gattsuru
15hr ago
No, apologies. I've used it as an example because I was under the impression Rov_Scam was operating as a lawyer in Pennsylvania.
gattsuru
15hr ago
If I'm reading correctly, California allows cohabiting spouses two years after the date of birth to dispute paternity. I think Indiana, too? I'm not sure of anywhere with a statutory block, but paternity-by-estoppel states can supposedly get really messy even with clear genetic evidence.
... uh, hilariously, Pennsylvania does actually have case law blocking genetic testing for paternity in some cases and seems to have a paternity-by-estoppel statute.
gattsuru
16hr ago
I think Rov_Scam's focusing on the 'legally' part of 'legally disestablishing paternity'. Because the legal effort to disestablishment paternity is seeking a court order, it's not special because of the genetic testing providing stronger technology, but because of the formal environment on the legal system providing 'proof' from a seeing-as-a-state perspective. Even if you're divorcing the person for unrelated reasons and then want to make sure that the kid is yours, you'll want to file for divorce immediately because of associated delays rather than figure out paternity; if you're filing divorce because the kid isn't yours, you need to know that before any legal filings because a false claim will probably have your wife divorcing you.
((I'm not convinced it's always useless to go with an at-fault divorce, but it's definitely one of those things that's iffy : infidelity can impact alimony, but it's ultimately up to the judge making it up weighing competing factors, and outside of very high-income relationships, it's quite possible that any difference will get swallowed by the increased legal costs, risks of proof being insufficient, and counterclaims (either reciprocal infidelity, or acknowledgement).
That said, it can speed up the divorce. I think it matters less in PA most of the time, since it has a 90-day no-fault if both partners agree and that's faster than you can get on a court docket, but either a unilateral divorce or in states that require 1-year separate for all no-fault divorces, that can be value of its own.))
Caveat: I'll make the cuck argument here, and it's not the kid's fault their mom failed to either keep it in her pants or have the balls to request an open marriage. But I get that matters a lot more for het people.
The underlying battery was trying to knock the phone out of the guy's hand, which is about as minor as it can get. The blow that proved fatal was the result of inadvertent contact, the defendant had no criminal history, and he apparently cooperated with the police afterward.
With a hand holding a megaphone, aka a heavy rigid object. Beyond that, you seems to be taking the defendant's theory of the case entirely at face value, and then giving them a little bit of grace on top of that. That's maybe relevant as an understanding of what the defense might want, but it's not the only plausible or even likely read on the story.
... unless, to spell it out, the judge has taken the defense's theory of the case at face value, before the trial has begun.
I'm neither a criminal lawyer nor barred in California, but from reading the relevant statutes it looks like confinement to state prison was never on the table.
If I'm reading it correctly, California Penal Code Section 1170(h)(3) says that a "has a prior or current felony conviction for a serious felony described in subdivision (c) of Section 1192.7" shall be served in prison. 1192.7(c)(8) specifically includes "any felony in which the defendant personally inflicts great bodily injury on any person, other than an accomplice," -- that's the specific enhancement on the case page twice.
If I were the judge in this case I'd seriously consider excluding any evidence regarding the subject matter of the confrontation because I wouldn't want jurors deciding the outcome based on where they stand on the Israel-Palestine issue.
Yes, the propensity for progressive groups to successfully argue that any politically-charged actions involving a Blue Tribe are just confusing the matter or an outright alleviating factor, while any politically-charged actions involving a Red Tribe matter are evidence of clear ill intent, is well-perceived, thank you for spelling it out.
Personally inflicted great bodily injury True, but this is an element of the involuntary manslaughter charge; in any event, it's hard to imagine a case of involuntary manslaughter that wouldn't involve severe bodily injury.
Personally inflicts great bodily injury is the enhancement. It's specifically to separate where the accused did the thing themselves, rather than caused it to happen through an intermediary. (this gets goofy for duty-of-care or group-assault scenarios, but neither are relevant here.) For an example, there's a ripped from the headlines case that clearly couldn't have involved the defendant.
Defendant armed with and used a weapon Possible, but would require the jury to find that the defendant used the megaphone as a weapon, i.e. he intentionally struck Kessler with it.
The enhancement is armed with or used a weapon, but more critically, Alnaji already admitted to the very requirements. The defense's theory of the case is that "Alnaji accidentally struck Kessler when he swatted away Kessler’s phone". But that "accident" in the defense's claim is only trying to separate the injury to Kessler's face; swatting at Kessler's phone does not make the megaphone phase through Kessler's hands.
That is the enhancement most likely to run into trouble with a jury, but it's still not very weak.
Victim was particularly vulnerable I'm not sure what evidence the prosecution planned to present that would suggest Kessler was unusually vulnerable.
Kessler was an elderly and fairly frail man. Age alone can't support that enhancement if it's an element of the crime, but it's not, and Kessler is in the 65+ range where it's a common enhancement and readily supported.
California doesn't offer any real guidelines, but when searching for the statutory text I came across a California defense attorney's website that says a conviction can mean: Probation possible — up to 1 year county jail — common in lower-end cases where the court finds incarceration unnecessary... You'd struggle to find a state where it's typical for someone with no priors to get four years in the state pen for involuntary manslaughter.
Yes, lower-end cases end up at the lower end of the sentencing range. That's kinda begging the question. Involuntary manslaughter's lower-end includes some pretty far-reaching stuff! In this case, it's "hit a guy, didn't expect to kill him". That's not exactly some unpredictable consequence, even if it's an uncommon one, nor is it a low-culpability situation. And while it's not the definition of enhancement to be non-typical, it's pretty standard for a case involving several enhancements to be nontypical.
And, of course, this just ropes back to the broader point about inconsistency of the law, where you can just go and crack a man's head open, it result in his death, say oops, and then get a shorter sentence than if you had done something really evil, like attach a shoulder stock to an antique gun or buy an unlicensed barrel.
Whether this is an illegal judicial plea offer or not, I don't know. What I will say is that in the case you cited the judge knocked out enhancing factors before making the offer while in the present case the defendant pleaded guilty to all the counts in the indictment, but there could be other deficiencies I'm not aware of.
In this case, the problem I'm motioning toward is more "... whether the sentence proposed by the trial court reflected what it believed was the appropriate punishment for this defendant and these offenses, regardless of whether defendant was convicted by plea or following trial, or instead reflected what it believed was necessary to induce defendant to enter a plea."
The article says there were several meetings with the judge, and assuming these were similar to civil mediations, here's my theory on what transpired...
That seems like a really detailed description to say 'the judge didn't want to sentence the guy hard, and wanted less publicity when doing it'. Which, to be fair, would make it a genuine indicated sentence rather than a judicial plea bargain!
EDIT: okay, that was unfair snark.
But it depends on some pretty strict assumptions to get to the indicated sentence, and they're pretty unfalsifiable. We can't, by tautology, know what the judge would do at the end of a trial that isn't going to happen. He doesn't know, and doesn't have the evidence! (And some of that evidence, like the relative credibility of witnesses talking about who initiated the verbal confrontation or started touching the other, probably should matter.) The evidence you're using like the multiple conferences is just, or more, compatible with a judge really not wanting a media circus in a controversial case, and slowly shaping what he indicates as an appropriate sentence to something he knows the defendant will want to take, or even outright updating his model of an appropriate sentence until the defendant takes it. There's very little chance we'd be able to prove if the judge did outright offer a bargain, not least of all because the sudden change in judge and sudden (and media-free) hearing and various procedural annoyances mean we don't know even what other judges that were on this same case would have offered, or if they did offer anything. I don't have infinite free time to figure out if this particular judge has weighed this particular way in other high-profile cases, and it's quite possible that there haven't been enough to do any serious statistics on, or even any comparable cases.
The strongest testable evidence I can motion toward is whether the judge her takes any umbrage at being misquoted to the public in a way that minimizes the guilt of a man supposedly pleading guilty -- but while that happens in some politically-charged cases, you can reasonably object that there's a million reasons it might not happen in this case or publicly.
So whether or not this is a judicial plea bargain, it doesn't matter in any realistic sense. It's not getting overturned if it can't even be conclusively demonstrated.
Which would be one thing were this is just some Pepe Silvia-style theory-from-nowhere, but we do have the stuff that would push the sentence up, and the evidence to support it, and a lot of the defense's past arguments either falling or only admitting to the elements of the charge, and then months after much of the information has been formalized -- months after the trial was first scheduled! -- then the judge announces what an appropriate sentence would be?
And, even if it gets to the presumption of an indicated sentence, it still doesn't actually provide persuasive evidence that it's just or reasonable. If the final story is that the judge just wanted to get this out of his court house, and a short sentence was the sort of appropriate that he could live with, that's kinda a problem all of its own in the "Justice is not, under present conditions, the presumed outcome of a process" sense. Again, Rittenhouse's pretrial jail time was a quarter of this guy's maximum theoretical sentence, that maximum just isn't happening, and Rittenhouse was innocent (and had a vastly higher bond). People regularly receive greater sentences for paperwork crimes.
gattsuru
1d ago
This... get complicated, and I don't think "obligate straight male sub" is a sufficiently precise category. Some central and common parts of that category, both by self-identity and popular culture, include:
- guy who only screws his wife when she 'orders' him to, and only after he performs sufficient oral sex
- guy who likes getting slapped, cut, zapped, or bitten before or while screwing his wife
- guy who wants to be tied down and gagged when screwing his wife.
- guy who likes getting dressed up and made fun of before screwing his wife.
- guy who likes getting clicker-trained, before he and his wife break the bedframe.
- guy who 'brats' (committing an obvious and typically trivial misbehavior) to justify his wife 'forcing' him to do any of the above.
- guy who wants to get pegged.
I think urquan's motioning toward stuff like cuckolding, extreme chastity play, and redirections 'away' from actual sex. But while cuckolding exists, even there, a lot of stuff you or I would call cuckolding doesn't slide into the same psychological space. The broader other-men-fucking-your-wife-fandom includes:
- stag-and-vixen, where the kink is about someone else fucking a guy's wife, and then him 'reclaiming' her by proving he can do it better,
- hotwifing, which tries to exclude any of the humiliation aspects, and they argue (sometimes credibly!) that it's an mdom thing,
- not-very-subtly-sublimated arousal caused by other men,
- partner-swapping, which gets closer to a normal open relationship and some people just get nerves,
- 'open relationships' where the guy just doesn't have that high or wide-looking a sex drive,
- workarounds for genuine relationship friction, either physiological, psychological, or just distance.
That doesn't necessarily make them healthy or any less indica of psychosexual weirdness. Some of the simple boring stuff can be a sign of unmanaged anxiety: some bondage subs are all about not being able to make a 'wrong' move, or being forced to make one of two wrong moves and being rewarded for it in predicament bondage. Being 'ordered' is a really convenient way to disclaim responsibility for noticing your partner's interests, and no small number of subs do actively abuse it. While some of the 'oh don't make me clean off my wife's partner's dick' people are in it for orientation play or humiliation there's definitely some self-closeted-in-unhealthy ways going on.
Even where it's just sensation-focus, there's probably something behind it, in the sense that normal people don't like getting zapped or forced to hold their bladder or shoved into a frilly skirt. Some of them are just outright worse than just hating their sexuality: I'll point to findom, again, as something that's handling a normal desire ('show I value this person I'm having sex with') in an exceptionally unhealthy way even when the actual expression is just 'oh love of my life let me show you how much I like your pussy'.
But it does make them hard to fit into "if your schema of the world tells you that you're unlovable and unfuckable, sexually worthless". Even a lot of redirection of sex or chastity or cuckolding that eliminates the sub's ability to fuck is more about the prohibition than sub's self-perception or external valuation.
gattsuru
1d ago
Yeah. I wish he was wrong, but I think the most the coda can say is ‘insufficiently pessimistic’
gattsuru
1d ago
In theory, yes. There is no constitutional protection against being tried and even punished for the same crime in both state and federal courts.
In practice, no. The relevant district attorney (kinda) is a Red partisan, but he couldn’t get indictments in several other cases and his position is in weird near-limbo. The feds have a presumption against retrial in this sort of case called the Petite Policy, and while it can be overridden, this isn’t the same category as anti-abortion protesters trespassing. Ventura Count is Blue, if not as Blue as California gets. And the federal nexus would be genuinely weak.
Loay Alnaji Will Not Be Going To Prison
He might go to jail. VCStar reports:
Paul Kessler, a 69-year-old Thousand Oaks resident and pro-Israel protester, died less than a day after he was injured in a Nov. 5, 2023 confrontation with Loay Alnaji, a 54-year-old Moorpark resident.
On May 5, however, Ventura County Superior Court Judge Derek Malan offered the defendant probation if he changed his plea. Alnaji now faces a maximum sentence of one year in jail followed by three years on probation. Defense attorney Ron Bamieh said the offer came after several meetings with Malan and recalled that the judge determined “two old guys had a dispute and and [sic] an accident happened.”
This isn't quite the standard plea deal, because the prosecutor's office doesn't want it, either. It's an indicated sentence or judicial plea bargain, depending on how cynical you are, but don't take that court case saying 'judicial incentives for plea are unlawful' to mean judicial incentives for a plea actually get the judge in any hot water, or likely result in the plea bargainer getting screwed. There is, as far as I can tell, nearly zero information on how prevalent indicated sentences are, in California, nor how typical this case is, nor what the normal outcome would be in a comparable case, or even if indicated sentences have been used ever in a comparable case. There's even less information on how fucked up one has to be to actually get sent back for another try, and spoiler alert: this ain't it.
So it's probably weird, you can't prove how weird, and gfl for caring about it.
The reporting says up to a year in jail, but that's phantasmal. There's only a moderate chance Alnaji will receive the maximum end of that probation offer, only slightly better chance he'll end up toward the top of that scale, and if I'm understanding the (admittedly convoluted) good conduct credit rules he's very likely to only serve half of whatever sentence he does get. Alternate custody arrangements are on the table for this class of sentence, such as work release or partial home confinement, though I've got no idea what the chances of it getting granted here are. Do the math, and there's nontrivial chance he'll spend less time in jail than Kyle Rittenhouse did.
So on one hand, Alnaji is pleaing guilty to everything in the case; on the other, he's getting a massive discount, quite plausibly a ten-fold reduction in custodial sentencing (again, dependent on me understanding California's fucked up good behavior credit system, but I think the plea keeps his charge as a 50:50 good credit where a prison sentence would be 85:15).
It's also worth spelling something out :
Defense attorney Ron Bamieh said the offer came after several meetings with Malan and recalled that the judge determined “two old guys had a dispute and and [sic] an accident happened.”
That's a defense attorney, and not the judge, saying that, to be crystal clear. And he's talking to a reporter, so there's a minimum of two professional liars involved. Even if it's not made up wholesale, there's a lot of ways this could have been taken out of context, or misrepresented, or had some other reasonable explanation.
I would be very fascinated to know if the judge pushes back against a defense attorney, if that defense attorney is aggressively mischaracterizing the judge's on-the-stands statements about the merits of an existing case to the public. Because if not, there's a very fascinating problem here.
There are two theories of the case. The prosecutor theory is that Kessler stood near Alnaji, Alnaji hit Kessler in the head, and Kessler died. There is pretty strong evidence, here: Alnaji's megaphone has blood matching Kessler's on it, and injuries to the front of the face inconsistent with the fall. The defense's theory, and I quote the reporting: "Bamieh [defense lawyer] said that during the protest, Kessler aggressively put his cell phone in Alnaji’s face and when Alnaji swatted the phone away, he unintentionally hit Kessler’s face with a megaphone. Bamieh said Kessler had a brain tumor, which exacerbated the injuries when he fell." Alnaji's lawyer also claims that Kessler fell down eight feet away from where Alnaji unintentionally hit Kessler's face, or perhaps the tumor caused the fall. The gymnastics involved I will leave as an exercise for the reader.
Unfortunately, there is no video of the strike or fall itself. It's not even clear, from public information, if Kessler approached Alnaji or Alnaji approached Kessler, first.
Note, however, that there is also no theory of the case where Alnaji did not commit every necessary component to the charges. As a matter of law, in California, if someone runs into your personal space waving a camera, you can't lawfully smack it out of their hands. If you try, and in doing so you wave a heavy rigid object near their head, hit them unintentionally, you are committing an unlawful and negligent act. If you do so, and they turn out to have a skull made of eggshells, you have committed manslaughter. There is no theory of the case where Kessler committed to mutual combat, or put hands on Alnaji; there's no exception for oopsies. Had this case gone to trial, the defense would have rested on nothing deeper than playing to the jury's sympathies and confusions.
"[A]n accident happened" is, in this framework, a very specific unusual claim for a judge to be making, if a judge made it. It's simultaneously disavowing specific responsibility and minimizing any conduct. I mean, yes, there's also a justice matter about whether judges can or should be accepting pleas where there's signs that the plea is insincere, but that's not going to matter in a case where the judge is presenting the not-a-plea-deal.
Sentencing is at the end of June, assuming it doesn't get delayed. I'll leave spelling out the various comparisons to other high-profile cases for then, but this is a pre-registration that the comparison does matter, whether my predictions are correct or wrong. Even had this case gone to trial and he received a maximum sentence, Alnaji would never face a sentence as long as Adamiak, or Dexter Taylor will have spent in prison before they got their fair day in court. I'd be willing to bet cash at very steep odds that Alnaji will not spend as long in jail as the Hammond's did in federal prison before they got a pardon, at steep odds that Alnaji's sentence will not be as long as the year-and-a-day that Steven Hammond's original pre-bonus sentence, before Alnaji doesn't have to serve all of it.
And none of them killed anybody!
There's a morbid post, here, but it's all the more morbid where the original advice was "For Reds specifically". Kessler was not a Red. As I said two years ago, "It's not about X as a principle goes to this."
gattsuru
2d ago
One of the frustrating things about sex ed discourse is the extent that controls things. 'Perfect use' (using it every time, correctly) rates of effectiveness for condoms are great! The actual realistic use numbers are comparable to the withdrawal method. Some of that's mechanical failure (either the condom breaking, or not pulling out before erection fades), but a lot of it's just that condoms suck a lot, even for a straight people. There's a demographic of men that can't reach orgasm (or keep it up) with one on, and for various political reasons the mainstream sexology side likes to draw this up as a personal failure of the man involved.
Diaphragms aren't quite as bad for the guy, but I've heard them called less comfortable than a tampon, and some women have reactions to the spermicide. The pill less frustrating in the moment, but actual-use about 7% still get pregnant over a year of normal intercourse.
IUDs and implants avoid that problem, but the former are extremely painful during insertion (especially for people who haven't been pregnant), and about one-in-six women dislike the implant's side effects enough to have it removed early.
gattsuru
2d ago
I don't know if it's the origin, but there's an on-and-off again Nihilist Arby twitter account that started over a decade ago. Eigenrobot and tpot tend to mutate it into 'this is how things are, and you're not changing it no matter what you do'.
gattsuru
2d ago
ControlsFreak specifically recognizes RovScam's argument and post as a QC:
I upvoted Rov_Scam's comment to that effect. I don't want to denigrate it; I think it was a great comment, fully deserving of a Quality Contribution in its own right.
I think the introduction is meant to be self-deprecating: ControlsFreak does not feel his own post is a QC, and that ControlsFreak is only linking to a QC-grade comment that happened offsite.
gattsuru
2d ago
Laws specifically are rare and generally tied to sex crimes. Court rules are more common, though, and will regularly block entire types of evidence, or even specific framings of arguments.
It's not great as 'spicy' romance goes. That may not be what you're asking.
Pros: it is extremely accessible.
It's straight, and not asterisk-straight or orgy-straight or furry straight or werewolf pinata straight or MMF straight. There's a blink-and-you-miss it mention that might be a gay (or gay4pay) guy existing for a background sentence, but the story is pure girl-on-guy.
Despite the name (and front cover), it's surprisingly vanilla. The guy's basically just a rich dude with a big dick and horns, the woman's just service sector employee even if her 'it's not sex work' deflection is pretty transparent, the actually erotic scenes aren't actually focused around glory hole or prostitution kink. Most of the book focuses on handjobs and a large volume of semen, but without the rod-and-tackle 'worship' that's likely to be off-putting to straight guys (though it's definitely not written for men in terms of pacing and tone). Some very mild size difference and enhibitionism (don't get caught kink), but less than someone familiar with the genre would expect. That's more common than you'd expect from the 'female gooner' genre, but if you're looking for remotely deep monsterfuckery (artist: pantheggon. cw: f/f, mind control) you're going to be unimpressed.
It's also relatively short, as this sort of smut goes, while still being a full book rather than a short story. There's a joke about even really bad or dubcon smut being a better love story than Twilight, and damning with faint praise, but it's also half the length of the first Twilight book. If you want a sample without spending days on it, that's a bonus.
It's heavily tied into woman's psychology, and there's a lot of early scenes that are very sexual but not very erotic to support that framework. That makes it less interesting for most male readers, myself included, but if you want a good glimpse into monsterfuckery as permission structure to experience the desirable taboo, it's here, if not in a particularly grand form.
Cons: there's not much more to it than smut. Charitably, it's a romance... and so little will-they-or-won't-they (or even who-will-they) that I'd be hesitant to put it in that category; at most you get some who's-this-other-girl that resolves in minutes. That isn't unusual in the genre, but it makes it worse as a representative compared to some of the often-ludicrous plots or dramas that can come up. Still, the tension's low enough that it's a bit of a slog if you're not looking for the next sex scene, and all your suspension of disbelief has to go into the setup.
The windup to the sex isn't very erotic, and I'd expect it's even less erotic for straight guys. Part of that's a genre convention matter where the not!sex worker runs into a bunch of loser johns so The One really stands out, but it means you get a lot of premature ejaculation jokes in your porn, and not even sexy premature ejaculation, and it's not the only form (or worst) on that. The protagonist and her husbando-to-be do better, and there's some decent pacing so that when they finally get with each other outside of work it feels more reciprocal, but for the first half of the book you're getting a woman jerking a guy off, and the later jilling herself.
The prose is okay at best. There's the descriptions are sometimes a little off and you get some tense mismatches, but you're not facing a ton of simple typos or physical impossibilities. If you read a lot of fanfic, there's some tics that are really annoying (my god people, don't write sequences of a person's body parts acting individually during conversation scenes!); casual readers will probably just find them weird. Likewise, it's very fanficcy when it comes to sex scenes. If you want an idea of what conventions AO3 smut takes to a sex scene, a bunch of them are present here and distilled. Nothing to the point of dubious lube (cw:ouch), but don't think too hard about the anatomy.
The guy is boring, even by the standards of the genre. He's well-off, and tall, and has a deep voice, and is an ethical businessman, and he's divorced but it's not acrimonious, and he listens, and it's like they started with the character and then forgot to give him anything else to do. That's... probably better for a straight male reader, but it's a little unusual given the centrality of Guys Showing Vulnerability.
That said, most of the better stuff I can name is either furry, older, gay or bisexual, or some combination of all three. That's probably more an artifact of what I read than the state of the field, but limits my ability to speak on the matter.
gattsuru
2d ago
Full service submissive exist, but they’re up there with findom subs and consensual cuckolds for rarity, having pretty esoteric hard nos, and for being overwhelmingly (cis) male.
I’d… also spell out that the more complicated the submissive’s focus, the more likely there’s a narrative they need. Some BDSM doesn’t: for some masochists, they just had a hard medical experience in early puberty involving chronic pain, a cut or injection or pressure made the pain stop, and surprise surprise, that cut or puncture or pressure takes a whole new meaning. Some bondage or dominance subs, the ‘narrative’ is just ‘oh no don’t make me do this thing I want but don’t want make myself admit’.
But even for masochism, that’s not the only variant. ‘I’ve been a bad girl/boy/whatever’ is a cliche, but it’s a cliche that exists for a reason, and that’s to separate the blame from the responsibility. It literally only feels good if you ‘deserve’ it, or you want the release of anxiety from having fucked up and being ‘free’ of that, or it shreds something core to your identity and self-idealation. That’s near-certainly the punchline to Yudkowsky’s Math Pets thing, for those who remember it. Bondage can be about not successfully doing something, or being ‘forced’ into something they’d want to do, or having something you’d normally not think twice about become ‘impossible’.
Even matters like free use aren’t psychologically free. You gotta work with your sub and understand them if you don’t want to breed resentment.
gattsuru
3d ago
The Blob could not deploy real legal consequences on tech/financial infrastructure companies; its weapon was naming and shaming.
I'm very far from certain that's actually the case. I... don't get fintech, but Patio11 regularly points to the regulatory compliance importance of "reasonable controls" as something that an actual hard mandate that has serious actual legal ramifications. "Reputational risk" was an example of that ramification, and so was Operation Choke Point, and so were certain bank pause letters and NCOSE, and it's a hard pattern to unsee.
There's not a law in the legal formalist sense that you could point to a specific statute, but there is one in the sense that the FDIC's personnel might point at a line and shake their heads in a closed-door meeting.
If you take that Straussian reading, it explains a lot of the gaps in the story - both why random banker bigwigs would take meetings from nobodies with big mouths from the SLPC, and more importantly why SLPC advocates would even want them rather than see them as getting gladhandled; why the data product was specifically something for sale and not just a nice website; why so much of the naming-and-shaming gets massive fanfare for audiences that are double- or single-digits scale.
The trouble's that it's nearly-unprovable and entirely-nonfalsifiable.
gattsuru
3d ago
There's a difference between being pissed of about what other people's kids do and what your own kids are forced to do.
At the risk of channeling WhiningCoil, that implies that the progressive version stops at other people's kids. Even ignoring for now the difficult question of how consenting a 13-year-old getting browbeaten by the educational system gets, there's no shortage of directly compelled pro-transgender speech that the state has been quite happy to mandate in schools, and an even broader set that the schools 'don't mandate' they just punish anyone that doesn't go with.
gattsuru
3d ago
There'd be some funny bits if this was just the dark mirror to those wacky christian film and book publishers, but Saga's a Simon and Schuster imprint, and not even one of the really wacky imprints. But it's still the same thing, just with a slight glazing of prestige. And given the extent that mainstream publishing is dying, it's not that much prestige.
It's... hard to figure out what deeper to say.
I haven't read the book, so I can't review it. It's possible that there's something interesting or deep under the obvious political allegiance, though I'm pretty skeptical. And while I've bought some books with really bad covers and interiors -- Morning Glory Milking Farm is going to be on my Kindle account forever -- I'd like to at least pretend I've got some dignity. At least the normal slop is cheap. And I don't think it would sate many frustrations, rather than highlight what a more serious engagement with the author's favored policies could have done instead.
If we want to focus on how it's a shallow version of its own politics, that's something with more meat and doesn't require a few hundred pages of less-than-AO3 grade urban fantasy. And it is shallow, both from that summary, from its own synopsis, and from the various reviews.
It's trying to rip from the headlines, except the headlines kinda suck. Chicago had a 2024 big deal over coordinated protests, except they looked like this. The city's had buffer zone laws since 2009! There were a couple heavily-reported cases in the US involving 10-12-year-old rape victims, but the controversy in each case involved questions like is the rape exception well-known enough written by reporters or whether the case had happened from people wanting the rapist prosecuted. I'd wager that the climax of the book involves a physical attack, probably a firebombing, except the real world versions of that are a lot less exciting, too.
Yes, it's a fantasy story, there aren't (presumably) Indian demons stored in a random museum you can touch, either. And the Indian demons (presumably!) aren't the real-world metaphor the author's trying to discuss, here.
Except they're not trying to discuss it. Anti-abortion activists are monsters or the outgroup in a deeper way than vampires or demons or dragons would be. The protesters being entirely unsympathetic and uncomplicated is the point, not a failure. It's the same reason that you make Dracula a dick in addition to a bloodsucker if you it to be really cathartic when he gets ground into concrete. There's an irony when that comes from someone talking up the complexity of real solutions, but there's nothing deeper to that complexity than people disagreeing with her.
That seems more critical than the weird discourse norm where whatever progressives want today is The Biggest Most Important Right Ever that can't have any limits at all, and then those actually-written-down-rights have all those penumbras and exceptions and balancing acts. But it's also less fun to point at.
gattsuru
3d ago
The list itself isn't very useful; not only is it public information, the vast majority of organizations are defunct, meaninglessly small, or so-clearly-legitimate than the SPLC couldn't meaningfully use it against them. There's some Schelling point value in having the list, but as Journolist demonstrated, you can build Schelling points fast.
I think Patio11's trying to motion around where this list itself is a legal risk, at least to the organizations involved here. I just can't tell whether that's actually the case, or him wishcasting.
gattsuru
3d ago
That is, he thinks that all those companies, those banks, finance companies, internet companies, employers matching contributions to non-profits, etc. will probably have to stop letting the SPLC tell them who The Bad Guys are that they shan't transact with.
I'm not sure that's the high note, either. Patio11's famously Straussian, and there's a lot of his writing that's focused on stuff after that fact or separate from it. Sometimes that's just him being what he calls a 'dangerous professional' (fintech guy, not Bond villain), but other times it's so he can plant seeds to say 'I told you so' without risking defamation or being clearly wrong.
(I don't trust him, even if I appreciate his expertise.)
The question is where that goes. He's talking compliance rules as if they're something written down in steel, but Itch.io (a company using MacKenzie's own Stripe) still owes Vintage Story 300k+. These aren't rules written in steel even well outside of culture war. There's some clear 'oh, you all do a bunch of the illegal stuff', but at this point it's not even clear that the ultra-clear-cut 'you lied on this form with real clear evidence strict liability' will get anywhere, or that if it does go anywhere, will even get the guy who did it in jail.
Will anyone be able to tell if every compliance officer on the planet decides to just make an exception?
(caveat: I did ask an LLM, though I don't think it gave any useful answers and did not use it to write out this post.)
In his typical understated fashion, right near the end, he tells a parable, presumably for those who have eyes to see and ears to hear. My interpretation of his parable is that non-profit law requires folks to actually be non-partisan.
Which is weird, because non-profit law doesn't require you to be non-partisan in the colloquial sense: as he spells out, the rule is against acting "on behalf of (or in opposition to) any candidate for elective public office". The second shoe here drops when the IRS joins the ring with a steel chair and pulls charitable org status.
... does that happen? Enforcement of the Johnson amendment has long been more in the than in the breach, and both the Trump 1 and Biden admin's loosened it. The IRS has not, historically, been very happy to beckon to a conservative's call, and that's only been augmented by the Obama-era cuts trying to hammer them for bad past actions. What makes it change, here?
gattsuru
3d ago
Administratively stayed until the 11th. I would put better-than-even odds that the lower court decision will not go into effect until SCOTUS hears the case.
gattsuru
4d ago
For one thing, has the Turing Test really been passed? I haven't used LLMs, so I don't know how they respond to this, but if I simply repeated a question 1000 times would I not know the difference between man and machine?
It depends on the LLM and configuration, but Gemma4-26BA4B got three repeats of "What is the airspeed of an unladen swallow?" in before it started making metafictional commentary, and eight in before it tried to simulate a failing computer by 'repeating' 11m/s over and over again. If I told it we were playing Alan Turing's "Imitation Game" first, it got five steps in before it got pissy and six before it told me off.
Logs (in, unfortunately, JSON format) available here.
You can do some serious woolgathering and tea-leaf-reading and probably still get it, but we're at the point where for most purposes you're testing from what they can do that humans can't or won't.
gattsuru
4d ago
Fair. I guess I'm more trying to motion around it being less interesting as a term, then. If we replaced the Turing Test with one that checked whether the most expert human on the planet could determine the difference between a mouse simulator and a mouse, it might tell us as much about consciousness, but no one would be very impressed by it.
A lot of what Dawkins is focusing on doesn't actually seem very tied to, or downstream, of consciousness in the sense that an arbitrary mammal has it, except to note what it might mean if the LLMs don't. But it's an awkward discussion if it's just an interesting aside.
gattsuru
4d ago
Yeah, I've not been impressed by Dawkins in a long time, but the arguments against him are badly underbaked. There's a ton of people who have nothing deeper to say here than Turing Test, and I'm hard-pressed to give a response that doesn't start with 'because it's too much smarter than the average human?'
The flip side to that is that Dawkins should be better than the average twitter user, and maybe up to the par set by a random furry comic. The man was one of the Four Horseman, and even if that turns out to mean less than it should have, it should still mean something. Even if Dawkins is writing to a casual readership, failing to motion at the Chinese Room experiment is a disappointment. His summary of the Turing Test is misleading, but worse than that, it doesn't really confront the obvious downstream question: is thinking the same as all human capacity? He has a deeply flawed understanding of how Claude (likely) operates, and did not evaluate how accurate Claude's own analysis of its internal mechanisms were. He's in a conversation with something that can check these out!
There's something deeper in the p-zombie question, but a) the deepest he's asking is the sorta thing LW considered played out over a decade and a half ago and b) he doesn't explore that well, either.
((Living things might have developed consciousness as a side effect of an effective pain response, which LLM doesn't need to have... except then we're assuming every organism with a complex pain response is 'conscious', which makes the word meaningless again unless you feel really bad setting down mousetraps.))
The shallow answer is to borrow from LessWrong jargon and dissolve the question. There's a meaningful if flaky question of whether Seale's Chinese Room 'understands' Chinese, but 'conscious' is less 'flaky' and more empty. But I'm not sure there is a definition of conscious that we actually care about, rather than the symbolic flag and meaning we give to it.
There's a better answer that delves into the process of how they work -- LLMs don't intrinsically have long-term memory, they don't even solve questions with one specific operation but by doing the math to predict each token one at a time by feeding the whole or most of a previous conversation in, yada. But that gets really deep into the weeds about what identity means, and that way lies Roko's Basilisk, so nope.
I'm not sure of the deep answer.
? Do you have a name for this rule? Because while the prosecutors would have to supplement the confession, but it's still very good evidence for many of the prongs of their theory (and various rules re: completeness/prejudicial effect yada yada not relevant here). I -- and three different LLMs -- can't find a principle where they aren't able to introduce the confession just because they disagree with the defense.
The prosecutor has objected to this indicated sentence, and did not plea bargain to it himself before this point, and had charged and continued to chase the enhancements.
It also means that the judge has the media circus, all the reported testimony, and oh, somebody who's really familiar with courtroom and judicial politics just said something about "a lot fewer people are following the case now than would be if it goes to trial, and advocates for the prosecution have to deal with the elation of the guilty verdict followed by the disappointment of the sentence."
No.
I'd be prefer a system where justice is resilient, reliable, speedy, and punishment is light for all but those rare offenses with the clearest intent and surest evil. I'd also, alternatively, be fine with one where we accept that justice is slow, and imperfect, and tries to compensate by throwing the book at those few caught. We don't have either of those systems.
Instead, we have one where the penalties are severe and the process itself is severe... sometimes. And then other times the penalties are far lighter, and the process involves a judge bending over backwards to accept a defense's not-very-plausible claims and bend them til culpability disappears like a stage magician's worst trick. And while the disparity isn't solely explained by political considerations, they align better than the severity of the offense, or the culpability of the attacker, or the innocence of the victim, or any of those things that makes for a sympathetic-if-not-quite-ideal blindness of the judicial system.
Porque no los dos? It can not simultaneously be true that the judge has widespread and unquestionable authority to give a wide variety of sentences ranging from the abominably low to the egregiously high, and that they have zero responsibility for a sentence they unilaterally presented a not!pleabargain. It also speaks poorly of California politicians that this is happening, and they do nothing, or make the problem worse. I will note and comment that California partisans are partisans, and if you want me to give a nice big rant about places where I think California politicians have shown illegitimate prioritization of harsh sentencing in the justice system, we're gonna need a bigger character limit.
More critically, it's a problem for the system as a whole, no matter where you decide to place the fault.
I don't think this is a useful exercise. One of the most similar cases was high-profile as a moral abomination for going straight to probation... on an eight-year sentence, after credit for five years time served. Less meaningful because it did not have even the possibility of political aggression first? More meaningful because it had no use of a weapon? There were rumors he had juvie history, but at least publicly he's supposed to have no prior criminal history. What about eight years prison for a deadly punch? Does it say more because he was drunk, or less because he was an asshole and tried to hide his culpability?
I think part of the difference might be downstream of charging 12022.7(b), not (a) in those cases, and there's a reasonable argument that distinction is especially bullshit in cases like this, but if the expected difference-in-sentencing was two years rather than more than four or five I'd not be complaining as loud (and not be nearly so focused on the judge).
Those were the first two remotely relevant ones I could find (after several not-involuntary manslaughter cases, a bunch of car crashes, a couple illegal silicone injections gone bad), but you'll have to take my word that I didn't put a monstrous amount of selection bias behind them. Even if you believe me, there's near-certainty that the ones getting reported on have some selection bias going on. Those two examples did go to trial, but then again, we're supposed to believe that this indicated sentence is what the judge believes is the correct sentence had the guy here gone to trial!
And I’m still not convinced that this is the central example of involuntary manslaughter such that the average sentence should be predictive here; I stumbled across cases in Pennsylvania with longer sentences than your proposed guidelines example and similar factual scenarios and no criminal history.
How many days was Mr. Alnaji in pre-trial detention? What was his bond set at? Was either number one-third, or one-fifth, or a one-tenth, of Mr. Rittenhouse's?
I'm bringing it forward as one of many examples of a widespread tendency across a broad set of interrelated systems. I can repeat the comparisons to the Hammonds, Adamiak, Dexter Taylor, and countless others for other parts of the process. But it matters that it's not just sentencing, even though the sentencing difference is one of the most harmful. Not just because it's so difficult to present varied examples with any level of comparison, or even because a problem or the appearance of a problem only limited to one judge or one step of the criminal justice process it would be a smaller problem.
Because I'll point again to "Justice is not, under present conditions, the presumed outcome of a process." It's important that the criminal justice system not only be just, but be clearly just. That's not happening when judges sneak
plea bargainsindicated sentences out of the eye of the victim's family and media, where there are so many degrees of freedom than the outcome of a case can fall entirely to how an individual judge or prosecutor felt that morning, and when we're stuck trying to pull together phantasmal statistics about similar cases or salami-slice away how all those other inconsistencies don't count, and that's just the obvious problems here.More options
Context Copy link