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PaperclipPerfector  2d ago (text post)   12660 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 16, 2024

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Chuck Todd wrote a fantastic op-ed about the current state of our political polarization: https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/elections/chuck-todd-unite-nation-trump-harris-election-rcna171303

It comes down to (1) Our acceptance embrace of inflammatory rhetoric to "own the [other side]", (2) our ever-present, chronically online culture, and (3) the spread of inflammatory rhetoric and disinformation propagate by big tech.

Some notable quotes:

"The problem with political discourse in America right now is that we are all stuck in a social media funhouse mirror booth. What we see isn’t what is, and how we’re seen isn’t who we are. And yet, here we are."

"But just because Trump started it doesn’t mean his opponents have the high moral ground when they single out him and some of his supporters for personal derision. I still want to live in a society where “two wrongs don’t make a right.”

"Come Jan. 21, we all are going to be living in the same country and sharing the same group of people as our elected representatives. We need leaders who accept that there are major political differences between us and that governing needs to be incremental and not radical.

"Right now, our political information ecosystem doesn’t reward incrementalism or nuance, instead punishing both and, more to the point, rewarding those who make up the best stories.

"Most Americans have an instinct of de-escalation when things get heated, and yet most elected officials in the modern era are incentivized to behave the opposite way."

The mistake Todd makes here is that he seems to recognize the characteristically Trumpian mode of lying — repetition of crude falsities — but not the mode preferred by the progressive establishment — capturing sense-making institutions and turning them toward promoting ideologically-driven narratives. The latter predates Trump, is far more consequential, and is propagated primarily by the likes of the NYT and CNN.

I disagree entirely with the premise that political polarization has anything to do with social media or big tech. It is an absurd claim on its face, because human history is littered with countless examples of extreme political polarization long before smartphones or the Internet. It's a waste to even name them, because basically every historical event learned in school would qualify. Relatively speaking, the current period isn't even particularly highly polarized.

The only semi-charitable way to interpret these articles is to interpret them as apologia for why the current regime's systems of control have failed. Before the latest technology wave, the regime had everyone's opinion under control because they could make sure that all three news channels were broadcasting the correct messages. They cannot control social media as a whole, therefore, it must be social media's fault because people are able to exchange information and ideas without their consent.

The article itself is self-contradictory. In one paragraph, it's attacking Fox News for "cherry-picking" quotes from Democrats, and in the next says the only solution is to "stop big tech" from using their current algorithms. I guess it's left as an exercise for the reader how "big tech algorithms" caused Fox News's programming. Yet Fox News's current state could not possibly have been "caused" by social media, because as I recall, Democrats hated and mocked Fox News more in the 2000's than they do now.

The fundamental mistake the article is making is to mistake correlation for causation. While a relative increase in polarization has coincided with the rise of social media, this does not mean that one caused the other. In fact, there is not even a common cause. They are completely unrelated. All civilizations oscillate between periods of division and periods of cohesion. America was in a period of relative cohesion, but it could not last forever.

I think this kind of article is just braining, the author has something he thinks or wants to talk about so he has to make up reasons to justify himself. This is really easy in politics. A million things are happening all the time and it's easy to remember a few and string them together. But Chuck Todd is not that smart and articles like this are really not worth much of anyone's time.

We’ve collectively underreacted — and perhaps there are perfectly reasonable explanations for that.

Yeah, no one got shot, and no one but law enforcement even got shot at. There's nothing strange about a muted reaction to the Secret Service chasing off an assassin.

Instead, the Trump campaign appears to be approaching this apparent assassination attempt as an opportunity rather than as a moment to reflect.

Ah, yes, the Trump campaign. That is, the organization whose raison d'etre is to elect Trump as President. It's hardly surprising they're trying to do so.

Fox News has been especially aggressive in its programming the last few days, going out of its way to find cherry-picked examples of rhetoric from the left that, on its face, can sound like incitement. It's something Fox could have easily done with Trump’s rhetoric but chose not to.

How many attempts have been made on Harris's life, again?

As a native of Miami, I saw firsthand similar attempts to dehumanize and otherize Haitians amid an influx of refugees from the country in the early ’80s.

I don't know what "otherize" is supposed to mean here; I mean, Haitians ARE different in various ways from both Miami natives and other refugrees. But I don't think accusing people of eating wildlife and/or pets is dehumanizing them. It's exactly this sort of overblown meta-rhetoric (and the speech policing which follows from it) that prevents any discussion of this topic across the left-right divide.

And no one has done a more effective job of exploiting this new medium of discourse than Trump.

Looks like someone never heard of the Arab Spring.

I still want to live in a society where “two wrongs don’t make a right.”

The uncharitable take on this would be that the author and his allies have done wrong and now they want to avoid the blowback.

We need leaders who accept that there are major political differences between us and that governing needs to be incremental and not radical.

Trying to get the other side to pre-commit to not actually making major changes in the direction they prefer isn't going to work any more.

Most Americans have an instinct of de-escalation when things get heated

And that instinct has been exploited over and over again. If by getting hot you can get the other side to concede, getting hot makes sense. Trump's habit of getting just as hot if not more instead is why he has taken over the GOP. If Todd doesn't like it... that's tough. The alternative to polarization his side offers is "Do it our way", and that will no be agreed to.

But I don't think accusing people of eating wildlife and/or pets is dehumanizing them

Ironically I think this defense of potential pet eating is a deflection. Migrants ARE different from locals and from each other, and not always for the better. By emphasizing that Noticing the pet eating is itself a 'dehumanizing' act, all Noticing is thus reflective of the Noticers dehumanizing intent and thus can be categorically dismissed.

This is why the pet thing is so damn stupid. Migrants ARE committing crimes at elevated rates relative to their demographic, violent crimes at that. All the statistics about migrants being good for the economy and good for safety are due to large numbers of women inflating the denominator of crime/migrant ratios. Thanks to this stupid pet thing, the haitian who drove illegally or migrants robbing in NYC or the other instances of actual crimes are dismissed by the polity. Harris absolutely fumbled the border during her time as border czar, and the only reason people don't care right now is because the ones suffering are deep blue sanctuary cities that normies don't particularly like anyways.

Illegal immigration is deeply unpopular and becoming more so. The pet thing didn't massively polarize people in favor of immigration. Maybe you're traveling in unrepresentative circles.

Yea this is a delusion the dems have been trying to sell themselves ever since Trump. They see themselves not as a specific group fighting for it's members interests, like the republicans do, but more like a religion like messianic figures that will bring about utopia if they can just get enough control and "eliminate" the external things dividing us. Reality is that Trump didn't start anything and the divisions had been brewing for a while. The things dividing us are us. Globalism has clear winners and losers, 20k Haitians get dumped on a rural town of 40k, but two bus loads would overwhelm Martha's Vineyard, etc.

Due to this they need a rationalization for why their universalist solutions aren't working or their self conception would break down. Similar to that Muslim meme people always post in regards to Europe where the bureaucrats are desperately asking what the Muslim wants, more healthcare, better housing and the Muslim says they just want Shariah. It's clear what the man in the meme wants, the increasingly desperate questions aren't for his sake. It's funny they made diversity one of the pillars of their ideology when they don't really believe it exists in the first place.

Globalism has clear winners and losers, 20k Haitians get dumped on a rural town of 40k, but two bus loads would overwhelm Martha's Vineyard, etc.

I think this hints at the root cause of our national malaise: pro-fargroup bias.

The Martha's Vineyard types care more about poor undocumented workers than they do about their own countrymen. They see themselves as global citizens with no great connection to a particular place.

The Haitian immigrant is better than the lazy American, why shouldn't we replace one with the other?

The problem with this situation is that it's inherently unstable. It's tough for elites to rule when they despise the people they rule over. And it's tough for working class types to be pro-social when they feel the game is inherently rigged against them.

Chuck Todd routinely degraded American politics. Why should I listen to a thing he says unless it starts with “I am a huge part of the problem—I’m sorry.”

I always wonder which people are really that historically ignorant. Noise, signal, so hard to tell. So little worth listening to at all?

This stuff kicked off at least as early as 2012, and it was more "nerd wars" and professor/student social media drama than politics to start with. (Tumblr isn't "big tech" either, though prior Twitter certainly made things even worse...) Trump is obviously a symptom of a problem that won't go away when he does.

This one is clearly angling for "hey guys it's both sides but don't you think Hillary Clinton has a point about the need to nationalize twitter and jail misinformation czar Elon Musk"

Placing the blame on tech companies after a decade of regime journalism is insane.

Instead, the Trump campaign appears to be approaching this apparent assassination attempt as an opportunity rather than as a moment to reflect.

Ah yes, he should be asking what he did to deserve being assassinated.

demanding that the big tech companies stop creating algorithms that are designed to incite

Yep, there it is, party control over social media.

Let’s remember who is at fault for sorting Americans... The tech companies

He's literally saying people should be banned from posting true things the regime doesn't want talked about, because "malinformation" creates division.

It’s why it’s hard to take seriously the outrage from some in Trump’s orbit that it’s the Democrats and their media allies who have created the more violent conditions in our political landscape"

"It was convenient to selectively delete my memories of 2020, so I did"

My friends on the left love to scream about both sides-isms and love to complain when some of us hold them to a higher standard than Trump.

"Both sides bad, but the left of course is better, and the bad things they do are only bad if they help the real enemy"

Just as “watermelon” has come to refer to politics which wears a green skin to smuggle in red outcomes, I want a word for politics which wears a nonpartisan skin to smuggle in Dem hackery. What’s something that’s grey on the outside and blue on the inside? Something something haemocyanin.

What’s something that’s grey on the outside and blue on the inside?

I think that's just called depression.

  • the spread of inflammatory rhetoric and disinformation propagate by big tech.

Just..big tech?

Are you really saying it's big tech's fault blacks and many liberals whites believe what's basically blood libel - that is, that police kills thousands of unarmed blacks every year ?

The realignment continues..

Here's a history of Teamster union endorsements over the last few election cycles.

2000: Gore

2004: Kerry

2008: Obama

2012: Obama

2016: Clinton

2020: Biden

2024: No one

That's right, the Teamsters aren't endorsing anyone. I think we all know what this means. But just in case you need a hint, the Teamsters themselves are here to tell us.

In the past week, following the Democratic National Convention and recent Presidential debate, the Teamsters commissioned independent polling firm Lake Research Partners to conduct the union’s final national survey. In the poll ending Sept. 15, Teamsters selected Trump by 58 percent for endorsement over 31 percent for Harris.

Here's the crazy bit. When they did the same poll just three months ago

From April 9-July 3, nearly 300 Teamsters local unions nationwide conducted first-of-their-kind Presidential town halls, soliciting endorsement preferences from members via straw polls. The in-person voting was held prior to Biden’s withdrawal from the race. The Teamsters’ polling data shows members backed Biden** 44.3 percent to Trump’s 36.3 percent.

What can explain this 35 point swing in Trump's favor over just a couple months? I can think there a couple possible explanations. The truth is probably somewhere in the middle.

  1. Biden grew up working class and can relate to these people where as Harris cannot.

  2. The original poll was conducted in person. The second poll was not. Presumably the first poll was a "show of hands" type of affair where people felt social pressure to vote the way the leaders wanted.

Whatever happened, this is a shocking result. Who could have imagined 20 years ago that the Teamsters would be a Republican stronghold and that Dick Cheney would somehow still be alive and also a Democrat? Wild times.

It's not really that much of a twist to me that no college education men continue to break for Trump even in the context of a union.

As for the town halls, I don't know how much to credit them. Town halls and "popular assemblies" are easy to pack and direct, and I assume union leadership would have directed them towards Biden.

To me, the more interesting question is how 44% gets an endorsement, but 58% gets no endorsement.

I have never been a union member. My only experiences interacting with unions have been profoundly negative. As such, I am unqualified to make any suppositions about why the leadership would act in such a way.

Is there anyone here who could speak to the culture and explain it?

In this case Trump talked about firing workers who strike. Which is a pretty big issue for a union. And the union leader was very vocally unhappy about that. Without that he probably gets the endorsement, given the Union leader spoke at the RNC and the majority of members liking Trump.

I remember a links post by Scott from like 8 years ago where he asked, given the fact that humans have been responsible for the extinction of tens of thousands of species, mostly bugs I think I recall, (not to mention introduced lots of invasive species detrimental to various local environments), why the hell haven't we seen catastrophic impacts to our ecology and agriculture? I guess I have a pet theory I've been working up in my mind for a while

Epistemic status: I know close to nothing about agriculture, except some basic historical facts I've heard about previous food industries changing.

Essentially, I think that capitalism and human industry may be what has saved us and prevented catastrophic changes. As someone who works in engineering, I know you always have to deal with changes to your plans, and nothing ever goes right. When you do deliver systems that work, nothing ever stays non-broken, and you always have to come up with new fixes. However, you have goals, and as such you keep finding tradeoffs and workarounds so you're still able to deliver and fulfill the customer need consistently. If you don't, then you lose the customer's business and someone else ends up fulfilling their need instead. Perhaps almost all human-impacting ecological sectors have essentially already been turned into self perpetuating industries.

Is there some fungus which is going to kill all the Gros Michel bananas in the world? Banana farmer moguls absolutely do not want that happening, and they're not stupid. They will end up employing experts that help them set up systems to delay that eventually as long as possible, so they can still meet their quarterly earnings projections, whether by developing new farming methods or new antifungal treatments for the plants.
Does it finally get to the point that the Gros Michel banana can no longer hang on? Either the Gros Michel banana moguls have already started setting up systems to farm new varieties of bananas in preparation for this eventually, or else some until-now specialty supplier of bananas that used to be not as popular (like the Cavendish banana) ends up rising to power by fulfilling the now-unmet demand for bananas, capturing the market and supplanting the old industry leaders as the new head of the industry.
For the record, Gros Michel bananas did taste different, and maybe even better, than Cavendish bananas. But I guess Cavendish bananas are a sufficiently good workaround because they've been the norm for 70 years now.

Is it still bad that humans cause so many changes to the ecology? Yes, but maybe not THAT bad. I postulate two situations.

  1. There might be aspects of ecology that would have been ripe for eventual human exploitation that have not yet been industry-ized. What if the Gros Michel banana specifically contained some protein that could have been turned into a low-carbon-emission fuel source using 2025 technology? Well, then we are out of luck in exploiting that fuel source as a new industry. However, this still doesn't impact current industries, only potential future ones. We may never realize what we could have achieved and what we lost the opportunity to do had that banana not gone extinct, and as such this isn't viewed as a catastrophe.

  2. There might be negative effects to the environment that are so detrimental that there is no mitigation possible, and it will make non-viable even other related industries that might have come in and filled the gap. This is the catastrophe scenario that is typically pushed by environmentalists to make laymen worried. But really, I'm not certain I know of any examples of this catastrope scenario coming to pass (not that that means it cannot happen in the future). I guess I've heard that in pre WWII France, they had the technology to farm truffles, and the decimation of France in the war resulted in them somehow losing that capability. As such, truffles need to be hunted and gathered these days by specially trained pigs, and the price of truffles went sky high. I'm not too clear on how this happened, and I'm not sure if it has to do with ecology or just loss of human knowledge.

I speculate that this model of "ingrained industries as a shield" may also apply to other non-agricultural scenarios as well.

given the fact that humans have been responsible for the extinction of tens of thousands of species, mostly bugs I think I recall, (not to mention introduced lots of invasive species detrimental to various local environments), why the hell haven't we seen catastrophic impacts to our ecology and agriculture?

I think ecosystems are massively overhyped. Most species aren't needed, there are a few which are really important and the rest are basically window dressing. They've managed to survive and that's about it. Closing 10,000 random businesses would not be nearly as disruptive as shutting down Microsoft or TSMC or Saudi Aramco. It's the same with animals, most of them are just there.

I think one key fact is that the central example of a human-extincted species is some bug living only on one type of tree in the rain forest, and the central type of domesticated species is perhaps the goat, whose precursor today lives in a region from the south of Turkey to Pakistan. Or take the genus Oryza from which rice was derived is found in Africa, Asia, South America, Australia.

Classical targets for domestication are generalists who thrive under a wide variety of conditions. Of course, for luxury food we might domesticate less resilient plants such as cocoa (which was doing ok in South America but can not really claim being native on multiple continents) or spices or drugs.

The other thing is that we don't have a long memory. I am sure that there are some wild species which the Romans found so tasty that they ate them to extinction, but 2000 years on, hardly anyone ever complains about not being able to eat them. As you say, capitalism goes on, and if I can't buy the tastiest bananas any more, I sure want the next tastiest.

In general, I would say that there is a big difference accidentally between extincting a domestic species through monoculture+infection and the typical 'depraved-heart' extinction of a wild species through loss of habitat. I am sure that the former can happen to specific cultivars, but are unlikely to affect the important staples where we have some diversity. I place the odds of a virus which wipes out all domestic rice plants at even lower odds than a virus which wipes out all the humans.

What if the Gros Michel banana specifically contained some protein that could have been turned into a low-carbon-emission fuel source using 2025 technology

Don't worry about anything like that. How much energy you can get out of crops is capped by photosynthesis. It's not that much because photosynthesis is extremely inefficient. If there was a plant that had a higher photosynthesis efficiency, we'd know.

they had the technology to farm truffles, and the decimation of France in the war resulted in them somehow losing that capability.

You heard wrong. Truffles are still farmed, and apparently there's been a recent breakthrough. Some micro-testing which lets people buying tree seedlings are successfully inoculated with the symbiotic fungi that grows truffles.

humans have been responsible for the extinction of tens of thousands of species, mostly bugs I think I recall,

There are many, many species of bugs. Notoriously many. Apart from pollinators I've not read anyone related to farming worrying about anything going extinct, as a niche wouldn't stay unfilled for long.

Don't worry about anything like that. How much energy you can get out of crops is capped by photosynthesis. It's not that much because photosynthesis is extremely inefficient. If there was a plant that had a higher photosynthesis efficiency, we'd know.

That was just a doesn't-matter-farfetched-hypothetical to quickly illustrate how past shifts in ecology might (or might not) have unrealized impacts on human progress, it's not meant to be a serious postulation. I could have said "What if the Gros Michel banana specifically contained some protein that could have cured malaria"

You heard wrong. Truffles are still farmed, and apparently there's been a recent breakthrough. Some micro-testing which lets people buying tree seedlings are successfully inoculated with the symbiotic fungi that grows truffles.

That's interesting. Do you have any links you can share? Perhaps only certain species of truffles were impacted?

Wikipedia has a qrd:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Truffle#:~:text=Volatile%20constituents-,Cultivation,-edit

Tl;Dr: WWI devastated the know how that provided huge cultivated truffle harvests. There have been recent successes in cultivation, but we are not back at the pre-WWI peak.

As the debate kids would say: “cap solves.” Leave the problem for someone else, so long as we can be reasonably confident their incentives are aligned correctly. Our best way of doing that is by letting them make money on the free market.

It’s interesting that @jeroboam mentioned Taleb, because I was thinking of his other works. Companies have their plans for the present. With a sufficient time horizon, they’ll also hedge against the “known unknowns” of the future. But how do they deal with “unknown unknowns?” Black swan events which defy the models and do incalculable damage before anyone pivots. The best-laid plans of mice and men oft go awry.

So how much of that risk is correctly measured by agriculture companies? Modern farming is capital-intensive and low-margin. I would expect this to pull their time horizon closer. Every dollar spent on contingency plans is one not spent on something more urgent.

There’s a fun little story which I also encountered via Scott. Vincent Kosuga managed to ruin onion futures for the entire country. It turns out what’s good for stock prices isn’t necessarily beneficial for everyone—or anyone—else.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb is a bit of a tool, but I think his concept of "skin in the game" is a valuable one. The older I get, the more I discount people's opinions when they don't have skin in the game.

For example, here's a group whose opinions I don't respect: climate change experts. We could mitigate 90% of the negative effects of climate change in the next decade – but few experts are recommending action. Why? Because climate change experts don't suffer from climate change. If anything, their power and prestige grows when the climate gets warmer. Why else would they hype up any negative report and downplay any positive news. If somehow the climate stopped warming tomorrow, they'd be out of a job and looking rather foolish.

The beauty of capitalism is that it usually (though not always) aligns incentives in a positive way because the people making decisions have skin in the game.

I think that tackling climate change is hard because it is a massively collective action problem.

The payoff matrix of anyone likely to drown when the ocean level rises basically does not depend on how much CO2 she emits, only how much CO2 the rest of the world emits. Thus, even she does not have skin in the game in the sense that she will personally benefit from any choices she makes regarding limiting her CO2 emissions. She will drown or not depending on the actions the rest of the world take, but her own consumption choices only influence how much she has to pay for her car.

I think that for some topics, it is very hard to find a person who has something riding on the outcome which is proportional to what society has riding on the outcome. Climate change is one such topic. Geostrategic matters are another, perhaps. You have a bunch of military leaders who recommend this or that action, buy an aircraft carrier, invade Russia in the winter, get out of Afghanistan, whatever. Their pensions do not depend on how well their country does with their advice. In fact, their personal interests may lie diametrically opposed to that of their country sometimes: large scale conflict is generally bad for the general population and has bad outcomes for at least half of the countries who engage in it, but for general it can be their chance to shine. Of course, the incentive of a grunt who does not want to die in some ditch is also sometimes misaligned to the incentives of a country.

We could mitigate 90% of the negative effects of climate change in the next decade

"Could" can mean a lot of different things.

For example, we could likely put a 100 people on Mars within a decade (if we made that the global focus of our economy to the detriment of every other goal).

Or NATO could invade and occupy Switzerland (i.e. it is technically possible but nobody has any incentive to do it).

Or we could build a Tesla with six instead of four wheels (if we pay Musk a few billions, he will likely design a prototype for us).

Or I could pass you the salt over the table (i.e. just ask and I will do it, no trouble for me).

Where on this spectrum do you think 'mitigate 90% of the negative effects of climate change' falls?

On the order of $100 billion we could do it. So somewhere between the Tesla and Switzerland options.

I’m pretty much the same. The opinions of professional activists, actors, writers, singers just get an instant dismissal from me. Nobody in that group has any real stake in the outcome. They aren’t going to feel the effects of failure or the benefits of success. An activist wants less policing but he doesn’t even live in that community. If crime goes up, it’s not his stuff getting stolen. And if businesses flee, it’s not them losing their job.

Even so called experts are hyper-expert in one tiny corner of a very large interconnected web. Yes, shutting down all the coal plants in the world would mitigate climate change. Of course, it’s not going to work because our entire economy requires electricity to function.

The beauty of capitalism is that it usually (though not always) aligns incentives in a positive way because the people making decisions have skin in the game.

Doesn’t the whole concept of externalized costs undermine this claim?

I’m don’t think it’s a specific failing of capitalism but the insulation of decision-makers in business from consequences seems alive and well to me.

Doesn’t the whole concept of externalized costs undermine this claim?

Capitalism isn't utopian, and most capitalists are willing to let the state address its inadequacies. You acknowledge that this isn't solely a failure of capitalism, but isn't the externalization of costs even greater in bureaucracy or democracy as a whole?

I don't follow the question really as I don’t see bureaucracy or democracy as the same type of thing as capitalism.

All I’m saying is whatever its virtues I don’t see how capitalism somehow leads to more decision makers having skin in the game. Would you be willing to flesh out an argument?

Doesn’t the whole concept of externalized costs undermine this claim?

No of course not. The existence of exceptions doesn't negate the general rule. I thought about bringing up externalities but it felt long winded. So I just said (though not always) and hoped that would cover it.

Capitalism is the worst system except for all the other ones, yadda yadda.

What is your evidence of the general rule?

To make sure I understand, you’re saying “in general, capitalism leads to decisions made by people with skin in the game,” right? Would you be willing to flesh out an argument a little more? I just don’t see why that’s true.

At the risk of being basic, here's a simple example. Let's say I own a restaurant making chicken sandwiches. I have skin in the game. If I serve bad sandwiches at high prices, I will lose money and then go out of business.

On the other hand, consider the DMV. No one gets promoted or fired based on performance of the DMV. People are required to use their services, and they can't go out of business. No one has any skin in the game.

Chicken sandwich restaurants are generally good. DMV's are generally bad.

Disagree that climate change experts are usually the ones to downplay positive news.

Often climate activists get mad at certain climate scientists for talking up the progress that’s been made or reasons for hope.

Some examples: Michael Mann (doom and gloomers really hate this guy), Zeke Hausfather (here’s an example of the measured tone he tends to take).

Petteri Taalas, the chair of World Meterological Organization in 2016-2023 and highly influential globally through IPCC and UN, was dunked on constantly by Finnish climate activists for statements like this.

“This translation service isn't available in your region”

That’s classic Petteri Taalas.

Invasive species have caused catastrophes though.

But in terms of extinction of bugs and the like, I think the speed of evolution as well as a redundancy makes the most major ecological building blocks to be more of self regulating systems than a delicate balance.

Invasive species have caused catastrophes but it doesn’t seem that the median invasive species does. Most are benign or positive, unless you’re an eco-preservationist. I’m not.

Invasive species have caused catastrophes though.

What sort of catastrophes? I'm interested to know, I know little about this.

Kudzu. What used to be a useful plant when planted, farmed, and cultivated became a natural version of The Blob when released into the wild. Because it grew uncontrollably, it's literally smothered millions of acres of other plant life by blocking out the sun. It's almost impossible to kill chemically without also destroying the natural habitat. While grazing by farm animals can help control the problem, it does not kill the plant itself. Even burning the plant doesn't solve the problem because the vines can grow back from the roots themselves.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kudzu_in_the_United_States

Edit: reading your other response you were looking for catastrophic impacts on humans, which isn’t the main point of what I wrote, but I’ll keep it up because I think it’s an interesting subject.

The chytrid fungus pandemic has taken a staggering toll on amphibian life around the planet. Probably the most impactful invasive species in the world from the standpoint of affected species and proportion of global biodiversity.

White nose syndrome is another fungal epidemic that has decimated bat populations across North America.

Fun finding, there’s a study connecting the collapse of bat populations to increased infant mortality. Bats consume copious amounts of insects. When they disappear, farmers have been found to increase their use of pesticides in affected counties. These pesticides have medical implications for humans.

https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adg0344

Another example with a more direct human impact, the disappearance and near extinction of the American Chestnut. Once was among the most prized and useful tree in North America for both its wood and its nuts. It was among the most common tree across eastern forests. In the early 1900s, chestnut blight arrived from Asia and essentially erased the species from the North American landscape within a decade.

Other invasives like cheatgrass generate much higher fire risks in the west, and aquatic invasives such as zebra mussels are extremely expensive for management organizations to deal with. The latter can reorganize entire food webs when introduced and end up having impacts on local economies such as fisheries.

Edit: reading your other response you were looking for catastrophic impacts on humans, which isn’t the main point of what I wrote, but I’ll keep it up because I think it’s an interesting subject.

Makes sense. But, yeah, I guess the core of my hypothesis is that human ingenuity and the human drive for survival is what keeps industries afloat in the face of ecological adversity, due to humans' vested interests. So it needs to be an example where humans have a large vested interest.
And that's not to say that there aren't problems which develop which make the agriculture harder or more expensive. It's just that I suspect people keep coming up with ways to overcome these problems, which results in much less impact to everyday people. Perhaps I'll edit that onto my post when I get a moment.

The most obvious case seems to be potato blight which somehow got from the New World to Europe in the 1840s and killed millions of people due to famine.

That couldn't happen today of course because our agricultural systems are not dependent on a single crop and we can easily transport food from all over the globe.

Cool. I wasn't sure of the cause of the potato famine. But if it is a case of human-caused invasive species of disease, then I would definitely call it one example of a catastrophe.

Complicating this is that it isn't just the potato blight which got from the New World to Europe via human action, it was the potato itself.

Here's a fun example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toads_in_Australia

In 2023, rangers discovered a female cane toad in Conway National Park in north Queensland which, recorded unofficially at 25 cm and 2.7 kg and dubbed 'Toadzilla', may be the largest ever seen.

Uh, that's a big toad.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cane_toads_in_Australia

Well, I'd certainly never heard of this before, but I am still wondering, after quickly skimming the article, what the catastrophe is.
This also might depend on your definition of what a catastrophe is, but I guess I'm referring to large loss of human life, or drastically decreased living conditions for tens of thousands of humans, as the end-result of an event like this in order for me to consider it a catastrophe.

It has been fairly devastating. I grew up camping around Australia's top end, across the Litchfield tabletop plateau and Kakadu escarpment and floodplains. True frontier country. Before the cane toads made their way up from Queensland, we often saw quolls poking around the firelight edge. When the cane toads first arrived, they were scarily thick on the ground, you couldn't go for a piss in the night without seeing four of them (and this is in remote, wild areas -- not constrained to places with human activity). You see fewer cane toads now, since the monitors, kites and wedgies learned to flip them over and eat them safely, but I never saw a quoll again.

I am perpetually surprised by how many of your animals sound fictional.

Australia’s got a whole continuum of them.

Cane toads, as you observed, mostly poisoned dogs and local wildlife. They’re also notorious as speed bumps for cars. I get the impression that more speculative harms (ecological collapse, cattle diseases) are scientists fishing for a justification.

Rabbits: erosion, which matters a little more for countries relying on grazing animals. Serious enough that the government built a fence across the continent to slow them down. There were obvious upsides in terms of meat and pelts, though.

There’s also a Dingo Fence! I mention it mostly as evidence that predator populations are worth keeping out. Also, it’s the only time I’ve seen native populations blamed for introducing a species.

All in all, we’re not terrible at mitigating the direct economic consequences. But is that really a worthy goal? Letting an annoying, messy species tile the continent just because it doesn’t do enough damage to get a corporation involved? There’s something sad about a decline so slow, so soft, that it can’t be called a catastrophe.

Thousands of walkie-talkies suspected of being used by Hezbollah members have just exploded across Lebanon. These devices use a different supply chain than the pagers that detonated in yesterday’s attack. It appears these walkie-talkies, being larger, carry a significantly larger payload. Hundreds reported wounded. Edit: some early indications iPhones are detonating as well

I am going to ask The Horrible Question. How do you know that the device you're reading this text on, right now, hasn't had a similar sabotage from China or [insert boogieman here?]

It is getting even crazier:

Lebanon's official news agency reports that home solar energy systems exploded in several areas of Beirut

https://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/lebanons-official-news-agency-reports-home-solar-energy-113809042

I wonder how deep Israel did go. And how much is paranoia/fud now.

Edit: And more! Exploding toasters next?

https://www.jpost.com/breaking-news/article-820703

Unofficial reports claimed that iPhones, video cameras, IC-V82 radios, and other devices also detonated. Unofficial reports also claimed that Hezbollah told its members to dispose of devices containing a lithium battery or that are connected to the internet.

A lot of this is surely just random accidents that gets blamed on Israel right now due to paranoia.

This is absolutely incredible. It’s like a small scale version of what happened to Japan after the second atomic bomb went off.

Allow me to explain; the first atomic bomb going off could have been seen as a one off, or an experiment, or as a luck break from the perspective of the Japanese.

The second one sent a clear message; we have more and we can keep doing this as long as we like.

It really was that second one that sent Japan into capitulation mode.

Now this is not as extreme as atomic bombs of course but the paranoia and fear from this following the pager attack has to be off the charts extreme. There’s absolutely no way of knowing if this is it, or they have something more in stored.

One of the wonders on the internet is that you can go to /r/Lebanon right now and see people freaking out. Apparently lots of residents are frantically disconnecting all of their electronic devices.

Except for a quick stop by Reddit...and then let me check the insta...and...

It's interesting seeing the split in perspective. About half of comments are saying things like "Hezbollah is destroying the country by dragging it into a conflict it clearly can't win" while the other half are along the lines of "This just shows how much we need Hezbollah, to protect us from the evil Zionist entity that would otherwise invade and us and try to take all our land".

I don't know if we can say for sure that Israel intended this, but the effects are pretty substantial.

  1. On the eve of a likely conflict, Hezbollah's entire simple comms chain is now suspect or compromised. 80% of modern worn is coordination and logistics. If you can't do that, you lose before you show up.

  2. The level of paranoia is going to go even further off the charts. "They got into the pagers and the walkie talkies, what else are they in?" If your Hezbollah and want to audit everything with a microchip, you can do that, but at the cost of being combat ineffective.

  3. Israel is demonstrating subtly to Iran that they can pull off very sophisticated supply chain attacks. "We know where you are / we know what devices you're using / we know how to hack them."

I can see someone at the Naval Postgraduate School or Army War College writing a big "Grey Zone" theory of combat thesis on this in a few years.

This is a second attack that happened this morning. Not the pager attack from yesterday.

whoops deleted

Wtf. Assumed this was a joke in the friday fun thread or something. It actually happened.

Can't believe they didn't check inside their other equipment after the pagers thing.

What would you check for? I’m pretty electronics literate (simple PCB designs, simple circuit designs, lots of IC use) and I’d have no idea what I was even looking for.

You could probably find the explosives by x-raying a Hizballah battery a some random guy's battery of the same type.

Explosives have a specific density, I've heard they show up on x-ray the same way cheese does. If you want to give someone a fun time, gift them some oval shaped hard cheese, pack it next to electronics..

A lot depends on how sophisticated the attacks are. It's not a lot of explosive (wild-ass-guess, say a hundred grams, on the high side?), but if you crack open a case and there's a weird goop with a couple wires sticking out of it, and the pager still works with said weird goop disconnected, that'd be one thing. If it's either modifying or wholesale replacing components such that it's an integrated part of the device... there's people who could do the necessary disassembly and maybe even code path analysis, but it's well outside of the typical threat model up until now. And in a more extreme case, I could imagine equipment that was normal on disassembly, because the actual threat would be passive and distributed through the plastic shell.

I'm not even sure I'd trust the US military to be able to do that sorta analysis for mission-critical equipment.

If it is true that the explosives were inside the batteries, then there is nothing to see. It would look normal inside.

You could cut apart the battery and compare it to similar batteries. Or blow it up with a sympathetic explosion to see if it has explosives.

Is the theory that batteries were augmented with explosive or are these explosions from thermal runaway of regular lithium batteries? Even a regular lithium fire can be quite explosive if triggered in an enclosed vessel.

In either case shouldn't there be some trace in the battery management system firmware?

In the case where the batteries are internationally being sent into thermal runaway, this must be commanded by the device or BMS firmware. Shouldn't you be able to dump the firmware out and check it's hash against an uncompromised version?

In the other case that the batteries have been augmented with additional explosives, shouldn't the BMS see that the battery has always been under rated capacity. Or in the case where the BMS was set to miss-report capacity, that you should be able to detect it as in the first case.

100% this was explosive charges in batteries. Funny they didn't notice the batteries had a low capacity somehow.

Most consumer devices are locked down in a way that prevents you from dumping the firmware. They’ll have UART disabled completely, or maybe if you’re lucky it might be programmed to support a connection if you provide power to some undocumented pins on the microcontroller.

And assuming you could dump the firmware, you end up with a binary that’s going to be nontrivial to analyze. There’s nothing human readable to give you context clues. Maybe an LLM could help to more quickly analyze, I haven’t tried.

Probably your best bet would be to watch network traffic to the devices, and try to catch it polling Mossad for whether it’s time to explode. But even then they’ve demonstrated the ability to trigger without need for internet access, assuming “walkie talkie” is a mere CB radio.

I wonder if they’ve also tainted Hezbollah ammo supplies, that’s a trick that’s been done before and is also greatly demoralizing.

What I had imagined was that the charge controller was some commercial off the shelf module and you could just compare a binary dump directly from the EPROM to a known good copy. I suppose the battery management could be integrated with the rest of the the devices firmware, and that the firmware is sufficiently localized that you couldn't locate an exact known safe version.

I'm amazed at the sophistication of the infiltration though.

Without getting into describing how to make an explosive out of a battery...a LiPo won't make an explosion, just a big fire.

Yeah, I managed to track down some unconfirmed videos of the reported explosions. It does look larger and more violent than you would get with even the most kinetic LiPo fire. In that case thought, the battery must have been significantly below standard capacity or have the dimensions way out of spec. Maybe that's fine though, like having to pull every radio and pager with a pillowly LiPo out of action effectively dismantles the communication network.

You could cut apart the battery and compare it to similar batteries.

For added fun, you'll need to be careful doing this because lithium battery chemistries have a tendency to spontaneously combust when exposed to oxygen.

I'm betting that's why they were set off today. The best theory I've heard is that Israel planned to activate the pagers during a major campaign against Hezbollah, but Hezbollah started catching on (or the campaign is imminent), so Israel activated the pagers before word got out. Now Hezbollah is probably going through everything to check for bombs, so they set off the walkie-talkies as well.

If it's hard to detect, that's extremely difficult to coordinate on short notice. It's almost literally impossible for an organization that's not all in one location together to suddenly get rid of / replace all of their communication equipment.

It’s also difficult for Hezbollah to communicate right now because a lot of their communication tech just exploded.

Encrypted emails still work.

I can't believe they didn't strip all their electronics to check for bombs. Basically asking for it.

IIRC it’s a liquid explosive that’s injected into the battery, so there’s nothing physical to check for.

Lol no. That'd mean inventing a whole new type of explosive that can be inside an working battery ?

Why - more likely these are custom made batteries no one thought to x-ray which were modified to have lower capacity and the empty space was taken up by a detonator and explosive. Much simpler.

What worries me is that the explosive compound might not exist at all. Maybe this is something that all lithium-ion batteries can do with the right command.

Maybe this is something that all lithium-ion batteries can do with the right command.

Rednecks blowing up batteries would have discovered it by now.

Come on. Short the battery, see if the effect is just as bad as a normal battery. Use sympathetic detonation to test if it is explosive. Use mass spectroscopy to test the chemical composition.

Other than that, a pretty ballsy power move by Mossad, betting on Hezbollah being to stupid to check for explosives in other electronics after learning that explosives were hidden in some of them.

Then again, any senior commander who personally handles electronics within 24h after learning that some of them had a tendency to explode is simply to trusting to live.

Short the battery

This won't do anything (other than causing a potential fire).

Explosives like that require an initial shock to actually detonate and overheating just sets them on fire (like it can set a regular battery).

If I had to hide an electronically ignited bomb in a battery, I would try to set it up so that a short ignites a primer which will ignite the explosive. Fill an electrical fuse with a primer which is volatile enough that the molten wire sets it off, perhaps?

The alternatives being that you have three leads on your battery (e.g. +, -, boom, where connecting boom with + will cause the explosion.), which is much more noticeable, or having another component which serves as a primer on the PCB near that battery. Of course, 'shorten the battery when receiving a particular message' is not a standard feature of most pagers, so you have to modify or swap the PCB anyhow, and putting the electronic ignition in there might be easier.

I concede that just because a battery is not rigged to explode on short it might still explode in other conditions.

Quite a lot of lipo have more than two leads, starting at a third thermistor wire, going up to per cell voltage leads, and eventually going to annoying Apple bullshit.

And even with two leads, if you're manufacturing a thousand battery-bombs, there's a lot of ways to do a one-wire (and ground) protocol to pass data to a microcontroller, which can easily be the size of a grain of rice. Or you could hard-short the battery leads on a battery without builtin overcurrent protections, and use it as a primary for your real explosives -- even a well-contained lipo fire is definitely hot enough to set off most thermal-ignite explosives.

Explosives like what? AFAIK the pager bombs were triggered by heat rather than shock.

PETN and any other similar explosives with enough power in such small size. At least PETN can be triggered by a spark which is simple enough to generate electronically (you just need a small transformer to produce high voltage and a very short spark gap).

Even if Hezbollah was checking (and we don't know they weren't), this is an extremely fast turn-around. The second tower was hit an hour within the first, and it doesn't really project incompetence that it wasn't protected sooner.

Reminds me of Jack London fiction where a lone genius found a way to explode gun powder remotely

There has been a third assassination attempt against former President Donald Trump. Police discovered a car bomb pre-placed near a site in Long Island where a Trump rally was scheduled to be held tomorrow. As the device was found well in advance of the rally, no one was harmed.

Where are you seeing this?

The ever-trustworthy Daily Mail says

'Reports of explosives being found at the site are unfounded,' said Nassau County Commissioner of Police Patrick Ryde.

'There is a person who is being questioned who may have been training a bomb detection dog near the site. The individual with the bomb dog falsely reported explosives being found and that individual is currently being detained by police.'

This…raises its own set of questions, but isn’t exactly Operation Valkyrie.

The ever-trustworthy Daily Mail says

I've been hearing these kind of jabs at the Daily Mail for years, but have they actually done something that would put them below CNN, NYT, MSNBC, CBC, etc.?

Almost all of their hard news comes directly from the newswires. They are no more or less reliable than any other paper that gets their news from the Associate Press et al, which is most of them, most of the time.

Their reputation comes from their populist-right editorials and trashy features like this. Right-wing politics plus celebrity gossip puts them in the firing line of the British PMC.

It’s marketed as a tabloid. I’m not really clear on the history there, but it generally has more interest in celebrity scandals and sports.

That just means their stories are more low-brow, not that they're less trustworthy, no?

Unless it came with a faster turnaround time and a reputation for leaping before they look. I don’t have data to back that up, mind you. Wikipedia offers a list of premature communications; they are naturally hard to compare to other outlets.

It’s noteworthy that most of the extremist attacks this election have been anti-Trump, while a section of the population still believes that the Republican Party is the “radical”, “extremist”, “violent” party. This is despite Republicans having twice the gun ownership, and being out of office. Judge a tree by its fruits. Who is producing the most violent radicals? This shows (once again) that media propaganda can exist completely outside the realm of facts — propaganda doesn’t need facts to undergird it, you can genuinely just manufacture and shill it.

‘Violent’ and ‘extremist’ now have meanings no more connected to their actual dictionary definitions than ‘misinformation’.

I still want to hear someone using the term "far-right" make a distinction between that and just "right."

I mean the last guy voted for Trump in 2016, though turned against him pretty sharply. So I am not sure that really supports your thesis here as to who is producing what.

Routh? No.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2024/09/17/ryan-wesley-routh-not-registered-republican-fact-check/75254525007/

Public records in North Carolina, where Routh is a longtime voter, show he has been registered as an unaffiliated voter for years but has most recently voted for and donated to the Democratic Party. An elections official confirmed that Routh was also registered as a Democrat at one point

He is now, but in his book and tweets from 4 years ago he said he voted for Trump in 2016 and deeply regretted it afterwards.

He was lying for clout. No records exist of him voting in 2016. Plenty of records of him donating to Democrats exist.

Saying that Trump was your choice, is not likely to get you clout as a Democrat in the current era. He tweeted at Trump that he was his choice in 2016 but was disappointed with him. Even if we allow that we don't have a record of him voting, that doesn't mean he was lying about being a Trump supporter back then. After all he also said he supported Gabbard, Vivek, Halley and Sanders at various points. He doesn't tend to stick with one party it seems, but he does seem to like outsider candidates.

He clearly had shifted towards Democrat's at the very least (though he believed Covid was a bio attack by the Chinese, so he was somewhat heterodox for a Democrat), but his statements that he supported Trump are indeed weak evidence that he did. People can change their affiliations and Trump did pick up many places Obama had won prior. Statistically there will indeed be many people today who voted for Trump in 2016 who are now Democrats. And indeed many people who voted for Obama who then became Republicans.

He lied about voting for Trump, so why do we immediately start believing the next-weakest claim, that he supported Trump? I have a hundred million dollars. No you don't. Ok, but I have 99 million dollars. Ok yeah.

Meanwhile, what radicalizes a guy to try shooting Trump? It doesn't happen in a vacuum. It comes on ten years of media calling Trump a threat to democracy, a traitor selling the country to Russia, a violent fascist thug who needs to be executed, take him out and beat him, put his severed bloody head on TV, talk about blowing up the White House -- what, I apologized, and Trump deserved it for all his violent rhetoric, I can't believe Republicans would try shooting him like this.

Meanwhile, what radicalizes a guy to try shooting Trump? It doesn't happen in a vacuum. It comes on ten years of media calling Trump a threat to democracy, a traitor selling the country to Russia, a violent fascist thug who needs to be executed, take him out and beat him, put his severed bloody head on TV, talk about blowing up the White House -- what, I apologized, and Trump deserved it for all his violent rhetoric, I can't believe Republicans would try shooting him like this.

In that case, do you think that Trump and/or the conservative media ecosystem are responsible for the Pittsburgh synagogue shooting, the El Paso walmart shooting or the Buffalo shooting in 2022?

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It doesn't happen in a vacuum. It comes on ten years of media calling Trump a threat to democracy, a traitor selling the country to Russia, a violent fascist thug who needs to be executed, take him out and beat him, put his severed bloody head on TV, talk about blowing up the White House -- what, I apologized, and Trump deserved it for all his violent rhetoric, I can't believe Republicans would try shooting him like this.

Sure, but none of this in anyway indicates he might not have been a Trump supporter at some point who became disillusioned. You are in fact describing how that could have happened. If we are believing all his stuff about Ukraine and disliking Trump now, the most likely explanation is that his previous statements are also true. He did think Trump was a good choice, and then whether by Trump's actions or by the media, or by a mixture of both, he came to despise him.

There is no reason for him to lie about Trump being his choice all the way back in 2020 publicly. It doesn't impact what he tried to do now, other than, if it is true that disaffected ex-Trump supporters or ex-Republicans are more likely to try to kill him, because converts and those who feel betrayed are more zealous in their new belief systems, it might slightly shift who needs to be watched more carefully.

If both Crooks and Routh were ex-Republicans or ex-Trump supporters who turned against him then that is important information when trying to keep Trump alive. It doesn't say anything about the morality of current Republicans or Trump supporters. I'm not trying to make a political point or to shift blame, rather than observing than if both attempted killers were currently Blue affiliated, but seemed to previously not be, then that is really important information if you are a Trump supporter or do not want him killed. 1) Because stopping that happening seems pretty important generally, and 2) Because it shifts the profile of likely further attackers.

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People keep saying this as if it's gospel, but it's based on a tweet where he was being critical of Trump. The format basically being "I thought you were different man but it turns out you were a fraud this whole time! I voted for you in 2016 because I didn't think you were a total complete fraud but it turns out you a fraud and always have been and people should vote for my lord and savior, Kamala Harris! Or he Republicans, you should support Nikki Haley!"

People lie. Especially delusional people on the internet when they're trying to push an agenda may lie about things like who they voted for 8 years ago.

Meanwhile he's been donating to Democrats since 2012, has Kamala stickers on his truck, and obviously champions Democrat causes.

It's an absurd level of cope to try and claim that the guy who has been donating to Democrats, litearlly volunterring in Ukraine, putting Democrat stickers on his car, and trying to murder Donald Trump is somehow mysteriously a Trump voter.

His self-published book also said he voted for Trump, and there isn't a lot of reason to disbelieve that. He clearly turned sharply away from Trump and did indeed donate to ActBlue etc. So i am not saying he is a Trump supporter now, but it appears he once was.

A person who feels betrayed by their own candidate or side can often become more vicious than a standard believer. Converts and dissidents are famously more zealous. See also Rick Wilson who also clearly hates Trump.

He didn't vote in 2016. He was lying.

Wasn't the guy who shot Trump in the ear a registered Republican?

He had donated to ActBlue and attempted to kill the Republican incumbent. A Republican would not do this, but a Democrat would have a motive to vote in a Republican mid-term.

There are Republicans who hate Trump (see Rick Wilson for a start), so I don't think we can say a Republican never would.

Indeed quotes from his school mates also paint him as conservative:

According to The Philadelphia Inquirer, former classmates remember 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks as a mild-mannered right-winger. “He was definitely a conservative,” said Max R. Smith, one of his ex-classmates.

When remembering Crooks, a classmate described a debate in American history class. “The majority of the class were on the liberal side, but Tom, no matter what, always stood his ground on the conservative side,” Smith said. “That’s still the picture I have of him. Just standing alone on one side while the rest of the class was on the other.”

So he registered as a Republican, his classmates say he was conservative, and he donated to a Blue PAC and presumably watched GunTube. At the very least he clearly wasn't a standard Democrat.

He also gave money to a leftist political group. In any case, both would-be assassins pattern match for mental illness more than they do any coherent political viewpoint. Why should we care about what particular flavor of crazy they were?

The bigger issue for the second attempt is the media downplaying and even justifying it.

In states with closed primaries (like Pennsylvania), there are plenty of reasons to register as a member of a party you don't really agree with completely to vote in the primary. As a voter in an open primary state, I tend to choose which primary to vote in to maximize the volume from my vote, not because I consider myself a member of a partisan group.

Recently Trump's campaign published a massive list of calls to violence against him by Democratic operatives in government and media. There are clips of Democratic operatives on cable news saying someone needs to put a bullet into Donald Trump.

It's old now, but I wonder if anyone remembers the first season of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. I haven't watched it in probably 15-20 years, but a major plotline from it is that the intelligence services essentially meme an assassination attempt of a prominent politician into reality. They craft this narrative around the politicians inevitable assassination at the hands of an unstoppable and mysterious foe, The Laughing Man, and a "Stand Alone Complex" kicks in and rando's take up the call to be the Laughing Man. And all this serves as misdirection to the security forces trying to protect the politician, because they are on the lookout for a elite assassination scheme, and instead an army of tards attacks.

Anyways, what was I saying?

It's old now, but I wonder if anyone remembers the first season of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex. I haven't watched it in probably 15-20 years, but a major plotline from it is that the intelligence services essentially meme an assassination attempt of a prominent politician into reality.

In the first season, it's a combination trying to meme the assassination of a corrupt police chief, lead primarily by a retired military corrupt politician ("General Secretary" in the dub, probably a mistranslation of cabinet secretary). ((It's also marginal as an example of a Stand-Alone Complex. The original hacker Laughing Man did exist, and the protagonists meet him; the lack of a true original comes from him discovered the underlying conspiracy of his time thanks to either an accident or someone airdropping a file on him, and because the violent actions the Laughing Man archetype developed after the original friendly kidnapping were a result of said cabinet secretary trying to play up the 'bad acts' and the Laughing Man logo getting used everywhere... as it did in real life.))

It's the second season where intelligence services other than Section 9 are involved; the Individual Eleven manifesto (which doesn't actually exist as a written text) is somewhere between an invasive meme and a straight-up brain-computer virus built to force those with certain traits into a murder-suicide plot targeting the Prime Minister, masterminded by a high-level incredibly annoying Central Intelligence Service bureaucrat.

Just pointing out Rick Wilson is an anti-Trump Republican though, he is certainly not a Democrat, given his positions on anything except Trump. And the attempted shooter at the golf course had also voted for Trump before sharply turning away from him. How much of this is about dissident Republicans or supporters who feel very strongly about Trump?

This is not to minimise it, I really do not want Trump to be assassinated. But sometimes those who hate the most are those who feel betrayed by their own side/choice. Splits or schisms within religions or ideologies are often more vicious than between opposing ideologies. We expect the side we don't like to suck, but when its your own side it hits deeper. See Protestant vs Catholic, Night of Long Knives, Stalin vs Lenin/Trotsky etc. Both Wilson and Routh clearly hate Trump, but neither are examples of standard Democrats.

And the attempted shooter at the golf course had also voted for Trump

This appears to be untrue.

https://www.yahoo.com/news/did-ryan-routh-actually-vote-144911519.html?guccounter=1

North Carolina voter records show he voted in 2012, but show a gap between 2012 and 2024, when the unaffiliated voter cast a vote in the Democratic primary in North Carolina.

Right, his tweet was that his choice to support was Trump in 2016 not that he voted for him.

I think it is a cultural thing. Almost all of the members of all the political tribes (myself certainly included) are at most armchair activists who mostly post on social media. The people who are willing to use gun violence to further their political aims are always a tiny minority, but the size of that minority differs very much dependent on the tribe.

In a bizzaro world where Trump dropped out of the race and Adolf Hitler became the replacement candidate, the blue tribe would certainly feel that Hitler needs shooting. But the average coastal city-dweller who puts their pronouns on twitter is certainly not going to snipe Hitler. On the other hand, if parts of the red tribe feel that Hitler needs shooting (which they would), a small fraction of these actually have the capabilities to carry out a serious assassination attempt.

So if say 10% of the blue tribe think that the US would be better off if someone killed Trump, and if 1% (Lizardman constant and all that) of the red tribe also thought that, I would expect most serious attempts to come from from the people at least vaguely associated with the red tribe.

This is not universal, but specific to the US. Gun culture, 2nd amendment (violently resisting tyrants) and all that are very much red tribe coded. In post-war Germany, the highest profile assassinations (such as the RAF killing an AG) were carried out by left wing terrorists, who picked up gun handling skills over a few years in the underground.

There is certainly the possibility that some fringe left people decided to get really good at long distance shooting in 2020 for the specific purpose of murdering anyone who would in their eyes turn America into a fascist dictatorship. But that is a very lonely path, you would have to tell all your blue tribe friends "I practice rifle shooting because it is fun" which would be received about as well as "my hobby is tuning my diesel engine so that it emits as much smoke as possible". From the state's point of view, keeping tabs on a few blue tribe activists who own long arms is much easier than figuring out who among the zillions of rifle-owning red tribe activists is actually likely to climb on some roof and shoot a candidate and who is only cosplaying with their tactical vests.

At a certain level this is a distinction without a difference. Trump wasn't attacked by his enemies on the left, but by other enemies allied with the left who... Taking the Rick Wilson example. Rick hates Trump, endorses Democrats, takes money from Democrats, etc. etc. Maybe at some level he'll call himself a Republican, but at this point that sounds like marketing. If tomorrow Tulsi Gabbard called for Biden to be shot, we wouldn't say, "wow, the radical left at it again." But we all know where the lines are really drawn.

This is really one of the key points of American politics over the last 15 years: Conservatives feel that elected Republicans don't represent them. Conservatives would overwhelmingly not identify Rick Wilson as one of them. So it feels like bullshit to pin him (or other such) on us just because he continues to call himself a Republican for rhetorical purposes. If I rob a store in shoe polish does that prove black crime?

Conservatives feel that elected Republicans don't represent them. Conservatives would overwhelmingly not identify Rick Wilson as one of them.

This is probably true, but being a Republican and being a Conservative are not the same thing. He presumably feels that his party is no longer what it once was, and I think he is correct. Whether it is better or worse depends on who is doing the judging, but he at least clearly feels Trump has hijacked the party.

I am not saying he is right to feel that way, or that the Republican party is not more representative of much of its electorate now (I think it is, or at least is cosplaying it while Trump is around, we'll see how things go after him), but rather his level of hate is driven by that feeling of betrayal, which looks to be much stronger than even the average Democrat. So strong he created an entire organization to try and stop Trump getting elected and is willing to work with people he also disagrees with just to do that.

The “Hitler 2.0” argument proves way too much. Do Democrats hate fertilizer bombs so much they wouldn’t use them on Turbo Hitler? How about samurai swords?

No, people don’t assassinate Presidents because of a more general principle: it’s fucking stupid. It’s difficult, it’s suicide, and there’s so much better to do with their time. They go ride a bike or chat up girls instead. The exceptions are a long tail of nutjobs. Some tiny percent of them make the dumb fucking choice and try to impress Jodie Foster.

Which means the load-bearing part of your theory is the last line. Are the Democrats doing a better job corralling the crazies? Does the kind of illness that gravitates to radical leftism tend towards lower functionality than the radical right? I’m not sure. I just know you can’t use it to understand more mainstream motives.

I do think that the radical left tends to attract lower-functioning nut jobs than the radical right, for what it’s worth. We don’t hear about white supremacist compounds in Idaho disintegrating because no one did chores the way anti capitalist coffee shops do.

The spread between democrats and republicans in gun ownership is real, but it’s not that big- there’s plenty of democrat gun owners. And while AR-15 ownership probably skews way more right wing, a deer rifle would work just as well.

I guess the implication here is that Trump will eventually get got by an elite hacker who can’t appear on cable news?

His name is 4chan.

Who is this “Four Chan”?

Nassau County police are currently denying this.

Is this like the Chinese balloon thing where it turns out low-sophistication incursions happen all the time and just never get detected or reported on until a big event draws everyone’s attention to the issue?

Since we just had a discussion on whether #MeToo has run out of steam last week: Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs jailed by judge after sex trafficking indictment

Combs was arrested Monday in Manhattan, roughly six months after federal authorities raided his luxurious homes in Los Angeles and Miami.

A conviction on every charge would require at least 15 years in prison, with the possibility of a life sentence.

The indictment describes Combs as the head of a criminal enterprise that engaged or attempted to engage in sex trafficking, forced labor, interstate transportation for purposes of prostitution, drug offenses, kidnapping, arson, bribery and obstruction of justice.

Combs and his associates wielded his “power and prestige” to intimidate and lure women into his orbit, “often under the pretense of a romantic relationship,” according to the indictment.

It alleges that Combs used explicit recordings as “collateral” to ensure the women’s continued obedience and silence. He also exerted control over victims by promising career opportunities, providing and threatening to withhold financial support, dictating how they looked, monitoring their health records and controlling where they lived, according to the indictment.

This sounds very similar to the tactics used by Keith Raniere, which bodes ill for Diddy.

He's always been a Weinstein figure in hip hop (both in the sexual deviant sense and because he fit the stereotype of record/studio owner screwing artists over better than any Jewish exec in hip hop at this poinnt). Most of the stories centered around his homosexuality in perhaps the most openly homophobic genre. But, as with Weinstein, this goes way past the lurid stories passed around for years.

Funnily enough, I was just watching a video of one of the victims of Raniere [talk about the FBI's recalcitrance to take on the case up until it became public, at which point "speed of government" ceased to be a joke.

In this case, I wonder if Cassie's very public lawsuit against Diddy, facilitated by the Adult Survivor's Act and its extension of the statute of limitations (the same thing that got Trump in trouble with E. Jean Carroll) is what opened him up to a more vigorous investigation?

So, a MeToo win or not?

FWIW, I think that this definitely qualifies as MeToo. Powerful man, coercion, promise of advancement, all there. Much more severe than most such cases, imo.

Of course, the ASA (besides being a lex Trump) reads like a prime example of an ex post facto law, which Article one, sections 9 and 10 of the US constitution would prohibit.

But of course I am reading that all wrong. You see, the framers intent of these sections was clearly to only prohibit ex post facto laws concerning criminal cases resulting in criminal punishment, which is defined as narrowly as humanly thinkable. Having to register as a sex offender, being banned from owning firearms or even being locked up indefinitely are clearly not punishments, and having to pay money to some other party never is.

This goes hand in hand with the triple jeopardy for the same act practiced by the US. First we try you in state court. If you get acquitted in state court, we can still try you in federal court. If you also get acquitted there, we will still allow civil cases which might bankrupt you but will at least not send you to prison (unless you do not comply with the definitely-not-a-punishment regulatory prohibition to own firearms, for example).

In Germany, from my understanding, most criminal allegations go to court once only (not counting either side contesting the verdict). Generally, if you want to get damages from the defendant, you would become a joint plaintiff (Nebenklaeger). A civil court will generally be very reluctant to make a finding of fact that one party committed a criminal act in contradiction to the finding of fact of an earlier criminal trial. I also think the statue of limitations for claiming damages is the same as for the criminal act on which they are based, 'we convicted the arsonist but you can't have him pay for your house because the civil statue of limitations expired' would be silly.

--

However, here, the charges made against Combs are clearly criminal charges. I don't know how the law is in NY, so it could be that without the ASA, none of the women who alleged sex crimes would have seen a single penny from Combs, so their motivation would have been limited to sending a sex offender to jail, which is of course not as good a motivation for the painful act of going on the stand and detailing degrading sex acts as the prospect of earning a few millions in damages is.

So is Diddy gay, bi or straight according to this latest evidence?

Yes.

Sorry, couldn't resist.

He seems like an equal opportunity degenerate frankly, raping women and having them used by male sex workers/his friends.

I skimmed the indictment and it doesn't seem to mark him as having a singular preference. It's naturally focused around the trafficking and prostitutions

My suspicion is that it isn't related to MeToo at all.

Powerful people in DC are still enraged about Musk's purchase of Twitter. This arrest happened shortly after it was revealed that Diddy invested in the Twitter purchase.

So I think that Merrick Garland saw Diddy's name in the Twitter investors and told the FBI to dust off their Diddy file and throw the book at him.

This would mean that either, they decided not to act on the info they had before because: (1) They found the allegations not credible and were doubtful that they could make anything stick (2) They found them credible, but were uninterested in enforcing sex crime laws against a high profile target

Now, (2) would be in contradiction to how I would expect a blue tribe, political DA to act. Securing a criminal conviction in a high profile #MeToo case seems like the best strategy for reelection.

(1) might be credible if we were talking about Trump. The narrative 'since 2021, the blue tribe is panicking about Trump and brings any half-baked allegations to court' has at least some merits to it. But Combs is very much not Trump, and putting a few millions (??) in twitter is not Trump-running-for-president level of evil in the mind of the progressives.

Seriously?

You think Merrick Garland’s secret vendetta against Twitter is more likely than the FBI pouncing on an ongoing public spectacle?

I’m not convinced it’s related to twitter either, but it is kind of strange it took them this long

The DHS was raiding him back in March. I think this kind of case just takes a while. It’s not like he’s going anywhere.

Haitians in Springfield eating cats appears to be at least a little more than just a wild rumor. A woman filed a police report on August 28th after her cat went missing and she found meat/gore in her Haitian neighbors' yard that she believed to be her cat's:

https://x.com/nicksortor/status/1836159326861562275

No information on if the police ever investigated further to confirm or deny this report.

For those of you who didn't believe the story, does this new evidence change your view, and in what direction? I was already leaning towards it being likely due to my prior knowledge of Haitian cuisine including cats, and the police call recording from Springfield about Haitians stealing geese from the park.

Somewhat symmetrically, does the WSJ follow-up with woman where she states the cat returned alive and well after this report was made change your view?

Not saying this proves anything one way or the other, but have you ever skimmed through the call logs of your local police department? I think they're all public record. I used to work at a community newspaper and we would get the logs once a week and look for potential stories. There is some crazy shit and I would guess at least 25% of the logs I used to read were the rantings of people who were not mentally well and should not be taken at face value.

Just like the American Office is a much more popular adaptation of the British original, the Haitians eating cats thing is really just a rip-off of Bangladeshis eating serving cats in their curry houses.

Or maybe it was gypsies eating swans.

I think it’s worth noting that while the locals don’t seem to disbelieve the cats story, their primary complaint is about bad driving. This serves as evidence that if the Haitians do eat an occasional pet, it’s pretty uncommon.

Have you ever tried to eat a live cat while driving? It's not easy. Accidents are bound to happen.

Too be fair, doing anything with a live cat while driving is pretty dangerous. And god help you if it sees a flashing light.

Wow, a story based on one dude on Twitter has been corroborated by…one dude on Twitter. I suppose I could suggest that the account is lying, the police report is fake, or its author was mistaken, but I’ll assume for the sake of argument that it’s perfectly true.

Consider the following statements:

  1. Humans occasionally eat weird things.
  2. At least one of the Springfield Haitians has eaten a weird thing.
  3. The Springfield Haitians are more likely to eat weird things than Springfield’s other residents.
  4. Haitians in general are more likely to eat weird things
  5. Haitians have an overwhelming reason to eat weird things such that it should be expected.

This tweet is evidence for 1 and 2. It says little about 3, less about 4, and almost nothing about 5. Unfortunately, almost everyone agrees on 1 and 2. That makes tweets like this pretty useless as wedges.

But that doesn’t matter if one can move the goalposts! Democrats say “no evidence,” which means they’re denying 2, which means this owns them with FACTS and LOGIC. Republicans complaint about squatting and driving and geese, which means they’re building consensus for 4, which means they’re GROSS and RACIST.

We did it! We scored the points! The goalposts are over there, but that’s okay: we’re BOUND FOR STREET.

Firstly, after looking into Haitian cuisine and religious practices and noticing the size of the denominator, it seems unlikely that it isn't happening. Moreover, waiting for evidence isn't all that important, since whether the allegations are true or not, the probability of strong evidence being found and then fairly distributed is quite low. The nature of the act is just not easy to prove.

Secondly, I think more people should be eating the local wildlife. We have severe overpopulationa of deer, rabbits, and other prey species across most if the US. Humans have displaced predators, but they have not taken up their responsibility to fulfil the ecological function predation serves. This has been highly destructive to local ecosystems. Wild cats and outdoor cats are almost as much of a problem because they destroy bird populations. Frankly, the Haitians are probably doing an ecological service while also getting a free meal, so it's a win-win scenario.

Thirdly, if it was my goal to create ethnic and racial conflict, then I could hardly think of a better way than to dump thousands of Haitians on to small town Ohio. These allegations, the suspicions, the resentments, the prejudices, etc., whether true or false, are all obvious consequences of throwing radically different people together while also encouraging a system of racial identity and spoils. This is just what happens when people don't speak the same language and have radically different cultures and values. It's not an historical anomaly--this is what usually happens. It's not even irrational, since these groups really are different, their interests do not align, and they're being pitted against one another. If the Haitians had power, then they'd almost certainly be behaving far worse toward their outgroup.

The real enemy is clearly the NGOs, politicians, and bureaucrats who made this happen.

Tangential rebuttal to the idea that we should be eating the local wildlife: I'd like to not get prion diseases. This is admittedly more specific to deer, and I can get behind an "eat more rabbits from your backyard" proposal. But the prevalence of CWD, the difficulty of killing and butchering a deer without damaging and blood-mixing any part of the nervous system, and the fact that the harmful protein remains a stable environmental contaminant in the soil for years, compels me toward lower-risk culling of deer.

Lots of people eat venison. We’re fine.

does this new evidence change your view

Not even a little.

A Vance spokesperson on Tuesday provided The Wall Street Journal with a police report in which a resident had claimed her pet might have been taken by Haitian neighbors. But when a reporter went to Anna Kilgore’s house Tuesday evening, she said her cat Miss Sassy, which went missing in late August, had actually returned a few days later—found safe in her own basement.

Folk epistemology really does boil down to literal witch hunts and blood libel if it festers long enough. I’m not sure what to do with this information. Go back to mainstream institutions controlling national discourse?

What about this is blood libel?

What about this is blood libel?

If you wade into the X threads where the Cats thing got started, there are now nascent claims of voodoo and, yes, cannibalism.

Voodoo and cannibalism are real things practiced in Haiti. That's not blood libel, that's anthropology. It happens in Africa too.

The part where a few migrants catching ducks and geese at the park turns into a nationwide panic over Haitans eating other people’s housepets. People are already talking about Haitian voodoo and cannibalism. It’s not hard to see where this would go in the absence of constraints.

Deporting illegal migrants and not letting in new ones?

It’s not hard to see where this would go in the absence of constraints.

Nationwide riots and a guy getting burned to death in his shop? A neighborhood declaring itself an independent territory, resulting in several unsolved murders?

My goodness, we can imagine almost anything could happen at all!

Edit: 'Pet discourse' is incredibly stupid. Vagueing about where it might go in the absence of constraints is only somewhat less so, since anything happening requires much more than mere absence of constraints.

There's also this tweet of a Springfield city manager saying he bas received complaints about people losing their lets:

https://x.com/GrageDustin/status/1836178999178866766

Is it gauche to refer to my own post https://www.themotte.org/post/1160/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/249419?context=8#context

Where I specifically said that there would be a race between 'HAH THEY ARE EATING CATS' and 'can we please stop talking about cats' conservatives?

JD Vance folded, said that he was making things up to get the conversation going. Trump hasn't mentioned it once more. Any unearthing of proximate evidence is burning sacrifices to a dead god. The point was fumbled, and memory holing is the best strategy. Repeatedly digging up this corpse to pretend it can still tapdance is not really helping advance the cause.

JD Vance folded, said that he was making things up to get the conversation going.

This is a gross misrepresentation of what JD Vance said. Yes, his exact words were "If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that's what I'm going to do". IMHO though, in the full context of the back and forth he said that, "stories" is analogous to "headline" not "fiction". If some journalist, and he's arguing with a journalist, was having a conversation where they said they created or wrote a story, you wouldn't not assume they meant they were passing off their own fiction as news. "News story" is a colloquial phrase. Almost every news outlet brags about having "top stories". Vance is clearly talking about creating a news cycle, not making shit up.

Who says "if I have to do [X thing] to bring about [good thing], I will" if X is good or neutral? This is transparently self-justifying talk, which creates the context for "story" meaning "lie", not "headline".

Very stupid way for a seasoned political operative to put it then.

Yeah, it was so stupid of JD Vance to use the exact same language his opponents use, ignorant to the fact that they can redefine language at their whim. Just so stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

The game isn't fair and the points are made up. When you have to be twice as good to get half as far, a lot hinges on that "twice as good" bit.

What he said might have been smart, but the fact that I misinterpreted it proves that it was actually dumb.

JD Vance is actually speaking to the public as an adult instead of giving empty word salad platitude answers.

What he said might have been smart, but the fact that I misinterpreted it proves that it was actually dumb.

Unironically. There are more dumb people than smart people (or just people who aren't paying that much attention). Vance's 3D chess playing audience is outnumbered by people like me.

I for one prefer politicians who talk like adults to smooth-talking bullshitters. He's not even saying anything complicated.

I'm sure it's a total coincidence that not a single conservative politician has even been a seasoned enough political operative to avoid having some sentence somewhere reframed dishonestly in ways that a) every mainstream news organization repeats and b) no mainstream news organization corects.

It's not a coincidence, obviously. They'll find something.

It's preferable they find "binders full of women" than you saying what Vance said. All you can do is minimize.

There's an argument for some Trump-style disagreeableness on important things. But I'd be making this argument if a Democrat spoke this way. This is not the sort of thing you want a paragraph-long explainer on. Waste of time.

Harris died in 2020 because she couldn't walk back her stupid defund rhetoric, and Biden eclipsed her totally on the campaign trail, with literally zero support for Defund The Police from Biden, not a single sanewashing soundbite. If you fuck up your point by saying something stupid, you power through and cede it so your efforts go somewhere productive.

Trump and Vance can still point to immigrant salvadorans and hondurans fucking up NYC. They don't do so because urbanites suffering hubris is a desired outcome for Trump, Trumps existing supporters and the remaining centrists who dislike far left open border crazies. Trying to tie the migrant threat to soccer mom suburbanites failed, and I'm not sure there is time to reload the chamber even if another bullet existed.

It's preferable they find "binders full of women" than you saying what Vance said.

Genuinely not sure about that. "I will do what I have to do, because this is important," may play quite well even among floating voters. It signifies strength and commitment (dishonesty, but pointed in a good direction). The "binders full of women" thing just came across as kind of sad, even for people who knew it had been misquoted. "I have binders full of people I want to promote to positions they weren't able to obtain under their own power" isn't exactly heartening.

I’m tapping the sign right now.

Journos Delenda est

*delendi sunt

Yeah, fair enough.

JD Vance folded, said that he was making things up to get the conversation going.

That's not exactly what he said.

Trump hasn't mentioned it once more.

So what? Trump is a busy guy. He isn't exactly backing off. He just had to deal with the fallout of a second assassin. Then he gives appearances and interviews. I could post a 20-minute monologue Trump just made connecting Tariffs, the Afghanistan pullout, China selling weapons, and the destiny of Michigan and its auto industry to be even greager than it has ever been.

The point was fumbled, and memory holing is the best strategy.

What point was fumbled? The Biden-Harris is bringing in millions of illegals under TPS and dumping them in small towns. They drive down wages and are a strain on basic social services. They kill people with reckless driving. Landlords use them to drive out tenants for more money. And some of them are even eating pets.

The biggest thing that's bugging me about it is the continued use of "no evidence" when people mean "weak evidence" and are using "no evidence" as an attack on the credibility of their opponents in a way that makes me think of Russell Conjugation. Consider, for a moment, how the accusations Christine Blasey Ford were treated - the key word that stands out in my mind was the phrasing that she made "credible allegations". The actual evidence for her claims is reasonably on par with the Springfield allegations, which is to say that it's physically possible, not proven false by established facts, and not so improbable in a Bayesian sense to discard altogether. When someone wants to believe something, a piece of evidence like that police report makes it a "credible allegation"; when they don't want to believe something, eyewitness or firsthand testimony shifts from being weak evidence to being "no evidence".

I make credible allegations, you offer unproven claims, he asserts without evidence.

The first thing that came to my mind was that animal killing may be part of some Vodun/Voodoo or other magical ritual. I tried to google it now and it seems that the internet was already scraped. You can easily avoid it by limiting the google search to before August 2024. Here are some articles. National Geographic in 2004

These disembodied spirits are believed to become tired and worn down—and rely on humans to "feed" them in periodic rituals, including sacrifices. "It's not the killing of the animals that matters," Corbett said. "It's the transfer of life energy back to the Loa."

Another one from Slate in 2013 describing sacrifice of goat

The life energy of the animal is for the Lwa. Often the blood is collected in a calabash bowl and later placed on the Poto Mitan, which represents the center of the universe and access to the spirit world.

Another article from New York Times that mentions that 90% of Haitians practice some form of voodoo and has this to say about animal sacrifice:

I talk about sacrifice a lot. That is usually the first order of questioning. People find themselves offended by it. And then I usually ask, 'Do you eat chicken? Do you eat meat? How do you think the animal was killed? Do you feel any responsibility for it?'

And then we usually move on from there. The imagery surrounding blood sacrifice is much exaggerated. After the food is presented to the spirits as a gift, it is given back to the people by the spirits. It is all cooked and eaten, so none of it is wasted.

Here is an article about dog torture in West Africa. Just do your own research. It may not necessary be the issue of hungry people eating cats or dogs - although it definitely can happen - but it is also about tradition.

Here is an article about dog torture in West Africa.

The first sentence of that article literally reads:

Countless Countries Worldwide that are involved in the Dog and Cat Meat Trade are also heavily involved in the Barbaric Demonic Voodoo Animal Sacrifices, where they are using various methods of torture such as Beating Hanging, Setting Fire to Animals whilst they are still alive, Mutilation, Stabbing ,Tearing Animals apart with their Bare Hands and Eating them while they are still Alive.

I would give you 20% odds that this is a parody site, with The random Capitalization Thing going On.

While I am hardly the expert, Haitian Vodou and West African Vudun have diverged a few 100 years ago. So even if the most common sacrifice in contemporary Vudun are in fact dogs (which I concede by no means), concluding from that fact that Haitian Vodou also sacrifices dogs is a bit like observing that contemporary Roman Catholic priests have a tendency to fuck altar boys at higher than base rate and conclude from that that that Calvinist pastor is the prime suspect in your child rape case. Or indeed concluding that your Haitian is, because Catholicism is also a key ingredient of Vodou.

From my understanding, the animals most likely to being sacrificed in Vodou are exactly the same animals which Americans put on their barbecue, and Wikipedia claims the same:

Species used for sacrifice include chickens, goats, and bulls, with pigs often favored for Petwo lwa.

I am not saying that Haitian Vodou does not have its problems, it certainly does not seem to be as capable of fostering the creation of a functional state as various branches of Christianity are, but blaming it for missing cats in a country where you can simply buy a more traditional sacrifice like a chicken for a few bucks seems implausible.

I keep trying to draw some sort of second-order conclusions from the Haitians eating cats thing. Is it supposed to sway people who were on the fence about border controls? Like, if it is true - then what? I imagine the leftist response to this story being absolutely confirmed would be:

0.) Continue to deny it anyway.
1.) When they have learned our country's norms they'll stop, it's not really their fault.
2.) Even if it's true, it's their culture and we should respect it, not try to change them to be like us.
3.) Either way the good they bring outweighs the bad.

Even my liberal dad admitted, he would feel concern about having 20,000 Haitians added to his community all at once. My impression as a private citizen has been that this reinforces something already true about America: the only way you can control who lives near you is to make more money. You have to continually move up the housing ladder so that you can live only near people who can afford to do the same thing; this is the only way to ensure you live near pro-social people. The poor people who were not able to leave Springfield when its industries crashed - they are "suffering what they must."

If it was true, then of course we have never denied it and you are racist for not respecting their cultural traditions. (OTOH, woke people really prefer dogs to pigs to some unreasonable degree, so perhaps it goes 'we have never denied it and anyway it is just a few isolated incidents and does not matter, why would you even talk about that anyhow')

That being said, I think it is very likely that it is either a complete fabrication or that it will never be proven beyond reasonable doubt. I just don't think that Trump operates the way that he would only make such an outrageous claim if he had ironclad proof, instead, he likely read the claim on twitter somewhere and that is close enough to the truth for him.

I think that the culture war playbook of the left here is solid. By focusing on one outrageous claim from Trump, they can reframe the whole discussion about what the benefits and downsides of suddenly having 20k refugees from the third world in your town, which is not an argument where the left is likely to win, into an argument if Haitians eat cats, which they can be reasonably certain to win.

You have to continually move up the housing ladder so that you can live only near people who can afford to do the same thing; this is the only way to ensure you live near pro-social people.

I think one of the key selling points of woke ideology over traditional left-wing ideologies is that it goes so well with economic inequality. A Marxist paying ten times the rent a member of the working class makes might have to face the cognitive dissonance of himself qualifying as an enemy of the working class.

In the woke mindset, economic disadvantage is an effect, not a cause. You are poor because you are black or female in a bigoted society, not because your parents were poor. (I guess if you are a poor white male, you are probably poor because you are either lazy or terrible racist and sexist.) This frees you to discriminate against poor people in a way which a traditional leftist would fine shameful. If you manage to keep the poor out of your neighborhood, you are basically all set, that black lawyer or immigrant doctor who can afford to live in your suburb are very unlikely to be involved in violent crime, hence any claims that a culture celebrating crime festers in any minorities are just racist libel.

I am finding the open way this is being handled really interesting.

  1. Assert a provocative claim you heard on TV.
  2. Later admit you were just creating a story to help get the word out about something else. (The story may prove to be a lie, but maybe lying to lead people to other truths can be a noble pursuit.)
  3. Try to find evidence for the claim anyway.
  4. If it was true on some level in some instance, act vindicated. Quietly thank the lord that your story turned out to have some basis. (To do this, you should really need to find multiple dogs and cats eaten in Springfield, but a single example across the whole nation also counts as vindication because you don't need the original claim to be true, you just need it to seem slightly less ridiculous.)
  5. If no adequate evidence can be found, keep investigating. (You still have the hope a news story will surface that backs the original claim, or that a crazy person will fake evidence good enough to move you to 4.)
  6. If no adequate evidence comes along, maybe try accusing others of using distraction techniques. How dare they go on about eating cats and dogs when the future of the country is at stake?

This level of information hygiene is so unhealthy for everyone exposed to it.

I still think that overall, mentioning the cat eating thing was a mistake by Trump, because it allowed the Democrats to reframe the debate in a way which is very advantageous for them.

The best argument I can find for it being a good move on Trumps part is not that he expects that some evidence will be found, but that he knows that 'Trump lies' is already common knowledge. The median Trump voter will not say "What? He lied on national TV? Now I can't vote for him". They know that he lies about everything from the size of his inauguration crowd to his affairs to random stuff he picked up on twitter or Fox News to (possibly) his golf scores. They vote for him regardless. Him being a liar is already priced in. Fighting Trump with fact checks is like trying to attack Lenin for not being very Christian.

So an easily disproved falsehood is him throwing a stick for the media to play fetch with, distracting them in a way unlikely to damage him.

Of course, the other side is also mostly post fact. Who cares if he is factually correct about the US having paid for gender transition surgery for some aliens, images of the Alien (1979) monsters in high heels are trending all over imgur not because Trump is wrong but because his point if found ridiculous.

I think the media on both sides is mostly preaching to the choir. While mobilizing the people firmly on your side is sound strategy, I think both sides fail to put themselves into the mind of a voter who is still uncertain which of the options is the lesser evil. That voter is likely not so strongly anti-trans that he would get enraged by the US paying for some transition surgery more than he would be by the US generally paying for health care. He also would not care that Trump is lying on TV.

I still think that overall, mentioning the cat eating thing was a mistake by Trump, because it allowed the Democrats to reframe the debate in a way which is very advantageous for them.

Can you point to a statement offered or an issue raised by a Republican that has not allowed Democrats to reframe the debate in a way that is very advantageous to them?

... This seems to be smuggling a few assumptions in here.

There's a 0., where several politicians were repeating claims made by locals in Springfield. [The original writer has since retracted, albeit under media scrutiny that's... close to wrestling gif levels of coercion.]

And then there's a -1., where Vance specifically, the guy who first brought it to national attention, had also spent over a month highlighting other problems with Springfield's ability to handle the migrant influx of this scale, while being a Senator for the state. Ie, being very likely to get direct calls from people who complained to him.

[I don't think this is epistemically healthy, even if most conservatives aren't echoing Trump's mention of dogs. But on the other hand...]

I've been thinking all evening of what to say to this, and I just can't. How do you even see the responses to this and come to this conclusion? How do you watch lib journalists deny the Haitians even exist, falling back to more and more desperate lies as the truth comes out, and still turn this into "lying Republicans pounce"

Yglesias literally posted a rant about how it doesn't matter if it's true because Republicans "want to destroy Medicare", so people should lie or ignore it for Harris's sake.

Yglesias literally posted a rant about how it doesn't matter if it's true because Republicans "want to destroy Medicare", so people should lie or ignore it for Harris's sake.

Which rant was this?

I'm compiling a list of screenshots and links on my laptop to do an effort post on this. Will need to get a password reset or something so I can log in on there (don't know my motte password, just permanently logged in on phone)

But if you want to find it first it should be the most recent post where he mentions both cats and Medicare. Think twitter search still works for that, unless they've changed it again.

Technically Medicaid, but here:

The dishonesty of this shell game is so self-evident that it’s not worth dwelling on. The point is that they want to ban abortion, bankrupt social security, and toss people off Medicaid and dissembling is how they want to do it.

But it's not exactly subtle why he wants that framing, and it's the same game as always.

It doesn't seem to me that he is acknowledging that Haitians are eating cats. It's more like he's claiming that Haitians are not eating cats. Also, Medicaid.

I completely agree, but I also have a hard time caring when the other side isn't much better, but simply has better PR.

See the "trans surgery on illegal aliens" bit from the same debate, which was roundly mocked on twitter and in the media; Not only did most people not bother looking it up but basically just assumed it has to be made up bc it sounds so ridiculous, when others then showed articles on Kamala talking about precisely this they turned to flat-out lying that "this is just the headline, but her real words were about medically necessary treatment". Except that it's trivial to look up that it was explicitly stated that medically necessary as judged by mental health experts was sufficient. Which in practice includes, among many other things, trans surgery based on suicide risk. They even explicitly mention "gender transition surgery"!

Or now that I think about it, as naraburns pointed out this is pretty much 100% what they are doing for "abortion denial deaths", except with the added irony that any alleged example they have found so far is more accurately described as just "abortion death".

I'd be more interested in knowing if they caught and ate any geese or not.

When I saw the reddit post of the black dude with the canadian goose, I had two thoughts:

a) theres gonna be an INCREDIBLY stupid point about immigration being made about this

b) that fucking goose had it coming

Wild animals are not cute pets just waiting for a human to show it love before it becomes a golden retriever. Animals are smelly pissing shitting scavenging shitpiles who scream their desire to fuck in their barbarian language and autistically attack anything that strays into their self declared territory. Waterfowl are the most guilty of this because we humans think these graceful birds look cute but they are vicious shitting squaking fucks who go out of the water specifically to fuck you in particular if you so much as glanced in their general direction.

If haitians are brave enough fuckers to clear out pests, then they should be given the hoglands to settle. Tell them they are forbidden from any trade except killing wild hogs with spears. Go all obelix on wild boars. Just give them fresh water and hexamine tablets to ensure the underbrush isnt set ablaze trying to make heat and you've got the workings of a feasible hog management solution.

Bit hunting/killing wild geese without a loicense is technically a federal crime, aint't it?

Why? I've been confused by this. My neighborhoods have been plagued by an overpopulation of rabbits, deer and geese with at least the former two caused by what I presume is a complete absence of natural predators. I've often wished it were socially acceptable for me to trap and eat the rabbits that are wrecking my garden or the geese who poop all over my athletic fields and bike paths.

What is wrong with trapping rabbits? Just make sure you cook them with butter and have some vegetables to go with them- rabbit starvation is a real thing.

You're in rare form today hydro, no modern human needs to worry about 'rabbit starvation', plus you can just eat the brains, everyone knows. Mal de caribou... it isn't just rabbits, you need to eat some organs if you're not eating fruit and veg. Get with the times! the last person to die of rabbit starvation was probably born in 1800.

Well, apparently your neighbors will rat you out and presidential candidates will complain about immigrants like me savaging the pets and local wildlife of ($town). Especially if I'm Elmer Fudding around with a shotgun in my tiny suburban backyard, as fun as that might be.

Then there's the possibility of heavy metal contamination. I'm probably willing to risk it given that I don't like in some crazy repurposed industrial zone, but still.

Otherwise nothing wrong beyond being ostracized by my neighbors.

I mean, shooting rabbits is legitimately dangerous in populated areas for all the usual ‘don’t shoot your guns off like yosemite Sam’ reasons, but why can’t you just set out some traps?

They sound like (distant) screaming children, either when you're trying to move a live trap, or when any but the most humane kill trap goes off, which especially since they're most active at dawn and dusk can be an Interesting way to get a reputation. But they are prone enough to overpopulation that sometimes it's necessary.

I mean yeah, that’s true. But shouldn’t we have rules regarding how the animal control is done?

This kinda mirrors the immigration debate as a whole. Whatever you want the level of immigration to be, we should have a system. It shouldn’t just be a free for all like it has been under Biden.

But shouldn’t we have rules regarding how the animal control is done?

Why does castle doctrine only apply to people, when my property is invaded by rabbits on a daily basis?

More seriously, sure. At the risk of having been silent in the first round of discussions and popping up now to defend a second set of goalposts, I just don't see the outrage over people eating local rabbits/geese/deer. Obviously pets are a different story.

This kinda mirrors the immigration debate as a whole. Whatever you want the level of immigration to be, we should have a system. It shouldn’t just be a free for all like it has been under Biden.

Republicans seem to have won this debate, as they largely seem to have won the debate on China. One way or another, some kind of immigration bill is likely to pass after the election.

I just don't see the outrage over people eating local rabbits/geese/deer.

Many years ago the State (the Crown at the time I guess) decided that all non-privately owned animals are its exclusive property, and if the serfs citizens want to eat them they need to ask permission first. (which may be costly and/or not forthcoming)

The hunting community no longer quite thinks that hanging/transportation to Australia is the appropriate penalty for poaching, but it's not far off -- the modal law abiding hunter probably thinks something between 'I have to follow all the dumb rules or I go to jail, so should the Haitians' and 'they are literally stealing state/common property' on this.

Non-hunters probably don't care, but are probably even less keen on watching people kill geese in the park than they are on watching them smoke crack -- even legal hunting/trapping is perhaps best kept out of sight of the general public for this reason.

If there had been some day-one arguments about how the geese deserved it, I'd absolutely agree, perhaps with some quibbling about unequal treatment of the law given how obnoxious hunting (and nuisance) permits can be.

In practice, though, we had people here wanting to make bet money about a thing Not Happening.

Totally agree. We have so many annoying cats that, frankly, only a bigot would be against eating a few of them, dont you think?

What, do you live in Istanbul or something? Why does your neighborhood have so many feral cats?

I didn't really believe the story initially just on base rates of wild twitter claims that end up being true. I thought it was plausible, though - rural cultures separated from ours could easily not view cats as a 'cute cuddly pet' but as more of an edible or farm animal, and there are almost a million Haitians in the united states, so I think that it's significantly more likely than not that one Haitian has killed someone's pet, and very plausible that some have eaten pets. (Of course, this means the cat-eating tells us precisely nothing about how problematic Haitians are as immigrants). And in the rufo video, I'm pretty sure that's not a store-bought whole chicken, because that's just not what they look like, although it probably wasn't a cat either. I feel like this in particular doesn't change my views much, in that I think something like that probably/plausibly happened depending on details but any individual case probably didn't. "no bones or fur around the meat", only evidence being cat going missing and her suspicion, and other context clues feel to me like this is fake, but dunno.

Yeah, this specific report reads to me like either a literal crazy woman, or just kind of an idiot whose cat went missing that concocted a ridiculous tale about it. The chain of events that would need to happen for the putative cat butchering to result in there being meat, just meat, in her backyard seems much more improbable than the base rate of a neighbor killing and eating an apparently stray animal.

a million Haitians in the united states

The appropriate denominator is the 5-20 thousand (depending what sources you trust) that moved into Springfield recently, since that's where the search for corroborating evidence has been focused, prompted by many other, less dubious grievances about the Haitians' misconduct and failure to integrate.

The Republicans looking for corroboration are treating the search space as "any dark-skinned immigrant, anywhere in Ohio, eating any kind of unusual meat". The meme went viral after an ADOS black woman was convicted of eating a cat in Canton, and we have seen African immigrants eating roadkill in Dayton cited as proof that the meme is "directionally correct". So the denominator is a lot larger than 20,000.

That said, if this police report is real, then it is the real thing and we have (noting that the date of the police report predates the meme) the source of the original game of telephone that led to the first "a friend of a friend thinks Haitians are eating cats" Facebook post. Note that most of the cat was not, in fact, eaten - even if the mystery meat is cat meat, stealing a cat and leaving chopped-up bits in the owner's back garden is what gangsters do to intimidate people, not something Mrs Lovett types do. It would be closely related to the "Sicilian immigrants are eating our horses" meme as featured in The Godfather.

50% that the police report is real (noting that the local PD said no such report existed), Conditional on the police report being real:

  • 20% that it turns out the cat is still alive and has been reunited with its owner
  • 40% that the cat was indeed murdered
  • 15% that the cat was indeed murdered by the Haitian neighbour the owner suspects.
  • 10% that the rest of the cat was eaten by a human.
  • 30% that there was no cat and the person who filed the police report is crazy

I also note that ex ante the search space for this kind of thing was "any immigrant, legal or illegal, anywhere in America, eats a housepet or does something similarly outrageous" Given the complete inability of Republicans to come up with anything good after a frantic search for "dark-skinned immigrant eats housepet" across right-wing social media, this looks like a single incident blown up into a national story by a combination of media crime blotter logic and conservative propaganda. If it really was the case that "they're eating our pets" was a thing, we would have found more than one questionable case by now. If it turns out that the police report is real, the cat is real, and the cat did indeed disappear under suspicious circumstances then the Republicans will have lucked out on this one. Turning a single incident into a nationwide viral meme is good politics and good tabloid journalism, even if it is bad epistemics.

BTW does anyone know the baseline rate of cat butchery in America?

And per @Quantumfreakonomics, the WSJ has found the cat (which, let us remember, is the only actual cat implicated in the whole sorry saga) alive and well. I will happily concede ln(5) calibration points for finding this outcome less likely than I should have done, and I suggest that the people who uncritically signal-boosted this shit do some soul-searching as well. This soul-searching should ideally be of the literal variety, because unrepentant Sowers of Discord end up quite remarkably close to the Fire and the eyewitness account of how they are treated is not pretty.

It would be closely related to the "Sicilian immigrants are eating our horses" meme as featured in The Godfather.

Uh, what? I think a re-watch might be in order.

In one of the early scenes, the Corleone Family tries to intimidate a film director into giving Jonny Fontane a part by killing his prize horse and leaving the head in his bed. What happened to the rest of the horse is not specified in the book or film, but horsemeat is a completely normal part of traditional working-class Sicilian cuisine. (The taboo against eating horse is an anglosphere thing - almost every other European cuisine uses it, although in may countries including France it is mildly stigmatised as only for poors.)

I've noted before that in suburban America rumors of ritual animal torture have been a semiannual tradition. There's always a rumor going around about it.

When I bussed at Canal St we would get smartasses asking if we were serving cat. The chef would always get some FOB masters student to sotto voce ask if they REALLY wanted cat just go fuck with them.

The FOB I got close to said that he would actually do it, but there were no stray cats in New York to serve. He was convinced the rats ate all kittens and puppies, and 'only filipinos eat rats'.

I looked askance the next time I ate lumpia, then decided if it smelled this good I didn't care.

Can't say I've ever seen a stray in Manhattan but I'll bet there's plenty in Brooklyn, Queens, and Staten Island. A sack of cats wouldn't be the oddest thing brought on the Staten Island ferry I bet.


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