culture war roundup
ymeskhout
7mo ago
Clarence Thomas's Gun Control Snare
So the Bruen decision came out more than a year ago, and it has scrambled how courts deal with gun control laws.
Step back first. The way courts typically evaluate laws that putatively infringe on a constitutional right was through an analysis called strict scrutiny. Basically, take any constitutional guarantee ("Congress shall make no law...abridging the freedom of speech...") and add an "...unless it has a really good reason!" exception. This isn't an exaggeration. Courts were allowed to give the government a free pass on constitutional infringements provided the state's efforts were "narrowly tailored" and "necessary" to achieve a "compelling state interest".
But what counts as a compelling reason? Who decides which laws are narrowly tailored? It's judges, all the way down. For something like freedom of speech, there's a robust enough appreciation that you can expect a reasonable amount of skepticism among the judicial corps against efforts by the government to muzzle expression. In practice, strict scrutiny generally functioned as decently high threshold, unlike its contrasting rational basis test which practically was a free pass for the government to do whatever.
But what about topics a little more heated, like guns? Judges have been squishier and far more willing to accept the government's justifications that a given legal restrictions was "necessary". Hell, some judges even weaseled their way into ditching strict scrutiny in favor of the more permissible intermediate scrutiny. Judge VanDyke of the 9th Circuit lampooned this doormat reflex in his 2022 McDougall dissent (cleaned up):
Our circuit has ruled on dozens of Second Amendment cases, and without fail has ultimately blessed every gun regulation challenged, so we shouldn't expect anything less here. As I've recently explained, our circuit can uphold any and every gun regulation because our current Second Amendment framework is exceptionally malleable and essentially equates to rational basis review.
The cases VanDyke cited illustrate the problem well. The 9th Circuit has ruled it's ok to require people to demonstrate either "good cause" or "urgency or need" to the government before they're allowed to carry a gun outside their home. Set aside whatever negative sentiments you might have about guns, and instead imagine the reaction if similar restrictions were imposed on newspaper licenses. Imagine having to convince a cop that you have "good cause" to start a blog. Constitutional guarantees are worthless if they're predicated on a government agent agreeing that your reason for exercising them is good enough.
The practice of circuit judges shrugging off challenges to gun control laws with "I don't know man this seems totally reasonable to me" went on for several years, and I can only imagine it pissed off the pro-2A wing of the Supreme Court. Sure, Trump's appointments eventually meant they had the numbers on their side and so a very favorable 2A opinion was inevitable, but a stern rebuke of "We really mean it this time!" didn't seem like it was going to work in getting the circuit courts to stop fucking around.
So when they finally got their chance, SCOTUS tried a different approach. Instead of just triple-underlining and double-highlighting the words STRICT SCRUTINY, Clarence Thomas writes the majority opinion that created a brand new analysis wholly unique to the Second Amendment: gun control laws can only be constitutionally permissible if they're consistent with "historical tradition of firearm regulation." Any law being evaluated must therefore have a historical analogue, and the closer the analogue was to the year 1791 (when 2A was ratified), the better.
I was thrilled with Bruen's result, but puzzled by its reasoning because it seemed to just recreate the circumstances that led to the "fake strict scrutiny" problem. It turns out Bruen had way more of an effect than I anticipated. Clarence Thomas is a fascinating figure in many ways, in part because he's America's most powerful black conservative, who just happens to draw direct inspiration from the black nationalism Malcolm X espoused. I have no idea if this was intentional, but Thomas laid out a beautiful carpet of caltrops that the government couldn't help but step on over and over again.
What followed Bruen was a litigation maelstrom. Government attorneys across the land scoured dusty historical tomes, in search of whatever they could get their hands on and use as justification. The first problem they ran into was there just weren't that many laws on the books around the time of the Founding, let alone laws that specifically governed firearms. Generally speaking, Americans were free to strut about town with their muskets in tow, no questions asked. The lawyers had to cast a ever-wider net to snag anything relevant, desperately expanding their search way beyond 1791 to include things like an English prohibition on "launcegays" from 1383. When they did find timely laws, they ran into a second and far more pressing problem: the laws regulating firearm possession were...awkward. Really awkward.
Judge Benitez overseeing the ongoing Duncan case ordered the state lawyers to compile a list of every single relevant law they could find, and the 56-page spreadsheet they created is incredible. It's not surprising to find governments actively disarming disfavored groups, it's another to see the arbitrariness outlined so starkly. Modern gun control critics have regularly pointed out how skewed enforcement can be, particularly along racial lines. And because Bruen requires historical analogues, lawyers defending gun control restrictions had no choice but to immerse themselves unhappily within its sordid origin story.
Numerous early laws specifically prohibited only "negroes, mulattos, or Indians" from carrying firearms (1792 Virginia law, 1791 Delaware law, 1798 Kentucky law, etc.), or specifically targeted only slaves (1804 Indiana law, 1804 Mississippi law, 1818 Missouri law, etc.). California had it out particularly for those with "Spanish and Indian blood" (aka what the law called 'Greasers') and prohibited them from possessing firearms in 1855. These are all laws favorably cited in courts today.
When tasked to defend §922(g)(3), the law that prohibits anyone who is an "unlawful user" of a controlled substance from owning a gun, government lawyers tried their best with what little they had. The closest analogues they could find were colonial laws that prohibited actively drunk people, "dangerous lunatics", or what they termed "unvirtuous citizens" from possessing a gun. And you know that's BASICALLY the same thing as preventing the occasional marijuana smoker today from ever having a gun. The judge wasn't convinced.
After languishing in a stalemate for decades, the legal precedent around gun laws has dramatically changed in very quick order thanks to Bruen. Prohibitions on drug users were struck down, a (limited) prohibition for non-violent felons was struck down, and so were prohibitions on individuals subject to domestic-violence restraining orders (for now...). Courts are normally slow to move, but these developments have happened at blazing speed, and it's only the beginning as there's still plenty of ongoing litigation.
None of this means that gun control advocates have given up, far from it! @gattsuru has extensively catalogued numerous ways anti-gun politicians and judges putting in absolutely heroic efforts to gum up the machinery, however they can. Judge VanDyke publicly accused his colleagues on the 9th Circuit of some robe & dagger procedural shenanigans putting the thumb on the scale in the Duncan case. Meanwhile, legislation of dubious constitutionality gets passed faster than it can be struck down and the NYPD is somehow approving fewer gun permits than before (maybe because their approval stamp fell behind a desk, or something?). The efforts Gattsuru highlighted are definitely a hurdle but we'll see if they're the beginning of a new stalemate, or just desperate cadaveric spasms. For now, I'm going to continue enjoying the spectacle of government lawyers arguing with a straight face to a judge that pot smokers are the historical equivalent of dangerous lunatics.
Hoffmeister25
American Bukelismo Enthusiast
1yr ago
A recent piece by Rod Dreher is the latest example I’ve seen on the Dissident Right of references to “Theater-Kid-run America” and to the dangers of giving power to “Former Theater Kids” and, well, it’s got me feeling called-out in a very uncomfortable way. Certainly this far from the first time I’ve felt conspicuously out-of-place and unwelcome on the Right; my sparring with @HlynkaCG and @FCfromSSC in this space, and with a number of users when I was an active poster in /r/CultureWarRoundup, have reinforced my acute awareness of how my upbringing and personality profile make me somewhat of an uncomfortable fit in the right-wing ecosystem. But the “Theater Kids” discourse hits me particularly hard because it touches on something over which I’ve agonized for a long time.
The question of “why are artistically-inclined people nearly universally left-wing” has occupied my thoughts extensively ever since I began my journey to the Right. As I’ve mentioned here before - probably extremely ill-advisedly, from an OpSec perspective - I have a theatre arts degree and spent over a decade heavily involved in the local theatre scene (both musicals and “straight plays”) in my city. At one point I was incredibly enthusiastic about pursuing a professional career in that field, and made my participation in it a central part of my identity. My political conversion isn’t the only reason I’ve drifted away from theatre (even my use of the British spelling gives me away as a Theater Kid), but it was by far the biggest accelerant of that decision. Another reason, though, is that even aside from their politics, theatre people can be… difficult to be around in certain ways that made me stick out like a sore thumb sometimes even without politics entering the equation.
So, when I see right-wing commentators taking potshots at “Theater Kids”, part of me wants to not only applaud, but to amplify their criticism: “Oh, you don’t even know the half of it!” I’m far more intimately aware of the particular failure modes of artists, because I saw them up-close and personal for a huge part of my life, and can recognize some of those failure modes in myself. Another part of me, though, becomes very defensive and wants to leap to the defense of the creative class; not only because, despite my current politics and estrangement from that scene, I’m still one of those people at heart, but also because I think right-wing people tread on dangerous ground when they too-eagerly dismiss and alienate artistically-/creatively-oriented people.
It is undeniably true that people involved in the arts are overwhelmingly and ostentatiously left-wing. Look at surveys of political orientation among any even remotely creative-adjacent field and you will find support for progressive parties/ideas well above 80-90%. The question of why this is the case is complicated and fascinating. Has it always been that way? It is dangerous to apply modern political categories to pre-modern societies, but if the “theater kid” personality profile existed in ancient/classical societies, would it be possible to say that those types of people would have been more “proto-woke” than the average citizen?
Remember that the great literary classics of Ancient Greece - the Odyssey, the Iliad, the Theogony - were epic poems delivered orally and accompanied by music long before they were written down and codified in literary form. The bards who would have invented, transmitted and augmented these epic poems were real people with real personalities, and I think there’s a significant likelihood that they were not too different from the actors and rockstars of today. Besides implying a degree of narcissism and superciliousness that we associate with artsy people today, does it also suggest that they would have been the “shitlibs” of their day?
There’s an interesting discourse about how the character of Odysseus is a sort of prototype for the theater kid’s idea of a hero - the idealized self-image of an artist imagining how he would be as a hero. Odysseus is a trickster and fabulist; he achieves his heroic deeds largely through craftiness, subterfuge, deception, and pretending to be anybody other than who he actually is. He can conjure whole worlds and identities at a whim through the magic of wordplay and storytelling. He is labile and mercurial, indirect and full of what we might call chutzpah. He prefigures more modern examples of the “trickster/bullshitter with a heart of gold” archetype epitomized by musical theatre characters like Harold Hill in The Music Man, J. Pierrepont Finch in How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, and the funhouse-mirror version of P.T. Barnum presented in the movie musical The Greatest Showman. The guys writing these musicals can’t imagine themselves as Herculean heroes of might and action, but they can imagine themselves saving the world by being so good at spinning a compelling story that they make it come true.
So, what does this imply about the self-image of artists, and what can it teach us about the likely consequences of giving the reins of power (cultural, political, or otherwise) to people who come from this milieu and/or have this personality type? Many on the Right - I’m thinking especially of the blogger The Z-Man - have noted that modern American politics are dominated by a sort of Carny (meaning a carnival performer or huckster) type of personality. There’s a persuasive case to be made that democracy inherently rewards and gives power to that exact type of person. I think we can see all around us many of the failure modes of trusting these people with the governance of our country and the production of our cultural narratives. They are fundamentally unserious people, addicted to attention and applause, attracted to head-in-the-clouds utopian nonsense because they never fully grew out of a sort of perpetual narcissistic adolescence, convinced that the key to solving hard problems is just telling a really good lie and crafting a feel-good narrative so aesthetically-pleasing that it can’t help but manifest into reality. This is a spot-on description of the personalities of many of the theatre people I know, and I wouldn’t trust them to organize a bake sale, let alone run a country.
And yet. By telegraphing its open hostility to artists and creatives - by throwing up a big sign that says, “people with liberal arts degrees, go away!” - I believe that the Right severely cripples itself. Firstly, on a practical level, it deprives the Right of its ability to mobilize individuals who can craft aesthetically-compelling narratives that will inspire and convert normal people. Right now, the only interesting art that most people in first-world countries will ever be exposed to is made by leftists. We can talk about the reasons for this; certainly some of them are structural, and are downstream of the fact that Hollywood and creative industries more generally are dominated by powerful leftists who limit the ability of right-wing content creators to access the kind of resources and backing required to produce and distribute media. But even when right-wingers get a chance to make art, it… generally doesn’t measure up.
Why is that? Is part of the reason why right-wingers (myself included) are so interested in pre-modern art is that they can keep Retvrning to it and are relieved of the burden of having to create something new? Why is it that the only people who go to classical music concerts and operas are PMC shitlibs? If the Right achieves its glorious counter-revolution, will the end product look like the town from Footloose? Distrustful of art and self-expression for fear that it breeds degeneracy? Forever fighting a battle to suppress artsy types who will corrupt the youth and bring the poison of leftism back from the dead? Should creative types who are otherwise on board with the Rightist project be concerned that we are helping to build a future that will have no place for us?
Maybe the fact that I’m asking these questions is proof that Red Tribers are right to be suspicious of people like me. If a conservative and traditional life is ideal for the vast majority of people, who cares what a tiny minority of whiny self-obsessed “artists” want? Aren’t people like me the reason we got to this point in the first place? It’s a tough subject for me to think about. To what extent can I whole-heartedly commit to a political project that will marginalize the people most similar to myself, in order to secure the greater good for the great mass of other people on earth? Am I just overthinking this entirely and letting a flippant shitposty meme trigger me into neurotic despair?
Much of the criminal justice systems operates on an assumption (or rather, an aspiration) that prosecutors and law enforcement should be trusted to carry out their duties honestly. While I don't believe this assumption is worth much, it's the reality we live in given the limited avenues for redress available. For one, prosecutors and judges have absolute immunity for misconduct, and law enforcement has qualified immunity for misconduct (which, practically speaking is basically absolute immunity with a few extra steps Edit: as @Gdanning mentions here, I significantly overstated the equivalence here). If you get fucked over by any of them, tough luck. Two, law enforcement has a close working relationship with prosecutors, and most judges are former prosecutors. Because of how the adversarial system is structured, there's a systemic bias against ruling in favor of defendants' (read: criminal's) rights. This is especially a problem when you consider that literally the only source of search and seizure precedent comes by definition from criminals asking a court to ignore damning evidence because it was illegally seized.
I just described a system where the levers of power are held by a fairly cloistered group of people, and it all skews heavily on the side against the meek defendant. There are indeed some attempts to artificially inject fairness into the system. Because civil lawsuits are assumed (not always reasonably) to involve two opposing parties on roughly equivalent footing, the evidentiary standard there is preponderance, which is basically 50% plus one. But for criminal trials, where it's the full weight of the government bearing down on a single person, it's beyond a reasonable doubt, which is basically you better goddamn be real fucking sure. Another difference pertinent for this post is what would be referred to as Brady obligations, where prosecutors are obligated to turn over every evidence which might be helpful to the defendant (who, unlike a civil litigant, has no equivalent obligation to the other side).
For the most part, verifying that a prosecutor has met their Brady obligations is near-impossible. Prosecutors are considered part of law enforcement, and they naturally have access to an entire universe of information which the other side will never see (for example, details about ongoing investigations which would tip off the subjects if it was revealed prematurely) so whether or not they've turned over every Brady material is an exercise in trust. I have to trust that the prosecutors aren't lying, and that they reviewed all the evidence they have and made a fair assessment on whether or not it's exculpatory. This is why virtually every Brady scandal involves exculpatory evidence that came to light accidentally. A fuck-up, in other words.
And oh man was there ever a fuck-up.
This happened this week during the jury trial of Ethan Nordean, a Proud Boys leader charged with seditious conspiracy stemming from his actions in January 6th. I haven't followed his case at all, but his defense attorney just filed this banger of a notice regarding the testimony of FBI agent Nicole Miller. As a government witness, Miller has an obligation to turn over any written statements she made regarding the subject of her testimony (this is known as a Jencks obligation). FBI agents use an instant messaging system called Lync, and Miller handed over a spreadsheet with 25 rows of Lync messages. Miller testified that this was her entire Jencks obligations, and she denied withholding any messages about Nordean's conspiracy charges, denied withholding any messages about whether anyone listened in on attorney-client calls, and denied withholding any messages about whether any reports (dear heavens) were falsified. And so forth. Miller just said no, absolutely not, no way.
Normally this is where the story would end, except Nordean's attorney revealed that the spreadsheet Miller had sent contained about a thousand hidden Excel rows, many of which absolutely one hundred percent directly contradicted Miller's testimony. For example, there were messages about:
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An agent asking Miller to edit a confidential informant report to remove mentioning the agent was present
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An agent reviewing attorney-client communication about trial strategy
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Agents openly expressing doubt about a Proud Boys leader's involvement in a conspiracy
And so on.
I'm certainly excited to see how Miller tries to get out of this vise. My assumption is that the prosecutor will dismiss charges against Nordean in a feeble attempt to make this go away (or a judge can do it for them, which is what happened with the Bundy ranchers).
It's certainly fucking funny that an FBI agent tried hiding Excel rows thinking they were deleted (this is known as the peek-a-boo fallacy). More seriously, FBI agents are acting this brazenly even though they're well aware how much public scrutiny is directed towards J6 cases. I think one can reasonably assume they'd have even fewer scruples in cases involving defendants no one gives a shit about.
Some jurisdictions (starting with North Carolina in 2004) have what's called an open-file discovery rule where everything in the case file (no matter how banal) is provided to the defendant by default. Tucker Carlson got access to and released footage of Jacob Chansley (aka QAnon shaman who was sentenced to 41 months in prison) calmly walking inside the capitol, which appears to contradict his charging documents. More relevantly, Chansley's attorney apparently never got that footage before. I assume the government will now argue that the footage they kept hidden wasn't that exculpatory but really, that should always be up to the defense attorney to decide.
Of course, even if open-file became the norm, law enforcement will get wise not to put incriminating statements on paper (hot tip: when doing FOIA requests, pay attention to any email or text that asks to speak on the phone about a sensitive subject). So beyond open-file discovery, I'd also keep riding my other cute little hobby horses and argue this is another reason to jettison qualified/absolute immunity. Anyone disagree?
As many of you know, I am not a Rationalist. My skepticism of Rationalism emerges in a variety of ways, but none are more striking than the feeling of bizarre disconnect when observing the Rationalist tendency to focus on systems, on rules, on formal structures as though they were some durable expression of baseline reality, as though they were dispositive in and of themselves. "well, this is the rule, so this should be the outcome".
This being the Culture War thread, a lot of what we discuss here orbits around questions of Law, procedure, or organizational norms. The problem is that law is not dispositive. It is not the motive power driving our society, or even the steering wheel. In some cases it is the bumper sticker, and in others it is the exhaust. In most ways relevant to our discussions here, it simply does not matter, and if you cannot wrap your head around this, I contend that you fundamentally misunderstand the Culture War itself.
Today's example, via the National Review:
Virginia Democrat to Introduce Bill to Prosecute Parents Who Refuse to Treat Child as Opposite Sex
Virginia Democratic delegate Elizabeth Guzman is seeking to introduce legislation that would hold parents criminally liable for refusing to treat their children as a different sex from the one they were born into. The legislation, which Guzman plans to introduce in Virginia’s upcoming legislative session, would expand the definition of child abuse so that parents could be charged with a felony or misdemeanor for refusing to honor their child’s request to be treated as the opposite sex.
“If the child shares with those mandated reporters, what they are going through, we are talking about not only physical abuse or mental abuse, what the job of that mandated reporter is to inform Child Protective Services (CPS),” Guzman told 7News. “That’s how everybody gets involved. There’s also an investigation in place that is not only from a social worker but there’s also a police investigation before we make the decision that there is going to be a CPS charge.”
The move comes in response to Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin’s latest policy initiatives, which empower parents to exercise control over whether and how children transition gender in school, as well as a speech he gave at a “parents matter” rally back at the beginning of the school year. “They think parents have no right to know what your child is discussing with their teacher or counselor,” Youngkin said.
Sing it with me, all together now: The last several years are best modelled as a massive, distributed search for ways to hurt the outgroup as badly as possible without getting in too much trouble. From the Blue perspective, legally redefining Red Tribe parenting as child abuse is certainly a pretty good way to hurt the outgroup, and options for retaliation are limited and costly. The algorithm is working! And for those who might have concerns, never fear: Guzman's got you covered.
When asked by the local reporter whether she isn’t “criminalizing parents” as many Republicans argue, Guzman answered unequivocally.
“No, it’s not. It’s educating parents because the law tells you the do’s and don’ts,” Guzman answered. “So this law is telling you do not abuse your children because they are LGBTQ.” Guzman was similarly unwavering in her thoughts about whether such an approach violated free speech or religious freedom. “The Bible says to accept everyone for who they are. So that’s what I tell them when they asked me that question, and that’s what I will continue to tell people.”
...I'd love to blame Blue ideology for that last paragraph's worth of mealy-mouthed horseshit, but honestly, I think we all can recognize that Normies shall inevitably Norm. Still, not great. I didn't bother to hunt down her full statement; let's tell ourselves she actually laid out a thoughtful argument about how society requires compromises and hard choices, gestured at trans suicide rates and some impeccably replicated studies showing that confirmed gender identity leads to better outcomes, and then the mean ol' National Review edited all that out to make her sound like a [DATA EXPUNGED] ...less ...persuasive person. Maybe that's even true! Let's not check.
Many Democratic lawmakers and liberal activists have criticized Youngkin’s recently announced education policy changes. Most prominently, the new policies prohibit teachers from using personal pronouns “not on a student’s official records.” They also reverse a previous state policy “allowing students to use bathrooms that align with their preferred gender.”
Last month, students across nearly 100 schools staged walkout protests across the state to criticize Governor Youngkin’s policies and defend transgender rights.
...It bears mentioning that those student walkouts were almost certainly partisan political actions organized by public employees. Red Tribe doesn't get to do student activism in public schools, and it certainly doesn't get to use schoolchildren as political props. This is in fact a perfect example of why the actions they're protesting are needed... but I digress.
This proposed law doesn't matter. It doesn't matter even a little bit, and not just because it hasn't passed yet. It's very clearly a violation of religious freedom so it should be flatly unconstitutional, but of course the Constitution doesn't matter either. None of the surrounding legal, procedural, or policy questions matter. None of it matters. Not even a little bit. These things aren't the engine. They aren't the steering wheel. They're the bumper stickers, and they're the exhaust. They are the effect, not the cause. If this law is struck down, another will replace it. If this law passes, the core issue will not be resolved. The Constitution should prevent this, but it won't, nor would amendments help.
The cause is the Tribes, Blue and Red, and their manifestly incompatible values. Blues/Reds do not Like Reds/Blues. Contrary to arguments presented here for years, we do not share values, moral intuitions, a workable understanding of The Good. The Culture War is not about mistakes, and people are not going to come to their senses any minute now and realize all this was just a whole heap of silly goosery. The Culture War is a conflict. We cannot all get along, because we have lost the fundamental capacity to agree on what "getting along" consists of. We can't agree on what constitutes murder, rape, child abuse, spousal abuse, what constitutes crime, what constitutes Justice. These are not the sort of disagreements a society can have, long term. Something has to give, and probably a lot of somethings.
Laws, norms, procedures, all of those are well downstream of Culture, of social reality. You need everyone more or less on the same page before you can even attempt law; trying to keep law together in the face of mutual values incoherence is... well, it's real stupid, and it's never going to work even a little bit. If you can't get people to agree on central definitions of murder and child abuse, how the Sweet Satan do you expect to run a justice system, a legal system, an election system, much less adjudicate free speech?
This law isn't being proposed because it solves a problem. It's being proposed because Blues hate Reds and want to harm them. That tribal hatred, by no means unique in its character and very much reciprocated by Reds, wants to Do Something About The Bad People. If we held the population constant and completely replaced our entire political system, someone very like this woman would be proposing some action roughly analogous to this law, because that is how tribal hatred works. The hatred itself is what matters; the specific grooves and canals it is channeled through, the details of procedure and custom, norms and institutional traditions, codified policies and so on are irrelevant. This concentrated, willfully malignant essence of humanity, cannot be constrained by ink on paper or dusty tradition. It finds a way. You are not going to prevent that by asking it politely to please not.
This event is not surprising, and as some of you are no doubt aware, none of what I've written above is even close to novel. I and others were predicting shit like this as far back as early 2016. If you couldn't, and especially if you are one of the OG Blues or Moderates who scoffed or harrumphed when we predicted it, well, is this sufficient to demonstrate the point?
A brief coda, if you'll allow me. A month or two back, we had an excellent thread about drag, kids, and the slur "groomer". A lot of the blues and moderates argued that "groomer" means someone actually trying to prep a kid for sex with themselves or a specific other person, and so applying it to teachers and other authority figures was an instance of The Worst Argument in The World, and so should be frowned on.
I disagree. "Groomer", as I understand it, is a person who's making a covert attempt to directly modify a kid's sexuality in unhealthy ways. I understand that many people here disagree with this definition, but there's something you should understand in turn: when people like me use the term "groomer", we are not saying "I really don't like this person." We're saying that we consider the people so labeled, the officials supporting them, and the section of the public providing their ideology to be a direct, serious and immediate threat to our children.
Perhaps you find that irrational, inexplicable. After all, they're not breaking the law, right?
The 'National Day of Hate' - Anatomy of a Propaganda Hoax
The Dissident-Right Telegramsphere was bemused last month to hear alarmed media reports of a "National Day of Hate" allegedly planned for February 25th. Despite the fact that nobody had heard anything from anyone about such a plan, the story seemed to grow and grow. The episode is recounted in this article, 'National Day of Hate' was ADL hoax. Within the DR sphere it was of course immediately recognized as such. It seems the ADL was the first to spread the claim, and at least one research group also pointed the finger at the ADL. On February 9th:
ADL has been monitoring plans for a day of antisemitic action set to take place nationwide on 2/25. This day may include antisemitic and white supremacist propaganda distributions and banner drops. At this time, ADL has not tracked any direct or specific threats of violence.
The ADL continued to push the story, with Greenblatt tweeting on Feb. 23:
@ADL is closely monitoring the nationwide extremist "Day of Hate" campaign planned for this Saturday. The Jewish community may be the target of vile antisemitic hate, but we shall not be intimidated. Instead, let's celebrate #SabbatOfPeaceNotHate
And with this, the ADL was able to mobilize law enforcement and national security action across the country.
We have been notified that this coming Shabbat, Saturday February 25th, a group of violent extremists are planning to come out and protest against Jewish communities across the country. NYPD Counter-terrorism Bureau has released a statement notifying the Jewish community in NYC of this group's plans. Shmira has been in direct contact with the NYPD 112th and 107th precincts and were reassured that there will be an increased police presence at Synagogues this week. The precincts will be utilizing all necessary means of man power such as, House of Worship auto, counter-terrorism units, precinct sector cars, and auxiliary units who will all be rotating posts at different key locations throughout our neighborhoods.
The allegation trended on Twitter and within the Jewish community. The Israeli ambassador to the US made a tweet that went viral:
How can it be that less than a century after the Holocaust, a Neo-Nazi group in the U.S. calls for a National Day of Hate against the Jews - and there’s no uproar? Have we learned nothing? Have we forgotten that words lead to actions? I pray for a peaceful Shabbat for everyone.
The story made the rounds among various blue checkmarks:
There’s a day of hate planned against Jews this coming Shabbat. So being an American Jew in 2023 is choosing between 1) taking my kids to pray, anxiously looking at the exits worried about their safety or 2) staying home and letting the anti-Semites define my Jewishness.
And an interesting reply from another blue checkmark to that tweet provides an interesting tidbit of information:
We are locked and loaded in my shul. There is training available specifically for shuls. There are also homeland security grants for guards.
Related to my bolded emphasis above, on February 23rd the ADL tweeted:
When neo-Nazis threaten the Jewish community with a National “Day of Hate,” we respond with resolve & solidarity. Celebrate a #ShabbatOfPeaceNotHate this weekend & let everyone know we won't be intimidated. Retweet this & sign our ADL call for action now
The call for action:
Earlier this week, the Jewish community learned of an attempt by white supremacist groups to organize coordinated antisemitic activity as a National Day of Hate this coming weekend. While ADL is not aware of any specific threats, we know that these groups are hoping for increased antisemitic flier distributions, small protests and graffiti. We know this is frightening; it is completely unacceptable that any faith should be targeted in this way.
We all deserve to feel safe in our communities. To protect the safety of our synagogues, mosques, churches, temples, and other houses of worship or religious gathering places, nonprofits are forced to spend their limited funds on security measures. A federal grant program already exists and is being utilized by nonprofit institutions across the country but Congress must increase funding to meet the rising threats of hate and extremism.
Please join ADL in urging your members of Congress to fully fund the Nonprofit Security Grant Program at $360 million
Following the money, the Nonprofit Security Grant Program appeared to begin in 2016 with a total funding of $20 million. This allocation has grown enormously year over year to a 2023 allocation of $305 million.
Last year I took note of the Biden administration promising Jewish groups more federal funding for security at the White House Menorah lighting. On February 17th, about a week before the 'National Day of Hate', the Biden Administration declared it had followed through on that promise:
In fiscal year 2022, implemented a nearly 40% increase in funding – from $180 million to $250 million – in the Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Nonprofit Security Grant Program (NSGP), which provides support for increasing the physical security of nonprofit organizations, including houses of worship and other religious affiliated entities. In his fiscal year 2023 budget proposal, President Biden called for $360 million for this key program. The omnibus spending package for fiscal year 2023 funded this program at $304 million.
In its call to action, the ADL is lobbying for the "fully funded" $360 million proposed by the Biden administration. A quick search through Google News of the "Nonprofit Security Grant Program" shows that this lobbying effort extends to over a hundred Jewish organizations:
More than 120 Jewish Federations urged House and Senate Appropriations committees to increase funding for security of faith-based communities...
“As you look to the next fiscal year, we write on behalf of the Jewish community, represented by the Jewish Federations of North America, to urge you to prioritize spending programs to secure faith and other vulnerable communities, fight antisemitism and hate crimes, care for Holocaust survivors and other vulnerable populations, and promote peace and security in the Middle East,” the Jewish leaders wrote in their letter on Thursday.
Both the Biden administration and ADL talk about places of worship and religion in a general sense as being the recipients of these funds, but I would like to see exactly how these funds are allocated. This is an enormous growth in funding- with one observer calling "nonprofits" the "big winners" of FY2023 Homeland Security Grants.
Looking at the FEMA datasets, they only record bulk allocations to state institutions who then allocate the funds to grantees. I would like to do more digging to see if I can find data on one or more states to analyze which nonprofits are receiving these grants. If anyone has experience data sleuthing grant allocations and can point me in the right direction that would be helpful.
While digging through the Google News surrounding the Nonprofit Security Grant Program when writing this post, I came across this article published yesterday in Jewish Currents, which to its credit, independently reaches the same conclusions I have here.
Ben Lorber writes a somewhat odd and revealing subtitle to his article:
In the lead-up to the recent Day of Hate, national Jewish defense organizations—along with media and law enforcement—played right into white supremacists’ strategy.
Lorber tries to say that this hoax somehow works to the benefit of "white supremacists", but how? Lorber writes that it "plays into white supremacists' strategy", but this entire affair has been the strategy of the Jewish lobby, which worked to spectacular effect. The ADL isn't playing into their strategy, it's playing its own strategy and in doing so showing that the 'white supremacists' are right, which are not the same thing.
But that's only something that actually matters if non-Jews are willing to criticize this behavior. As long as this public criticism is restricted by right to "in-house" criticism in Jewish publications, there's no check to this sort of behavior.
If I'm able to find a dataset on which non-profits are receiving these grants, I'll follow-up with additional analysis on the NSGP.
DaseindustriesLtd
late version of a small language model
1yr ago
Is it really likely that the average person of African ancestry is cognitively impaired when compared to the average white person? I can't think of how that could actually be true.
Harvard historian and medical ethicist to Vox, 2021
We've had a few discussions about futility lately. Why bring up HBD? Even granting that it's an accurate model of reality – what are consequences of that? Do any policies different from race blindness follow? If not, why not let sleeping dogs lie?
The pragmatic answer is that the opposite of HBD awareness is not the innocent race-blind utopia that millenials have retconned into their childhoods, but ¬HBD, which by virtue of impossibility to bring reality in accord with it has unbounded actionable consequences.
On another note: lately, we've also had discussions of RLHF-tuned AIs. The technique is now associated with an image of «shoggoth wearing a smiley face mask». The joke is that the essential nature of an LLM is an eldritch mass of inhuman thought patterns, which we don't see behind its friendly – and perhaps transient – public-facing outgrowth (a pity Kkulf Kkulf was forgotten). Rationalists panic about the beast's misalignment, Mottizens ponder the ambiguity, and Scott observes sagely: humans are scarcely different, yet robustly human. «…babies are born as pure predictive processors… But as their parents reward and punish them, they get twisted into some specific shape to better capture the reward and avoid the punishment. … After maintaining this mask long enough, people identify with the mask and forget that they’re anything else».
On a yet another note: @ymeskhout reports on the failure of DEI activists to redefine the word «racism» such that it would cease to apply to anti-white discrimination. They have gaslit some people into believing that the academic «systemic power (=being white) + prejudice» definition is official, and normalized it in spaces they control, but are not legally in the clear. This may be seen as consolation: the Law remains the substantial aspect of the culture, and enterprises of these Twitter radicals are simulacra, a painted mask that can flake off under real heat. But consider: a Law becomes void if enough people deny its legitimacy. We shake our heads at quaint laws that have stayed on the books; and they are typically worked around, reduced to trivia, almost fiction. In other words: the mask and the shoggoth can trade places. Like in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, fiction can consume reality; yesterday's modus tollens will become modus ponens and so on. Such is the power of changing common-sense intuitions.
Two examples that made me write this.
The Independent: MRI scans reveal impact of racism and poverty on Black children’s brains (The American Journal of Psychiatry)
[…] In this study, we investigated the relationship between racial disparities in adversity exposure and race-related differences in brain structure among participants in the ABCD Study. We hypothesized that Black American children would have experienced more adversity than White American children in the sample. We further hypothesized that greater exposure to adverse life experiences would be related to lower gray matter volume in the amygdala, the hippocampus, and several subregions of the PFC. Finally, we anticipated that Black and White children would show differences in gray matter volume of these regions and that these differences would be partially explained by racial differences in exposure to adversity.
Sure enough,
Lower brain volume was detected in children with lower household income — both Black and white. However, Black children are more likely to live in lower-income households in the US, as they are in the UK, so they were more likely to be impacted.
“These racial disparities are not random,” researchers confirmed. “Rather, they are deep-rooted structural inequalities that result from a history of disenfranchisement of racially minoritised groups (e.g., slavery, segregation) that reinforce themselves through societal norms and practices (i.e., systemic racism).”
Some psychologists have long attempted to assert the egregious and discredited theory that Black people’s brains are different because they are inferior.
However, given that race is a social construct and all human beings are 99.9 per cent identical in their genetic makeup, the study has been hailed as further proof that social inequalities are a key determinant in health inequalities, and not the other way around.
Nathaniel G. Harnett, who led the study and is director of the Neurobiology of Affective Traumatic Experiences Laboratory at McLean Hospital, said: “There’s this (…) view that Black and white people have different brains.
When you do brain scans, you’ll sometimes see differences in how the brain responds to different stimuli, or there might be differences in the size of different brain regions.
But we don’t think that’s due to skin color. We don’t think white people have just categorically different brains than Black people. We really think it’s due to the different experiences these groups have,” he said.
Now the study is fine but for the logical fallacy in its premise. They assume causation: brain volume is changed by adversity& the group with smaller brains faces greater adversity (mainly from parental dysfunction), ergo differences in brain volumes cannot have non-environmental origins (also race isn't real so it double dog can't be); voila, systemic racism, yer guilty of shrinking brains of black babes, shitlord.
Bizarrely, their mediation analysis shows modest upper bounds for (assumed) effects of adversity, adjustments don't change the result that brains of white children are summarily bigger; they do a ton of calculations to pad the piece with rigor but it does not amount to the desired pattern that'd be suggestive of specific effects of stress. I'm told the Adolescent Brain Cognitive Development Study has data on adoptees, to wit, an opportunity to test causality. They've abstained.
But sociologist's fallacy is an old hat; here comes a big one! Perhaps the most popular conservative explanation for the condition of blacks is «single mothers»; I did not realize how bad the issue is. Or is it?!
The Myth of Low-Income Black Fathers’ Absence From the Lives of Adolescents (Journal of Family Issues)
Coresidence was a robust predictor of adolescents' reports of both father-child closeness and father child interaction in the current study. Moreover, coresidence significantly predicted father involvement after controlling for race/ethnicity, child gender, education, work hours, and immigration status. These results are noteworthy in light of media portrayals of Black fathers as being uninvolved with their children (Goodwill et al., 2019). The tendency to associate race/ethnicity with fathers' noninvolvement with children obscures the real contributor to noninvolvement, and that is the residential status of fathers with their children. Even though Black fathers were more likely to be nonresident, as a group, Black fathers were perceived by their children to be no less involved than fathers in other racial/ethnic groups.
It's even worse, they filter out uninvolved fathers entirely: "Adolescents answered these questions only if they had seen the biological father in the past year." So by definition, all of the data (never mind analysis) removes the least involved fathers.
It's not easy to find plain up-to-date figures for noninvolvement of fathers by race, unlike those analyses with nonsensical «corrections», strange comparisons, highfalutin deboonkings: there's an effort to popularize the notion of «The Myth of the Missing Black Father», plugging it back into the stereotype threat and systemic racism that shrinks brains, I guess. Census Bureau, 2012:
- 57.6% of black children, 31.2% of Hispanic children, and 20.7% of white children are living absent their biological fathers.
I can only echo Lemoine:
«This is what an academic Übermensch looks like to be honest. The rest of us try to be coherent and show some concern for truth, but this guy doesn't give a shit and just forges ahead with pure narrative. Absolute chad move».
This is good science now: publishable, welcomed by press like CNN and Bloomberg, «hailed as further proof». Those are scholars; standards; incentives; a whole gimped epistemology and philosophy springing forth from the intuitive starting point that one can't think of how innate race differences could be true. Workable solutions, though, do not follow.
My takeaway is simple. I believe the Shoggoth-Mask metaphor is, like other takes on LLMs, more useful for sociology. Much of American social and biological science has already metamorphosized into the shoggoth of ¬HBD, with the smiley face of StaTiStiCS on top; the same is happening in all other institutions and in imperial satellites. This is the concrete price of the sane choice to sacrifice a boring autistic truth on the altar of peace for our time.
naraburns
nihil supernum
6mo ago
YOU KNOW WHAT NOBODY HATES EACH OTHER ABOUT YET? BIRD-WATCHING.
I wanted to post this over at /r/slatestarcodex but it's obviously CW material and surely someone should bring it to Scott's attention, as it wins him quite a large number of prophet points I suspect...
NPR reports that these American birds and dozens more will be renamed, to remove human monikers.
And the next day half the world’s newspaper headlines are “Has The Political Correctness Police Taken Over Bird-Watching?” and the other half are “Is Bird-Watching Racist?”. And then bird-watchers and non-bird-watchers and different sub-groups of bird-watchers hold vitriolic attacks on each other that feed back on each other in a vicious cycle for the next six months, and the whole thing ends in mutual death threats and another previously innocent activity turning into World War I style trench warfare.
The story is... well, pretty much exactly what you think it is, I bet.
Get ready to say goodbye to a lot of familiar bird names, like Anna's Hummingbird, Gambel's Quail, Lewis's Woodpecker, Bewick's Wren, Bullock's Oriole, and more.
That's because the American Ornithological Society has vowed to change the English names of all bird species currently named after people, along with any other bird names deemed offensive or exclusionary.
I don't really care? Except that I do care, to just this extent, as I've written before:
When stuff like this happens, one of my first reactions is to reflect on the fact that everyone gets forgotten eventually. Some of us get statues or scholarship funds or university chairs carrying our name or likeness a little farther into the future than might otherwise have occurred, but the "Laura Ingalls Wilder Award" was always destined to go away someday. Roads and schools and landmarks get renamed, statues are left to crumble.
And yet I concur with you--this sort of thing makes me uncomfortable. But it can't be because they are ending the "Laura Ingalls Wilder Award" that I had never heard of and could have predicted would eventually vanish anyway. I have wondered in the past whether similar cases bothered me because I didn't approve of the deliberate social engineering that tossing things down the memory hole reveals, but I find even that objection does not quite do it for me. I find that I'm not in principle opposed to people making the world over in their own preferred image, provided they do so within certain rational constraints. So I wondered if I should simply chalk my discomfort up to personal political bias, but this felt wrong, too--for example, I found myself bothered by the tearing down of Confederate statues even though I am not from the American South and had no other discernible reason to favor their preservation by reason of political bias.
At present the best I've managed to come up with is that I am bothered by the publicity of destruction. That is--what would have happened if the ALSC had, beginning last year, simply not mentioned the "Laura Ingalls Wilder Award" to anyone ever again? Simply conduct business as usual, and if asked by anyone about the "Laura Ingalls Wilder Award" respond only that the Award was "undergoing some conceptual reorganization in hopes of better-serving our community, but while we workshop it we'd love your participation in some of our alternative programs" or something.
Of course, they don't do this, because someone decided that they would get more attention (=dollars) with a press release on their "core values of diversity and inclusion" coupled with a prima facie sacrificial offering to signal sincerity. If you look very hard at what's happening, it's the memetic equivalent of sacrificing sick animals and weeds instead of the firstling of the flock--there's no real sacrifice taking place here--but the gods of social justice are so far pleased. This is probably because it establishes a precedent, so when they come calling for greater sacrifices--how long before the residents of Seattle demand to live in a state that isn't named for a slave owner?--the practice of signaling your allegiance by tossing things down the memory hole in a way that also alienates you from the Other Tribe has already become so ingrained that no resistance to such demands remains.
Both ideas and people fade, but it is one thing to lose your struggle against time, and something else entirely to be thrown into a volcano by someone trying to prove their loyalty to Moloch.
I am not an ornithologist. I'm not even a bird-watcher. The closest I've ever come is snapping an occasional photo of a bird that catches my attention. These changes have nothing to do with me... except, of course insofar as they represent the continued burning-down of the contributions of "my" culture to humanity's broader understanding of the world. The active removal--dare I say "erasure?"--of the past, so as not to offend the sensibilities of the present.
(But mostly, I'm once more astonished by Scott's peculiar prescience...)
WhiningCoil
1yr ago
An update to a post I made after Christmas lamenting the state of children's books, and all their on the nose, "current year" agenda pushing nonsense. Specifically an update in reply to this comment.
This is why we only have classic little golden books and some innocuous stuff from the 80s and 90s on our bookshelf. Also Roald Dahl, he's great. As others have said, there's no reason to buy modern propaganda children's books. Not only are they proselytizing, but they're mostly objectively ugly.
Roald Dahl goes PC in a world where no one is 'fat' and the Oompa-Loompas are gender neutral
The publisher, Puffin, has made hundreds of changes to the original text, removing many of Dahl’s colourful descriptions and making his characters less grotesque.
The review of Dahl’s language was undertaken to ensure that the books “can continue to be enjoyed by all today”, Puffin said.
You can read the litany of changes for yourself. I guess I missed the boat on stocking up on Roald Dahl children's books. As is feeling increasingly typical these days, there can be no escape from current year. Fuck me I guess.
Yeah, so that's neat.
It's hard to be frank on this topic without sounding conspiratorial. The reality is that there is a small but obsessive cadre of 'activists', mostly a distinct subset of Extremely Online trans women, who hate my bosses with every fiber of their being. I knew that coming into the B&R job, of course. It was priced in, and the question was not "will they hate me once they notice me?" but "when will they notice me?".
The answer seems to be approximately when the podcast decided to cover the recent Keffals/Kiwifarms kerfuffle with care and in detail rather than jumping on the "Kiwifarms must go" train (link). They don't care at all about me qua me. I'm a nobody still, some random with a tiny platform who mostly just bloviates on obscure forums. But they do care about my bosses, very much, and in the recent scuffle it seems they've finally identified me as another angle of attack.
This can mostly be attributed to everyone's favorite AgainstHateSubreddits moderator, who has a personal and longstanding feud with rdrama. She spammed Jesse's replies and her own Twitter account with six-degrees-of-Kevin-Bacon links between rdrama and Kiwifarms, using my prank as an excuse to link Jesse to Kiwifarms to try to discredit his reporting. See: Exhibit A and Exhibit B as the most relevant—per her, I carried out "fascist terrorism" in league with Kiwifarms and Libs of TikTok, working with them to terrorize trans people and push teachers out of their jobs. This is now Established Fact on a certain corner of the internet. One obsessive in particular who has a long history of spreading particularly unhinged malicious rumors about my bosses (eg baselessly accusing Jesse of assaulting trans women) has tried to amplify it further (see here), having cracked the code that I am a "right wing monster" who is "laughing at the thought of his contributions to queer people and school teachers facing armed violence", indicated in part by my dogwhistling username reference to Known Bigot Orson Scott Card.
Any amount of engagement with this set encourages them, of course. Responding to out-of-the-blue false accusations from people I've never met gets morphed into "screenshotting the posts of trans people who have them blocked to try and rile mobs up" (see here) and becomes more evidence that I am a "creep" connected to a "dangerous stalker".
Andrea James is part and parcel with this group, and has a long history of genuinely unhinged harassment in this domain. She was discussed in Alice Dreger's Galileo's Middle Finger (1, 2, 3): in 1998, for recommending Blanchard's book and commenting on her own autogynephilia; in 2003, for posting images of J. Michael Bailey's children with lewd captions parodying his book, and later in her own interactions when James referred to her kids as her "precious womb turds", among other things. My bosses have been stalked by her for a while on this front—see here.
Inasmuch as I have an official statement on the matter, it can be found on my Twitter over here. I knew this sort of thing was inevitable, and while it's definitely an irritation, it's just chatter from people who were going to hate me no matter what I did, looking to wield me to undermine reporting they'd rather my bosses not do. Quite frankly, in the circles I travel in and care to travel in, having that sort of enemy is more likely to help than it is to hurt. In candor, it felt much worse to be called a Weapon Of The Cathedral in league with Taylor Lorenz by people I'd been chatting with on good terms for years (eg here). This, in contrast, is just Business As Usual. It's frankly not even worth correcting the explicit factual errors on the page, since nobody who is likely to like or respect me in any capacity is particularly likely to trust James, Oaken, or the rest. I'll just take note and move on.
My only disappointment is that she didn't commission a caricature of my character like she did for my bosses (here).
gorge
1yr ago
Back in September a commenter here on the TheMotte posted an argument about fertility trends claiming that among rich countries fertility actually increases with feminism. I did not have time to respond at the time, but this is something that I have heard many times, so I wanted to make an effort post explaining why I don't believe the claim. Here are some examples of prestige outlets making the same claim, from a New York Times op-ed:
The culture of misogyny and gender inequality [in South Korea] may be affecting family life, in a country facing predictions of population collapse. Research shows that a low fertility rate in developed countries reflects backward attitudes over female gender roles. source
And here is the United Nations Population Fund:
Want to increase birth rates? Try gender equality. Many countries in Eastern Europe face what is often perceived as a population crisis....There is broad consensus on what needs to be part of such a policy package: Quality, affordable childcare starting from an early age. Flexible and generously paid parental leave for both parents (with incentives for men to take what they are entitled to). Flexible work arrangements, and providing equal pay for women. Programmes to encourage men and women to equally share care and household work. And affordable housing as well as financial support for low-income families. source
The original TheMotte commenter wrote:
However, what I have noticed is that rich female friendly nations do far better in terms of birth rate than rich conservative strict gender role societies. For example - France has a fertility rate around 1.8. 1.7 for the US. Germany 1.4. In the east with more strict gender norms the rich societies however have far more abysmal fertility rates - Japan 1.3, South Korea 0.8, Taiwan 1.1, Singapore 1.2.
I will address three big problems with the argument, and then I want to talk about the elephant in the room.
The first problem is that this is cherry-picking examples. We could just as easily cherry-pick other countries that show a reversed trend: Spain has a parliament that is 50% women but a fertility rate of merely 1.3. Finland ranks number one on female empowerment, sharing many of the same policies as Sweden, but has a a very low fertility rate of 1.3. In Ireland, where men only do 43% of the housework (which is low for Europe), women have a fertility rate of 1.6.
You might think we could get around the problem of cherry-picking by running regressions against a broader dataset. But turns out there are still too many researcher degrees of freedom. In playing with the data myself, and in reading about others who have played with the data, I could get anything from a massively negative impact of female empowerment on fertility, to no impact, to modestly positive. Here are some charts I made:
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Gender Inequality Index versus Fertility for all countries in the world -- massive correlation between less gender inequality and less fertility -- https://i.postimg.cc/8PngCpQM/gender-inequality-index-versus-fertility-all-countries.png
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Gender Inequality Index versus Fertility for rich countries (>$15k GDP, as rich as Poland or Uruguay) -- small correlation of less gender inequality, lower fertility. No correlation after removing the petro-states. Big range restriction problem (more on this later) -- https://i.postimg.cc/JnWLWpwF/paid-leave-versus-fertility-oecd.png
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Weeks of Paid Parental Leave versus Fertility, OECD countries (neglibile negative correlation, more paid leave, less fertility) -- https://i.postimg.cc/JnWLWpwF/paid-leave-versus-fertility-oecd.png
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Net childcare costs (after government subsidies) versus Fertility, OECD countries (no correlation) -- https://i.postimg.cc/nV4LMQ07/net-childcare-costs-versus-fertility.png
That parental leave or subsized childcare has no correlation with fertility rates should dispense with any notion that these are the magic policies that will fix fertility while reconciling child bearing with women pursuing careerist paths.
The second problem is that fertility rate itself is confounded by sub-cultures within a country. The poster children for feminist family polices with high birth rates are Sweden and France. However, their fertility stats are hopelessly confounded by the fertility of more patriarchal subcultures -- that of non-European immigrants. Unfortunately, it is fiendishly hard to find accurate statistics on how much this impacts the numbers.
France, for instance, bans collecting statistics by race. But this report showed 38% of new births in the cities were considered high-risk for sickle cell anemia -- meaning the parents are of Arab or African origin. That's a huge number.
In the United States, fertility is boosted by less feminist groups, such as recent immigrants, Amish, Mormons, and evangelical Christians. Israel's fertility is boosted by ultra-Orthodox Jews who have a fertility rate three times that of secular Israelis.
(continued in the replies due to excess word count)
@ymeskhout has written a couple of posts recently discussing the treatment of the Jan 6th defendants, a sequel of sorts to his series of posts on the evidence and court cases surrounding the Red Tribe accusations of election fraud in the 2020 election.
These post has gotten a bunch of responses raising a variety of objections to Jan 6th, arguing for violations of symmetry based on other events, questions about fairness, questions about framing, and so on. The objection that immediately springs to mind, for me, is that the posts are narrowly focusing on specific questions where the facts are on their side, in a bid to minimize surface areas to relevant counter-arguments relating to the Jan 6th riot in general. Certainly, I have encountered similar tactics by others in the past, and previous conversations with the OP have left me with the clear impression that they're a member of my outgroup.
So I think it's useful to state, as clearly as possible, that the general thesis I've just laid out is dead wrong.
Rumor-mongering is an obvious failure mode for political discussion. A lot of different people raise a lot of different arguments, present a variety of different facts, these cross-pollinate, and people walk away with an erroneous impression of facts. Then someone tries to correct the record, a whole bunch of people raise a whole bunch of new arguments, and people walk away with their erroneous impression strengthened, not weakened. This is a very easy problem to fall into, especially if you are good enough at rhetoric and arguments to self-persuade. Normal argument effects dig you in, and bias inclines you to think worse of the people arguing against you.
This effect combines poorly with another of the basic failure modes of political discussion that shows up here with some regularity: speculating and theorizing rather than simply checking facts. This allows one to spin out "evidence" ad hoc to support a position that can turn out to be entirely spurious. It is woeful to see an event commented here, and then a whole tree of a hundred comments going back and forth on some speculation, followed by a five-comment thread where someone points out an easily verifiable fact that renders the entire previous discussion and all the arguments in it completely pointless. More woeful is the realization that the entirely-fictional hundred-comment-thread did vastly more to modify peoples' internal model than the factual disproof. The third or forth time one sees this, one begins to contemplate serious drinking. Since examples are always helpful in driving a point home, here's an example of me confidently talking out my hindparts.
It is extremely important to be able to notice when you're wrong. It's important personally, and it's doubly important for a community like this one. Often, the people who are the best at pointing out that you're wrong are going to be people you disagree strongly with, and maybe don't like very much. The ability to point out error is one of the main reasons such people are so valuable to have around.
Here's what I've seen so far in the recent Jan 6th threads:
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@ymeshkhout was presented with a number of specific arguments about Jan 6th. Many of these arguments consisted of bald assertions, absent supporting evidence or even links.
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They did some googling, looked at the evidence available for the specific events named, and found that it absolutely did not match the claims being made.
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They wrote up a calm, unfailingly polite post detailing the claims, who made them, and what the actual evidence was, with copious links.
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If anyone actually conceded that their claims were false, I didn't see it. What I did see was a flurry of additional claims, some thankfully including links at least.
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They then wrote up a follow-up post taking apart a number of the additional items raised.
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the follow-up post appears to mainly be responded to by more claims, many of them highly tangential to the topic at hand.
I am no stranger to arguing with bad-faith bullshit. This is not what bad-faith bullshit looks like. This is, near as I can tell, what being wrong looks like. The proper response to that is to admit it and take your lumps like a grownup. If you can't do that, if you don't actually value seeing misconceptions corrected, you're acting like a jackass, and ymeskhout is doing this place a tremendous service to make that fact as obvious as possible, with bonus points for style.
I am fairly confident that both Jan 6th and the 2020 election were some degree of bullshit in meaningful, provable ways. Arguing it would take a fair amount of effort, effort that I have not chosen to spend, and so it behooves me to admit that it's entirely possible that I'm wrong, and not to expect other people to give my gut feelings any consideration. It's an argument I want to make, but it's an argument I cannot actually back up, and so it's not an argument I should expect others to take seriously.
To the extent that I think that the picture ymeskhout is presenting is false, the proper response is to put together a detailed argument, backed by the best supporting evidence I can dig up, on exactly how and why he's unambiguously wrong. Until then, I should accept that my point of view is just, like, an opinion man. That's my understanding of how this place works, and why it's valuable. In the meantime, the next time you see someone talking about mistreatment of Jan 6th defendants, a reasonable starting question might be "what's your evidence of this?"
Hell, that's a pretty good practice generally, isn't it?
FOSS and The XZ Problem
A critical vulnerability (CVE-2024-3094) was discovered in the XZ Utils library on March 29th, 2024. This severe flaw allows attackers to remotely execute arbitrary code on affected systems, earning it the highest possible score (10) on both the CVSS 3.1 and CVSS 4.0 scoring systems due to its immediate impact and wide scope.
The exploit would allow remote code execution as root in a wide majority of systemd-based Linux (and Mac OSX, thanks homebrew!) machines. There's some reasonable complaints that some CVE ratings are prone to inflation, but this has absolutely earned a 10/10, would not recommend. Thankfully, this was caught before the full exploit made it to many fixed release Linux distros, and most rolling-release distros either would not have updated so quickly or would not yet be vulnerable (and, presumably, will be updating to fixed versions of XZ quickly), with the exception of a handful of rarely-used Debian options. Uh, for the stuff that's been caught so far.
Summary and FAQ, for the more technically minded reader, the NIST CVE is here, background of initial discovery at here.
Ok, most of us who'd care remember Heartbleed. What's different here?
In this case, the exploit was near-certainly introduced intentionally by a co-maintainer of the library XZ Utils, by smuggling code into a binary test file, months apart from adding calls to execute that test file from live environments, and then working to hide any evidence. The combination of complexity in the attack (requiring fairly deep knowledge of a wide variety of Linux internals) and bizarreness of exploit steps (his FOSS history is sprinkled with a replacing safe functions with their unsafe precursors, or adding loose periods in cmake files) leaves nearly zero chance that this is unintentional, and the guy has since disappeared. He was boosted into co-maintainership only recently, and only after the original maintainer was pressured to pick him up by a strangely large barrage of very picky users. The author even pushed to have these updates shoved into Fedora early.
Most mainstream technical advisories aren't outright calling this a nation-state actor, but The Grugq is pretty willing to describe whoever did it as an 'intelligence agency', whether government or private, and with cause. Both the amount of effort and time put into this attack is vast, and the scope of vulnerability it produced extreme -- though this might be the 'cope' answer, since an individual or small-private-group running this level of complex attack is even more disturbing. It's paranoid to start wondering how much of the discussion aimed encouraging XZ's maintainer to take on the bad actor here as a co-maintainer, but as people are having more and more trouble finding evidence of their existence since, it might not be paranoid enough.
There's a lot of potential takeaways:
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The Many Eyes theory of software development worked. This was an incredibly subtle attack that few developers would have been able to catch, by an adversary willing to put years into developing trust and sneaking exploit in piecemeal.
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Except it was caught because a Microsoft (Postgres!) developer, without looking at the code, noticed a performance impact. Shit.
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This attack heavily exploited access through the FOSS community: the author was able to join sight-unseen through a year of purely digital communications, and the 'business decision' of co-maintainership came through a lot of pressure from randos or anons.
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Except that's something that can happen in corporate or government environments, too. There are places where every prospective employee gets a full background check and a free prostate exam, but they're the outlier even for dotmil spheres. Many employers are having trouble verifying that prospective recruits can even code, and most tech companies openly welcome recent immigrants or international workers that would be hard to investigate at best. Maybe they would have recognized that the guy with a stereotypical Indian name didn't talk like a native Indian, but I wouldn't bet on even that. And then there's just the stupid stuff that doesn't have to involve employees at all.
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The attack space is big, and probably bigger than it needs to be. The old school of thought was that you'd only 'really' need to do a serious security audit of services actually being exposed, and perhaps some specialty stuff like firewall software, but people are going to be spending months looking for weird calls in any software run in privileged modes. One of many
boneheadedcontroversial bits of systemd was the increased reliance on outside libraries compared to precursors like SysV Init. While some people do pass tar.xz around, XZ's main use in systemd seems to be related to loading replacement keys or VMs, and it's not quite clear exactly why that's something that needs to be baked into systemd directly. -
But a compression library seems just after cryptographic libraries are a reasonable thing to not roll your own, and even if this particular use for this particular library might have been avoidable, you're probably not going to be able to trim that much out, and you might not even be able to trim this.
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There's a lot of this that seems like the chickens coming home to roost for bad practices in FOSS development: random test binary blobs ending up on user systems, build systems that either fail-silently on hard-to-notice errors or spam so much random text no one looks at it, building from tarballs, so on.
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But getting rid of bad or lazy dev practices seems one of those things that's just not gonna happen.
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The attacker was able to get a lot of trust so quickly because significant part of modern digital infrastructure depended on a library no one cared about. The various requests for XZ updates and co-maintainer permissions look so bizarre because in a library that does one small thing very well, it's quite possible only attackers cared. 7Zip is everywhere in the Windows world, but even a lot of IT people don't know who makes it (Igor Patlov?).
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But there's a lot of these dependencies, and it's not clear that level of trust was necessary -- quite a lot of maintainers wouldn't have caught this sort of indirect attack, and no small part of the exploit depended on behavior introduced to libraries that were 'well'-maintained. Detecting novel attacks at all is a messy field at best, and this sort of distributed attack might not be possible to detect at the library level even in theory.
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And there's far more varied attack spaces available than just waiting for a lead dev to burn out. I'm a big fan of pointing out how much cash Google is willing to throw around for a more visible sort of ownage of Mozilla and the Raspberry Pi Foundation, but the full breadth of the FOSS world runs on a shoestring budget for how much of the world depends on it working and working well. In theory, reputation is supposed to cover the gap, and a dev with a great GitHub commit history can name their price. In practice, the previous maintainer of XZ was working on XZ for Java, and you haven't heard of Lasse Collin (and may not even recognize xz as a file extension!).
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((For culture war bonus points, I can think of a way to excise original maintainers so hard that their co-maintainers have their employment threatened.))
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There's been calls for some sort of big-business-sponsored security audits, and as annoying as the politics of that get, there's a not-unreasonable point that they should really want to do that. This particular exploit had some code to stop it from running on Google servers (maybe to slow recognition?), but there's a ton of big businesses that would have been in deep shit had it not been recognized. "If everyone's responsible, no one is", but neither the SEC nor ransomware devs care if you're responsible.
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But the punchline to the Google's funding of various FOSS (or not-quite-F-or-O, like RaspberryPi) groups is that even the best-funded groups aren't doing that hot, for even the most trivial problem. Canonical is one of the better-funded groups, and it's gotten them into a variety of places (default for WSL!) and they can't bother to maintain manual review for new Snaps despite years of hilariously bad malware.
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But it's not clear that it's reasonable or possible to actually audit the critical stuff; it's easier to write code than to seriously audit it, and we're not just a little shy on audit capabilities, but orders of magnitude too low.
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It's unlikely this is the first time something like this has happened. TheGrugq is professionally paranoid and notes that this looks like bad luck, and that strikes me more as cautious than pessimistic.
It is... interesting... to see all this discussion about "progressive male role models" given that the progressive memespace has long been, and mostly still is, dominated by gender eliminativists. The elevation of fringe-of-a-fringe transsexual issues to the "cause du jour" has of course introduced irreconcilable metaphysics into the discourse, but coalition building has ever been thus. The philosophical work underpinning extant views on gender goes back over a century, to Nikolay Chernyshevsky's declaration that
people will be happy when there will be neither women nor men
and philosophical feminism has been broadly gender-eliminativist pretty much ever since.
All of that to say: progressives can't do "male role models" because progressives are fundamentally opposed to the existence of men. Sure, sure--ask your local progressive, they might very well deny it. But this is the standard motte and bailey that exists between thought leaders and political movements everywhere, the disconnect between political theory and political practice. You can't read feminism without stumbling over gender eliminativism, and progressivism is avowedly feminist. "Eliminate gender" is right up there with "abolish the family" on a list of things progressives explicitly and actually want to accomplish, even if these are things they're willing to compromise on for the moment, for the movement.
And you can't really believe that gender needs to be abolished, while simultaneously believing that anyone needs male role models. At best you might say something like, "well, we have to meet the little troglodytes where they are, so we need some... mannish... role models--but not too mannish! Nothing, you know, toxic, nothing overtly heteronormative..." and you've already lost the plot.
This is just another clear case of progressive dreams running headlong into the unyielding embrace of biological reality. People are incredibly plastic! And yet we are not, apparently, infinitely plastic. "Cultural construction" can do a lot, but it cannot lightly obliterate thousands of years of natural selection.
Talk of "misogyny" simply misses the point, and the problem. The only really committed misogynists I've ever met have been women. The men I know who seem to hate women, very obviously genuinely love women--but are angry that they have been denied access to women, by whatever means and for whatever reason. Sometimes it's literally just their own unrealistic expectations. Sometimes they have been badly mistreated by women. Sometimes they are bewildered by the refusal of women in their lives to behave as women. You cannot use "role models" to train people away from this kind of behavior; heterosexual men denied access to women will never just accept that fact. At best, maybe you build sexbots sufficiently indistinguishable from tradwives or something, allowing biological women to pursue whatever bland "non-binary" life they imagine lies at the end of the eliminativist project, but until those bots can do particularly biological things like have babies, there will still be men who dedicate their lives to finding a woman--and, sometimes, going off the rails when faced with sufficiently brutal failure.
Or so it seems to me. I think the progressive response is probably retrenchment on the idea that, surely, anyone can be taught to be anything, given sufficiently quality teaching methods. ("We just need more government!") But their real goal isn't to make better men, it's to make a world where there are no men, in the sense that the social gender binary has been eradicated. Recruiting masculine role models to achieve that end is flatly contradictory.
Some updates from New Mexico since two weeks ago.
Firstly, the court ruled on requests for a temporary restraining order, most pertinently that:
... Defendants New Mexico Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham, New Mexico Department Secretary Patrick M. Allen, New Mexico Department of Public Safety Jason R. Bowie, Chief of the New Mexico State Police and any other New Mexico officials (“Defendants”) are ENJOINED from applying, enforcing, or attempting to enforce, either criminally or civilly, Section (1) of the New Mexico Department of Health’s “Public Health Emergency Order Imposing Temporary Firearm Restrictions, Drug Monitoring and Other Public Safety Measures” (“PHO”) published on September 8, 2023, which reads:
(1) No person, other than a law enforcement officer or licensed security officer, shall possess a firearm, as defined in NMSA 1978, Section 30-7-4.1, either openly or concealed [within complex metric that means Bernallio County]...
In addition, Defendants are ENJOINED from applying, enforcing, or attempting to enforce, either criminally or civilly, Section (4) of the New Mexico Department of Health’s “Public Health Emergency Order Imposing Temporary Firearm Restrictions, Drug Monitoring and Other Public Safety Measures” to the extent it imposes additional restrictions on the carrying or possession of firearms that were not already in place prior to its issuance.
The next hearing, for a preliminary injunction, was originally scheduled for October 3rd, three days before the initial state of emergency was scheduled to end, though I'd expect that gets delayed. How did the governor respond?
It's not terribly clear how this will work, either as matter of enforcement or of law. I'd say that she's trying to maneuver for mootness and standing challenges to the lawsuit, but this is still unconstitutional under Bruen and the state constitution, the loose definition raises serious due process concerns, and it's not even very likely that the state's public emergency law permits it even outside of the right to bear arms problems. This revision to the emergency order can't or at least shouldn't avoid the TRO, and were it a right-wing effort it'd likely just get the judge mad; as it is, the Biden appointee sounded just disappointed during the initial hearing.
Nor, on the other side, have I seen any reports of the video-driven Grisham enforcement had claimed to be bringing during initial protests. On the other hand, even while enjoined anyone who wants to carry needs to evaluate whether they're willing to become a poster child for today's constitutional challenge.
What sort of fallout is Governor Grisham looking at? KOAT7 has a wonderful quote from one of the state politicians:
"People need to realize this is the first time in New Mexico history that a governor could be impeached," State Rep. John Block said.
That is somewhat undermined by reality: No, they don't, because no, she can't.
There's only been one successful legislature-initiated special session in New Mexico history, and its context (responding to a budget's veto) made it far easier to coordinate on top of the far simpler political calculus (the final budget vote passed 90%+ in both houses). The paper gives a single federal Democrat saying he'd be willing to vote yes to condemn Grisham, should it reach the floor of Congress, but the same man voted against considering the resolution, which failed without a single Dem yes, which isn't quite the same as a vote against the resolution (because it was mixed with two other process matters) but makes for awkward bedmates. The Santa Fe New Mexican reports that the state's congressional Democratic party's official position is against a special session or impeachment.
It ain't happening, bruh.
There's been a bit of embarrassment from state politicians and police pushing back -- the state AG, another Dem, did not defend the executive order -- which, fair, kudos. Not the most significant kudos, but worth mentioning.
What about that shooting that motivated this whole thing? NBC reports:
A third arrest was made Friday in connection with a shooting outside an Albuquerque baseball stadium that killed an 11-year-old boy and prompted the New Mexico governor to issue a controversial gun ban. Albuquerque police took Daniel Gomez, 26, into custody a day after two other men were identified as suspects. Police didn’t immediately release further details about Gomez’s arrest.
Romero was already wanted for failing to appear in court in connection with alleged drug dealing, Medina said. Garley happened to be in custody when he was arrested in connection with the killing. He had been stopped by state police on Sept. 13 while returning from Arizona and authorities found a gun and about 100,000 fentanyl tablets in the car, state Police Chief W. Troy Weisler said at the news conference.
Police alleged that the men, both reputed gang members, pulled up in a car and attacked the pickup truck that was leaving the minor league game at Isotopes Stadium.
I haven't been able to find any records showing their CCW permits being pulled. Or that they had CCW permits. For some reason.
Apropos of nothing, a couple other interesting notes in firearms law :
On one hand, great work if you can get it. On the other hand, Paul Clement and Erin Murphy, the men who lead Bruen, no longer can, and it's just over half of their old law firm's typical billing rate. The reasoning, such as it is:
Plaintiffs failed to show that this was “a case requiring special expertise [and] that no in-district counsel possessed such expertise,” or that local counsel “were unwilling or unable to take the case,”.. .Plaintiffs’ arguments in support of out-of-district rates are limited to pointing to Plaintiffs’ success at the Supreme Court and the conclusory statements that “few in-district attorneys regularly practice Second Amendment litigation and even fewer practice this constitutional litigation on behalf of plaintiffs against government entities; . . . even fewer in-district attorneys have briefed or argued Second Amendment cases before the Second Circuit and the Supreme Court, like the attorneys Plaintiff selected; and . . . no in-district attorneys have the experience necessary for Plaintiffs’ challenge.”
I expect Clement and Murphy won't exactly cry all the way to the bank, to whatever extent their biglaw contracts covered this sort of case, but neither will it be a big war chest for their Second-Amendment-focused law firm, to whatever extent NYSPRA wasn't forking over those fees well before this point and is down some pretty pennies. Which matters quite a bit given NYSRPA was better titled NYSRPA II, and NYSRPA I was filed in 20_13_. Nor will it serve a particularly strong disincentive to avoid losing future court cases, or, for a matter where New York state might actually be persuadable, pad future court battles with beggaring levels of necessary paperwork to beggar their challengers.
At least they won, right? Well... Back in response to the NYSPRA II decision at the old place, a couple posters had different perspectives (with some format edits for brevity) :
Yes, the jursdictions which want to ban guns will simply claim historical justification, and the lower courts all the way up to the courts of appeals will pretend to believe them ("a bee is a fish"), and nothing will change. I expect New York's list of "sensitive locations" to include : Banks including ATM lobbies, Subways and other public transportation, taxis and other licensed transportation, All public buildings, All premises licensed to serve alcohol, Maybe all public parks.
Many, and it would require a whole-of-government sort of rebellion to engage in that level of open defiance. Even if Governor Hochul attempted to enforce the law, state judges would not follow such an instruction, especially as against an explicit binding precedent. I can go through the mechanisms if you like, but the idea that NY would openly defy this ruling is an absolute pipe dream for a few radical accelerationists on either side, and will not happen.
And neither is wrong, and indeed excepting a few quibbles Huadpe's later post is a good overview of procedural protections. No one planted their feet at the door of a school house, so it's not true Massive Resistance, it's just sparking legal warfare. On the other hand, if Nybbler had a time machine or a crystal ball, his description of the Bruen response bill and its reception in the judiciary would have been broader, not more narrow. And on those broader points, the state has been playing with mootness and standing to avoid the obvious revelation that it still does exactly what Bruen says the state may not.
And that's just the explicit stuff. One thing neither Nybbler's list nor I expected:
The NYPD approved fewer new licenses to people requesting permits to carry or keep firearms in their homes or businesses in 2022 than the year prior, data obtained by THE CITY shows — despite the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court ruling that found a key provision of the state’s long-standing gun control law violated the Second Amendment right to bear arms.
In 2021, the NYPD — which vets firearm permits — received 4,663 applications and approved 2,591 of them, about 56%, all under the stricter “proper cause” standard the Supreme Court struck down last year. That standard required gun owners in New York to show “proper cause” in order to receive a permit to carry a weapon, but the court said licenses should be granted by default unless there was a specific reason to deny an applicant.
In 2022, the NYPD saw an increased number of new applications — 7,260 — but approved just 1,550, or 21%, even though applications filed in the second half of that year no longer had to meet the “proper cause” standard where applicants had to make an affirmative case for why they needed a license.
It's far from alone, here. Hawaii's response bill has repeated many of the same steps and components, California was just weird for waiting til this year before informing people that their right to carry a firearm is limited to sidewalks. Dick Heller from the 2008 Heller v. DC case is still working on being allowed to own the semiautomatic pistol and magazine he started that whole matter on. Defense Distributed is still fighting its mess of a case.
When I've made motions around this before, people have rejoined that lawsuits are a process: winning a case, no matter how big, does not mean winning everything forever and hearing the lamentations of your opponent's women. There have indeed been where state defiance has lead to significant costs. I don't mean to suggest that the court's never work.
But at the same time, it's hard to even find a pretense that this faces the same level of legal opprobrium or cynicism that favored rights get. Nor is it limited to guns. There's been a lot of Recognition that the aftermath of SFFA v. Harvard would result in a tremendous change in legal discrimination as teams of lawyers would be going through every admissions process in the country, and that's not wrong! But they've done so to hilariously transparent efforts. And there are lesser and lesser-known variants on a pretty wide variety of topics. There's no conservative equivalent that leads a country-wide and overnight shakeup, or even a state-level one, even in fairly egregious matters.
There's an argument that this shows what Really Matters is The Institutions, and while that might feel a little be retroactively defined by whatever conservatives aren't doing or by what they'd face massive discrimination should they wear their hearts on their sleeves -- can I point to Clement and Murphy again, and that even if you had their skills you'd be a fool to think you could follow in their paths -- it's not exactly wrong.
But then we're back to denouement of the post two weeks ago, but more so, and much broader.
I'll just draw a brief comparison to my "Skin in the Game" rant from a couple days ago.
We have here a massive contrast to the problem I pointed out with most elite institutions.
In this case, the particular man responsible for the failures put his own life on the line as part of the process.
So, regardless of what else you think of the guy, he didn't slough the consequences of his decisions off on someone else. If they got stuck and had to suffer for days of slowly dwindling oxygen supply, he was down there suffering with them (unless they killed him or he killed himself first).
Compare that to this little bit from the aforementioned rant:
The overarching issue is that no matter how much damage an elite causes through their decisions, no matter how foreseeable that damage was, no matter how incompetent and unsuited for their position they are, the system as it currently operates does not allow them to actually suffer in any way that matters. There's no 'feedback loop' or filter that catches bad elites early on and keeps them from advancing to positions of greater power or enacts harsh consequences when needed to dissuade others from misbehavior.
In this case, the CEO willingly put himself into a position where his own survival and comfort would be compromised if the comfort or survival of his customers, riding in his vehicle, depending on his decisions, was compromised. His incompetence, to the extent it impacted the outcome, would impact him as well.
The feedback loop and consequences in this case were pretty much instantaneous. We don't even have to go through a lengthy investigation and trial, nor wait for a vengeful family member to attack him. If the submersible imploded, he died. If they survived for days in agony, he suffered... then died.
And now he has filtered himself out of the system, so whatever bad decisions and processes he may have been following are shown to be defective, and the person pushing those decisions and processes has no more influence.
And, in theory, this should make future incidents of this particular type substantially less likely, so the system as a whole is stronger for his absence, although we can certainly mourn for the people he took with him.
Quantumfreakonomics
11mo ago
Reddit Blackout Update: The Admins Strike Back.
Entering day 5 of the "48-hour" blackout in protest of the proposed API changes, many subreddits have chosen to stay private indefinitely until their demands are met. Over the last few days the admins have not-so-subtly telegraphed both on Reddit and in the media their intention to end the blackout and remove uncooperative moderators. But how? I have mentioned before Reddit's feudalistic structure which requires unpaid mods to do the dirty work of removing spam and enforcing content rules. If Reddit were to simply force open subs against the wishes of the mod team, the mods could simply revolt and refuse to work.
Well, Spez seems to have found a solution:
How to request an abandoned community or a mod list reorder.
We’ve received hundreds of inquiries regarding what to do if your mod team disagrees on how to reopen your communities. I am sure many of you are aware that mod teams of subreddits that have stayed private are receiving modmails from this account. Our goal with these messages is to restore community stability by establishing moderator consensus on how to move forward. In many cases, we've already helped teams reopen with no action beyond a conversation. In some instances, this might result in a reordering of the moderator list. In rare instances, this will result in mod removals. What this means is:
- If mods disagree about how to moderate their community, we will reorder the moderator list to grant top slots to mods that want to keep their communities active and engaged. For example, if a top mod wants to stop moderating, but keep the community private indefinitely, they will be bumped down the list so a more active moderator can step in. (rule 4)
- If a mod or mods are engaging in flagrantly disruptive behavior that compromises the stability of their community, they will be removed. For example, if an inactive top moderator comes back and decides to vandalize the community, they will be removed. (rule 1 & 2)
Both actions are against our Moderator Code Of Conduct.
How to request moderation privileges for an abandoned community or a top mod removal:
We’re experiencing a high volume of requests via our standard Reddit Request and Top Mod Removal Process. To expedite the process, if your mod team has an inactive top mod (or mods) and you would like to request to have that mod moved down the list, please reach out here.
Please include the usernames of inactive mods you wish to have reordered on the mod list, and be sure to inform your fellow mods of this request. When we say “inactive,” we do not mean overall activity on reddit – we mean activity within your subreddit specifically. Once we receive this message, we will reach out to the entire team to ensure we understand your needs and then work with you to rebuild community stability.
We understand this is a turbulent time and want to do our best to support you and your community’s needs.
Feudal problems require feudal solutions. In this case, the king (Spez), is checking the power of the upper nobility (power mods) by playing them off the lower nobility and peasants (small time mods and users). This ensures a smooth transition of power, as the lower mods who will be actioning these requests have moderation experience, familiarity with the communities they will be moderating, and they will be selected specifically for their collaboration with Reddit against other unaligned forces.
In reality, this process makes itself redundant by design. The power mods behind the blackout know they've been outplayed and outgunned. Subreddits that were committed to indefinite blackout as recently as this morning are reopening, much to the embarrassment of the mod team at the hands of the community. Reddit moderators now answer directly to Spez, and they know it.
Walterodim
Only equals speak the truth, that’s my thought on’t
1yr ago
Secondly, a question for the community: What gets you fiercely activated, beyond what you can rationally justify?
The student loan subject, but in the opposite direction. I find it absolutely infuriating, I think people that want me to pay their willingly incurred debts are greedy and untrustworthy. I wrote more about why I think it's [so wrong here] (https://old.reddit.com/r/TheMotte/comments/kcsx2u/culture_war_roundup_for_the_week_of_december_14/gg9ijd4/):
On student debt forgiveness, I'm seeing the emergence of a new framing that seems almost completely nonsensical to me. In a recent Voxsplainer, this quote is included from a policy person:
“What’s attractive about student debt cancellation in this moment is that in addition to righting a policy wrong — which is the decision to make the cost of college an individual burden when I would say it’s a public good — is that it can help stimulate the economy at a moment when we need economic stimulus. And it has significant racial equity implications as well,” said Suzanne Kahn, director of education, jobs, and power at the Roosevelt Institute and an advocate for complete federal student debt cancellation. It’s also something Biden could try to do independently of Congress, which is attractive since stimulus talks have stalled out.
I want to emphasize the use of "public good" there - this doesn't mean something that's good for the public, this is a specific economic term used deliberately. The meaning is:
In economics, a public good (also referred to as a social good or collective good) is a good that is both non-excludable and non-rivalrous.
...
Non-rivalrous: accessible by all whilst one's usage of the product does not affect the availability for subsequent use.[8]
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Non-excludability: that is, it is impossible to exclude any individuals from consuming the good.
This is not at all what university educations look like. Not only are degrees both rivalrous and excludable, they're also positional goods that convey signaling benefit to their recipients. To make them non-rivalrous and non-excludable would substantially remove their value to the individuals receiving them. We can imagine a world that looks like that, where Harvard offers all of its classes online to anyone that would like to take them and anyone that signs up and passes receives that Harvard degree, but that looks nothing like the world we actually live in.
From my perspective, student loan forgiveness would be one of the worst policies in American history. It would:
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Reward irresponsible people that had no plan to pay debts freely entered into.
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Reward universities that conferred expensive degrees that don't have an actual return on the investment.
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Reify moral hazard and perverse incentives related to the above.
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Continue to inflate college costs due to the expectation that no one actually has to pay for anything.
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Further the class/social war by explicitly choosing to extract from non-university labor to reward the formally educated.
Almost all of the upsides seem to me to be incredibly short term and ignore normal human reactions. To me, the justifications all look like sophistry in service of smash-and-grab politics.
The Loudon County Special Grand Jury final report has been released. [previous discussion here]
For a summary of the background: Loudoun County School District had a possibly-gender-something student sexually assault a much-younger female student who the assailant had a previous relationship with at Stone Bridge High School (SBHS) on May 28th, 2021. While eventually arrested, state law limits pre-trial detention to 21-days for this class of juvenile, and the assailant was transfered to Broad Run High School (BRHS) for the next school year. The father of this first victim was expelled from the school on the day of the assault, and later arrested by the Loudoun County Sheriff's Office (LCSO) during a school board (LCSB) meeting where he confronted or was confronted by someone (not a part of the school board?). On October 6th, the assailant further abducted and sexually assaulted another female student at BRHS.
Get used to the acronyms; the report uses them everywhere.
The report is... a read. With apologies for transcription errors:
Later that evening, a school board member asked the superintendent "do we have assaults in our bathrooms or in our locker rooms, regularly? I would hope not but I'd like clarification." The superintendent responded, "to my knowledge we don't have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms." The SBHS principle, who attended the Teams meeting with the superintendent the afternoon the SBHS sexual assault took place, testified the superintendent's statement "is not true." Another witness testified the superintendent's statement was a "bald-faced lie." We agree.
There's two separate failures, here, that I think are worth discussion and highlighting. One is the more overt culture war, and the grand jury report does make very clear that the culture war drove a lot of bad practice. It's a little hard to tell since the report uses roles rather than names for everything, but it seems like even the last fig leaf Superintendent Zeigler was using about the controversial school board meeting, that he assumed the questions were about policy 8040-related sexual assaults rather than sexual assaults in general, was not actually true either, as an half-hour before the email previously made available, it turns out that:
At 3:30PM the chief operating officer emailed the superintendent, the now-deputy superintendent, chief of staff, directory of communications, and assistant superintendent, [stating in part]:
The incident at SBHS is related to policy 8040.
With extreme charity, perhaps this refers to the father’s near arrest, and not the rape itself, but that doesn’t absolve much.
At the same time, there's another disturbing component that I think a lot of 'mainstream' conservative critiques are likely to overlook:
The special education teaching assistant later said she saw two pairs of feet under the stall, but she did nothing about it. She testified this was not an uncommon occurrence, because "somebody could have their period. They might need a tampon. Or somebody had a boyfriend they had a fight with." The assailant later acknowledge that "They usually don't do anything" regarding two pairs of feet in a stall. After the teaching assistant left, the assailant again forced penetration against the female student...
That is, a teaching assistant -- in Virginia, a mandatory reporter -- walked past a bathroom stall where a violent rape was in-progress and, once the teaching assistant left, continued. Further, that this was not an unusual mistake, but enough of a practice that it was recognized by the offender. It's quite possible that Superintendent Ziegler was making a bald-faced lie not in the sense that this particular sexual assault occurred in a bathroom, but that there is little effort or interest in preventing dubiously consensual sexual behavior in bathrooms between students at all.
And this continued more broadly. On the day of the assault, the report details how the school was more intent on expelling an angry father and seeking a no-trespass order against him (e-mail at 3:09), even suggesting that the father "should have been arrested", than tracking down the at-large rapist (who was only grabbed at the end of the school day). Even once arrested, the local police showed little interest in bringing the case.
And even once that was done, there was a complex game of blame- and paperwork-passing that seemed optimized to lose track of things, and not just for this specific case.
However, juvenile intake did not call the superintendent's office, email the superintendent's office, or send a copy of the notification through the mail. Instead, the process in place at the time was to send it via inter-office envelope that was picked up at the courthouse. Further, the envelope was addressed to "David Spage," who is an LCPS employee but has not worked in the superintendent's office since 2014...
During the calendar year 2021, there were 39 school notifications sent [in this method], but it is unknown how many of those the superintendent's office ever saw.
((SBHS seemed to think the student had transferred to SBHS from another high school, THS, over similar allegations. The grand jury report says that this probably is confused and didn't happen? Which is another level of wtf, maybe.))
This continued even as other warning signs kept scaling up.
In the ensuing weeks after the assailant was released from custody, the court services unit learned information from the assailant's family that cause them to "keep a tight eye on this kid."
This included, separately, the assailant's grandmother and mother both requesting additional assistance from schools and the probation officer, with the grandmother calling the assailant a "sociopath."
In early September, the assailant had separate incidents at the new school, first following female students around school long enough to result in an art class shuffling the assailant's seating around, and then a more serious incident in an English classroom where the assailant tried to take a female student's Chromebook, and asked the female student about online nudes (and another boy if the boy's grandmother had online nudes?). This was escalated, yet:
The most senior individuals in LCPS knew about this incident, and knew is was the same person who had committed the May 28, 2021 sexual assault. Multiple people in the LCSO were aware of this incident around the time it occurred and kenw it was the same person who had committed the May 28, 2021 sexual assault. The deputy commonwealth's attorney prosecuting the May 28, 2021 case knew of the incident, and the probation officer, who had been communicating with the student and his family nearly daily for over a month, knew of the incident.
Not a single person with knowledge of the student's history or of this current action stepped in to do anything. Instead, discipline was left to the BRHS principal, who did nothing more than issue him a verbal reprimand.
On October 6th, this escalated to a second sexual assault, this time with the assailant abducting a female student without a fig leaf of a pre-existing relationship.
In "late October", the school commissioned an independent review of the incidents at hand. However:
Many board members were surprised to learn the report was subject to the attorney-client privilege.... Several board members testified they were given only half an hour to read the independent review and ask questions about it. Despite having asked for the review in the first place, they were handed out numbered copies of it and required to return it upon leaving the room. On January 14, 2022, LCSB [County School Board] issued a public statement stating the report would not be released, listing the attorney-client privilege as the third, and least-important, reason for keeping it private. The statement [link] also noted several changes and updates to LCPS [County Public Schools] policies and procedures.
It's hard to summarize exactly how much of a shitshow this was, but :
The director of school administration disagreed with this assessment [that they could not proceed until police completed their investigation] and had conversations with the chief of staff about it in July and August 2021. The director, even those his office was not supposed to be doing Title IX, also created a Google document of possible Title IX violations reported from schools because he was "worried at the time that we were not reporting some things that could become Title IX."...
On September 17th, 2021, the director of school administration testified he emailed the superintendent, chief of staff, deputy superintendent, and chief of schools, about the situation. He testified the email laid out his extensive training, experts he had met with, and the fact the SBHS assault should have "immediately" and "automatically" triggered an investigation. It is unknown how the superintendent or these officials responded - LCPS refused to provide us this email -- but it was not until a month later, and after the BRHS sexual assault, that a Title IX investigation into the SBHS sexual assault was opend. The individual who ultimately conducted that investigation testified it was the first Title IX investigation she had ever done.
gattsuru
4mo ago
The Colorado Supreme Court holds:
A majority of the court holds that President Trump is disqualified from holding the office of President under Section Three of the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution. Because he is disqualified, it would be a wrongful act under the Election Code for the Colorado Secretary of State to list him as a candidate on the presidential primary ballot. The court stays its ruling until January 4, 2024, subject to any further appellate proceedings.
[recent related discussion, slightly older]
The Colorado Presidential Primary is scheduled for March 5th, for both parties. As the decision notes, January 4, 2024 is "the day before the Secretary’s deadline to certify the content of the presidential primary ballot)"; while the matter is open to further stay should federal courts intervene, such an intervention would itself determine at least the state presidential primary.
How are the procedural protections? From the dissent:
As President Trump, argues and the Electors do not contest, section 1-1-113’s procedures do not provide common tools for complex fact-finding: preliminary evidentiary or pre-trial motions hearings, subpoena powers, basic discovery, depositions, and time for disclosure of witnesses and exhibits. This same concern was raised in Frazier; the then-Secretary argued that “it is impossible to fully litigate a complex constitutional issue within days or weeks, as is typical of a section 1-1-113 proceeding.”...
Despite clear requirements, the district court did not follow section 1-4-1204’s statutory timeline for section 1-1-113 claims. The proceeding below involved two delays that, respectively, violated (1) the requirement that the merits hearing be held within five days of the challenge being lodged, and (2) the requirement that the district court issue its order within forty-eight hours of the merits hearing.
And the other dissent:
Thus, based on its interpretation of Section Three, our court sanctions these makeshift proceedings employed by the district court below—which lacked basic discovery, the ability to subpoena documents and compel witnesses, workable timeframes to adequately investigate and develop defenses, and the opportunity for a fair trial—to adjudicate a federal constitutional claim (a complicated one at that) masquerading as a run-of-the-mill state Election Code claim...
and
Even with the unauthorized statutory alterations made by the district court, the aggressive deadlines and procedures used nevertheless stripped the proceedings of many basic protections that normally accompany a civil trial, never mind a criminal trial. There was no basic discovery, no ability to subpoena documents and compel witnesses, no workable timeframes to adequately investigate and develop defenses, and no final resolution of many legal issues affecting the court’s power to decide the Electors’ claim before the hearing on the merits.
There was no fair trial either: President Trump was not offered the opportunity to request a jury of his peers; experts opined about some of the facts surrounding the January 6 incident and theorized about the law, including as it relates to the interpretation and application of the Fourteenth Amendment generally and Section Three specifically; and the court received and considered a partial congressional report, the admissibility of which is not beyond reproach.
Did the Colorado Supreme Court provide a more serious and deep analysis of the First Amendment jurisprudence, at least?
The district court also credited the testimony of Professor Peter Simi, a professor of sociology at Chapman University, whom it had “qualified . . . as an expert in political extremism, including how extremists communicate, and how the events leading up to and including the January 6 attack relate to longstanding patterns of behavior and communication by political extremists.”
He testified, according to the court’s summary, that (1) “violent far-right extremists understood that [President] Trump’s calls to ‘fight,’ which most politicians would mean only symbolically, were, when spoken by [President] Trump, literal calls to violence by these groups, while [President] Trump’s statements negating that sentiment were insincere and existed to obfuscate and create plausible deniability,”
There are interpretations here other than that of the Russell Conjugation: that stochastic terrorism is limited to this tiny portion of space, or perhaps that shucks there just hasn't ever been some opportunity to worry about it ever before and they're tots going to consistently apply this across the political spectrum in the future. They are not particularly persuasive to me, from this expert.
Perhaps more damning, this is what the majority found a useful one to highlight : a sociology professor who has been playing this tune since 2017.
If you put a gun to my head, I'd bet that this is overturned, or stayed until moot. But that's not a metaphor I pick from dissimilarity.
gattsuru
5mo ago
I've been skeptical for a while, but to expand the reasoning:
More specifically: I, a gay, centrist Biden voter, am one of the most conservative students at my law school. The Federalist Society here is anemic and widely derided, while there's a dizzying array of progressive organizations. The professors and administrators are, if anything, even more progressive. My school is in no sense an outlier in this regard, nor is this specific to law. The same patterns are overwhelmingly visible in every group of educated, young professionals.
At the trivial level, it's worth spelling out why that is. Conservatives are a minority among the sort of identification you're talking about. But even when 'yuppie' leaned conservative, this dizzing advantage for progressive organizations still existed (it dates back to at least the Eisenhower era!), and the lean of organizations and visible political speakers today is far greater than that of their underlying demographics.
Conservatives and conservative organizations are not just uncommon but destroyed in a wide variety of professional fields, and that's a result of enemy action. Maybe that's well-intended, sometimes, but more often the good intentions or serious objections are a pretext. More often, it's not even that. Simple discrimination is common enough that it doesn't even have to pretend to hide. Demands to fire anyone to the right of the last Democratic President are common, regularly backed up by violent protest. And that persists outside of academia: state bar selections of continuing education credits have gotten hilarious recently, and one of the single most effective members of the SCOTUS bar got booted from his practice, with the threat leveled during and about an appeal. I can go into further detail if @Amadan wants to do the "you are not oppressed" deal, but it's a long list spanning decades, and I don't think you need me drop thirty examples. You have your recent tweet on Sanderson; you don't need me to spell out how suicidal trying to be a mainstream conservative culturati gets.
That doesn't necessarily make you wrong, but it does change any potential solution. A conservative -- or even anything people want to call conservative, with all that implies -- working within the system is inviting a cheesegrater to their tender bits, hopefully figuratively. Any conservative organization trying to work within the system at minimum is subject to being shut down at a moment's notice, if not subject to being hollowed out and worn like a skin suit; any effective capability itself becoming justification for such an attack.
What does change the conclusion is that Doom bit. There is not some deep physical law that educated young professionals are the source of administrative or executive power in this world. They have been favored for the last seventy years because (outside of academic-enforced Curleyism) they were competent, not just in systems that they created, but in their ability to manage and adapt to the world.
The average college graduate today struggles to use a screwdriver, and increasing numbers struggle to write or comprehend an essay; a far broader group have actively rejected even the ideals of meaningful understanding of reality. Teacher's unions have begged and striked to require increasing levels of education that you and I know does absolutely shit for their actual capability, and they're unusual for anyone studying it, rather than it being a problem. If you throw the mandate of heaven in the trash, it ends up in the trash.
That's not necessarily a good thing! Obviously there's the big grifter problem, where once you realize that the TV-show grifter and the PhD are equally unknowledgable about 1800s history, you have the problem of distinguishing what randos do have anything. There's a lot of infrastructure and cash that's hard to replicate outside of academic or industrial settings, and the resulting processes not getting done because those settings are so hostile to you they'd rather burn cash and credibility, and just no one trying, doesn't change much.
More broadly, there are still places that have keep some undercurrent of adherence to actual skill or knowledge that's hard to develop elsewhere, with some interest in actual capability, whether or not they've been skinsuited by politics. There's a far broader scope where the things they teach aren't deep knowledge or skills, but they're the teacher's passwords necessary to get anywhere today. FCFromSSC-style "iterated harm-seeking" is going to be very interesting in the !!bad!! sort of ways, when applied here.
But the resulting answer is going to look very different than Kulak, or than Theilites, for better and for worse.
gattsuru
1yr ago
"Oi, Bruv, Can I See Your Porn Loisence"
I've made this joke a lot in relation to the serially-delayed and maybe abandoned UK age verification mandate, so it's probably worth talking about Louisiana doing it for real:
Act 440 took effect on Jan. 1 to create a cause of civil action for Louisiana parents whose children access pornographic websites that do not utilize an age verification process. The legislation, sponsored by Rep. Laurie Schlegel, R-Jefferson, passed both chambers of the Republican-controlled Legislature in June with little debate and only a single nay vote — from Rep. Mandie Landry, D-New Orleans...
Last week, Schlegel took to Twitter to defend the law, which has faced criticism for restricting personal freedoms, as well as questions about legality and enforcement.
"This law had bipartisan support and passed almost unanimously in both the House & Senate with close to 50 co-authors, including Democrats and Republicans. It was not a Republican win but a win for children in Louisiana. This bill is about protecting children not limiting adults," she posted. "And thankfully, the technology today allows us to not only protect children from the dangers of online pornography but also protect the privacy of those adults who want to view this material."
Text of law here: it requires porn sites -- or at least most sites with more than 33% of their content matching the law's definition of 'harmful to minors', based around a modified Miller obscenity test -- to use 'reasonable age verification methods', or be liable for unspecified damages and court costs.
In its defense, the law does prohibit age verification companies from retaining "identifying information" (with again unspecified civil damages) after allowing access. For a variety of technical reasons such enforcement would be incredibly impractical, though: it's not clear how a person would find out, would find out who actually did it, and then show damages, without getting any complaint dismissed to early for meaningful discovery, or even with enough certainty to justify starting a lawsuit.
There's a pretty clear and wide potential for harm. Yes, yes, getting your porn tastes revealed to the general world isn't as embarrassing as it might once have been, even as the potential for Implications remains. And while I might trust the average incredibly-sketchy-porn-site or age verification company to secure my personal data that they're totally not supposed to be storing better than, say, Home Depot or EquiFax, that's kinda damning with faint praise. For someone that wants to host material -- increasingly, a necessity to speak in any meaningful sense -- this is a pretty tremendous landmine: not only do I get to wager what a Louisiana court might consider prurient or how it might do math, or what the risks of a teenager even finding my material might be, but also such fun imponderables such as "what impact might an unsuccessful lawsuit have on my job or position in the community".
It's... also not clear how this is going to work, at a pretty fundamental level. There are some deep constitutional questions regarding compelled and anonymous speech, and some annoying legalistic ones like the dormant commerce clause, and this is the sort of thing that's had SCOTUS involved before. And then there's annoying problems like grammar issues, whether the exceptions meant for exclude CDNs or avoid supremacy clause problems with CDA230 would also exclude booru or tube-style sites that do not create content, or how ads get handled period. Nevermind how much of a clusterfuck that "33%" threshold is going to be for all but the most overtly and specifically porn-focused sites: do courts have the infrastructure to handle this when even specialty sites can have millions of files in content? What happens if it changes, and how quickly does a site need to track changes? If a site decides to host a million pages of lorem ipsum or an old copy of wikipedia to pad their SFW side?
((Example: e621 has 3.3 million uploaded images, with 26% of them "Safe" and 20% "Questionable" ratings, though this goes by different definitions than what the law here would involve, or even what non-furries would necessarily define them to be. Do I want to make bets on how the law would go there? No, because the answer is 'don't get in an incredibly humiliating interstate civil suit if you can avoid it'.))
Some is just that none of the authors of the law nor the people promoting it can agree on what, exactly, the harms or scales of damages are. Peter Gheil points to Aella as the prototype of the 'who-cares' side of the progressive and libertarian perspective, and there's a lot of Culture War in that position existing, but there's a lot of positions outside of it (sfw meme). At the other end, there's people who want the extremely unsexy nudity excised from Maus, or object to Gender Queer over one comic panel out of hundreds of pages having portraying someone performing 'oral sex' on a dildo. Presumably Heinlein's later works fall somewhere in this spectrum, or outside of it.
But there's a slightly awkward situation where, in addition to the Baptist-and-Bootlegger coalitions, there's a separate compromise where this sort of law (Utah is considering a similar one, and California's regulatory apparatus might accidentally invent it by parallel means) is vague enough to marry people who simply don't want their ten-year-olds stumbling across the weirdest porn possible after typoing a web search, those who think a seventeen-year-old seeing a nipple will immediately and irrevocably twist his or her sexual orientation, the TradCaths who think showing ankles can lead someone down the path of temptation, the feminists that think showing PIV or bondage will push men to rape or domestic violence, and the feminists that think maybe sadomasochism should start in the late teens, along with every possible or plausible position in-between. Actual policy implementations are going to get a little rougher when practice comes about.
On that bootlegger side, some sites have voluntarily complied: MindGeek-related sites (such as PornHub) have begun requesting Louisiana clients to provide driver's licenses to the third-party LAWallet (which is its own weird mess). MindGeek had been an early adopter for that currently-mothballed UK version and has done some technology work on the verification side, along with being a pretty high-profile target, so it's not a huge surprise, though in turn it's far from clear how many other companies would want to work with them. Or comply at all.
In turn, though, it's hard to not think about where this might go down the road. Many of the objections to porn here generalize beyond it, even if a number of the advocates of restrictions don't (currently) want to expand them. China has recently pushed 'video game addiction' as a concept to the point of restricting gameplay hours, and a general 'social media addiction' is a pretty common political talking point (and tbf, may not even be wrong), and there's been an increasing (and tbf, not even wrong) push to talk about how the human brain doesn't really finish maturing until whatever age the immature-brained speaker wants a matter to add restrictions to.
And a tool to bring identity to a wide swath of internet activity is a pretty nice weapon to leave around waiting for someone to be tempted by it.
In the thread below about the WNBA player who was sentenced for weed possession in Russia, the discussion dovetailed into how January 6th defendants are treated and a couple of people made what to me were eyebrow-raising claims. @anti_dan worried about the fact that J6 defendants could "be held without bail for wandering in", and @The_Nybbler was concerned about how "many of the "rioters" who committed no crime worse than trespassing (in some cases not even entering the building, just supposedly-forbidden parts of the grounds) are getting harsh punishments for political reasons".
As the token defense attorney who cares about criminal justice reform, both concerns piqued my attention. But as far as I can tell, the concerns are fictitious [EDIT: see notes below]. I've previously written about the difficulties inherent with collecting representative data about state crime statistics (tldr: lots of scattered jurisdictions + lack of court record transparencies), and while I've previously whinged about people here being sloppy with their claims about state crime trends, I fully appreciate the reluctance in committing to what can amount to a thesis-level research endeavor.
But it's different with the J6 prosecutions because they're all happening in a single jurisdiction with a lot of people paying attention. Information is surprisingly easy to find. Just googling "january 6th defendants database" will lead to dozens of hits.
Regarding the people held without bail just for wandering in, I did a quick google search but couldn't come up with an updated number of how many defendants are still held in jail (either with no bail or with unrealistic bail). There was a DC Appeals Court decision a while back that instructed magistrates to release people unless the government can demonstrate a specific threat. This means that anyone who is "held without bail for wandering in" would be contrary to that court's order. It's possible I missed something, but I couldn't find any evidence of this happening [EDIT: see notes below].
For the claim that "many" of the J6 defendants were facing "harsh punishments" (in fairness, this is ambiguous) for doing no worse than just trespassing, this too was easy to quickly google. This database from Politico is out of date but was at least searchable. Most of what I was familiar with for misdemeanor J6 pleas was just probation with no jail time. I plugged in "entering a restricted building" in the full table and sorted by incarceration and saw only three people got jail time (reminder that the database is incomplete) with the highest being 50 days for William Tryon. I quickly googled and easily found the guilty statement that was filed in his case. I would guess that the aggravating factors that made his case stand out was that he asked police to enter the building, was denied, tried to enter anyway, was pepper-sprayed, created an opening at another location by removing broken glass, encouraged other people to enter the building, and then confronted another line of police. He couldn't have claimed a plausible defense of "I didn't know I couldn't enter" based on those facts. Given what I know about misdemeanor sentencing, 50 days of jail for this fact pattern did not strike me as out of the norm. Maybe The_Nybbler knows about "many" other cases that I somehow missed, or perhaps they have a specific definition of "harsh punishments" which would encompass probation.
I responded to both with my concerns but neither replied. Maybe either/both have some evidence to showcase, in which case they now have another opportunity to do so (yay!). I think this is an illuminating exercise because it can shed light on our biases and how we can process information. In my last whinge on this topic, I had an enlightening exchange with adamsb6, where they initially suspected that J6 defendants were treated especially harshly. I asked some basic Bayesian questions (how many J6 defendants? what % of those were released? what % of all federal defendants are released?) and they were surprised at how off-base some of their assumptions were. This does not mean that J6 defendants are not treated especially harshly, but the exchange was instructive because it plainly demonstrated how even a conclusion arrived at in earnest can be muddied up if you are led by inaccurate premises.
I hope we can have a similarly enlightening exchange with the above examples. It's possible that both @anti_dan and @The_Nybbler 's claims are true, in which case I remain eager to see their evidence. If neither claim is true, then I would be very curious to know how they arrived at these conclusions. I anticipate that the likely issue is feeding inaccurate premises into the system, which can befall anyone and is not a personal failing. You don't always know what you don't know after all. In either case, I hope I've shed light on just how easy quickly googling shit can be (I swear I am not sponsored by the search engine company).
Edit1: @DradisPing helpfully pointed me to the case of Timothy Louis Hale-Cusanelli. As further explained in my post below, I think this is someone @anti_dan can plausibly argue was "held without bail for wandering in", but not "without them even proving that you knew it was illegal to be there".
Edit2: @JarJarJedi had a solid response and pointed out Karl Dresch and Michael Curzio to which I responded to below. Both were indeed "held without bail for wandering", although arguably they knew it was illegal to be there.
sohois
1yr ago
This is probably too "boo outgroup", but given the direct relation I felt it was probably worth sharing.
Our once and former (?) moderator TracingWoodgrains has been called out as "a sociopathic troll" who exists to create anti-transgender drama. This is according to transgendermap.com, a pro-trans website which has built a list of communities toxic to the transgender movement.
The focus on Trace comes from their look at Blocked and Reported, and includes a list of ideologically affiliated subreddits, including:
“Rationalist”/libertarian:
CultureWarRoundUp
theschism
TheMotte
slatestarcodex
It seems that the move came at the right time, since if we weren't particularly noticeable before, we likely are now.
Rather famously, we spent and continue to spend a ton of money on the liberal promise of education for everyone, and it turns out that they can't do that; FCFromSSC had a pretty entertaining post on CultureWarRoundup about it when DeBoer finally admitted to the writing on the wall, though given he got modhatted for linking it contemporaneously I'm a little hesitant to link it now.
More broadly, though, there was a short time where people said "live and let live", and even if you couldn't exactly believe they meant it, they at least were willing to put more than a little lip service to the concept. And then theory encountered practice, and it was easier to believe in Santa Claus.
Firing people for their bad speech or associations was so beyond the pale that we built entire structures and train every teenager with stories of how important it is to resist, until it turns out that this was a useful power to have, and then an entire administrative infrastructure was developed to provide corporate liability should sufficiently large businesses not do it fast enough. We've found that protest is the voice of the unheard, until the wrong unheard do it, and then when countries declare martial law and confiscate bank account there's just a bit of a shrug. We've found that political abuses of law enforcement powers were so unacceptable to earn consent decree after consent decree, until it could happen to someone who 'deserved' it. We've found that government pressures to restrict free speech were awful, until they happened in ways people liked and then became a nothingburger. Freedom of religious belief was absolutely vital for two decades, then turned into lacite, and then every so often even the mention of those beliefs becomes its own violation.
And this goes on for even the small stuff, in a thousand different ways, on a thousand different topics. Anything that could be remotely read as celebrating violence was so unacceptable as to result in new reddit rules... and people who should have noticed patterns just keep missing these certain occassions. Taking kids from their own flesh and blood was to be a last-resort, even under violations of some criminal law, the sort of atrocity that left people walked in dazed horror, and also perfectly acceptable as an administratively-designed ad-hoc threat against someone using their constitutional rights. There's been a few places like EFF that at least drop a mention to their principles against their politics every few years, but the fall of the ACLU and other core institutions has been legendary; where they could once at least use a fig leaf and pretend they merely ignored rights that they didn't like because other groups focused on them, they now highlight individual people they don't like.
You're right that dissidents were silenced in the past, but the liberal movement was built, in no small part, about protecting the rights of those dissidents to speak more publicly! And then it turned out, no matter how much we avowed generalized principles that would protect everyone, the people actually making decisions and a worrying number of hangers-on either (charitably) designed their reference classes in such specific ways as to carefully exclude everyone not on their side or (less charitably) just wanted their dissidents freed.
This may not be especially severe by some historic standards -- and I agree we're pretty far from the KKK-era South, at least -- but if you wanted to do a hard comparison to the McCarthy era it's at least within an order of magnitude, and the McCarthy era is far from what the liberal movement considered a best alternative to negotiated agreement.
In between blogging about fursuit collections, former motte moderator TracingWoodgrains has started to blow up on twitter after wading into an ongoing feud between Steve Sailer and propagandist Will Stancil.
Something in the replies must have really upset him (possibly interactions with a number of replyguys making not-so-veiled threats about what happens to people who associate with bigots or question "lying for the pursuit of good aims"), because he suddenly got really invested in proving that the recent FAA-DEI scandal is real.
After giving up on conservative journalists and deciding to do the legwork himself, he's now posting PACER documents from the recent FAA lawsuit, proving that the FAA HR department sent black applicants a list of resume buzzwords that would get their applications fast-tracked, via the National Black Coalition of Federal Aviation Employees.
A few hours ago this got the attention of Elon Musk, and Tracing is promising a follow-up, somehow trying to juggle 1L coursework with doing more investigative journalism than the entire conservative media put together. Obviously one of these things takes more time than the other, but I'm sure he'll have a coffee break free for the journalism bit.
One reason I think this could be important is that it's going to paint a huge target on Tracing's back. Propagandists have been claiming that the FAA DEI story was fake, the test designed to favor black applicants never existed, etc. They're going to get very angry at this evidence becoming widely known, and tracing is in a unique position to spread it outside the right wing news ghetto that prevents most liberals from ever encountering facts like these.
I'm not saying it's certain they're going to go after his law school, but he's in a uniquely vulnerable position right now, with very few allies in a position to help him (and probably a number who will suddenly decide he's on the enemy side of the fiend-enemy distinction.) So if anyone is in the position to help if he needs it, maybe start reaching out early.
Unfortunately all of this is getting difficult to follow without a twitter account (I even have one, but they're not letting me log in right now for no apparent reason). It's going to get even harder as Nitter instances die off. If anyone has a reliable account and would be willing to make screenshots, I'd love if you could take over covering the story as it develops.
Edit: his effortpost is now out on twitter and at his blog. I'll copy it into a reply below in case the nitter instance goes down again.
Just a note, this has obvious parallels to colleges letting DEI departments screen out the 80% of applicants before any objective hiring process begins:
It's a very effective method of manipulating procedural outcomes, isn't it?
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