enemies and let me say anything I want," but so it goes). This is a free speech forum in the sense that we don't ban any views. No one gets banned for having the wrong opinion or having unthinkable thoughts or unpalatable beliefs. Instead, they get banned because instead of wanting to talk and actually hear what other people think, they just want to dump shits on the floor, or pour gasoline and light a match, or shit on the floor and then pour gasoline over it and light a match.
And that's what your post is doing. What exactly do you think anyone who supports Trump (or even, not necessarily supports him, but thinks he's maybe not the most damaging person in US history) is supposed to say to your rant? Do you think they would have any expectation that calmly explaining why they support Trump would get anything more than another round of angry "fuck you"s and "repent sinner"s?
So you got your shot off, and now you're banned, because you're an angry ranter who got warned four times and banned twice for doing the same thing.
TheMotte became a performative space where people were allowed to tell themselves the story that they were 'grey tribe' neutral at the same time they bitterly denied and resistance any news which made their actual side look bad.
Only some people here call themselves "gray tribe." There are leftists and rightists and moderates here and people who don't neatly fit into any particular label. No matter how much critics try to insist this place is all a bunch of Trump-apologist red tribers (when they aren't screaming at us for being too accommodating to Blue Tribe sensibilities or being converged by Da Joos or whatever), it's not, and your anti-Trump arguments would have been welcome here, except what you tried to do was enforce consensus. Like, literally your entire post was an argument that we should all get on the same page about how bad Trump is. You can go somewhere else looking to force everyone into agreement with your position or browbeating those who won't, but if you actually want to participate here, you have to do so accepting that people are not going to agree with you and you need to deal with them, civilly.
The A&W Halberd
The A&W Halberd is a makeshift weapon, an artifact most likely inspired by meth demons or related brain damage. It is a fine piece of methgineering. The weapon is composed of a crimson plastic broomstick, two chef knives (dull), and copious amounts of grey duct tape. One of the knives was attached to serve as the tip of the Halberd. To poke with. The other, perpendicular to the broomstick, is evidently for striking overhead.
One cold morning, armed with this masterpiece of a weapon, a knight possessed by evil methgic hastily stumbled into A&W. He was agitated, yelling, mumbling, shifting in unnatural ways. We'll never determine whether he arrived to vanquish the demons or to aid their evil cause; the knight was captured by the police of my beautiful, medieval city, Vancouver, BC. We'll never know the real cause. But there is a silver lining to this incident: nobody, not even a single Teen-type burger, was harmed.
Did you know that one homeless shelter in Vancouver, according to this commenter, has a weapon locker that has seen all sorts of medieval arms? Crossbows, maces, flails, swords, shurikens, you name it. If you can imagine it, methiculous methgineers can construct it. Guns are for modern times. Guns are boring. Halberds, spears, whips. Bows, nunchakus, quarterstaffs. These are the weapons I find infinitely more appealing. Infinitely more appropriate for a medieval city like Vancouver. The shelter staff agrees with me: they only reported guns to the police and not anything else of the endless selection of arms surrendered to the locker.
Shortly preceding the A&W Halberd incident, there was a hostage situation involving a dagger-wielding rogue (it might have been a knife in all actuality, but bear with me if you will). That wretched 7-Eleven is not two blocks away from the unfortunate A&W, to which the knight showed up with the halberd. The rogue was shot with the boring guns by the boring police. In the summer of the same year, a machete (let's imagine it as a shortsword) was employed by one raging barbarian to sever an arm of one stranger and a head of another.
These are the three incidents that were deemed worthy of reporting on by newspapers in our boring non-medieval world. But there are many more that go unreported, evident to me by the fact that I had a personal one in the time between the Halberd one and the 7-Eleven one, right by Vancouver Public Library, just across the road from the very same 7-Eleven. A tall 6'5" warlock, dressed in scraps, eyes devoid of any emotion but rabid madness, was trying to obstruct the path of a maiden, and I'm proud to say I fended him off. I waded into the dark medieval fairy tale of Methland for a quick second and became a hero of the day, saved the maiden. In all honesty, it was not really a great act of heroism; I put myself between the warlock and the maiden and with an awkward yet firm gesture kinda shooed him away, more like. His excuse for being creepy was yelled in our backs: "I was just trying to get directions!" If you say so, but I don't trust mad warlocks. If you commute to downtown Vancouver, I wouldn't be surprised if you had an encounter like this yourself.
I have many more incidents to spin my yarn about, much less scary ones, but for now, behold this map. I put all of the four incidents mentioned above on it. With the red cross, I marked my personal treasure: it's a Japanese cuisine place called Ebiten, serving a delicious plate of Kimchi Yaki Udon. I work 10 minutes away from it, and on the days I'm overcome by a bout of laziness sufficient enough for me to forego cooking for the next day, I fancy myself this succulent Chinese Japanese meal. Also on the map, you can find that murky, dark place, the infamous East Hastings street and it's younger brother Granville street, where I was told all of the vagrants are localized and who never stray from those regions.
I live in this fairytale city. I'm on Robson St every work day, commuting. I'm here to tell you that this predicament Vancouver and the whole of Canada found itself in is crazy. Having my office building do multiple lockdowns in one year is not in any way, shape, or form normal. I'm an immigrant here in Vancouver, and I readily admit I don't know the customs and traditions as well as the natively born Canadians, but when they tell me in the comments to the Halberd incident article on Reddit that I lead a sheltered existence, I have to respond: you've lost your mind. It's hard for me to express how thoroughly the Forces of Evil defeated everyday citizens of Canada.
I'm originally from Russia, that backward warmongering authoritarian country, and naturally, I made friends with Russians here in Vancouver. One of my friends waded into that dark domain of East Hastings drove through East Hastings in order to record it, by the request of her father. He's a teacher and now uses the footage as a piece of propaganda about the decaying West - it's that jarring to us Russians. It's bizarre to our sheltered minds: the tents, the drug use, all of the fent zombies bending down, all of the trash piling up on the sidewalk. Not to say that homelessness doesn't exist in Russia; it naturally does. Just take the Three Station Square in Moscow (famously visited by Tucker Carlson) that serves as a shelter for the homeless during the winter frost and in all other months too but especially during the cold winter months. When the denizens get kicked out of one station, they migrate to another - a perpetual problem for the guards and the police, an eyesore for the commuters (more of a nosesore? is that a word? they smell is what I mean).
(Sidetracking, calling a station on Three Station Square "a station" is a disgrace to it, to be honest. It's vokzal (вокзал). A big station. A grand station even. Each vokzal is a huge pavilion and for you North Americans to understand - it's big-mall-sized. More-than-a-big-Costco-sized. Imagine enormous Stalin-era-skyscraper style waiting halls and nooks and crannies and unused toilets where you can sleep, drink and shoot up at night)
Homeless people in Russia are neatly tucked away for the most part. It's harder to see them than in Canada, where they sit or lay everywhere cocooned into blankets. In Russia drug users mostly use drugs in condos and apartments. For the most part homeless people huddle in the aforementioned vokzals and stations, underground walkways or maybe along insulated pipes, anywhere warm, in fact. Train drivers traditionally turn up the heat in one or two cars on the last late-night intercity train for the homeless to warm up and sleep in peace during the winter (a small act of kindness, but not a sentiment broadly shared by the public. From 2023 onwards, persons in dirty clothes are forbidden from entering public transport, as if it wasn't already hard to be a homeless person). Sewers and entrance halls for apartment buildings can tide one over for a night. Public spaces like vokzals are the main ways to survive - various NGOs like Nochlezhka and government organizations like Doctor Liza are much more scarce and have much less funding than their Western counterparts.
I didn't live in Moscow, but I lived next to Moscow, commuted there every day. To me, trains, train stations, subways, and public transport are familiar environments, so naturally, I met a decent amount of homeless people. Maybe they were fragrant and unpleasant and often drunk, but I was never afraid of them (and I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm afraid of the Vancouver ones). The homeless in my motherland were rarely drug addicts, and even then, never were they really aggressive. I felt (and still feel) pity for most homeless when they were harassed by the police. I still perceive them as people down on their luck and for the most part they were. From what I know, it is not uncommon for Russian homeless people to be working towards reintegration. They weren't scary and that's the most important part. They lived a regrettable existence, but they were still humans who held on to some semblance of dignity that I almost never see in homeless people in the West.
As sheltered as my upbringing was (I like to think that it wasn't), I was never on guard when I was at Three Station Square; I could never imagine an "unhoused person" in Russia threatening me with a makeshift polearm, it just wasn't an issue for me or anyone else commuting downtown. Did I expect them to beg for change? Yes. Stab me? No. Expecting it and just accepting it as a status quo, from my oh so very sheltered perspective, is crazy. This commenter, and from my perspective, Western society at large just gave up, surrendered after a few policy misses, and just left this wound to fester and fester until cities like Vancouver ended up magically teleporting back in time, to medieval Europe with polearms and all. Don't westerners want to enjoy their burgers without being embroiled in a 100 year war?
My first idea is that everyone just fled downtown to quiet and comfortable suburbs and this is why Canadians don't care, but don't Vancouverites work downtown, commute there and have to deal with this shit and squalor every single work day of their lives? Downtown Vancouver is chock-full of offices, various government services, restaurants, sight-seeing attractions, doctor offices, etc. There are legit reasons to go there every day of the week. Well, I find one. I don't want this to become an urban vs suburban debate: it's just that as a person who grew up in a very urban environment of Moscow, I'm shocked to see the neglect of the shared parts of your city.
One big difference I see between how Russia treats homeless people and how Canada does is that it's just hard for them to live as vagabonds. Yes, you technically can tuck them away in vokzals and underground walkways, but it doesn't mean that the police aren't harassing them constantly. Yes, it's not illegal to live as a homeless person, but it's also really hard and shameful. You can't really sleep in a vokzal without getting woken up every hour by a cop who tells you to remove your feet from the bench. And cops will kick you and punch you too, a big taboo in the West (those damned "human rights or whatever). Having less funding, NGOs can't provide the same level of care as in the West. They don't receive as much in subsidies. Homeless are routinely getting kicked off public transport by the police or even commuters. They are refused entrance to grocery stores and medical facilities.
It's really, really cold during winter in Russia. The most common cause of death for a homeless person in my Motherland is freezing to death. That fear of death, less drugs on the street, constant harassment and shame are crucial motivators. These things sound bad, but the fear of getting beaten, the fear of hardship, the fear of freezing to death can be drivers for rehabilitation and, most importantly, prevention.
In 2024 Scott wrote about homelessness. I posted the article. When I hear about the Finnish model touted by Scott, it makes me laugh. If you see a medieval encampment like the Skidrow on your street and your thought is "let's make their life even simpler" you've given up on the homelessness problem. It's honestly self-evident to me: make their life harder for them! Not simpler! Scott admits himself that draconian ways work in the article, so let's do it, why not do it the draconian way? We are not even talking about people experiencing temporary homelessness, we are talking about hardcore drug users who are dangerous to themselves and to the society at large. They don't feel any sympathy for me or a for a guy getting stabbed when he buys a Monster Energy Gold at a 7-Eleven, so to me, a foreigner to this culture it's impossible to understand why Canadians still feel sympathy for them. It's so evident to me: no more safe-injection sites, no more funding to NGOs, no more investment into safe supply, no more free money and food to subsidize drug-addiction lifestyle with it.
When I see Ken Sim, the current mayor, do a "fire inspection" clean up of East Hastings it makes me... audibly sigh. You have this dangerous, armed medieval brigade and your best idea wasn't to make their life harder. Your idea was to evenly spread them across the city. With all of their weapons. Huh?
When I see a safe-injection site next to the most hipster movie theater in Vancouver (VIFF) and a playground for kids, it makes me laugh, again. The West truly may have fallen, I refused to believe it until I saw it with my own eyes: a guy smoking meth (presumably he got it from the safe-injection site) on that playground and not a single father to even try telling him to fuck off. People just stopped using that part of the playground, moved aside in fear. Not a police officer in sight too. Don't even get me started about a meth zombie erratically waving a knife near kids with a knife in a school. (While trying to find the exact article I saw, I found out that there were multiple incidents involving schools and men armed with knives).
My solutions for this problem are as radical as they come and I feel silly typing them out because they seem so self-evident to me:
- You need to empower police to be brutal, make it dangerous to your life to be a homeless drug user. This part will serve as a replacement for a cold Russian climate. Make it known to every homeless drug addict: you will not be warm, you will not be fed and you will be jailed and sent to rot in prison for life if you do this. Human rights are for upstanding citizens and if you abuse drugs, you forfeit your human rights just as you have forfeited your brain cells in a pursuit of a cheap thrill.
- The patchwork of useless bleeding heart NGOs managing this crisis must go. It's time to reinstitute all of the previously closed mental health hospitals like Riverview, for the sole purpose of safeguarding citizens and especially children.
- The libertarian objection of "who's going to pay for it" is obvious here: IMO the value of shared urban areas is self-evident enough to use tax-payer money to clean up the streets. I'd like to argue about this from-the-first-principles-style some time in the future, but this post is not about the inherent social value of urban areas.
- This one is much harder, but if I could, I would drill it into every Canadian's head: it is your business when someone acts anti-socially. No shaming, no disgust, no pushback only empowers the belligerent homeless population and disempowers police.
There's one and only one takeaway from this whole ordeal for Canadians, the one that will prevent the worsening of already bad areas once and for all: you can't entrust your safety to someone who fundamentally cares about fent zombies more than they care about making your presence in the city safe and pleasant.
So when a commenter tells someone who is surprised by the plethora of weapons in the homeless shelter weapons locker that he lived a sheltered existence, maybe I did live a sheltered life, maybe I did, but I also know when I'm afraid and I see with my own eyes that you are afraid of the archers and infantrymen of Methland too. I've seen liberals go "I'm not actually uncomfortable about them, homelessness is just a part of life and you need to be okay with it. That's just what Downtown is like" and at the same time conveniently avert their eyes from a situation where your compatriots yield completely when a part of a playground for kids is occupied by an invader. Well, in any case, their compassion for drug addicts seems horribly misplaced, at the very least.
The question of "why and how did we allow all of this to go to shit?" is the hardest part. Does it all go back to the old Motte argument that the police in the West exist to protect homeless people from you, not vice versa? (I'd be grateful if someone could link). If so, why? Or is it just a temporary liberalism pendulum swing that happened perfectly in sync with drugs becoming more potent than ever before in history? I don't know. I'm just an observer whose opinion on homelessness was shifted to a diametrically opposite one by real-life experiences of living in a West Coast city.
I'll close with this: Canadians, you don't have to give up multiple streets of your beautiful city. This city doesn't really need to stay medieval. Neither you need to give up your emergency room — it can be safe, actually — for the staff and for the patients.
A&W can be safe, too! Take your A&W back! Be mad! No sane person should have more sympathy for Methland invaders than for little children! My message to proud Canadians: you don't deserve to live in fear of being stabbed by a polearm!
Something I noted when I first read Coming Apart in undergrad for an assignment, and have only continued to see grow over time: it's not just economics, we're Coming Apart everywhere in America. In almost every way, our society is less equal than it was in 1962. Across domains that don't seem like they should be related:
Fitness Hobbyist athletes of today would largely stomp on the professionals of 1962 in fitness metrics. Nobody in 1962 ran marathons as a hobby, now it is common, no PMC office lacks a marathon guy. Lifting weights was weird, and maybe kinda gay. Now it is common. The lifts and PR times of your average Crossfit box would be jaw-dropping at any of the few existing gyms in 1962. The fitness obsessed are stronger, faster, better than their 1962 equivalents. And yet in 1962 the average person was in better shape than the average person in 2024. They weren't overweight or obese, they could walk ten miles if asked to do so. A randomly selected man of 1962 could join a touch football game or help you move furniture in a way that your randomly selected man of 2024 often cannot.
Sex 1962 society was more monogamous, and because of the drive to achieve pair bonding, most people could get one long term partner and marry them and stay together. More men had sex with one woman in the past year compared to today, but more men had sex with anyone. In 2024, it is vastly easier for some men to get laid, your top percentage of men can get vastly more sex with vastly more partners. But there are also vast numbers of men who never have sex, have no long term partners, and few prospects of getting them.
Cooking Imagine I took 100 mothers from my local high school today, and 100 mothers from my local high school in 1962, and Iron-Chef'd them with scratch ingredients and told them to bake me a cake. I posit that the 1962 mothers would all make more or less the same mediocre American cakes, with some ethnic-white flourishes or particular talents, but mostly pretty similar stuff. But virtually all would know how to make a cake given flour, butter, eggs, sugar. The 2024 mothers, a large percentage would simply have no idea how to make a cake from scratch without premade ingredients, only a vague concept of what to do with the ingredients, and we'd get some truly sad attempts. But among the 2024 mothers, there are also some percentage of hobbyists, Great British Baking Show and youtube obsessives, who will make a ridiculously good cake, vastly better than anything that the 1962 mothers would even know how to attempt. All one has to do to figure this out is look at old cookbooks and new cookbooks.
Physical appearance Paul Newman vs Chris Evans. Or just compare Superman to Superman, or even Hugh Jackman in different Wolverine roles. The earlier physiques are easy for a man with good genetics if they don't screw it up or attainable for most men with a bit of effort, the current physiques are impossible without at least two of good genetics, extreme effort, and pharmaceuticals.
Education More Americans than ever have completed college degrees, the value and difficulty of which we can debate but there is no question that completing years of education highly correlates with intelligence. Fewer books are read every year in America. Authors lack the popular celebrity impact they once had. Literary prizes lack the credibility and punch they once did. PhD Theses of 1962 and earlier are often pretty readable, covering a basic or normal topic. PhD theses of 2024 are often whacko, out there, unreadable to anyone without a master's in the topic already, citing obscure theories unknown to anyone outside deep academia.
Gun Ownership Gun ownership has declined from a narrow majority of households in the 70s to a third as of 2014. At the same time, many gun owners today have an absolute arsenal compared to the men of the 60s and 70s. A lot of Old Timer Fudds at my small town gun club think it's insane that the young guys want to own anything other than a shotgun, a deer rifle, a .22, and a revolver. A small percentage of gun owners in America own a vast number of firearms. This simply wasn't a normal middle-class pursuit in the 1960s.
There are other places it feels like there's something there, but I don't know how to parse them with any rigor. Religiosity, racial tolerance, "handyman" skills, foreign travel, military service, automobile driving. It feels intuitive that in the past, a base level of each was expected in every middle class man and variation was rare; and today extremes at both ends are more common while the middle is shrinking.
We live in the age of the Barbell Shaped distribution. There's something deeper there.
jeroboam
5mo ago
Trump renaming stuff is good, actually.
My initial reaction to Trump renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America and reverting Denali to Mount McKinley was "this is dumb and childish".
I've changed my mind.
If you're a white man under 50, then you've experienced things being renamed as something that is done to your people, for the benefit of others.
Statues of Jefferson and Washington are taken down and statues of civil rights leaders go up. Columbus Day is referred to as "Indigenous People's Day". Robert E. Lee, once the namesake of so many things, is gradually being erased from the map. Since the 1960's, nearly every sizeable town has acquired an MLK Boulevard (usually ridden with crime). And King County, Washington recently did a "name change" in which it discarded its former namesake, former Vice President William R. King, to honor (who else) Martin Luther King.
Countries in the third world have employed this power play as well. Bombay becomes Mumbai, Madras becomes Chennai. Cape Verde becomes Cabo Verde, the Ivory Coast becomes Cote d'Ivoire, and Turkey becomes Türkiye. How long until China insists that foreigners uses its rightful name: 中国.
The indigenous names are worse. Barrow, Alaska is now Utqiagvik. Port Elizabeth, South Africa, has become Gqeberha. Apparently, the citizens of these places don't even use the new and unpronouncable names – which seem to exist only as a way to flex on white people.
Since the 1960s, name changes are one of those things that the left just took complete control over while no one was paying attention. But why should should the left get the exclusive right to rename things?
Trump is now upsetting this forgone conclusion. You rename stuff, we'll rename stuff too. And if you want control over names, you're going to have to give up something else in return. I think it's a good move.
A Dyslogy for Ireland's "Hate Speech" Bill
When someone shows you who they are, believe them
In several posts over the last few months I've alluded to a piece of legislation making its way through the Irish houses of parliament. The Criminal Justice (Incitement to Violence or Hatred and Hate Offences) Bill 2022 (widely referred to as the “hate speech” bill) was a bill which would provide the government with sweeping powers to arrest and convict individuals they suspected of “stirring up hatred” against members of communities defined by one or more protected characteristics.1 This bill has been enormously controversial throughout its entire lifecycle, with precisely 40% of pollsters in favour and 40% opposed, and no less than Elon Musk pledging to pay the legal fees of anyone prosecuted under it in the event that it passed. It was first proposed in October 2022, passed in the Dáil2 in April 2023 after several rounds of amendments, and then made its way to the Seanad3, where it languished for well over a year, being neither approved nor rejected.
What an unmitigated joy and relief it was two weeks ago, to learn that the bill has officially been shelved by Ireland’s Minister of Justice, Helen McEntee. This specific bill has proved something of an albatross around the government’s neck for months, and not even a change in Taoiseach4 was sufficient to kill it. But a general election is due to be held no later than March of next year, and the incumbent Fianna Fáil-Fine Gael coalition government now finds itself in the unenviable position of needing to hastily course-correct just in time to appeal to the median voter (the budget announcement of two weeks ago, with its generous salary tax cuts, is part of the same drive). After the national embarrassment of a referendum rejected by fully 70% of the electorate, the government is finally cottoning on to the fact that its woke agenda, while enormously popular among progressive think tanks, NGOs and media outlets, is absolute cyanide at the polling station. Of course an effort to save face must be made, and Minister McEntee has committed to still pushing for hate crime legislation in spite of dropping the hate speech bill itself. But it’s also too soon to be doing victory laps, as McEntee has promised to come back for another bite at the apple if she’s reelected.
If you live in Ireland, you will likely have heard plenty of claims about what this bill entails: that previous legislation of this type proved ineffective at its stated aims, and so more robust legislation is required; or that the existing incitement to hatred legislation was drafted in a pre-digital, pre-social media era, and that this bill represents a simple but necessary “modernization” of existing legislation. (“Modernization” is the preferred term among the pathologically oikophobic East Yanks making up Fine Gael’s rank and file to describe the changes they wish to bring to bear on Irish society, who seem wholly unable to conceive that one could be opposed to such changes without being a parochial cattle farmer who takes his marching orders from Rome.) Given that there’s a significant possibility that this bill could be resurrected next year, understanding exactly what it entails remains as urgent as ever, so I would like to take this opportunity to explain what it proposed to do, in plain, unambiguous language. I will be quoting at length from the text of the bill which was approved by the Dáil in April of last year.
The first few examples of what constitutes an offense under this legislation are alarming enough. As outlined in articles 7-9, the bill would make it a criminal offense if a person “communicates material to the public or a section of the public… that is likely to incite violence or hatred against a person or a group of persons on account of their protected characteristics”; if a person “communicates material to the public or a section of the public… that condones, denies or grossly trivialises [sic]— (i) genocide, (ii) a crime against humanity, (iii) a war crime”; even if no actual hatred or violence resulted as a result of this communication. These offenses would be punishable by a maximum of 5 years in prison or twelve months in prison, respectively.
It’s article 10 where things get really scary, however (bolding mine):
Subject to subsections (2) and (3) and section 11, a person shall be guilty of an offence under this section if the person—
(a) prepares or possesses material that is likely to incite violence or hatred against a person or a group of persons on account of their protected characteristics or any of those characteristics with a view to the material being communicated to the public or a section of the public, whether by himself or herself or another person
(b) prepares or possesses such material with intent to incite violence or hatred against such a person or group of persons on account of those characteristics or any of those characteristics or being reckless as to whether such violence or hatred is thereby incited.
Creating or owning material “likely to incite violence or hatred” against protected groups would be a criminal offense punishable by up to two years in prison, even if this material is never distributed. It’s not merely a crime to verbally express racist thoughts in public, or make sexist jokes on Twitter: writing something racist in a Word document on a private desktop computer to which you’re the only person with access and which isn’t even connected to the Internet would also constitute a criminal offense.
Actually, it’s even worse than that. Did you know that when someone sends you an image on WhatsApp, by default that image is automatically saved down to the internal storage of your phone? This is true even of WhatsApp chats that you’ve muted or archived. This means that every image sent to you on WhatsApp is hence “in your possession”, by virtue of being saved on a device which belongs to you - the fact that you haven’t sent that image on to anyone else is irrelevant. Think about how many group chats you’ve been added to that you’ve had muted for months, in which ex-colleagues or old GAA teammates you didn’t even get along with at the time are constantly trying to one-up each other by sharing tasteless memes about the topic du jour. Think about your family group chat, to which your annoying uncle sends crudely drawn newspaper cartoons about “the old ball and chain”, amusing to no one but himself. It doesn’t matter that you didn’t create any of these images, that you didn’t forward these images on to anyone else, that you don’t agree with the contents of any of these images and actually find them crass and offensive - they’re saved to your phone, which means they’re in your possession, which means you’re guilty of an offense punishable by up to a year in prison.
Somehow, it gets worse. The bill also explains how search warrants are to be executed. If a judge was to be presented with compelling evidence that a given person is guilty of one of the above offenses, they can issue Garda Síochána5 with a search warrant, which must be executed within a week (bolding mine):
(2) A search warrant under this section shall be expressed, and shall operate, to authorise [sic] a named member…
(a) to enter, at any time within one week of the date of issue of the warrant, on production if so requested of the warrant, and if necessary by the use of reasonable force, the place named in the warrant,
(b) to search it and any persons found at that place, and
(c) to examine, seize and retain anything found at that place, or anything found in possession of a person present at that place at the time of the search, that that member reasonably believes to be evidence of, or relating to, the commission of an offence under section 7, 8 or 10, as the case may be.
(4) A member acting under the authority of a search warrant under this section may—
(a) operate any computer at the place that is being searched or cause any such computer to be operated by a person accompanying the member for that purpose, and
(b) require any person at that place who appears to the member to have lawful access to the information in any such computer—
(i) to give to the member any password necessary to operate it and any encryption key or code necessary to unencrypt the information accessible by the computer,
(ii) otherwise to enable the member to examine the information accessible by the computer in a form in which the information is visible and legible, or
(iii) to produce the information in a form in which it can be removed and in which it is, or can be made, visible and legible.
(7) A person who—
(a) obstructs or attempts to obstruct a member acting under the authority of a search warrant under this section,
(b) fails to comply with a requirement under subsection (4)(b) or (5), or (c) in relation to a requirement under subsection (5), gives a name and address or provides information which the member has reasonable cause for believing is false or misleading in a material respect,
shall be guilty of an offence.
(8) A person guilty of an offence under subsection (7) shall be liable on summary conviction to a class A fine or imprisonment for a term not exceeding 12 months or both.
Let’s imagine for a moment that you are sympathetic to the stated aims of this bill, and you sincerely believe that far-right people spewing vitriol about immigrants online really ought to be locked up. Imagine you share an apartment with a flatmate called Joe, a shy, quiet guy who keeps to himself. You don’t consider Joe a personal friend, you don’t know much about him, and you don’t even eat your meals together - but he’s neat and tidy and pays the rent on time, so you have no complaints. Completely unbeknownst to you, Joe operates a pseudonymous Twitter account in which he expresses opinions about immigration to Ireland which some people consider offensive. Unfortunately for Joe, he’s been a bit careless about his digital footprint, and an anti-racist activist on Twitter was able to connect the dots and figure out his real name, which they pass on to the guards. The guards in turn determine his residence and request a search warrant, which is granted.
One evening you’re home alone (as Joe is away on holiday) when you hear a pounding at the door. Fearful that the guards will kick the door down (which they are perfectly entitled to do), you open the door. The guards explain they have a warrant to search your apartment, as they suspect that Joe (named on the warrant) is guilty of incitement to hatred. You explain that Joe is away and they should call back later. The guards don’t care, and demand that you present your wallet/handbag, phone and laptop to them so that they can search them for hateful material. You retort that this is ridiculous - you aren’t even named on the search warrant, you barely know Joe, Joe has never touched your phone or your laptop (or vice versa). The guards don’t care, and again demand that you surrender your phone, laptop, and the PINs to both. At this juncture you have the choice:
- Grant them access. The guards can now view all of your private documents, emails, messages and images. This would be invasive and potentially embarrassing enough, even if they don’t find any material they deem likely to promote hatred or incitement to violence against minorities. But of course, there’s every chance they might find an edgy meme that your annoying uncle sent to the family group chat which you didn’t realize was saved on to your phone - so they promptly arrest you, you’re prosecuted for incitement to hatred and sentenced to a year in prison.
- Refuse to grant them access. For refusing to hand over the PINs to your phone and laptop, the guards promptly arrest you, you’re prosecuted for obstructing justice, and you’re sentenced to a year in prison.
I see no reason, none, why the above scenario could not have transpired exactly as described above if this bill had passed according to the wording approved by the Dáil.
Now perhaps you’ll say to me - come on, that’s ridiculous. Maybe they want to enact this bill, but they won’t actually use it - it’s only being enacted as a deterrent, and maybe there’ll be one prosecution every five years for extremely persistent neo-Nazis literally waving 14/88 flags outside the synagogue in Terenure. Ordinary people with a dark sense of humour have nothing to fear from this bill.
I wouldn’t be so confident. For an example very close to home, consider section 127 of the UK’s Communications Act 2003, which makes it illegal to intentionally “cause annoyance, inconvenience or needless anxiety to another” with online posts, on which it appears Ireland’s “hate speech” bill took at least some inspiration. As reported by the Times, at least 2,315 people were arrested under this section of the act in 2014, a figure which shot up to 3,395 in 2023. And before you say that all of these people were let off with a warning, 1,399 people were convicted under this act last year - and this was under a Tory government!6 Scale these figures down to the size of the Irish population, and ceteris paribus you would expect 253 arrests and 104 convictions in Ireland every year. In a period in which the Irish prison service is massively underresourced and ovecrowded, with the prison population consistently in excess of the total bed capacity by as much as 10-12% throughout the year - the government now wants to throw as many as another hundred people in jail every year for the crime of making tasteless jokes in the privacy of their own homes.
Or you’ll say, sure, the bill is written in an extremely sweeping fashion, but it’ll never actually be used to lock people up just for making a joke in poor taste. They’re keeping the wording expansive only so that genuine racists and far-right nutters won’t be able to weasel out of a conviction on a technicality, but the genuine racists and far-night nutters are the only people who’ll be targeted by it: otherwise decent, law-abiding citizens will be left alone.
I’m having none of it. Look at past efforts to control speech and behaviour and/or invade citizenry’s privacy from this century alone, and the apology outlined above pattern-matches to none of them. “Hate speech” legislation in France was adapted into ag-gag legislation so quickly it must have made those poor Parisians’ beret-clad heads spin (“stigmatizing agricultural activities” is certainly a colorful way to refer to any and all criticisms of factory farming). If you made a list of all the activities which could be reasonably characterized as aiding or abetting terrorism, I very much doubt “operating a fan website about the TV show Stargate SG-1” would make the top 100 such entries, or even the top 1,000: that didn’t stop the US government invoking the USA PATRIOT Act (enacted just six weeks after 9/11, ostensibly to combat terrorism) to subpoena the financial records of the unfortunate webmaster in question. When governments are afforded sweeping powers to invade the privacy of their citizenry, they tend to put them to full use. Consider the aforementioned section 127 of the Communications Act 2003 - do you think the only people convicted under it were outspoken neo-Nazis and white supremacists? Let’s see:
A 20-year-old builder has been ordered to pay more than £500 after he drew a penis on a police officer's face using Snapchat.
Jordan Barrack secretly took the photo on his mobile phone while being interviewed by an officer at Sleaford Police Station, Lincoln.
He then drew two penises on the picture using Snapchat, one over the officer PC Charles Harris' face, before sending it to some friends and posting it on Facebook.
…
He pleaded guilty at Lincoln Magistrates’ Court to 'posting a grossly offensive, obscene picture on a social media site' and was ordered to pay £400 in compensation.
The youngster, who lives with his parents, had to pay an additional £85 of costs and a £60 victim surcharge, and was ordered to serve a 12 month community order with 40 hours of unpaid work.
…
"They confiscated my phone at the time and I still haven't got it back over five months later even though the case is finished now."7
As I've gone out of my way to outline above, criminal offenses are defined so broadly under this bill that you would be hard pressed to find someone who isn't guilty of one of them - after all, who among us hasn't been sent an edgy or offensive meme by a relative, work colleague, or friend of a friend? Some apologists for this bill will use that very fact as a point in its defense: they think there's some kind of “safety in numbers” effect, wherein a bill which makes a criminal of just about everyone will quickly be exposed as a farce and abolished. But this defense rests entirely on the touchingly naïve assumption that the government (or more specifically, the director of public prosecutions) would have the slightest interest in enforcing this law in an impartial manner. On the contrary: a crime which is defined in such a way that everyone is guilty of it is an absolute godsend to a cabinet looking to silence or intimidate its opponents. Selective enforcement is the name of the game, and you can be certain that the DPP would come down like a tonne of bricks on anyone critical of the establishment, but look the other way when people who toe the party line crack offensive jokes or say hateful things.
Hell, even if they're unable to secure a conviction, being dragged through the courts is exhausting, expensive and humiliating enough. If you criticise the government, and then have to endure the embarrassment of the guards rifling through your personal effects and private documents for hours, getting arrested and charged with possessing materials which could be used for incitement to hatred, having to waste hundreds of man-hours and tens of thousands of euros mounting a legal defense before showing up for your day in court - even if you win, even if the state agrees to pay your legal fees (which they probably wouldn't), do you think you'll be as strongly inclined to criticise the government going forward? No one wants to go through that grief even once, never mind twice. The process is the punishment, and “hate speech” legislation can here function as the criminal justice equivalent of a SLAPP lawsuit. Don’t believe for a second that this has anything to do with combatting “hate” or “prejudice” or whatever: this is the iron fist in the rainbow glove all over again.
Apologists for invasive, authoritarian legislation of this type sometimes fall back on that old saw: “if you're innocent, you've nothing to worry about”, or as one commenter on the r/ireland subreddit put it, “just don't be a cunt and you'll be fine”. Putting aside the question of whether it's appropriate or proportionate to jail someone for a year or longer for the crime of “being a cunt”, what I've tried to do in this article is emphasise that this argument simply does not apply in the case of this specific bill. Whether by accident or by design, collateral damage and guilt-by-association are built into this bill from its foundations. If enacted, it will be entirely possible to go one's entire life without expressing a single hateful opinion or tasteless joke, and still be convicted of a criminal offense. All because you had the poor fortune to live in the same house as someone who has done one or more of these things, or because someone sent you a tasteless image on WhatsApp and you didn’t realise in time to delete it.
This government spent most of 2020-21 urging its populace to practise social distancing and limit their social contacts for fear of spreading a virus. Now they are doing the same thing, only for “viruses” of the mind. Think about the kinds of behaviour being incentivised, when people realise that they could be found guilty of a criminal offense simply because someone else (even someone they don't know, who they've never met) sent a crass image to their phone. The chilling effects are predictable and inevitable: people will steadily begin to avoid giving out their phone numbers (even to potentially valuable business contacts, or potential friends or romantic partners); will avoid joining WhatsApp groups unless they are certain that none of the members of that group have offensive opinions (something they can never be certain of, obviously); and will begin to curtail their documentable interactions with anyone without the “correct” politics (baldly counter to the basic goals and values of a pluralistic society). Ireland is already the loneliest country in Europe - how could such a situation not be exacerbated by this bill, if Irish people are reluctant to give their phone numbers to acquaintances out of an entirely legitimate fear that doing so will put them at increased risk of arrest and prosecution?
Meanwhile, anyone with unorthodox politics or a dark sense of humour will find themselves left out in the cold, their friends having blocked them on WhatsApp for fear of being convicted by association. Confused and hurt by rejection from all angles, they will retreat into online echo chambers of like-minded individuals, in which their worst tendencies will be amplified beyond all proportion. Far from serving as an effective antidote to far-right radicalisation, this bill is a recipe for it.
Assuming you reside in Ireland, I’m not going to tell you how to vote in the next general election - that’s entirely your business. But before you cast your vote, I’m pleading with you to consider this. Listed below are the names of the TDs who voted in favour of this bill when it passed in the Dáil.8 If you are considering voting for any of them, please bear this in mind: these people know that, as a consequence of this bill, a member of the public, just like you, could be sent to prison for a year for refusing to disclose the PIN to their phone to a police officer, without having ever been named on a search warrant or having been personally accused of incitement to hatred. They know that a member of the public could be sent to prison for a year merely for possessing an image that somebody might find offensive - even if they didn’t create it, even if they never sent it to anybody else, even if they literally didn’t know it was in their possession (because it was sent to a WhatsApp group of which they are a member, but which they’ve had muted for months). They know this for a fact, and they don’t care: they are completely fine with it. And if the opportunity presents itself, they’ll vote for it again, as Minister McEntee surely expects them to do.
Maybe knowing this fact about these politicians isn’t a deal-breaker for you. But it is for me, and I don't even care that this bill hasn’t been enacted (yet): by voting for it, these TDs have told me everything I need to know about them and their respect for ordinary people and their civil liberties. To keep myself honest, I am making a public pledge: I will never give any of the names which appear on the list below any preference in any ballot paper I fill out until the day I die, unless the politician in question gives a public apology for voting for this bill and expressly admits that they personally were wrong to have done so. If they canvass me, I will ask them point-blank why they think it’s appropriate to arrest someone because someone else sent them an offensive meme. If the only candidates running in my constituency are candidates who voted in favour of this tyrannical, authoritarian monstrosity and express no remorse about having done so, I will abstain.
-
Andrews, Chris
-
Berry, Cathal
-
Brady, John
-
Brophy, Colm
-
Browne, James
-
Browne, Martin
-
Bruton, Richard
-
Buckley, Pat
-
Burke, Colm
-
Butler, Mary
-
Byrne, Thomas
-
Cahill, Jackie
-
Cairns, Holly
-
Calleary, Dara
-
Canney, Seán
-
Cannon, Ciarán
-
Carroll MacNeill, Jennifer
-
Carthy, Matt
-
Chambers, Jack
-
Clarke, Sorca
-
Collins, Niall
-
Conway-Walsh, Rose
-
Costello, Patrick
-
Coveney, Simon
-
Cowen, Barry
-
Cronin, Réada
-
Crowe, Cathal
-
Crowe, Seán
-
Daly, Pa
-
Devlin, Cormac
-
Dillon, Alan
-
Donnelly, Paul
-
Donnelly, Stephen
-
Donohoe, Paschal
-
Duffy, Francis Noel
-
Durkan, Bernard J
-
Ellis, Dessie
-
English, Damien
-
Farrell, Alan
-
Farrell, Mairéad
-
Feighan, Frankie
-
Flaherty, Joe
-
Flanagan, Charles
-
Fleming, Sean
-
Foley, Norma
-
Funchion, Kathleen
-
Gannon, Gary
-
Gould, Thomas
-
Griffin, Brendan
-
Guirke, Johnny
-
Haughey, Seán
-
Heydon, Martin
-
Higgins, Emer
-
Howlin, Brendan
-
Humphreys, Heather
-
Kehoe, Paul
-
Kenny, Martin
-
Kerrane, Claire
-
Lahart, John
-
Leddin, Brian
-
Lowry, Michael
-
Mac Lochlainn, Pádraig
-
Madigan, Josepha
-
Martin, Micheál
-
Matthews, Steven
-
McAuliffe, Paul
-
McConalogue, Charlie
-
McGrath, Michael
-
McGuinness, John
-
McHugh, Joe
-
Mitchell, Denise
-
Moynihan, Aindrias
-
Moynihan, Michael
-
Murnane O'Connor, Jennifer
-
Nash, Ged
-
Naughton, Hildegarde
-
Noonan, Malcolm
-
O'Brien, Darragh
-
O'Brien, Joe
-
O'Callaghan, Cian
-
O'Callaghan, Jim
-
O'Connor, James
-
O'Donnell, Kieran
-
O'Dowd, Fergus
-
O'Gorman, Roderic
-
O'Reilly, Louise
-
O'Rourke, Darren
-
O'Sullivan, Christopher
-
O'Sullivan, Pádraig
-
Ó Broin, Eoin
-
Ó Cathasaigh, Marc
-
Ó Cuív, Éamon
-
Ó Murchú, Ruairí
-
Ó Ríordáin, Aodhán
-
Ó Snodaigh, Aengus
-
Quinlivan, Maurice
-
Rabbitte, Anne
-
Richmond, Neale
-
Ring, Michael
-
Ryan, Eamon
-
Ryan, Patricia
-
Smith, Brendan
-
Smith, Duncan
-
Smyth, Ossian
-
Stanley, Brian
-
Stanton, David
-
Tully, Pauline
-
Varadkar, Leo
-
Ward, Mark
-
Whitmore, Jennifer
I hope for our sakes that Elon Musk’s coffers are as deep as everyone says they are.
1In the order listed in the text of the bill: race, colour, nationality, religion, national or ethnic origin, descent, gender, sex characteristics, sexual orientation, disability.
2 Lower house of parliament.
3 Upper house of parliament.
4 Prime minister.
5 The Irish police service.
6 As pointed out by Greg Lukianoff, more people were arrested under this act in a two-year span than the total number of people arrested during that infamously repressive period in American history, the first Red Scare, even though the UK population in 2014-2015 was only 70% that of the US in 1920.
7 I wonder if the woke people defending legislation of this type, many of whom have “ACAB” (all cops are bastards) in their Twitter bios, are aware that it can and has been used to prosecute people for playfully teasing police officers.
8 And believe you me, I never foresaw finding myself in a position in which I’d have to give credit where credit’s due to Richard Boyd Barrett, Paul Murphy, Bríd Smith and the Healy-Raes of all people. Coalitions make strange bedfellows indeed.
New from me: Reliable Sources, investigating how longtime malicious critic of this community, RationalWiki sysadmin, and Wikipedia administrator David Gerard launders his grudges into the public record. The article is a bit of a labor of love: I'd been loosely familiar with him from his time in spaces critical of this forum, but I had no clue just how deep the rabbit hole went. For the past five years, he's been on a mission to slash-and-burn "unreliable sources" from Wikipedia, advocating for sites like PinkNews and HuffPost as reliable while pushing to make heterodox and right-wing sources impossible to cite.
Back in the day, Gerard was a surprisingly big fan of Eliezer Yudkowsky and a reasonably good-faith contributor on LessWrong who was alternately friendly and critical. At some point, though, coinciding with the 2012-2014 cultural schism that destroyed old internet culture, he turned more and more against it. After his longtime friend [Elizabeth] Sandifer got banned from Wikipedia for doxxing someone in the wake of Gerard's abusing mod tools to lock Chelsea Manning's article under her new name back in 2013, Gerard seems to have elected to abandon all pretense of good faith on Wikipedia, instead spending years shaping the LessWrong, Slate Star Codex, and other rationalist-adjacent pages to reflect any negative information he could.
In particular, he was directly responsible for more-or-less fabricating ties between LessWrong and neoreaction, going so far as to have his friend self-publish a book (Neoreaction: A Basilisk) that used him as a source for all claimed ties, finding a review of the book from another friend of hers, and sliding that review in as a citation to claim a tie between the two communities. He also fed as much negative info about Scott to the NYT's Cade Metz (an old rival of his) during that whole affair a few years back while repeatedly trying to doxx Scott on his Wikipedia page and editing the page to put the focus on the NYT affair and remove articles critical of the NYT. That behavior, in the end, got him banned from directly editing things related to Scott Alexander, but to this day he remains the primary contributor to e.g. the LessWrong Wikipedia article.
There's much more in the article. The man has thirty years of online history, from running an anti-scientology page on Julian Assange's server back in the day to hosting LemonParty to a whole lot more, and I was caught up by a mad impulse to document All Of It. It's almost impossible to explain this sort of context to uninvolved parties without, well, sitting down, trawling through hundreds of obscure pages, interviewing a bunch of people close to the events, and pulling three decades of online Lore into legible form, so that's what I did.
All the best.
More options
Context Copy link