gattsuru
1d ago
This seems a little prone to presentism. On top of the disclaimers you had to throw in, Lyndon B Johnson famously would wave his dick at reporters and got the FDA to pretends eggs were unhealthy just to paper over inflation. Nixon was Nixon. Ford started off the whole 'pardon the last guy' trend. Reagan had the exact same untrustworthy sack-of-shit empty-suit cargo cult leader stuff pointed at him, continuing well after he left office. Clinton interrupted national television to disclaim whether he, in fact, had sex with that woman, enough of a cult of personality that he got thrown into random cartoon intros, and a variety of hilarious corruption that at best gets the disclaimer 'not proven'. Dubya was Dubya. Obama's cult of personality has his defenders insist today that his worst scandal was a tan suit, after literal court settlements and his attorney general being held in contempt of congress (by a bipartisan vote). Biden Purged as or more aggressively.
I'll give you Carter, who was merely incompetent in his areas of expertise.
Trump's a culmination of the long-standing paean against democracy, but he's far from a novel or extreme one. The institutions hadn't rotted by coincidence.
gattsuru
1d ago
Part of the problem, as someone who also dislikes the man, is that there does genuinely seem to be a difference between those who dislike him on principles, and those who dislike him as a principle. Trump Derangement can be a cop-out, but there's far too many people who start with long lists of new superweapons they want to bring, a long list of supposedly unique grievances that justify their use, and then after the parallels or exact precursors to those grievances are shown to have been common or applauded, the need to launch the nukes remains. That's been true from Trump v. Anderson to the campaigns against the vulgarity of the office to grifting.
... which, uh, raises the obvious question. There's a pretty large number of other world leaders for whom each and every one of those criticisms applies, and a larger number of polities that have been either infected by or been the morass from which those leaders arose.
gattsuru
1d ago
I don't want to rest my position on that, specifically, since involuntary commitment and medication are rare (and a little unprincipled), while TheSchism or anti-arson or anti-discrimination laws were all supposed to be consistent and universalist by their own terms. But Nicholas Decker and Ken White's posts are within the bounds of stuff that has historically gotten a lot of negative attention, including warrants or arrests on their own, and when paired with other behavior or insufficient deference, escalated to commitments or medication.
Unfortunately, that sorta stuff usually doesn't get much attention (tbf, probably because it's not a great thing to publicize for either the nutjob's sake post-medication / calm down time, or for the general populace given contagion risks, in the cases it does turn out to be serious), so examples tend to be jank. So if you want a clear-cut example where it's clearly defensible speech, I'm not going to have one. All I've got are people about as crazy as Ken White.
gattsuru
1d ago
You're still turning a hypothetical into a clear conclusion that it "didn't seem to based meaningfully off of his speech", which is pretty clearly untrue given that he wouldn't have gotten a visit but for his speech.
And maybe that's still a strict scrutiny-passed tots-reasonable thing for police to do. Or at least close enough that everyone involved gets qualified immunity, and the courts never get around to deciding whether it's 'clearly established' one way or the other. But then we have Ken "violence against not just the government doing it and the private people joining the violence but the soft-target think-tank, media, and academic aparatus that empowered it becomes morally and philosophically justified" White, who already has a history of past mental health episodes, past gun advocacy, and who has promoted the belief that he's being personally targeted by the current administration.
No it's not the new standard for true threat, but it is a good showcase of why our currently existing standard is so high. People say edgy things all the time without doing violence.
I'm asking whether it's your standard of evidence. Because I can find a lot of people who were involuntarily committed and then, after release, didn't do anything violent; that's a far more common case than serious judicial review.
My point is that people say edgy things all the time without doing violence, and find either the feds or cops at their door with a fancy piece of paper signed by a judge. Not all the time! But again, Ken White isn't some random preteen being edgy on a Fortnite voice chat; trying to reason from the median case is pretty misleading.
And it's not just that he didn't get that noncon overnight stay with the fancy extra-long jacket sleeves, but that no one seems to be acting like they were even worried about it being a risk.
gattsuru
2d ago
but the content of his speech doesn't seem to have been a deciding key element as I highlighted above.
"Even if Mr. Raub's statements were protected speech and a contributing factor to Mr. Campbell's determination that Mr. Raub must be detained, it was not dispositive."
[Emphasis added.]
"didn't seem to based meaningfully off of his speech"
Hm.
Given that to the best of my knowledge they haven't committed any violence despite the length of time that has gone by, it definitely suggests their statements did not indicate serious intent to harm ala a true threat.
Oh, is that the new standard? Or is it just the defense you're going to jump to before insisting that only the clearest and most unilateral court ruling counts for anyone else?
gattsuru
2d ago
Did you just respond to a post where I linked to an actual opinion by linking to a summary of that opinion, in direct-to-print format, which you yourself further misleadingly summarize (from "Even if Mr. Raub's statements were protected speech and a contributing factor to Mr. Campbell's determination that Mr. Raub must be detained, it was not dispositive." to your "didn't seem to based meaningfully off of his speech")? And all to counter an argument I didn't make, since I don't think any human reader would expect me to think Ken White or Nicholas Decker to be harmless or non-paranoid schizophrenic.
It's also not a 'first' example given that it's after Schoolcraft.
You're not doing a great job denying the "powered by a laptop-grade LLM" allegations.
The funny part is that I agree with Lukianoff on the Bushart case. If the central examples of pro-Kirk overstep had involved jail or police presence, I'd understand and empathize with the response.
But it's not, and not just in the sense that Bushart is the most extreme abuse.
Involuntary commitment to political opposition has the easy, uncontroversial, and high-profile example of Adrian Schoolcraft, though it didn't last 37 days, so I'll give Lukianoff points for stamina there.
Involuntary commitment for pure political speech is one of those places where most of the examples you're going to reject as unverified because it wasn't examined by the courts, but for a good example that was and where the courts later found "the petition [was] . . . devoid of any factual allegations", Brandon Raub. To be fair to Virginia, he was pretty nuts! To be less fair, my comparison is to Ken White.
Involuntary medication... the TopHattingson example is noncentral enough that I'm only going to give it so we don't have someone interject, but yes, I'll admit I'm riding heavily on the 'other contexts' bit, there. Lower courts abusing involuntary medication to the point of violating the law because someone is just really annoying happen.
So if you want a mea culpa, yes, I don't have a good, clear, court-reviewed example of involuntary medication motivated solely by conservative-tinged speech.
EDIT: for solitary confinement, I'll just quote that right-wing nutjob Elizabeth Warren. Solitary confinement might have been appropriate for most J6ers that were confined pre-trial, but the blanket policy was clearly motivated by their politics.
gattsuru
4d ago
Calls for government to do something.
No, noticing that the government did not do something that it happily did in other contexts.
Literally government.
Not only does California have a law requiring private businesses to recognize the free speech of their employees, and the NLRB require private businesses to recognize free speech rights about working conditions, the agency review held that federal anti-discrimination law instead required businesses be able to fire him.
Yes, to be clear, I'm not accusing the moderators here of a political bias on fedposting; I'm highlighting that we're worried about it, and zero of the left-fedposty sites are or had reason to be.
gattsuru
4d ago
I think it's a perfectly reasonable decision on Zorba's part. I even think it's a perfectly reasonable calculation on the part of progressive-leaning forum.
I'm critiquing the process, not the people reacting to the result.
Do you have an example?
A central one. As a more prospective one, see here.
(edit: improved context on first link to include where it was explicitly called fedposting)
gattsuru
4d ago
I'm saying that not-left-aligned organizations and groups have to be extremely cautious about tolerating fedposting because they have clear examples of lawfare and other destructive outside forces targeting them, often successfully. Left-aligned organizations don't fear that, and they have gotten away with fedposting without evidence of having to even resist any lawfare, and it cost them zero support among self-described 'normies'.
However, it's quite clear that saying that someone deserved to die is not fedposting.
The moderators here have included far less overt advocacy than "His killer committed a just act." as fedposting.
gattsuru
4d ago
We don't know they're fine with it; we just know that they think it's the best strategic choice. Which is probably true, since they don't have a friendly administration on the other side of the lawsuit.
But there's another bit I'll highlight. The time from April 20, 2021 to February 27, 2023. Can you guess whether the college staff was fired for her speech longer, or shorter, than Kelly?
gattsuru
4d ago
Nope.
But there's a lot of places it was tolerated, and not only did their management have no concerns about lawfare, more importantly, literally zero have shown up in the news having been hit by or having to resist that lawfare. There's no sequel to ARFCOM; there's no even a sequel to 'Discord Channel Shut Down for making fun of George Floyd'.
This isn't perfect information, just like there are limits to our ability to extrapolate from the lack of Brendan-Eich-facepunching aimed at modern day interleft-battles. It's still information.
gattsuru
4d ago
Clearly whatever the result is, Hogge is fine with it and did not wish to pursue further.
Hogge's the lawyer, giving lawyer-speak for 'I can't even say I won'. Kelly got his job back, so he's not complaining and definitely not doing it somewhere where the department could get him fired for doing it, but there's no evidence he's come out of things with a million or even a hundred thousand bucks.
In the US, it absolutely does.
Party presentation rule, anyone?
It does a lot against warrants.
I would be fascinated to see you explain what procedural protections are present in an ex parte warrant hearing in front of magistrate judges, where police and prosecutors don't even have a duty to present exculpatory evidence. The standard of probable cause means that even a warrant focusing on arguably protected speech is fair game for that 'arguably' result in a search warrant to be evaluated post-ante at trial, and that's before we get to the continuing effort by lower courts to water down Brandenburg.
gattsuru
4d ago
Amadan has specifically and repeatedly noted concerns about a possible warrant to Zorba as a major motivating factor. Whether it's "particularly likely" enough for you to let it count, it's clearly enough for an actual person who actually hosting a website to care -- but only for one political allegiance.
gattsuru
4d ago
Welcome to the difference between public sector jobs and private sector jobs.
In case you missed the reference
Because their speech is protected from the government under the 1st amendment. They did not make a True Threat.
That stops a conviction (maybe). It does less than nothing against a warrant. Moderators here have been Very Concerned about warrants for speech that would easily avoid Brandenberg.
gattsuru
4d ago
There's been a minor news story recently after a teacher got well over a million bucks in settlement money, and there's a strong argument she shouldn't have gotten fired originally... and then you think about everyone who got fired and didn't get anywhere near the compensation or an order of magnitude under that, didn't get their jobs back, and didn't get the fawning political coverage, for something far less charged than saying the target of a political assassination (and his family!) deserved it.
But what really gets me is the dog that doesn't bark. Nicholas Decker's "When Must We Kill Them" (answer: when he wanted the substack revenue) wasn't accompanied by an involuntary commitment and a warrant; PopeHat's complaining about a Bluesky ban rather than the solitary confinement and involuntary medication after he called for people to kill Musk. Trace is back from his internship and has a lot to say, and can't quite get his dander up about the forum he built because TheMotte didn't respect the humanity of spree criminals and arsonists can't reflect on the humanity of a guy who talked. There's no serious investigation of all those Tesla arsons, nor are we getting lawsuits by people fired for supporting the Tesla arsons. Damore isn't independently wealthy; he got judges informing people the law required his speech be infringed. William Kelly probably got his job back, and if he got anything else it was a rounding error, for 25 USD in Rittenhouse donations.
We know what happens when people do things that progressive leadership oppose. It's not a surprise when it didn't happen here.
gattsuru
4d ago
What's the last update you heard in the news about Goode or Pretti? Or is the slop diagnosis something that's only goes on direction, or only means something one direction?
gattsuru
5d ago
Dugan was sentenced to a 5000 USD fine. Her attorneys claim to plan an appeal.
gattsuru
5d ago
It's always plausible for the military to be lying, but helicopters are genuinely dangerous even in noncombat scenarios, and four days of search would be a pretty expensive cover story. There were also three survivors, which... isn't incompatible with hostile military action and isn't anywhere near the size of the general coordination you'd need to keep the story secret, but sounds closer to 'mechanical problem' than 'rocket fire' from a gutcheck.
gattsuru
6d ago
The nuclear warfare option is something from his time on Kik. The platform has a bad reputation for underage users, and while I'd understand the argument that what's been shown so far is much worse than waving his dingaling at a 17-year-old, there's both political and philosophical reasons the latter might be more of a showstopper.
But on top of the question of whether that exists, the trouble is the old "Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across". Nothing from this point onward is more dangerous to a Senator than to a random loser; any further threat is just another layer of double-or-prison.
(maybe literally; the statute of limitations in Maine for rape is 20 years)
gattsuru
6d ago
The more plausible failure mode is just that SpaceX writes a report, the FAA looks at it, and then says "more", rinse and repeat. That's a really common failure mode for environmental law, but the FAA (generally through DAR/DER) is pretty well-known for it, too.
gattsuru
7d ago
It's a weird version of the story to tell themselves.
There's a version of post-rat that buy into woo because it's woo. There's a version of the normal rat that buys into woo because oh there's there's really fascinating and counterinuitive and probably-fake theory but it's a minor cost and there goes the Pascal's Wager; that's the popsci version of Roko's Basilisk. There's a version of the normal rat that buys into woo just because they miss the woo; arguably, the original HPMOR-era fascination with Kahnneman fits here.
But that's not what happened, here.
Leverage's people seem, at least from the summary here, to have purchased into the central example of a thing that their mainstay texts specifically highlight as not working. It's like a Christian worshiping a bronze bull, or a tech guy being happy about Microsoft's business practices.
Of course, SBF bought a concussionball endorsement for his 'EA'-themed organization, and that was also a central example of bad charity.
I'd be willing to throw some hours at this, though I'll recognize my area of focus is neither webdev nor the massively parallel http serve optimizations you'd need to have this scale.
My biggest immediate concern is the face value of "What if subreddits had a unique internal ID, but the front-page label was replaceable?" That's a hard problem, and one with a lot of bad solutions. Reddit (and tumblr, and a lot of other social media) overloads the value of 'name'. It's both an identifier for access purposes, a community label, and a navigation and search aid.
So... let's pretend we have /r/trees (id: 101) and /r/pot (id: 102), which are humorously mixed up so that 101 refers to marijuana, and 102 is the horticulture of apple trees. The joke finally got old, and everyone agrees (note: this will never happen) that they need to be fixed so that /r/pot is attached to ID 101, and /r/trees is ID 102. What does that mean, from a technical level?
Is the new link themotte.org/r/101/this-is-a-pot-thread, and all that changes is what themotte.org/r/pot redirects toward? Because humans don't remember even small numbers well, and if the IDs are alphanumeric or GUID, they'll hate it. Or is it themotte.org/r/pot/this-is-a-pot-thread, and any previous links are updated automatically (that seems a database nightmare, and impossible for off-site links)? Or is the ID part of the thread identifier, and the submotte id only a navigation aid?
Who arbitrates when /r/politics has been taken over by your outgroup, can they fund the inevitable lawsuit or forced arbitration, and what's that look like to normal users?
I think there's ways to sell it, but I think it matters heavily what you're selling. People like reddit, tumblr, twitter, yada, because it's hilariously easy to go from a community member to running your own minisite, and the pressure to do so first means that anyone on the fence either jumps or ends up drawn to an aggregator. Even though setting up a XenoForum site is just a couple hours of work, the
Part of your alpha is the direct website functionality and the aggregator work, but it also needs to be the services you're offering, which is one of the spots that Reddit/Tumblr/whatever have historically been the worst at. People get committed when they buy in, even small costs, and there's a lot of genuine services that are pretty valuable to users and that traditional social media has avoided.
But those services are their own fracture point: DNS means you can get ARFCOM'd, private messaging or live chat adds a lot of COPA concerns, custom templating rather than rawdogging CSS means support costs. So tradeoffs, there. And there's a very serious temptation to go full Discord and start upselling useless crap, at which point your customers hate you.
Uh, some non-obvious problems:
Categorization. I'll take ARK as an example: you have /r/playark at the 'official' subreddit, /r/ark as the community subreddit, /r/survivetogether as the 'official' server listing, /r/playarkservers for community server listings, a handful of other subreddits for specific ports, yada, and that's just the stuff that's on reddit. And while ARK is particularly poorly thought out (badum tish), that's not really unique. /r/ffxiv has about thirty related subreddits, and maybe a dozen or so subreddits that are still about FFXIV that the /r/ffxiv moderators either don't want to highlight or actively loathe. This both pollutes the namespace, and it also means finding a list of everything ARK-related or FFXIV-related is extremely difficult, rather than a single existing page.
There's a couple solutions here. The namespace solution is the obvious coder one: r.games.ffxiv.<community> and r.games.ark.<community>, throw a page that lists them with some sort capability (and maybe allow management of that page by moderators for the recognized community), done. (uh, until you think about Prey 2017 vs Prey 2006). And then you think about literally anything other than video games, where the categorization gets weird fast. This is how usenet worked, but it's also why usenet ended up with things like alt.horror.werewolves having a bunch of furries and therians.
The other is tag-based. Still have the collision problem, but the bigger issue's whether you allow user tagging -- see tumblr's search for how that goes -- or have to do some work to manage it.
Separation. Even if you don't host images/video, you're going to get content you don't want available to every user, and you're going to get content that goes together like peanut butter and some of reddit's now-banned infamous subreddits. Smut's the most obvious case, here, but it's also the 'easiest'... and it's pretty telling that Reddit's NSFW marker keeps getting reused for everything from spoilers to gore to trychtophobia to spiders to a million other things.
Search. Good fucking god, reddit, what the everliving fuck.
Federation and the Transitive Property. I'm... not sure if this is a general problem, or one specific to the Mastodon implementation, but there's historically been a tendency to threat some forms of content as fundamentally corrosive, and I don't expect that to decrease. Technical solutions haven't historically been sufficient, in general because of reputation effects, in some cases (the baraag saga) augmented by legal concerns.
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